Kelly Azuma

The last half of this week was a bit of a blur. I was meant to go out to my women’s group on Thursday but my friends’ son had a bad asthma attack and ended up staying in hospital for 3 days. We were also meant to be going out to her friend’s birthday drinks at our local pub but I had a headache all day friday and I felt really tired by friday night so I stayed home. I’m not sure if she ended up going as she was still in the hospital with her son at 6pm.

Yasu came home on friday night with a sore throat. I dosed him up with homeopathics and sent him to bed, and I followed soon after.

Saturday Yasu worked and came home a little after 2pm, he was ill, it seems like the flu. I was already in bed because I didn’t feel well, so he climbed in and we ended up reviewing some Kit Kat’s for my other blog. He fell asleep soon after and when he woke we went and got KFC for dinner as a treat for him, and then I gave him a massage and a reiki treatment. He ended up having to get up every 5 minutes because he couldn’t sleep, and I ended up giving him half a sleeping pill so he could get some rest. He doesn’t know it was a sleeping pill though because I told him it was a paracetamol. I shouldn’t have done it but he wouldn’t take it otherwise. And anyway it was a very low dose.

He has woken up since then saying he feels better so I know he’s ok.

Yasu has to work tomorrow (Sunday) morning and he has his last baseball game in the afternoon though I doubt very much he will be able to play. It’s a long weekend for Labour day here but Yasu has to work as usual. I’m once again a long weekend loner. At least the following weekend he will have 3 days off. That will be nice!

Sorry for the boring post…it’s pretty low key around here when Yasu is sick.
Hope you have a great weekend!

Well as my week progresses I’m finding I’m more and more energetic. Tonight after dinner I did the dishes, put them all away, cleaned the bathroom, folded the washing, practised my belly dancing routine, hung up Yasu’s clothes in the wardrobe and read a book (The Harsh Cry of The Heron by Lian Hearn).

This GM is giving me so much energy! It’s amazing. Even Yasu asked me if I was ok. That means that previously I was a pretty crappy housewife!

Monday night I went to belly dancing as usual. My friend picked me up at 5am, a bit early, but because she was in the area picking up her kids from daycare, she thought she would pick me up too. I had already made dinner for Yasu, a kind of gyoza-esque tsukune without the sticks and some rice, and so I left with her and went to her house and her hubby cooked us dinner, but we had to eat it quickly as we were running late. We ended up getting there 15 minutes late, but only 3 other women had shown up so we had a rather intense evening learning a routine to practice.

Today I did a variety of errands which saw me into the city and back, picked up some work pants for Yasu, and some things for tomorrow, my mum is coming to see me so I had to get something for lunch, and I picked up a nice white chocolate mudcake for afternoon tea.

I have a woman coming at 7:30 tomorrow morning to weed the garden. It’s not so much infested with weeds as with grass. Last year when I was in and out of hospital, I could not bend down to weed the garden, and Yasu didn’t have time, so the grass overtook the curbing and grew into the garden bed and now it’s all interwoven like a grass mat!

It’s meant to be raining tomorrow so I hope she still comes. If not, at least by the end of this week.

I bought two books at a second hand book store called Elizabeth’s Bookshop, they were both books about massage featuring step by step photo’s. In one of them there was a massage for Asthma, so tonight I tried it on Yasu. It really worked! It’s rather simple but by the time he sat up he was coughing up all the mucus that had been stuck down there. It’s so amazing how these things work on the body, I would never have known to do that otherwise. I just hope Yasu can learn it so he can do it on me!

Oh well, that’s me for the night, have to get up early tomorrow morning. I’ve also got to go wrap and pack my sister-in-laws birthday present! Her birthday is on the 26th but somehow I am late in sending. I’m sure she won’t mind, she’s pretty laid back.

