National Strawberry Day!
It’s National Strawberry Day. Everyone around here loves strawberries especially our granddaughter. My personal favorite is fresh strawberries but frozen will do in a pinch. I even have a Pinterest board on Everything Strawberries. I could use a lot more healthy strawberry pins so if you have a recipe or know of any healthy strawberry recipes, comment away. I would love to fill that board up. My favorite way to use strawberries is on top of waffles with Greek yogurt or in a smoothie. Or a delicious, simple and healthy dessert is a couple strawberries and a banana. Yum! So refreshing. The Eating Well online magazine has some delicious healthy strawberry…
Losing Pain and 60 Pounds
Congrats to Teri who lost sixty pounds seven years ago and has maintained this weight loss since then. She says she used to be a yo-yo dieter all her life and had tried many diets. “I had a stressful career, and my position required excessive travel. I was home on average of three days a month, and mostly I wined and dined for a living (sounds tough, doesn’t it?). When the weight creeps on at five pounds a year, it doesn’t seem so bad. At least not …
Elimination Diet Tips by Chef Christy
Please help me welcome Chef Christy, our guest blogger this week. Enjoy part 1 today and come back to read part 2 on Monday. Not All Calories Are Created Equal I have struggled with my weight all my life. I went on my first diet at age 5 when my Mom joined Weight Watchers for the first time. I can remember watching my mom make her own ketchup (with saccharine!) and how bad it tasted. Since I was a teen I have been experimented on with liquid protein diets, measured the size of my portions, used colored plates, adjusted my eating times, made food logs and oh yes, counted calories. Most of these methods resulted in a minimal weight loss for a limited amount of time. Many…
For Labor Day: Farmworkers’ Rights Still in the Toilet
Cross-posted from the TEDxFruitvale blog. (Why? Read this.) Today is Labor Day, a time when most Americans think of barbecues and Mondays off, not so much the people who picked the potatoes in that salad and the peaches in the cobbler, or who slaughtered and processed the steer that became that hamburger. Chances are they were paid very little for this hot, often dangerous work. As the Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States outlined in painful 65-page detail, federal and state laws treat farmworkers differently than other workers. Children as young as…
Having Fun Outdoors as a Family
The days are getting longer, the sun is shining harder, and I can’t help but feel spring is right around the corner! This is the perfect time for guest blogger, Ken Myers, to impart some inspirational advice about getting active outdoors with the entire family. As summer approaches most of us start to plan our vacations or at least begin thinking about getting out of doors and basking in the sun. Sometimes life gets so busy that we put very little thought into our lives and we get into ruts. We go to the same places and do the same things every year without much thought. Spending time outside doing things with your family can…
Tesla stealing Toyota Prius drivers
Who’d switching to Tesla? Owners of BMW, Mercedes, and Audi luxury vehicles, but also a whole ton of Toyota Prius drivers.
Homemade Shampoo Review: Coconut Milk and Aloe Vera
After 3 years of faithful no-pooing with baking soda I noticed that my hair has become brittle and dry, I did a pH test which proved that while I was saving my hair from toxic chemicals in commercial shampoo I was destroying it with the highly alkaline baking soda. Read more about the pH of baking soda and why you should not use it as a shampoo. I set on a journey to find easy to make homemade shampoos that will not only replace baking soda but will also be pH balanced. A few weeks ago I tested rye flour shampoo and…
Death By Stubbornness: What’s A Doctor To Do?
Over the years that I’ve worked in acute inpatient rehab centers, I have been truly vexed by a particular type of patient. Namely, the stubborn patient (usually an elderly gentleman with a military or armed forces background). I know that it’s not completely fair to generalize about personality types, but it seems that the very nature of their work has either developed in them a steely resolve, or they were attracted to their profession because they possessed the right temperament for it. Either way, when they arrive in the rehab unit after some type of acute illness or traumatic event, it is very challenging to…
9 Important Productivity Habits My Parents Taught Me When I Was Small
My mother taught me more about productivity, the power of consistency, and making a positive impact in the world than any other person in my life. Someday, I hope I can be half the person she is. To honor the lessons she and my father introduced to me, I compiled these nine important productivity habits my parents taught me. Enjoy!1. Stop trusting yourself to remember stuff.Tell me if this sounds familiar: you go to the store and tell yourself, “I don’t need a grocery shopping list! I’ll remember everything I need”, but then within mere moments of getting home, you realize you forgot something so important that you have to go back to the store again …
How to Deal with Stress: 33 Tips That Work
“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.” Sydney J. Harris “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Bertrand Russell “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” John Lubbock Feeling stressed in today’s society is pretty much inevitable. But how stressed you get or how often this happens are two things that you can have a great influence over. Without smart habits for dealing with situations that could be stressful…
Minding common ground: “Poly-farming” in northeast Ohio
Just about any road I take that leads me out of Wooster, Ohio, very quickly guides me past vast fields of corn or soybeans. Agriculture plays a vital role in Wayne County’s economy, and for several decades now, commodity crops have contributed more than their fair share to our local economy. Smaller farms that emphasize fruits and vegetables (so-called “specialty” or “differentiated” crops)…
Making Sure Your Elder Parent Eats Well
If you’re a regular Live Lighter reader, you’ll know that over the holidays my Mom was hospitalized. Part of the reason for this was that she wasn’t eating right — which is absolutely essential when you have diabetes and when you are elderly. So I’m very happy to present today’s guest post by blogger, Kimberley Laws! “Finish your broccoli or there will be no dessert.” You remember your mom uttering those words so clearly that it feels like it was only yesterday. It was, however, decades ago. And, now, the roles have reversed. It’s your turn to make sure that your …
7 tips for green spring cleaning without toxic chemicals
Happy Spring Equinox! In the grand old tradition of spring cleaning, we’ve rounded up some of our best ideas for green cleaning.
