For those of you who were on this teleclass  (How to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits) did you go to the place you thought of in our visualization? Did you really go there?

There are places that just hold a special place in your heart. Here in Maine, we have the blessing of living by the ocean, with an incredible coastline. There’s a place in Rockport that I have always loved with a dirt road that snakes along the coast. I never get sick of going there. It smells like cedar trees.  Last fall, I developed a habit of going there to run. During the run, there are two places I stop. First is a tiny, wooden, open-air chapel with a rough stone floor that overlooks the ocean. I do a meditation there in which the sounds of the ocean and the wind blowing the tops of the pine trees anchors me into the present moment. I watch my breath until the wind and the view actually crowd out the yakyakyak of my thoughts, and then I ask for guidance. After that I run again until I end up at the place where big, smooth boulders tumble down into the surf and I stop again and do yoga, stretch out and look at the lobster boats on the sparkling water.

I’ve done this ritual in all seasons and at all different times of day and I cannot tell you how addicted I am to it.  I cannot wait to do it again every time, even right after I finish.

So what’s the secret of getting addicted to good things like this instead of to self-destructive habits? Read on.

Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

On the eve of this holiday, I have been trying to teach my son that Christmas is about giving and about feeling and expressing gratitude. Of course, he’s five, so it’s mostly countdown to presents, but we’ve created some cool Christmas cheer, too. Check out this collage he put together to be our Christmas card.

Holidays are hard, eh? It’s hard to keep your equilibrium with all the extra parties and the entire part-time job that preparing for the holidays entails. What if you have extra stress happening at the same time? I’m not going to pretend I’m anywhere close to on top of my life. I’m so not!

As a matter of fact, I’m going through a “relationship transition” and moving house. I’m racking up some points on the “life stress scale.”

Interestingly enough, though, I feel great physically. One of the side benefits of having increased stress is that I’ve gotten addicted to running again in the last few months. I’m also eating really well and my sleeping pattern goes like this; For 2 or 3 days, I sleep six hours, wake up rested and bound out of bed to get to work. Then, I get really tired and sleep hard for 10 hours. (Then, sometimes, I fall asleep with my son at 8:30 and then am WIDE AWAKE til midnight…)

All I can say is, I’m psyched to be addicted to things like vegetables and exercise rather than sugar and alcohol. It wasn’t always this way.

I had this bad habit of eating entire boxes of cereal when I got stressed out in my 20s. Then occassionally I’d put new holes in my own body (ear, nose, eyebrow.) Sometimes it was a response to stress, sometimes it was simple reckless self-destructiveness.

I don’t recall a point at which I consciously decided to get addicted to positive, life-affirming things, but I did. I had both options around me of course. I even TRIED to learn to smoke, because all my friends did! (And still do! You know who you are!)  I sort of found a common ground between reckless self-destruction and life-affirmation with my reckless, life-affirming trip around the world. Slowly I was just steadily drawn to whatever forced me to grow. (Sometimes that feels good, but a lot of times it doesn’t!)

I found that growth often calls for a good habit that will neutralize a bad habit. Exercise, for example, was my antidote to bulemia in my early 20s because it gave me a sense of empowerment. Whole food neutralized my out-of-control sugar addiction. Right now running is neutralizing my stress and a regular spiritual practice is grounding me when I feel like a small bird caught in an upward-rising thermal.

The older I get (I’ll be 40 in 2010!) the more I’m leaning towards the light. I am really feeling the value of being “addicted” to habits that keep me rested and vibrant and clear during this major life transition.

My wish for all who lay eyes on these words is peace. Peace of mind and gentleness with yourself wherever you are in your life. May your holiday be full of restorative rest and overflowing joy.

Holly

Filed under: 1 | 3 Comments »

Here they come! The holidays. A mixture of excitement, joy, overwhelm and reckless abandon. It creeps up on you every year, doesn’t it? And yet you can see it coming.

Thanksgiving is first. The old standards come out, there’s so much emphasis on the food… you actually try not to eat and then you get hungry and there are so many treats around… you’re socializing while you’re eating and then all of a sudden, you’re stuffed! But it’s the holidays and you’re so “good” most of the time. You’re SUPPOSED to indulge at this time of year!

