I’ve really enjoyed reconnecting with cooking, and re-learning to make my recipes more in line with primal principles. Sugar is a nasty business, and I’m pleased that I’ve finally gotten over sugar cravings. Thanks to my vegetarian friends who did this challenge with me, I’ve found my favorite dessert ever – sliced strawberries and almonds covered with coconut milk and cinnamon. It’s FABULOUS.

I also finally got rid of the annoying energy highs and lows during the day. These have been horrible since recovering from Lyme disease, and really interfered with practice. It would take me about 4 hours to wake up in the morning, and by the time I was mobile, I would have to work at my horrible job. Couple that with a daily 4pm crash for a couple hours that wiped out most opportunities for evening practice. Fun.

Yeah, they’re gone.

I’ve actually managed to be up and mobile in the wee hours of the morning for the past couple weeks, and have even started getting some practice in before the new job, which actually encourages me to have a life. That’s a new experience.

I haven’t lost a ton of weight, only about 10lbs, but my husband has lost 30. That’s absolutely remarkable. Weight loss wasn’t really my goal, but I’m pleased to see that my change is having a positive effect on someone I care about. Couple that with the lack of job stress, and we’re finding ourselves in an entirely new situation.

Nice side perks:

Coffee doesn’t make me crazy. I love coffee, and it’s always made me super jumpy. Apparently it’s the sugar, not the caffeine.

My lifts have gone through the roof. My max deadlift is now at 230. I can now lift my husband off the ground, so if he is trapped in a burning building, I have options.

My recovery is faster. I can do more with less downtime. This is great for dance because hard practice doesn’t make me tired.

So all in all, this experience was definitely worth it. I’m planning to stick with the Paleo for a significant amount of time, and Crossfit I can no more give up than dancing. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what benefits pop up in the longer term.

For Kazoogrrl: My arthritis is definitely better. I had a physical in late April coincidentally, and my inflammation levels were negligible. They go up and down with flare ups, but I’ve been between flareups for much longer than I usually am. Woot!

That’s what hit this week. The transition was rough. Last Friday I felt almost as if I had a stomach virus, but one day and one acidophilus tablet later and I felt normal again.

Feeling “normal” has changed. For the first few days of week 2, I felt really strange, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized I wasn’t having blood sugar swings anymore – no more energy burst after breakfast, no more falling asleep at my desk at 4:00, no more trouble falling asleep or getting up in the morning. It felt really weird, and definitely took some getting used to. I’m also just not as hungry without the sugar spikes, so I’m working through lunch without any interruptions. I’ve had to set an alarm to stop working.

I tracked my food for a couple days to see what my nutritional parameters were just out of curiosity. I’m usually eating well over 100g protein, around 80g of fat (mostly due to avocados), and 80g of carbs from fruits and veggies only. I’m getting the same protein I used to get when I raced, without supplementation. Back then I *only* ate chicken breast and salad, and supplemented my protein intake twice a day. It was as boring as it sounds.

I’m also eating a ton of veggies. Just sayin’.

The GOOD:

I took a peek at the scale and I’m down 7 pounds. Normally, I don’t care about my weight at all – I accepted long ago that I’d always weigh as much as a guy due to all the weight lifting and martial arts, and I really don’t care about adhering to the stupid starvation-based standard for women that seems to be prevalent. All I care about is what I can do.

What’s interesting about the loss is that it’s a quantitative measurement that can be an indicator of progress with this experiment. My strength has increased, as I’ve hit some PRs lifting lately, so it’s a healthy loss of excess water and fat rather than the typical muscle loss due to starvation diets.

KazooGirl – my arthritis seems much better. I still have flare ups, but they’re less frequent and less intense. I’m still testing to see how much better it is, and I’m looking up information about sugar and inflammatory disorders so I can figure out the how and why of it.

So what does all this have to do with dance? This is a dance blog, after all. The best benefit so far is that I can practice longer and with more energy, and with less back distress. Usually, an hour in and I’m starving or seriously dehydrated, or worse, my back is killing me – this just doesn’t happen anymore. As both my classes last longer than an hour, I can train more efficiently with less physical distress. Less back stiffness also means a bigger range of motion for hip and chest movements. I’m excited to see what I can come up with, now that that limiting factor isn’t there.

