HealthPuzzles
Targeting Trails To Truth
Hey there,
I’m so excited to launch my new blog. It’s been a dream of mine for several years. It took some time and learning but here we are. This blog will be dedicated to you and all things HEALTH
Talking about health includes much more than food. Food is very important as you know because it feeds us which in turn affects our energy which in turn affects our brain. How we feel and think affects our spiritual health. It’s all connected. Our bodies are amazing and want to be well.
To be healthy should be natural. It is our birthright. In our time and culture, we are fed so many messages which don’t lead us there. We have so many conflicting stories, we have so many things to do and we have a built in need for instant gratification. I’ve learned that to counteract that is to arm myself with information and signals leading me in the right direction. I’ve learned that I have to do that often or I get side tracked and sucked back into things which are leading me back to unhealth. I’m hoping that if you feel like me, this blog will help with that.
Be Well,
http://www.healthpuzzles.com
Living, Loving and Grief
How are you doing these days? It’s been a good while since I wrote anything. We have all been living the horrendous covid virus experience in our own ways. And now we have the protests and riots in the streets. It’s a scary time. But what I feel a need to talk about is something we will all experience at some point in our lives, maybe even now…no one gets a free pass if they love. It’s grief. How does this pertain to health? It is part of the human experience and there are healthy ways to get through it. When it strikes, feeling grief and sitting with it is harder than running from it with drugs or overeating or sleeping too much. I know because that is what I have been doing for the past month. It just prolongs the sadness which is part of healing. But I have also been reading my books about healing and trying to practice being present and looking for a healthy side of feeling and moving through pain. These are my salvations and they really help more than the addictive things that are easy to reach for but in the end, make you sicker.
What has happened to give me this experience with grief? I lost my friend, my constant companion. She was a dog named Morgan. I was lucky to have had her for nine years. She got cancer and I didn’t have a clue until eight days before she died. If she was feeling sick before that (I hope to God that she wasn’t) I didn’t see it. I thought she was getting older and slower but so am I, so I dismissed it. I took her to the vet for a cough. I always knew I loved her beyond belief and I never seriously contemplated losing her.
Those eight days were the hardest days I’ve ever experienced. Yes. I realize I’ve been very lucky to not have lost an actual person which I was close to on a day to day basis, but I think I can definitely relate to the feelings of devastation and loss. I now know the terrible feelings of helplessness, of sorrow and the emptiness that comes with losing a loved one. We were each others shadow and I don’t remember a day in nine years in which she wasn’t one of most important souls for me to consider.
Grief for me, it is several feelings, sometimes all at once. Sometimes I can hardly breathe and sometimes I can go on about my business. Sometimes I can plan my day and sometimes I cry most of it. Sometimes I realize I need to move on and sometimes I feel justified in being sad.
What have I learned about grief that might resonate with you? I’ve learned that clichés are said over and over for a reason. When someone said these things before, I didn’t really get it….”She had a great life.”, “At least she didn’t suffer.”, “She’s happier now.” you know those. I think it’s because when someone is grieving, we want to try to make it better. It’s human nature. I’ve learned those clichés kind of do help when you are in the midst of trying to process what you could have done differently.
I’ve learned that sometimes, we lose our way. We feel the need to be comforted and we fall back on old habits. Junk food and chardonnay have been companions too much lately. I have not been able to muster out my yoga mat even though I know I need to. I’ve learned to have more compassion and to judge less.
I’ve learned that you find out who your real people are and that they come through for you. They are there for you even if you don’t deserve it. I’ve learned people can be really awesome. I’ve had a much needed lesson in the goodness of humanity.
I’ve learned that feeling grief is so powerful but it probably is not going to kill you and it just might make you stronger. I’ve learned that you can run but you can’t hide. You must feel the feelings and think the thoughts to start to move in a more positive direction. Which is where I personally want to go. Crying and moping is not going to bring Morgan back.
