Ladies, I so enjoy this web site and your blogs, and I'm very encouraged, but still waiting for improvement to my walk. So I have a question. You and others in your book describe your walk improving, but how? I mean that my gait habits are so bad that even if my strength returned to my dropped foot, how does it come about that your walk normalizes? Judi, you sound as though you were very bad and improved quickly. Did sure-footedness and balance suddenly show up one day? Please share my question and your answer so everyone who visits your web site can be helped, too.
Thank you,
Nicole Siebert
Nicole, thanks for the great recipes (see above) and the question. As sensation, strength, and endurance returns to compromised body parts, it often takes conscious work to regain former abilities. Conscious work means locating and exercising each muscle group. The bad habits mean that we tend to call on our stronger parts and tend to ignore the weaker ones to get the job of movement done. As you begin to recover, you may well need help to retrain yourself to equalize the the weaker/stronger situation most of us deal with. In our book, we suggest many exercises that should let you know which muscles work and which do not and there are some that specifically begin to call on the proprioceptive faculties that are involved in balance. If you have access to a good body work teacher of any discipline (see the resource chapter at the back of the book for brief descriptions of many kinds of movement modalities) I suggest you take a lesson or class with them and that will give you a blueprint of how to begin. An outside observer can be very useful to discover ways of waking up lost muscles and then you can take home the new challenges they offer you. My walking still requires effort on my part- undoing 40 years of downed communication lines takes time to reverse. To the casual observer over short distances, you may not notice how hard I have to work my weaker left side to achieve a normal looking graceful gait. It is mental work to remind myself to hold the appropriate muscle tone in my back. Before the diet, I had no access to those back muscles at all. Now I can tighten them the right amount if I think about it and eventually, my body wisdom will take over and it will occur naturally. Lost movement patterns may indeed show up suddenly for some, but for many of us, persistent ongoing exercise is the key. Good luck, Judi