The Challenge Is On!

I don’t know if it was an epiphany, or whether it was all the little things that occurred in my life over the past 18 months, that made me say “I’m doing the IsaBody Challenge!”. But today I decided. When I took the first sip of my Cleanse drink in January 2005 I weighed 220 pounds and wore a size 18 pants. In four and a half months I had released 68 pounds and wore a size eight! I was elated! So much so that I celebrated quite frequently! I gained about 8 pounds back, but remained pretty stable. I was surprised when I realized that I had stopped craving the ice cream and pizza that had been the main staples of my diet for I don’t know how many years!

In 2007 I made choices that did not serve me and I chose to stop cleansing, stop drinking the shakes, and stop eating healthfully. My cravings for pizza and ice cream returned, and I gained back most of the weight and became depressed, and in March 2009 I sat in my doctor’s office in tears as I realized that I can’t live like this any more. It was either “not live”, or “do something.” At this time I weighed 203 pounds and wore a size 16. I already had hypothyroidism. My cholesterol was at an all time high, my blood sugar was bordering on high, and I had been diagnosed with insulin resistance. That’s another term for “pre-diabetes.” My blood pressure was also creeping up. As a registered nurse, this made me very uncomfortable. I was 46 years old and heading down a very slipperly slope, following in my father’s footsteps, and his father before him. It was that very day that I decided to integrate Isagenix into my life again. 

This time the weight came off more slowly, and I hit plateaus more frequently. But I persevered and followed the 30-day program, and eventually I broke through all the plateaus. That is until recently. 

It’s been about six months or so since I released 59 pounds, and I’ve been at a plateau since then. I’ll put a couple pounds on, take a couple pounds off. My weight is stable. I’m quite pleased with my progress and my ability to manage my eating by choosing healthy foods. Until today...

Today I said “enough is enough!” I reminded myself about the journey I have been on from the moment I was born... the decision in 2005 to take a different path with Isagenix. Has my journey been easy? Well, releasing the weight was easy, but the inner transformation has been painful and enlightening and frightening and uncertain and  exciting all at once. I was once someone who was very introverted to the point of isolating herself from social connections, someone who was insecure and afraid of “stepping outside the box”, a scared little girl who cried every day of her life because there was nothing else to feel. In the past five years, I took a step at a time, testing the waters, sometimes jumping back two steps for fear of the unknown, for fear of what waited for me in the deep dark waters. At times I remained paralyzed by the fear, running away from possibilities and opportunities. But in the past couple of years I started saying “who cares” and did it anyway. I started looking the fear square in the eye and challenging it - and myself - to move forward, to take risks. It no longer mattered whether I was good at what I was setting out to do, whether I had all the skills to perform at my best, heck, it didn’t even matter whether I knew anything at all about what I was about to do. I just started doing it! And in doing “it” I am becoming a person who I really, really like. 

So today I DECIDE to embark on the next part of my journey. As I began to transform my body, I transformed my inner self. And the new “me” is ready to take it to the next level, and complete the transformation. Funny thing... I have always been so good at going the extra mile for someone else, giving my love until my heart ached, going out of my way to make something possible for someone else. Today, I DECIDE that I am worth going the extra mile for myself!

Journey Of A Lifetime - Part 2

As you know, one purpose of my blog is to share some of my personal perspectives on things that are important to me at the moment du jour – thoughts that come from my heart and soul that move me. One of those things is my previously declining health and increasing weight. But these days, my weight has been drastically decreased, and my health is better than it’s ever been! I had my regular blood work done in early February, and when I went back two weeks later for the results, the nurse practitioner I see for all of my visits was completely shocked at my results. She asked what I had been doing, and I enlightened her. The reason she was shocked was that since my previous blood work, my HDL cholesterol increased 13 points, and my LDL decreased by 11 points! She told me “that’s unheard of!” When I reminded her that I am not using any cholesterol lowering drugs, she leaned forward and said, more emphatically, “I know! That’s unheard of!” And this is sort of funny, because just a few years ago, when I was experiencing a little bit of chest pain, my doctor sent me to a cardiologist for a “full work-up” which included a thallium treadmill test, some fancy heart scan, and an echocardiogram. One funny thing about that experience was that they could not find any plaque buildup in my arteries, my heart was pumping perfectly, and I passed the treadmill test with flying colors. The other funny thing about that visit was that despite all those perfectly glowing test results, my cardiologist still felt the need to prescribe a cholesterol-lowering drug for me because, as he so bluntly put it, “you’ll never be able to lower your cholesterol on your own.” I said “watch me.” And just so you know, I never took the drug. The samples he gave me ended up in the trash.



I had previously been using a nutritional cleansing system but had stopped for reasons I won’t go into just yet (those things will be reserved for my book, and frankly, they are too sad to bring up now). I knew how powerfully beneficial those products were, and how they had transformed my health. I lost a whole bunch of weight and five pant sizes! After I restarted those products in March 2009, my health became transformed yet again! One of the nurse practitioners I see actually said to me “I want to be as healthy as you are!” Seriously, I have had no flu, no cough, no cold, no sinus infection, no sore throat, no headaches, no muscle or joint aches, no sleeplessness or tiredness, no mood swings, no getting up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat! None of that anymore! All of these problems which I previously endured for 15 years or more of my life – stopped dead in their tracks! My blood pressure was even starting to creep up into the 130’s/80’s. And now, my blood pressure is right back in a nice, normal healthy range of 110/60’s! And let’s just say, the results of my blood work have pleased my doctors and nurse practitioners! I have no plans to go back to that cardiologist in the future! (if you’d like more information about the system I am using, feel free to send me an e-mail: beth@TheHealthySpirit.com).

Journey of a Lifetime

I've been shaking my life up lately. Over the past five years I've been on a journey of spirit and health. Not so much a quest - an intention to seek, although I do consider myself a seeker of truth. The journey started in late 2004 when I literally had to squeeze myself into my oversized office chair that sat in the office in my spare bedroom. I was working from home as a legal nurse consultant. Something just wasn't jiving in my life. The job didn't fit, I didn't fit. Not only did I not fit into my chair, I didn't fit into my life. Let there be no misunderstanding here – the only thing that did fit was my relationship with my amazing, loving, peaceful husband. He was and always will be my rock.

At the end of 2004 I weighed 220 pounds (I'm only five feet and a quarter inch tall). I was 41 years old. OLD. Not only did I not recognize myself in the mirror, I no longer recognized my spirit. In fact, it felt as though my spirit had up and left my body, leaving me in a shell of despair and certain that I would never again live, in the truest sense of the word. How I arrived at this destination of misery and discontent is unimportant now, because in January 2005 I took the first step on the journey of a lifetime, a trek in the mysterious jungle of insecurity and fear, and I forged forward.

Little did I know where that journey would lead me…