Lock the knee. Lock your eyes.

This week, I picked up my Bikram yoga practice again. I practiced Friday night, did Saturday afternoon, and am leaving for the Sunday morning class in about an hour. I practiced Bikram last fall/winter for about six months, but then stopped when I went abroad to Australia. There was actually a Bikram studio a few miles from my apartment down there, but I didn't really see having that much extra time or money to keep going, so I never kept it up. Then, last semester, my life was crazy and my class schedule, the Eagle, and babysitting just didn't allow for me to squeeze in yoga. It is a little bit frustrating to go back to Bikram after such a long break. I remember everything my body used to be able to do that it can't do anymore, and I am sort of mad at myself I let that happen. But, I don’t want to say I regret not going, because you can’t really regret something you had basically no control over. I missed it a lot.

This semester I have made room for it in my schedule to go three to four times per week, because with Bikram, (and most yoga), it is really important to go at least that many times, ideally five days. The more you regularly your practice, the more you get out of it.



Bikram yoga, also known as hot yoga by some, is basically a 26-posture, 90-minute routine developed by Bikram Choudhury. It is always performed in a room with a temperature of about 105 degrees and 40% humidity with the lights on bright. This allows your body to sweat out toxins but more importantly limbers up your muscles so you don't strain something while you are working on the pretty demanding poses. It is amazing how much more flexible you become after spending a little time in the heat.

I remember on my couple days of yoga back in August 2008, I looked around the room at all the ripped bodies, some curvy, some with not a drop of fat on them, but mostly all in great shape. Let’s just say you could tell who had been coming for a while and who, like me, were just starting out. I started to compare myself to everyone around me. Then the class began and I started to compare myself to how well my body was working compared to other people in the room. Then I remember during Ardha Chandrasana with Pada-Hastasana, which is a pose where you extend your arms with your biceps at your ears and push your body as straight as can be to each side, holding for a minute, then repeat again. It’s the first real pose aside from the all-important breathing exercise, but it’s intense. This excruciating cramp hit my right bicep (which isn’t used to doing any work) and then all I can remember thinking was, “Ohh, this isn’t gonna be easy, is it?” From then on I sort of knew I had to forget everyone else in there and focus on me. I perform my best postures when I completely free my mind of distraction and focus on my own eyes in the mirror. Which is sort of why I titled this entry that. There are a lot of phrases the instructors tend to use a lot, specifically, “Lock the knee!” “Push more! Fall more! Back back back!” etc. But I really like repeating, “Lock your eyes” to myself because it actually does help. I usually stand in the front, because if I can’t see my eyes in the mirror, I often can’t focus. If I concentrate on my own gaze, I'm not thinking about anyone or anything else, and I can work through some of the balancing poses a lot easier. The balancing poses are my hardest. I'm fairly flexible all around, but I can't balance for the life of me.

I think that is the beauty of most lasting exercise routines, specifically yoga, which is so individual. You do it for you, no one else. No one in there is going to pat you on the back and say, “You know, you had a really excellent triangle pose today, much better than last week!” because no one knows your practice except you. Sometimes instructors will encourage beginners with comments on how well they did, but generally it’s more of a comment to their stamina and staying in the room than specifics about their postures. Instructors are always there to motivate, but they are not what keeps you going. This is going to sound really cheesy, but it’s your internal dialogue and patting yourself on the metaphorical back that keeps you going. Sometimes it’s congratulating yourself for touching your head to the floor in standing separate leg stretching pose, sometimes it’s just for getting your butt to class. Or to play on what Emerson once said, “Finish each pose and be done with it. You have done what you could.”

I'm off to see what I can do today. Namaste, everyone.


(not Bikram, but me doing yoga in Brisbane, one of the only photos I have of me in any yoga pose.)

Happy Twenty-Ten. Here's the obligatory New Year list.

Well, actually two lists. They sort of address a smattering of my interests, categorizing them into things I hope go away and things I hope come about. Some is serious, some is not so much.

These are things I hope go away in the next decade:

Tiger Woods. Please go away. And while we’re at it, let’s also do away with all the celebrity gossip about famous men cheating on their wives. Not that I don’t think they all deserve to be ridiculed and publicly humiliated, but I frankly just don’t care. Actually, just all celebrity gossip and news should go away. I don’t know what we are going to talk about on Friday nights at the bar, but we will figure something out.

Twilight. And vampire stuff in general. I mean, I sort of got into True Blood, but I hated myself for it a little.

All the H_N1 hype. And yes, I am making the assumption that there will be another flu next year. (Hmm…Feline flu?) Next year there will be some other strain, I just hope the hysteria dies down a bit as time goes on.

Ugg boots. UGH boots. I can’t even believe how long these have stayed popular.

