Homeostasis and Health (Yours!)

I (heart) balancing rocks

By http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesjordan/2738582688/

Homeostasis; that fine balancing act the body does to keep us harmonious and on keel can really benefit from a little extra help. A little love if you will. So with the turning of another year I am bringing a little attention to this somewhat forgotten bodily function.

When I left the world of Health and Wellness in its retail form (closing my 2 health food stores) seven years ago, one of the things I was burned out from was the growing desire of the customers to have or find the “natural pill” to replace their drug or the “magic bullet” for their ill health or weight loss. Whatever the form, what they were demanding was a quick fix. Over the 12 years I was in business I watched attitude changes in the same way the health food stores changed from being co-ops or mom and pop centers of natural, organic, wholesome foods, herbs, supplements and information to more corporate centers of commerce. The trend toward the natural quick fix seemed to coincide with the trend to make quick money from natural health. Who’s idea was this?

While I rode this wave and enjoyed the increasing numbers of new and interested customers I dismayed at lack of willingness of many newer customers to take the time to “do their homework” and see time as one of the elements to health and healing.

This same trend is seen in the 60 billion dollar a year diet industry. The demand is for the one diet, food, herb, supplement, work out or book (or magical combination) to make the fat disappear (even from people who have nothing extra to spare none-less lose). Obviously there is no one size fits all here no matter what the product sales pitch says.

I hope you will hear me when I say there is no one size fits all in health and wellness either.

To help our body stay on keel (homeostasis) we need to be aware of its reactions. It can do soooo much on its own but just as you will don a sweater on a chilly evening vs letting the body shiver to stay warm, why not ease some of the other systems by paying attention and responding with care?

As an example let’s say you take sleep medication to get the rest you so desperately need the truth is the sleep medication itself is keeping you off kilter and therefore dependent on the drug. Yes drugs have their place and are lifesaving when truly needed yet ignoring the bodies own urge and ability to maintain internal stability is simply another cause of dis-ease. Another approach might be to eliminate any light in the room, caffeine during the day, nagging thoughts (write them down and tell yourself you will give them full attention in the morning), try cooling the room down or taking a hot bath, keeping your feet out from under the covers, exercising earlier in the day, not eat for a few hours prior to retiring and so on. Maybe you have to all of the above or add warm calcium and magnesium. Its worth the time and effort to research and implement as the snooze pill only makes the gap wider and a longer journey to find the way to sleep well and let you body do its nocturnal recovery work.

Some diseases which result from a homeostatic imbalance include:

  • diabetes,
  • dehydration,
  • hypoglycemia,
  • hyperglycemia

Just to name a few. Being aware of the correction the body is trying to make and responding to that need can relieve a lot of stress. Even thirst cues can be missed if we are unaware so imagine some of the more subtle (although not always subtle) cues of blood sugar swings for an example. Giving the body what will support its efforts for correction will go a long way to a life of health and wellness.

Taking  time to feel how your body reacts to what you ingest and how you live can be a real wake up call. Pay more attention to your body and it’s own reaction rather than to the experts, the numbers or the label of the package. How do you FEEL after eating sweets? A light meal? Grains? Alcohol? Fats? Legumes or animal protein? How about after a soda? We are each different and have particular needs at various times. Fine tuning and adjusting to our own needs can bring the body great relief!

I believe much of what we need to do to be free of so much disease is more about subtracting rather than adding. What do you think?

What can you subtract to help your body find homeostasis and feel better?

Aloha!

 

 

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The Great Bell Chant -a mindful meditation

Happy Winter Solstice! What an interesting time of year. I invite you to take the seven minutes to watch and be with this Great Bell mindful meditation.

  • Set aside seven minutes
  • Get comfortable
  • Allow your self to immerse in the sounds and sights
  • Welcome the Peace that is already within you

The Great Bell Chant (The End of Suffering) from R Smittenaar on Vimeo.

Aloha!

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Video on Restrained Eating and Obesity

Today I saw an interesting video on Intuitive Eating (the book is available on the right hand side under suggest reading) and wanted to share it with you…its short, simple and to the point!

So much of our quest to eat the right thing and cut out the wrong thing has led us to the black and white world of disordered eating. We have left our selves, our bodies and our intuition out of the equation in favor of the dogma of the experts all of which is highly subjective. We simply want to believe!

