Today I made some activated pecans (activated means they were soaked until sproutable then dehydated so that the enzymes are preserved in the nut) that were coated in wattle seed and spicy bush tomato dukkah. I orginally found these spices in Aldi, but I don’t think they are sold there anymore. Perhaps they can be found in an Australiana shop. This recipe is totally delicious!

It includes:

500g pecans, soaked

Sauce:

2-4 tablespoons of dukkah (I used 2, but they are not too spicy)

a few teaspoons of coconut oil

a few of the soaked pecans

small amounts of water until a thick blendable consistency is achieved

Blend sauce in a small blender like a Tribest, then mix with pecans in a large bowl. Dehydrate at 145 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour then 115 for 8 hours. It fills the whole house with a delicious spicy smell.

Related posts:

1. Tasty raw greens and kale chips
2. It’s not that easy eating greens; spending each day munching on leaves…

Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine

Since introducing a bit of bread into my diet six months ago I have been constantly battling with candida again, which once it flares up is incredibly difficult to get rid of. I have since removed the bread from my diet again, but once our bodies are harbouring a yeast infection it doesn’t just go away when the cause is eliminated.

While I have successfully healed flare-ups in the past, this time it is not going away with my usual high raw diet. My diet is made up of mostly green salads, fruits, nuts and seeds, oils, a couple of non-raw foods like kefir and hommous, a few powdered superfoods like maca, and the occasional raw treat like raw 72% cacao chocolate. For maintenance and nutrition I think this is an amazing (and delicious) diet, but to get rid of candida and bacteria that has already formed a colony requires a short-term elimination diet.

There are two such diets based around the raw food lifestyle that claim to heal the body from candida and other systemic infections. While both of these diets are high in greens and vegetables, the diets and the mechanics of how they work are very different.

The 80/10/10 Diet

The first of the two is The 80/10/10 Diet which is based on natural hygiene. This diet works by eliminating grains, flesh foods and fats from the diet. The premise is that glucose is the natural fuel for humans and that ingested fats and proteins block insulin receptor sites and cause insulin insensitivity and rising blood sugars which then go on to feed yeasts and other pathogenic microorganisms. The author, Dr Douglas Graham claims that there is enough essential amino acids and essential fatty acids in fruit and vegetables, that these are not required to be added as additional food, and so he claims that it is quite healthy to live on this diet long-term. This diet requires a substantial amount of exercise to ensure that the muscles have a glucose deficit so that the sugar is always moved into the muscles instead of remaining in the blood. This diet is very high in water, very alkaline and has a huge cult following in the raw community. Many people on 80/10/10 describe their diets as euphoric. This diet is effective against candida with many people saying their symptoms disappear overnight due to their bodies regulating their blood sugar better when fat is taken out of the picture. I am not going to follow this diet for a number of reasons that I will describe later when comparing the two.

The second diet is the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine diet by Gabriel Cousens (I haven’t read it, but I am sure one of his other books There Is a Cure for Diabetes follows the same principles). This diet is an anti-mycotoxic diet. Gabriel Cousens espouses removing sugar from the diet in order to starve the microorganisms in the body. Unlike the traditional anti-candida diet however, which is quite high in meat, low in water and is highly constipating, this diet is 100% raw, vegan, alkaline and hydrating. The diet goes a step further than the anti-candida diet and eliminates all foods that have a high toxic microorganism count such as meat, dairy, eggs, grains, corn, peanuts and mushrooms. The goal is to ingest as few pathogenic microorganisms as possible and simultaneously keep your blood glucose low so that any pathogenic microorganisms that do enter the body are not provided with the food they need to grow and multiply. While Cousens does not describe it as such, in the early stages this diet is low in carbohydrate and is likely to be ketogenic. Ketogenic diets have been studied by nutritional scientists and have been proven time and time again to be very effective against epilepsy, diabetes and PCOS (the latter two being diseases caused by insulin resistance).

