finding out about food
By heather | March 10, 2010
For a while now, one of the topics on my mind has been food. Not recipes or yummy-delicious treats, but what actually goes in our food and how it affects us. I’ve written before about my disgust with Splenda, so I’m not sure why I’m continually surprised by the research and reading I’ve been doing lately.
I grew up with an adopted brother. The “adopted” part is important, because my parents didn’t know the child they were getting was born to an alcoholic mother, who abused her body and his the entire time she was pregnant. He came to our family when he was 6 months old, sickly and weak, and nearly died before his first birthday. A few years later, he was diagnosed as hyperactive with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome along with a laundry list of other things, including violent behavior and aggression.
One of the suggestions our pediatrician gave my mom was the Feingold Diet and we followed it to the letter. No artificial colors, flavors, mint, or chocolate. As a kid, I hated never having Kool-Aid in our fridge, and used to love going to visit friends who ate mac n’ cheese from a blue box. But as much as I resented having to follow the diet, to say the difference in my brother’s behavior was noticeable would be an understatement. When he ate anything artificial, he went absolutely crazy with rage – kicking people and walls, screaming, and looking like he couldn’t contain the anger that shook his body. To even write about this is difficult, because most people who know me in my adult life don’t even know he exists. It’s always been easier to be an only child when people ask, rather than explain the complicated relationship that I still haven’t fully accepted.
Several months ago, I noticed Alex having the same out of control reactions to little things. My mom was the one who first pointed out that his worst behavior came right after a treat of some sort: a lollipop or a candy apple. It made me physically sick to think that my child had the same behavioral reaction to artificial colors. How was this possible? I exercised and ate organic, healthy food while I was pregnant, and now I was going to have to go through the same drill that my mom used to, explaining politely that , “No, he doesn’t want/can’t eat those yellow crackers/birthday cake/bright red popsicle” to the other moms. Even more disturbing to me though, was the thought of Emily Kate growing up witnessing the cycle of violent behavior, frustration, and rage that I grew up with, so to reject something that I knew worked seemed stupid, despite hating the idea of it.
I started reading. I read a book on the Feingold Diet, and I read The Unhealthy Truth. I convinced my husband that the majority of our grocery shopping had to be at Trader Joe’s. (TJ’s products don’t have any artificial colors or flavors.) Then I started noticing articles popping up everywhere – on growth horomones and high-fructose corn syrup, on pesticides and antibiotics. All of a sudden it seems like our society is starting to realize that how unhealthy we are is directly proportionate to how much we’ve messed up our food. A simplistic summary is to say that everything from allergies to obesity to behavior has a root cause in what we eat because our bodies don’t know how to process all the crap that we put in our food.
Yesterday one of my friends on facebook posted a link to this article on MSNBC. This is a decent introduction to what I’m talking about, but it focuses more on why we’re fat, rather than why we’re unhealthy. At least it’s a start. The bottom line is we all need to wake up and stop trusting that just because a corporation or the government says that something is healthy and safe doesn’t mean it is. When animals get high doses of antibiotics, we do too when we eat them. Genetically modified corn hasn’t been modified to be healthier, it has been modified to be resistant to pests – which means it has pesticides in it’s genes. We have no idea what artificial horomones in milk and meat are doing to our endocrine systems. Stop feeding your kids colored goldfish crackers. Don’t cook with Splenda or mix it into smoothies like the commercial tells you to – why does your smoothie need sugar anyway?
This post isn’t preaching about being all organic or vegetarian, but an encouragement to be more aware and make simple changes where you can and where you see the need. There is so much we don’t know about “food technology” but the evidence is growing that it isn’t the best thing for us. So why not become educated?
Topics: food | 3 Comments »
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learning, humbly
By heather | February 26, 2010
(Hey where has everyone been this week? My feed reader doth NOT runneth over like it usually does.)
This weekend is my next to last weekend of teacher training and so far I LOVE IT. Initially my brain fought with my body during every single practice, because it was HARD. And DIFFERENT than what I am used to practicing – teachers at this studio hold poses until your legs shake and although my butt hurts constantly it is in a good way. I have discovered things about my practice and my body that never occurred to me – for example maybe the reason my lower lumbar spine is always slipping and sliding out of place is because I have a ridiculous imbalance of strength between my right and left sides.
