Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

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I eat healthy because I want to. Some may say I don’t have a choice, but I prefer to embody the reality of my physical container as a temple, and to keep the temple clean and sacred, I only put the best fuel in it. If I eat bread or glutinous grains of any kind, I blow up like a toad and look like I’m carrying triplets. Discomfort doesn’t begin to cover it.

And when I eat animal products (increasingly rare) they’re organic - meat, eggs and cheese, because even those with their heads still far down in the sand have pretty much acknoweledged the contamination of world food supplies with pesticides, hormones and the like. Ditto veggies, which must be organic.

Above is a picture of my kitchen counter with a few staples on it and my award-winning (with family at least) recipe for Pumpkin Apple Crumblebutter. So healthy it counts as a beefy serving of veggies AND fruit, and I lived on it as a treat and dessert while I was writing the book. Click the link to go to the recipe. It’s gluten free and you won’t even miss Pumpkin Pie at holidays with this stashed in your pantry. 

But if I’m back in my home state visiting friends or in suburban areas, organic is hard to come by, so I’m okay making do with the best I can get. Lots of filtered water, lots of farmer’s market fare. At home, we keep healthy foods on hand and eat more out of the cupboard than outside the house. I pretty much figure out dinner a few hours before we eat.

But I was very suprised to learn that on the other end of the scale from anorexia and bulimia, is a zone where healthy eating becomes unhealthy obsession. Complete with a quiz of course, to see if "this is you".

Check this out, from an article from the NBC11 local television station:

Is there a dark side to such healthy living?  Bay Area doctor Steven Bratman coined the term "orthorexia" from the Greek word ortho, which means correct. The disorder is not in the obsession to be thin, but with being pure.

El Camino Hospital Dietician Kim Bandelier said orthorexia is not a medically-recognized diagnosis, but it’s real and can be very dangerous.

"We normally see it associated with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). It’s a symptom of a mental disorder. They definitely have an unhealthy preoccupation with food," Bandelier said.

Dieticians say the vast majority of healthy eaters are nowhere near orthorexic. But like any eating disorder, there are red flags to watch out for. One of the signs is when someone no longer enjoys food.

Alexis Perlmutter said she and many of her friends have some orthorexic tendencies.  "I used to love Big Macs. Now I look at Big Mac and I think, ‘Poison, poison, poison’ and I won’t eat one," Perlmutter said.

There are some questions you can ask yourself to see if you are obsessed with health foods and may be at risk of developing orthorexia. This quiz is from Dr. Bratman’s book "Health Food Junkies." Give yourself a point for each question you answer with "yes."

• Do you spend more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food? (For four hours, give yourself two points).
  
• Do you plan tomorrow’s food today?
  
• Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it?
  
• Have you found that as the quality of your diet has increased, the quality of your life has correspondingly diminished?
  
• Do you keep getting stricter with yourself?
  
• Do you sacrifice experiences you once enjoyed to eat the food you believe is right?
  
• Do you feel an increased sense of self-esteem when you are eating healthy food? Do you look down on others who do not?
  
• Do you feel guilt or self-loathing when you stray from your diet?
  
• Does your diet socially isolate you from others?
  
• When you are eating the way you are supposed to, do you feel a peaceful sense of total control?

Light said she’s aware of her hyper-healthy attitude and she believes it that keeps her in balance. So, as the phrase goes, too much of a good thing can be bad for you, even when it comes to health food.

The original article is here: at the NBC11 website

CHICAGO - The first follow-up of a landmark study of hormone use after menopause shows heart problems linked with the pills seem to fade after women stop taking them, while surprising new cancer risks appear.

That heart trouble associated with hormones may not be permanent is good news for millions of women who quit taking them after the government study was halted six years ago because of heart risks and breast cancer.

But the new risks for other cancers, particularly lung tumors, in women who’d taken estrogen-progestin pills for about five years puzzled the researchers and outside experts….

….Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a New York University women’s heart specialist, said the study underscores that in addition to cancer screening, women who stop taking hormones need to find other ways to keep their bones strong, including getting more calcium and exercise.

