Month: July 2016

Successful Lifestyle Doctor: TMJ Edition

Posted on by Julie Pearson


I bet you didn’t know that as successful lifestyle blogger, I also suffer from a chronic illness. Well, I do. I have self-diagnosed TMJ. I’m a little confused about what that means exactly, but a dentist sort of mentioned it to me once in passing a lot of years ago, and told me to get a bite guard to fix it.

I didn’t get the bite guard then, but lately I’ve been getting a lot of headaches and jaw pain. So rather than going to the doctor and figuring out what’s going on, I ordered a bite guard on Amazon.

So I fixed it! I’m not grinding my teeth in my sleep anymore. In fact, I’m not doing anything in my sleep, because sleeping with a bite guard is impossible.

I thought constant headaches were bad, but sleeping with a piece of plastic bigger than my mouth inside my mouth is more than adequately unpleasant. And as I toss and turn in bed, wondering why I’m biting on something that feels like a gummy bear but tastes worse, I know I’m not making my self-diagnosed TMJ worse. I probably am getting less headaches too. I’m still getting some, but probably less?

I cured myself without a doctor, and it only cost me about $12. I think this means I am a doctor. And that’s what I’d call a success 🙂
 

I’m a Mop!

Posted on by Julie Pearson

Is the swiffer a mop? No, I’m a mop!

As a successful lifestyle blogger, I’m really, really good at being a person. But after a while, being a person isn’t enough anymore. So I thought to myself, if I’m this good at being a person, what else can I be? The answer was clear: to be truly productive, I had to also be a mop.

Successful lifestyle bloggers multi-task, and this is the ultimate multi-tasking: I’m a successful person and a successful mop. I can exercise and clean at once. I’m multi-tasking at the kind of multi-tasking I’m doing. So successful!

With these mop socks, it was so easy to transcend my humanity. I just put them on, sprayed some Green Works on the kitchen floor, and danced around for a while. It sort of raised my heart rate a little bit, and the floor got sort of cleaner than it was before.

The socks made me more successful than a person, and less successful than a mop. Now that’s what I call an adequate day’s work 🙂

 

Photo by Maggie Gottlieb

Cured by Carbs

Posted on by Julie Pearson

I felt like such a productive, healthy human all week, until Thursday when I woke up feeling weird and awful. Mostly, my head hurt a lot. And it seemed like I had some weird sinus pressure going on, but I wasn’t congested. Also I was very thirsty. No matter how much water I drank, or how much veggie curry I ate, nothing helped. I googled lots of diseases and by Saturday afternoon, I decided I was dying. But before I threw in the towel and decided that my health was a lost cause, I tried one last thing:

 

I ordered a pizza! A half hour later, I felt amazing. It might because I hadn’t eaten enough for the last three days, or because I had a chance to lie down for a while, but I think my body just needed a miracle cocktail of cheese and empty carbs. It brought me back from the brink of…I don’t know, some kind of flu? A migraine? Death?

Oh, also I took an Excedrin but that’s probably not related.

Fad Diet: Salad Week

Posted on by Julie Pearson

I couldn’t call myself a successful lifestyle blogger if I didn’t endorse a harebrained dieting scheme. So let’s go with this one:

A few weeks ago, my roommate Inae and I made a commitment to eat salads for a week. The parameters were that we would take turns making a salad every day, and the salad would be dinner. That’s it. No other guidelines. Easy diet, right?

WRONG. No, just kidding. It was pretty successful! We made it six days, which is hereby called an Adequate Week™. And the salads were, overall, pretty healthy. I was surprised how full I felt from just eating a lot of vegetables.

Though Salad Week was pretty successful, I did chronicle it poorly. There were lots of homemade dressings and delicious roasted chickpeas and marinated tofu, but I don’t remember most of what they were. Instead, enjoy these unexplained photos of salads!