Back to school

It’s been a while since I had an official “first day of school”, but the transition from summer to fall always brings out the sense of anticipation, the ideas of new beginning, excitement over fresh new notebooks and a little bit of sadness that my favorite season has passed. Even if you’re not going back to the classroom this year, September may be the perfect time to take advantage of this “back to school” ritual and incorporate some new things into your daily life.

Start a new journal – if you’re like me you’ve been eagerly anticipating any excuse to buy some new writing supplies. Journals can help you organize ideas, create and keep track of plans or just take a break from the day to doodle.

Create a little space that will remind you of the calm, lazy days of summer. Imagine what it would be like to wake up each morning and the first thing you see is a reminder of the warm, sunny days at the beach, or something else that instantly brings a smile to your face. Spend a few moments and put together those things and set them on your night stand or next to your toothbrush so that they can set the mood for your entire day.

Find time to meditate. By now you’ve heard all about the health benefits of meditation, so this “school year” it’s time to take that “class” and make it a part of your daily schedule. Don’t be intimidated by the idea of meditation or the notion that you have to turn your mind off. All you have to do is find a quiet spot, close your eyes and focus on your breath. For example, try to visualize the path your breath takes as it enters your nose and then follow it all the way to your heels and back out. If you find yourself thinking about the events of the day while your eyes are closed, simply to shift your focus back to visualizing your breath. With practice you can stay focused on that one thing longer.

Get a couple of new dishes, cooking pots or cookbooks and get excited about cooking again. Preparing healthy meals will feel fun again when you have new tools you can’t wait to try out. If you’re watching your budget, you can always trade dishes or cookbooks with a friend.

Hope all of you had a great summer and will have an even better “school year.”

Burn Treatment

A few years ago, while rushing around the kitchen, I accidently grabbed a metal spatula that had just come out of the oven. The utensil left a perfect outline burned into my palm. I quickly abandoned my dinner prep and rushed to grab my acupuncture kit. I’ve read and studied all about Dr. Manaka’s burn treatment in school, but this was going to be the first time I would get to use it. Since this incident, it’s still one of my favorite treatments because the results are unbelievable and undeniable.

Dr. Yoshio Manaka was a Japanese poet, artist, scholar and physician. During his medical tour of duty in World War II, he discovered that applying tin foil to burns reduced pain and helped to speed up the healing of the area. Upon further studies, he developed a device called an ion-pumping cord which serves as a way to use the body’s own electrical potential to reduce the severe pain that comes with second degree burns. Within 10 minutes of starting the procedure, patients in severe pain noticed a reduction in pain. After 20 minutes, all patients reported markedly less or no pain at all.

Since I’ve always been a huge skeptic, I didn't count on much relief but I thought I would at least get a chance to “test” Dr. Manaka's treatment on myself. Within a few minutes of treatment, my hand stopped hurting. My first thought was that my burn wasn’t that bad! So I removed the cords and foil and, within minutes, the pain returned and my hand throbbed. I spent the next 10 minutes applying and removing the treatment – just because I could not believe how clear it was that it was helping. By the end of the day, with my hand “healed” enough to submerge in water without screaming, I decided that this was officially my favorite acupuncture treatment – and a much better reminder of that day than a spatula-shaped scar.

Since that day, Dr. Manaka’s treatment has brought smiles to many of my patients who showed up for treatments, sunburned and in pain.

Motivation

Like most people, I find it hard to stay motivated to exercise all the time. When a friend of mine worked close by, I had no problem meeting her daily for a quick run… rain or shine. But when she changed jobs, the struggle to stay motivated resurfaced again.

After some trial and error, I found three things that helped me the most:

1. Setting a specific time to run. Just as I did when running with my friend, I set a specific time each day that was dedicated to my workout. I noticed that if I didn’t do that, it was too easy to come up with a million and one projects that were more important to do first and all of the sudden the day had passed. Scheduling my workout in advance, preferably at the same time each day, has made a huge difference.


2. Adding books on tape to my ipod. Listening to music is great, and some songs get me going the minute I hear them. But after about a week of running, I noticed I would just tune out the music and get really bored on my run. Listening to a book on tape or an interview with an interesting person made a huge difference. It almost felt like chatting with a friend and, before I noticed, I had completed my full workout.


