Nia Peters

Nia Peters, January 2022

Challenge Description: For the first month of the new year I will engage in activities associated with select principles of Natural Hygiene. Overall Natural Hygience is a very large body of literature, but the general principle is naturally eliminating toxins from your body by eating at the right time, properly combining foods, and eating more water-based foods. I will focus specifically on sticking to the following principles:

1. Timing: Eating fruit between 4am-12pm ; Eating properly combined meals between 12pm-8pm.
2. Properly Combined Meals: Not combining fruit with anything. Combining vegetables (water-based) with non-meat concentrated foods. Since I want to continue on my vegan journey the main thing here is not to combine fruits with anything and eat them in the morning.
3. Water-based foods: Our body is 70-80% water so I would like my plate to reflect this. I will try to make all my 12pm-8pm plates 80% water-based (veggies)

Motivation: After reading the book Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, I was impressed by the simplicity of some of the ideas. I wasn’t looking for a diet, I was looking for a way of life. I admit I tried practicing the principles in the book and could only last about a week or two. I figured trying it for 30-days may help in developing better eating habits even if I don’t stick to it after the challenge.

Expectations: I expect this to be challenging for a few reasons. It’s January so I’ll be coming off a few weeks of unhealthy habits. I’ve tried this before and I wasn’t successfully after a week. I remember being very hungry. I know stress is a key part of why I have such bad eating habits and I’m still working on de-stressing activities. That may be my next challenge

Grade: F

Outcome: I didn’t do any of this. It’s cold. I’ve been depressed. I’ve engaged in excessive eating, little physical activity, and overall just being really down on myself. This too will pass, but honestly I did nothing in this challenge except reflect on how much I was failing it. Giving myself a little bit of grace, I was able to avoid eating flesh-based meat this month. I started back eating dairy and seafood (mainly shrimp). Last month I was vegan, doing cardio at least 2 hrs/week, and doing strength training 5 hours/week. This month I introduced new foods back into my diet and did on average about cardio 2 hrs/wk. Introducing these foods back into my diet and not working out as regularly as I did last month reduced my energy levels.

I am happy that my teaching Zumba still allows me to workout regularly. I just want to be honest about this month’s journey. It wasn’t what I expected (mainly because I’m comparing it to last month), but I appreciate this space to be open about it.

Next Steps: It’s been a hard month. I may be a little too hard on myself because last months I was doing such a great job health wise and I feel like this month I just dropped off. Additionally mentally and spiritually I just haven’t felt my best. Next month I’m going to try to re-do two previous challenges. One challenge focuses on eating, the other on physical activity. Additionally I want to try a little experiment. Work with me here. I would like to increase the timing for which I engage in these challenges. I don’t know if 30 days is enough for me to form good habits. It took my years to develop bad habits. I imagine it will take a bit of time to break them and focus on habit development. I think I need more time to achieve this.