How to Whiten Your Teeth Naturally
Unpleasant as it is, as the years progress, our teeth tend to lose their pearly white color for a yellowish tint that is not as attractive and is a sign that something is wrong. Luckily, there are a number of things we can do to prevent our teeth from discoloring. There are not only ways to prevent it,but there are also many ways to bring back the white and get that perfect smile everyone wants. Teeth are made up of 4 tissues: enamel — the strong white covering that protects the tooth dentin — a hard yellow material that carries nerves; supports the enamel pulp — at…
Fit Family Challenge 2013: Ten Tips For Fast, Healthy, And Affordable Meals
I’m very excited to be the nutrition coach for the Boys & Girls Clubs’ Fit Family Challenge again this year. In surveying the finalist families, I discovered that the two most important nutrition issues on their minds were cooking speed and food affordability. Far down the list were things like food allergies, weight loss, …
Six Ideas For A More Productive Work Day
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)As the new year begins, a lot of you are probably evaluating 2013 to figure out what worked and what didn’t. For me (and most of my co-workers), the last year was a roller coaster: the startup I co-founded, Ministry of Supply, took off and our customer base more than quintupled. As I became more and more busy, I tried to experiment to find out how I could become more productive and keep up with the workload. I tried it all, from scheduling 15-minute meetings to not taking any meetings; from sleeping less to sleeping more.In the end…
Could this Vegan Pizza Stop Heart Disease, Cancer and Altzhiemers?
Domino’s Now Offers Vegan Pizza In IsraelThe world’s favourite food just went vegan. Well not strictly true – we do have vegan pizzas in the shops.V Bites make one and if you take your own dairy free / vegan cheese into PizzaExpress they’ll usually oblige with a vegan version of whatever you like (just don’t expect a discount for…
Powerful new exposè: food giants plot to addict us
The US govt and dairy industry worked together to force more unhealthy milk fat into our diets Sad and dangerous fact: the first and maybe only priority of any giant corporation is profits. Check out the documentary “The Corporation” to understand the frightening fall-out of that reality. I learned from that film why public health and environmental health always seem secondary, if they’re considered at all. They ARE secondary when powerful corporations are in control, as they increasingly are.The new book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us drives that message home. Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss lays out an appalling picture of profit-scheming…
Hey New York: Free food at Terri on Thursday for the Great American Meatout!
Who wants to come to lunch with me on Thursday? Or breakfast? Or dinner? To celebrate this year’s Great American Meatout, Terri in the Financial District is offering $10 of free food for anyone who mentions the Meatout. That is an actual meal’s worth of food! And it’s all vegan, and everything I’ve had (and I work around the corner, so
Veganic Farming
When it comes to agriculture, arguably the biggest buzzword of the last decade has been ‘organic’. With the huge expansion in organic farming, organically grown crops no longer need to be sought out at specialised farmers markets or stores, and it’s now commonplace to walk into your local supermarket and alongside every vegetable comes its organic counterpart. However, the word ‘organic’ has, to some extent, become a victim of its own success. With the huge hype around organic, people often choose to buy organic food (and now clothing) with little understanding of what …
Veggie Grill Heads For Carlsbad
The popular Veggie Grill is coming to Carlsbad. On January 22 the chain’s 23rd location will open at 965 Palomar Airport Road. To celebrate the opening, the restaurant will thank every guest in line between 10 am and 11 am on January 22 with a $20 Veggie Grill gift card, and one lucky patron will win “Veggie Grill for a year”. Going to LegoLand soon? How about surfing on the coast? Checking out the Carlsbad Outlets? Now you can enjoy delicious plant-based Veggie Grill
Honoring Whole Foods’ Right Decision On GMO Labeling
Regular readers will know that our publication has repeatedly criticized the Whole Foods Corporation for failing to walk their talk in so many ways. Today, we want to take a moment to honor this powerful entity for announcing mandatory GMO labeling on foods it carries by 2018. Please, read the whole article I’ve linked to in order to understand the grassroots…