Most of us have heard about the stages of grief or experienced them…There is denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance…I’m still traveling through all of them but in “Finding Meaning” , David Kesseler suggests there is another stage which is, finding meaning. I have started to think about the meaning in my dogs life that will always be with me. One is that she taught my husband about how awesome dogs are. He didn’t know. Another is that she taught me to live in the moment because that is all we have. She was so noble that it was astonishing when she got sick. I saw her bravery and I want to mimic that if I can. But the most important thing I think I got from her was getting to know an animal so well that looking in her eyes, I saw the eyes of all animals. I saw that they think, feel, have needs and want to live their lives. Yes, I have quit eating them many years ago and I now feel a stronger need to advocate for them. What a gift she was.
In moving forward without her I will try to remember this quote by Rose Kennedy who had her share of heartbreak and sorrow…”Birds sing after a storm: why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?”
Be Well,
Faith, Hope and patience
Tomorrow will be a new day and like these vulnerable plants, we will be one day stronger. Like these plants, we can adjust and thrive.
What a crazy time!!!! If you are feeling like I am, the feelings that come to mind are fear of the unknown, sad about changed plans or worried about lost income. There is uncomfortableness with this present reality and there are probably some feelings of boredom and missing loved ones.
When I was over watering my new seedlings, I realized I am also feeling hope, faith and patience. Looking at them trying so hard to get strong and adjust to their growth, I realized that in order to grow stronger, I need to concentrate on those positive feelings.
I am reminding myself that I must have hope or I wouldn’t be over there taking care of what will some day feed us. I must have faith for the same reason and patience, well, I have patience too because as any gardener knows, it takes all three to make a garden grow.
What we concentrate on and how we focus on our circumstances effect how we grow. Those negative emotions I mentioned above are not doing me any good and they are actually hurting me. I am determined to try to find humor and lightness to focus on as much as I can. As I sit here writing this, I realize how fortunate I am to have a house, wonderful company (most of the time) and enough food to keep us fed. I have places for exercise and being safely outside. The opportunities for growth are endless thanks to books and my computer. The downtime can really be a blessing and for now that is enough. I don’t know if I am contributing enough to the unfortunate who are dealing with this virus personally but I am doing my part to stay home and stay healthy. I have faith that this will end and we will have learned what we needed to learn. I have hope that something positive will come out of this and just maybe, we will all feel more connected towards each other. I am practicing patience, as we all are, by being still and inquiring about the lessons we can learn from this.
Mental health and physical health go hand in hand. In Switch On Your Brain, Dr. Caroline Leaf, says this: “Our mind is designed to control the body, of which the brain is a part, not the other way around. Matter does not control us: we control matter through our thinking and choosing. We cannot control the events and circumstances of life but we can control our reactions. In fact, we can control our reactions to anything, and in doing so, we change our brains.”
The more we practice being in the present moment, (the only one we have for sure) the more we can be calm in all circumstances.
I can’t wait to be writing to you at the other end of this but until then, let’s all try to make the best of our common situation, help those we can and stay home and healthy.
Be Well,
Protecting your Heart
We have so much power over our heart. No, not who we fall in love with or how many times it gets broken but how long and strong it beats. Our number one cause of death in the United States is heart attacks. It is, according to many Doctors, mostly preventable by diet.! It’s never too early to start protecting your heart. If you have been eating a Standard American Diet most of your life, you can start reversing possible damage right now.
There are documented autopsy results done on young adults between 15 and 34 years old who died of external causes which show that damage starts in most people very young. Fatty streaks and raised lesions increase rapidly during that age span and will continue throughout their lives. There are several reasons this happens but the biggest one is diet.
One of the things to be aware of, not related to diet, but of lifestyle is (NSAIDS) nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They are proven to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke which can have the risks increasing as early as the first week of taking them.
Stress can also be a lifestyle risk factor. Stress if it’s chronic, exposes your body to unhealthy, persistently elevated levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Studies have also linked stress to changes in the way the blood clots and yes, you guessed it, not what we want.
Drinking too much alcohol (dose related) causes higher amounts of cortisol to be released altering the brain’s chemistry and shifting the hormonal balance and changes how we respond to stress in a negative way also. Alcohol causes anxiety and panic attacks. All this is bad for our heart.