Well we knew that ingested hormones were bad for you, but here’s even more proof. Get a bone density test if you’re over 35, don’t smoke or quit if you already do, exercise like a rabid rottweiler and drink your milk or oyster shell calcium with an acidic chaser like a shot glass of orange juice or a teaspoon of lemon juice, to help it absorb. Don’t forget if you’re taking a calcium supplement to make sure it has Vitamin D in it to aid assimilation of the calcium inside the body - milk in America already has Vitamin D added. And please do go read the whole article here

Forwarded from powerful beauty, and ace girlfriend, Jasmine White (right) is this "friendly chain mail".  Send it to all the Beautiful Women in your life!  

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Did you know that it’s Beautiful Women Month? Well it is, and that means you! I’m supposed to send this to FIVE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, and if you’re a woman reading this, YOU are one of them!!!  

Below is a wonderful poem Audrey Hepburn wrote  when asked to share her "beauty tips." It was read at her funeral years later:

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness…

For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people

For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.

For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day. (or your mother, sibling or lover  ~ Maryam)

For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone…

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed;

Never throw out anyone.

And one Maryam-tip:

For a smooth and wrinkle-free face, live in the Now where there are truly no problems to cause brow-furrowing.

Remember,
if you ever need a helping hand,
you will find one at the end of each of your arms.

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands;
one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.

If you share this with another woman,
something good will happen.
You will boost another woman’s self esteem,
and she will know that you care about her.

It’s
BEAUTIFUL Women Month
TAG
YOU’RE IT!

When I see disinformation, even very well-meaning disinformation, I’m passionate about correcting it if I can to spare someone some grief. Recently at LifeHacker, the very excellent blog edited by Gina Trapani, there was an article on "Combatting the Common Cold" that contained the advice to eat pasta with garlicky red sauce. Yes’m to the garlicky ragu, not so to the pasta. (about which read more, below)

Inflamed with all the passion of the recently converted, I wrote an off-the-cuff sermon on the evils of gluten which I also give you here. Please take heed. You cannot imagine how very much more healthy you will feel without the "glue" of wheat-based products gumming up your insides!

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Exclude Pasta, make sure it’s gluten-free pasta or better - strands of spaghetti squash - over which you ladle that garlicky ragu. Pasta and other items made of glutinous grains such as wheat, rye, barley, spelt, kamut and millet all form mucus in the body. If your system is clogged with mucus to begin with, and a virus piles more mucus on, it takes you twice to three times as long to recover from ANY illness, no matter what enhancements you use. (Image courtesy of www.kidsaware.co.uk/ where you can get gluten allergy stickers and other gluten-free goods)

Researchers also posit mucus-filled intestines clogged with undigested food, (which can barely extract adequate nutrients from the food we take in) to be the primary source of most of the diseases we face as human beings. Where there is excess mucus present, digestion - and health - is a dicey proposition.

The 7-10 days doctors suggest is the "normal recovery time" for a cold is for the average American body clogged with mucus and fighting for health on several different fronts. Most Westerners are mucus filled due to the fact that the average American and European diet contains a disproportionately large amount of milk and glutinous grains. By "mucus filled", I don’t necessarily mean you have drippy sinuses (though this is certainly a symptom) - this kind of mucus is in the body’s cells and tissues inside organs, muscle and particularly, the intestines. When mucus fills the intestines, food is allowed to ferment, bacteria and parastic infestations can gain hold and low-grade inflamation moves over the body without our even being aware of it.

If you’re gassy after a meal including grain or dairy, this is why. If you have freakish amounts of gas and are wondering how to get rid of it - go gluten-free. Ditto infections that keep coming back and that you just can’t seem to cure. It’s no accident that the primary component of the cold cure above is garlic. Garlic wipes out intestinal parasites in large enough quantities, and is both a virucide and bactericide. Large enough quantities I should note, are quantities big enough to make you severely antisocial, and cause gas and loose bowels of their own. Don’t worry though, you’re excreting the toxins that were making you sick in the first place.

I would also add to the above 10 - 15 mg of zinc every three hours and Vitamin C to bowel tolerance (again, until it makes you gassy) every four hours and sambucus nigra - elderberry - extract, tablets or syrup which has been proven in European studies to fight even the flu virus. On a tertiary level, what a cold is trying to tell you is to slow down. We have cold and other viruses in our environment all the time. We become susceptible when we are stressed, hurried, not eating well or taking care of ourselves.

