WHAT I EAT – GRANOLA AND AVOCADOS

By Nancy Deville | Published: January 19, 2010

You thought I forgot about the WHAT I EAT series, but no, I was just traveling. So I will start now and try to give you a few days of examples before I leave in February for book signings in California.

John is on a skiing trip this weekend so I’m eating all my meals alone. I made granola yesterday using my Hippie Girl Granola recipe.

I went to a challenging yoga class and felt like I needed some good fats and proteins today. So I ate the granola as brunch with some whole French vanilla yogurt and two hardboiled eggs. Later I made dinner to take down to the TV room to sit by the fire and listen to the classical music station—while I answered emails, ha!

I made a pork roast a couple of days ago, and had my green juice earlier, so I just decided to heat up some slices of pork and eat it with a simple avocado salad (olive oil, balsamic, salt & pepper). And a beer. It was so good. I then had a Godiva chocolate.

For a snack later on I had a banana and an orange and a bottle of Pellegrino.

Hippie Girl Granola
You should adjust measurements to taste as this is one recipe that lends itself well to a little of this and a little of that. Multiply the recipe to fit your needs—granola freezes well.

1/4 cup each raw, organic pecans, walnuts, almond, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, or nuts and seeds of your choice
1 cup organic rolled oats
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1 tablespoon cinnamon or to your taste
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/8 cup unrefined, organic honey
1/8 cup organic currants
(or any dried fruit—figs, raisins, pineapple, apples, bananas)

Pre-heat oven to 350°. In a medium-sized bowl, combine all ingredients except currants, which become teeth-shatteringly hard if you bake them too long. Spread over a cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes. Stir and bake another 20 minutes. Remove from oven and stir in currants or other dried fruit. Cool. Keep in airtight container.

SIMPLE PORK ROAST

Nancy’s Mindless Marinade

Savory Version
In proportions appropriate for the size of your roast:
Lemon juice
White wine
Olive oil
Mustard
Crushed Garlic
Salt & Pepper

Sweet Version
In proportions appropriate for the size of your roast:

Lemon juice

White wine
Olive oil
Mustard
Honey
Salt & Pepper

Mix together and pour into a Ziplock bag with your roast. Squeeze around to coat and let marinade overnight.

Heat oven to 375º. Put roast into a roasting dish along with the rest of the marinade. Roast 30 minutes for each pound. To see what’s going on inside, I pierce the meat with a sharp knife toward the end, when the outside is well-browned even crispy to blackish looking. The meat will look pink but not red when it’s done. Pork is one of those meats that continues to cook after you take it out of the oven.

You can also put cut up Acorn squash, potatoes, carrots, and sweet potatoes in the roasting pan and they will soak up all the juices and extra marinade. Wonderful.

Posted in Care About Your Body, Health, Live Happy | 2 Comments

ENVY IS NOT A PRETTY THING, AND DOESN’T FEEL GOOD EITHER

By Nancy Deville | Published: January 17, 2010

Have you ever noticed that feeling jealous is a very uncomfortable emotion? It affects your entire body down to the ends of your hair. If you indulge in a gossip fest with someone else about the person you’re jealous over, you feel even worse.

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Buddha provided us with a doable, and easy solution for envy. It’s part of the “Four Immeasurables”: Love, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity (composure). I guess that means that there is simply no measure of worth that you can ascribe to these four emotions. Here they are (out of order so I can talk about sympathetic joy last).

Love is defined in Buddhism as wanting other people to be happy. Love is unconditional. The enemy of love is conditional love—you want something back. The opposite of love is wanting others to suffer and be unhappy. That is anger and hatred, emotions all humans struggle with.

The definition of compassion is wanting others to be free from suffering. You want to help. The enemy of compassion is pity, which puts others down as lower or less than yourself, and dulls the impulse to help the other person.

Equanimity refers to having an even temper even if something or someone totally annoys you. You don’t distinguish between a friend, an enemy, or a stranger. Your state of mind is tranquil regardless of what is happening around you. Your head is not full of agitation. The enemy of equanimity is indifference. You don’t give a damn about anyone or anything, maybe even yourself. Indifference is a form or egotism. The opposite of equanimity is anxiety, stress, worry, and paranoia.

Sympathetic joy is being happy with someone else’s good fortune or happiness. The enemy of sympathetic joy is hypocrisy and affectation. And the opposite of sympathetic joy is jealousy and envy. I think that sympathetic joy is a really good place to start to get a grasp on the Four Immeasurables because it’s an emotion you can apply in a conscious manner. When you do, you recognize immediately the different impact of sympathetic joy and envy.

I’ll give you two examples of employing sympathetic joy in my own experience. I was practicing yoga with a woman who just started out (and I have been practicing for 12 years). There were many poses that she could do much better than I could—or probably ever can. It was really starting to annoy me. But then I thought of sympathetic joy for her. I told her, “You have real aptitude for yoga and your form is really beautiful.” I immediately felt better and actually felt joy for her.

Recently there have been two authors who have ripped up the bestseller charts with their books. They both had two books out, the first ones major bestsellers and then follow ups intended to capitalize on their tidal wave success. The first author’s first book I thought was one of the most enjoyable reads I’d experienced in years. I found her follow up book to be a dud, but it was selling briskly and getting rave reviews. The second author’s first book I found to be self-indulgent and self-congratulatory. I wouldn’t even buy her second book, and it galled me to see it reviewed by all the major players and to see her face plastered everywhere.