Right?

Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

The time is here when we give ourselves permission to go to town with those mini candy bars “just for a few days.” It just happens to be coinciding H1N1 hitting our state.

Yet we know that sugar is one of the triggers for lowering our immune system, along with alcohol, stress and lack of sleep.

While this “swine flu” doesn’t seem to be more severe than a regular, seasonal flu (with some unpredictable exceptions) it is way, way more contagious than a regular flu.

Watch this 60 Minutes video about how it’s spreading and why young people are more at risk than those who were born in the 30s and 40s. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

Empty Nest?

Did your youngest just leave home? Wow, it’s SUCH a perfect time to go all-organic, exercise and finally focus on taking care of yourself.

But…yet you might find yourself longing for comfort foods, even misting up at that box of mac and cheese that you weren’t very interesting in before. What’s going on??

Give yourself some time. Really. It’s a major shift in your life. Allow it to rock you for a while. The only real deadline is that it would be nice to regain your balance before the holidays throw you off again. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

Dear lawmakers-
We are witnessing a moment in history when massive, fundamental shifting is possible. There are very powerful people in this country who are interested in preserving the status quo of profit-driven politics that keep millions of Americans uninsured and underinsured, not to mention addicted to processed food and sick enough to require medication. It is only during a crisis that powerful players who helped create our crisis don’t have the influence that they are used to having. These simultaneous economic  and health care crises are giving us a tremendous opportunity; to finally shift the status quo in our health care system. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

I have a renewed respect for single parents after the week I just had. My husband was just away for a week on an incredibly-well-deserved vacation (solo kayaking at Moosehead Lake.) I got everything done. I fed the dog and gave her her meds. I emptied the dishwasher and the dehumidifiers under the house. I fed, bathed and nuzzled my son to sleep every night. Then I got up and cleaned the kitchen and finished all my domestic work by about 9:15pm, at which time I would start my other work. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | 2 Comments »

No one is happy with their current health care benefits (except, perhaps, Congress who have blessed themselves with lavishly complete medical benefit plans,) but according to a recent article in AARP magazine, we in the US are now spending about $8000 per person per year and we’re getting crappy results for that exorbitant investment. Our hospitals are suffering, our doctors aren’t happy and patients are fearful and stressed-out and over-medicated. The universal health care models in Europe are spending approximately half that much and are getting better results. A recent study revealed that three decades ago, 7% of American corporate profits went towards health care costs and now the average is 50%! It’s amazing that anyone is attached to the status quo, but we need only see who is struggling against of health-care reform to know who is making money off the pain. There are powerful entities in this country who are invested in keeping people passive, unwell and prescribed-to. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

A friend of mine recently had a skin irritation in her armpit that turned into an abscess that had to be surgically removed. OUCH! A course of antibiotics followed. She had been using an antiperspirant for 20 years and apparently her pores just clogged up. Antiperspirants work by using aluminum to stop the functioning of sweat gland. Deodorants, on the other hand, use antibacterials to stop odor, but they don’t stop the flow of sweat. She switched to using a deodorant until the abscess healed and then went back to using the same antiperspirant. The same thing happened and she had to go on antibiotics again to avert another surgery.

Read more »

Filed under: 1 | 3 Comments »

For school break, my son and I flew to Grammy and Grampy’s house in Ohio. Oh what fun we had! The Aquarium! The Train Museum! The Children’s Museum of Cincinnati. It’s good fun heading to a big city, but boy is it a wilderness of whole food.

This is modern America. Interstate 95 runs from Maine all the way down to Florida in one gigundous corridor of fast food franchise. This is true of every highway in every single state. For those of us who set an intention to eat seasonal, local, whole food that would be recognizable to our ancestors, the simple act of eating real food while away from home seems impossible.