3. Nike+ gadget. This is that little sensor you can put inside your Nike shoes or simply attach to the laces on any kind of a shoe. While you run or walk, the sensor communicates with your ipod nano or itouch letting you know how far you’ve run, how fast you’re going and how much further you have to go to complete your goal. You can also set up a power song that, with a press of a button, can come on right when you need to conquer that hill. At the end of a workout you may hear Lance Armstrong congratulate you on completing your fastest mile or longest workout.
   
   But the real advantages of using the Nike+ system, at least for me, are the features that you have available to you when you sync up your ipod with your computer. They include:

• Keeping track of all your workouts


• Setting up goals for yourself


• Creating challenges – for yourself or joining other teams and contributing the miles you ran or walked to an overall team goal


• Creating a cartoon version of yourself (perfect opportunity to try out that pink hair color you’ve been thinking about) that can then become your screen saver and praise you when you workout or scold you (gently) when you don’t.


• Adding any of the above feature to your Facebook or MySpace page so that your friends can cheer you on – and maybe even get inspired to work out themselves.

Given a choice, I still prefer to have a friend at my side when I run. But with this little gadget, her and I can still share our workouts and keep each other motivated – even if it is in cyberspace.

Fire up a healthier grill

Summer is here and the air will soon be filled with the irresistible scent of a backyard BBQ. To keep the meat tasty while reducing the carcinogenic compounds use rosemary.

A Kansas State University food science professor, J. Scott Smith, while researching a way to reduce cancer causing compounds in meats, found that rosemary could help keep grilled meats healthier.

When meats, such as beef, are cooked for more than four minutes or at temperatures greater than 350 degrees, they produce high levels of carcinogenic compounds called HCAs (heterocyclic amines).

Unfortunately reducing the temperature or cooking time is not a great solution if your mouth is watering at the thought of that true BBQ taste. The simple and healthy solution is to use rosemary.

Rosemary's rich antioxidant make up includes phenolic compounds - rosmaric acid, carnosol and carnosic acid, which can block the HCAs before they can form during the cooking process.

Using rosemary in a marinade for example, will allow you to cook the meat at high temperatures while helping to prevent the cancer causing compounds from forming.

Professor Smith's research team recommends a rosemary extract for meats where marinades are not practical - burgers for example.

For more variety, you can experiment with marinades and rubs made from other herbs that are rich in antioxidants. These include basil, mint, sage, savory, marjoram, oregano and thyme.

Drink your greens

If you want the health benefits of a diet rich in leafy greens but are finding it hard to get excited about yet another salad, drink your greens instead. Making a smoothie that includes spinach and kale for example, is a surprisingly tasty way to consume these leafy greens...really! It also allows for easier digestion.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Sweet and Spicy Green
Blend together 2 cups of spinach, half of a regular cucumber (or use a whole Persian cucumber), 1 kiwi, ½ cup of apple juice, ½ teaspoon of freshly grated ginger root, 1 tablespoon of *Total EFA with pure fish oil (you can also use flax seed oil, or borage oil or use 1 tablespoon of crushed flax seeds). If too thick, simply add a little water or a bit more apple juice. Slowly sip on your way to work or with dinner… better yet, have it twice.
*Total EFA with pure fish oil can be found in the refrigerated section of the vitamin and supplement aisle at the local Whole Foods. I really recommend this particular one because of its light taste - it has a slight citrus flavor.

Green in Disguise
If the thought of drinking something green is too traumatic for you, try this one.

Blend together 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of kale (remove and discard stems), 1 banana, ½ cup of blueberries (you can use frozen ones), ½ cup of apple juice, ½ cup of water, 1 tablespoon of Total EFA with pure fish oil (or suggested substitution from above). The blueberries in this smoothie will change the color from green to purple… so your green-phobia can stay safely intact while you get all the benefits of leafy greens.

Experiment on your own by combining your favorite fruits with spinach, kale, collard greens etc. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to get all the iron, fiber, B-vitamins, calcium and more each day when you drink your greens.

For more ideas and a little bit of humor, check out this video from Tim VanOrden’s Running Green Project. http://tinyurl.com/oxlalo

Make the long weekend memorable

For many, long weekend plans will include spending a lot of time outside – a day at the beach, bike ride or catching an extra wave surfing. To ensure your Tuesday recap of this weekend includes only the fun stuff, not your sunburn or achy muscles, try a homemade bath to wrap up your extra dose of fun.

