7 Steps to Strengthening Health

From Essene Market website.

Strengthening Health is an orderly approach to eating and living. It is based on creating healthy eating habits (format of meals), and diet (content or food choices, and quality within the meal).

EATING HABITS: (Format of meals)

1. Take time for your meals every day.

• Sit down to eat your meals or snacks without doing other things. This is the first step towards good health and will help you feel more satisfied. It is an expression of your appreciation for food and allows you to receive nourishment.

  Allow adequate time for your meals. The meal has a minimum time the same as sleep. It takes at least 20 minutes for your body to adjust and receive nourishment.

  Eat slowly and chew well. Eating slowly and mindfully returns you to balance and relieves stress. Chewing is like a pump that circulates all of your body's energy and fluids, it is the internal body rub (see step 4).

  Stop eating 3 hours before bedtime. Your body cleans and repairs itself while you sleep. Your stomach needs to be empty for this process to be efficient.

  Eat in an orderly manner. Soup may be eaten first or together with the meal. Start with heavy, well-cooked dishes and finish with lighter, less-cooked dishes. Grains should be eaten from beginning to end of the meal. Your beverage and dessert come last.

  Avoid mixing foods in the same mouthful.

2. Set your daily schedule.

• Rise early and sleep before midnight. Rise early to be more active and discharge more toxins. Sleep before midnight to be more refreshed and healthy.

  Keep your meal times regular. Regular meals regulate all of your body's cycles--physical, emotional, mental. They make your energy and life more stable.

DIET: (Content and quality of meals)

3. Eat 2 or 3 complete and nutritionally balanced meals every day.

Grain and vegetable dishes together at the same meal provide the most complete and balanced nutrition. Plan every meal around cooked grains and grain products.

• Vegetable dishes: Complete and balance every meal with 1 to 2 vegetable dishes.

  Soup: Activate and harmonize your digestion with a bowl of vegetable soup at 1 or 2 meals.

  Organic: Buy the highest quality organically grown, unrefined and naturally processed foods.

LIFESTYLE: (Approach to health)

4. Make your daily life active.

• Walk for 30 minutes every day. Walking outside at a comfortable pace, with a natural stride produces the best results. It can be a combined 30 minutes.

  Give yourself a daily body rub. Gently rub your entire body with a hot, damp, cotton face cloth for 10 to 15 minutes morning and/or night. Do it separate from your bath or shower. The body rub is the Secret of the Fountain of Youth, it winds back your biological clock. The body rub together with thorough chewing will make you younger in body and mind, day by day.

  Life-related exercise provides the most benefit for lasting health.

  Hobbies: Cultivate and take time for hobbies.

5. Create a more natural environment.

You can think of your home as a recharging station. It is a place to relax, return to balance and enrich your life.

• Plants: Surround yourself with green plants, especially your bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms and office or work space.

  Cotton clothing: Wear pure cotton clothing next to your skin.

  Natural materials: Use natural materials, wood, cotton and wool, etc., in your home.

6. Make your macrobiotic practice work.

• Keeping to the format of meals improves your ability to make healthier food choices. If you keep the format you can follow these principles at home or in a restaurant. It helps you make better food choices.

  Keep a daily menu book to help you become more objective about your macrobiotic practice.

7. Cultivate the spirit of health.

• * Have openness, curiosity and endless appreciation for all of life.

  * Be flexible and adaptable in your practice.

  * Develop a strong will and the determination to create your own health.

  * Be accurate in your practice.

  * Create a good support network.

  * Learn to cook well

Movie Typecasting

I watched Dysturbia the other night while at a hotel in Washington, DC - work trip. The lead actor is rising star Shia LeBeouf (also of Transformers and the new Indiana Jones movie). When I went to www.imdb.com to check out his body of work I clicked on his most recent project New York, I Love You which comes out next year. When I scrolled that movie's cast of characters I saw that a friend from high school, Vedant Gokhale, was in the movie.

I've only seen Vedant once since high school and that was at our 10-year high school reunion in 2005. I recall Vedant sharing with me that he was going into acting, after becoming a lawyer and not liking it. So from Vedant's IMDB profile, it seems like he's starting to build an acting career - though I wonder if he still practices law on the side to make a steady income.

After I got past the excitement that I could see a friend of mine on the silver spring, I got pissed that so far he's almost always played a culturally stereotyped role of an Indian - his parents immigrated to the U.S. from India as adults and he and his brothers were born here.

In this movie, Vedant plays a seemingly minor role as the "cab driver. "

While I bet Vedant is happy to just break into the movie business, it's unfortunate that non-White Americans are so often casted in a culturally stereotypical way.

Marking Memorial Day

Most holidays come and go and I lament that I don't do more to mark the day. National holidays are often little more than a day that I don't go to school or work. Yesterday, Memorial Day 2008 was shaping up to be more of the same, though I did at least openly lament my likely lack of engagement pre-holiday instead of just during or after. While the thinking about the day is something, yesterday I did a little more and am now not beating myself up as much as I usually do.