Night all. xx

Somehow Yasu woke me at 5:45 am this morning, even though he reckons he crept out so as not to wake me. I am finding now that since I’ve been on the gabriel method whatever time I wake up in the morning, I can’t get back to sleep because I feel energetic. It’s a good thing, but my logical mind thought that I wasn’t going to be doing anything that early in the morning, so I made myself a cup of Chai, got some organic whole oats with blueberries and took them into the bedroom and read “Foreign Fruits” by Jojo Moyes until 7:45 am. It is a really good book, I’ve read other books by her before but somehow forgot about her, then I saw this book in the library and grabbed it, glad I did.

Around 8am Yasu came back to bed and we lulled around on the bed, both eventually falling asleep. At 10:38 am I woke up and Yasu was still sleeping but I had to get up to go to the toilet and he woke up saying he was late for his Baseball game. He got ready but couldn’t find his belt or his socks (this always happens) and ended up going around the house like a mad thing trying to find it. I eventually found them where I had put them (folded up on the drawers) and off he went.

Since I was up I had a shower and got dressed. Then got undressed again as a surge of energy hit me like a lightning bolt. I had a brainwave: to clean the ensuite. Unfortunately because it’s a small bathroom and we don’t have glass screens in the shower, rather a glass screen on one side and a shower curtain on the other side, the water slides down the shower curtain, in between the curtain and the tiles and gets into the grout and makes it dirty very quickly. There was alot of staining a bright orange colour from the water, and some black in between the tiles so I decided that today I was going to tackle the whole bathroom with my bannister brush and some elbow grease.

I find it easier to clean in the nude because I’m going to get wet if I put clothes on and they will get dirty, so when I’m done cleaning I usually just give myself a rinse off.

I really got into the swing of things scrubbing, mopping, wiping, and finally vacuuming the furballs and hairs up after I had dried it. Now it looks sparklingly white, as the tiles in the bathroom are white with a sealife deco border.

I’m quite proud of myself and amazed at the same time. I had energy left over and no trouble breathing after finishing all that which makes me think that this GM is working. Afterwards I went in and cleaned the vanity, mirror, and the screens, and I can’t believe the difference. I’m not going to tell Yasu, and just see if he notices anything.

I really feel good about getting that done though. Gradually as my health gets better I seem to be getting to all those chores I left for ages because I was too sick to do them.

My counsellor said that once our house was ready, and my body’s house is ready, then a baby will come. I have been working on myself, and now the house so I can see that I’m getting somewhere, and somewhat closer to our dream.

I had a lovely salad for lunch with tomato, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts, gourmet lettuce, red onion, beetroot, cheese and some flaxseed oil while reading some of my book. It felt like a great reward for some hard work!

I’m planning on making gyoza for dinner tonight. I know Yasu has wanted to have it for a while so I thought I would surprise him.

Hope you all enjoy your weekend!

I had an appointment at the hospital yesterday to do with the tumor in my stomach. I was so exasperated after a year of to-ing and fro-ing I was ready to say hey, I’ve had enough.

But then I saw Dr. Studd. (Yes, his real name, and no, he’s not really a stud, but he’s very nice!)

He had been reading my very thick file for the previous hour before I came into his office, and he was up to date with everything that had happened since I had my gall bladder removed in January 2008, including the most recent find of a tumor on my stomach.

He was so switched on. I almost wanted to kiss his feet I was (and am) so happy!

He got right to the gist of everything and I was signing consent forms for a biopsy on the tumor, then he sent me for a blood test, and prescribed me some pantoprazole for the constant lump in my throat. He gave me another blood test form as well, so that if I got the pain during business hours (uh huh…since when does my pain ever comply with business hours??) I should go down and have a blood test so they can see the difference between the results of both tests, if there are any.

I walked away feeling satisfied that everything was being done properly and with my best concerns, and I have an appointment with him again in 6 weeks so things are finally moving the way they should have from the beginning.

After that I went into the health food store, stocked up on digestive enzymes, organic flaxseed oil, whey protein powder and multivitamins & minerals and managed to get charged twice for the digestive enzymes ($27.95) and only discovered that when I got home last night, so that means another trip to the city tomorrow. I will use that to my advantage though and go visit my mum on the train about 30 mins from the city, so all is well.