Muscle Rejuvenating Bath
Perfect after all those sports activities you decided to do over the weekend.

You’ll need: 10-12 basil leaves, 3-4 sprigs of rosemary, 1 cup of Epsom salt and a piece of cheese cloth and string or ribbon.

How to use: Crush basil and rosemary together, combine with Epsom salt, place in cheese cloth and secure with a long piece of ribbon or string. You can hang this pouch from your tap as you fill the bath or just drop it in the water. Keep the water a bit cooler, to help invigorate muscles.

Too tired or sore to make your own bath? Try Dr. Hauschka’s Sage Bath for a soothing, rejuvenating effect.

Hydrating Milk Bath
Perfect after a long day in the sun to restore your skin to its silky smoothness.

You’ll need: ½ cup of baking soda or cornstarch, 1 cup dry goat milk or dry milk, 1 cup ground oats (use a blender to make ground oats or use oat flour), 1 tablespoon of honey, 10 drops of lavender essential oil.

How to use: Combine everything in a bowl, except lavender essential oil. Add mix to running water. Once the tub fills, add lavender essential oil.

Enjoy your weekend!

Stress… in a new light

Who Says Stress is Bad for You? by Mary Carmichael caught my eye in last week’s issue of Newsweek magazine. Until now, most articles on stress only stress how bad stress is for us and how we should, in any way possible, eliminate it from our lives. Of course that’s easier said than done. But in the Newsweek article, the author points to studies that show that not everyone is affected by stress in the same way and how, in some cases, stress may actually be beneficial.

In one of the most fascinating examples, she quotes a 1970s and 80s study that followed some 430 employees of a company that was undergoing a major crisis. “While most of the workers suffered as their company fell apart – performing poorly on the job, getting divorced and developing high rates of heart attacks, obesity and strokes – a third of them fared well”. Surprisingly, those that survived the crisis without sacrificing their health were people who had experienced a lot of stress in their early childhood.

Another common assumption that is picked apart in this article is that mother’s stress during pregnancy harms the fetus. But in a soon-to-be-published paper, a Johns Hopkins researcher showed that “women under moderate stress in mid-to-late pregnancy wound up with toddlers who were developmentally advanced, scoring highly on language and cognitive tests… [and that] 2-week-old babies whose mothers were under moderate stress show evidence of faster nerve transmission – and possibly more mature brain development – than those whose moms had stress free pregnancies.”

The biggest problem with studying stress, according to the author and most researchers, is to classify what mild or moderate stress means. Each individual responds differently. Therefore, there is no such thing as a standardized method of measuring stress. There is also evidence to suggest that forcing yourself into stress-reducing activities like meditation or exercise may actually do more harm than good.

Ms. Carmichael writes about a study that placed two rats in running wheels. One of them was allowed to exercise whenever he wanted but the other was forced into the activity whenever the first rat was running. The rat given the freedom to exercise when it wanted showed positive changes in the brain (new neuron growth). The other one lost brain cells.

This, and similar studies, shows that the amount of control that we have over our lives determines how well we manage. “As a rule, if we feel we’re in control, we cope. If we don’t, we collapse” and Carmichael writes, “no amount of meditation or reframing our thinking can change certain facts of our lives.”

Regardless of how we choose to interpret these studies, I think they do provide a bit of hope and therefore may help us regain a little control in our own lives – or at least eliminate all the stress about being stressed out.

Breathe

You probably don’t notice or think about your breathing unless you’re running to catch your dog or trying to mimic Michael Phelps by trying to swim half the length of the pool underwater. But paying attention to your breathing and doing some simple exercises to improve it, will have a great effect on your overall health – and it’s very easy.

Each time you are sitting in traffic, or reading a blog or watching TV, plan to practice this breathing technique. Imagine that as you breathe in, you are trying to inhale all the way to your heels. Yes, your heels. By focusing on your heels, you ensure that you fully expand your lungs, diaphragm and as a result “squeeze” all the vital organs in your body which will help improve the lymph and blood circulation through them.

My teacher explained this breathing technique in terms of a karate student trying to break a block of wood with a swift chop. Those who focus on the block itself would fall short and end up with a broken hand. But if instead they focused their attention on the floor below, the wood block simply became something on the way to their final goal and was much easier to break.

With a little practice you can put something as simple as breathing to use and really improve your overall health.