For some time now I have been trying to decide for myself whether I want to base my long-term diet on Graham’s or Cousen’s principles. These two diets are the fundamental (and I guess you could say extreme) basis for all other raw food diets and can be returned to in their foundational form if healing is needed. Graham’s is high in glucose and very low in fat and Cousen’s is high in fat and very low in glucose (its not really possible to have a diet high in protein unless you consume a diet primarily consisting of synthesised supplemental powders such as soy protein isolate, whey protein isolate, egg white protein isolate, spirulina and chlorella – and that diet sounds disgusting and constipating). I want a foundation nutritional base from which I can gently experiment rather than swinging around wildly trying this and that and never being very efficient or effective. I also want to eliminate disease from my body, even as I age. I am extremely sensitive and have a generally poor constitution so for me this is a challenge.

There is a Cure For Diabetes

The reason why I have chosen the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (vegetarian, low carbohydrate, high fat and moderate protein) is for the following reasons:

– I have never been very athletic, and while I try to keep moderately fit, I am never particularly active. My favourite activities include reading and writing and my day job involves sitting at a desk as a computer programmer. Regular intense exercise is an essential part of the 80/10/10 diet and many people for whom it works well are athletes. See my article about why exercise is essential when eating fruit here.

– I feel satisfied and do not require much in the way of snacks if I eat a high fat diet, whereas if I eat a lot of fruit I want to graze all day. I do not at all feel comfortable eating a third of my day’s supply of fruit all in one meal and stretching my stomach like Douglas Graham suggests, so inevitably I snack and so I am consistently hungry/eating/digesting if I eat a lot of fruit.

– Eating fruit all day without brushing teeth can result in an acidic condition in the mouth, leading to tooth decay. Tooth decay is the #1 most prevalent disease in Western culture due to the high quantity of starches and sugars we consume. There are numerous reports on the internet of fruitarians losing teeth.

– Wild fruits are lower in sugar than their modern, hybridised counterparts and there is some possibility that in the past fruits in general were lower in sugar. Douglas Graham says that this isn’t true, because if it were we would have to eat more in order to get out calories and this is unrealistic. However, he hasn’t considered that if fruits in the past were lower in sugar they would have naturally had to be higher in fat (like olives and avocados), and the fat would have been the significant macro-nutrient for energy, not sugar.

– When I attempted to eat a diet very high in fruit while pregnant, I found myself constantly craving fat. I craved hot chips, fish, butter, avocado and ice cream. Once I even craved bacon (but didn’t eat any as I am vegetarian). As a result, I added fats to my diet and my high fruit diet became undone.

– Douglas Graham describes the 80/10/10 diet as satisfying the desire for sweets, but when I eat a lot of fruit and zero or little fats I crave honey, dried fruit and bread. I don’t crave these foods when I eat a diet low in sugar and high in fats. Inevitably every time I try eating 80/10/10 I end up giving into my cravings for more refined sweets and then end up with candida infections.

– While the phase I of Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine is quite limiting, it does allow fruits in the second phase, and overall the diet is less limiting than 80/10/10. If I wanted to stop being vegetarian in the future for some reason, or if I wanted to travel and try different international cuisines, the foundational low sugar diet – eating plenty of greens and no grains – is a good base for adding grass-fed organic meat, grass-fed organic dairy, eggs or oily fish.

– Scientists are discovering that high fat diets promote mental health and cognitive function.

– Gabriel Cousens quotes more scientific literature than Douglas Graham does, and Douglas Graham makes some outright errors in his analysis such as on page 169 saying that a large man should eat 6,250 calories when his figures add up to 4,800. He also contradicts himself on the same page by saying a sedentary woman can follow the diet, when he has previously stated that doing a lot of exercise is a must for the diet to work. These kinds of statements in the 80/10/10 diet makes me feel that less consideration has been put into the facts than Gabriel Cousens’ books which are typically very detailed with a lot of reference to scientific studies.

– Long term raw foodist doctors such as Fred Bisci do not agree with eating high levels of glucose and believe that in the long term it is very dangerous. Gabriel Cousens is a medical doctor with 35 years clinical experience.

– There are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but no essential carbohydrates.

I have more reasons but wordpress is starting to get slow as I pound away at the word limit

So today I am starting the Phase I diet of Rainbow Green Life Food Cuisine; I have been grain free and high raw for a while so I am hoping that I can get through the first (detoxifying, elimination) phase with minimal cravings for sugar. Here I go!

Related posts:

1. Why a high fruit raw food diet requires exercise
2. A successful low fat mostly raw food diet
3. Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine

A storm has been brewing for a while in the raw food movement and that is the question of fruit vs fat.