I came home and made a beef and salad dinner with a flaxseed oil dressing. Yasu had the same but with a bowl of rice. (no carbs in the evening for me, yay!) and the flaxseed oil was really yum.

I started Yasu on all his supplements last night, although he is refusing to eat breakfast so i’m just giving him the supplements at least to get his body the nutrition he needs, even if he doesn’t change his eating habits. Although last night I did notice he was trying to eat slower, rather than wolfing it down like he usually does, so that’s a start.

After dinner Yasu played his Nobunaga game on the computer and I watched Criminal Minds and then NCIS, after that I went to bed and listened to a meditation, fell asleep and got woken by Yasu at 3am. He was coughing, he has something like spray painter’s asthma, the paint he uses to spray the boats at work gets in his lungs, even though he wears a mask.

I told him to either put another pillow on top of his or go and get the asthma spray. He did neither and continued coughing. I nearly strangled him and so he ended up getting another pillow and the spray, and our sleep continued. Ugh, men. Think they know everything!

My previous post was about the Gabriel Method that I had just started out on. Yesterday I lost a total of 500 grams and today I stepped on the scales to find I had lost another 500 grams. A kilo in 2 days!

When I was listening to the meditation mp3 on my ipod last night and he was saying “your body wants to be thin” my pelvic and stomach area just started to get this really weird feeling and I felt as if something was activated. It kind of felt as if my sacral and solar plexus chakra had been opened. After that meditation yesterday and today I just slept like a log.

This morning I woke up at 7:30 am by myself, and I was so full of energy I had to get up and have breakfast! It’s so amazing I never wake up that early, I’m usually not a morning person at all.

I’m off to the hospital today to see about my stomach tumor so we’ll see what the day brings, but I just wanted to report on my good news. 1kg is not much when you want to lose 50kg I guess. Well I need to lose about 30 kg to be back to my old self but I thought while I was at it, why not shoot for a model’s body while I’m at it? Another 20 kg was added to my goal weight. If my body wants to be thin it will be so at it’s own approximation of thin so whatever weight I think of that is “thin” might be different in the end.

Have a great day people!

A few weeks back I started saying “yes 2 life” and I’ve seen what a great impact that has had on my life, I’ve had so many invites out, which all of them I’ve accepted and grown from. Even if it’s just a walk down the park with a friend, instead of saying “no thanks” like I used to, I started accepting, so I’ve made many more friendships and I think I’ve grown as a person.

Yasu and I sat down and had a serious talk about our future. His mum is now getting worried because her son will be 34 this year and he isn’t a father yet. That’s all we needed was pressure from his parents. As if we haven’t been feeling the pressure within ourselves for a long time as it is. Since I said “yes 2 life” I’ve let myself shrug off the pressure and the inward pressure I exerted on myself has gone. I feel much freer, and I no longer worry about conceiving, instead just concentrate on enjoying life and seeing where it takes me. So many stories I have heard suggest that when you’re not thinking about it is when it will happen.

I recently came across a website by an American man who now lives in Western Australia who was morbidly obese (something like 181 kg) and one day he had an “a-ha moment” and started on a journey to find out how to lose weight without dieting. His premise is that there is a fat switch and a thin switch and if your body is on the fat switch there is no diet on earth that will make you lose weight. He went and spent a couple of years with researchers and learnt all he could then applied it to himself. He didn’t just work on the body but also on the mind, using visualisation techniques as part of his program. I like this idea because I think alot of weight issues stem from things that have happened in the past, I know with me I’m an emotional eater. He had an image in mind of what he wanted to look like and he went from being that morbidly obese guy to being the exact image of what he wanted, and because his body was working with him, and wanted to be thin, he didn’t have any sagging skin at all. His skin maintained all it’s elasticity. The other thing that impressed me is with diets you lose weight quickly then really slow down. But with his lifestyle change “The Gabriel Method” you lose weight slowly then as your body switches to thin mode the weight just flies off until you get to your goal.