Instead, there is a smorgasbord of highly processed, genetically-modified, pesticide-sprayed, federally-subsidized wheat accompanied by the meat and milk of extremely unlucky creatures and finished off with additives, preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. De-lish! Read more »

Filed under: 1 | 1 Comment »

My New Favorite Book

This is one of those books that I swear I want to clear my schedule so that I can just sit down and read it til I’m done. My good friend Elizabeth told me about this book that was written by her doctor– that I might be interested in it. WOW! It’s called The Jungle Effect, but Daphne Miller, MD. (2008) It’s part travel log, part culinary anthropology and part cookbook.

Dr. Daphne sets about researching the diets in the epidemiological “Cold Spots” around the world. Some places are “Hot Spots” for diseases like heart disease (guess where) and other places are the opposite. Dr. Daphne actually travels to these cold-spot locales (Copper Canyon, Mexico, Crete, Iceland, Cameroon and Okinawa) to see what the people are eating and reports back on the virtues of food systems that have evolved over the millenia. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

1.) Eat well yourself. If your relationship with food needs some work, there is nothing that will have a greater single impact on your kids’ health for the rest of their lives than for you to eat well and feel good yourself right now. (Need help with that? Hire a health counselor!) The “do what I say and not what I do” line your parents gave you never worked when YOU were a kid and it won’t work now. Kids listen to your actions, not your words. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control has said that children born in the year 2000 are predicted to be the first generation to die at a younger age than their parents (that’s us) and its because of what we feed them. At least we started out eating real food. Kids now eat pure crap. (And BTW never underestimate how easily they pick up on Oreos on your breath and wrappers in your car. A double standard blows your cred.) Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

My proverbial cup runneth over with optimism.  It’s not just because Barack Obama finally took the oath of office, but boy did that help! His inaugural speech moved me deeply and it feels as if we have palpably turned a corner in history. The problems are still there but our capacity to meet them has changed. We have turned a corner but now we face a precipice.

The paradigm has needed to change for a very long time. Paradigms have changed throughout history. That’s what makes up history. But as David McCullough has said, “History didn’t have to go the way it did. Nothing is inevitable.” Our choices now are crucial.

And it was Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I see evidence of the paradigm shifting on political, environmental, societal and spiritual levels. Who doesn’t feel it? The financial crisis is a major paradigm shift, hopefully one where we remember  (or learn) how to save up before we spend and contract our consumption to a level that maybe approaches one that’s sustainable. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

Does guilt work as a motivator to change your life for the better in a longterm way? Both my observation and my experience tell me that, at best, it’s an unnecessary expenditure of precious energy, and at worst, it can lead to bad backlash. Backlash is when you find that you’ve just eaten/drunk/done the very thing that you swore you would NEVER eat/drink/do ever again, period. Whoops.

It’s actually easier, more realistic and requires less psychic energy to just anticipate that you WILL eat/drink/do it again and that hopefully next time you will have your eyes open while you’re doing it so that you can at least learn something from it. We are cyclical creatures. We all have cycles. For some that means maintaining an intense pace of life and then crashing hard 3 or 4 times a year. For others it’s feeling awesome for a few weeks and then kind of down for a week. For many the cycles are more subtle. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

I learned this week about a Dentist in Bangor, Maine named Jonathan Shenkin who proposed that people should not be allowed to purchase soda with their taxpayer-funded foodstamps. The roars of indignation that followed his letter online at the Bangor Daily News were quite fascinating. Some people see the proposal as an effort to usurp free will when it comes to food. But author Raj Patel nailed this beast on the head when he said, “We choose at the end of the day between Coke or Pepsi and we’re told that this is free choice at work. But when you say to someone ‘Coke or Pepsi,’ it’s a synonym for saying you have no choice at all.” Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

It’s a common refrain that good food is not affordable food, and unfortunately, it’s often true. This is, however, the first time in human history that nutrient-depleted food is cheaper than nutrient-dense food. This is a twisted fact that stems from none other than the industrial revolution. Once machines could process our foods, we started having them do it in massive quantities. Why would white rice ever be cheaper than brown rice? It’s had more done to it! Volume. Industrial processing was what made sugar affordable to the average American family for the first time in about 1850. (That’s right, only 158 years ago. For the millions of years prior to 1850, we actually didn’t have cane sugar in our diet. Now we have an average of 170 pounds per American per year.)

