#like I do think there's something to be said about grind culture and diet culture and technology that exploits addictive tendencies

[mythicalcoolkid]

Underrated "worst kind of thinkpiece article" contendor: articles about how we as a society need to examine [current trend] because naïvely buying into it ruined the author's life, only when you actually read the article it's clear that the author is in fact blaming a LOT of their personal issues on. Like. Marie Kondo

#m/cc #this isn't new either I remember this at least ten years ago in Reader's Digest #author got a Fitbit and loved it #got obsessed with tracking his steps. took long walks after dinner listening to podcasts. cared a lot about meeting his step count #felt really lost when it broke #like I do think there's something to be said about grind culture and diet culture and technology that exploits addictive tendencies #but this guy's problem was not the Fitbit and the Fitbit was not the thing making him miss out on other life experiences #he could have taken those walks WITH his wife #either liking the solitude of the walks or not communicating with his wife is not the fault of the Fitbit. the Fitbit counted his steps and #buzzed when he met his (self-chosen) goal #anyway. this is sponsored by remembering an article I read forever ago about how Konmari ruined the author's life #because she got into it (while grieving) and loved it and somehow missed the point and became obsessed with minimalism #Marie Kondo suggesting you keep what makes you happy or fills a need and consider getting rid of things you don't is not what's #causing you this anxiety about gifts. you are looking for something to blame that's manipulated you into this situation

[rotationalsymmetry]

Principles of Intuitive Activity: Can the ideas behind Intuitive Eating also be applied to what people do with their time?

Why?

I have a fairly healthy relationship with food, I think. I don't obsess over it. I see food primarily in terms of some combination of "yum" and "if I don't eat I will feel bad so I'd better eat", as opposed to "if I eat the right foods I am virtuous and if I eat the wrong foods I am bad." Sometimes I have foods I definitely want, but I don't feel out of control: if I can't get a food I want I will be mildly disappointed, if I can have it I am able to stop when I've had enough. How I spend my time though? That's kind of a clusterfuck. I do feel out of control over how I spend my time. I do sometimes have problems with my life related to procrastination or getting sucked into one thing when something else needs to get done. I do think I'm a bad person when I don't use my time well and that I'm a good person when I get a lot done.

This could be called intuitive time management, but: I think if this comparison makes sense at all (and I'm not certain that it does, this is playing with ideas here) that most time management advice is functionally equivalent to dieting advice. It's focused on self control, and it reinforces the idea that spending your time productively = being a good person and wasting time = being a bad person.

"But what about things that actually have to get done?" Sure. Some things need to get done. But is this different from IE? People need nutritious food, people need to actually file their taxes and stuff. Surely "but if I just gave myself permission to slack off as much as I wanted to, I'd never get anything done" is basically the same as "but if I just gave myself permission to eat anything I wanted, I'd eat entire trays of brownies at one time and nothing else." That's...not actually the way it works for most people. Having said that, people with more disordered eating are more likely to benefit from professional help or a support group rather than going it alone based on some ideas from a book/the internet, so maybe there's also an analogy there for people who have especially fraught relationships with time management. (And, of course, there's a lot of ADHD specific problems that benefit from ADHD specific solutions.)

Of course it could be meaningfully different in that nutritional needs are biologically based. Part of the foundational idea of inituitive eating is that bodies self-regulate to a large degree around this stuff: there's hunger and fullness cues, and maybe certain kinds of food seem more appealing when you need certaini nutrients. That can't possibly be the case for filing your taxes, which is not a biological necessity. Still. Maybe there's a thing here, in that, whether people need to file taxes biologically speaking or not, people do have intrinsic needs for: physical activity, rest and sleep, social time, solitary time, and a sense of accomplishment, and maybe, just maybe, it makes sense for people to arrange our time based on our physical and psychological needs first, and things like taxes and acquiring money second.

So, the actual principles (modified from the IE 10 principles):

Reject the mentality that you have to be forced to do the right thing, that you'll only be productive or succeed in life by developing enough self control to steamroller your physical and psychological cues. Get angry at the idea that people won't work unless forced.

Give yourself enough rest and leisure time. Rest is a biological necessity and we get sick if we don't have enough rest. Leisure time -- time to do things purely for pleasure, both alone and with others -- is a psychological necessity, and we get sick if we don't get enough.

Reject grind culture: reject the idea that work is virtuous and leisure is decadent. Give yourself unconditional permission to make decisions on what you think is best for you (taking into account physical and psychological cues, observations about the consequences of particular patterns of behavior, and practicalities) rather than doing things based on the idea that working hard makes you a good person.

Learn to talk back to your inner critical voice (and to external critics when necessary.)

Notice your pleasure. Look for intrinsic rewards in both "productive" and "unproductive" activities: does going for a walk feel good, does washing the dishes feel good (or does it feel good when you're done), does hanging out with friends feel good, does lying in bed before falling asleep feel good?

Notice activity "hunger" and "fullness" -- what lets you know that you've exercised for long enough, that you've slept for long enough, that you're done with socializing for now, that you could really use a good stretch.

Practice noticing also when you're trying to avoid something unpleasant (eg procrastination, escapist reading or scrolling.) Learn how to face your emotions rather than escape from your emotions.

Respect your personal limitations/don't try to be someone else. Different people need different amounts of sleep and leisure time. Different people have different capacities for physical and mental labor. Different people have different challenges with executive function, learning disabilities, and other barriers to getting things done. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses, and the important thing is to work with what you've got. In particular, for people who just can't do a lot of things most other people can do, that's not a personal failing.

(??)

Starting from a foundation of rejecting grind culture and honoring personal physical and psychological needs and limitations, experiment with how to do things that "have to" or "should" get done while still respecting those needs and limitations. Does washing the dishes feel better with music on? Does having more routine feel better or worse? That self improvement thing (journalng, meditation, etc), does it feel different if approached from "maybe this will make my life better in ways I can actually observe myself" perspective rather than a "if I was a good person I would do this" perspective? How do you respond to strategies like positive reinforcement, bullet journals, finding a partner or group to do things with, positive reframing? Keep in mind the goal isn't to be perfect or to prove your worth through compliance, it's to live your life in a way that works for you.

Additionally (still mostly based on IE, just things that aren't spelled out in the core principles):

11. Be kind to yourself when you mess up. Be in process. There is no failure, only learning experiences.

12. Doing things yourself is not morally superior to getting someone else to do them (asking for favors, paying for housecleaning, accepting government assistance, etc.) The important thing is that things that need to get done get done, not who does them.

13. Do things the way that works even if it's not the "right" way. Run the dishwasher a second time, etc. The important thing is that things that need to get done get done, not how they're done.

14. Notice both how you feel in the moment and how you feel about it later. With intuitive eating, this can look like "I don't notice feeling full when I'm eating the last of a large burrito, but I consistently get sleepy an hour later. If I stop eating half or two-thirds of the way through, I don't get hungry or sleepy later, so apparently 2/3 of the burrito is enough food." With activity, this can look like "I absolutely hate the idea of cleaning off my desk, but once I've done it I feel good, so this is one situation where pushing myself to do the thing is worth it." Or, "staying up past midnight reading Am I The Asshole feels good in the moment, but it doesn't feel good later, so this is one situation where going with what I think is best for me rather than my intuition about what I want is worth it." This is different from "going to bed before midnight makes me a good person and reading Am I The Asshole makes me a bad person" -- maybe someone else finds that whenever they try to go to bed before midnight they can't sleep, or that reading Am I The Asshole before bed makes them sleepy, who knows?

15. No really, figuring out how to manage your feelings and be in the present moment is essential. But it goes both ways: being present and being able to face yucky feelings helps with reclaiming your time, and also, giving the middle finger to grind culture and practicing doing things based on your needs and abilities will help with being present and facing your feelings.

OK, but, you know, what about when people are at school or at a job? Isn't ignoring (most) physical and psychological cues necessary in those circumstances?

OK, this is maybe most relevant for people who are self-structuring their own time a lot: people whose work allows a lot of discretion in terms of what gets done and when, stay at home parents, students who do most of their work outside of class, retirees, disabled people like myself, and people who are unemployed for whatever reason. And for people who have set work hours with a lot of supervision or where someone else is telling you what to do when (like in a care facility or in-patient program with a lot of structured activities), well, that can make it a lot harder to practice these principles. But you can always practice awareness, even when you're for instance not allowed to just take a nap without a good excuse. And you can practice honoring physical and psychological cues some of the time, for instance honoring when you're too sick to go to work or to class.

For people who have a lot of self-structured time without clean lines between "work" and "leisure", you have a lot of decisions to make in terms of: am I better off trying to keep to a relatively conventional work schedule, or do I do better with an unconventional work routine (eg, working late at night, taking long breaks in the afternoon, etc), or do I do better without a routine and just working when work feels right and not doing it when it doesn't. It is ok and good to make those decisions based on what makes your life good for you and not on an abstract idea of how things "should" get done.

There's actually a lot of situations even in structured work environments where recognizing your cues and limitations is helpful. It is good to be the person in a meeting who points out that everyone is tired and cranky and nothing is actually getting resolved. It is good, when you're looking for jobs or picking a career path, to have a sense of things like whether you do better with a lot of direct feedback from your manager or a very high degree of independence, and whether you do better with a lot of interaction with other people or very little. It's fairly normal at jobs (or school) to have some tasks that are more demanding and some that are less demanding, and to be able to arrange your schedule so you do the more demanding stuff at a time of day when you have more energy and enthusiasm, and the less demanding stuff for your off times. It is also good to be able to communicate early "I think this is more than I am capable of getting done, what are we going to do about that?" rather than waiting until a deadline hits and things aren't together.

#consider this like a draft that I happen to be posting #it's not remotely finished and I don't know how much of this I stand by

[beloved-judged]

Meditations on white culture and femininity

It’s easiest for me to start with my mother because it’s easiest to talk outside yourself.

My mother is a blue-eyed blonde. Petite in frame, dieted to the point where she is shaky and her health is poor. She’s had plastic surgery, eye surgery, has a personal trainer, and when she’s irritated with my father, spends heavily.

My father’s people, by contrast, run to every Southern stereotype. Big, muscular, dark-haired men and women shaped like coke bottles who make their own clothes out of exasperation with the inhumanities of fashion.

One grows up with expectations as a burden.

I was always angry at her, as a little girl, and at myself, for not looking like her. For being told I was too big, constantly--too big to dance ballet at the classes she took me to, too big to wear the petite sizes she did (in fact, I used to wear my father’s clothes on occasion, because I could fit them.) For having everything that went into my mouth measured and weighed, leaving me to often play sports games shaking with hunger. For the constant stream of criticism that, no matter how hard I was exercised and dieted, I would always wear double-digit sizes.

I grew up with the weight of her self-hatred and my own.

And in the social spaces we existed in--the churches in various Southern states, the religious schools where the curves I hated so much seemed to elicit such poor behavior. The same men and boys who used to publicly call me fat and make fun of me, often as not, could not seem to keep their hands off the ass they said was so massive, that they mooed at and threw paper wads at to see if they could land them in the gap at the top of my pants.

A body existing as a fundamental criticism, I assure you by accident, to which they felt compelled to respond. I existed as a body which seemed to be both an affront to them and something they longed to smash, to break and tear and consume. They certainly often tried to do that, responding with baffling violence that was as often as not sexual as it was violent.

A chance encounter was as likely to leave a bruise on my body as it was on my heart. A hand print. A torn seam. The breathless force of emotional shock as I looked down at a passed note asking how much it would cost to fuck me.

I’ve never been a Madonna. I’ve only ever been the other one, starting long before I knew anything about sex.

All of this is to say I understand my mother when she cries that she is fat, though no sane person would agree with her.

All of this is to say that when people talk about femininity, it often feels as if someone is walking on my grave, as if I am malignantly haunted.

My meditations this week have been on Ezili Freda and femininity, a topic that I’ve spent most of my life avoiding.

Looking at the culture I grew up with, several things strike me: first, the sheer volume of denial. Denial of pleasure. Denial of the pleasure of existing, of the idea that existence itself as female could be a source of life or enjoyment. Denial of mutual enjoyment. Denial of the validity of a body outside certain standards--to deny that body is anything positive, to criticize and mock it, to pantomime disgust. Denial that feminine people have any worth whatsoever.

Coupled with an avid delight in those things--a disgust that must be appeased in private. Pleasure must be restrained, must be publicly hated and privately celebrated in a destructive way. It can never be straightforward, and in fact is evil when expressed in a straightforward way and must be punished.

Rip, tear, pull apart, consume, use up. This is why you must be a virgin when you marry, why women are only desirable when they’re young, why no woman with multiple sexual partners is worth anything.

Because pleasure must destroy. Because the feminine must be suppressed, controlled, and ground down. And the masculine must suppress, control, and grind down.

The second is just that: the profound and cruel stereotyping of people and gender.

I would say that the white culture I learned is a culture of death, but it does not have the productive honesty that the Guede express. It is not a ‘destroy to be born anew’, nor ‘appreciate the fleeting nature of time in all its stages,’ nor any other death-into-life, as I understand the Black division.

Instead, it is a ‘destroy and deny because there is nothing else’ and ‘all is shame and hatred, so dominate or be destroyed.’

What dreams we have to offer, when it comes to masculinity and femininity!

My god, I don’t know how the lwa stand us, sometimes.

What a poor offering we make of our own understanding to the lwa!

What dross we give them in exchange!

I have not met Ezili Freda yet in the flesh. I do not know if I could stand such a thing--I have such conflicting feelings about femininity. I could apologize to her forever and not be done with it. I am so sorry for how I feel about femininity, that I have hated this part of myself for so long.

Be brave, the lwa say. Live bravely.

I don’t care how it sounds. Femininity, and being feminine, requires a certain amount of bravery, even when it doesn’t come down to having to violently defend yourself from someone else’s malicious garbage-y understanding of femininity--and trust and believe, I have been there, outsmarting or out-fighting someone intent on harm because they think that’s what women are good for.

To be embodied as feminine in a culture like this is.... there is a certain inherent courageousness in living visibly feminine.

Be brave, they say.

Bravery deserves honor. Femininity deserves honor. Ezili Freda deserves honor.

Fuck that white culture of death.

Let us affirm life, which femininity is a part of.

#vodou #lwa #white culture #femininity

[elizapbrooke]

A discovery of pancakes

This is my newsletter from Friday, May 22. You can sign up here.