While many health conditions require foods to be used medicinally or in a corrective manner most of us do not need such restriction in the variety of foods, we have become a nation of restrictive eaters! And all this restriction is what is paving the path for the diet industry…we just need to restrict the “right” way. They continue to churn out one “right” way after another and none of them will help you be your true harmonious weight. Only tuning in to your body, your needs and your hunger (physical and emotional) will you find what you need to eat and when. You need to be present.

When hungry EAT, when physically satisfied STOP. Repeat as necessary…Do NOT ignore your physical hunger, your body will do everything it needs to survive including storing and rationing for the perceived famine your restricting is causing.

What you eat is important, how and when you eat is very important.

Take a few minutes and listen as Matt explains the Milkshake and Ice-cream study from Intuitive Eating. Then think about your daily eating habits, maybe there is room for some loosening up!

Matt’s Video on Restrained Eating and Obesity

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Top 10 Tips For Making Peace With Food


Peace Milchmäuse

Top 10 Tips For Making Peace With Food

  1. Develop self acceptance through practicing compassion toward self.
  2. Develop a positive and self nurturing internal dialogue.
  3. Treat co-occurring disorders such as anxiety and depression.
  4. Practice mindfulness and living in the moment.
  5. Listen to and honor your feelings.
  6. Eat well, enjoy and listen to your body’s hunger and fullness signs.
  7. Accept your particular genetic makeup and appreciate your body.
  8. Seek Harmony, have a friend or group to call for support, remember how far you have already traveled.
  9. Develop faith and trust in God -your Higher Power- and let go of what you cannot control.
  10. If you have an Eating Disorder work with a treatment team if possible, if not, seek out self help programs available to assist you in recovery.

Aloha!

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Heart Opening

Gratitude A visual feast and reminder of living each day with mindfulness! Enjoy!

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What Is Mindfulness?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindfulness…we hear this mentioned all the time these days. I often speak of mindfulness to clients in reference to eating and while mindful eating as a practice can be very helpful with health and wellness it can also change your entire life!

What we are really talking about is being but not at the expense of doing but learning how to inhabit being to such a degree that the doing flows out of being.

~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness Is

moment to moment non-judgmental awareness

and is Cultivated by

Paying Attention

 

To begin with we get in touch with the present moment (paying attention). We are only alive in this moment so it’s really the only place we can do anything. When we start to pay attention we begin to notice where the mind is -and often, very often it’s not here and it’s not now… it is off:

  • in the future obsessing about what will happen (worry or planning)
  • in the past trying to explain the past (ruminating)

 

both of these behaviors can become a habit because we usually feel we must be doing something, ANYTHING! We are simply terrified of doing nothing so doing anything (worrying, ruminating, etc) is better to us than non-doing. One mistake we often make is believing that non-doing is not doing anything. Non-doing is actually opening to the state of being which is an opening to everything (fullness of life itself).

How do we cultivate this mindfulness, this state of being? By paying attention, on purpose in the present moment, non-judgmentally and “as if your life depended on it” in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn “and it does, in more ways than you think and more ways than you can possibly think because it doesn’t have to do with thought”

 

The reason we practice in a favorable milieu is so when we are out in the busyness of the world we have the skill level to deal more consciously and find our inner place of calm and equanimity and the more we practice the more skillful we are. We practice mindfulness just as we would with any new skill we wanted to learn, so have patience with yourself (and your endless stream of thoughts which will continue to do what thoughts do….come to mind! Just pay attention and notice them) and give yourself the time and space to be where it is easier to:

  • pay attention
  • in the present moment
  • non-judgmentally
  • and as if your life depended on it

In the next few posts we’ll explore mindful eating, how it can be useful in health and wellness and how it can also be a genuine meditation practice. How beautiful is that- with the act of eating daily we have the practice right at our fingertips.

How do you practice mindfulness in your life?

 

 

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Self Compassion vs Suffering

Something sets you off…your new love fails to call, your scale reads something different than you want, or you get news from the home-front that just doesn’t sit well with you. This would be the first arrow…the pain the hurt the frustration of well…LIFE. It happens.

