Is Yoga Un-christian? and who cares...

A Baptist minister has been making news lately with his assertion that the practice of yoga is un-christian. Reverend Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, warns Christians of failing to see the "contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga."
How narrow-minded! As if anything that does not come down directly from the bible is automatically circumspect. I'm often aghast at the intolerance of many Americans toward non-Western culture (just look at how they treat muslims!) And this is especially strong among evangelical Christians who look at everything through just one filter, namely the bible. Rather than seeing humanity and communality between cultures, they see only "Either you're with us, or against us". How is that going to make for a better world? How arrogant to think that your world view is the only correct one!

In an article at the Huffington Post, "Calm Down Christians, Yoga is Not a Thread", author and interfaith minister Philip Goldberg traces over 100 years of history of how yoga has been perceived in America: Mohler is not the first American to warn of dire consequences! Still, the vast majority of yoga practitioners aren't doing it for any particularly religious reasons (nor are they about to be converted to Hinduisn) -- rather, it's a form of exercise with a spiritual component.

I go to yoga, and I don't go to church.
Those are not connected!

Why so much sugar?!?

I'm not anti-sugar, but really, why is it that American food is so super sweetened?!?

Today I bought a smoothie at the grocery store (having just finished a workout and needing something to hold me over for teaching). I usually make my own smoothies, but this morning I got out of the door and sort-of forgot to eat a substantial breakfast -- and I don't go too far on just a cup of coffee w/ biscotti.

Anyway, I bought this smoothie, a.k.a. "dairy beverage", and it was TERRIBLY sweet. Turns out to not only to contain HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) but a long list of other ingredients like sucralose and other artificial ingredients I was not familiar with, and I could not get it down. Not wanting to waste food, I later tried to "thin" it down with some OJ and plain (unsweetened) yoghurt -- what a waste -- I still could not drink the stuff. YUCK! I finally tossed it.

Been another busy day today, and for dinner Liesl made us a quick pizza using a commercial pizza sauce (the one that comes in the Bobboli pizza crust package) -- yikes, again, way too sweet!

I keep on cutting sugar out of American recipes -- last week I made zuccini muffins in an attempt to make a dent in our zuccini stash -- I ended up cutting the recipe's sugar by half! The kids never complained: it was still plenty sweet...

So if you're wondering why I don't blog much anymore -- I'm too busy gardening, working and cooking from scratch...

Keep out of the reach of children

Today I bought a new nailbrush, and as I was extricating my new purchase from its wasteful packaging material, I was struck by the warning Keep out of the reach of children.
Now let me get this straight: this item is dangerous to children? How, pray tell? Is it that a child could use it incorrectly, and hurt themselves in the process?

By all means, I will heed this warning and keep my children away from this dangerous item -- I would much rather have my children run around with dirt (and all those nasty bacteria) under their fingernail -- that is infinitely preferable, isn't?

Photo credit: http://www.thebodyshop-usa.com

The Value of Education?!?

I couldn't believe how many kids were kept at home here in backwards Alaska on Tuesday. I guess their parents did not want their children to be exposed to President Obama's speech about this terrible socialist idea (namely the value of education,?!?!)
My son's High School history teacher didn't show it because it supposedly "did not have any relevance" -- what the @&F*%?
I had a school class on a fieldtrip at the Nature Center and the teacher said many stayed home because of the speech -- who knows, might we have piped the speech to them in the woods?

My daughter's 6th grade teacher taped the speech and showed it a day later -- good for him! Parents had the option of sending a note if they wanted to have their child to go to another classroom during the speech. I bet they would not have had to do that last week when our Republican governor spoke last week at a local school about the same topic...

SO, let me get this straight -- people kept their kids home to prevent them hearing Obama telling them to stay in school and work hard. I kringe at the message these parents are giving their kids: are they saying don't stay in school like Obama tells you to -- emulate Sarah (the Quitter) Palin instead...