I am learning from an E-RYT 500 who trained with Bikram Choudury and with B.K.S. Iyengar…in person. In the yoga world, that’s like having Slash and the Van Halen guy teach you how to play guitar. The professor teaching us yoga philosophy has a PhD from Harvard and lectures at the Smithsonian and has an amazing way of making all this stuff seem exciting and accessible. We’ve also spent a significant amount of time discussing the concept of Atman, and I am delighted to learn that Finding Atman as a concept still makes perfect sense. (The blog name anyway, maybe not so much the posts.)
The concepts of divine love and uniting our spiritual self have sparked an interest and started to fill a void and I find myself more patient, and able to just…sit…without being antsy, or looking for something to do, or constantly checking email every 5 minutes. I feel incredibly fortunate to have stumbled on a yoga teacher training of this caliber, and it truly was the right time for me to do it, furthering my belief that things happen when they are supposed to happen.
Initially I was dreading the drive to and from the studio – it’s about 50 minutes from my house. Thanks to books on CD, the drive time has become a sort of meditative practice in and of itself. The first book I listened to was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve listened to and love all his books -they have the kind of logic and examples and pace that make me sad when I get to the last CD – but this one was probably my favorite so far.
The second book I got was The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. Depending on my mood, this book was either heart-warming or unbearably saccharine. Mostly it was the latter, but the concept is interesting and there is a quote in there about children that will resonate with me forever – “All children are damaged by their handlers – some get fingerprints, some get cracked, and some get shattered.” (That isn’t a word for word because I am disinclined to go look up and link to the exact quote.)
In my queue are The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (I think the Omnivore’s Dilemma should be required reading for everyone who eats meat), and Super Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. Currently in my CD player is Raising Boys by Dr. James Dobson.
Now, about that last one. I read somewhere that it is good for us to listen to and read things that we disagree with – it keeps your brain sharp and engaged. I’ve always tried to follow that and indeed even seek out material that presents a differing viewpoint. That is the single reason that I was able to get through the introductory chapters of this book.
Having made it to Chapter 8, I’ve finally been able to stop gnawing on my knuckles/screaming/laughing out loud and can agree with some of what he’s saying. (SOME. Not all. Not even half.) I often feel like I have no idea what I’m doing with Alex which is why I picked it up in the first place, but the in-your-face approach, blatant disparagement of women in the workplace, and feminism as a dirty word, plus assertions with no hard facts or studies to back them up has been…ahem…hard to swallow. I think my buddy Malcolm G would disagree with Dr D., who thinks that boys are better at math because they are wired to be that way, since one of the examples in Outliers is a fascinating study of why Asian cultures are so much better at it than Western cultures. Anyway.
As part of the teacher training, I’ve also read four amazing books that have opened my eyes to the rest of the practice of yoga. One of the books talks about how to be a student – come to practice with a mind like an empty cup, because any knowledge the teacher gives a student with a half full cup will spill out and is lost. I have tried to make a concerted effort to approach every day of training and every book with that mindset, and not having to be right about anything has made a huge difference in my daily attitude. Humility, I think it’s called. It’s refreshing.
Topics: self improvement, yoga | 1 Comment »
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free spirit
By heather | February 18, 2010
I see dance lessons in our future, which I suppose will keep me from being a soccer mom with a minivan. I don’t know if I have enough competitive spirit to be one of those dance moms.
emmy’s happy feet from Heather on Vimeo.
Topics: EK | 2 Comments »
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overcome
By heather | February 18, 2010
I had a great post I was going to write about teacher training last weekend…how amazing the Sanskrit professor was and how much I enjoyed anatomy while bonding with my group and doing lots and lots of yoga. (I ended up solving the high maintenance problem by succumbing to my natural hair curl and using headbands, and it wasn’t even a big deal.)
Unfortunately, the kids came back from the in-laws with a sort of stomach flu thing, and have been home with me in various levels of sick the whole week. Today everything is back to normal but it’s already Thursday and by now I’ve lost some of the “I heart yoga and the world and everything in it” buzz, not to mention losing almost a week’s worth of actual non-yoga related work (you know, the stuff that pays my mortgage).
Tomorrow starts another weekend of training. Suffice to say, I am so happy to be doing this and have found things in common with everyone in my class. I may have lost some of the immediate high but definitely find myself more deeply in thought and more aware of every action…working at keeping my brain connected to my heart and keeping my ego (in the yogic sense) out of the way is teaching me so much about parenting and just…living.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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