March 6th, 2010

Detoxing with carrots

Hmmm.. looks like my posting frequency’s dropped to about 1 new post per week now. Not good. But then again, who cares?

So I’ve spent today drinking lots and lots of fresh carrot juice. Because I love the taste and it’s also great for detoxing. I had a pretty big dinner last night, which is unusual for me. I had Indian food in the form of my favorite Chicken Biryani. Yum.

So today I’m paying for it. Which isn’t really much of a hardship – like I said, I really like carrot juice.

Talking about juicing, I’m considering getting one of those masticating juicers. The one that I have right now is a centrifugal one, and while it does a pretty good job, it also leaves a lot of wet pulp and hard carrot bits at the end. Plus, I keep reading all these articles about how centrifugal juicers heats up the juice too much with all the chopping and spinning, and this kills the valuable live enzymes. It’s made me a bit paranoid about the quality of the juice that I get and… I want all my enzymes, dammit!

It also doesn’t help that there’s all these amazing live demonstrations of masticating juicers on YouTube.

Like this one below.

Sigh. Once again, the Internet is making me want new and shiny things!

I’m pretty sure I’m going to get one eventually. Yay!

February 27th, 2010

When it rains, it pours

I swear, sometimes I have absolutely nothing going on in my life, but when I do, it all comes at once.

To recap my week:

- I went to the airport again. I finally sent off my Japanese friend. A whole bunch of us came with her to the airport to send her off. We had a lot of laughs over dinner and then we moved on to another restaurant for some (really good) cake. I love the friends that I have at work. If I had to work in another country for a year and at the end of it, I have 7 or 8 people sending me off at the airport, I’d be a pretty lucky girl. No tears at the departure gate, but I was tempted for a second or two.

- Went to one birthday dinner with another group of friends. They’re my ex-colleagues from the first job that I got out of college (in 2000). None of us have worked together for years but we still meet up every so often and whenever it’s someone’s birthday. Had too much sushi. I love raw fish with a passion. (Might go to Japan to visit my friend in winter.)

- Two of my girlfriends separately offered to set me up with their single male friends. I still have some lingering body issues, but I’ve decided to keep an open mind and an open heart. In any case, I do really love that my friends want me to be happy.

- Work was hideous. Well, not really, but I had a couple of bad days. Felt some anger, frustration and flat-out exhaustion. One night I came home so drained I couldn’t eat dinner. I just watched a little TV and crashed. Eventhough I love my job, I started to give some thought as to what I would do should I just up and quit. Fueling these thoughts was also the fact that a couple of weeks ago, I got a small freelance editing/writing gig completely out of the blue. So I’ve been thinking about whether or not I can swing more jobs like that into a full-time gig. It’s nice to dream…

- Today my sister and my niece came over to my place. I swear, she gets smarter every time I see her (my niece, not my sis!). She’s almost two and is starting to learn how to sing ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’. She’s now into mimicking our actions, which is really cute. As always, I was fascinated by every single thing she does. Including going to potty.

And now that I’ve blogged all about my crazy week, I think I’m gonna curl up in front of a movie with a cup of tea. Tomorrow’s another day.

February 21st, 2010

DNA does not determine our destinies

Believe it or not, I had my very first taste of figs today. All my life, I’ve never really been very adventurous about trying new food. It was only last year when the message of “you are what you eat” really sunk in to me and I started to change how I thought about food. Hence, the figs. :)

It may sound strange,  but I now see my health problems as a blessing, because it’s forced me to learn so much. It’s also made me keep an open mind to things.

Probably the most useful thing I’ve learned is that my DNA does not determine my destiny.

My mother passed away when I was five – she had ovarian cancer (among other health issues). Ever since I hit puberty and started having painful periods, I’ve always thought it was inevitable that I would one day end up like my mother – everything I read about ovarian cancer told me it was hereditary.

While that may be partly true, no one told me how much control I actually had over it. So I went through most of my life thinking this would always be a part of who I am. And for 15 years, I’ve depended on strong painkillers to control my pain, thinking there was no other way. My pain was so severe that I would stock up on my precious painkillers, fearful that I would one day run out. Without them, I would be bedridden, curled up in pain (and sometimes in tears) and praying for sleep just so I can escape the exhausting pain for a few hours.

Then last year, I started to make a conscious effort to eat healthily. I learned about the importance of body pH and alkaline-forming foods vs acid-forming foods. I read up on everything I could. And since I made those changes, every month (every single month!), I would notice how the pain had lessened from the month before.

It’s been more than six months now, and I haven’t taken a single painkiller since. They’ve been gathering dust in my medicine drawer, and as I’m writing this, I can’t tell you how amazing that is to me.

If you’re interested and want to know more, the science behind my gradual healing has to do with our epigenomes, which is a part of every DNA strand. I can’t explain this very well, so here’s an extract from a 2006 article in Discover Magazine.

We commonly accept the notion that through our DNA we are destined to have particular body shapes, personalities, and diseases. Some scholars even contend that the genetic code predetermines intelligence and is the root cause of many social ills, including poverty, crime, and violence. “Gene as fate” has become conventional wisdom.

Through the study of epigenetics, that notion at last may be proved outdated. Suddenly, for better or worse, we appear to have a measure of control over our genetic legacy.

You can read the original article here.

p.s: The figs were awesome. :)