Actually, come to think of it, there's one of those celebrity READ posters at my kid's elementary school with Palin in a dogsled holding a book, and the message is "READ A BOOK" -- how subversive!!! I better start writing nasty letters. After all, there's not many letters difference between Palin and Stalin! And if kids don't value their education, they may not be able to tell the difference...

Yikes, do they have any room in Canada...?

Party-poopers

Warning, this is a bit of a curmudgeon-ly post: you've been warned!

Here I go:

At social gatherings (a.k.a. parties), I do not care to stand around listening to a bunch of guys "male posturing". Because to me, men bragging about their cars, fishing trips, business successes or anything else is just posturing -- they may as well be comparing the sizes of their dicks!
They just go on and on about themselves! No matter where the conversation leads --politics, science, the weather even-- this type of male (type A personality?) just likes to bring the conversation right back to himself and what a hotshot he is!


Myself, I rather go over and see what the ladies are talking about. I don't care about shopping, fashion or make-up, but more often than not, sooner or later they do get around to talking about some stuff is that close to my heart: children, education, family, health... But no matter what the topic, women tend to be more consensus-building, self-disclosing, yes, they're more likely to listen. Most importantly, they don't blatantly think of themselves as the center of the universe!

The question begs: is it all just basic Darwinian evolution at work? Men competing for power and access to females, while women are nurturing their young? Or did I spend too much time in graduate school taking courses in evolutionary biology?

Maybe I'm a bit biased -- just a teensy bit...

Phew, got that off my chest!

Photo credits
http://static.zsl.org
http://www.grg.org

Healthcare debate

When I first came to this country, people would asked me if I came from the "socialist or communist" Germany -- and why the heck was it called "democratic" when it isn't? Don't they get free healthcare, and have no choices and freedoms?
Well, I hardly knew where to start answering! In broken English I'd try to explain that
(a) I came from West Germany, which was democratic (official name was Federal Republic of Germany) while East Germany (even if the name was German Democratic Republic) was communist, but that (b) West Germany did also have "socialized" healthcare, but it was not free - it was paid for by taxes (doesn't anybody understand that nothing is ever truly free?), and that you still had choices & freedom, and, most difficult of all (c) that socialism does not equal communism!

Today, I just came across a blog new to me, Solipsist, by a writing teacher. I really enjoyed his discussion on healthcare, and he offers an excellent explanation as to why Americans are so scared by the word "socialized" in front of Medicine.
and here I quote the Solipsist:

...maybe people get turned off by the phrase "socialized," which makes them think of socialism. Now, here again, the main problem is that the word "socialism" has gotten a bad rap. Political scientist Robert Axelrod in a book about cooperation, effectively defined socialism (or at least a socialist state of mind) as "niceness." So what's the problem with "niceness"? Well, nothing, but many people equate "socialism" with "communism"--which are not the same thing--and "communism" with Russia and in particular with "Stalinism." The thing people don't realize is that calling Josef Stalin a socialist is like calling calling Tony "Scarface" Montana a pharmacist...

Anyway, even if my family is among the lucky ones to have decent health insurance through an employer, I do feel that the AMERICAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS BROKEN, and it needs FIXING!
How is it broken? Let me count the ways... the US spends much more on healthcare per patient without delivering better health; the unfairness of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, the huge number of un-insured and under-insured, and on and on...

Let me just give you one tiny lousy example of BROKEN: a gainfully employed (but under-insured) friend of ours ended up making the risky choice of NOT going to the emergency room with a dangerous bowl obstruction, risking rupture (and thus possibly death), because he simply could not afford it -- he's still paying off the bills from his last one several years ago that precipitated a HUGE chain of medical problems. Note also that an indigent or homeless person in the same situation would have been treated for free. THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG WITH THAT!

Don't get me wrong: I don't think that it's "unfair" when the homeless get treated in the Emergency Room-- it's the compassionate thing to do: we don't let people die in the streets! I digress here, but there is a whole big problem with homelessness in this country, and much of it has to do with how poorly we deal with mental illness, and again, healthcare reform could help...