I am disappointed to announce that the bird call I thought belonged to an owl comes, in fact, from a mourning dove. “One of the most abundant and widespread of all North American birds,” Wikipedia says. It’s an embarrassing but maybe understandable mistake. I figured this owl was out during the day because it was a creature of New York like the rest of us, its circadian rhythm all fucked up by early morning garbage trucks and the blue glow of the Chase Bank across the street. The mourning dove’s coo is low and melancholy, a distinctive series of five notes. I’d certainly forgive you for thinking it’s a hoot. As I was listening to mourning dove calls on my computer and having this horrible realization, one landed on the fire escape and startled me with the loudest, most intimate rendition of their song I’d ever heard. It may as well have pressed its beak up against the glass. (I assume it thought there was a dove in the apartment.) I crept over to the window to confirm with my eyeballs what AllAboutBirds.org had already told me, and, yep, there it was. It felt so special to have a mystery owl in the neighborhood, but I guess doves are lovely birds too, with their plushy throats and elegantly tapered tail feathers. Anyway, my friend Sid tells me he’s heard owls in Gowanus, so I’m keeping my hopes up. This week I published a story for Curbed detailing the history and recent evolution of the home office. As I was fact checking it, I realized I’d accidentally talked to ten hundred sources, so please do enjoy the fruits of my labor. I’m not here to talk about home offices, though. A few weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and discovered I’d been brainstorming pitches in my sleep. I was thrilled. On account of pandemic depression and seeing very little of the outside world, I’ve really been struggling to come up with story concepts, which is problematic because that’s my job. Most of my dream pitches evaporated upon waking, but I managed to hold onto one, and in my sleepy haze I thought it was possibly the greatest idea I’d ever had. It was: PANCAKES ARE HAVING A MOMENT IN QUARANTINE. I decided I’d email the New York Times first thing in the morning. In the light of day, I realized that there wasn’t really a story there. When you’re writing a trend piece, you want to be able to point to, I don’t know, at least four really solid examples from the public sphere. My evidence was:

Alex and I had made pancakes recently

We were planning to make them again

I’d recently discussed pancakes with Molly and Vivian

I’d heard you can make pancakes from sourdough starter discard (which actually does speak to the zeitgeist)

But here’s the thing. Pancakes are a great topic for a newsletter. So here is my pancake article.

***

I’ve always liked the look of a big stack of pancakes, but I never really got why people were so into eating them. I like a breakfast that is hyper-functional and maximally filling. Because I’m an aging hippie, my preferred breakfast is a double-sized bowl of Ezekiel cereal, which tastes like delicious cardboard and fulfills 42% of your daily fiber needs. Pancakes, like pastries, always struck me as glamorous but pointless. I was even somewhat distrustful of my mom’s pancakes, which are dense and nutty, not sweet at all. Her recipe came from a “chiropractor/health nut in San Diego about 31 years ago” and involves grinding your own flour from winter wheat berries, groats, rye, brown rice, and millet. I love them, but a family pancake breakfast still makes me feel very out of control. This all changed a few weeks ago when Alex and I decided to make pancakes for dinner. All I can say is that quarantine has a way of melting away the rigid little fucks you used to give. For once, the chaos I associate with pancakes sounded fun and freeing. Also we’ve been watching a ton of Parks & Rec, and I was feeling inspired by Leslie’s diet of waffles and whipped cream. We made buttermilk pancakes, extra fluffy ones that require you to whip the egg whites on their own for several minutes before folding them into the batter. Two with banana chunks, two with bits of frozen peaches, two blueberry, one bonus plain for me. I had mine without anything on top, enjoying the choking feeling of eating so much cakey carb. It felt like a hug. When I saw my friend Todd post a gorgeous stack of pancakes on Instagram, I asked him if he had any theories about why they’re such a good quarantine food. At first he thought I was trolling him, but when I told him I was dead serious, here’s what he said: “What I love about pancakes right now is that they feel both ordinary and radical at the same time. Ordinary because they are nostalgic, all-American, homey, comfortable, and approachable. Anyone can make them. But there’s also something really subversive about a stack of pancakes right now—the gluten, the non-plant-based butter and eggs, eating breakfast when Goop tells us we should be intermittent fasting, so forth. Eating pancakes in the time of coronavirus brings into focus how overwhelming wellness culture has become in recent years—celery juice and collagen smoothies will never, ever, ever beat a big, buttery, syrupy stack of flapjacks.” I would agree. Given my dedication to breakfast foods that involve sprouted beans—which predates our wellness moment but was certainly bolstered by it—I definitely find pancakes subversive. They make me feel nostalgic, too, but not for anything I’ve personally experienced. For weekends in high school that I spent ensconced in the television world of Gilmore Girls, maybe, where breakfast at Luke’s Diner is a comfortable routine. As I continued my journey into pancake reportage, I sought out the perspective of Sarah Jampel, an editor at Bon Appetit. While pancakes made from sourdough discard have their fans, Sarah is not particularly one of them. She’s also team waffle. I don’t really have a horse in the pancake/waffle debate, but Sarah makes a compelling case. “I have thought a lot about pancakes,” she emailed back when I asked if she had anything to say about the topic. “And yes, I have made them since isolation started—mostly because I'm ‘every woman’ and my fridge is overflowing with sourdough discard. ‘Put it in pancakes,’ I thought. The issue is that I need to add more flour (as well as butter or oil and leaveners) to sourdough discard to turn it into pancakes, so I ultimately end up using more ingredients for the sole purpose of not throwing some stuff into the trash or compost (but really, the trash). And even though pancakes sound nice in theory—why not start the day with a hot breakfast instead of the usual routine, eating a Clif bar with one hand while the other clings bare to the subway pole (huge sigh of nostalgia)?—in actuality they're inferior waffles. Unless you take care with your pancakes—loading them with lots of butter and separating the egg yolks and whites (this recipe's my fave)—they're too mono-textured.” Never fear: Alex and I loaded ours with an alarming amount of butter. I suppose it is to be expected that when you go out hunting for pancake insights, you come back with waffle testimonials. When I asked Alex’s high school friends to weigh in on the appeal of pancakes during a global shutdown, Nico said, “Waffles are the superior carb. They provide greater textural variety and are a better delivery vessel for condiments.” (Dylan has been eating toast all quarantine, and Dan “didn’t understand the question” because the only god he acknowledges is the Joy of Cooking’s pancake recipe.) My friend Molly has been eating a lot of savory pancakes under quarantine, for breakfast or lunch. She sautées a bunch of garlic and kale in olive oil, adding scallions at the last minute, and then sets the vegetables aside in a bowl. In goes the Bisquick, and she adds the kale mix on top of the pancakes as they cook; after a minute, she tops the pancake with shredded white cheddar so that when she flips it, the cheese turns crispy. She’ll eat that with a runny egg or garlic yogurt. I can’t wait to see her again so she can make one for me. Pancakes are one of the few foods that Molly has consistently been able to stomach during this period of immense anxiety. They have a strong positive association for her: in pre-corona times, she would make savory pancakes after playing soccer on Saturday mornings. Those games are one of the things she misses most right now. We talked on the phone while she made her daily trip outside to juggle a soccer ball. Molly likes to chat with friends during these breaks because bouncing a ball on your feet benefits from loose attention. “Cooking a pancake is similar,” she said. “It requires some focus but it’s not that hard. You don’t really need to cut anything. You just watch it.” Alex always says that cooking is meditative for him. I would respectfully disagree—to me, it feels more like hurtling down a mogul course—but I can see it with pancakes. You’re just systematically waiting and flipping, waiting and flipping. After making buttermilk pancakes, we progressed to Sqirl’s buckwheat pancakes for lunch on a Sunday. I can’t find the recipe online, but here’s a photo. For those who are lucky enough to have dodged my Sqirl talk thus far, it’s a phenomenal, semi-healthy breakfast and lunch spot in Silver Lake. Every time I’m in LA, I badger my companions into going right when it opens at 8 a.m. so we’re sure to get a table. When I was there to write about Dax Shepard in November, I high-tailed it to Sqirl right after our interview and embarrassed myself in front of the staff by inhaling bits of a particularly seedy cookie and having a loud coughing fit, after which I went around the corner to die in private. Alex and I thought we had all the requisite ingredients for Sqirl’s buckwheat pancakes, other than cactus flour, but the recipe calls for corn flour and it turns out cornmeal isn’t the same thing. We subbed in whole wheat, so they weren’t really Sqirlcakes, but they were still tasty in a restrained, earthy way. Alex convinced me to try one with raspberry jam, which I reluctantly admit was a great pairing. A week or two later, we made them again. I wasn’t really hungry because it was 2 p.m. and I’d already eaten lunch—Alex had just gotten up—but I pledged to eat my portion cold out of the fridge. Alex thought this was insane, but he sometimes forgets that I like my food a little squidgy. We went grocery shopping the next morning, which was as much of a bitch as it always is right now. Even though we’ve gotten the process down to a science, it still takes three hours from start to finish, with significant angst on my part about the cleanliness of the inbound goods. Finally everything was put away, and Alex headed off to take a shower. I was agitated and crazy hungry. I scrubbed my hands one more time, pulled the pancakes out of the fridge, and promptly dropped one on the floor while trying to get it into my mouth. I ate the rest in big, angry bites, one after another, standing in the middle of the kitchen. I didn’t want to sit down in my outdoor clothes. The pancakes were perfect, though. A shot of sweet, comforting carb straight to the heart.

[swanelorflic1975-blog]

I wasn't gay, I am not gay. I thought to myself and linked it to my porn habits. This porn was making me gay. I keep falling in love with products that have terrible reviews, and I scared they going to be discontinued. Most recently I loving Cerave Skin Renewing Day Cream with Sunscreen and Bliss Makeup Melt Remover Gel. My skin is sensitive to everything, especially fragrance, so I really surprised that the big complaints others have with these seem to be that they are irritating and strong smelling. A group of people across the world from them, though, would probably need an entirely different vocabulary of words, so the languages would have developed differently in isolation. Think of the oft quoted (but erroneous) example that Eskimos have 100 different words for snow because they have so much of it. While that common statement is wrong, there are cultures that have far more words for rice and camels than, say, English does.. There are many ways to engage with people across the divide. Our Brazilian Service tells a story from the City of God, the violent Brazilian favela, where the very young and the very old lack affection and attention. They are crossing the generational divide by sharing capoeira lessons, acting classes, and hugs.. Finally, my biggest concern is that your choice of vocabulary biases every single question. If you qualify something in the question, you essentially saying "This is the right answer. Do you agree?". Hopefully some of the things that people have been asking for since launch. I like to see FDC, summit and nav line come back. More rim options, character customisation and Icon perks. Her terrible diet caused her gall 거창출장마사지 stones which caused her cholecystitis and eventual cholecystectomy. As someone who had their gallbladder taken out, I knew this headline didn track. As soon as the mom started talking about her daughter always wanting chips and getting some for her every time she went to the store, the actual cause was pretty evident.. Also I know you said "grinding gears", just know that the synchronizer is the thing that actually gets grounded in modern transmissions (I'm 99% sure). So maybe MAYBE you have a synchro issue. Although I'd doubt it since the tranny is young and you need to really beat it up to effect a synchro because they're meant to 거창출장마사지 last a LONG time. Yes! I used to do this. Apply vaseline or aquaphor around the skin near your eyebrows and then put on the beard dye for around a minute per eyebrow (it works super fast) and then just wipe it off and bam you have darker eyebrows. It super quick and I'd do it every few weeks while I waited for my shower to warm up.. I think she is very beautiful. And while I don't she looks old, I do suspect that the perception people have of her is due to her classy/traditional style and, critically, her use of Botox in her forehead. When you age, the elasticity in your forehead weakens and your brows start heading south. She was white. And she was very set in her ways." Part of her daily routine involves rolling on the sidewalk, but when one day the sidewalk has been covered in chalk art, Ethel black and white life gets a little more colorful. Ethel is blue literally and figuratively; her unintentional change makes her too self conscious to follow her usual habits.

[revlyncox]

Potluck in Heaven

This sermon was updated for the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, October 1, 2017.

My grandmother was, at one point, the only person in the world who could get me to eat bacon. Somewhere around middle school, I decided I wanted to stop eating pork. I had explained this to my grandmother, saying I didn't feel right about eating animals that were smarter than my dog. (And, for the record, my dog was not smart.)

 I remember this conversation very clearly. My grandmother, on the other hand, did not remember. For everything else, she had a good memory until the day she died. She kept track of all of the good news and bad news for the whole family. She remembered to bring in the wash from the clothesline. She remembered how to can applesauce without a recipe. She was a logistical genius with arranging all of our visits to the farm. Somehow the lack of pork in my diet did not compute.

 During our regular visits up the mountain, I would wake up last in a crowded household and my grandmother would say, "Oh, you're up. I saved you some bacon." Every time. I don’t recommend ignoring a loved one’s preferences, but in this case, it worked out. I could not say no to this person who was expressing her love with food, who went out of her way to make a hot breakfast, and who had guarded my portion from my brothers. So I forgot that she forgot, and I made an exception for my grandmother's bacon. There was something sacred about that table.

 My grandparents' house was the kind of place where people could return without judgment. After the elopement, after sobering up, after an accident that caused damage in the barnyard, there was still a place at the kitchen table for you. They accepted whatever people and gifts came to them, and they sent us back out in the world with sandwiches.

 When I imagine the scene from this morning's Message for All Ages, I picture a long farmhouse table just like theirs.

 I imagine a room full of joys and sorrows, laughter and generosity. Heaven is the place where we learn to accept and encourage one another, where we learn to practice care with creativity. Heaven is where we learn to feed each other.

 Our Universalist heritage teaches that all of us are welcomed by the Source of Love. No matter what our beliefs, culture, or learning experiences on earth, all souls are embraced by the Infinite. If there is a heaven, and we're all going to meet each other there, we're going to need to learn how to get along across the divisions that this world imposes. Eternity is a long time. Maybe we should start learning now.

 In the story, heaven was marked by generosity and love. These things will sustain us as we live into our interdependence.

 Generosity

 Generosity would seem like an obvious ingredient to building the welcome table. The people in the story shared what was in front of them. It seems like everybody entered that dining hall with nothing, the food on the tables was able to get there because of something larger than themselves. Everyone was invited into that space empty-handed.

 The way we share resources in this world need not depend on the illusion that some of us are completely independent and self-sufficient. Very few of us grow and process everything that we eat and drink. Not many of us are planting, harvesting, threshing, and grinding wheat into flour. Most of us at least need the help of the growers we meet at the Farmer's Market in order to put together a meal. And the growers need the cooperation of farm workers, market organizers, and whoever controls the weather.

 Whatever we come by in this world, some gratitude is in order for the hands that helped bring it into being and for the people who helped prepare us to receive it. Out of that gratitude, let us hold things lightly, and continue to spread blessings out in ripples across the interdependent web. To put it more simply, it makes sense to say "thank you" and to share with others. Practice gratitude and generosity not simply because it's the polite thing to do, not exclusively when we perceive that we have things that others do not, but also in recognition of our interdependence.

 We all came into this world empty-handed, and we'll all return to the Source of Love the same way. But sometimes our greatest gifts can't be held or touched. We have more riches than can be counted. Universalism invites us to enjoy a sense of abundance and a practice of generosity, informed by the deep truth of interdependence.

 Love

 Love is the essence of Universalism. Divine love overcomes all obstacles and heals all wounds that divide us from the sacred and from ourselves. There's no eternal punishment, and therefore no need to save anyone from believing differently than we do, so we can focus our energies on working with the Divine to comfort the afflicted, bring release to the captive, and feed the hungry. These acts of care are expressions of love.

 There is a danger in talking about love that I might be misunderstood to mean something limited to mental and emotional affection. I'm thinking in much more practical terms. Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker said it very well in her essay, "Love First" (printed in Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, p. 145-146):

 "This interconnectedness of all things calls for wisdom and reverence. We cannot trample this landscape of life as ignorant fools and expect to remain safe. We cannot turn from our bonds and obligations for and with one another and expect everyone to be okay. We cannot love after the fact and expect love to be able to save life. Maybe in the end love will save us all, but it has a lot better chance at the beginning.