Yes, we all love fruit. We’re hardwired for sweetness. Its moist, hydrating, tasty, aroma-filled and beautifully coloured. It appeals to all our senses.

But fruit comes with a surprise package called sugar and that sugar imposes a duty upon us; those of us who use fruit as our main source of calories must exercise.

Maybe for some people this is no big deal, they love exercise; they would exercise if they didn’t have to; they would exercise just for fun. But for others, exercise is something that is merely endured. They are not used to it, only do it out of a sense of duty, or don’t do it at all and make excuses for why it can’t be done today. Someone in this latter group, especially if they have become a raw foodist for health reasons, needs to either reconsider their view on exercise, or eat a reduced fruit raw food diet.

Why am I making this claim?

Fruit, for all its super powers, vitamins, antioxidants and pure water is very high in carbohydrate, especially simple sugars called fructose. It wouldn’t even matter if it were more complex carbs that released more slowly, the fact is that carbohydrates turn into sugar. Because fruit is so low in calories, we have to eat much more of it. A typical 80/10/10 meal, for example, contains 500g of carbohydrate, all entering the blood stream as sugar in the course of any one day. This is about the equivalent carbohydrate load as eating 1.8kg of cooked pasta each day.

When carbohydrate enters the blood stream as glucose, it requires preferential treatment from the body in order to burn the sugar. This is because sugar is very dangerous to the body, it quickly increases acidity, fermentation and becomes a choice food for parasites and bacteria. Our bodies want to get rid of sugar at any cost, so our pancreas releases a hormone called insulin whose single goal is to get the cells to open up and let the sugar in.

But sometimes, our cells don’t want to open up and let the sugar in. This is called insulin resistance, and this is also where the exercise comes in. A person who does not exercise is going to meet with some form of insulin resistance, irrespective of whether the fruit is eaten all at once, or in a number of small meals.

Let me provide an analogy of why our cells might not want to open up and let the sugar in.

Say a cell is like your fridge. You do a big shop and the fridge is overflowing with delicious fruits and greens and coconuts and root vegetables and oils and whatever else you might have bought. When your fridge is empty you can put food in it. When it’s half full you can still put food in it. But once its full you really have to force food in there. Lets say you forgot you went shopping and then went shopping for a second time! You have to start rearranging things, taking some things out, cramming things in. Eventually you just can’t fit any more in that fridge. The fridge has reached its capacity.

It’s the same with cells. If a cell is empty the insulin can come along and throw in some sugar. If a cell is already full but more sugar is consumed then the body creates more insulin and tries to jam the sugar into the cells. If even more sugar is consumed the body gives up and the sugar is converted into fat and stored in the stomach area as a kind of TODO list – I’ll burn this when I get around to it.

If you are lean but have stomach fat, that is the reason why, it is excess carbohydrate that could not fit into your cells!

So now your body is in a state where the cells are full of sugar and the excess sugar has been mopped up and stored as fat. The body then goes about slowly burning the sugar that is already in the cells, because sugar is burned first before the body considers fat. Perhaps overnight the body finishes burning all the sugar in the cells and the cells are empty again the next morning.

But now, some sugar has been stored as fat. Maybe not much as a raw foodist, but if you didn’t exercise at all, then there is a good chance that some will have been stored as fat. This fat is then released into the blood stream so that the body can finally start to burn it off. But wait! In comes more sugar for breakfast; someone who eats fruit as their main source of calories is eating sugar around the clock.

In this case, the cells are empty, but there is fat in the blood from yesterday’s sugar consumption hanging around. This fat blocks the cell’s insulin receptors, so now the insulin has a little bit of difficulty in getting the sugar into the cells. As a result, the pancreas makes more insulin to try to knock out some of the blocked receptor sites.

If you are eating a diet where your main source of calories are fruit and you are not exercising, you will have a downwards spiral of excess sugar becoming fat, fat blocking insulin receptors, more insulin being created, the cells getting tired of being hammered with insulin and then eventually the cells becoming insulin resistant and more and more sugar being converted into fat.

This is why some of the raw food teachers, lovely as they are, who do not like to exercise but do consume fruit as their main source of calories, are overweight. You wouldn’t think you could become overweight from bananas and strawberries would you!

