The Art of Healthy Living

This morning I checked out YouTube - I admit, I hadn’t checked it and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I did a search of nutrition, and one of the first clips I watched was Steve from The Office’s video, “Slimming down with Steve”.

Note that the same day I linked to this video on YouTube, it was taken off. This link goes to another place I saw the video. If the link stops working, you can probably google it…

If you want a lift and think Steve’s funny, spend a five of your precious minues watching this.

Have a healthy week.

Annie

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.

What a sad state that organic spinach was the source of the latest break of e-coli. While we may never know the root cause of the outbreak, the government got decent grades for their quick response.

The USDA and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) both suggest that we refrain from eating fresh packaged spinach until the investigation has been completed. In the meantime, it’s a great time to remember again to buy local, throughouly wash all produce, and peel it when you can, cook it when you can. Would these steps have prevented the outbreak? Cooking would have, but the others, its still hard to say.

To hear more about what CSPI has to say about the outbreak, check www.cspinet.org

The big story out of fashion week in Milan was the banning of models with BMI of less than 18. A BMI of 18.5 is considered underweight. So just how thin are the too-thin models? For a 5′8″ woman, a BMI of 18 would put you at 120#. If you are 5′4″, weight 105# to make an 18, and if you are 5″2″, you’ll need to be 99# to have a BMI of 18.

Overall, I think this is great news for women everywhere. Other cities are considering following suit. Unhealthy just insn’t beautiful. I hope this incident sparks a trend.

You can follow the headlines on this at:

http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=13488541&src=rss/oddlyEnoughNews

For those of you who’ve known for years (and years and years) that I’ve been working on a book combining yoga and nutrition for weight management, hang tight because it’s very very close to being available.

At this point, books will be available to ship in early November. The book cover is beautiful to look at (thanks for designer Peri Poloni-Gabriel of Knockout Books, www.knockoutbooks.com), and the whole package came together with the help of many many people, but Ellen Reid, (www.bookshep.com) really helped launch the project into the world. I’m eternally grateful to these women, and to many more folks whom helped me along the long road to beautiful-book-in-hand.

You can see some of the artwork and read the introduction on my website, www.anniekbay.com. And you can pre-order the book - we’ll pick up the shipping and handling of books you order now, and you won’t be charged until they actually ship. Please note that our site is soon to be up and running…as of this writing, it’s not quite up…

Much more to come…

Annie

Hello all. The day before the 4th, here on Nantucket. July is a real glory month on the island - the water’s warm, people are happy, lots of fresh produce…

Here are my wishes for this blog.

I wish this blog could be a coming-together place for women and men concerned about their weight where bloggers leave with a little more appreciative attitude toward themselves and their bodies.

I wish this blog would teach me what the heck a blog is.

I wish this blog could be a real coversation between real people.

Happy holiday, everyone. May you be free.

Annie