Ask yourself: "what is my body trying to tell me?"

More On Why You Should Consider Going Gluten-Free:
My pre and post-gluten-free recovery times for an average upper respiratory ailment are night and day different, as most who are gluten and dairy-free find. Unlike the most common of gluten ailments, celiac disease, I do not have serious physical problems - my body is simply allergic to gluten like most Westerners,  and produces gas and liquid in response to it. I had no idea until a naturopathic doctor pointed this out to me by looking at my abdomen girth and measuring it against the rest of my body. When I stopped eating gluten (which was easier than I thought it would be), I lost 3.5" off my abdomen in two weeks, from elimination of the gas and edema (excess liquids) that the allergy caused.

What a great benefit!

Like my "GF" (gluten-free) kindred, I also have by my own reckoning, about forty percent more available energy than I did when eating grains and dairy. I don’t miss grains at all. GF folks can eat rice, nuts, seeds and some of us can also eat corn. Ancient grains are also available to us, such as amaranth and quinoa and grass seed products that are used like grains, such as Ethiopian teff. None of these place the mucus burden on our bodies that wheat, rye, barley and the like do.

And on the virus front….most of the gluten-free find we either just don’t have colds anymore, or it’s a matter of a 48 hour recovery at most. I used to take two weeks to recover from a cold on average, when I was eating gluten. The American Academy of Family Physicians also links gluten with viral issues. (Source: http://www.aafp.org/afp/980301ap/pruessn.html)

YMMV, but when "conquering" a cold, at least for the time it takes you to get over it, consider going gluten and dairy free and taking more water than you think you need. Most Westerners are also chronically dehydrated as we tend to drink coffee, tea and soda over plain, pure water. You’ll get over your cold faster, and your body will appreciate the vacation!

Some sites you might like to visit for more info:

Shauna James Ahern’s awesome blog: http://glutenfreegirl.com
Wikipedia’s Explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet
GF Diet Helps Autism (Aspergers, ADD and more): http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001526.htm
Karina’s Kitchen: Gluten-Free Goddess: http://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com/

Or, simply Google "gluten-free" to get more information about this healthy and health-inducing lifestyle. Enjoy!

I love the Everything Yoga blog. Diane had a great quotation for the Winter Solstice:

Take time to do yoga and meditation on the Winter Solstice,

A moment of time in the midst of your busy holiday schedule,

To acknowledge healing and the possibility of a miracle in every moment.

I’ve revamped my Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) Tutorial "EFT In A Nutshell: The Quickstart" to make it even easier to understand. For the "knowledge of healing and possibility of a miracle" using only your hands and mind check it out here:

http://maryamwebster.com/eftbasics

Happy Solstice!! 

Warmest Love & Blessings,
Maryam

This just out from Watson Wyatt Worldwide Research Reports: stress plays a large part in why employees job-surf and high-pressure companies find loyalty difficult to guarantee. Execs, take notice. If you don’t already have one, you NEED a stress reduction program in your company NOW.

Read the below and contact me if your company of 20 - 1500 employees is willing to have:

a) Far fewer collateral sick days

b) Employees able to take pro-active care of self and others

c) A comfortable, respectful work environment

d) Sky-high morale at ALL levels of the company

e) No snags to trip up and derail the workforce (and those few that might happen easily resolved)

f) Serious longterm employee loyalty and support

If you’re willing to do some of the most pleasurable work you’ve ever done as a team, contact me for a complementary prescriptive analysis.

From: watsonwyatt.com/research/resrender.asp?id=2007-US-0164&page=1

Playing to Win in a Global Economy – 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards® Report and United States Findings

Executive Summary

The increasingly global market for talent makes it critical for companies to understand the factors that affect employee attraction and retention everywhere they do business. Organizations that do not balance financial imperatives and employee reward preferences risk losing their best talent.

The 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards® study examines how companies in Asia-Pacific, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States are tackling attraction and retention issues and reward management. The first half of the report highlights the similarities and differences between the regions, while the second half focuses on U.S.-specific data.