So what is the solution for this fruit eating dilemma? If you want to eat fruit this is what you’re going to have to do:

Firstly, aerobic exercise requires all of the muscle cells in your body to kick into gear and start providing the energy you need in order to sustain the activity. If your cells are full of sugar then this is the first thing they will burn. They will not only burn the sugar already in the cell, but they’ll also open the door and usher in new molecules of sugar. The insulin can pretty much sit back and watch, the pancreas doesn’t need to get involved. As long as you’re moving and burning sugar you can consume sugar in the form of fruit without any problems.

If you stop moving however, the cells fill up again. That’s where the second trick comes in…

That is to increase the number of muscle cells you have in your body! If you had two fridges in your home, it would not be such a big deal if you went shopping twice. The first lot of shopping can go in the first fridge and the second lot of shopping can go in the second fridge. So it is with muscle cells. If you create new ones, you can store some sugar in each of the new cells as well as in the original cells, and so if you are still eating the same quantity of sugar you will not need much insulin to force sugar into the cells. Increasing the number of muscle cells requires resistance exercise such as weight lifting.

So if we do enough aerobic exercise and resistance exercise we should, given this simplistic example, be able to eat fruit without any side effects such as abdominal fat gain, candida albicans, PCOS, diabetes or any other blood sugar disorders.

How much exercise is enough exercise? This I don’t know, but if you are eating fruit and other carbohydrates and you are gaining weight around your stomach area or having any blood sugar related issues, then you are not doing enough.

For some people, if they have a sedentary occupation and perhaps also a sedentary hobby and don’t do exercise, or if a person is physically incapable of doing exercise, then a high fruit diet might not actually work for them. Do not believe teachers who say that everyone can eat a high fruit diet, some people are pre-disposed to having blood sugar issues and these people will have to exercise more, perhaps more than they are able to do given their daily schedule. Some people just can’t exercise.

For any who fits in this category, you can still be a raw foodist! More and more scientific studies are starting to extol the virtues of eating higher levels of fats, particularly anti-inflammatory fats containing essential fatty acids, and if not coupled with a diet high in fruit and sugars, the body can switch over to become a wonderful fat burning machine. Couple raw fats and proteins with life giving vegetables and a small amount of lower sugar fruits such as berries and you have a wide range of delicious meal options and excellent health to look forward to. Fats can be more readily utilised by a sedentary person, as long as that person is not consuming sugar.

We are so fortunate to have such highly intelligent bodies that work all this out for us!

So the moral of the story is, you can choose fruit or you can choose fat, or have a balance of both. Your body will happily work with either. But there is a caveat, and that is: if your calories are coming from sugar, you have to exercise.

Related posts:

1. Comparison of the Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine Diet by Gabriel Cousens and the 80/10/10 diet by Douglas Graham
2. Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine
3. A successful low fat mostly raw food diet

I found this medical journal abstract today, and I thought it was very interesting.

It explains the effect that almonds and walnuts have in improving the symptoms of PCOS. The people in the study ate about 50g of their allocated nut each day.

Walnuts lowered cholesterol and increased insulin response by 26%! (Insulin response is opposite to insulin resistance). It also increased sex hormone-binding globulin which is useful for binding testosterone, which we women do not want floating around our bodies in large quantities.

Almonds reduced the number of free androgens, which is good because PCOS is linked to having too many.

I have been learning that a low-sugar diet, high in nuts, seeds and vegetables is excellent for healing PCOS. I found it interesting from this scientific study that different nuts have different effects, so it is probably a good idea for us to eat a variety of raw nuts and seeds rather than just stick to our favourites.

I enjoy multi-seed dehydrated crackers from flax, pumpkin, sunflower, almond, sesame and chia seeds, which are delicious with some added tomatoes and maca powder.

It is very important that nuts are eaten raw, because the fat in nuts is unstable and becomes rancid when heated.