The next action reaction is often where the second arrow comes in to play. You may eat, drink , medicate, binge, purge, restrict, overexercise, ruminate, lash out, hole-up or simply fall apart. In other words you may set off a second arrow…insult to injury and this one is self induced!

The first arrow is simply what is happening, it is life and we cannot get away from life’s ups and downs. We need to recognize the piece of life that is happening and we can then make a little space for what is to come next. Without recognition of what is happening we cannot have enough awareness to make a different choice.

This recognition causes a  slight pause in the flow of events and is enough to begin to have awareness of what is happening and how we can choose to see it. Also we can use this little pause to ask “can I allow this and know I am not alone?”

Try it …

“this [insert your life distress] is painful and I am not alone”

…because you are not alone and knowing others have and are experiencing pain helps to put you into a compassionate space.

The second arrow is fully our own projectile of self harm and we have control over this dart. Now now don’t go beating yourself up for shooting yourself with the second arrow all these years. This is exactly what we want to move away from! We want to begin to see that our being hard on our self and placing another arrow of pain into our self is really where the suffering of life lies.

My old dentist back in NY had a plaque on his wall that said

“Pain is Inevitable and Suffering is Optional”

This pain we feel day in and day out with disappointment, frustration, fear and loneliness or what ever is the flavor of the day is -as the plaque stated- inevitable and the suffering that comes from the second arrow we fling at ourselves is optional…we can pause here and instead of shooting our own pain with yet another barbed arrow we can make a different choice…

We can choose self compassion. We can begin to see ourselves as we would see a dear friend who was in pain or as a mother would see her hurting child and offer to ourselves the gift of kindness, tenderness and empathy the same gifts you would offer to a friend or loved one ….so why not yourself?

Why not begin to take a look at being your own best friend?

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What Would You Have to Feel if You Did Not Numb-Out?

The beautiful lion of the zoo of Basel

You know what I mean…what would you have to feel if you did not:

  • Binge
  • Purge
  • Self medicate
  • Over exercise
  • Restrict

You may not even know yet why it is you are numbing-out. You may know this is not the way you want to live your life and you have desires to change your behavior to a more healthy manner. So why is it so difficult? The decision is made and the follow through is just not not there.

It is very scary to be alive, often we would rather do anything verses just pausing and actually connecting and feeling the thing we  fear. Often this thing we do takes us further away from ourselves and is the exact opposite of self care. We will do anything verses nothing.

Nothing is exactly what we need to do to feel. Doing anything is our way of controlling the world around us so we can stay away from any feelings we don’t like, pushing us further from ourselves.

The doing can look like any of the list above or the following:

  • Being different
  • Being wrong
  • Saving, controlling or managing others

So how do we stop and feel the feelings that are driving us? We take responsibility which is to say, we become aware. That is our fundamental responsibility, to become aware. This takes courage, courage to feel that which we are afraid of. remembering feelings like thoughts are not who we are.

When you feel the numbing or controlling behavior start try the following:

  • Pause
  • Contact the feeling
  • Feel the disconnect
  • Lean into the fear
  • Feel it
  • Open with the feeling- this is simply being with what is happening verses changing and manipulating the situation

This feeling at opening may be vast, know you are that vastness and that it cannot be controlled and the more it is run from the more we lose touch with it the more alone and fearful we become. Finding the place where we can see the imperfection of being human and knowing it is OK we can let go of the need to control. Again this takes courage.

Ask your self if you can live from what really matters and be OK if you do it imperfectly? To live fully we must be able to be willing to risk failure.

Another place we get into running away from what matters most to us is in living in the should box. Should pushes us away from our center and who we are into the needs and desires of the world around us. When we hear “should” perhaps we can pause and ask “what really matters right now?”

What matters most is the coming home to our own presence and we cannot be afraid to be a fool if that will be what takes us to ourselves. We need to express our lives in a courageous manner to let our inner wildness out and be expressed as the love and mystery that we are.

So what would it mean to you to live true to your heart, to have your true heart expressed?

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How To: Healthy Grocery Shopping

How to Choose?

Recently (with the New Year and all  the resolutions it causes) I have been asked a number of times how to be less confused while grocery shopping, all the labels all the nutrition facts all the claims and choices. Well this is to answer that cry for help.

