Happiness = Muffins

A week ago I signed up for SparkPeople.com to try to get myself to make a serious, consistent effort to Get Moving—to stop being a helpless victim of my body chemistry and instead try to deal with the hormonal swamp of Chronic Depression + Menopause = Misery with very intentional healthy living.  I've fallen out of the habit of physical exercise, a habit I'd always had without having to think much about it.  I just always liked to be active.  But events of the past 4 years have knocked me flat:

1)  Relocating (stressful in itself) to the gray skies of the northeast after 10 years in the sunny southwest
2)  Buying a house (and selling the previous one right as the "housing bubble" burst)
3)  Starting a new job
4)  My husband starting a new job
5)  My mother's death
6)  Developing Morton's neuromas on both feet
7)  A lower back injury
8)  Pushing myself way beyond my musical comfort zone to sing with a jazz band (which may not sound like a lot of stress, but believe me, for me it is!)
9)  Traveling to Turkey for 10 days with the above-mentioned jazz band (who are a terrific group of people and I loved the trip, but traveling is always high-stress no matter how much fun it is)
10)  The full onset of menopause

I could come up with a few more, too, but we'll leave it at that.  Enough said.  So anyway, I found myself in total despair, feeling like I had to choose between two lousy options to cope with my crummy body chemistry:  change antidepressants? or try hormone replacement?  Neither, thank you very much.  Then I took an honest look at my lifestyle and realized that my activity level had gotten really sporadic and ineffective.  Sure, I'm on my feet for several hours straight at work, and not just standing but hustling back and forth to wait on customers and receive shipments and get change for the registers, and etc., etc., etc.  But like my chiropractor says, "That's STRESS, not exercise."  And doing Pilates once every other week, or walking to work once every other week, just doesn't add up to good health.

I think because I always loved and wanted to be active before, I never had to develop a real habit of it.  I just did it.  Without much conscious intention.  So I'd slid into sedentary lethargy without realizing it, taking for granted I was an Active Person when in reality I've become an Occasionally Active Person.  So to take myself in hand and get back into the shape I want and need to be in, I joined SparkPeople because they have good nutrition and fitness trackers and tell me what exercises to do on what days.  It's great for my OCD self—to track every nutritional element of everything I eat, and the number of sets of the number of reps of every exercise—To Do lists extraordinaire!

One of the fascinating things I've discovered through this obsessive practice is how low in calories my diet had become, and how out of proportion it was as well.  We've been following a South Beach-esque regime for a couple of years, which mostly worked well for me until this past summer when everything went to hell in a gutbucket.  So I've decided to add back in some carbs (and calories) and take out some fats (and sodium) to see if it helps me feel better.

And let me tell you, I'll never eat McDonald's Chicken Selects again except as a Very Last Resort!  Wow, those are bad for you.

Muffins are probably my favorite food group, so it's great to be able to enjoy them again after a couple years of them being South Beach No-No's.  This morning I made a batch loosely based on a recipe from SparkPeople ("Carrot Pumpkin Bars"), so loosely based that it's really a whole different recipe.  They still have carrots and pumpkin in them, but they're muffins, not bars, and I substituted a bunch of stuff, and the resulting nutrition info is so different that I just wrote it up as my own recipe:  Pumpkin Carrot Muffins, lowfat.  They are GOOD! and Good For You, too!

Mostly I'm doing all this for the exercise, not the diet, but it's good to get a new perspective on my nutrition, too.  And the permission to eat muffins again.