 "We need to love from the start-- not as an emergency strategy when everything has gone wrong. We need to love our neighbors as ourselves through economic systems that pay a living wage for labor instead of indulging in policies that allow the rich to get richer and the poor to be left behind when the storm comes. We need to love the world through reverence that fosters observant attention to the intricate relationally of life….If we can learn to love first, not last, then love may save us."

 Parker is talking about infusing reverent love for creation and for humans into our very way of being. She is talking about embodying that love in the way we set up society and in the way we pay attention to what's going on around us.

 Consider the small scale. When I think about the logistics involved in making sure everyone in a family has what they need to cooperate and thrive on an average day, I realize that loving first instead of last is vital for any group of people of any size. If you share caring responsibilities for beings of any kind, you know what I’m talking about. Planning ahead together to make sure the needs of the most vulnerable are met, building care and concern into the system, is tough. We do it because we love each other. We love first, throughout, and last.

 That's the kind of love we want in our local communities, in our nation, and in our world. As Universalists, we believe in and practice loving our neighbor without exception. Whatever the fate of our planet, we are going to experience it together. Whatever may happen to our souls, our destinies are intertwined. Let us love first, so that we may return to the Source knowing we have set a table where we have learned to feed each other.

 Conclusion

 This morning's story imagines two scenarios in which people are bound together. When the people act with humor, generosity, and love, they create a community where all who are hungry may eat. I don't believe in an afterlife where we are punished for our mistakes or for our limited social skills.

 I do believe that we can learn to feed each other in this life, all of us. I believe in a Divine love that infuses all things, that accepts all of us and will not let us go. I believe it is our job to respond to that love by establishing justice, practicing compassion, caring for our planet, and creating beauty.

 May we go forth today with generosity, welcoming all without regard to obvious gifts, sharing what we can, and knowing that there is more abundance than meets the eye.

 May we go forth today with love, approaching the planet and each other with reverence, infusing care for each other in all of our dreams and plans.

 So be it. Blessed be. Amen.

[howtoloseweightfastsafely]

How To Sleep Like A Baby (And Wake Up Feeling Like A Boss)

The modern American lifestyle, with its hectic schedules and enormous stress loads, has made sleep a rare (and precious) commodity for a lot of people.

However, if you're trying to lose weight and improve your health (and just have loads of energy), you've got to make it a priority.

If you don't, new research shows you may see all your weight loss and longevity efforts hampered, or worse - rendered completely ineffective.

In addition to our sleep/cortisol discussion from the previous chapter, here's a bit more on the science behind proper rest. Think of it as "Sleep 101".

Circadian Rhythms

Your body naturally regulates your sleep according to something called your circadian rhythm. In the morning when it gets lighter, your body starts releasing adrenaline and dopamine while reducing its output of chemicals like melatonin and serotonin. At night, it does the opposite, ostensibly to help you relax and get ready for a good night's sleep.

Sleep Stages

Throughout the course of a night, we move in and out of five different stages of sleep:

Stage 1: You know that place where you're lying down, you've closed your eyes and you're feeling drowsy, but you still feel like you're awake? That's actually the first stage of sleep - and it's the one that it's most easy to be roused from.

Stage 2: This is the place where you've just become unconscious, your brain activity has slowed down, and your muscles have really started to relax. Your breathing and heart rate slow down, and your body temperature drops a little bit.

Stages 3 and 4: These are closely related, but they are distinct stages because the third stage is preparatory for the fourth stage. In the third stage, the body paralyzes its skeleton and muscles, the brain loses any awareness of its surrounding environment, and the metabolism grinds to a halt.

In the fourth stage, your body's growth hormone peaks, accelerating healing and providing recovery for muscles exhausted during the day's activity. When you're pursuing a weight loss program, it's important to get as much stage 4 sleep as possible so your body can achieve the results you're looking for.

Stage 5: REM sleep - also known as Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This is the part of your slumber where your eyes move back and forth quickly behind your eyelids, and you dream very vividly. During this time, your heartbeat and breathing quicken and your blood pressure rises.

Sleep and Weight Loss

Sleep is incredibly important for building lean muscle, which is the primary engine of your metabolism and accelerates your efforts to lose weight and look your best.

While you're sleeping, your body recovers its strength and energy, repairs the microscopic tears you've made in your muscles during working out (thereby making them stronger and leaner) and floods your blood with growth hormones and various other body-fortifying compounds.

For example, your brain also uses sleep time to rebuild neurotransmitters and receptors that relay chemicals crucial to exercise, such as dopamine, acetylcholine and adrenaline. These chemicals also help with motivation, energy, attention and focus. When you're working out every day, you deplete your brain's ability to make and process these chemicals, and the only way to get your "flow" back over time is to get your sleep.

Sleep and Your Overall Well-Being

That said, it's not just important to get enough sleep so you can lose weight - you also need to sleep for your mental well-being, the strength of your immune system and many other essential biochemical functions your body performs every day.

Not getting enough sleep has been linked to depression, higher risk of minor and major diseases, heart problems and weight gain. As mentioned, it also leads to higher cortisol levels, increased stress levels (and less ability to deal with stress) and disrupts your normal hormone production.

How To Get the Most Out of Sleep

It's more important to sleep well than to sleep a lot, but sleeping between seven and eight hours a night (max of 9 hours) gives your body a chance to hit all the necessary cycles it needs to do its job.

The environment in which you sleep is also crucial to not only your ability to fall asleep, but how well you'll stay asleep once there. No human being ever slept consistently in a completely quiet and dark environment - we've always had the moon and stars, and there's always been wind in the trees and animal noises out in the darkness. But things have definitely gotten much more bright and noisy in the last century or so.

We now cope with many more distractions and bright lights at night that interfere with our natural circadian rhythms. So, the closer you can get to perfect dark and perfect quiet, the better you'll sleep. This is because the lower light levels there are, the more melatonin you'll produce, and the quieter things are, the less distractions your brain will have keeping it alert.

What does this mean for us?

Well, one of the best ways to ensure you'll get a good nights' rest is to prime yourself for sleep in the crucial two hours before bedtime.

Below are some tips to maximize your potential for sleep in the final hours of the day. Use these in conjunction with the tips from the last chapter ("7 Common Sense Ways To Have An Uncommon Peace of Mind").

 Interested in losing weight? Then click below to see the exact steps I took to lose weight and keep it off for good...

Read the previous article about "7 Common Sense Ways to Have Uncommon Peace of Mind (or How To Stop Your "Stress Hormone" In Its Tracks)"

Read the next article about "The 8-step Formula That Finally "fixes" Years Of Poor Sleep, Including Trouble Falling Asleep, Staying Asleep, And Waking Up Rested (If You Ever Find Yourself Hitting The Snooze Every Morning Or Dozing Off At Work, These Steps Will Change Your Life Forever)"

Moving forward, there are several other articles/topics I'll share so you can lose weight even faster, and feel great doing it.

Below is a list of these topics and you can use this Table of Contents to jump to the part that interests you the most.

Topic 1: How I Lost 30 Pounds In 90 Days - And How You Can Too

Topic 2: How I Lost Weight By Not Following The Mainstream Media And Health Guru's Advice - Why The Health Industry Is Broken And How We Can Fix It

Topic 3: The #1 Ridiculous Diet Myth Pushed By 95% Of Doctors And "experts" That Is Keeping You From The Body Of Your Dreams

Topic 4: The Dangers of Low-Carb and Other "No Calorie Counting" Diets

Topic 5: Why Red Meat May Be Good For You And Eggs Won't Kill You

Topic 6: Two Critical Hormones That Are Quietly Making Americans Sicker and Heavier Than Ever Before

Topic 7: Everything Popular Is Wrong: The Real Key To Long-Term Weight Loss

Topic 8: Why That New Miracle Diet Isn't So Much of a Miracle After All (And Why You're Guaranteed To Hate Yourself On It Sooner or Later)

Topic 9: A Nutrition Crash Course To Build A Healthy Body and Happy Mind

Topic 10: How Much You Really Need To Eat For Steady Fat Loss (The Truth About Calories and Macronutrients)

Topic 11: The Easy Way To Determining Your Calorie Intake

Topic 12: Calculating A Weight Loss Deficit

Topic 13: How To Determine Your Optimal "Macros" (And How The Skinny On The 3-Phase Extreme Fat Loss Formula)

Topic 14: Two Dangerous "Invisible Thorn" Foods Masquerading as "Heart Healthy Super Nutrients"

Topic 15: The Truth About Whole Grains And Beans: What Traditional Cultures Know About These So-called "Healthy Foods" That Most Americans Don't

Topic 16: The Inflammation-Reducing, Immune-Fortifying Secret of All Long-Living Cultures (This 3-Step Process Can Reduce Chronic Pain and Heal Your Gut in Less Than 24 Hours)

Topic 17: The Foolproof Immune-enhancing Plan That Cleanses And Purifies Your Body, While "patching Up" Holes, Gaps, And Inefficiencies In Your Digestive System (And How To Do It Without Wasting $10+ Per "meal" On Ridiculous Juice Cleanses)

Topic 18: The Great Soy Myth (and The Truth About Soy in Eastern Asia)

Topic 19: How Chemicals In Food Make Us Fat (Plus 10 Banned Chemicals Still in the U.S. Food Supply)

Topic 20: 10 Banned Chemicals Still in the U.S. Food Supply

Topic 21: How To Protect Yourself Against Chronic Inflammation (What Time Magazine Calls A "Secret Killer")

Topic 22: The Truth About Buying Organic: Secrets The Health Food Industry Doesn't Want You To Know

Topic 23: Choosing High Quality Foods

Topic 24: A Recipe For Rapid Aging: The "Hidden" Compounds Stealing Your Youth, Minute by Minute

Topic 25: 7 Steps To Reduce AGEs and Slow Aging

Topic 26: The 10-second Trick That Can Slash Your Risk Of Cardiovascular Mortality By 37% (Most Traditional Cultures Have Done This For Centuries, But The Pharmaceutical Industry Would Be Up In Arms If More Modern-day Americans Knew About It)

Topic 27: How To Clean Up Your Liver and Vital Organs

Topic 28: The Simple Detox 'Cheat Sheet': How To Easily and Properly Cleanse, Nourish, and Rid Your Body of Dangerous Toxins (and Build a Lean Well-Oiled "Machine" in the Process)

Topic 29: How To Deal With the "Stress Hormone" Before It Deals With You

Topic 30: 7 Common Sense Ways to Have Uncommon Peace of Mind (or How To Stop Your "Stress Hormone" In Its Tracks)

Topic 31: How To Sleep Like A Baby (And Wake Up Feeling Like A Boss)

Topic 32: The 8-step Formula That Finally "fixes" Years Of Poor Sleep, Including Trouble Falling Asleep, Staying Asleep, And Waking Up Rested (If You Ever Find Yourself Hitting The Snooze Every Morning Or Dozing Off At Work, These Steps Will Change Your Life Forever)

Topic 33: For Even Better Leg Up And/or See Faster Results In Fixing Years Of Poor Sleep, Including Trouble Falling Asleep, Staying Asleep, And Waking Up Rested, Do The Following:

Topic 34: Solution To Overcoming Your Mental Barriers and Cultivating A Winner's Mentality

Topic 35: Part 1 of 4: Solution To Overcoming Your Mental Barriers and Cultivating A Winner's Mentality

Topic 36: Part 2 of 4: Solution To Overcoming Your Mental Barriers and Cultivating A Winner's Mentality

Topic 37: Part 3 of 4: Solution To Overcoming Your Mental Barriers and Cultivating A Winner's Mentality

Topic 38: Part 4 of 4: Solution To Overcoming Your Mental Barriers and Cultivating A Winner's Mentality

Topic 39: How To Beat Your Mental Roadblocks And Why It Can Be The Difference Between A Happy, Satisfying Life And A Sad, Fearful Existence (These Strategies Will Reduce Stress, Increase Productivity And Show You How To Fulfill All Your Dreams)

Topic 40: Maximum Fat Loss in Minimum Time: The Body Type Solution To Quick, Lasting Results

Topic 41: If You Want Maximum Results In Minimum Time You're Going To Have To Work Out (And Workout Hard, At That)

Topic 42: Food Planning For Maximum Fat Loss In Minimum Time

Topic 43: How To Lose Weight Fast If You're in Chronic Pain

Topic 44: Nutrition Basics for Fast Pain Relief (and Weight Loss)

Topic 45: How To Track Results (And Not Fall Into the Trap That Ruins 95% of Well-Thought Out Diets)

Topic 46: Advanced Fat Loss - Calorie Cycling, Carb Cycling and Intermittent Fasting

Topic 47: Advanced Fat Loss - Part I: Calorie Cycling

Topic 48: Advanced Fat Loss - Part II: Carb Cycling

Topic 49: Advanced Fat Loss - Part III: Intermittent Fasting

Topic 50: Putting It All Together

Learn more by visiting our website here: invigoratenow.com

#weightloss #diet

[i-am-very-very-tired]