Am I really so old that the idea of shopping the perimeter of the grocery store has been lost on so many? If so I’m glad my memory is still sharp because what I’m about to share I’ve been teaching clients for decades.

  • The positive wording: shop the outer edges (perimeter) of the grocery store
  • The negative wording: step away from the inner isles for your food purchases

The inner isles of foods are

  • filled with extras you do not require as a human such as:
  1. sugar (sweeteners of all types including agave, honey, maple syrup, cane, etc)
  2. preservatives
  3. hydrogenated oils
  4. rancid oils (absolutely detrimental to health)
  5. grains (possible allergens)
  6. soy (this will require an entire post)
  7. peanut (allergen and lousy fat)
  8. corn (allergen and lousy fat)
  9. the list goes on and usually on and on (a red flag to step away from the product)
  • Over
  1. packaged
  2. priced
  3. processed
  4. advertised (its a jungle of misleading messages to get you to pick up a new product)

Now to leave you on a positive note

The outer isles or perimeter of the grocery store is where you will find food that are

  • Fresh (that’s why its on the outer edges, back in the day that was the easiest place to run the coolers and chill)
  1. meats
  2. veggies
  3. fruits
  4. dairy
  5. eggs
  • Real
  • Unprocessed
  • Unpackaged

This is where you want to have the bulk of your shopping come from (if not all-but I am not into absolute). What a wonderful place to spend your money, which by the way is how you tell the store what to carry (believe me I was in natural retail for over 12 years- if you don’t buy it they wont carry it, for long)

If and when you have them available, do (please) shop the local farmers markets! When you can connect your food with the faces of the growers your shopping experience becomes personal and don’t we need a little more of that in ours days? Again we speak with our wallets so choose your worde wisely!

You can’t do anything but pump up your nourishment by shopping this way. Go forth and enjoy! Oh and be sure to bring your bags :)

Sending much Aloha!

Posted in Mindful Eating, Nutrition | 2 Comments

Shimmy,Samba, Strut or Swing, Just Get Down! Dance!

Forget “just do it”, “no pain no gain” or gym machines.

“Let’s make moving our bodies fun…remember the days? Look at kids (little kids) they just move and wiggle and jump and man if you put some shakin’ music on they will be all over the place. As it should be.

Why are we in such a rut when it comes to moving our bodies? I have a feeling the routine of movement needs to be more spontaneous and erratic to be healthful (just like our foods) routine is not what we are built for.  With the recent trend toward caveman eating (Paleo) and living I wondered why I have not heard more about dance? A lot of discussion around barefoot running and I for one agree with the bare foot thing (but I walk on a beach) and love the interesting moves and weights (kettle bells etc) that are making a come back but to me it seems if you toss in some music you can have a workout for all seasons. Pick your tempo in relation to your energy level and have at it!

All cultures have their dance, I think we are really falling off track here I wonder if they even teach dance in schools any more? (Not that we needed to be taught to move with music but it sure was a break from dodge ball!) Get off the treadmill and set your body mind and spirit free.

  • Keeping the mind sharp- just try a new style of dance and take some lessons, your mind will get a really good workout along with your body.
  • Social interaction-I have met some of the nicest people I would have never run across at a dace class. Cheap some are even free lessons or class…way less than a yoga class in my area.
  • Laughing- when was the last time you laughed your way through a run or treadmill workout?
  • Body image- watch it soar from zero to sixty when you start to strut your stuff.

Even dancing alone at home brings up so much energy and emotion seems like it’s really a full being exercise.  Take your day into the dance and let the music and movement put it all into perspective. You have a body a glorious body that can move, cant move all your parts? Move what you can, chair dance wheel chair dance, bed dance moving your fingers to the music…move what you can, with joy!

You need not buy a thing, go bare foot or don your favorite dance shoes, put on your music…you say you have none? Try Pandora or another free streaming radio station, they even have it broken out by genre for you already. Turn it on and let loose. I bet you have a better work out than yoou have in a long, long time. My guess is that it’s longer, more diverse in the movements/muscle groups and FUN (which means you will WANT to do it again and again).

Gotta run I’m off to a dance class with a friend!!

Love to hear from you…

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