Global Key Findings

Regardless of region, the study found:

• The majority of employers have problems attracting critical-skill employees (70 percent) and top-performing employees (67 percent).
• Employers have an incomplete understanding of why employees join or leave their organizations. For example, employees rank stress as a top reason they would leave, but it is not even among the top five reasons cited by employers.
• When employees are satisfied with stress levels and work/life balance, they are more inclined to stay with their companies (86 percent versus 64 percent) and more likely to recommend them as places to work (88 percent versus 55 percent).
• Financially high-performing firms get performance management right. For example, their managers are much more likely to link organizational performance to rewards (51 percent versus 38 percent of low-performing organizations).
• Clearly setting expectations and delivering on the reward promise is a formula for a more engaged workforce. Sixty-nine percent of employees who say their employers succeed at both promise and delivery are highly engaged, versus roughly 25 percent overall.

U.S. Key Findings

• Employers report difficulty in attracting and retaining employees — particularly, top-performing and critical-skill employees — for the fourth year in a row. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of employers are having difficulty attracting critical-skill employees, while 60 percent are having difficulty attracting top performers.
• Consistent with the global findings, U.S. employers and employees have different ideas about why employees join or leave (see below*). As a result, some of the actions that employers are taking to attract and retain employees may be counterproductive.
• As employers continue to manage their cost structures, they are putting more money into variable pay and raising the bar for performance. As in 2007, more than one in five (21 percent) increased the size of individual target awards for 2008.
• Merit-increase budgets for 2007 remained relatively stable, at an average 3.6 percent, and are expected to rise only slightly, to 3.7 percent, in 2008.
• Highly engaged employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers than are other employees.

Interesting stuff, no? It says basically what most savvy execs have known all along - value someone appropriately, keep them engaged in interesting duties that fulfill them and invest them with personal power insofar as possible. Do this and there isn’t anything they wouldn’t do to stay on the job and tout the company and its products to all they meet.

Why employees actually leave is found in another Watson Wyatt report (here and in charts below) of the European market where we learn that there is a large gap between the employee’s values and the employers perceptions of those values.

You can’t market where the market doesn’t exist. Employers wanting to pitch their employees on longevity of their position within the company, need to take a more prosaic set of employee needs into account: people hate long commutes, they don’t want to spend most of their waking hours during the week in a pressure cooker environment with little to no release, and they want to have some security when they finally do decide to take a job. That and a dollop of feeling like they’re in control of their life. From the study:

"…employers need to increase their focus on more immediate needs as well, such as the nature of the work they do now, and the internal and external pressures that affect employees’ working experience, like stress and length of commute.”

What attracts employees?
The three reasons most frequently given

Rank	Employers	Employees
1	Career development opportunities (55 per cent)	Nature of work (49 per cent)
2	Employer reputation (51 per cent)	Job security (34 per cent)
3	Base pay (43 per cent)	Base pay (30 per cent)
4	Company culture (33 per cent)	Length of commute (29 per cent)
5	Nature of work (23 per cent)	Employer reputation (24 per cent)
Percentages reporting element as one of the top three reasons European employees consider joining an organisation

Why they leave?
The three reasons most frequently given

Rank	Employers	Employees
1	Career development opportunities (49 per cent)	Stress levels (35 per cent)
2	Promotion opportunities (48 per cent)	Base pay (34 per cent)
3	Base pay (43 per cent)	Promotion opportunities (27 per cent)
4	Relationship with manager (31 per cent)	Career development (25 per cent)
5	Work/life balance (28 per cent)	Work/life balance (20 per cent)
Percentages reporting element as one of the top three reasons European employees consider joining an organisation

Found here: www.watsonwyatt.com/news/press.asp?ID=18396

Is this you? Your company? Then you may be able to benefit from what I offer executives and their teams. Contact me for your company’s complementary prescriptive assessment.

WIth this dish you’ll never miss pumpkin pie at the holidays. The "crumblebutter" portion is great for an Apple Brown Betty, cobbler topper or with spicing amendments, a spice cake or coffee cake streusel. You’ll have to fight even the kids off to finish this one. It is a foregone conclusion that as with all my recipes, this calls for all organic ingredients, or as many as you can find.  