Yesterday at around 6:30pm, I went for a run. I ran north on Front Street and at about Pine Street I turned right into a small public park. While I had been there before, I forgot that this park is the Philadelphia Vietnam War Memorial. So while I wasn't looking for a way to acknowledge the day, I was given a nice opportunity. I jogged in place and kept listening to my ipod mix and read every name on the memorial - it took about ten minutes. And then I kept on running and on the way back I stopped briefly at the nearby Korean War Memorial.

Next American holiday to celebrate in a way bigger than fireworks, day off and drinking is Independence Day. Two years ago I was taking a cultural diversity class in my masters of social work program at Bryn Mawr and recall writing a journal entry which included an excerpt of famous speech by Frederick Douglas on the hypocrisy of Independence in America. See below for the excerpt:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Thinking About Conservation

Over the past few months as ideas came to me (those who know me well know that ideas come often) I often put them aside until "after graduation" to seriously consider them. Take a look at my "tasks" in my phone and you'd see:

-acting classes
-cleaning my apartment
-installing window air conditioning units
-cooking class
-improving my home repair skills
-setting up quicken (has been on my task list for a while...)
-joining a CSA (community supported agriculture)
-buying clothes/food thoughtfully

It's the last two tasks, along with a third (being more energy efficient at home and beyond) that I've been thinking about lately.

I've felt good about some of my energy saving ways over the past year.
- Composting
- Using reusable bags when grocery shopping (cutting down on my plastic intake)
- Walking and bike riding whenever possible
- Recycling paper, cans, cardboard, etc. (though not sure if I'm recycling correctly or the fate of what I put in the recycling bins).
- Buying books less (mostly about cost, but also saves paper and utilizes the library)
- Take train for work trips to Harrisburg and DC instead of driving
- Vegetarian for one year (not contributing to costs associated with growing, hunting, killing, processing, shipping seafood products. I gave up meat years ago, but my giving up seafood was in part due to the environmental costs associated with food production and distribution).
--- I'm eating seafood again...

Potential To Do's to be more energy efficient and environmentally responsible

- Get an Energy Audit of home and make repairs (like changing and insulating windows, changing light bulbs, turning off the electric power at night to TV, computer, stereo, etc).

- Buy food more thoughtfully - farmers markets, too late for a CSA?, read labels. Buy fewer packaged products

- Watch TV less and instead read and be outside more

Message to myself:

Realize that change is a process. It's not all or nothing and doesn't have to happen in a set period of time. Don't be hard on myself but do push myself to look into and follow through on the above because it's important to me.

These potential energy/environment related behavior changes is connected to a larger feeling that I need to take care of myself first before and perhaps instead of working for change in others. The only person that I can fully change is myself and if I take greater responsibility for myself than perhaps my desire to organize and facilitate change will be better satiated. That said, I am not trying to quelch the organizer in me, just re-focus the energy inwards for a little while and see what the results are.

Watching the Dishes Dry

Yesterday I took pictures of my dishes after I washed them and set them to dry in my dish rack. Washing dishes is an enjoyable activity for me and as I find it to be a discreet task that I can accomplish quickly. Furthermore, living without a dishwasher (or as the dishwasher), every time I set my dishes to dry, they are arranged in a different way. And that different arrangement - to me - is art.

So yesterday I started to capture that art. I might take pictures with each new ensemble of washed dishes or every day or in some regular way until I stop taking pictures. (I'll keep washing dishes though).

This project is inspired in part by a new friend who took a picture of herself every day for 30 days. She didn't dress up or do anything special for the photos. Instead a photo a day at home for 30 days to capture life as it is lived most of the time.

Some questions I have about the Dishes are:
-Do the dishes I use or the way I place them to dry say anything about me?
-Is each turn of drying dishes a completely unique arrangement?
-What role does the dish rack and/or surrounding area have in the art?
-Will I carry through this Dishes project to a point of completion, however I end up defining completion?

ACTION

I've been meaning to be more active, and even have the idea of taking at least 1 action every day.
Perhaps I've stored up some actions for future dates...

• $50 donation to Al Franken's US Senatorial Campaign in Minnesota
• Will pitch supporting Franken's campaign with friends who just moved from Minneapolis to Philadelphia
• Looking at AFSC's page on Iraqi refugees. Did not send electronic letter on troop withdrawl. Can write my own letter. Looking for a more concrete action around refugee support.
• Called my Congressman, Robert Brady, and encouraged support for increased funding towards renewable energy, per an upcoming vote on a big Energy bill. I spoke to the Staff Assistant who did not know the Congressman's position initially, but who found out for me, and herself, that the Brady is a co-sponsor of H.R. 969 which calls for increased funding and benchmarks on use of renewables, especially by companies.

When I Grow Up

Could I be a travel agent and utilize my current and future social work training/experience to create a professional niche. Initial meetings with potential clients take on an intake interview quality where I learn about the dynamics of the travelers, as individuals and in the group, along with where they want to go and the types of things they value in their life and on vacation. And then I take all of that into consideration and craft trip scenarios.

Something to definitely think more about...