Happy Spring!
Are We Feeling A Little Irritable?
According to the principles of Chinese Medicine, the spring heralds more than the arrival of tulips and daffodils. This time of year, when the earth is re-born and energy rises, the liver becomes more active, enlivened, if you will. As energy warms, it’s important to nourish the function of the liver and to honor the season by adapting your food and cooking to the season. Read more
Ice or Heat… I’m So Confused! - by Ken Dill
You are exercising (good work by you!) when you feel a pain in your leg. You stop for a minute to check if it’s all right. All the while you are wondering…should I stop or continue ?…should I ice it or heat it? Then you do what most people do and just try to ignore it and hope it goes away. Nothing in medicine is 100% sure, but here is what I’ve learned over the past 27 years and 10’s of thousands of patients. I hope it helps you. Read more
Where Does Your Food Come From? - by Christina Pirello
It’s all the rage. Eating organically produced foods, supporting farm markets, CSA’s and eating locally have become as common in our language of food as food itself. Read more
Sister Giant - by Jessica Porter
I recently spent a weekend with Marianne Williamson .jpg)
. Well, with her and about 500 other women. It was an amazing, educational and transformative experience called Sister Giant, designed to re-connect us with our female power and to find ways to apply it in the world.
Of course, this wonderful yin force we are governed by loves to talk, to bond, to love. It’s damn good at nurturing and picking one kid up from school before dropping the other one off at soccer practice. But what we used to called "feminism", the active acknowledgment of female power, has become a weird and tangled issue of late. First of all, the word itself has become sort of icky in our culture. Like "liberal" it has somehow made the weird slide from sunlight into shadow, as the media machine has churned it up and spit it out.
It’s too bad. I guess we need a new word. Or to take the ‘F’ word back. Because there is a ton of female power in this country today. And, paradoxically, that’s part of the problem too. We’re DOING REALLY WELL, LADIES! Human history has never seen so much freedom, wealth and power among its high-heeled set. We can earn enough money to compete with the Big Boys, buy low-carb snacks with the click of a mouse, and have sex without ever getting pregnant! We are in Congress, on the Supreme Court, in the boardroom and just barely missed the White House. This time.
So why even talk about it?
Well, first of all, we need to avoid complacency. This freedom was hard won. Lest we forget that Suffragettes were imprisoned so that you and I could vote. That thousands and thousands of women were burned as witches because…well… just because. You see, it seems that the shadow of world’s psyche has been regularly projected onto us, my fellow hip chicks, and since the shadow never goes away entirely, we need to stay on our toes. This lovely, upward, outward, yin force we channel needs to be honored and protected. Just because women are "free" doesn’t mean there aren’t countervailing forces doing push-ups, in the dark, to bring us down. And that’s not paranoia. Poverty affects women more than men. Although it’s slowly getting smaller, the wage gap between genders is alive and well. According to the Riley Center in San Francisco, a woman is battered in the U.S. every nine seconds, 95% of all domestic abuse is suffered by women, and domestic violence is the single most major cause of injury to women, outnumbering car accidents and muggings. And let’s not forget the malignant monster which is pornography, now just a click away from every modern brain.
So are we really doing so well?
It was wonderful to spend a weekend in a place honoring our girl-ness. Our wo-mojo. The Yin. Marianne Williamson, who wrote A Woman’s Worth (among other great books–check her out), gathered a bunch of strong ladies as Sister Giant to help us figure out what we can do with this delicious, hard-won freedom and power. We were reminded that the Great Yin has a moral rudder the world needs very badly right now. That an awakened female conscience would never knowingly let a child starve to death. She gave us permission to feel the female power that says "Not in THIS house" in the face of an immoral, crazy, 1-in-4-American-children-goes-to-bed-hungry world. She hooked us up with a group called RESULTS whose mission is to create the political will to end poverty. Because that’s what’s missing; not the money. Not the food. The political will. RESULTS regularly lobbies Congress on Foreign and Domestic Aid issues with the goal of getting real and badly needed help to the hungry here and abroad. She had us role-play talking to our representatives. She reminded us that we vote. That we matter. That people around the world right now need some compassionate, loving, fierce yin.
