Annie’s Healthy Weight & Eating Blog

It’s been quite a ride, being a student and teacher of yoga through the last two decades. Like riding a tsunami. At this point, yoga has washed over the country, and nearly every single family in America has been touched. Who’d ever thought that so many of our moms, dads, aunts, and preschool counsins would be doing yoga.

So, it’s really high time for the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) to hold their first Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR). A fascinating collection of clinical researchers, medical professionals, and yogis and yoginis will gather in LA in mid-January to discuss the state of this rapidly growing field.

When I first began teaching yoga, I was amazed at the quasi-health advisor role that many yoga teachers play with just a month or two of training (and those were the ones to took more comprehensive trainings). This after training for nearly twenty years to become a Registered Dietitian, qualified to skillfull counsel people on what they should eat, or how to determine therapeutic nutritional needs.

Well, things are getting better, as far as defined national certifications for yoga teachers (though many rightfully mourn what is lost with the quantification of yoga training, when it was traditionally a guru-teacher style training, and the guru followed his own track - the trackless track).

Coming back to therapeutics and the symposium, my abstract: Yoga and nutrition for weight management: a case study in program rationale and design was acception for inclusion in the program. Who-ho. I’ll post the abstrack here after the conference, as I think I need to let the IAYT have first publication rights.

Yoga therapy is a gem for those with mind-body issues, include wieght and eating issues. Having all these yogis gathering to talk about ‘what works best for this, what works best for that, and still keeping it the wonderful practice that it is’…will benefit us all.

Read more about the association and the conference at the website, www.IAYT.org.

Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, wrote one of the better digestions of the whole spinach problem in last weekend’s NYTimes Magazine. You can read the article on his website.

In “The Vegetable-Industrial Complex”, Pollen hits on the big problem - that, as poet-farmer (and underappreciated American treasure) Wendell Berry points out, when we took animals off farms and put them into feedlots, we had, in effect, taken one elegant solution - where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops - and created two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.

It’s the American way to then address these problems with everymore technically complex solutions (Pollen says look for a call to irradiate all fruit and vegetables..), rather than waking up to the simple reality that, as far as food goes, the simple old way may be better.

You’re worth the time and energy.

Our food supply is getting more centralized and more processed by the day. What can you do? Eat local and get to know the farmer that grows your food whenever you can. If it interests you, read about the issue in the growing number of books exploring food quality. A few fascinating reads to start with include Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, (look them up on Amazon) and Pollen’s book.

When VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club first aired a few years ago, I hated everything about it. Using only the number on the scale to determine a winner or loser, the berating that the participants got, how crummy they felt about themselves and how much that was reinforced by everything about the show…

hated it.

But I have to say, during my late-afternoon break, I’ve been tuning in, and liking what I’ve seen. I think they’re actually reruns - the sessions with Carney Wilson (whom I love), and the guy from the love boat. And while they still focus on the number on the scales, the show is much better at putting it all in context (that the pounds are a result of lifestyle changes, and that even if someone misses a ‘goal’, they get much more positive reinforcement). It’s not about berating, it’s much more real.

It may be the celebrities they happened to have - they had a really positive, motivated group. But too, the judges were a great combination, and I thougth they were great.

Not too crazy about their website, but there is a BMI calculator on it, as well as diet and fitness inforomation from the MD on the show. You can check it out at www.vh1.com.