You can read more about it at his website www.jongabriel.com.au it’s quite a good read.

Anyway what does this have to do with me? Well, after seeing him on our local news, and then coming upon his website one day, I thought this sounded like a good idea for me. Unlike a diet you don’t have to force yourself to give up certain foods you like. You can eat whatever you want. It’s all about adding to your diet, as in probiotics, digestive enzymes and omega 3’s, plus protein. He says that we are starving nutritionally, because our bodies when we were cavemen had all these things. Our brain still thinks we’re in cavemen era, and all the food that we put into our bodies now is processed and artificial. Our body doesn’t know what to do with this food so it stores it as fat. If we add the nutrients our bodies are starving for, our bodies won’t be hungry anymore so it will start working with us. He also says that because our bodies think we are cavemen, it thinks we have to fight for survival and we don’t know where our next meal is coming from so it thinks it has to store fat for survival. Our fat switches are turned on, so we have to turn them off by telling our bodies “hey, food is abundant, no need to store it, turn on the thin switch NOW”. If you’re naturally thin and you eat whatever you want without gaining weight then your thin switch is activated. Lucky you!

So over the next month I will concentrate on doing the first phase of the program and feeding my body some nutrients.

I started yesterday, as I already had some omega 3 and probiotics in the house, and I took them with dinner, then went to belly dancing, and came home. I listened to the visualisation cd before bed and when i got up this morning I had lost half a kilo! Yippee. I didn’t expect it at all, I just looked because I was curious.

So that gets me back to the conceiving matter, which Yasu thinks is because of my weight. I’m doing this program not just to conceive, but also to get healthy and feel better and more fit. Yasu has also decided to do the program with me, though it will be a little bit harder as he works and it’s hard to fit some things into his schedule such as drinking all the water and taking pills at certain times. Though I’m sure that just doing a few things at a time is ok for him because while he’s solidly built, he doesn’t really have any excess fat. So for him it’s more of a supportive role with health benefits.

I’ll keep you all up to date with any progress. I have a weight ticker which I will put on the bottom of my blog if anyone is interested.

Well Valentine’s Day has come and gone. We didn’t do very much at all as Yasu was sick with a sore throat. He was going to buy me a sewing machine as a present but in the end didn’t get around to even getting me a card until the afternoon of the day, thanks to overwork. The card he did get me though was lovely, red with roses and red glitter, and a pretty cream ribbon. I gave him a clock that has a temperature gauge and a humidity meter, whatever it’s called, that he had his eye on for a while. I also gave hime some Kirin Nama-Cha and some Wasabi Kaki no Tane which is his favourite, so that was nice to see him happy. I will get my sewing machine but when i find the right one for me. As i’m an absolute beginner i need something that doesn’t have too many bits and bobs otherwise it will just confuse me! We did get around to watching a dvd on Sunday, a movie I had bought last year but never watched called Takeshi’s featuring Takeshi Kitano, in what was a very weird movie! He played himself as an actor, and another guy, also an actor, that was him, but was meant to be a guy who looked like him. The guy who looked like him, who was actually played by him, actually kills the real him at the end. Confusing!

I went to belly dancing again tonight. It seems to be getting easier, the things we have learnt at the beginning were brought back tonight and it seemed much easier to get into it. We also had a few minutes of “freestyle” dancing to get in touch with our bodies which was good. I think most people just did the steps they felt more competent at. My friend did shimmying and i did some hip movements. I’m not very good at the leg shimmying thing…my knees just don’t go where i want them to! I guess i’ll get there with time…

I showed Yasu some moves when i got home and he said i “look like a dancer” so i guess that means he’s impressed! He’s paying for my lessons so i guess he’s seen that it’s worth it now. haha.

I hope you all had a nice weekend! Did any women out there in Japan get a reverse-Valentine? I’m interested to know if all that Dars reverse valentining worked.

Oh well i better get to bed i’m yawning my head off. My hips are starting to hurt which means that the belly dancing has done it’s thing once again. I won’t be able to move tomorrow morning…though in a good way!