Marianne calls it a national security issue. She says that where there are desperate, hungry, hopeless people, there is a petri dish for pathological behavior, crime, war and possible terrorism. Happy, educated, well-fed people don’t tend to blow things up. At least, not as much.
We didn’t have time to talk about girls’ schools getting terrorized in Afghanistan. And no one mentioned female circumcision in Africa or the phenomenon of Bride Burning in India. That’s the stuff that makes me crazy. But, of course, there are too many problems facing women in the world for just one weekend. So we focussed on the solution. We recovered and re-affirmed the great loving, mothering, yin which steers our female souls. And for us, lucky enough to be free and empowered, it can be our currency in the world. Let’s awaken the Sister Giant and use her power.
Read more
Transitioning to a Delicious Vegan Diet - by Jason Wyrick
Usually, I write or speak about how to successfully transition to a healthy vegan diet, but the main impetus for making that transition is to first and foremost make the transition to a delicious vegan diet. There are, of course, those people who can eat simply for nutrition and fuel and ignore the pleasure side of food, but those people are completely alien to me. Their way lies chaos and madness and, for most other people, failure and guilt because we all know when we fail at a healthy dietary change, there is quite a bit of guilt that accompanies said failure. I know, I’ve been there. And we all know that, deep down, most of us eat not necessarily because we’re hungry, but because the food tastes good. If it doesn’t taste good, we don’t stick with it for very long. That’s why it is vitally important to make any dietary change a delicious dietary change and with vegan cuisine, it’s not that hard. This series of articles will cover some of the most important tips and tricks I’ve found over the last nine years that worked for both me and my students. Speaking of which, on to your first tip! Read more
Living As If Life Mattered - by Bill Tara
Life is precious. We all say that but the evidence often tells a different story. When I started doing health counselling in the early 1970’s one of my first clients was a man who was brought to see me by his wife; this is often the case. She had good results with a program I had given her and wanted the same benefits for her husband. He was overweight and had very high cholesterol levels so we reviewed his history and began the process of creating a health plan for him. Read more
Razzblueberry Pine Nut Pie - by Jessica Porter
I made this pie this weekend to celebrate The Kind Diet hitting #1 on The New York Times Bestsellers list. Looks like whole foods, veganism and macrobiotics are coming out of the closet! Read more
Our Conditioning - by Christy Morgan
I met someone at this awesome vegan restaurant in LA who is a health and fitness expert. He wasn't eating anything and I couldn't figure out why! This place had tasty food so why would you go to a restaurant and not eat? So, being the curious being that I am I went ahead and asked him why he wasn't eating anything. He said he hadn’t done much today (in the way of fitness) so he wasn’t going to eat much today. I got to thinking. That kind of makes sense! If you don’t do a lot of activity it doesn’t really warrant eating a lot of food. Then it got me thinking of how we are conditioned from childhood to get our “square 3 meals a day”, and from the USDA food pyramid to get 'x' number of servings of this or that. We are conditioned to finish our plates and not be wasteful. We are not conditioned to eat when we are hungry and take in less calories if we do not expend much energy in the day. No wonder more than half the US population is either overweight or obese. Read more
Lift With Your Legs….It’s Not That Simple - by Ken Dill
Everyone knows to lift with your legs. Most people don’t do it, but most of us have heard that phrase somewhere, sometime. I’m here to tell you (again) that lifting with your legs is extremely important. However, it’s only half the battle to avoid injury. You must also “protect with the abs”! That means you must contract the abdominal muscles and stabilize the lumbar spine in the neutral position. Those of you who have been “lifting with the legs” may have actually been putting yourselves more at risk of injury if you weren’t also protecting with your abdominal muscles. This is because you can lift more weight with your legs than your back muscles. But now you have more weight on an unprotected spine and thus, a greater chance of straining a ligament or blowing out a disc. Read more
The Greatest Cleaning Tool Ever!!!!!
I know; I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s true. As a genetically wired to clean Italian, I love a sparklingly shiny house. But I hate what most products do to our environment. Read more
