Saturday, February 26, 2011

Just the Minimum

Sometimes, when I have to talk myself into going for a swim, when I'm tired, I'll just tell myself I only have to to do a few laps, I know I'll feel better after I'm done. Then when I find myself in the pool, it's easy to give myself a few bonus laps. Sometimes I lose track of how many laps I've done, after the minimum. So give yourself permission to just do a little bit, to get over the inertia, and then you can reward yourself with more exercise. You know you'll feel better once you are done.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Food for thought

Food is such an essential part of who we are. We literally take things out of our environment and take it inside of ourselves and make it part of our bodies. For most of human history, that meant things found in nature, plants or animals. Less than a hundred years ago, they started to process food, to take the germ and fiber out of wheat, so it could be stored longer and not go bad. They took the corn plant and wrested sugar out of it (high fructose corn syrup). They feed corn to cows, who naturally eat grass, not grain. And they feed cows growth hormones to produce more milk, and antibiotics so the cows don't get sick. There is more e-coli bacteria in their system because they are eating corn and not grass. It's hard to eat meat for a while after seeing "Food, Inc."

We are omnivores, we have the teeth to digest both plants and animals. But so many of the processed foods are full of chemicals, that really, we have no idea of what they are doing to our health. We see as populations around the world start to eat a western fast food diet, they start having western problems like obesity and heart disease and diabetes. Fast food burgers and super sized sugary sodas and potatoes deep fried in trans fat oils are a recipe for health problems.

Real food comes from nature. It grows in healthy soil, comes from a diverse ecosystem. Real food takes some time to prepare and cook. It doesn't usually come out of a box.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Time to move

Inspired by Joel Friedman's talk yesterday, "Blogging 101," at the Bay Area Independent Publisher's Association meeting I feel ready to start a blog of my own.

So much of our health depends on what we do each day, the choices we make, and one of the easy choices we can make is to include some kind of movement everyday. Opt for the long way around, park far away, take the stairs, put on some music and dance! I'm going to take my own advice and go out for a bike ride, while the sun is still shining