Related posts:

1. Nutritional data revealed (And the winner is!)
2. Why a high fruit raw food diet requires exercise
3. Comparison of the Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine Diet by Gabriel Cousens and the 80/10/10 diet by Douglas Graham

On the weekend I decided to work out what raw foods give the most bang for the buck in terms of nutritional value for fixed calories and price. I thought it was more interesting than by weight as we normally look at it (certainly for anyone who wants to lose weight and save money). So far I have only been able to look into nuts, seeds and oils because they are the least numerous, but this is what I discovered:

I collected data in 100g/100ml quantities for:
flaxseed oil ($4.59), olive oil ($2.60), sesame oil ($2.60), coconut oil ($3.33), flax seeds ($0.80), macadamia nuts ($3.50), chia seeds ($2.20), walnuts ($2.00), almonds ($2.00), cashews ($2.00 – not really raw at this price), mature coconut meat ($0.66), young coconut ($0.60), pecans ($2.00), pine nuts ($6.00), pistachio nuts ($4.50), pumpkin seeds ($0.80), brazil nuts ($2.00), sunflower seeds ($0.80) and raw cacao ($4.30). If you can get 100g locally for a different price then my results might not be accurate for you.

Calories:
sunflower seeds win the most calories with 730 per $1

Omega-3:
flax seeds gives the most per $1
flax oil gives the most per calorie

Omega-6:
sunflower seeds gives the most per $1
walnuts give the most per calorie

protein:
pumpkin seeds give the most per $1
cacao gives the most per calorie

vitamin A:
pumpkin seeds gives the most per $1
pistachio nuts gives the most per calorie

vitamin E:
sunflower seeds gives the most per $1 and per calorie

vitamin K:
pumpkin seeds give the most per $1 and per calorie

folate:
sunflower seeds give the most per $1 and per calorie

choline:
flax seeds give the most per $1 and per calorie

calcium:
sesame seeds give the most per $1 and per calorie.
this is kind of obvious, but is it less obvious to know that chia seeds and young coconuts came in second place, and not miles off like I would have expected?

iron:
its a draw between pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds for the per $1 rank, but cacao wins per calorie

magnesium:
pumpkin seeds wins per $1
cacao wins per calorie

phosphorus:
pumpkin seeds wins per $1
cacao wins per calorie

potassium:
flax seeds and pumpkin seeds have a draw per $1
young coconut wins hands down per calorie

zinc:
pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds have a draw per $1
nothing stands out per calorie

selenium:
as you would expect, the winner on both counts, hands down is brazil nuts

Related posts:

1. Scientific study showing almonds and walnuts can help PCOS
2. The power of simple food

Like the Law of Attraction, what we get from our relationships with others is what we focus on. This is a lesson I have learned this week from Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships by Will Bowen.

What does that mean exactly?

Bowen explains ‘focus’ as the type of questions you ask yourself.

In our lives we are constantly asking questions in our head and then answering them; this is our judging process and is necessary for survival. For example, we need to be able to identify threats to our safety and protect ourselves accordingly, so asking “is now a safe time to cross the road?” might be a good idea if you are a pedestrian at a busy intersection. But the questions that we ask ourselves about people and experiences that do not pose a safety concern have the ability to colour the experiences that we have in our day-to-day lives.

If you were focusing on things that you like about other people, you would consciously or unconsciously ask and answer questions like “What am I enjoying about this relationship?”, “What do I like about this person?” or “What can I do to make this person happy?”

If you were focusing on things that you do not like about other people, you would consciously or unconsciously ask and answer questions like “What is bothering me about this relationship?”, “What is annoying me about this person?”, “What do I wish I could change about this person?” or “Why is this person not making me happy?”

If you are always asking the latter kinds of questions, then answers will come and those answers will bother you for as long as you continue to answer the same questions. Some people will move from partner to partner, never staying with anyone for very long, because they ask the same negative questions about every person they meet and keep receiving answers. Other people will stay in a relationship but won’t enjoy it very much because of the fact that they are always focusing on the negatives. The fact of the matter is, if you are asking questions like “What is annoying me about this person?” and the answers you get make you feel annoyed, then don’t expect that changing the other person will make any difference to your relationship. If you are focusing on what is annoying then you will find something to be annoyed about.

Bowen explains that one of the keys to enjoying happy relationships is to change what you focus on and start to ask yourself more positive questions. At first this may be very difficult if focusing on the negatives has formed a habit, but if you commit to changing this aspect of yourself it will show up in the positive relationships that you will attract to yourself. One question that he suggests asking yourself is “How are we able to exist and perform in a harmonious and agreeable way?”. Try asking yourself this question whenever you run into trouble, and see if it makes any improvement to the outcome.