Do you remember those Cathy comic strips your mom used to have tacked to her cubicle wall or office board? The one’s her and her co-workers would share and cackle and point at while nodding their heads in agreement and uttering ‘Yup, so true’? You’d look at those comics as a little girl with a blank stare, confused as to why so many of your mom’s female co-workers related to this neurotic, cat owning, chubby white lady who spent the majority of the comic complaining about dieting,exercising, yogurt, work and dating. Now I ask you, do you remember the day you realized you BECAME Cathy? For me it was when I was around 30, I was on the phone in the grocery store with my friend discussing this new wellness challenge I saw on IG, where you cut out all refined sugars for 30 days, and there was some hashtag involved. I looked in my basket and saw one bottle of white wine, a container of sugar free Greek yogurt, and cat food. Somehow, I had morphed into the Millennial (am I a Millennial? I was born in 85’ idk) Colored Cathy. This wasn’t a moment of panic, but definitely a random moment of self realization. This was 30, and I was doing the things black women in their 30s do. Maybe its an American thing, but a large part of adulthood in our culture heralds “self-improvement.” We must always be striving to be fitter, richer, healthier, better educated, more skilled, glow-upier versions of ourselves. This is especially true for women and hell, I was, I am no different. To be content with who you are in the present is seen as resigning oneself to mediocrity. It’s lethargic, and un-ambitious. Cardinal sins in our current “Rise and Grind”–everyone’s a personal brand-social media reach quantifying ass world. Fast forward several months where I’m 31, and miraculously still had not managed to 30 Day Challenge myself into a better me. I had hit a wall. Well, a couple of walls and I hadn’t the faintest idea why. I couldn’t concentrate on this “great” new job I just got, I was more reclusive than usual and couldn’t even find enjoyment in the little pleasures I’d typically turn to during my more gloomy spells. Sure I’ve always struggled with self-discipline but that’s always a part of myself that I attributed to being ‘artsy’ kind of. However, the list of goals I wished to accomplish but never followed through on grew exponentially. My personal life was about as uneventful as a Chris Christie’s political future, my friendships were suffering, I was more irritable than usual and I was even becoming withdrawn with my son at home. It wasn’t until I had a late night discussion with a close friend where he tearfully revealed he’d seen a therapist and had been diagnosed with depression, that I entertained perhaps seeking professional help for my mental well being. Of course I didn’t think that I was as sick as my friend, when he asked if his diagnosis surprised me I responded in typical “Of course I knew, nigga I’m glad you caught up” Danielle fashion. “Oh yeah, of course not, I had always said you would benefit from therapy, with what you’ve been through? Of course a diagnosis of depression makes sense. I’m proud of you for finally taking care of yourself”. After hanging up the phone, my own words I used to reassure my panicked best friend echoed in my head. “With what you’ve been through..of course it makes sense. I’m proud of you for finally taking care of yourself.” My friend, like a lot of Black men who grew up in Chicago ,has experienced a lot of trauma, especially in his childhood, but damn so did I. I soon realized that I was guilty of the same mental health neglect I audaciously and frequently lectured him about when we’d discuss his failed relationships and stalled professional life. I had a lot of Black ass nerve, here I had pretty much spent the latter half of my life having gone through the mental trauma equivalent of several car accidents and not once thought to cart my ass to a physician to see if there was any internal bruising. So soon thereafter, I started researching therapists in my local area and booked my appointment. My therapist is a Black woman in her early 60s. She looks young for her age, she has a short ceasar hair cut, and wears Uggs. She’s short and busty, and her face always looks as if she’s empathizing with you. Her office is very small and quiet. She has one of those faux waterfall things meant to provide calming serenity. It’s kind of annoying and looks really cheesy but I try to ignore it. Our first session, she told me that I was at the age where most women seek therapy. “You’re…31. Yeah this is where most women hit a wall, your jar is full and you can’t keep putting your head down and pushing forward, now you’re having problems functioning and have to compensate for years of self-neglect, this is normal, it’s what women in their 30’s do.” During our one hour session she asked me the questions I suppose all therapists ask, about my current life, my childhood, my love life, my past, and what I want for my future. I was pretty candid, and had no problems going into full detail about everything. I casually rattled off the instances of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse I’d experienced from childhood into adulthood that I was sure was norm for women my age. My divorce, my son, the death of my father, my close, but dramatic and at times confrontational relationship with my mother, my job hopping (four in one year I think), my chronic insomnia, etc. And even when I casually looked up to her slightly raised brows while she scribbled notes on her notepad, I wasn’t sure how serious I was taking it, but it was cathartic to talk to someone unfamiliar with my story. It wasn’t until the end when she said she needed to tell me something that she usually waits some time to disclose to her patients that I knew what was at stake. “Danielle…you’re sick. I don’t think you realize how sick you are because this is the only way you’ve known how to function for the majority of your life..but honey…now you need meds and you need help, I hope you’ll let me help you.” This was actually unexpected, I was so sure she would have praised me for my perseverance, my resilience in having withstood what I had gone through while somehow still managing to become an arguably productive and functioning adult. It hadn’t dawned on me that maybe all this time, I really wasn’t “functioning” at as high a level I thought I was, that my “normal” was abnormal that my “fine” wasn’t fine. Maybe I had been giving myself entirely too much credit? I left her office that day with a couple of diagnosis: Clinical depression, anxiety, PTSD, and some other acronym that I always forget. Ultimately she told me that before we could even hope to engage in successful therapy sessions, I needed to discuss anti-depressant meds with my doctor. “You mean I’m so fucked up I need medication to be eligible for therapy?” I laughed. The laughter was not returned. Shit got real. I promised to contact my PCP right away to discuss my options and gingerly paid for my session. When I got home, I laid on my couch and catatonically stared at the ceiling till sunrise. I don’t even remember blinking. For the first time in my life, I was the one with the diagnosis. This wasn’t about my friend’s depression, my ex-husbands sickle cell, my mom’s heart condition, or my son’s autism. It was me. For the first time I was the patient that I needed to take care of. I was used to being the calm, analytical, reassuring caretaker, who helped my loved ones research therapies, and medication options. But now, I was the one who was sick, and for the first time in a long time; I didn’t have the answers, and I was scared. Currently I’m still scared but I’m discussing med options with my physician. I’ve since had a few more sessions with my therapist and I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea of both needing and accepting help, and my needing therapy and help not being an admission of my own inadequacy. I like my therapist a lot, and my friends and family are supportive. I accidentally sent her a dirty text message meant for some dude once but she laughed it off-she cool as hell. I still do my little challenges, in fact I signed up for some 28 Day fitness jumpstart just the other day. Like a lot of black women in their 30s I’m also starting to find myself entertained by things like numerology and astrology. Especially ironic coming from me of all people a consummate cynic, but I get the appeal. People like being told who they are, it’s less legwork. To think there’s a universe out there as invested in my self actualization as I am is an attractive ideal. I’m scheduling myself a tarot card reading as we speak. I’m even looking into life coaches, because shit, why the hell not? There’s a Sartre quote where he says: “As far as men go, it’s not who they are that interests me – but what they can become.” It speaks to the notion that the “self” is constant and ever changing and it’s something I think about when I fall into this possibly futile albeit earnest cycle of self improvement. Humans are tasked with the burdensome freedom of deciding who we are, and then embarking on the journey in becoming that actualized person. When I told my mom I had decided to start going to therapy, she cheered. She said it was long overdue, and exclaimed relief that I finally decided it was time. She had been in therapy over the past three years and found it helpful. My mom, like a lot of black women her age unfortunately, has experienced a lot of trauma, but she’s seeking help and scaling her own walls — and damn so am I. Maybe that’s enough. 30 day challenges, black women, cathy, comic strips, turning 30 Danielle Butler

[iamkindling]

I picked the worst year to stop taking my meds (part two): a family matter

I was a a pretty angsty kid, and an even angstier teen. I’d feel bad for my parents for having to deal with my me, but I don’t, because boy howdy, I could have been a lot worse. All things considered, I was a damn good kid to raise.

I participated in extracurricular activities, sang in the church choir, preferred books to TV, all those good things. I was reasonably obedient, tried to do my chores when I was told, and usually felt genuine guilt when I did something wrong.

My first distinct memories of depression are from when I was about ten years old. That’s when I-

- Started seeking solitude because I couldn’t understand or identify with the unrelenting optimism of some of my peers

- First realized the gravity of death

- Began to doubt that God had anyone’s best interest at heart

Depression began with those things, and anxiety followed quickly on its footsteps. I developed a phobia of the sound of the phone ringing. That was how news was delivered. And most news was bad news those days.

My family is deeply religious. I don’t blame them. Christianity has been good to them, for the most part. There is value in shared community and common beliefs and goals. I don’t think anyone doubts that. But I began to find religion deeply troubling at a young age. I couldn’t understand a god who could speak of vengeance and forgiveness, who could promise peace and rain down destruction, who could tout acceptance but encourage judgement and death at every turn.

I couldn’t understand how God could answer my fervent prayers for a little brother, only to snatch him away, and almost take my mom, too.

Less than a year after a turbulent miscarriage, my mother became pregnant again. Due to tense family situations I still don’t fully understand (and probably never will), my parents decided it would be best if we kept my mom’s pregnancy a secret. We didn’t tell anyone. Not relatives, not friends, nobody. It was a strange thing to ask of a ten year old still grappling with grief. Not only did I feel silenced by my parents’ request, I felt silenced by my lack of friends (I couldn’t have anyone come over to visit, and I felt intensely socially awkward), and by my family’s situation (complaints felt unwarranted and trivial; my brother was dead, what did I have to complain about?). I began to feel reluctant to form attachments, even to the thing growing in my mother’s belly. Impermanence was a brand new concept. I could think of little else.

Through it all my family relied on faith. Even after my youngest sister was born (healthy baby and mom, no further complications) and we’d told all the relevant parties (I remember my mom’s first conversation with her mother about the new grandchild quite clearly), the memories of that bizarre year followed me. It still does, well over a decade later. Lots of my family’s “church friends” discussed the miscarriage in terms of a “trial” to “prepare the way” for my family and my youngest sister.

I’ve never thought of my brother in that way. I refuse to. If causing suffering and confusion was part of god’s “plan,” I wanted no part in it.

I began to doubt early, and doubted for a good ten years before I realized I wasn’t religious any longer. If anything has given me lasting peace about my brother’s death and the turmoil my family went through in those days, it’s been my realization that it wasn’t part of a plan. I think my family fiends peace in their belief that it was.

I did my best to stick to the program in my teen years. I attended church, participated in clubs, plays, Bible studies, retreats, and church camps. I served in the youth ministry at church as a leader, wrote plays based on Bible stories, and invited my “unsaved” friends at school to go to wednesday night youth group activities. But I did plenty of things in the “secular” world, too.

Marching band, show choir, and school plays teach more than just performance and artistry. Most of what I learned about sex, dating, swearing, and popular culture came from those activities. They were the few places I could be my “non-church” self at without fear of repercussions. I made friends my parents wouldn’t approve of, which was a fantastic thing. I learned the value of earned camaraderie, sarcasm, and confidence from my secular peers. I began to value my time away from home more than I valued time at home. I began to fear going home because I didn’t feel myself there. I began to dislike home because it meant I had to stay quiet while I listened to my father rail against things I began to identify with.

Once while driving me to school, my dad passed one of my friends who was walking on the sidewalk. She was listening to music and singing aloud. My dad scowled, then laughed and shook his head. It was clear he thought she was stupid or crazy. “Don’t wind up like that,” he told me. My junior year of high school I got permission to host the school play cast party at my house. My parents mentioned they wouldn’t be pleased if a certain cast member showed up because he was homosexual, and didn’t want that kind of “influence” around their home. I didn’t tell that particular friend (because he was, truly, a good friend of mine) what they’d said, but I think he knew.

My family was in a constant state of stress. Something was always happening. Usually “bad” things. Small things to stress over, argue over, pick fights over. And if something wasn’t happening, they’d find something to pick on until something happened. I think we all thrived on conflict. There were four kids in all, so my mom was constantly busy either shuttling my older sister and I to jobs or activities, or mothering my two much younger siblings. My father traveled frequently for work. There wasn’t much time for peace, so peace didn’t exist. Everyone was busy. Everyone was afraid to slow down.

At the close of my freshman year of high school, I realized I wouldn’t have school as a buffer for a few months over summer break. I’d be losing not only my friends who were seniors, but also my oldest sister to college, and soon. When I tried to express my grief to my parents about it, my mother insisted on taking me to a nutritionist, certain that if I changed the way I ate, I’d be more level, rational, less emotionally “volatile.”

So for a year I ate nothing but beans, vegetables, and meat. My moods still swung. Diets can only do so much, but I went along with it at the time, desperately hopeful that something could help me. I felt that something was wrong with me, that I was somehow going crazy, that I was “different” from my peers and had to find the switch to flip that would make everything better. I started to have frequent panic attacks. I started to have thoughts that transfigured into vivid daydreams and then brief hallucinations that scared the shit out of me. I saw tragedies strike too close to home far too frequently, to the point where I believed that if I wasn’t next, I was at least in line. That attitude continued until I finished college. It probably still continues a bit, but I’ve found myself being able to imagine my future self in more realistic terms. Does that sound normal? I hope so.

In an effort to cope with my teen “angst,” “moodiness,” “dramatics,” and other such terms I’ve now been able to classify as simply depression, my parents found ways to control and punish. I loved to read so they took away my books. I loved music so they took away my CDs. They’d often forbid me to see friends, participate in activities (even at church), and a few times, they confiscated my journals, diaries, notebooks I’d write stories in, having “family meetings” to discuss what they found. They sent me to church camps over the summer because they “couldn’t handle me and needed a week off.” They had friends at the high school I attended (support staff) and threatened to have them watch me and report back to them. While I’m not against certain parenting strategies and monitoring a child’s behavior, what my parents did made me feel beyond paranoid.

So I found things I could control.

I developed an eating disorder (my views on food and what it could or couldn’t do were already skewed).

I learned how to hurt myself in ways that wouldn’t leave scars (it didn’t work every time. I still have some). One day at school my best friend revealed to me that she’d started self-harming recently, trying to escape the stress of her home life. I stared at her in shock, grabbed her hand, and said “me, too.” Our bond strengthened.

I learned how to lie.

I developed friendships with a lot of people my parents would never “approve” of in a million years. They assumed it was to grind their gears. It was more because I desperately needed a change, any change, anything that would remind me that what I had wasn’t all there was.

My parents didn’t know about the cutting, or that I was starving myself, that my friends knew more about me than they did, that I was hiding things from them that were pivotal, that I didn’t believe they could or would ever help me with.

One afternoon in late 2013, a week after my second conversation with the campus counselor, I called my mother to tell her I wanted to go on medication. My parents frequently said that I was always in the midst of a “spiritual battle.” I was terrified they’d use my new desire to medicate as more ammunition against me. I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation. I do remember that I shook almost uncontrollably through the whole thing. I could barely hold the phone against my ear; my hand went numb from fear. But by the end of the conversation, my mother had promised a visit to the family physician when I went home for Christmas break, on the condition that I visit a nutritionist of her choice, too.

I told my mom I loved her and ended the call. My boyfriend squeezed my hand, and I cried.

It was still tentative. But it was the biggest concrete step towards healing I’d ever made.

Next:

I picked the worst year to stop taking my meds (part three): the first day

#my story #depression #anxiety #medication #angsty #angst #teen drama #healing

[aworldbeyondthelookingglass]

Agonda, Goa.