Additionally, I have less muscle fatigue overall. I don’t get muscle soreness at all anymore, and I can hold weird jazz poses while remaining motionless for much longer than I used to be able to do. Hold a leg in attitude with arms in second for a minute? Singles with a leg in passe while doing level changes? Okay. It’s kind of fun. Now I can do all the one-leg drills I came up with in a fit of madness last year.

The BAD:

I’m developing a rotator cuff injury, and my arthritis in my hands is being stubborn and NOT GOING AWAY. I also need more veggie only recipes.

I also missed three days at Crossfit due to feeling bad, and due to garden cleanup weekend, which I couldn’t miss. My WOD was to garden in 80 degree weather for two days, five hours each day. I’m very sunburned.

The Recipe winner this week: My troupe mate Jennifer cooked the Lilams dinner, and made the most amazing tray of potato skins with shredded pork. I had the veggies and the pork, and it was DIVINE. Nobody cooks like Jennifer.

30 days of a very strict Paleo diet, which means no sugar, starches, dairy, grains, or artificial crap. Just meat, veggies, and some fruit. I also coupled that with 30 days of Crossfit, just to see if I could do it. If you don’t know what Crossfit is, it’s kind of crazy, but fun. Just look it up.

I’ve been following Primal loosely for years, as well as trying to regularly attend Crossfit, but this challenge took it to a whole new level. I’m also a big time sugar addict, as anyone who’s been to dinner with me can attest. It’s pretty challenging to say the least, especially as part of a community that revolves around restaurants, wine, and revelry.

I was nervous to start, not knowing how I’d be able to sync this up with how we do things. Lilam’s mascot is a plate of Joe2′s potato skins, after all.

Why am I doing this?

I was very, very ill in 2009. I had contracted Lyme disease approximately five years before (we think), and it was never caught. By the time it was caught, my immune system was functioning very poorly, my formerly mild arthritis had become much more of a problem, and my brain just wasn’t working right. Lyme disease really makes you nuts. I had contracted Mono and Pneumonia, and was having major neurological issues. Fortunately, after four months of intensive treatment, I came out of it.

Lyme disease knocked me out of racing the year before due to knee and back problems, and I never recovered. Since that time, I’ve felt like I needed a major challenge to get myself going again, and get back to what I used to be able to do, prior to being sick.

I needed a big challenge, and since races are out, I’d been trying to figure out something for a while. I tried it with Nationals, and that just wiped me out. So when this challenge came up, I jumped on it, also because I wasn’t the only person going through the challenge. I’d have a built in support network at my gym.

Essentially, this is an elaborate attempt to thumb my nose at Lyme disease.

The Results

So for a week, I’ve been to Crossfit every day, and not had any sugars or starches of any kind (except for three almonds I accidentally ate before I realized they had honey on them).  Here’s what happened:

For the first four days I was completely sugar crazy. It was much, much worse than I expected. I was mooning around the house, was bored with my food, and was extremely agitated. I was having dreams about donuts, and I DON’T EAT DONUTS.

Tuesday, I completely lost it. I ate a pound of bacon for lunch. In class,  I couldn’t do an exercise properly due to back issues, and I just broke down, threw my hands up in the air and started swearing. It was a bad scene.

Also, my muscles hurt. A lot. Much Motrin was to be had, and I really didn’t want to go back to class. I didn’t skip through sheer force of will. To their credit, the instructors put up some serious routines that made me nervous to think about, and I was swearing about them more than once.

Around Thursday afternoon, something started to shift, and I felt great. Not just great, but GREAT. It happened slowly, but by Saturday morning I was walking around with permagrin. My stress levels dropped dramatically, and my muscles stopped hurting. Food started tasting better, both more flavorful, and subtle sweet flavors were more apparent in the veggies. Yes, I was so chipper I started annoying myself.

The Best of the Food

Here are my favorite dishes from this week. These were made up by me, so should be self explanatory:

• Seared catfish with tomatillo salsa and dinosaur kale
• Oven-roasted butternut squash
• Oven-roasted beets
• My giant bacon plate
• Pineapple with coconut milk and almonds
• Mushrooms and peas in coconut milk with Goan curry spices
• Smoked Salmon and Honeydew melon

Not too bad for week one. I’m excited to see what happens this week.