The kinds of questions I have been asking myself this week include: “How can I be more friendly?”, “What can I do to be more helpful?”, “What do I really appreciate about him/her?”, “how does s/he make my life good?”. For someone I don’t get along with, I have started asking “What do her friends like about her?” I have been giving it some good thought and recognising that I can like those same traits too.

Related posts:

1. Complaint Free Relationships
2. Book Review: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One
3. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way

This week I’ve been reading Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships by Will Bowen.

After a few years of marriage I have been wanting to make some improvements in communication and I have been finding it hard going without a good role model. The usual advice from other married couples and of course from counselors is to ‘get marital counseling’, but after trying that it seems to me that the counseling route is fraught with danger. If people feel safe to talk (complain) about their spouse to the counselor while said spouse is listening and feeling upset, then I am not sure whether it is really communicating or whether it is just going to cause more damage in the long-run. Going to the counselor abdicates responsibility for the marital communication to the counselor, and then when issues arise there is a sense of “well we already saw the counselor and it didn’t work, so that proves we’re never going to get along!”

To be honest there have been a few times recently when I thought that my marriage is never going to get better, but I’ve been trying anyway. I simply don’t believe that you can get better at anything without practice, and being good at marriage requires practice too. After a couple of recent disasters in communication I figured it was probably time to practice some better skills, and given that I was already looking into A Complaint Free World, I decided to add Complaint Free Relationships to the same Amazon order. I’m happy I did, it is a good book!

In the second chapter, ‘Relating in Relationships’,  Bowen describes a relationship he had with a coworker when he was working for a radio show. Bowen had been promoted to a managerial role, but was still relatively fresh to the industry, whereas his coworker Phil had been working at the radio station for his entire career. The two were always fighting about how things should be done and they could only see the worst in each other. Bowen just assumed that Phil was an argumentative and unfriendly person and that their relationship would never get better.

It was when Bowen saw Phil meet a friend for lunch and the friend clearly actually liked Phil that Bowen realised that there was more to relationships than meets the eye. In fact, for any person who you might have a bad relationship with, there is most likely people who have an excellent relationship with that same person. The difference between their relationship with that person and your relationship is you.

Bowen expliained, “Phil’s relationship with his friend was different from his relationship with me because Phil related (recounted or told) different things to himself about his friend than he did about me. Phil’s internal dialogue was about things he appreciated about his friend. Phil’s pal also told himself positive things about Phil. I, on the other hand, experienced a constant, negative, judgemental voice shouting in my mind whenever I thought of Phil. “Phil is an obnoxious, opinionated, condescending jerk,” I related to myself about him, and the result was that I had a relationship with a person who was all those things. Phil’s friend had a very different relationship with Phil because he related different things to himself about Phil.”

Here’s a quick and easy exercise that Bowen suggests so that you can see how you are affecting your own relationships, for better or worse:

• Think about a person you really like. What characteristics of the other person makes you like them so much? What do you tell yourself about this person that makes you like them?
• Next, think about a person that you do not like. What do you tell yourself about this person? Do you tell yourself that they are rude, mean, fat, selfish, lazy, conceited, all of the above? Feel free to list as many things as you think about the person.
• Now consider this: the person you really like is probably really disliked by someone else. And the person you detest is most likely someone else’s favourite friend or relative! If so, what might those other people think or say about them?
• If you believed what they believed, would you have a different relationship with these two selected people?

Using this realisation, Bowen realised that Phil acted differently depending on who he was with. Bowen was able to turn his relationship with Phil around by choosing to relate to Phil as a friend instead of as an enemy. He learned that you absolutely can change people using the power of your mind. “Having Complaint Free relationships is not about learning what to do; it is about learning how to be. When you become the kind of person for whom such relationships are common, others shift in your presence.”

Bowen offers some very good advice in the next few chapters as to how to change yourself to make your relationships better. I have taken his suggestions as a personal challenge, and I am pleased to say that so far his advice is very effective. I don’t think I have had even one fight with my spouse since I started last week! I will share some of his suggestions over the next few days.