The biggest known factor to affect your heart health though, is fat, in particular but not restricted to, saturated fat. The waxy, fat-like substance found in all cells of the body is cholesterol. The body makes the cholesterol you need naturally. When you start adding more on a regular basis, (dose dependant) you start hurting your body. Cholesterol is only found in animal foods. Plants don’t have any.
There are two types of lipoproteins ( packages of proteins that travel through the blood stream carrying cholesterol. Low density lipoproteins (LDL) and high density lipoproteins (HDL). HDL is called the “good ” cholesterol- and carries cholesterol from the blood stream to the liver, which is then removed from the body. LDL is called the “bad” cholesterol and contributes to plaque in the arteries. The newer science is saying that having the good cholesterol is not necessarily a good thing….it means you have more of the bad stuff to get rid of.
Just one gram of saturated fat increases LDL by 2%. Cholesterol in animal foods also increases serum cholesterol levels. Decreasing dietary cholesterol decreases serum cholesterol and is the goal. A well done, documented study including 356,222 men between the age of 35 and 57 showed cholesterol levels are directly related to the risk of coronary heart disease and deaths. The more you have, the more you are likely to have heart disease.
Statin drugs can make your blood numbers look good, but they have been shown to decrease cardiovascular events by only 1.2%! That is a false security with too many side effects to really be a good advantage in most cases. Diet, has been shown to reverse heart disease. Again, it’s plants for the winner.
I don’t have the space here, to show you some of the awesome results of eating more plants and less animal foods so if you are interested in some evidence, google Dr. Caldwll Esselstyn or Dr Dean Ornish among many others.
Another piece of evidence was gathered by my instructor, Pam Popper for a documentary which showed the rate of heart and cancer mortality in relationship to diet. She gathered many countries and studied their diet with their rate of documented mortality. It was amazing! The more populations eat animal foods instead of plants, the earlier and the more deaths they had. The shortest version I can give you is the example that in Uganda, they ate an average of 6.4% of calories from animal food and had 49.4 deaths from cancer and 120.8 from heart disease per 100,00. In Hungary they were eating an average of 30.7% calories from animal food and had 328.5 deaths from cancer and 651.3 from heart disease per 100,000. She listed a total of 8 countries (there were many more) to narrow down the evidence that she says weren’t cherry picked as examples and they all showed the same results. The more animal foods these countries are eating, the more deaths in percentages to all most match exactly. Pretty impressive. Another thing shows that when cultures start eating like us, they aren’t immune. They start getting our diseases. It’s a fact and not one dairy and meat industry want us to know. You can’t blame them, they are trying to make a living but the truth has been so distorted that people don’t know what to eat. It’s not good.
Some of the ways we fool ourselves include thinking if everybody is doing it, if we have always done it, it can’t be that bad. Well, we have had heart attacks since the invention of agriculture and more so since those foods have been affordable. In this current age, we have access everywhere and always. Again, It’s dose related. The more we eat it and the less we eat plants, the faster we are likely to experience the bad results.
It is not normal for us humans to have a heart attack. It’s food related. If we care about being alive and healthy, we need to save ourselves. Doctors have very little experience with nutrition and a lot of experience prescribing pills. News is paid for by the big companies (guess who) and couldn’t afford to be on the air if they told the truth….the truth is out there along with many studies made by these very same companies to confuse and fool us. It makes my heat beat faster just thinking about it. We want to believe the things we hear so we do but there are so many untruths.
The good news is that we have easy access to plants also and there are so many people out there making those foods available. They are easy to eat (you don’t even have to cook many of them) and if eaten without oil and sugar, are a natural diet for us. We start looking leaner and feeling more energetic. Start looking into eating more plants. I promise your heart won’t be sorry.
Be well
Pamela A. Popper, PhD., N.D.
Wellness Forum Institute for Health Studies
Reading = Health and (10 Reasons Why)
I am passionate about reading. I prefer non fiction and I think I know why. Reading fiction has to be very, very good for me to enjoy. I hear the tactics and the story doesn’t reel me in as much as non-fiction does. But what really gets me interested are people’s stories and the books that tell me how I can improve my life, my body or my mind. They are fascinating to me and I love every minute I spend reading those types of books. I know…I’m weird but that is me. It’s no wonder I am writing a blog based on my experiences and my books.