Once machines could process our food, we stopped growing just food and started growing commodities. Commodity crops, you know, corn and soybeans, are subsidized by our federal government so that we wouldn’t run short of calories, and oh, has that worked. Of course, these commodity crops are designed to be processed. The food processing companies (like Cargill and Archers Daniels Midland) get the benefit of buying our tax-subsidized grains for less than it costs to grow them and then they whizz it into the least healthy calories available in the supermarket. This fun fact then contributes to peoples’ declining health when they hit tight economic circumstances. Of course you’ll pick something that is filling over something that is healthy if you can only afford one of them. Unfortunately our country also can’t afford the consequences of this when it manifests as obesity (overconsumptive malnutrition,) type 2 diabetes, heart disease, nutrient-deficiency-related developmental delays and behavioral problems in our schools and offices.

So how do you win? How can you eat well AND save money? Read more »

Filed under: 1 | 2 Comments »

If you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s October 9th Open Letter to the Next President in the New York Times, I can’t recommend it more highly. This champion of food writers, a man who has been one of the great heroes of illuminating the unfortunate realities of our food supply through his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and many other books and articles) will actually be in Maine tomorrow night, speaking at Bates College. (I’m gutted I can’t be there. I found out about it too late.)

Michael Pollan finally says it outright: “Food is a National Security issue.” He notes that more than 30 nations have experienced food riots because of shortages in the past several months, and one government (Haiti) has fallen. He makes the point so clearly as to be unmistakable, that our policies up to now which have encouraged massive flows of cheap, subsidized commodity grain to flow unencumbered across global free-trade zones, has been a mistake. The results of this oil-dependent, unsustainable, non-local food supply system is that the poorest on our planet are starving right now. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

In 1944, in the wake of World War II, our government issued an appeal to American citizens to grow their own food. 20 million Americans did it! People who had no experience with gardening planted up their front yards with vegetables and took over derelict urban lots in order to alleviate pressure on our agricultural industry which was trying to fed the troops and to help to feed hungry Europeans. Amazingly, almost 40% of America’s vegetables were provided by these Victory Gardens! To learn more, click here.

The coolest thing about this was that our government asked people to sacrifice, to chip in and to cooperate by making these gardens a group, family or community effort. In an era when our government tells us “to go shopping or the terrorists have won,” this kind of call to action seems hard to imagine. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

Ireland Rocked

We got back from 2 weeks in Ireland this past weekend. Snapshot of my impressions:

1) Boiled cabbage and carrots; no wonder people think they don’t like vegetables!

2) I had heard that Irish people have a higher incidence of celiac disease. Well, in St. Nicolas’ cathedral in Galway, there was a sign that read “Coeliac Communion Line Starts Here.”

3) We ate a lot of meals in pubs. “The Gift of the Gab” is a publican’s provenance. It helps you digest your meal when you’re smiling.

4) While almost all meat and dairy products seemed to be from Irish grass-fed animals, I discovered a pretty minimal local food economy otherwise. Tiny to non-existent farmers markets, where some of those farmers sold produce from abroad. Strawberries came from Wales or Scotland, but most other produce in Marks and Spencer’s seems to come from North Africa, and had caveats on the labels like “Not to be eaten raw! Needs to be washed!” Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »

I’ve lived in parts of the world that didn’t have clear seasons. In Nepal the “seasons” were basically whatever altitude you happened to be at. (high was “winter”, low was “summer”.) Southern California is just disorienting to me with the unrelenting sunshine. Australia was similar. Gum trees are all evergreens, and the odd, confused imported deciduous trees would lose their leaves in the July “winter,” winter being a season during which you could still plant pansies.

I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in the northeast, or perhaps because my genes are mostly from Ireland, but I’m partial to the summer rains and crystalline winters where I live. (but ok, I would not wish for more this year, we are getting plenty of both.) To be clear, the thing that I like is the CHANGE. The difference, the counterpoint, the sharp contrast. If it were always overcast, that would be as boring to me as if it were always sunny. Read more »

Filed under: 1 | No Comments »