A Delicious Life

Diet is such a personal thing. Many people define themselves by what they eat. A steak and potatoes kind of guy. A crunchy granola girl.  Try to change them, taking away the foods they know and love, and they become massively defensive. Because you’re not just taking away their food, you’re also taking away part of the essence of their being.

Add love into the mix, and things can get tricky. Can a vegan ever love a carnivore or vice versa?

“Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.”

I remember when I started living my delicious life. I was in transition - just started dating this guy who was really into health food, and I was starting a strict regime of Ayurvedic cleansing and rebuilding. I said to him, “I don’t want to become a vegetarian!” As if that was such a bad thing.

I did go vegetarian for a while - and it felt great for that time. Then I learned so much about eating and diet - and that, for me, vegetarianism might not be the best thing, but not for the reasons that had detracted me from it when I was starting my adventure.

Changing your diet when you’re in a relationship can be difficult. You and your partner start out eating a certain way together as a couple, and life is good. And then you decide that maybe you want to eat better, get healthier, lose weight, or whatever. You’re making a change.

If your partner is supportive, great. It will still take some lifestyle adjusting, but it’s not such a big deal. You learn and figure it out. If your partner doesn’t like this new change, however, watch out. They might try to subconsciously (or worse, deliberately) sabotage you. You’ll keep trying to change but feel torn. What’s more important? The relationship or the diet?

Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.

As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.

Quotes from I Love You, But You Love Meat found in the New York Times.

Did you get your laughter for today? There are many benefits you can get just from laughing - it boosts your immune system, relieves stress, stretches your facial muscles, relieves tension in the head, neck and jaw, and can be good for alleviating headaches.

Besides all of those tangible benefits, there are many other that come with regular laughter. I think we could all use a little more merriment in our lives. Life is not all that serious, yet so many of us take everything so seriously all the time.

I want to start one of these laughter clubs - or find one to join near where I live.

I went to see Donna Eden speak Monday night. She was pretty amazing. In her book, she says something like, “My mother said I was born smiling…” and it seemed true - she just radiated positive energy, especially when she was smiling which was most of the time.

I had just picked up her book, Energy Medicine, a couple of weeks ago from the library on recommendation from a friend. A week after I started reading the book, I picked up a Learning Annex catalog and saw that she was teaching a class in a week  - I couldn’t believe it. And it was going to be the only night that she was in New York. I had to go.

The class taught a lot about how to perform the basic exercises outlined in her book and why they were good for you. She gave us a basic routine to do each day that will restore and balance our energies. Then she took many volunteers from the audience, quickly diagnosed their energy issues, and helped them solve the problem through various exercises - tracing meridians, tapping trigger points, visualizing, and using acupressure on different parts of the body to stimulate or calm the energies of different organs or systems.

Her husband, David Feinstein, was also there teaching alongside of her. He is an energy psychologist, and he also taught portions of the class and answered questions. They are both very knowledgeable about energy balance and control. By the end of the class, the mood had shifted from drained and tired to awake and alive.

I highly recommend her book if you want to learn more about how to revitalize your energy, from balancing your chakras to redirecting your meridians to strengthening your aura. Also, check out her website, Innersource, for some very good information about how to solve energy issues (look in the questions and answers section).

I’ve been talking recently about the importance of how you eat - what happens when you change your focus from eating to other things, and how your emotions affect your digestion. I found this article interesting and related to this discussion, so I thought I would reprint it:

How Mindset Affects Your Waistline
By Jon Benson

When it comes to being fit, you should focus on being happy first.

This may seem like putting the cart before the horse. However, new research on the brain shows us that simple meditation - for as little as five minutes - can alter brain chemistry in a way that improves both athletic and work performance and increases our own experience of happiness and well-being.

Numerous studies on why diets fail demonstrate that a happy person is more prone to follow through on a diet or exercise program than one who is merely going through the motions of life. Depression is often cited as the number one reason people give up on a diet. It makes sense to make yourself truly happy… and science shows us you can.

Give meditation a try. Just take five minutes in solitude, and focus on two simple things: Kindness and compassion. This is a great start. See if you can work your way up to 30 minutes a day. Changes in brain chemistry occur in as little as two weeks, according to Harvard University researcher Olivia Carter, Ph.D.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

Meditation practice is really good for calming the mind, as long as you don’t get caught up in the fact that your mind is constantly wandering while you’re sitting there. That’s why they call it “practice.” If you can get over the fact that you will not be able to do it “perfectly,” even for five minutes, and just allow yourself to practice it, you will benefit over time. Five minutes per day in the morning and five in the evening is enough to get long-term benefits - as long as you practice every day.