The reasons are pretty simple – my day job turned into a nightmare. I’ve been refraining from saying anything publicly, but at this point it really doesn’t matter. To put it simply, any place that yells at you for missing a status meeting after working almost 30 hours straight to meet an arbitrary deadline is not something that is beneficial in any way. And that’s only one incident of many – and certainly not the worst.

In December, I knew that I either had to find a new job right away, or make one within a couple months. With hundreds of people competing for every opening in my industry, I decided to start a company instead, and I’d extend my break until Art of the Belly.

Art of the Belly was great, needless to say. Stick hundreds of dancers anywhere, and we’ll have a good time. I sold a ton of sparkly stuff, caught up with some of my favorite people, and watched everyone have great sets.

Now that business is doing well and I’ve got some good things on the horizon, I’m trying to return to practice. Despite what some members of Lilam would say, I haven’t practiced. Bopping around to a song in my car, running through an old choreography, or being goofy at troupe practice is not the same thing as individual practice. My body is stiff, it doesn’t want to move right, and I don’t have the muscle memory anymore. It’s amazing what four months off will do!

So the journey back isn’t going to be fun. Coincidentally, my gym started a health challenge on April 1st, so I signed up. Their challenge involves going on a super strict version of Paleo for a month – meaning no sugar, starches, processed foods, legumes, or alcohol (yes, you heard me). I decided to couple that with 30 days of Crossfit and practice, to shed the last of my post-Lyme disease weight, and give myself a practice kickstart.

For the next four+ weeks, I’ll be posting about the process. I’m only on day 3, and I’m very grumpy.

In light of the utter craziness that was 2011, I’ve decided to make a life change. A good one, I promise. I’m throwing a lot of time and energy in this direction, so I’m not going to be around as much while I work on it. It’s slightly secret right now, so please bear with me while I work on this instead of dance. If you are one of the few that knows, please keep it to yourself for now.

I’ll still be at Art of the Belly, with massive amounts of glitter and several bottles of high end Riesling.

Dance-wise, 2011 was a great year, I really can’t complain. Many things came together, and a lot of my experiments started gelling this year into a cohesive whole. I met tons of great new people, saw some incredible sets, and maybe had a few myself. So no complaints from me.

Life-wise, 2011 has been rough. My husband has been out of work since June, and while I like having him around, there’s a pervasive tension that underlies every day, where you know if something bad happens, you’re that much closer to disaster having only one income. Couple that with my overall discontent with working in an agency environment rather than a product shop, the fact that I seem to get a nasty cold every month, and several other things going on – that compounds a lot of stress.

The upside of this is that I threw myself into my creative stuff as an outlet, and I was shocked to realize on Friday that I had choreographed an entire year’s worth of work, in addition to selecting 6 or 7 improv songs. I have enough for all of 2012. I also made many sparkly things that people seem to like, and have ideas for even more sparkly things. I got a 5 lb box of glitter shipped to my house. Just sayin’.

In the end, I feel extremely fortunate to have the outlets I do, both creative and supportive, especially from those in Lilam and Transcendence. 2011 has been trying, to put it mildly, and I can only imagine how difficult it would be if I didn’t have those areas in which to channel my energy.

I have experience with a handful of local teachers, all of whom are absolutely amazing ladies, both in and out of the studio. I haven’t even scratched the surface of teachers to study from, and my list remains, and will remain, a mile long. Whether it’s “tribal” or “traditional” (and yes, we all know those labels are inadequate), we never have to travel far to get instruction from world-class performers in a variety of flavors of belly dance.

We also have amazing shows. Whether it’s yearly “showcase” shows (Shems’ 2009 Ya Omri still sticks out to me), or recurring shows like DCTC that give performers a regular outlet to be awesome. And the community regularly turns out for them. Whether they’re dancers, drummers, or long-suffering partners of dancers, there are so many people that are a part of this community that make it even more interesting.

I also think it’s great that there are more scientists-by-day / belly-dancers-by-night than I can count. It’s kind of like knowing superheroes.

Just a little love for my community today.

This is all despite the fact that I don’t have what’s thought of as “normal” blonde girl hair, so most advice and cuts are not applicable. It’s wiry, coarse, naturally knotty, and soaks up everything like a sponge. Most traditional styling regimens don’t work, and often make things worse. I’ve even had hair dressers try to make me get relaxers, when I’m very opposed to chemical treatment.

