8 months ago I started eating a carnivorous diet after being ketogenic for about a year; this saved me from a lot of inflammation and pain and pretty much reversed in some sense my diabetes2. (My success with this means that I won't be responding to anyone who tells me that I should be vegan or omnivorous, nor will I appreciate such foolish pontificating, given my success.)
About two months ago, I ate a high carb meal. The pain and inflammation came back with a severe vengeance and basically and truly made me a cripple. I had to use a scooter to shop and for weeks I walked around the house in a downward dog pose. My only relief was climbing stairs which made the required non-painful position of the downward dog much easier.
So I started doing yin yoga. This got me to a really good place. I could walk normally and even shop normally. But still I could notice a negative impact from eating carbs. Stumbling happens to imperfect people when there is temptation around.
So I took the principles of yin yoga (stretching and focusing on the inward feelings; long poses; and complete relaxation with no fidgeting; rather than being form oriented like yang yoga.). [If I missed a principle, please remind me.] I used these principles to construct poses that I thought would correct what I thought were deficiencies in the back bend poses that I knew and had been doing. Basically whatever stretch and strain I felt with a forward pose, I would do the opposite with a backward stretch using lots of pillows. If my hips were stretched or painful from say a butterfly or a butterfly variation, then I would pile my many pillows up so as to get my hips to stretch as far as possible backward without injuring myself. I have become more and more proficient at this. My BIG COUNTER (what I call it) is a correction for my 4 butterfly variations that last a total of 20 minutes. The BIG COUNTER lasts for a total of 10 minutes, and it is on top of a really big hill of pillows. I even stretch out my arms over my head to maximize my stretch. And deep breaths also give a really wonderful stretch. All of these stretches are so challenging that I have to do a child's pose for perhaps 40 seconds the other way to counter the counters. If I did the child's pose counter any longer, I'd have to do another back bend to counter the counter to the counters, and so forth.
The bottom line? Thanksgiving happened yesterday, and I am NOT having a black Friday. I am having a JOYFUL Friday knowing that this strategy worked. Even though I had far more Costco pecan pie than any health minded person should eat, I was not able to discern ANY negative consequences of my eating several helpings of that pecan pie. I slept my usual 8 hours, something that never happened after one of my usual stumbles before these DIY back bends. It fact, it took me days for my sleep to recover from a carb stumble before my DIY back bends. My BMs are 'B's and 'A's whereas before I would count myself lucky to be able to give myself a 'C'. (Acupressure didn't hurt with the sleep and the BMs.) There was no inflammation and no edema.
My DIY yin yoga back bends are inherently inversions, so that might have something to do with my success.