The Aftermath

Home again, home again, after a lovely Christmas holiday. Our hearts, bellies and suitcases left Plano fuller than when we arrived on Wednesday, and now we're sorting through everything, trying to get back to normal.

I will be attending my first yoga class in a week, which is somewhat daunting. The first class after a break always feels like the first class of my entire life, which leads me to an important question: is having a healthy lifestyle all it's cracked up to be? I eat a healthy diet, exercise most every day, my jobs keep me active the rest of the time and I almost always sleep at least 8 hours a night. It's everything that everyone says you should be doing to feel good and ensure long-term health, but I find that I simply fall apart during the holidays.

I have no moral problems with taking a break from my healthy habits for the holidays, my problems are physical. I just feel weird after a couple of days of staying up late, sitting around and eating pie and mint M&Ms and cookies. Food ceased to taste good, I began to have aches in my lower back and I felt tired. Even my skin began to feel weird. Is this what it's like to be old?

A gal from my church who is a nurse and has gone on many mission trips to foreign countries said that she's noticed that the people who have the most strict diets tend to be the ones who get sick on mission trips. Similarly, I've heard that (based on observation, not scientific experiment) people who live in ultra-clean houses get sick more than people who don't.

So what conclusion am I to draw from this? If I am keenly aware of the effects of being sedentary, decadent eating and irregular sleep after just a few days, does that mean I'm more in tune with my body than those who don't notice? Is this just the tension of being healthy in an unhealthy world? Or does it mean that I've babied myself so much that I can't handle deviation from my normal practice? Maybe I just didn't have enough to keep me busy, so I spent all my energy dissecting every little feeling I had?