College binge drinking. We all love a cocktail/cold beer/glass of wine. Or two, or three. But, at the risk of sounding like my mother, the binge-drinking problem in America has become absolutely insane over the past 10 years. The CDC estimates that 75% of the alcohol consumed by adults in the United States is consumed in the form of binge drinking. Vehicular homicide, unsafe sex, date rape situations, yuck. I don’t expect binge drinking to disappear entirely, but it would be great if it did, and wasn’t replaced instead by an alternative drug. Happy, social drinking is in. Puking and waking up next to strangers, not so much.

Excessive spending. People need to save more and spend less. Banks need to stop lending money out to people with bad credit. This irresponsibility put us in a recession. Everyone needs to grow up.

Facebook. Bane of my Internet existence. Takes up way too much of my time and ultimately serves no purpose that other more legitimate social networking Web sites don't already have to offer. That being said, unless everyone else stops using it, I probably won’t either. Therein lies the rub. I mean, going into the PR field, I should embrace Facebook, but I just can’t help but have a love-hate relationship.

---

These are things I think and hope we’ll see over the next decade:


Better interactivity and involvement with personal health. Let me explain what I mean by this. So you go to the doctor, you get weighed and poked and prodded and then you are sent on your merry way, with nothing really tangible in hand, no record of your own so you can monitor your health. People need to have a better way of keeping tabs on things like their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, even things like birth marks on their body to make sure they don’t change too much over time. Doctors can easily miss things. Most of them are super busy, forgetful, or incompetent, and especially if you are going to multiple doctors, it would be fantastic if there was a more convenient way to just pop in all the information on your health into a central location online. Google is working on something like this, but it’s very difficult to work with and needs a lot more development. I would imagine that people would be nervous about this sort of transition, because you might think if all that information is out floating around in the interwebs, anyone will be able to get their filthy little hands on it. There would of course need to be proper security in place, this information would need to be protected just like our credit card information is all protected online. [Update: Yeah, this guy knows what I'm talkin' about.]

More widespread access to and knowledge of CSA’s and farmers’ markets. I actually dream about this kind of stuff.

Better pay for interns. Read: any pay for interns. And along with this, just more jobs in general. I’m a big believer in the economy turning around in the next few years. It’ll bounce back. I am fine with unpaid internships for college students just getting their feet wet in something, but it’s becoming a bit exploitative how much interns are being expected to do with no pay at many places.

Environmentally-friendly technology and products will become more affordable, available and mainstream. Hybrid cars will becomes the norm. Energy-efficient appliances will be the only kind you can get. Plastic forks will be replaced by bio-degradable forks made of corn—you get the idea.

Faster Internet connectivity, better battery power capacity (in all kinds of technologies), and advancements in data storage. Like, who would have thought five years ago that we would have a terabyte hard drive available for home use? Craziness I tell you. Maybe one day my Internet download speed at my apartment will surpass 3.32 Mbps. Sweet, can’t wait.

A renewed respect for journalism. Journalism has been going through a difficult transition as citizen journalism on the Internet has grown and newspapers have lost money and their workforce. But I see a transformation happening soon, where objective journalism will find a better place in society and people will realize its importance much more. Um, this is really vague. I'll blog about it later in more detail.

HDR high-dynamic range imaging photography will begin replacing traditional photography. I don’t even know how they would do this, but what if they made a camera that could? Oh boy. Can you imagine a world where HDR photos were everywhere? My head can’t even wrap around this concept. What a beautiful thing it would be.




Anyway, who wants to join me in this new decade? We can sit around sober, talk about our health and personal savings plans, and eat locally grown food with forks made of corn. No, but seriously.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Taxing tanning, just another example of how treatment is replacing prevention

Last week, I was bombarded by emails with special holiday discounts and offers from different tanning salons I have frequented over the past four years that somehow slip through the spam filter. Yesterday, I received an email from one of those places with the subject line. "Help Stop the Federal Tanning Tax BEFORE 12/24/09." REALLY? Oh, dear.

Now, I hadn't really heard too much about this tanning tax. But the long and short of it is that the new health care bill the Senate is futzing around with now includes a 5 percent tax on "indoor tanning services," instead of the previous tax on elective cosmetic procedures. (Still unclear to me is if "indoor tanning services" includes spray tans--or tanning/bronzing creams for that matter--as these are also methods of getting a tan indoors, however they are not skin cancer-causing.)