I’ve pulled it back for years, just to avoid having to deal with the annoyances it brings. A few years ago I decided to stop cutting it, as my husband decided to grow his hair long. I wasn’t going to have his hair be longer than mine, because that’s just wrong. As it got longer, I just braided it back, and still rarely left it down.

Around that same time, I had my first couple performances (pre-Lilam) with in a studio group with tribal stylings. Everyone else was pulling their hair back and sticking hairsticks and flowers in it, so I did the same. As I joined Lilam, and was introduced to the wonderful world of wigs, I started augmenting my hair with a clip in hairpiece, still sticking lots of stuff in it of course.

Yes, with hair down to my lower back, I was wearing a hairpiece. Hi, I’m Spiral, and I often do things that make no sense.

This summer I started studying with a new teacher who’s classes are just incredibly fun. She’s a great mix of good-natured and business-like, and I’ve had a lot of success mixing in what I learn with her. I let slip in class recently that I wore a hairpiece, and she was aghast, saying we would have to have a discussion about it. After class, she made me take my hair down, discussed with me why it would be best to leave it down – that it was the fullest expression of femininity, that I was selling myself short, and that many Egyptian teachers would be equally upset by my pulling it back, and several other reasons. She was one of the first people (besides my dad, but he’s biased) who gently, but directly, challenged me to let it go as it was.

I have to admit, it was hard to just leave it down and listen to the advice she was giving me. For years I had the attitude that there was something “wrong” with it, and tried to hide it and make it conform as a result. Despite this, after she pointed out several times I was still tucking it behind my ears, I agreed to leave it down for my next fusion set to see how it felt. I added some hair tricks and a beaded headband, and figured I’d be very annoyed with it by the end of the set.

How did it actually feel? Kind of amazing. This sounds overly dramatic, but it’s accurate – I felt like I had flipped off years of conformity and people telling me what I should be, should look like, and should do. I still watch the video and am amazed that I never trusted myself to let it fly before.

I haven’t pulled it back since, other than to work out and sleep, of course. It does still like to attack my husband at night, after all.

The moral of the story? Always listen to your teachers, and let your hair down every once in a while.

*EDIT:* I just noticed something funny. My professional StereoVision shots from early 2010 (brown costume) showed the last time I had it down while in costume. I did that only for the photoshoot. I wore the same costume this past performance – it must be good karma.

American culture is largely “extroverted”, as friendly interactions are expected to be loud, boisterous, and exciting. For those of us who are introverts, this itself can be overwhelming, as we are constantly drained by loud public interaction. I spent years forcing myself to act as an extrovert, trying to be the life of the party, only to realize that it was causing me a huge amount of stress.

I can be an extreme introvert. Without solitary space at night, I won’t sleep – I have gone nearly 5 days without sleep when forced to travel with others, often ending in near insanity on my part. This isn’t an exaggeration, it’s why I rarely travel, and why when I do, I always get a separate room. I need a few nights a month to get my social fix, but I need to have an equal or greater amount of quiet to balance it out.

That being said, I LOVE to travel or go to social occasions together with an extrovert. They usually deflect attention off of me, so I can have space to mostly listen, and only speak when I have something relevant to add to the conversation. The extroverts I usually travel with understand my tendencies, which is even better.

Performing as an introvert is interesting. Restaurant / hafla settings are hard, because I’m not naturally the type of person who dances between tables and thinks it’s the greatest thing ever. Stage shows however, are GREAT. I have enough room to breathe and communicate effectively, without feeling like I have to address everyone individually.

How this ties in with stage fright, I’m not certain. I’m sure there’s some connection.

I don’t always enjoy performing, and will often hide myself away for a little while after a set, usually changing out of my gear, before rejoining the audience and talking with others. I almost always love those others, but it can be overwhelming to deal with the energy from being on stage, and then shifting gears immediately to being social.

In classes, I often get questions about why I don’t talk (read: am mean). I usually prefer to be at the back, watching the entire room – I really enjoy watching how others process the same information I’m receiving. Most of the time I just get caught up in what I’m learning and forget that there are other people around. From non-scientific anecdotes I’ve gotten from other introverts, this seems to be pretty common.

So if you see someone watching a workshop in the corner, or disappearing after a set, you’ve probably got an introvert on your hands. With proper care and feeding (and a little quiet), your introvert will be most appreciative.

If I meet my practice goals for one month, I can get Skyrim and play it all day. If I miss a day, I have to start over.

There, I said it.