From the category archives:
Healthy Living
September is National Yoga Month
September is National Yoga Month.
To celebrate and promote yoga and healthy living, A 10 City Yoga Festival Tour is being held throughout the US and Canada with many of the top names in Yoga - Shiva Rea, Larry Payne, Timothy McCall - participating. All proceeds from Yoga Month and Yoga Health Festivals will benefit Youth Health Alliance and health education for underserved children.
To learn more about Yoga Month.
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Recipe for Healthy Eating
“Far more indispensable than food for the physical body is spiritual nourishment for the soul. One can do without food for a considerable time, but a man of the spirit cannot exist for a single second without spiritual nourishment.”
~ Gandhi
Is there a recipe for healthy eating?
The quality of what you eat is important to your overall health and wellness. But is there something that is even more important? The folks at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition think so. Advocates of a holistic approach to nutrition, they postulate that what you eat is secondary to the quality of your life - your relationships, your career, your physical activity, and your spirituality - considered primary food in their unique recipe for healthy eating.
No matter how much attention and care you give to your diet and what you eat, optimal health and wellness will evade you if your sources of primary food are deficient. Focus on what really feeds and nourishes you and you are sure to thrive, even if your ‘diet’ isn’t perfect. This is a key ingredient in their recipe for healthy eating.
It’s the news I’ve been waiting to hear after years of trying to determine the ‘right way to eat’ from all the experts and authorities who appear locked in a violent battle of conflicting nutritional information. When you look around you realize that the science of nutrition has done little to alleviate the modern woes that surround us - obesity, chronic disease, and deep seated unhappiness.
It’s because what we eat can never replace our desire for quality relationships, rewarding work, enjoyable physical activity, and spiritual connection with food. And yet we try to fill all that is missing in our lives with food. In the process we become sicker, fatter, and unhappier.
Once we recognize the importance of primary food in our recipe for healthy eating and begin focusing on improving these critical areas of our lives our issues with the food we eat take their appropriate secondary position and become manageable. We are able to lose the weight and eat better with much less struggle. It seems too good to be true, but it’s not. We are on the path to living healthy, happy, rewarding lives. We have found a recipe for healthy eating we can live with that will support us. Will there be bumps in the road? Yes, but given our increasing awareness of food’s rightful position of importance we will feel equipped to handle them.
If you are you interested in learning more about holistic nutrition or working with a counselor The Institute of Integrative Nutrition has a graduate directory to assist you. I worked with Darshana Weill of Fruition Health by telephone for several months. One of the first graduates of the IIN program, she is a gifted holistic health counselor who helped me fine-tune my nutritional concerns.
IIN graduate, Dani Spies, has a beautiful informative website full of healthy recipes. You can purchase the book, Integrative Nutrition: The Future of Nutrition
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Basic Yoga Poses Improve Stability and Balance in Women Over Age 65
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
~ Seneca
I came across an interesting article today on the power of basic yoga in preventing falls in women over 65 years old. “Results from a study conducted by The Temple University Gait Study Center found that at the end of the nine-week Iyengar basic yoga program, participants had a faster stride, an increased flexibility in the lower extremities, an improved single-leg stance and increased confidence in walking and balance.”
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Benefits of Personalized Yoga Instruction
Personalized yoga instruction can be a great way to get fit, lose weight, and feel great. If you are having trouble getting started with a yoga practice or making time for class, maybe personalized private yoga sessions are the answer to helping you get started. Sometimes just a few sessions are needed to help you establish a home yoga practice of your own that you can then supplement with Yoga DVDs or CDs. It might be the perfect alternative to traditional personal training sessions too.
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Why I Do Yoga
Why Yoga? What makes it so special?
The truth is I don’t understand completely how yoga works, how it has done what it has for me. I know that it has been a constant companion through good and bad - sickness, health, happiness, sadness, divorce, death, marriage - and my life is better because of it.
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Mindless Munching
There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal called, Putting an end to Mindless Munching. According to the article, Mindful Eating, the art of slowing down and paying attention to what you are eating, is being studied at several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health as a way to combat eating disorders and the results are promising.
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Is My Clutter Making Me Fat?
Does our clutter make us fat? Simplification and organization expert Peter Walsh thinks so. This is the topic of his book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More.
He makes a strong case for the link between excess stuff and excess body weight. “As a society we keep getting fatter and fatter and our stuff keeps getting bigger and bigger from the size of our burgers and fries to the size of our houses and cars. We keep filling ourselves up inside and out with more and more stuff.”
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The Conscious Gourmet Cooking Retreat
My sister and I recently attended The Conscious Gourmet Cooking Retreat in Sedona, a five day program advertised as a ‘Culinary Retreat for the body, mind, and soul.’ It’s designed to provide you with a foundation in health-supportive cooking and theory, based on The Natural Gourmet Institute’s Core Program which was historically offered only in New York City.
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The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy & Weight Loss
I just finished a wonderful ‘non-diet’ book called The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss by Marc David that combines the best of The French Women Don’t Get Fat philosophy with the latest research on body biochemistry and the powerful mind-body connection. It’s complete nutrition for the body, mind and soul.
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Ten Secrets for Stress-Free Living
Stress Make You Sick. Stress suppresses the immune system and has been linked to many chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome. Stress Kills. How can we learn to live in these stress filled times without succumbing to its ill effects?
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