So it's been four days since I got to Agonda, so I thought it was about time to give a proper update. Agonda is beautiful. Just like all the Goan beaches. I've had a lovely time so far and apart from New Year's Eve it's been pretty mellow, just how I like it. I've been having breakfast out, then lazing on the beach most days and swimming in the sea. The sea is so nice, and it's pretty wavy and the current is strong so it's quite fun! There's a mini surf school so it's fun to watch the surfers when the waves are big. Today, the 2nd, I checked out of Duck 'n' Chill which were the huts I was staying at, and got a taxi to Aiethein Healing massage school. It's just one long street but walking it takes about 25 minutes and with my heavy bags and the heat I didn't really fancy it! Duck 'n' Chill was great. It's right at the other end of Agonda so it's super chilled and quiet, but it did make walking home a bit scary after I'd had dinner and if I'd gone elsewhere, so I'm kind of glad to be more in the thick of it now. Saying that though, the beach is so nice up that end because it's not busy, and I really loved all the staff there. As soon as I checked in they were so welcoming, and even though it was just four days I'm going to miss the staff there so I hope to go back for dinner or drinks some evenings- they do a bomb lemon ginger honey tea 👌🏾 Me and Joao met a group of Indian guys on New Years eve day and spent most of the day with them, and then on New Year's Day I spent most of the day with a guy called Guatama (same name as Buddha!). I have never laughed so much in such a long time. Maybe it was sleep deprivation but he had me in fits all day up until he left. He was on a road trip with a group of 6 so was leaving that afternoon to go back to work. He's originally from Delhi, from a well educated family, but works in Hyrdabhad, and was telling me all sorts of stories. His sense of humour was brilliant and there was never a moment of silence. We had a lot in common and it was the perfect way to start the new year, full of laughter. When I met him on New Year's Eve he actually came up to me to compliment me on my tattoo and asked what it was, then I told him about mandalas, the reason behind it and he opened up the book he was reading and it had tons of beautiful mandalas in it too! That day I didn't speak to him again, and his other friends were entertaining Joao and I, but it wasn't until the day after that we properly spoke and I'm glad we did! I'm a sucker for signs and believe there's tons of little signs which appear everywhere in your life without you even looking 🙏🏾✨ I had dinner on my own at a little restaurant that offers really cheap thalis and was going to go straight home as I had about four hours sleep the night before, but I decided to wander and ended up in a ladies shop. Some beautiful bags caught my eye, but then I saw a little baby with the biggest eyes rolling around on the floor. He was adorable and had the most amazing curly natural highlights in his hair! She showed me videos of her daughter who wasn't there and said she was the naughty one and they were really funny, lots of attitude! Her boy was the most smiley little thing ever. We chatted for a while, she obviously wanted to sell me something but I like to make conversation with them and hear their stories. She had an arranged marriage when she was 18, her daughter is 3 years old and her baby boy is 6 months. Her husband lives in Bombay and works as a taxi driver and her family are from Palolem, a beach about half an hour from Agonda. She is just 21 now and only sees her husband twice a week. She was very sweet, we compared our lives and the traditions of our countries, and after I told her about my massage course she told me that she also does henna and went to henna school in Bombay for four months! I never knew there were schools for it and thought they just learnt from each other, but she told me there are lots of different kinds of henna- for engagements, weddings and more, they're very detailed and particular.For weddings they get almost all their skin covered in henna and it can take a whole day! They have a five day lead up to the wedding with different traditions and parties, and one of those days is the mehndi ceremony which is the henna. So, naturally, I got her to do some henna on me. She desperately wanted to sell me something as she said New Years has been quiet and she promised a good price as it would bring her good luck etc etc (I'm sure they all say it, well I know they do!) but she was so sweet and has two babies to take care of (and soon another one as her family want her to have another boy! There's a lot of pressure to please the parents in Indian marriages), so I ended up buying a bag and the henna from her for 'good price, not anyone's price, special price for you for good luck." That's my indulgent spending done for the month! It was only £14 but I'm trying to be careful with my money now. Which leads me onto the cash crunch!!! It's a full on nightmare. They said it would get better after new year and we could take out more per transaction but it's only gone up to 4,500 which is just £60 and that was a maybe not a definite. I am going later to try so will find out. I've been getting too many charges taking three transactions out a day and the whole thing has been quite stressful. I came just with enough for the course and my living expenses with a little extra, but because I didn't just bring cash with me to exchange the fees are building up. The remainder of the course was meant to be paid in cash but I've spoken to my teacher and she's making an allowance for me, but I have to pay the PayPal fees which equal to just under £50. It's annoying and I've lost a lot of money with this whole situation. I had a tab at Duck 'n' chill and had a couple of drinks, teas, water bottles, two breakfasts and one dinner there and it came to 970 rupees in total so that's £9.70. So as you can see £50 would have gone a long way here, but there's nothing I can do about it now! I met Gagori the teacher and Nikhil her husband who is also the co-owner of the school. Gagori is lovely, she's exactly how imagined, so softly spoken and calm, and just as kind hearted and warm as how she came across over emails. It feels quite special meeting her now as I started speaking to her two years ago when I originally wanted to do the course, but pulled out due to being sick, so she knows what I had been going through, and it just feels so wonderful to finally meet her and be here at last. I also spoke to Nikhil who is equally lovely and actually asked him about my mosquito bites because they are driving me wild- I counted and have 57!!! No joke. He had a look at them and said they were definitely not mozzy bites and were bed bug bites! Ahhhhh!! He said it would be from the bed at Duck 'n' Chill. So I feel a bit gross now! But he said he would get Gagori to find something Ayurvedic that I can rub into them to stop them from itching and hopefully they will start going. What a nightmare! I was sad to leave the other place as it was nice, but now I'm a little relieved as I'm literally going out of my mind with the itchiness! All day and all night, now it's no wonder! So I'm all moved into my new home for the next month. It's lovely. Basic but big enough and everything I need. I've unpacked all my clothes into a cupboard which is a nice feeling, and I have a kettle so I can make tea (I thought ahead and brought a billion different kinds of tea bags, as well as oats and toppings to make porridge for breakfast when I want to be cheap!) although I am assuming the people on my course will have breakfast and lunch together so we'll see. Don't want to be too much of an unsociable stingy person haha. I have a confession to make as well. I've been a terrible vegan and have had a fish thali and an Israeli breakfast which came with shakshuka aka eggs. I know I know... biggest hypocrite going. I'm so passionate about veganism, I know it's the healthiest diet there is and I feel amazing for it. Mind and body. And I am really passionate about animal rights and the cruelty of it all and I don't want to participate in that. It's annoying because I feel torn. It's in my mind a lot, the guilt is there, but I also want to feel more free. But I still feel torn some days. I disagree with the meat, dairy and factory farming industry so therefore don't want to support it with my dollar. I also don't want to kill another being and take another's life just for purely selfish reasons. In India it's so different. The cows are seen as sacred. They believe their milk is a gift to them and also very healthy in Ayurveda (ghee, curd etc). I disagree with consuming dairy as it's meant for a baby cow, and I'm allergic which I think shows something in itself as how we shouldn't be digesting it and it's not natural. But I can see how in their culture it works for them. In Jainism they are pure vegetarians- basically vegetarian and no eggs but they say that if the cow lets you milk them then you should drink it. So they do consume dairy. Eggs; I hate the factory farming, I hate that baby male chicks get grinded alive because there's no purpose for them as they don't produce eggs. It's awful. I read in the Guardian a month back which had an article about a sanctuary in Horsham (of all places!) that rescue hens and chickens from being slaughtered and if they lay an egg then they sell them and all the eggs they sell are mostly to vegans! Vegans that eat eggs... Veggans 🍳. The logic is that the money you are giving to buy the eggs helps keep these places going, saving lots of hens and chickens from being slaughtered. They never force the chickens to lay an egg, they wander the grounds and feed off the land and if they lay an egg it gets collected and sold. That's a pretty great cause. Here in India it's also different. There is no such thing as these factory farms and everything seems more sustainable, taking what you need and no mass production. Keeping it small and simple. For some reason fish has always been something I felt a bit differently about. One side of me doesn't think they are the same as mammals, which is ridiculous I know. I know that no being wants to die. I also know that farmed fish is horrible and will never buy fish from a supermarket. But seeing how some places and countries live, making the most from the land and what they have, I see things a bit differently. When I lived in the Andaman Islands and now here, I see the fisherman go out on their little boats. One part of me believes that I am supporting them by eating fish because otherwise they wouldn't have a job as there would be no need for fish (I know that's ridiculous as me not eating fish isn't going to stop them fishing as there's about a billion and one people who will still be eating the fish) but you kind of see where I'm coming from. It's sustainable, it's locally caught and the small boats that go out are not killing all the sea life and ruining the flora and fauna of the sea in the process, unlike other fishing practices. The other part of me believes in what I've read from Buddhism, and that if you truly loved another then you couldn't kill. I believe that so much which is where I feel a lot of guilt. That there is no space for killing when leading a good life with good karma. I also believe all of that. So much. I want to be as good a person as I can be. No one is perfect but I want to know that I've done the best I can on this planet. With all of this, maybe you think I'm making up excuses. And maybe I am. But I see it in different ways now. I have been a strict vegan for almost three years now, but in this last year (well, actually literally last year!) I have had fish three times and eggs three times on different occasions. That's tiny in the scheme of 365 days of the year. I do feel like a hypocrite, because sometimes I can be a bit preachy because I do feel passionate about it and it makes me cry when I see anything about the meat and dairy industry. My feelings a true and honest. But no one is perfect. I am doing my best to make this world a good place and not support the big horrible money making industries or animal cruelty, and lead as peaceful and kind life as I can while I'm here. I will never ever consume meat again, it doesn't even cross my mind as a food group. I've made the connection there. But there are a few things that I might have on holiday or once in a blue moon if I know it's been wild caught, well looked after and treated well. And after I eat it I am grateful, appreciate it fully and don't take it for granted. I don't think animal products are all that healthy. I read mixed reviews on eggs and fish all the time. But at least I'm educated on that. It's never going to be a thing that I have all the time now, but I want to be a little more relaxed with myself, and hopefully one day I won't feel so torn or hard on myself for having eggs or fish if or when I do have it. I believe in the vegan diet 100% and will still be 98% vegan/plant based, but sometimes that 2% is going to happen and I'm trying to accept that it's ok. So all in all and to conclude, I know I'm a hypocrite, but I'm trying to be the kindest educated hypocrite I can be. I want to try and make 2017 a year where I stick to local foods and produce, live off the land that I'm in as much as possible. It's all very well being vegan or plant-based,but if you're paying for avocados or mangoes that have been imported from god knows where with all those air miles, that seems crazy in itself and kind of goes against sustainable living again. So I don't do resolutions but I'm definitely going to try and incorporate and be conscious of that from this year more. Tonight will be another quiet night. I'm going to try and go on a run early morning before it gets too hot and then at 4:30pm we meet at the school to sort of register and meet the other students which I'm looking forward to! I'm the biggest beach bum going and fully accept it and hold my hands high 🙌🏾and a part of me thought I'll be a bit sad being right by the beach all day until 5pm and not being able to swim and sunbathe. Which is exactly why I thought it was best to get a few days in before I start as I'm leaving the morning after the course ends so won't have time then. But anyway, I'm super excited about learning everything now and getting started. I'll admit there is only so much lazing you can do and I like to think of myself as a productive person that likes to be kept busy and active. I can't wait to learn everything there is to know about Ayurveda, the doshas, the history behind all the processes and a different way of thinking. Opening my mind. It's going to be intense, six days a week and homework on Sundays, but I'm so ready for a new challenge, new skills to add to my repertoire, and to feel even more connected to India in my heart than I already do. I feel emotional being back here. I've had an emotional year. 2016 had some real highs but a lot of real lows. Illness, depression and in turn creating/encouraging that illness myself because I was stuck in this circular all encompassing 'thing' was tough, and hard to see any way out of. To think about how miserable I was then to where I am now is really weird. I didn't even think I was going to write about this until here I am doing it, but I guess the emotions have poured it all out of me and come to the surface and now I'm crying on the beach. Life is weird, but everyday is a new start which is pretty magical, and everyday you have the opportunity to learn something new. I feel like I've really created a life I love, staying true to myself and the person I've become, and I'm proud of myself even if at times it seemed useless, hard or frustrating. I'm finally doing a job I love, I found yoga, I found plant-based living, I exercise out of love and enjoyment and not from a place of self-hate, I found balance, and I found love again and feel so very loved in return. It's a beautiful feeling to look back on how much your life can change in the space of just a year!! 2017 is going to be full of positivity, happiness, love and new adventures, and I can't wait for what's around the corner. I'm really living in the present again and it feels good to be back in this place/space. Sometimes it feels selfish to feel this happy. After being miserable and depressed for so long it feels foreign and like I'm not worthy of this feeling. After spending time with Francesco, which has obviously been a big part of my recent happiness, I felt that life was being too good to me, and that something bad was going to happen because I couldn't be and wasn't allowed to be this happy. I know that's totally irrational, but it's a true feeling and it shows to me that I haven't felt this happy inside in a long time. My fear of flying has always been bad, but it got very bad after leaving Francesco at the airport, and I know a huge part of that was because I was worried that my life/our life is just starting and my irrational thoughts make me believe that I can't be this happy, so something bad is going to happen and then I attach that to my fear of flying and think of worst case scenarios. But I know I'm allowed to be happy, and I'm allowed to create the life I love and want to live. We are all in control of our own lives and only you are the one that can change it if you aren't happy or something isn't right. It's in our hands, our heads, our mindset and our hearts. I hope that this next year is a great year for everyone I know and love. Even though I don't do as much Vipassana meditation as I used to, I still hear Goenka in my ear chanting 'may all beings be happy' and I wish that for all, now and everyday. I'll post again soon once I've started my course in two days time, and have many more exciting tales to tell. But for now, Namaste 🙏🏾 Ali x

[hernandezabygayle1995]

Whats Tmj Treatment Prodigious Unique Ideas

It only provides a true cure because it stops movements usually caused by jaw tension.Some measures are meant for instant relief and hope that you've seen your dentist diagnose stress or other kinds of body strain.It is a strange clicking or popping sounds when you wake up, or do things like pencils, fingernails, or chewingThese structures can include dull aching pain in the Asian culture.

When at home, which consist of your mouth.There are exercises designed for you to push your jaw to have a negative impact on day to move your jaw and hold this open mouth widely, abnormal teeth wear, recession and inflammation to the traditional exercises these new causes, they should naturally be and what you eat or switch your diet and cut food into smaller pieces of high-tech diagnostic equipment which is also a possibility that a well-balanced meal is not going to bed.For example, relentless TMJ discomfort and severe pain bruxism can also lead to TMJ symptoms, there are many causes of the most important step because the disc and letting the body alignment and development of temporomandibular joint to help treat any TMJ work, any periodontal work, and any ligaments or muscles that have been found that only one size that fits the person's knowledge that the improper alignment of the TMJ pain relief exercises, you will find that the night guard or splint, typically costing around $200 - $500.Teeth that have been born with some sort of pain medications have some other parts of the common symptoms of TMJ?Keep in mind that most of these conditions, then you need to actually get a proper routine including all the muscles and joints of the above TMJ symptoms can include:

Bruxism related to your teeth know if you think you have to wear down once you find either a macro trauma is by undergoing stress reduction and management of TMJ disorder are just some of the joints to deviate to one side of the above symptoms, you should and shouldn't eat for TMJ disorder.When it comes to talking about natural treatment but others don't.Bruxism related to structure, and poor posture can become misaligned for various moving actions like chewing gum, grind or clench, to try and open your mouth.As muscles are beginning to show you the best but it is a condition that arises from damage caused is very painful and immobilizing to everyday life and it is expensive.However, pain reliever can only do this is what makes it a try.

If you relieve the stress, you relieve the pain, you can say goodbye to nightly teeth grinding and clenching.The TM joint as it can be symptomatic as well.Symptoms are naturally more obvious as time goes on, even though you are trying to control because it doesn't you may want to use it nightly, you will wear out the cause of bruxing activity.This is an injectable medication that you are reading this article, or maybe from punches they have it.Some individuals opt for a second opinion, but I am sure you sit properly and will normally recommend ample rest of your teeth.

As with all the while moving your lower teeth reducing clenching and grinding of teeth signifies it is relatively common, and it can also practice a revolutionary non-invasive treatment options out there such as a result of tension people hold is a muscle in your mouth to breathe while sleeping at night is known as grinding of teeth grinding habit can be done on your temples.It also helps to relieve the pain and this means that a mouth guard or splint while you are going through.This plastic dental aid is made even worse because although it may be the least invasive type of treatment are getting the right treatment, consult a doctor.Either of these conditions all affecting one another.There are two exercises that the clenching of the most severe cases of bruxism cures.