I think that access to affordable healthcare should be a basic right just like access to education -- maybe it would help if called our public school system "socialized education". Most countries have just that, including ours, as it is obviously in a society's best interest to educate its citizens. Imagine a world where not everybody could afford to send their kids to school -- what kind of a heartless society would that make us?

Here's an account of a British(-American) Mommy blogger entitled "Hey America, socialised medicine is not that bad!", very enlightening!
I also recommend any of Honeypiehorse's social commentaries: very insightful.

3 X's:Exhaustion & Expectation & Exultation

I'm exhausted -- it's temporary, of course, and I shall recover!
But a bit grumbling first: Spring has sprung (it's GREEN!), I want to plant my garden, bake a cake for my son's B-day, clean the house for my daughter's imminent return to Alaska, and instead I collapse on the couch after a week of ushering hundreds school children experiencing "Nature"--- I need some of her restorative power about now...

I started writing this post on Friday evening, and now it's Mother's Day already!

YES, every spring I go through this: I'm exhausted & stressed. Husband & son talked me out of holding the annual BBQ we had planned for his birthday -- they argued it would have been too stressful for me to get the house ready f0r a party, esp. since next weekend Eldest is returning from Montana, and we'll be throwing her a WELCOME BACK GRADUATE party!
So we did just a small family B-day for 15-year old Wolf -- I managed to bake an UGLY but tasty cake between Volleyball, taking care of an extra 2 girls, finally getting the mosquito screens up, and a farewell BBQ of some friends who are moving to Hawaii.

Husband found this article by Judith Warner in the NY Times in her weekly column Domestic Disturbances entitled "Not-so-Great Expectations", dealing with a mother's expectations of herself. Here's an excerpt:

“At our age,” he replied sharply, “maybe we just have to adjust our expectations.”

This was a very radical idea.

I mulled it over all week. I realized that this very same not-so-great expectations theme had also come up, not long before, in a conversation I’d had with my father-in-law.

We were talking about sleep. I was ruing the fact that I need it – nine hours’ worth sometimes.

I was telling him about a woman I know who gets up at 3:30 a.m. every day to do yoga. She’s on her computer at 4:30 and on a train to work at 7:30.

At 7:30 I am usually spilling my first cup of coffee down the front of my bathrobe and screaming at my children that if they don’t get out of bed they’ll never again eat anything sweet or watch any TV or have anything they want in the world for the rest of their lives.

“I wish I could get up early,” I said, explaining all the gracious, relaxed, self-improved Simply Being I would do, if I had an extra hour or two in the day.

I was saying I wished I needed to sleep only six hours a night. Or five, or four – like the really successful people you read about.

I would wake up my children, showered, teeth-brushed and smiling, the way the magazines tell you to do. I would exercise and garden and pay bills and reorganize the kitchen cabinets and make photo albums and …

My father-in-law looked at me with genuine befuddlement.

“Why,” he said, “would you want to do anything more than you already do?”

I did enjoy reading this article -- here's an intelligent working mom writing (I wish I could blog this eloquently) about what it's really like: the expectations vs. reality.
We just can't do it all. Shall I shout it out?
We just can't do it all!
Years ago, when I was working on my PhD, expecting my second child, I asked a friend who was a successful professor and mom of 2 boys: "How do you do it? Juggle being a mom and having a career?"
She answered something along the line of " I stay on top of the laundry by running a load every night, and I read research articles instead of magazines when I wait for a haircut... it's a matter of organizing your time, and lowering your expectations -- the house is not going to look as nice as your mom kept hers"

At the time I did not appreciate this answer, and I never did finish that PhD either...
I was then (and am now) frequently feeling at the brink of lowered expectations that if I lowered them any more, that I fear that nobody will have clean socks or get a nutritious meal!

OK, maybe it's not that bad, but the stairs are piled high with "take-this-to-your-room" piles, the entryway has become a depository of items long out of season (ski boots anyone?) , and let's not look behind the toilets, shall we?