Related posts:

1. What questions do you ask yourself about other people in your life?
2. Buying and eating organic and chemical-free food in order to improve health
3. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way

I love to learn. For some time I have been considering doing some further studies around one of my favourite topics which is health. I can either continue my private studies in health and share what I learn through my blog, or I can enrol in some formal studies so that I gain accreditation in the field while learning.

There are benefits to each – the benefit of doing private studies is that I have more time to practice what I learn on myself because I have no pressure to complete my studies in a particular length of time. I can learn whatever I want when I want, and by writing about it on my blog I can share what I learn with other people, in an informal sense. Also informal studies are inexpensive and can be done as a vocation. On the other hand, if I study health formally and then if I want to change my career in the future to do something more in line with my interests then I will have built up the necessary accreditation to practice in the field. I can still share what I learn on my blog, although it may at times be more theoretical rather than practical. I can still develop and work on my own health, although I would need to be careful not to overburden myself and let my health slip backwards when studying and working at the same time. Finally, I would get to learn some really interesting information that I might not have come across if reading books that are aimed at a general audience. I would also get to learn skills like blood microscopy, something I have been interested in for many years.

I’ve been considering whether to move from individual study to formal study for about a year and a half now, and it just hasn’t felt like the right time. About two weeks ago however, something happened in my family situation which shocked and surprised me, and during some periods of introspection I realised that I was not exploring my interests in enough depth. For a long time I have wanted to run a home-based business while I raise a family and for a long time I have been interested in psychology, health and management, and yet I am taking the more comfortable and secure road of earning a good salary as a computer programmer.

So I have decided to do the studies in health in my evenings and in the meantime to transition my computer programming career to become more business and interpersonally related, rather than sitting by myself in front of a computer. The career side of things I’m not sure how to change yet, but last week I enrolled in an Advanced Diploma of Naturopathy with Health Schools Australia, which is studied by distance education in my evenings. The study load is about 20 hours a week over four years. The challenge is going to be how to study health without letting my own health lapse due to busyness, and so I will probably need to make some changes to my lifestyle, such as working 3-6 month contracts rather than perm, and finding ways to incorporate more exercise into my daily routine.

But I’m having fun! My first subject that I am studying is anatomy and physiology, which reminds me of my year 12 biology studies which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Related posts:

1. Working out the blog as I go…
2. Focusing on health for the next 30 days
3. Book Review: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One

I went out for a Thai dinner last week and I was blown away by the entree. It was iceberg lettuce leaves on a plate, some tamarind sauce and then an arrangement of raw apple, raw ginger, coconut, raw chillies and some nuts. It was great!! It wasn’t 100% raw, but it was the closest to raw that I had seen at a Thai restaurant. I loved it so much, the combination was delicious, yet it was so simple.

So this week I have been eating iceberg lettuce rolled up with avocado, capsicum and dill. Yummy yummy. Using iceberg lettuce as a wrap is so simple, but because it is sweet and rolls easily it works well with sweet or savoury fillings.

Related posts:

1. A successful low fat mostly raw food diet
2. Search for an apartment continues
3. It’s not that easy eating greens; spending each day munching on leaves…

Well something came up only one day after my last post about breaking through obstacles, and it was a big enough issue that I had to stop everything I was doing and focus all my attention onto fixing the problem. It was such an intense pressure that afterwards I needed a few days of complete rest and recuperation. As a result, the momentum has been lost from the focus points and it doesn’t feel right to start these ones exactly where I left off. I could kick myself for lack of discipline, or I could celebrate flexibility. I think the latter is the better approach I’ll come up with some new focus points soon.

As a final report on my previous focus points, I learned a new way to make water wicking planter-boxes for the balcony so that is great news. I’m going to put it into practise once I have the equipment ready. I shared my desire to support my endocrine system with my naturopath who has suggested some herbs that will work well to restore adrenal balance and can be used alongside the maca (which I am now using faithfully in a daily tomato-based savoury smoothie, which I have decided is the tastiest way to consume maca). I have definitely lost some weight, and I have also benefited from cutting out the higher glycemic foods like dried fruit from my diet. Finally I did get to W3D2 of the C25K running program, and I am confident that I can get back into it this weekend.

I am looking forward to a new set of focus points, and in the meantime writing about some of the books I have been reading lately!

Related posts:

1. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way
2. General updates, maca recipes
3. My points of strength and weakness – the direction of this blog