Clean vs. Dirty

So as you may be able to tell I really enjoy food. I enjoy all kinds of food, the problem is not all kinds of food enjoy the lovely environment I provide for it. Over the past week I have been eating the foods that are not a big fan of me. Which makes me feel flat out dirty (slow, bloated, fatigued, etc.). This past weekend my son turned 5! So needless to say it was a weekend of wonderful cupcakes which I will have to post a picture of as it may be my last time baking with flour and sugar we also had pizza and tacos. If I ever want to make myself feel miserable all I have to do is eat what I call dirty foods. I really need to focus on eating as clean as possible this week especially as I am flaring up. Now let me tell you the embarrassing reason as to why I'm flaring up. I'm going to my rheumatologist tomorrow and I don't know how I'm going to tell her about my stupidity so this gives me a good outlet to practice. Well I decided to try and go down by .5mg of my prednisone. OK so when you have been on this nasty stuff as long as I have you have to do a gradual taper. Well I fill my pill box weekly and I knew I was going to go pick up my 1mg tabs later on this specific day so I only put 5mg in my box, I usually do 7.5mg. So I was thinking to myself "OK em, pick up your meds and fill with 2mg tabs tonight!" Well I must have talked myself into doing it without even doing it until I was in a lot of pain three days later and realized I cut down by 2.5mg a day instead of .5mg. Holy Cow! I didn't think it would cause this much of a flair. So I guess we all make mistakes, I can be pretty sure that I will not make this mistake again...hopefully! Now tomorrow I'm cheating and going for a quick fix, a couple cortisone shots hopefully in my ankles and maybe I will be back to "normal".

I did go for an acupuncture treatment this afternoon to try and get my overall chi flowing and body feeling better. My lovely acupuncturist used moxa with me today and sent me home with some to try out. It is very interesting. It is used for overall health and strengthening, you can feel it working when the point and the area around it becomes warm. You can read more information at this link: MOXA. She also sent me home with some to try out so I will try to take pictures and post. For those of you with arthritis or other health problems I urge you to try out acupuncture. Take a look around the Moxa link to learn more about acupuncture and what it can all treat. It has done wonderful things for me!

I have been brainstorming on ways to eat clean this week. I have a huge bowl of leftover fruit from the party that I plan to incorporate into every meal. I should make some oatmeal for my breakfast as it makes me stay full in the morning. I need to stick to veggies and light meat for supper. We have some salmon that I would love to broil. I also want to take my Pamelas GF pancake/waffle mix (which you can use for just about any flour substitute) and make some oatmeal raisin cookies with my stevia fiber blend as a sweetener. I will make sure to post pics and recipe if I get the energy to do that later. I have to say the weekend wore me out. I also didn't sleep very well last night either due to the pain from being on my feet to much yesterday.

The one great thing I did for my health and my family today was to put my notice in at my second overnight job. I will start working more hours at the health care center so I will not need to work two jobs anymore! Yeah for no more 60+ hour work weeks! Thank you God for answering my prayers and showing me the signs that I asked for!

The following two cupcakes I would consider DIRTY!

Spicy Red Velvet, this would be simple
to do gluten/sugar free. Just would
need to find a frosting replacement.

This is a smores cupcake. They were not
bad, I don't think I would spend the time
or waste gf/sf ingredients on these cupcakes though.