The best thing I ever did!

Thanks so much for stopping by today!  I'll show you a quick stitchy-update and after that I will tell you about how I got help to improve my overall health in a pretty dramatic and unexpected way.  I think that many of you will find the read pretty interesting and I definitely think that it is a story well worth sharing.  Maybe my story will give you or someone you know some help, who knows?

Anyway, back to the "important stuff" - stitching!  ;-) 
I finally put the last stitch in the Scarlet Letter shepherdess and actually surprised at how pleased I am with them.  The colors were a bit less exciting than they showed up on the kit cover-photo, but all in all, both of them turned out pretty cute anyway.  (LOL on the sheep/pig/horse... and the black critter is a what..?)

The photo below shows the state before all the hundreds of filling stitches...  I decided to use a riskier strategy and stitched the white critter and the year Assissi style to avoid that the white stitches would be "drenched" in the grass.  It did work out nicely and it also made the actual stitching process a bit more interesting.

The kit came with a dark-blue velvet to mount the pieces on.  I am thinking of trying to find another color velvet.  The thing with velvet is that it doesn't necessarily like to be folded, stuffed into a bag and set on a shelf for a number of years....
The piece I have looks a bit sad now...  The "midnight blue" is also more of a dusty blue and I would like something closer to a gem color, like dark sapphire or emerald.  Any suggestions?  (I know that the "midnight blue" looks black in the photo below.)  I have already decided to do a simple hem-stitching around the pieces and I am actually looking forward to that - I have problems, I know... LOL

I did also finally get myself in gear, looked through my long 2012 WIP list and decided to work on the second Rosenstand bird bell-pull.   There are still many leaves left to stitch on this one, but it is fun and I really enjoy working on it.  The chart is so easy to read, which is a wonderful break after the shepherd and shepherdess.  It is divided into four large pages and the photo belows shows a tad more than a quarter stitched up.  The top-part is the busiest with the "leaf tuft" at the top (I am stitching "center up" and will start on "center down" as soon as the top part is completed).  It will be so much fun to stitch the sweet little bird, so that is something I really look forward to!

This piece and its already finished companion will also be hemmed along the sides before making them into bell-pulls.  After this project is complete, there will be a hemming party at my house... :-)
I picked out a couple of bamboo bell-pull hardware sets to use with these designs - can't wait for these to be done!  I even know where to hang them!!!   :-)

I don't think that I have shown you the companion before, so here it is (should be clickable!):

All right!  On to the health part of this post, so feel free to skip!  :-)
  A few years back I started to feel like I had no energy whatsoever.  I slept badly, it never seemed enough and I was really more passed out than sleeping (I can not recall ever dreaming during this time).  If a colleague so much as sneezed in the same room as I was in, I could pretty much sit back and wait to get sick too and for a really long time - it never failed.  I was eating healthy, exercising regularly (as high impact cardio at least 4 times a week) and I tried to get 7-8 hrs sleep a night.  Yet, something was really not right.

I finally decided to invest in myself and try to get some help.  Instead of going to a doctor that would either give me pills or tell me to change my busy life-style to a slower pace, I went to a holistic medical doctor, recommended to me by a female colleague.  (DH calls her "The Witch Doctor" - LOL)  This doctor is fantastic!  First of all, the doctor was a female, so she could relate to what I was talking about on a whole different plane than any male MD can.
Within meeting her the fist few minutes, she already had a pretty good idea of what was going on.  She told me that I probably had an inflammation in my intestines that had changed my hormone levels, specifically cortisol.  She explained that the change of the cortisol level will affect everything else that goes on in your body - all the other hormone levels will get out of whack automatically, with all the problems that follow.  Furthermore, she explained that she is not a magician, but that this is a really common problem among women and that she had seen it countless times before.

I won't bore you with too many details, but after meeting with my MD about 4-5 times and running a number of (pretty costly, paid out-of pocket) tests through a company called Geneva Diagnostics, it was determined that
- my cortisol levels were completely out of sync with the day rhythm it is supposed to follow.  This explained why I was dead-tired every day at 10AM, but ready to play at 11PM. 
This test is called Rhythm Plus Profile
- the intestinal inflammation was caused by a number of delayed allergies to a vast assortment of foods.  Delayed allergies are just what they sound like, they show up hours or even days after you have  been exposed to the allergen and are there really tricky to pin-point.
The list of foods that I was allergic to was very long and a bit over-whelming at first, but the MD assured me that I only had to carry our detox for 6 months and I would be back to feeling a lot better again.  Just a few examples of things that I was allergic to were (are) corn (this is the one I am very allergic to), cow milk, coffee (this is pretty interesting and may explain why coffee has always made me sleepy rather than perky), sugar, chocolate, yeast, a number of fruits and veggies, all sea-foods including shell-fish, turkey, all seeds, rice, potatoes, and the list goes on.  She informed me that most of her patients do not have the will-power to cut all of the foods that they are allergic to out of their diet, but I did manage stick to it for the half year to come.  It was half a year of not eating out, not eating anything processed, and a lot of time spent reading labels in the store.  (If you think that it is hard to live with gluten allergy, try to buy anything, ice-cream, yogurt, you name it, that is made without corn syrup or corn starch here in the US...  )
This test is called IgG Food Antibody Assessment
- I had about 0% protein in my body and I was told to eat more meat.
This test is called Optimal Nutritional Evaluation or ONE

After the 6 month detox, I did notice some significant and very nice changes:
- My immune system finally got back on track and I could stay healthy - even when co-workers dragged all kinds of stuff in to work
- I had a lot more energy and my sleep pattern started to change - I started remembering dreams, I was awake during the day and I got tired in the evening
- I lost a bunch of weight (not strange, since there was not a whole lot that I could eat)
- My skin improved - finally - after struggling with acne since I was 12!!! more than 2/3rds of my life!  (Lots of heart-ache there, let me tell you...)
- My pain resistance levels went down.  This may sound bad, but in my case, my body could override and "walk off" pains that most people can not function with, which is not a good thing - we are designed to feel pain for a reason.

If you think that this may be something that I may have imagined or changes that were very subtle, I can tell you that I had never ever gotten a compliment on my skin until after I did the detox.  People that I don't really talk with on a regular basis would tell me how nice my skin looked and ask what I had done!
If you feel like I felt a few years back, this may be something to try out.  It is no fun going through life feeling drained, you should not have to live like that if you do! 
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!

Well, time to start working again.
Take care, have a great weekend and Happy Stitching,