When I search and find a topic that resonates, I usually get something out of it that I can use in my life. Even biographies and memoirs help me with things such as that feeling that I’m not the only one or that make me grateful that either I’m escaping what that person is doing or that I Have been where that person is and have moved on. There is always something in each one that I can relate to. I can’t imagine not having had books over my many years to keep me company.
Now that I am retired and am pretty much in charge of how I spend my time, reading has moved up to the top of the list of how I spend my time. When Dave, who spends most of his time working outside, comes in and I am reading, or better yet, still reading, I tell him I’m studying. I feel like that is kind of true. If I am learning, then I must be studying. Any way, it makes me feel better about my lack of accomplishing something tangible like laundry or dishes.
Reading a book even beats social media. I love logging onto Facebook to see what’s going on and I belong to many groups who share my interests but reading takes me to another place. Where I can relax and learn and be alone. I love all three of those things so I guess I am a natural reader.
Ten Reasons to Read
- better writing skills
- improved focus/concentration
- stronger analytical skills
- memory improvement
- vocabulary expansion
- knowledge
- stress reduction
- mental stimulation
- good use of time
- improving brain function
The Corona virus and stress
This new virus and the accompanying news is stressing us out. We all are having to change our way of living and thinking, hopefully, temporarily. There is one thing we can control…how we treat our immune system.
The basics: our immune system includes a group of cells in your body that protect us from infections and illness. When we are exposed to things such as viruses, bacteria, mold parasites and foreign proteins in foods, our immune system takes action.
The molecules in the foods we eat tell our cells how to behave. The process of identification and instruction is called nutrigenomics. Food is information that communicates with the body on a cellular level and tells it what to do as well or better than medicine can. Eating fresh plants will help you strengthen your immune system.
Stress creates a series of physiological events inside your body and how often and how much stress you experience impact our health. Feeling stress affects your hormones and weakens our immune system. This can make us sick which turns into a viscous circle.
We have a lot of choice when it comes to diet, exercise and stress. That is where our personal power comes from. If you are feeling the stress like I am from all the latest world events, we need to take the power we do have. There are things we can do that will help us get through this. Here are some suggestions:
- Go outside and breathe in some air.
- Catch yourself if you are taking the stress out on your partner and stop. It only makes things worse.
- Read uplifting books or materials.
- Help others when you can.
- Remember that we will most likely get through this alive.
- Walk and walk some more.
- Look to the wisdom of your animals for support, they are so comforting.
- Try to find the good in this situation… ex; We are learning and China is bringing down the cases so we will too.
- Stop watching so much news. Honestly, it’s not all correct and it’s playing into everybody’s fears.
- Eat right, it really does a body good.
Be well,
The Immune System Recovery Plan (Susan Blum M.D.)
Helping people change their mind
I have learned that changing your mind will change your life is real. I started small…food I eat…and have continued to make changes that matter. Do you ever dream of…
- losing weight?
- doing more with your day?
- figuring out what we need to eat to be healthy?
- being more motivated?
- learning new things?
You have found a kindred spirit. I would love to share what I have been learning.
Soy Should be in Every Diet (plus an easy delicious recipe)
There are so many studies that show people who make soy a part of their diet are likely to live longer. Soy has anti-angiogenic properties which help you fight some cancers and coronary artery disease despite it’s relatively high fat content.
Soyfoods represent dozens of different kinds of foods made from the soy bean, an ancient legume that originated in eastern China three thousand years ago. From fresh soy products range from edamame, soy milk and soy nuts to soy that is fermented such as soy souce, tofu, miso, tempeh and more. The new foods (faux meat) taste great to me and are made with soy but are not as healthy and are processed. They are not considered healthy.