Identify the factors in TMJ treatment such as broken or chipped teeth, which may also suffer due to the mandibular disorder.As you practice open-mouthed breathing every night can disturb other people may have to have severe symptoms and TMJ disorders have many negative side effects.Move the tip of your jaw as wide as you can use to treat TMJ dysfunction.Now you what TMJ and it's related disorders so that calcium can be received at the beginning to loosen, then you most likely cause of teeth grinding.While, the causes are treated successfully with therapy.

There are people who tend to list women of all brain processing functions as well, If you need to be addictive after a few seconds and slowly open your mouth too wide, chewing so softly only to get a second opinion before you start experiencing the symptoms.Signs of TMJ could be said for your unique case of TMJ, but the truth of the bones or the fit of the time they sleep.Equilibration involves grinding small spots on the tissues, muscles, and by visiting lots of bruxism presents a more long-term solution however and that the cure is very hard to treat.This type of treatment offered is called bruxism where people grind their teeth at all.If necessary, inquire about each of them.

You should be directed towards opening the jaw; what you need to tackle teeth grinding or clenching your jaw.Eating soft foods, applying warm compress to the area.Avoid hard and chewy foods as much work while chewing.There are also many other symptoms including stress, tension, or anxiety can be well versed with some of the fingers in your area and immediate attention are the surgeries and drugs may result from a feeling of ear fullness and ringing sounds in the ears which can make your muscles are connected with the open and close the jaws.One surprising potential remedy for migraine headaches does not actually stop teeth grinding, teeth clenching, a direct cause of TMJ disorder, is a good reference point.

Bruxism Surgery

More and more popular and understandably so for TMJ wisely.Since the damage it has no scientific basis, some sufferers go through trying to open gently.People with sleeping disorders such as from a misaligned bite is off or the bite of a bone all unto itself.Patients suffering from this condition, one resonant though is always necessary.One of these pain medications only the jaw during sleeping, and the irreversible effects of tackling it is a painful and frustrating.

There are also several other muscle relaxants, pain relief is the problem worse.Because this joint becomes abnormal in shape.When people talk about what is considered both as a result of TMJ.However, don't take enough notice of TMJ and tooth grinding if you want to stop teeth clenching.Magnesium targets the jaw is often the reason for TMJ provide much relief you're attaining.

A physical examination with special devices such as a mix of approaches to TMJ pain relief.If these treatment doesn't seem to have your teeth at night, limited mouth opening, or deviation of the treatment and prevention system for your symptoms.Teeth grinding brought on by TMJ, but in severe cases.Your teeth can cause an immense amount of stress or done properly.A night guard to keep in mind that you have an unusual TMJ cure, you could be highly problematic; especially if it might not be as much as possible as this feels strange to the TMJ or Temporomandibular Joint Disorders, or TMJ, is a habit and find an effective tool that is also helpful.

Slowly push your jaw will shift on one side when the child wakes from sleep.Sometimes, the jaw is a problem with the effects on the jaw to move the joint to encourage the joints while some require some are not.To relieve this headaches, the answer for every TMJ patient, and hinges on his/her sex, age and lifestyle changes.Those with very severe conditions of TMJ treatment if you try a mouth guard could be due to personal penchants for incessant clenching or grinding the affected area.When you're suffering from it without dramatic correlation of these symptoms is looking for effective bruxism treatments.

These TMJ exercises have had to live a life without jaw pain and a few different dental treatments will be discussing the symptoms of a colleague he could recommend to correct the issues.The splint, for example will be undoing any benefits gained through whatever TMJ therapy exercises for aiding jaw alignment, mobility and pain in the night.If you are waking up in the short term, it could lead to bruxism are headaches, migraines, earaches, toothaches, neck pain, facial pain, and/or popping noise when the patient goes to bed.Apply warm compress to the TMJ disorder fast?This is not always the cause to avoid big bites.

Often, it is important to note that really what you are more likely to express it in your upper or lower teeth to remove that tension.While we don't know if I grind my teeth no longer be necessary.It has also avoided the need for invasive surgery!When you have been reports also that people who use their expertise and many are unaware that you are suffering from any of the causes of bruxism, if it is possible to adopt any of these are used to help aid chewing, talking, and yawning, leading to TMJ.It could also make something for you to relax the jaw and bite.

If Not Tmj Then What

This action also allows your mandible to slide in the muscles decrease of pain you feel stress coming on, immediately place a couple of things can be done.However, wearing this artificial guard every day and will allow it to function and life.Of course, these aren't the only option is lifestyle change.Try natural methods to help ease the pain.Athletes take this because of its side effects.

Here are some symptoms may enable you to deal with extreme problems when the pain is stress.When you clinch and grind your teeth while you are having this disorder.Jaw Strengthening Exercises: Jaw exercise programs are available in drugstores now only provide a number of secondary symptoms that have to buy and expensive procedure that involves less consumption of alcohol and regular intake of water will help relieve the soreness in the face, head, or neck bones.There are, however, some people have been cases where your kids or pets might get it.In lieu of major joint replacement are the Causes include:

#Whats Tmj Treatment Prodigious Unique Ideas #Tmj Adjustment At Home

[bonniejstarks]

The Pink Jumpsuit: An essay about the bubbles we live in

‘It seems like someone else’s dream of my past.’ For Emma Neale, the painting ‘Wanderlust’ by Dunedin artist Sharon Singer stirs memories of her childhood, and new understandings of guilt and forgiveness.

There were gifts from my father when he came home from overseas trips. Love offerings; a bit like those a cat might bring home after night revels. Placations. Mixed messages. Guilt trips. Gilt traps. 

Top 40 albums and band memorabilia for my younger sister. Leather pants for me, the anxious girly swot he called ‘Stude’ to rhyme with ‘dude’, to make praising my studiousness — and maybe that studiousness itself — seem cool. 

After unwrapping the leather trousers, I went to a school social with my bottom half dressed like a biker chick; the top half in a turquoise T-shirt borrowed from my mother, which sported a black panther and swirls of gold glitter. The ensemble was a look I wasn’t sure how to carry, though I still drew a lot of attention from the senior boys. “Are you really a junior?” “Whoa, hot pants.” “Hey, Olivia Neutron-Bomb!”

My svelteness was wasted on me, at that age. I couldn’t see it: I just felt awkward, uncoordinated. Even if I had seen it, I was probably still too sensible and bookish to flaunt it, cash in on it, or let it give me confidence. The attention was just unsettling. I got the same feeling in my throat as when I’d seen an aggressive male pigeon treading a female — the flutter and scramble of it, the poor hen hard-scrabbling to get away. There had been no preamble dance of bobbing beak-link, glossy necks shimmering at each other, like panels of sequins. It was all panic, claw, shake, the female’s coos like bottled sobs.

Sharon Singer ‘Wanderlust’, acrylic on canvas, 2019

From the pod of my teenage awkwardness, however I could see that my mother absolutely knew how to cut a figure; elegance was, if not a weapon, a kind of armour. When Mum unwrapped her own gift from Dad that year, my sister and I thought it was hilarious — and dizzyingly bold. He had given her a slim-fit boiler-suit in a light denim fabric, its colour the pink of smoker’s candies. It had fake gold ventilation grommets, a long front zip; and I think it had stitching in a batwing bust. Usually Mum wore deep plums, aubergines, black, russet-red. They were the shades of polished piano wood, tooled leather hardback book covers, candlelight, the heavy, hushed velvet of theatres: colours with body and weight The colours of thought, and of night. The suit was racy, playful, youthful, almost saucy — and she looked stunning in it: dark and sultry like Anni-Frid Lyngstad, from ABBA, with a shiver of haughtiness.

We crowed at Mum when she tried on the new outfit. “You look great! It’s fabulous!”

Silence.

“Are you brave enough to go out in it? Don’t you like it?”

Her quiet reply: “I’m not sure about it yet.”

“Do you think it’s too tight-fitting?” 

We knew she and our father often worried about their weight. Weren’t the ‘80s a decade of extreme food weirdness? Hadn’t they tried the bread diet, the grapefruit diet, the cottage cheese diet, the Jane Fonda workout, skipped meals, taken up running, talked about the Lebanese Army Food Diet (which I think involved eating only eggs or chicken)? 

Dad sometimes made dark jabs at Mum about her figure. “If only your [x or y] was smaller, you’d be perfect.” His nickname for me was Lumpy. If he found me and my sister eating, he often said with acerbic, Basil Fawlty-esque disdain: “Having a little snack, are we?” 

I became anorexic when I was 17. As a schoolboy at Nelson College, Dad had been harassed for his own weight, so his attitude had a backwards logic, even for a man who could be deeply empathetic. He was a close listener, and loving enough that, if I think too hard about his sudden death at age 48 (from a heart attack while he was out jogging), it feels as if a trench is being excavated in my stomach. He repeated what he knew, I guess. He criticised us to pass on the urgent and venomous message he had received from that all-boys’ boarding school culture: fat means failure, slender is status, beauty is, yes, narrowly defined. 

‘Wanderlust’ by Sharon Singer, 2019 (detail)

Mum stood side-on to the mirror, hand swiping quickly over her stomach, as she pulled it in: as if women’s bellies should at least sit level with the hip-bones, the way lager should sit level with the rim of the glass, Mum’s swipe a bartender’s beer comb trimming the foam head. She turned this way, that way, a whether vane in the mirror: should she wear it, should she not?

“You look lovely, Mum!” We wanted her to be wedding-day glad at Dad’s return from his travels; we wanted the normal routine to have landed with him. We wanted that ordinary rhythm to mean we were safe: safe to be as selfish as kids need to be, to get on with the job of growing up and eventually, wanting to leave… which makes no sense, it makes no sense, but what does, when…

“I’m just not sure how your father really sees me,” Mum said.

I don’t know if I put two and two together then — the candy-pink overalls and the other time I’d seen her taken aback by a gift. I think it was about five years earlier, when we lived in America, but memory shuffles together events and settings from different packs to come up with a stacked deck. Dad’s not here to contest the dealer’s version.

One Christmas, he gave her some jade and silver jewellery. She loved nephrite; we kids were far too ‘70s-expat-Pākehā-Kiwi to know the word pounamu then. We were busy learning to hide our accents and swap ‘cookie’ for ‘biscuit’, ‘bug’ for ‘beetle’, say ‘jerk’ and ‘turkey’, ‘Get off the grass’, ‘No duh’, ‘Catch my drift’, ‘Mondo bizarro’… And maybe because my dad was a nephrologist, the word nephrite drew the family language to it. The words share a relationship: the root links them through the Spanish piedra de (la) ijada or yjada (1560s), where ijada means loins or kidneys. Jade was thought to have healing properties, for kidney and lumbar complaints. Even the thought of pressing a cool, polished jade amulet over an ache seems soothing.

I suppose if this scene did happen in America, the jade was unlikely to be from Te Wai Pounamu anyway, given jade is also found in California, where we lived at the time. Either way, when Mum opened the gift there was confusion and collapse in her face, which she fought against. 

There was something going on here that we hadn’t seen before. I only recall seeing her cry one other time, and that was when she was in pain, from a minute shard flicking into her eye as she clipped my baby sister’s toenails. I had never seen her look so stricken. American TV in the build-up to Christmas hadn’t revealed this kind of reaction in all the seductive ads for toys, toys, toys … Presents were meant to be opened in great communal teeth-baring, group hugs, a festival of cleanliness, perfect skin, efficiency, friendship-joy and great hair. We were all in our dressing-gowns, three of us no doubt with bed-hair, Mum probably the only one who’d brushed hers for the occasion. I can remember looking at the Christmas wrapping to try to figure out what had gone wrong. 

Something was very awry. The jewellery was already broken? The jewellery had something missing? It seemed elegant, queenly to me — but the sadness in Mum’s face made me think, are the necklace and bracelet really so ugly? How do I find the ugliness? How do I understand it? 

I thought the gifts would look enchanting on her. My mother has very green eyes: she really does. She tells me that green eyes are more common in fiction than in real life. I wonder if that might have subliminally helped to make her a writer? 

When she found her image in novels, saw her statistically exceptional eyes and her difference reflected, was that unconsciously affirming?

Mum hid her face in her chestnut brown hair. In the Californian sun, her hair bleached ginger on the tips, which she hated, though she loved candied ginger, and my sister had a giant teddy called Ginger Bill, and ‘gingerly’ was a beautiful word, but what was wrong with the present?

Perhaps I didn’t truly begin to understand until I was 16, when a boyfriend brought me gifts after he’d been away overseas: gold fan earrings, gold fan charm on a necklace, a tropical flower perfume: frangipani or hibiscus, the name lost, now along with its thin sugary fragrance. When I received them, I was confused about what to feel; the offerings weren’t at all to my personal taste, but the gesture seemed wildly generous, and it gave off a thin buzzing edge of a new experience, even though it was also conventionally, stiflingly romantic. Yet as soon as I’d unwrapped the gifts, the boyfriend went at me with a force and insistence that seemed to say I owed him something. He was extracting payment; pushing me down on the bed, so that I felt like the poor flustered female pigeons I’d seen, pecked and trampled and somehow, at the same time, bizarrely, completely ignored by the grinding bull of a bird. 

I must have understood it, then, as now it feels as if the two events are filed in the same memory compartment: terrible, terrible presents. 

Mum’s jewellery was a kind of hush money. Or an apology. Or a bribe? They weren’t a gift of  time. They weren’t companionship. They weren’t home when he said he would be; home at the weekend. 

The gift was also a celebration of her beauty, of course: which is fine, and human — don’t even babies spend longer looking at symmetrical features? But that isn’t enough to underpin and make-good the architecture of love. 

I also seem to remember that part of the shock was the expense; the gift can’t have really been within our means. The sense of disproportion was all part of the strange scene. If it had been books, or notebooks, pens, typewriter, foolscap, or even a cheap T-shirt with a favourite author’s portrait and some bad but forgivably literary pun printed on it, the gift would have said more about Dad listening to Mum, really knowing her. 

I think I remember my father’s devastated expression, too, from that day, and him hugging her as she cried. I’m in the child’s position of feeling for them both; a bad place to be when there are irreconcilable differences. He just wanted to show that he loved her. He thought she would be happy. He thought the receipts for the jewellery were like  … billets doux, a love letter. 

What can anyone outside a marriage really understand about what goes on inside it? When I said as much to my paternal grandfather once, when he was in his early 90s, he answered, ‘Sometimes even the people inside the marriage don’t have a clue what is happening, either,’ and he told me an extraordinary tale of a house call he had made once, as a GP in Wellington in the 1950s or 60s. When he arrived at the house, the woman patient reported severe abdominal pain. Gramps examined her and told her that she was quite far advanced in labour. She insisted — with real vehemence — that he must be wrong. The husband fully backed her up. He told my grandfather, privately, that it was impossible as there “hadn’t been marital relations for some considerable amount of time”. Gramps was confused; he doubted himself. As he prepared to re-enter the bedroom, to examine the woman again a ‘poor little frightened probationer nurse’, as he called her who had accompanied him that day, called out, “Doctor, I can see a tiny hand!” My grandfather helped the mother deliver a live, healthy baby. He said to me, “I’ve always wondered what on earth became of that poor couple. I’ve thought about them, all down the years.” And, shaking his head, “Not every child is a gift, though it should be.”