The Pumpkin - Apple

1 baked squash of any kind. Pumpkin, obviously, but butternut, acorn and banana squash work just as well

Bake small, cleaned and quartered pumpkin in oven in a traditional manner or in glass dish with 1/4 c. water, covered with a towel for 6 - 8 mins in the microwave. For extra added goodness, toast the pumpkin seeds with a little good olive oil and sprinkle to top the dish. You have to chew these up and spit out the hull, but the meat of pumpkin seeds has too many vitamins, minerals and precious natural oils to simply throw out. Enjoy.

Scrub one firm fleshed organic apple such as Fuji, Jonathan, Gala or Granny Smith and slice into eighths, removing core, stem and seeds. Set aside.

The Crumblebutter Streusel

This is where the gluten-free gourmet gets to haul the sorghum flour out from wherever it’s been stashed for the last six months and really go to town. This crumble can be used as noted above for a variety of dessert toppings, just vary the fruit underneath. Or beans, if you prefer. The local mosque in my hometown made a mean navy bean pie that rivaled pumpkin in its taste, smoothness and protein count. Be creative with it!

4 tbsp sorghum flour
1tbsp + 1 tsp tapioca flour
8 tbsp finely ground coconut meal
8 tbsp finely ground almond meal
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp cinnamon or 3/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice
4 tbsp Blue Agave syrup
4 tbsp softened organic butter

Mix all ingredients in a bowl with a fork until they form a crumbly mash. It’s okay to leave a few large pieces, it doesn’t all have to be uniform. Set aside.

The Puttin’ It All Together Method

Arrange large chunks of cooked pumpkin in an oven or microwave safe bowl. Drizzle the tops lightly with Blue Agave syrup which is very low in glycemic value and can be eaten safely by those with sugar issues. You may wish to substitute honey - either will do. Sprinkle the crumblebutter streusel over the pumpkin. Arrange slices of apple atop the pumpkin in a nice circular pattern. Sprinkle this with a little extra cinnamon or a light dusting of pumpkin pie  spice.

Drizzle a few extra teaspoons of Blue Agave syrup over the top. I like throwing a handful of pecans, broken into tiny pieces over the top for added protien and to round out the "brown betty" type of taste. So much the better if you’ve first roasted them with a little olive oil, but raw works just as well.

Broil on medium heat for a few minutes until the butter melts and apples go soft. Watch carefully - the baking time will depend on your oven. Alternatively, microwave uncovered for 2 minutes. If you microwave, the crumblebutter streusel will not brown, but will otherwise taste just fine.

Serve immediately. The decadent may wish to pour a dollop of heavy cream over the top, but artificial whipped toppings are absolutely verboten. This dish is remarkably low in sugar, high in fiber and protein. If you have it with a side of yogurt, (or mix a little honey and cinnamon into the yogurt and use it as a topping) Pumpkin Apple Crumblebutter makes a nourishing, hot and filling treat for winter morning breakfasts. A dish similar to this has long been our home’s standard Solstice and Christmas morning fare.

Enjoy!

I’m a pink ribbon kid. Mom, grandma and two aunts on both sides of the family all either had or died of breast cancer. I’ve decided I won’t be doing the same, thank you very much. Tapping on the acupoints around the breast, including the thymus, helps keep the breasts free and clear of toxins, and the emotional issues can also be worked on by tapping as well using EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique.

Wonder of wonders too, last night I heard on the news that a compound found in cannabis, CBD, greatly slows the spread of aggressive breast cancer cells without the painful side effects of other treatments currently available.

Researchers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco warn that this is not a recommendation to start smoking though, as you can’t get enough CBD this way. CBD, unlike that other cannabis compound, THC, does not get you high. The proposed CBD  treatment would be the first all-natural, non-toxic breast cancer treatment, without the serious side effects of radiation and chemotherapy.

Having watched strong and precious women in my life become shrunken shells of their former selves while on radiation and chemo, this news comes as a great comfort. This herbal form of medicine may in time come to replace chemotherapy if all test results pan out.

My grandmother, Grace Evans Ratliff, a natural herbal healer who herself battled breast cancer, said that there is no disease known to man that God did not put a plant in the ground to either help or cure.

How sad that the plant in question happens to be illegal. Perhaps this research will at least see cannabis admitted once again, to the American Pharmacopoeia and world-wide materia medica - as it has been, safely and effectively for thousands of years.

Read the full article here:

http://cbs5.com/health/breast.cancer.marijuana.2.571109.html