Barefoot Journal
It’s now been 10 weeks and 3 days barefoot. My feet are much tougher and only the roughest patches of road or asphalt will bother the feet now. I’ve noticed the tops of my feet need to be stretched out more. As I gain more use of my arches, the top of the foot has to be stretchy enough to accommodate. The right foot especially has trouble flexing all the way forward. There is a small, calcified lump 2/3 up the top of the foot toward the ankle, which seems to be a clue as to why that foot is less stretchy. When I massage it really hard, I get nerve sensations in my first 2 toes. Those first two toes are the ones that went numb in 2008 after standing in a new pair of shoes all day. But I know I have had that calcified lump since high school, I believe. Perhaps it was a holdover from an old ankle injury (I used to get them often), or maybe I dropped something heavy on that foot as a young lass. I don’t remember.
So stretching the tops of my feet more is my goal for this week, in order to continue improving the the health of my feet.
Also, there is more skin breaking between my pinky toe and fourth toe on the right foot, and the fourth toe is very tender on the pinky toe side, just inside the ball of the foot. I have been massaging it and trying to help spread the pinky toe away from that toe. Both are untwisting very nicely. I think what is happening now is that the pinky toe is beginning to get its knuckle functionality back too. The left pinky toe appears to have some functionality already, but not the right one. When I pull on the right pinky toe, it pops every time, so I keep stretching it out to open up space for knuckle development. I will probably have knuckle development in that toe within a week, esp. if I keep stretching the foot back and massaging between the last 2 toes.
There is some wear patterns starting right in the center of the ball of each foot, and on the second and fourth toe of the left foot. On the right foot, it is just the center of the ball of the foot, as if I had stepped on a rock/sharp object there and it wants to recover.
Whenever I get wear patterns now, I suspect that the feet are compensating for a weakness. Given the pain I am having in my right fourth toe, I think it may be an overall compensation for that foot.
Eyesight – 20/20 project
I got excited about my eyesight experiment again yesterday. This is really progressing in phases.
I noticed (again) just how important it is to relax the vision for up-close work, and to focus the vision on blurry distant objects. My eyes are so conditioned to relax when looking at distant objects due to wearing glasses or contacts for 20 years. But I noticed when I tried to focus on distant objects (while keeping the eyes relaxed), they would actually come into sharp focus for a little bit, accompanied by a lot of eye tearing. The extra eye water seems to help a lot with distance focusing.
Also, I would get good results by stretching my eyes really wide to “feel” oxygen hitting the eyes. This feels really good to the eyes, and it brings on more eye tearing. I suspect my eyes have been oxygen-deprived after many years of contact-lens wearing also. My eyes are sensitive to silicon, so the high-oxygen silicon contact lenses weren’t an option for me. I also suspect that the mercury (thiomersal) in my contact lens solution has denatured some of the proteins in my eyes, but I’m not sure of what long-term effects this might have.
I have always had a lot of eye “floaters,” which I’ve been studying about recently.
This week, I am back to doing about 15 minutes of eye exercises each morning. I have done this for 3 days now.
It’s probably worth noting that I ate 2 carrots yesterday, and a couple hours later had my breakthrough/renewal of commitment!
Back/Shoulders
As my third priority, I am also working on reversing the curve of my thoracic spine. Likely due to the way I walk, and I suspect also my low thyroid, I have developed excessive lordosis of the thoracic spine (I’m not sure what that term is – kyphosis maybe?) Instead of a hump, I have a slight dip.
The way I walk now more on the balls of the feet rather than the heels is helping with this. It lets my chest round forward a bit more. But it is quite awkward to try to let the chest be more concave while keeping the shoulders down and back. It is more challenging.
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Maybe I will try to make this a weekly update. Probably should be taking pictures along the way too…