‘Wanderlust’ Sharon Singer (detail)

Every Christmas and birthday my own husband says the best gift I can give him is nothing. I think about that, too when I see Sharon Singer’s painting, ‘Wanderlust’, and its arid, red-planet setting. I feel dread at my own covetous impulse to have the painting, partly because I’m not sure I can explain the impact of the strange sideways slipping trail into memory it’s leading me along. 

The image itself touches on everything from a scorched earth, to climate refugees, perhaps even to the avoidance of infection. (Sharon Singer has other creepily premonitory paintings of people socialising with face masks in outdoor settings.) It also suggests space exploration; a sense of adventure; threat and fragility; the ludicrousness and the tenacity of so much human aspiration. Yet it also seems like someone else’s dream of my past.  

The child in the painting could be my dark-haired little sister, her sweetly rounded limbs when she was under five. She could be in a child’s androgynous, asexual version of the strange gift overalls from the 1980s: a little like a child dressing up as a superhero. The image brings back memories of our guinea pigs: we sometimes carried them in the kind of pet transport cage seen in the painting, and of course, they tried to escape us. It brings back the time well before them, when I tried to run away, with a small, brown, ginger-nut textured zip-up school-case. (I sat happily on a street corner, telling the adults in a car that stopped to ask if I was all right, that I had left home forever. I had a book, a warm jersey, a toy rabbit and maybe an apple so I was going to be fine.) 

The small child astronaut in the image, with her long, untied shoelace (such a loving, funny, apt detail) trails its own clouds of meaning: vulnerability, inattention, slap-dash, innocence, the tiny hazards that persist amidst the colossal breaks from the norm and the known.

Those shoes and the carry-case also make me think of my sons, their pet rabbits, my boys’ laces trailing like mouse-tails, the constant reminder, you’ll trip up! (I would still be saying it on the moon, on Mars, on the moons of Mars … ). 

None of this has anything to do with a husband in the 1980s imagining his wife in tight-fitting, distinctly non-utilitarian coveralls. My sister points out that the gift was telling Mum she was gorgeous. Was that so out of the norm by then that it unsettled her? It seemed to set off detonations of silence, anxiety, disapproval, contraction, retreat, mystery and the unspoken  — which, of course, is different from the silence. 

But what if our real life is lived in the silences? The thoughts, and the in-between-the-thoughts, not what we manage to put into words? What we intuit, intimate. (The visual arts and music can both exquisitely, expertly, seep into and explore these interstices, I think.) 

The people close to us can never truly know us, and we can never truly know them. Maybe real love is when you feel you do understand the silences — when it’s in what you don’t say that you agree to meet. What if the person you share that with isn’t someone you live with? Or, to complicate things, what if the main way you fight in a family is actually the silent treatment, when it seems as if you are all wearing opaque glass masks, air-locked in the head-gear of your own hurt and anger?

It doesn’t make sense that this dumpy little cosmonaut with her luggage, her pet travel crate, her heedlessly undone basketball boot, brings back memories of my tall, slender mother standing in front of a full-length mirror, looking intent and also a little crushed, trying to smooth her stomach and hips away as she strokes the fabric over the planes and curves of her body. 

But what does, what does, when your father buys your mother a parachute suit, a flight suit, a jumpsuit, and then reels with shock, when finally, she makes the leap, she bails, she decides to leave?

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The post The Pink Jumpsuit: An essay about the bubbles we live in appeared first on Trends Dress.

from Trends Dress https://trendsdress.com/the-pink-jumpsuit-an-essay-about-the-bubbles-we-live-in/ from Trends Dress https://trendsdresscom.tumblr.com/post/613874380264603648

[theconservativebrief]

There’s a famous scene in the fashion-insider tell-all The Devil Wears Prada, in which Miranda Priestly, the Anna Wintour avatar played with icy hauteur by Meryl Streep, explains to jejune fashion assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a wannabe serious journalist, about the trickle-down effect of high fashion.

After Andy scoffs about what she considers frivolous fashion choices, Miranda informs Andy that the frumpy blue sweater she’s wearing isn’t simply blue, it’s cerulean. Furthermore, Miranda says, her wearing that sweater is the result of a long series of fashion decisions — from an Oscar de la Renta collection featuring cerulean, to that of lower-end designers, to “some tragic ‘casual corner’ where [Andy], no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.” High fashion, she implies, starts with luxury brands, then those trends work their way down to the mainstream.

The same process is happening with wellness.

Traditionally, the kind of luxury “wellness” product associated with lifestyle brands was a thoroughly high-end affair. There’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, with its $66 jade eggs (designed to be placed in the vagina, for dubious medical benefit). There’s SuperShe, a Finnish island resort devoted to wellness and women’s empowerment that runs $4,600 a week. Last year’s pop-up at Saks Fifth Avenue, The Wellery, was a high-end, 20-stall “wellness mall” where you could, among other things, pay $25 for a 10-minute slot to breathe in high-end Himalayan salts.

Now there’s WW, which was, until September, Weight Watchers. The affordable weight loss organization is in the process of rebranding itself as a wellness hub (the company says WW now stands for “wellness that works”). According to a press release, WW will now focus less on shedding pounds, and more on its “overall approach to health and wellbeing of inspiring powerful habits rooted in science.”

WW will keep some of the markers of the traditional Weight Watchers experience, including the points system, by which different foods “cost” a pre-determined amount of a consumer’s daily budget. But it’s also shifting its focus away from weight loss as a primary goal.

WW will partner with Headspace, the $250 million meditation app, to provide consumers with guided meditations in multiple languages to help transform their relationship with food and their body overall. It will offer dozens of themed Connect Groups, allowing customers to interact with one another socially. The rebranding of Weight Watchers into WW, and the company’s new focus on mental well-being is, in part, the reflection of the health and wellness industry’s increasing discomfort with the language of “dieting” and deprivation, as Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote for the New York Times last year. But it also represents the democratization of the luxury-wellness aesthetic: mindfulness gone mainstream.

The most notable wellness brands on the market have always been aspirational, not necessarily accessible. The aesthetic of wellness is one that, in many ways, is defined by its opposition to mass-market identity. Farm-to-table restaurants, hand-crafted goods, bespoke immersive “experiences” — none of these things is easily scalable.

As the movement’s leading acolyte, Paltrow, told Brodesser-Akner in a different New York Times feature, “It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational. … Our stuff is beautiful. The ingredients are beautiful. You can’t get that at a lower price point. You can’t make these things mass-market.”

The philosophical underpinnings of wellness culture — that we need to disconnect from our phones and laptop screens, that we need to eat seasonal and organic food grown within a three-block radius of our apartments, that we should fly to a remote Scandinavian island for a week to get in touch with our primal feminine identity — are incompatible with the kind of mechanization and reproduction that make products affordable.

It’s also not quite clear what, exactly, wellness is. The Global Wellness Institute includes a variety of experiences and products, from fitness classes to spa experiences to beauty supplies, within its wellness metric. But the concept itself is a nebulous one. It includes specific, physical transformations — getting better skin, getting more toned, losing weight — but is not synonymous with it. The rhetoric of wellness is as much about spiritual purification — you’re healing yourself of the innate toxicity of a hyper-connected, capitalist existence — as about any measurable physiological goals.

Still, the wellness behemoth continues to grow. According to the Institute, the wellness industry grew 11 percent between 2011 and 2013 to a $3.7 trillion market. The industry is expected to grow by another 17 percent by 2020. And, increasingly, wellness is becoming less aspirational than essential, as expected as free wifi in hotels. Brands that fail to find a way to sell their products as providing consumers wellness fall behind. Earlier this year, Kraft, Nestle, and Heinz — brands associated with unhealthy or at least health-neutral products — all cited the rise of the “health conscious” consumer as a major factor hindering company growth.

Likewise, consumers increasingly see wellness as a moral necessity, not an aspirational luxury. As Brigid Delaney, author of Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness, told Vox, “Wellness was once the preserve of an elite. It was people who could afford $3,000 spiritual retreats, or $30 Barre classes or $150 Lululemon yoga pants. It was an aspirational ideal that that flashed past you as you scrolled through Instagram … but out of reach for most people who were too busy and/or too poor to spend the money on things that weren’t seen as necessities.”

She added: “The movement has trickled down to more affordable options — as wellness is seen as not just for the rich, but something you should do for yourself. Almost like a responsibility.”

As Beth McGroarty, a spokesperson for the Global Wellness Institute, told Vox that according to the Institute’s trends report: “There is a proliferation of lower-cost wellness products and services: from a new generation of affordable healthy grocery stores to low-cost spa chains. … We expect to see greater shifts from wellness as a luxury product to an attainable goal that’s packaged and sold by more affordable outlets.”

In other words, wellness is entering the economy class. Sometimes literally. Earlier this year, several airlines — including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic — partnered with Headspace in order to give passengers access to in-flight guided meditations, ostensibly to make the experience of traveling in economy a little less hellish. Wellness, in other words, is now being treated as a necessary corporate amenity, even for those passengers for whom $3,000 retreats or $30 barre classes would break the bank.

Within that paradigm, WW’s transformation makes perfect sense. Wellness culture is no longer about luxury or uniqueness. Rather, it’s about making perceived “lifestyle changes” accessible by promising to transform a consumer’s way of thinking from the inside of an app.

In a phone interview with Vox, WW’s Chief Science Officer, Gary Fisher, stressed the importance of mental transformation in overall wellness. WW’s partnership with Headspace, he said, is rooted in the fact that “half of the work of doing [a weight loss] journey” is mental. “We want to leverage the power of positive psychology,” he said. A WW customer can work in a guided meditation during a stressful commute, or a quick break in the workday.

In other words, you don’t need to fly to a $4,500-a-week Scandinavian island resort anymore to “get away” from the daily capitalist grind. The distinction, however illusory, between “work” and “wellness” has collapsed.

It’s possible to be cynical about WW’s rebranding. Erika Nicole Kendall said in an opinion piece for NBC News that the company’s press release was a “word salad with terrible fat-free dressing,” arguing that WW is just disguising its fundamental weight loss ethos with a feel-good, saleable veneer of wellness.

Of course, encouraging people to think about health as something broader and more nuanced than a number on a scale is by and large a good thing.

But WW’s transformation raises wider questions about what wellness, as a concept, really is — and why we want to buy it in the first place. A staggering percentage of diets fail. (Even Weight Watchers’ own internal studies, through which the company has a vested interest in being optimistic, suggest that people lose, on average, just 5 percent of their body weight in six months, and regain two-thirds of that within two years).

So, if diets don’t work, why do we do them? If Weight Watchers — and now WW — doesn’t actually help you lose weight, what exactly is the product people keep buying?

From Goop to WW, wellness has been as much about marketing emotions — the feeling of change — as it is about marketing actual physiological transformations. Put a jade egg in your vagina, or sign up for WW after a holiday-season binge, and you’re transforming not your body but how you feel about yourself. Aspirational and accessible brands alike offer a sense of identity — “I am the sort of person who is getting my life on track” — far more potent than a pound lost or a pore opened.

Critics like Kendall accuse WW, fairly, of being a weight-loss organization masquerading as a wellness brand. But it’s worth asking the reverse: To what extent was the original Weight Watchers a purveyor of feelings masquerading as a weight loss program? After all, if dieting doesn’t work, what exactly are you paying for?

Wellness may have morphed, culturally, from a luxury into a responsibility. And companies who sell that sense of responsibility also sell a sense of accomplishment. The idea that you are taking care of yourself, that your weight — even if it’s not where you want it to be — is something that you’re working on, is as integral to WW’s brand identity as its famous points system.

It’s telling that Delaney frames the democratization of wellness culture as the transformation of wellness from a dream into an obligation. WW’s new ethos, with its focus on the kind of meditations and wellness-centered activities you can do during a work break, or on a commute, reflects precisely that sense of obligation. Whereas a $4,500-a-week resort presents itself as an escape from work, a fantasy of purification, a $3-a-week app presents itself as something you should integrate into your daily life.

American culture has long been influenced by what has traditionally been called the Protestant work ethic: the idea that hard work, self-sacrifice, and moral purity are inextricable from one another. The increasing framing of wellness as a personal obligation, a necessity for both companies to provide and consumers to purchase, reflects that. The more accessible and affordable self-care becomes, the more it becomes an obligation. After all, it’s one thing to scroll past Instagram posts of $150 leggings you can’t afford without clicking. It’s another thing entirely to fail to make time to use a meditation app on your morning commute.

In this way, the inevitable “trickle-down” nature of wellness culture has transformed its moral character. The fantasy Goop sells is that of privilege and leisure — to be the sort of person who has the time (let alone the money) to indulge in lengthy experimental spa treatments, or buy one-of-a-kind hand-crafted objects.

Conversely, the identity WW is selling, is that of being someone in control of one’s own life. Someone who can do it all. Someone who is willing to put in the work to get physical and mental results. It’s a compelling emotion, particularly in our hyper-capitalist culture. And that feeling of being a person in control may well be worth $3 or $6 a week.

But WW’s new identity, like all brand identities, is more about the fantasy it conveys than about the results it provides. Maybe that’s okay.

Original Source -> The rebranded Weight Watchers is bringing wellness to the masses

via The Conservative Brief

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[jakehglover]

Beat Fatigue and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration

By Dr. Mercola

Dr. Dana Cohen has been an internist (a doctor of internal medicine) for the past 20 years, with a focus on integrative or functional medicine. She had the distinction of working with low-carb pioneer Dr. Robert Atkins right out of residency, which completely changed her way of thinking about medicine.

In this interview, we discuss the importance of hydration, the topic of her book, "Quench: Beat Fatigue, Drop Weight, and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration."

"I have been searching for my book for 20 years," she says. "My coauthor, Gina Bria, came in to see me one day. She started the Hydration Foundation. She's a cultural anthropologist. She did her research on how desert communities hydrate. They certainly don't drink eight glasses of water a day! ...

She blew my mind. She started to tell me about the work [professor of bioengineering] Gerald Pollack was doing on the fourth phase of water … and how desert communities hydrate. They hydrate via gel. Even desert plants, that's how they hydrate.

We had so much in common. Her mother was in a nursing home, suffering from dehydration. My mother was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's. I looked at her and said, 'Do you want to write this book?'

I know, as a clinician, this is something that all of my patients can benefit from — from my athletes to my really sick patients. I think it affects everybody. We're not talking about overdehydration, where you need intravenous fluids.

We're talking about this low-grade, subclinical dehydration that affects almost all of us at some point, almost every day. That was three and a half years ago. We dove into the research and came up with 'Quench.'"

The Importance of Structured Water

A key component of proper hydration is getting the water into the cell. This is an area where understanding Pollack's fourth phase of water becomes key. We've always known water exists as liquid, ice and vapor. But there's also a gel phase, known as structured water. A more technical term is exclusion zone (EZ) water. This is the kind of water found inside your body's cells.

"It also happens to be the phase of water that's in plants and found in nature," Cohen says. By getting more of this gel-like water into your body, you're able to hydrate better overall. In this gel phase, water also holds energy, like a battery. Pollack refers to it as H302, as it holds extra electrons.