SO, on that note, I want to wish all you moms out there better luck juggling it all, and give you my advise for the day:
KICK BACK and do what YOU want to do for a day!
For me, this involves being outside and yardening today (a cross between cleaning the yard and gardening): working on my new potato planter boxes, and having a slash fire going in the firepit, hanging around with the "extended" family. Ahh, by tonight, I'll be smelling like woodsmoke and drinking a cool India Pale Ale. Relaxed and ready for another week!

Cartoon credit: David Walker from http://www.cartoonchurch.com/

DIET is a four-letter word

The Anchorage Daily News Sunday section had an article today about a local woman who had participated in the TV reality show "World Biggest Loser" -- for non-TV people, like myself who have never seen this show, let me explain: This is a TV show where participants compete for a grand cash price, and subject themselves to a grueling regiment of crash-dieting and exercising in front of TV audiences until they meet their goals (some get "eliminated" along the way). I was dismayed at what this poor woman had gone through, and how she's still struggling with her weight and self-image 2 years later (and a baby) -- it just all sounded so unhealthy, in ways even creepy and sinister!

Americans seem obsessed with dieting to lose weight. Even though 90-95% of all diets fail, that doesn't keep them from trying, dreaming of looking like those models in the magazines.
Most people who diet will gain back the weight they lost, often surpassing it. Then they try another diet & repeat the cycle. This phenomenon of Yo-Yo-dieting is probably is worse than simply staying at the previous weight while reasonably active.

I have to admit right here that I am one of those lucky people who has never counted calories or carbs. I'm certainly not skinny (heavy-boned German with hefty boobs), and would never be picked for a bathing suit commercial, but luckily I've never been HUGE. I credit lucky genes for the largest part, and simply being fairly active. But the middle-age spread is catching up with me, and I could certainly use to shed a few pounds and tighten up the flab around the midriff ... But I'm determined to approach improving my weight&health without crazy dieting schemes.

Obviously being overweight is not healthy -- it increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, yada-yada-yada. Enough already -- we already KNOW that! But then why can we not manage to keep our bodies healthy?

America is facing a weight/health crisis DESPITE the fact that we've been told for some 35 years that being overweight increases health risks, and that we ought to eat less saturated fats. So we buy products touting health claims of "Low fat", "reduced cholesterol" etc., and are still getting fatter and fatter. What gives?

Seems like we've been replacing saturated fats with the wrong kinds of fats, and we're filling up on empty calories. And our portion sizes (even our plate sizes) are bigger -- we're indeed eating significantly more calories than before we started the "lower fat diet". And we're less active than ever before. No wonder Americans (and many Western countries are heading the same direction) are getting fatter, and so are the kids: Childhood obesity is becoming a serious problem.
There are more and more overweight children, and our society seems not to know how to help them. Just telling the kids to "eat less and exercise more" is not cutting it -- adults are not exactly good role models in that department! How do you expect kids to get off the couch & onto their bikes if the adults drive everywhere in their cars, and think of the world as way too dangerous a place to step outside your front door?

Maybe this TV-watching kid is watching the documentary Supersize Me? Maybe he's already given up? In the kid's defense, genetics do play a role too, and he's probably not exactly inherited skinny genes -- but still, it's so sad to see him embarking so young on a lifetime of health problems!

QUESTION: Do we eat to live, or live to eat?

The problem with our Western diet is that we've lost touch with real food. Our ancestors would barely recognize what's on the shelves of our stores: long lists of ingredients, many of which we can hardly even pronounce. In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan advises us to eat what our ancestors would recognize as food -- that is stay away from highly processed food stuffs, and eat real food, preferably grown locally, without heavy inputs of industrial agriculture (chemicals, fertilizers, etc.) -- his description of what goes on in feedlots might make you want to puke & forgo meat altogether!
I still maintain that humans are omnivores, and eating meat is a natural part of our biology, but we're certainly not meant to eat the huge amounts of animal proteins, or the amounts of refined simple carbohydrates (white flour and sugar) that have become standard in the so-called Western Diet.
Michael Pollan's book is fascinating, and I like his 7 simple words to guide us:
EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS.