There is a widespread misconception that women should avoid eating soy because of the belief that the natural plant phytoestrogen can cause cancer. The truth is phytoestrogens in soy do not increase the incidence of breast cancer in human studies. In fact, it’s the opposite. The phytoestrogens actually act as antiestrogens in humans, interfering with the ability of estrogen to fuel. certain cancers. Check out the study from the Shanghai Breast Cancer Survival Study which studies 5,042 cancer survivors. It’s just one study that will back this up. Try for 10 grams of soy a day at least.
For me personally since I am mostly vegan, I eat a lot of soy instead of meat. My favorite way to have it is for breakfast as a soy scramble…so, so good and filling.
Easy recipe for Tofu Scramble full of protein, vegetables and whatever else I have to throw in.
- 1/3 of a pound of hard tofu
- a handful of mushrooms
- 1/2 of a zucchini
- a bunch of onion
- a handful of spinach or kale
- 1 slice soy based provolone cheese (optional)
- 1/4 cup fresh salsa (optional)
Cut the vegetables into small pieces and sautee in water. When they are pretty well done, add the spinach/kale and crumbled tofu and mix in for another minute. Then add the cheese until it melts. That’s it. A nice hot, breakfast.
Soy is so versatile. It can be added to anything. The silky tofu can be made into great guilt free desserts like chocolate pudding. The edamame can be used in salads. Stir fries are so good with tofu. You can also use soft tofu to make salad dressings that don’t need any oil.
Use organic as soy is one of the most genetically engineered foods.
I spent most of my years thinking I hated soy. I can’t believe I did this. It has become one of my staples. I can only say that the reason was because I had a taste for meat which is very different. I also had the mindset that I didn’t want to “waste” my calories on something like that. Ug. Well, better late than never has become my new mantra. There are so many great plants out there to discover. Try it, you will thank yourself.
Eat to Beat Disease (The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself William W. Li, M.D.
How Not to Die Micheal Greger, M.D.
Fake Meat vs. Real Meat (The New York Times)
Being Well
What does that mean? We all want it to magically happen but we also want to live a life of comfort and immediate gratification. Being well takes work in this age of distraction.
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs shows our general needs and in what order we seek them.
Being well, to me, means feeling good and grounded, physically, mentally, and spiritually. It’s knowing you are on a path and while you are alive, you will be making choices, detours and summits. We are never going to arrive at our final destination but the more we energy we give it, the more we will feel it.
Being well physically (the part we can usually control) depends on what we eat and when and how we move. Being well mentally (the part we can usually control) depends on how we handle what comes our way and what we feed our mind regularly. Being well spiritually (the part we can usually control) depends on believing in something more powerful than ourself. It means having a need to help others. It’s faith that for now, this is how it is supposed to be. It includes being kind and seeing that we are all one.
Many people have tackled these issues and I know we are a work in progress. Being well doesn’t just happen. It takes work and awareness. It seems to be largely a matter of habits. Lately I have had the wake up call that my habits were leading me somewhere I didn’t want to continue to go to. These included what I was eating and drinking but more importantly what I was thinking. Interestingly, there is more and more science that what you eat and drink effect how you think. How you have habitually been thinking colors all your decisions.
I don’t know if most of us have taken the time to examine our thoughts and if they are serving us. For example one of my past habits was to try to cut and count calories instead of trying to eat healthy. That thinking led me to
“save my calories” for things I really wanted such as bread and chardonnay! Both were important to me and spinach and broccoli were not. So my thinking was why waste calories on things I don’t like. That one decision over time was really costing me my health.
Another example of a thought that guided my habits was that I hate going to the dentist. I would rather do anything than spend my time going to the dentist. Well, I am lucky to have inherited good teeth but still my mouth has suffered. Now my mindset is that I need to take care of my teeth or I will pay later (thanks Dave) so I show up for something I hated regularly and it’s not near as bad as I thought because I changed my mindset and then my habit. And on it goes for all most everything we want to focus on.
Pay attention to what you are thinking. Ask if it is serving you. If not, what will ? Do that and you have taken a step in the direction we all want to go…being well.
Be Well
“Be Patient with yourself. Nothing in nature blooms all year.
HealthPuzzles 