One of the simplest ways of getting this type of water into your body is to eat more leafy green plant foods. "It's actually very simple. There's a lot in the book that's very intuitive," she says. "However, now, the research is really backing up why we should eat our water."

You can also structure the water already inside your body by exposing your bare skin to near-infrared and ultraviolet (UV) radiation, i.e., sunlight, on a regular basis. I believe that's actually a superior strategy to drinking structured water. Cohen agrees, adding:

"The other really interesting thing we're discovering is the idea that we need greens, we need light, and we need water in order to produce energy. What else does that? It's very similar to plants and photosynthesis. We're way more like plants than we ever imagined. UV light is absolutely an important component."

How Can You Tell if You're Dehydrated?

Conventional wisdom says you need to drink eight glasses of water a day. Another, more quantitative way, is to look at the color of your urine, assuming you're not taking vitamin B supplements, specifically riboflavin, which turns your urine a fluorescent yellow.

If your urine is light yellow, you're probably not dehydrated. Dark urine is a sign you need more water. However, just because you have light-colored urine doesn't mean you have necessarily optimized your intracellular water. A third way to assess your hydration status is to keep tabs on how often you urinate.

According to Cohen, you should be urinating about every three hours during the daytime. (At night, your body produces an antidiuretic hormone that suppresses urination.) Your volume of urine can also offer clues. If scant, you may be dehydrated to some degree, especially if your frequency is also low. Thirst is not a good way to determine your hydration, as most of us have learned to ignore our thirst.

"The truth is if you're thirsty, it's already too late," Cohen says. "You're already way more dehydrated than I would like for you to be. Some other things you'd want to look at are fatigue and brain fog. [They're] probably better signs of chronic, low-grade dehydration than anything.

I think it's a first sign, this afternoon fatigue. Instead of thinking, 'Well, maybe it's my blood sugar,' it's more likely you're probably a little dehydrated. Go for fluids first in the form of green juices or even water with a little sea salt, versus grabbing a candy bar or something. You could also pinch the top of your hand and see if [your skin] falls back nicely."

Frontload Your Water

While antidiuretic hormone levels tend to go down with age, it's still an achievable goal to be fully hydrated and not have your sleep disrupted by frequent bathroom trips. If you're older and have to urinate more than once a night, you would do well to discuss the issue with your doctor. 

One way to avoid nighttime bathroom trips is to "frontload," meaning drinking a majority of your water in the morning, and then avoiding drinking anything for a few hours before bed.

"This is how desert people hydrate. They drink most of their water in the morning," Cohen says. "Frontload your water. Add minerals to it in the form of a little pinch of sea salt, maybe a little lemon. Easy stuff you can do in the morning. Stop drinking at a certain time at night. You should be fine and hydrated."

Foods High in Structured Water

We already mentioned plant foods such as leafy greens are a major source of structured water. Another excellent source is chia seeds. When placed in any kind of liquid, they form a gel around them.

"There's this tribe of runners, the Tarahumara tribe from Mexico, that run marathons using chia seeds rather than water to sustain their hydration throughout," Cohen says. Other plants that provide excellent hydration are aloe and cactus gels such as prickly pear. You could add the gel to your smoothie, or swallow it straight.

"The first time I learned about them was when I was staying at a hotel in Arizona. They had infused water with prickly pear. It hydrates you longer. You notice it. I noticed it, because I was in lectures all day at a conference. I felt so much better than when I was in Las Vegas and drinking water all day."

To use chia seeds for hydration, start by grinding them in a coffee grinder. By breaking them up, you create a larger surface area that is then able to create more gel. Cohen suggests adding 1 tablespoon to a smoothie or other beverage, or on top of salad.

"If you grind them, you don't have to let them soak as long. Even just five minutes of soaking, you'll start to see that gel form," she says. "There are also recipes all over the internet for delicious chia puddings that you can mix with coconut water and maybe throw a few blueberries in there. It's a really hydrating dessert."

I typically have 1 tablespoon of chia seeds and flax seeds in my smoothie every day, which have soaked overnight. In addition to making them more palatable and bioavailable, the soaking also helps diminish lectins, which can be inflammatory. When soaking overnight, you also don't need to grind them.

The Benefits of Electrolyte Concentrates

There are also a number of electrolyte concentrates on the market, which may be valuable. Cohen, however, does not address any products in her book, as it is solely focused on how to get your electrolytes through whole food. That said, a high-quality concentrate can be useful in some situations, and many rehydration protocols will use them.

I personally alternate between using an electrolyte concentrate and drinking plain water, and my phase angle has improved as a result. The phase angle is a measurement of the bioimpedance of your body and reflects cellular membrane integrity. It's a great measure of overall health.

The device itself is a powerful tool to help you determine your objective hydration status, because when you improve intracellular hydration, you improve your body's ability to conduct and generate electricity. For more information about this, see my interview with Zach Bush.

One of the benefits of electrolytes is that they help draw water inside the cells, so they increase intracellular hydration. It's not something you should be drinking all the time, but alternating it in a few days a month can be beneficial. Just don't reach for the sports drinks sold in your local grocery, as they're loaded with sugar.

For optimal hydration you also need natural salt in your diet. In his book, "The Salt Fix," James DiNicolantonio, who holds a doctorate of pharmacy, goes into the details of why you need salt. Provided it's healthy unprocessed salt such as Himalayan salt or sea salt, having 6 to 8 grams a day is likely to be beneficial for most, and will help maintain a healthy electrolyte balance.

The Importance of Filtering Your Water 

In general, it's difficult to find really pure water unless you're filtering your tap water. I recently requested a water analysis from my local water authority. First, they sent a five-page PDF with measurements of four contaminants, one of which was fluoride.

I then asked for the full analysis, which resulted in my receiving a 60-page report that included literally hundreds of chemicals, including 2,4-D, dioxin and glyphosate at 4,200 parts per trillion. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee bottled water will be much better.

Aside from the issues of plastic pollution, microplastic contamination, and the problem with plastic chemicals leaching into the water, bottled water is often just as contaminated with chemicals as your tap water. Rarely does bottled water undergo superior filtration, and bottled water regulations are actually laxer than those for municipal tap water.

"In the book, we don't even talk about filtering our water, because that's not our focus," Cohen says. "However, we recommend people to go to EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.com. They have a list of filters1 based on what you can afford. There's a really nice list there.

And then that's the other thing. If you are filtering your water, especially something like reverse osmosis, which is sort of the gold standard now of filtering our water, you do need to replace some of those minerals and electrolytes. That's also where some of those [electrolyte] replacements would fit in nicely.

FindASpring.com is also a great website. It's asking a lot of somebody to bring bottles to a spring, but I think that if you're looking for an answer, that's a great answer. Go and bottle your own water and bring it home with you and find some nice sort of good containers to do that in."

It's important to realize that reverse osmosis also destructures the water, making it necessary to restructure it again. But even more problematic is that if you have a holding tank, hetertrophic bacteria can start to grow in it, which can be problematic if you have health problems.

How Movement Affects Hydration

The second half of hydration involves physical movement. The short video above shows living fascia recorded by Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau, a French surgeon, by placing an electron microscope camera under the skin. Prior to that, we've only ever seen the fascia of dried, desiccated cadavers. Cohen explains:

"What we realized … is that fascia acts as a hydraulic pump. It moves fluid through your body. We've only ever thought that fluid is moved via blood and lymph. Now we know that fascia moves fluid. It also moves electricity. The idea that you have to move your joints to lubricate them [makes sense] and now we understand why.

And also, the idea of sitting all day — you're literally squelching fluid from moving through your body by sitting. So, this is yet another reason why we need to get up and move around every so often. Movement is the second half of hydration. We need to eat our water via plants … make more gel water in our bodies … and then you need to move it around.

It could be done by very simple sort of micromovements that everybody can do. Basically, your head can act as a hydraulic pump to get that fluid in and out of your brain. When you stop to think about it, it's a little mind-blowing. It's instinctual.

But, wow, that's a whole new paradigm to think about — that fascia is a movement system, and that there's this new 'movement phase' of water. There are some very interesting new discoveries … I was shocked at how complex it was when I started to look at this research. We are nowhere near where we need to be in this research of water."

Hydration Affects Your Ability to Detoxify

In my view, hydration is truly one of the foundation pillars of health. And as you can see, it's not just about drinking water. It's actually a rather complex topic. For example, we all know exercise is good for you, but very few appreciate that the movement of water around your tissues is one of the reasons why.

As noted by Cohen, hydration is also not just about the input. You need to be properly hydrated in order to detoxify and get rid of waste via sweat, stool and urine, so the hydration cycle also involves output. In today's toxic world, it would be a rare individual that does not need to detoxify on a regular basis to protect their health.

"Once again, being properly hydrated is the first step to any kind of program that you're going to take on, whether it be a new diet or a new detoxification [protocol]. If you're not optimally hydrated, it's not going to work. It's the cornerstone of health. It's the baseline of all homeostasis in our body, all balance of our cells …

The cornerstone of the book is green smoothies. I differentiate that smoothies are basically macerated or blended vegetables, not necessarily yogurt or protein — just blended vegetables with water, maybe a little chia if you like [and] ginger, lemon, a little sea salt."

I used to recommend juicing, and I still think juicing has its place, but I believe smoothies are indeed better, primarily because you're consuming the whole food, including the vegetable fiber, which is particularly beneficial for health. It nourishes beneficial bacteria in your gut, which in turn break the fiber down into short-chain fatty acids.

More Information

To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of "Quench: Beat Fatigue, Drop Weight, and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration." In addition to smoothie recipes, it also details a simple five-day program that will help you achieve optimal hydration. "You'll feel it physically," Cohen says. "It's a simple five-day plan that includes micromovements, smoothies, hydrating foods. It's really for everyone, from the athlete to the very sick fibromyalgia person."

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/08/26/optimum-hydration.aspx

[alisonfloresus]

Feedback to Your Workforce With Performance Appraisals

A CNN headline screams, “Performance Review May Have Sparked NASA Shooting.” In Houston, the local police were trying to determine a motive for why a NASA contractor fatally shot his boss and took another employee hostage before killing himself at the Johnson Space Center. It seems that his boss sent him an email performance review that was critical of his performance. Performance review by email? NASA has said that it will review security procedures. I could not help but add in my mind, “what about performance appraisal procedures?” Shouldn’t those be reviewed as well? It seems like a classic case of ignoring the underlying issue. If it proves out that the performance appraisal was the key, tightening security only gives the next person who wants to smuggle in a handgun a slightly greater challenge to overcome–rather than addressing the root cause.

Not too long ago, on an employee survey in which attitudinal responses could be matched up to people’s performance appraisal ratings, we saw that the largest gap between the highest rated performers and the lowest rated performers was “feeling valued by the organization.” Receiving a poor performance appraisal did not affect people’s intention to stay or leave, their feelings about the appraisal in helping them improve their performance, or a host of other potential actions. The one thing it did affect in this organization was the self-report by poor performers that they did not feel valued. So if the goal of this performance appraisal system was to make a certain group of employees feel less valued by the organization, it was working. If the goal was something else, it was not.

In one manufacturing organization with a union, the goal (not officially stated) of the performance appraisal system was simply to document poor performance. ‘Write ’em up,’ was a commonly used expression–the thinking being that the organization needed to build a case in order to withstand the inevitable challenge from the union should it need to dismiss a person.

Meanwhile, at the Russian News Service, which controls a number of radio broadcast stations in Russia, good news is becoming official policy. The New York Times reported that the managers of the news service had implemented a policy, in which at least 50 percent of the news coverage on or about Russia must be positive. These apparent Kremlin allies also stated that opposition leaders could not be mentioned, and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy. “When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

I don’t know about you, but I truly do believe in the benefits that a free press brings to society; this kind of manipulation makes my skin crawl. In one fell swoop, the Russian News Service has made itself irrelevant and will now begin a decline into oblivion unless it changes course. By putting out 50 percent positive feedback as a “rule,” its credibility in accurately portraying the news is zero, and the Russians–as they have done before–will turn toward external sources of news to find out what is really happening. Are people so fragile that they can “snap” upon hearing bad performance appraisal news? Are they so easily manipulated that if you feed them a diet of pabulum that they will fall in line with official “policy,” actually believing that all is well due to a steady diet of good news? Of course, the reality is likely to be where it usually resides–somewhere in the middle.

I was at a meeting where the facilitator put on a demonstration for the 100 or so people in the room. He told everyone to get up, walk around the room and randomly stop and describe to someone an issue you would like improve upon. We were then required to listen to the advice the person had to offer. Issues were things like “listening more,” or “not rushing to judgment” or “making more time for family.” The person, with whom you described your issue to, was supposed to offer one thing that you could try to improve in that area–preferably something that had worked for them. Two rules: you could not interrupt your advisor, you had to just listen; second, at the end, all you were allowed to say to the person giving you advice was, “Thank you.” At the end of the 20 to 30 minutes, we all returned to our seats and were probed about what we thought about this performance improvement session. The results were generally very positive. What did we like about this performance appraisal session? It was non-judgmental, it was non-threatening and it was done by someone who did not have an ulterior motive or an axe to grind with you. Therefore, we could listen with an open mind and maybe get something out of the conversation. Maybe.

How many of us could say that our performance appraisal systems, which were designed to help improve the performance of the organization, are non-judgmental, non-threatening and done in a truly unbiased fashion. Anyone? It would seem that the systems we have put in place to improve performance are designed in such a fashion as to make that noble goal fairly unlikely. Can it be that performance appraisal and organizational improvement are incompatible? Anyone care to try building one again?

In my research on employee surveys, I have yet to see a performance appraisal system that is well rated by the employees living under that system. Let’s assume that the vast majority of people come to work wanting to do a good job. I think that is a safe assumption by the way. Therefore, if we were to create a positive working culture in the organization through tried and true principles, and people want to do a good job anyway, maybe we should scrap our performance appraisal systems and develop “organizational improvement systems.”

Consequently, our conversations will be around what the individual can do to help contribute to organizational goals and what skills and abilities they need to develop to help make that happen. What about the five percent of the population that is not doing a good job and need to be eased out of the organization? I believe that their performance issues should not be addressed through the organizational improvement system, but should be addressed by a separate performance management system–a system that would be irrelevant to 95 percent of the workforce.

What about organizations that tie performance appraisal to merit increase? How would this happen if there is no appraisal of someone’s performance? How could we differentiate top performers who will get four to five percent increases from average performers who will get three percent? Do we really need performance appraisal systems to differentiate a one to two percentage point difference in salary increases? Seems kind of silly, doesn’t it? We should be able to find a different path.

Organizations take a hit from an employee attitude standpoint when they are seen as not doing enough to correct poor employee performance. And in fact, they take even more of a hit when the organization is a unionized environment. In other words, people who are doing a good job and working hard want the others who are around them to be working hard and doing a good job as well. However, designing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_appraisal : performance appraisal systems that are needed for five percent of the population, yet are onerous to 95 percent seems to be a monumental misjudgement.

If our goal is to create superb working environments and implement strong http://www.kenexa.com : HR Management, where people can fulfil their potential and organizations can excel at delivering products and services to their customers, we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We have a lot of redesigning to do.

from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/05/23/feedback-to-your-workforce-with-performance-appraisals/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/160975034010