Now, in my opinion this tanning tax is a great idea. If we can't outlaw something that is clearly harmful, the next logical step is to tax it, to hopefully dissuade people from doing it. As an aside, if I had my way, there would be an even higher tax on cigarettes, I hate the stupid things. Frankly, I think it would be fantastic if cigarettes were outlawed, but I know this won't be happening anytime in my life. Also “personal freedoms, and blah blah blah,” etc. Whatever. It doesn't even bother me so much that people smoke—except my family and friends because they are important to me and I don't want them to die. What bothers me is that there's some corporate fat cat getting rich off of people’s addiction. And basically, that’s what tanning boils down to. It’s a business where people (like me) get addicted.

I agree with this doctor though, that a tax will do little to prevent people who are already regular tanners from keeping on tanning. If they have to spend 5 percent more, they will:

Dr. Robinson foresees the indoor-tanning tax dissuading first-time users and people considering “event tanning” before a prom or wedding. But she isn’t hopeful that the “twice-a-week tanner” will stop. “They are truly addicted to the feel-good tendencies from having a tan,” she said. “They will spend money on that, and not spend it on other things.”

Now, the whole tanning thing is a rough topic for me. I touched on this in a column I wrote a couple months back. It's rough, because probably six months ago, I was a self-proclaimed sun worshipper. Tanning itself made me feel good and being tan made me feel good. I hate being that flip-floppy person who thinks this way one day and that way the next (Example: the butter versus margarine debate.) But recently, I did a little cost-benefit analysis, and came to the conclusion that it's just a dumb move. My health won out. I haven’t been tanning since last February. But, I can without a doubt say that if this tax had come about 2 years ago, it wouldn’t have kept me from going to the tanning salon.

I guess what my opinion boils down to is this: The tanning tax won’t prevent most people from tanning, but really that’s not the government's intention anyway. The point is to increase federal revenue to support the proposed government-run health care system. A health care system that is currently crippled because people aren’t making the proper health decisions they should be making based on proven scientific knowledge that we have (case in point, tanning is cancer-causing) and people are requiring more health care (melanoma removal).

And around and around we go, I guess, with treatment trumping prevention. It's sad.

S.O.S.: This is a global call.

You better make a stand
You better make it now
Take back your rights from the IMF, World Bank and Monsanto

When they wage war on you, you lay asleep
When they poison your food, you choose to drink
There's poison in the well!
- Anti-flag

While I was down in Florida last week, for the first time I started to notice advertisements for the genetic engineering company Monsanto, who "pledges to be part of the solution." Perhaps, if you define "the solution" as pumping bodies full of genetically engineered foods while the profits of food items (which are steadily increasing due to the price gouging of seeds sold by said company to farmers) are pumped into the hands of one corporation, and our already dwindling farmland is wiped out even more. We shop at grocery stores because it is a) convenient and b) cheap. I am terrified to see how "cheap" food will be in ten years, even 5 years, as farmland disappears more and more. We all know the basic principle of supply and demand. Monsanto won't care, they will have what they need--control of the seeds (our food), control of the government which essentially taxes and regulates agriculture (our food) and control of the people who do the farming, because they can no longer afford to farm any other way.

When a friend of mine and I went to the Green Festival about a month ago, we met Joel Salatin, the author of Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, here. He wrote about his hardships being a small farmer, trying to deal with the restrictions and fees and taxes that the government places upon them. We told him about our Practical Environmentalism class and he was really excited that we were learning about these issues. He signed copies of his book for us and wrote, "Thank you for being part of the solution."

Monsanto is not part of any solution worth being a part of.



Our farmers, and more generally, our global food system, is in crisis. There are videos about this topic all over the Internet and books everywhere. I suggest beginning with this one, or this one if you are in the mood for something "lighter".

I mean, our government can be very corrupt, both sides of the aisle and in between. Government is corrupt all over the planet. This shouldn't be condoned, ever, but when the corruption really strikes a nerve with me is when it comes to issues of our planet, and specifically, our food. Food shouldn't be treated as a special interest. It's a requirement for life. If our food system falls apart, which it inevitably could if these genetically engineered seeds replace biodiversity and natural growth, the human species would cease to exist.

That isn't alarmism, it's just fact.

Happy Green Bean Casserole Day

Did you eat mindfully?
I tried and think I did well.



After writing my column about mindful eating on Monday, I really did try to eat slowly and carefully and with at least a speck of grace yesterday on Thanksgiving. Particularly during dessert. It is really almost inhumane how much we stuff ourselves on this day. We eat mashed potatoes and squash and green beans and stuffing and yams and corn and cranberry sauce and rolls and gravy and wine (and turkey, if you do) and then we sometimes have seconds--and then we clean up and then we eat MORE. It's gluttonous!

So this year, in light of my column and just generally what I always try to do but often fail at, I took about three or four bites worth of only what I really like. Except the green bean casserole, which is my favorite. Haha. I was still very full at the end--certainly not ready to go for a run around the block--but I wasn't ready to roll over and pass out either. And I tried some of this pumpkin cake thing my mom made for dessert. She got the recipe from Paula Dean, so needless to say it was the richest dessert I have ever tasted. I don't usually like pumpkin things (hate pumpkin pie--blech) but that dessert was darn good. Way too rich to eat more than a couple bites.