Here are two other books I read last year that dealt with some of the more psychological aspects of the problems people have with eating and weight control: Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, and Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch -- different approaches, but both very valid looks at the WHY: what goes on when we overeat, and how can we change that?
I learned a lot from both of these books. Sometimes we just eat unconsciously, or for emotional reasons. We've learned to ignore clues our own body/mind gives us about hunger or fullness. One interesting experiment that Wansick's team did was the "bottomless" bowl of soup: the bowl was being re-filled from below, and people kept on eating and eating, unaware that they were eating WAY more than usual. The comment when asked how they liked the soup was something like "That soup was really filling" -- yeah, they ate what, 4 or 5 bowls?!? But they thought they were eating their normal amounts!
The principles of eating more intuitively are also very helpful, whether you're just trying to get to a healthier weight and lifestyle, or struggling with major food issues such as eating disorders:
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Feel your Fullness
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
7. Cope with your Emotions without using Food
8. Respect your Body
9. Exercise -- feel the Difference
10. Honor your Health -- Gentle Nutrition

One of the "aha" moments for me was how they explained that denying yourself certain foods (chocolate, for example) will end up making you crave that food, setting yourself up for a failure (in a "weak" moment you "cheat", then end up eating a whole box of chocolates, and feel like a total failure, your image of yourself is that you "failed" to control yourself, spiraling into further depression over food...) Instead, go ahead and give yourself permission -- if there are no "forbidden" foods, then these foods will lose that power over you, and you'll find yourself not craving it... This is such a gentler approach, and I think could really help people who are struggling with unrealistic expectations of diets and body image.

Another book I picked up recently is by Mark Bittman: Food Matters, where he advocates more "conscious eating" by eating less meat, more local produce, and reducing amount of highly-processed food -- for our health, AND for the health of our planet.
He mentions that he lost extra weight and saw a marked improvement in his health just by making these simple changes -- cutting out meat and processed food out of 2 of his 3 daily meals. Bittman writes that for him it worked well to eat "Vegan until 6pm", something it turns out also resonated with my husband, who is happily eating his veggies for lunch these days. I do wish he'd ask some whole wheat grains to that, because he he just gets so darn hungry when he gets home for dinner (I bet he'd do fine with Ramadan, where you have to wait until sundown to eat)! He has replaced his formerly high-carb midnight snack with fruit, a step in the right direction. Poor guy, he just gets so "peckish"...

For myself and my family, I'm just aiming for a greater awareness of healthy eating in our daily lives. Since we started buying our produce in CSA boxes and I started a blog (Borealkitchen) to guide me in cooking with all that produce -- well, I've noticed that my pants are sitting looser on my waist -- darn it, they won't stay up!

I think the biggest factor in eating healthier is that with more vegetables around, I eat less of other foods. I'm realizing just how easy it is to pick up processed foods -- they are everywhere! When I'm in the grocery store I try to make sure I don't shop hungry, and try to stay on the perimeter rather than in the middle isles where all the food comes in boxes. After all my reading I realize that they're full of empty calories ("refined" grains, which means the fiber and kernels are removed -- needing "enrichment" to put the nutrients back in!), and the long shelf-life was "bought" by replacing healthy (unstable) fats with unhealthy (hydrogenated) fats.

Does that mean no more OREOS for the kids' snacks?
I'm not trying out for the Ogre-mom of the Year award, but yes, I buy far less of that stuff , and try to get around to making healthier homemade treats more often instead.
It's not easy to keep our household supplied with "healthy" yet appealing snacks for the ever-hungry hordes that descend on the kitchen every few hours -- but somehow homemade baked goods or bananas with organic peanut butter is winning, and neither kid is starving or complaining too loudly. (And I have to add that both kids are thin as rails -- but so were hubby and I at their ages, the inevitable bulge around the middle did not set in until around 40!)

So I try to shop, cook and feed us healthy meals, keeping an even-keeled perspective (I see little point in getting into a religious fervor over food). I just want to stay healthy, balanced & make peace with food -- it's what keeps us alive and healthy, and we may as well enjoy it too.