The envy didn’t feel good. So I started thinking about these authors as real people with dreams. They had worked hard and deserved to bask in their success. Both are worthy writers who will go on to contribute to the literary world. I started thinking positive thoughts about them, and the ugly envy dissipated. That is the power of sympathetic joy. And we all need to employ it daily even if just to creates a little joy in our own world.

Posted in Care About Your Body, Live Happy, Yoga, Your Mission | Leave a comment

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IS COMMON

By Nancy Deville | Published: January 16, 2010

Throughout the world, one out of every three women is physically or sexually abused at one time or another in her life. Rates of violence against women have reached 70 percent in some countries. Violence against women includes:

  • Being beaten regularly
  • Being raped by husband, or other family member
  • Being raped by military person or stranger
  • Being imprisoned and even put to death for being raped
  • Sold into sexual slavery
  • Having acid thrown in her face
  • Being forced to incinerate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre
  • Being forced to kill herself
  • Being forced into marriage (even if she is a child)
  • Being killed (“honor killings”)

The International Violence Against Women Act of 2008 was introduced in the 110th Congress, but never came to a vote before Congress adjourned. Amnesty International is continuing to work on advancing the I-VAWA in the 111th Congress. This Act would (mindbogglingly) amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. I suppose it’s better late than never.

You can read more about this Act on Amnesty International’s website.  And read what you can do to help stop the violence.

Posted in Modern Slavery, Sex Slavery, Sex Trafficking | Leave a comment

SWEAT YOUR BUTT OFF

By Nancy Deville | Published: January 15, 2010

DSC_0077

Bikrim yoga is one of the various types of yoga I practice regularly. I’ve heard people say that you lose weight from exercising in the heat because of how much you sweat. But I think there is some confusion as to why you lose weight from sweating. Of course you can rush home and weigh yourself and exclaim, “I’ve lost four pounds!” But that water, and weight, will be replaced as soon as you drink.

Still, people who regularly sweat are thinner than those who don’t.

It has to do with toxins.

Even if you eat nothing but organic food you can hide but you can’t escape environmental toxins. Every year over 6 billion pounds of chemicals are released into our atmosphere and water supply. Mercury spews out of cement kilns. A lot of people still have mercury amalgams in their teeth and every time those fillings get chewed on mercury vapors are released. People who can’t afford bottled water are drinking fluoride. People who can afford bottled water are drinking water from bottles that have sat in their sun-baked cars, emitting xenohormones. You would have to live in a bubble to not be exposed to second hand smoke, gasoline fumes, volatile organic compounds (from new carpeting, and that “new car smell”), pesticides, prescription drugs, fire retardants, solvents, plastics (and the xenohormones they emit when heated in the microwave or in your car), polymers, and styrenes. I could go on!

When your toxic load is high you’re going to suffer from fatigue, lethargy, depression, headaches, allergies, chronic infection, colds and flu, nervousness, sensitivity to perfume and other fragrances, memory loss, fits of anger, and joint pains. Environmental toxins play a major role in the epidemic of cancer, autoimmune conditions, and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder. Last but not least, toxins are fattening!

The body is an amazing machine that is programmed for survival. If it were to allow all those toxins to float around in your bloodstream you’d get sicker and die faster. So it cleverly stows them away in fat cells. This is one huge reason why you don’t want to eat the meat and milk of animals raised in CAFOS, because these abused animals always receive copious amounts of drugs and eat pesticide and herbicide laden feed. Those poisons migrate to the animals’ fat cells. And when you eat tortured animals, you’re eating all the toxins they consumed or where otherwise exposed to.

The problem is, that if you want to lose weight, and you’ve got a big toxic load, your body’s gonna say, “Uh-uh, no way, cause I need the fat cells as storage repositories for all that poison!”

Then you start vigorous bike rides or spinning, jogging, Bikrim, or other activities that make you sweat a lot. Out of your pores comes the poison that’s been stored in your cells. When you toxic load goes down, your body is more likely to shed fat cells. That’s why “Sweating your butt off,” really does mean exactly that.

Posted in Health, Yoga | 1 Comment

MEN WHO BUY WOMEN DESERVE LONG JAIL SENTANCES

By Nancy Deville | Published: January 13, 2010

In previous blogs I’ve talked about starting out writing about sex trafficking in the early 90’s when no one knew it even existed. Today more people are speaking out. Like two time Academy Award winning actress, Emma Thompson.

The story of this nineteen-year old Moldovan woman is typical of what is happening to girls trafficked from Eastern block countries, only she was very lucky to have escaped. Moldova is a landlocked country sandwiched between Romania and the Ukraine. It’s extremely impoverished and is a hunting ground for sex traffickers. Many of these girls leave home tricked into thinking that they will be getting good jobs in the west so that they can support their children and families. Instead they end up in Italy, where picking up a streetwalker has become so affordable that Italian men are indulging and society has accepted the practice. In other words, people are ignoring the fact that the girls are working as slaves. They can’t run to the police because the police are their customers. The sex slavers threaten, and then follow through, with harming and even killing their family members if the girls try to escape.

Very few stories on sex trafficking focus on the men who buy women. In my opinion, men who buy trafficked girls should be given heavy jail sentences, including and especially the police.

Posted in Sex Slavery, Sex Trafficking, Women's Issues | Leave a comment

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