Then, I loaded up the dishwasher, mopped the floor, went back home with my parents, walked a couple miles around the neighborhood with them, then fell asleep on the couch watching Home Alone. Thankful.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoys their break (if they are on one!).

Thriving Off Two Hours of Sleep Per Day--For Life?

This guy makes some interesting points about sleep.

He says that we waste a whole lot of time with our traditional sleep method of 8 hours at night (or 4 or 5 for most of us...), because the most important part, in fact the only important part, of our sleep cycle is the REM cycle, which is when we have dreams. This is when our brain actually is rejuvenated.

He suggests breaking up our sleep, or "hacking into our brain" so that each time we fall asleep, our brain is expecting us to only get a 20-minute sleep session, so it sends us straight to REM, straight to rejuvenation. Do that enough throughout the day and you can trim out all the unneeded hours of unconsciousness.

It is true that my best, most vivid dreams always come from those little cat naps I take in between this or that activity, and I always wake up feeling refreshed from them.

Maybe I will experiment with this over Thanksgiving Break or something. That way if I screw up and don't "fit in all my naps", I won't end up crashing and sleeping through an exam. Or falling asleep on the metro and waking up in Silver Spring at midnight on a Tuesday night.

The Fructose King of Condiments

What coal is to our atmosphere, sugar is to our bodies. The silent killer, in a sense.
I think that is basically what this man is saying...


Granted, this is nothing new. People have been talking about high fructose corn syrup for the last couple years, actually, long enough for the high fructose corn syrup industry to rally up its own troops in response. (Gotta love America.)

It is hard to deny, though: sugar is what is making America (and Americanizing nations) fat. And hypertensive. And tired. And depressed. And most of all, STILL hungry.

It's almost all because of sugar. And not even just the sugar we put in that occasional batch of cookies. Even the healthiest of us ingest fructose every day without realizing it.

I did a quick inventory of my roommate's and my kitchen, which has been deemed "empty" by our friends. The Kraft Light Sicilian Garlic Dressing (35 calories in 2 T, practically nothing) has sugar in it. My Nature's Own light wheat bread has sugar in it (albeit very little). The FIRST ingredient listed (therefore making it the most highly used in the item) on the box of Nutrigrain Bars is high fructose corn syrup.

And, alas. My beloved ketchup. Since I have been old enough to eat solid food, my mom has been telling me that ketchup is awful for me. She avoids the condiment like the plague. I have to hide how much I use it, like some junkie, whenever I am around her. She looks at me with this look that says, "I can't believe I raised a daughter who eats ketchup."

I inspect the bottle. She's right. Ketchup is 15 calories per tablespoon (ask me if I ever just have one tablespoon--the answer is no.) Ketchup is 100% carbohydrates, 4 grams of it, all of which come from sugar. I am looking at approximately 16 grams of sugar per day in my diet, just from ketchup (don't judge me).

I don't know, guys. I can deal with being pale, but now no ketchup either?


Fine. Ketchup, you and I are going to have to take a break apart from each other. Maybe forever, we'll see.

Practicing What I Preach

So I started writing a column for The Scene section at The Eagle this semester. So far I have written five. I have gotten a few compliments on them from people other than my mom, so that is encouraging. I even got a few emails in the first couple weeks.

I like writing columns, because it basically allows me to talk about whatever I want to talk about, kind of like a blog, but do so in a more 'legitimate' way, in printed form, in a newspaper. Also, I always bring in real research, whether it be from an interview or from the Google machine, and I always bring in my own personal connection to whatever topic is at hand. This is easy for me to do with health topics because frankly, I have done and tried it all. Good and bad, healthy and unhealthy.

It's the unhealthy things I have done that I like talking about most, which is what I did this week. When I write about my mistakes, I think it shows I'm not perfect, just like my readers, just like everyone. None of us are perfect.

[That's another thing I like about blogs, you can get off on mini-tangents and it's OK because there's no word limit.]

Anyway, I am particularly nervous, but excited for my most recent column about the dangers of tanning, because as a person who has gone tanning since the age of 15, I always knew it was bad for me, I just chose to ignore that fact. Now, it's kind of like, grow up and get over yourself. I'm not invincible and on top of that, I don't ever want to have my skin look like my mom's friends' down in Florida. Yuck.

So, in a sense, my column has been about being the change I want to see in other people. Sort of like Gandhi said. If I want my readers to change, I have to change myself. Clips aside, experience aside -- I think that is where the real benefit of writing this column will lie.