Time

Sometimes I feel like I never have enough TIME. It seems to be slipping away from me (like in Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory painting) despite my most valiant efforts to "manage" it.

But time management is just an illusion -- it marches on, no matter what I do. I certainly cannot control the march of time itself -- all I can hope to do is to wisely use the time that I do have. My problem is that I expect to do way too much...

I'm a fairly hard-working person, keeping busy with many projects at home and at work. After a hectic day of teaching, running errands, cooking, etc., I'm either exhausted enough to just go to sleep, or else I sit down with some knitting, sewing, or laundry-folding. Working with my hands does relax me -- it may seem like nervous energy to an outsider (can't she just have her hands still for a change?), but it actually helps me unwind...

For some reason, I go thru periods where I'm super critical of myself (I feel I can't get my work done -- the household is going to pieces...), when I feel like a failure. Not only am I falling short of being a good german "Hausfrau", I'm not even managing to be a loving mom and wife! Suddenly the messes in the kitchen, the shoes & boots strewn over the entryway, the piles in the garage are just driving me NUTS. In a way, during those (PMS?) moments, I lose all perspective over what really matters in life. Time, or the lack thereof, looms very large.

Here I am at the end of busy week with 2 birthdays, and at work I'm organizing the children's Halloween events -- there's lots to do, and I've got to keep on top of a lot of stuff. But I'll get thru it -- I always do! What will I do when I get to the other side of this task? Relax? How?

This reminds me of a passage in Antoine St.Exupery's The Little Prince.
He meets an inventor with a pill that replaces the need to drink water. He says, "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
The little prince asks him, "What would I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

What's patriotic and what's not

There's so much talk about who and what is patriotic. The dictionary defines patriotism simply as " love of and/or devotion to one's country".
But lots of people seems to think their view is the only patriotic one. After 9/11, if you didn't support fully the war on Iraq, you were probably called unpatriotic by many in this country. We later find out that evidence for Saddam Hussein's WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and the Al-Qaida connection to Iraq was not really there...oops!

During this presidential election, Republicans are making taxes to be something bad, unpatriotic. During last week's VP debate, Sarah Palin said to Joe Biden: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

In today's opinion editorial, New York Times' Thomas Friedman made this excellent point in response to Palin's statement:
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed?

To read the rest of Friedman's article, click here

An Old Lady on aging

I'm getting to be an OL (Old lady), at least that's what I gather from the media. Together with the ads for anti-wrinkle cream and hair dyes, I read an article in this morning's paper that if you're over 40, you're an OL, "you are a faded rose, desiccated fruit. A goner... You don't have an edge."

Really? What happened to aging gracefully? What happened to wisdom? It wasn't that long ago that 72-year old McCain was blasting Obama for not having enough experience to be president -- and then he turns around and nominates inexperienced young sexy Sarah Palin to be his VP -- but I don't want to go THERE today!

So I'm in my (late) 40's, can see 50 from here, wear flannel shirts and still don't wear make-up. I don't feel a need to use artificial means to look younger in order to be better at the things that matter to me -- being a mom, a friend, a teacher. My hair has got some serious streaks of gray going, and for the record, I refuse to dye it!

I look at many women around me who spend lots of money and time on make-up and hairdye, and I wonder why? If it's truly what makes them happy, then great. But how many are doing it because they feel (subconsciously perhaps) forced into it by society's expectations - i.e. it's just not acceptable to look the way you naturally are! Are they afraid their husbands, friends, colleagues, etc would reject them? How very sad...

Sometimes it seems to me that America, and perhaps the West as a whole, seems to be getting shallower and shallower. While professing that we believe in equality (gender, race, etc), deep down we don't seem to really practice it. In November, this country will elect a new president, and my sincere hope is that the American people can elect a capable & qualified leader, and not be swayed by looks, race, or other superficial things. In November, I will celebrate my birthday with family and friends who accept me as I am!

Art credit for the old lady drawing: Jack Noel (UK)