Saturday, May 31, 2014

Seeking help and monthly challenge update

It's been a while since my last post, not only because I've been struggling with a bout of depression but I've also come down with the flu. I think my body has simply collapsed under the strain of worrying about my family, working full time, having relationship issues and generally just trying to cope on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis.

Mike has convinced me to sign up for counselling with a carers organisation, which I can do via email rather than face to face. Its such a relief to be able to access that kind of service that way, as there is simply no time I could take out of my week to visit a counsellor, without work having to know (which is not something I'm ready to face as yet). So hopefully communicating with someone external to our situation, with experience caring for someone, will be able to help relieve the emotional burden I'm feeling.

Our trip to Germany is also coming up soon, we fly out in just over two weeks and all the arrangements are made. We want to continue with our monthly challenge up to and around our trip, while we'll have the three weeks we are away as a holiday without any challenge attached. So we only have two weeks to implement this 'months' challenge, so we thought we'd pick a tough one. As a lead up to trying to go vegan, we have decided to go dairy-free for the first two weeks of June.

I already drink soy milk in my coffee and rice milk in my smoothies (I'm lactose intolerant), but Mike is dreading having a soy coffee so will probably go back to drinking black coffee instead. The toughest part of this challenge will be for both of us to go without cheese and chocolate. We have cheese in most dinners and often have a few pieces of chocolate for dessert.

We found a deli not far away that sells raw vegan chocolate and it is the tastiest chocolate I have EVER eaten (no exaggeration), however it costs about $10 for a tiny tiny bar, so we are going to try to make our own raw vegan chocolate. I'll let you know how that goes.

Our monthly challenge for May was to quit smoking again which I managed after the first few days but Mike has struggled with this more - he still doesn't really want to quit, so without the motivation it just isn't possible, however he has cut down enormously.

I'll send an update prior to our trip to let you know how the raw vegan chocolate and dairy-free experience is going.

Auf Wiedersehen

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