HomeSpunHealers

Generally, when one thinks of gardening only thoughts of having lots of fresh vegetables, or beautiful flowers, at little expense come to mind.  However, there’s much more to gardening than meets the eye.  Gardening is beneficial in the following ways:

Body: Gardening requires a certain amount of physical stamina. You might want to consider trading in your boring tread mill routine once in a while for some fresh air and gardening.  You will get quite a work out with all the bending, stretching, chopping, digging, kneeling, and squatting that gardening requires. Will you burn calories? You bet’cha!  Not only that, all of your hard work will not only pay off in terms of weight loss, but depending on the type of gardening that you do, you will have lots of fresh vegetables, and/or flowers.

Mind:  Gardening is great therapy for those of us with too much on our minds. It’s as good as meditation for me. I leave my “to do” lists in the house, all of my worries on the back porch, and I am fully engaged in the moment.  Fully present in only the here and now of gardening.   Sweet peace!

Spirit:  There’s a certain pride you feel in successfully growing your own flowers and vegetables.  A lot of work goes into working a garden, but a lot of love goes into it too. There’s also the added bonus of being able to share the fruits of your labor with others. The single act of giving is great for self esteem, and also sends a powerful message to the Universe which will respond in kind to you.

In essence….Gardening not only “does a body good”, but it’s great for the mind and spirit as well. :) 

I hope you’ll enjoy the photos from my own gardening efforts.

Abundantly Yours,

HomeSpun Granny

I don’t have a yard that is designed to grow a lot of things that require full sun, but I have a very sunny side porch that is suitable for pots of flowers and vegetables. Since I only have a little room there, I have chosen to grow two pots of tomatoes. Nothing tastes any better than a fresh tomato, still warm from the sun. I already have six little green tomatoes growing and soaking up that sun, and pretty soon, I should be able to sink my teeth into them. Not only are they delicious, though; they are very nutritionally healthy for us. I heard Dr. Oz on the Oprah show call tomato paste a miracle substance!

What I’ve read about tomatoes is that they are very high in vitamin C and E and in a substance called lycopene. From what I understand, it’s the lycopene that is the “miracle” substance in tomatoes. What lycopene does, besides giving the bright red color to tomatoes, it’s an antioxidant that may help prevent prostate cancer and some other forms of cancer, heart disease, and other serious diseases. In the body, lycopene is deposited in the liver, lungs, prostate gland, colon and skin. Its concentration in body tissues tends to be higher than all other carotenoids. This is why it’s so valuable to us.

Dr. Oz says that while eating fresh tomatoes is good for us, eating the processed tomato juice, tomato sauce, and tomato paste is even better for us because the lycopene is concentrated. And if you add healthy olive oil to the mix, the body absorbs the lycopene even better and we have the beginnings of a miracle working in our bodies.

There are so many things that can be made from tomato sauce and tomato paste. Who doesn’t love a delicious bowl of chili or a fresh, steaming bowl of vegetable soup? How about a succulent tomato sauce over pasta? I even remember my mother making a spice cake when I was a little girl that had a can of tomato soup in it! You can probably think of hundreds of recipes that include tomatoes.

So, this summer, while I enjoy my fresh tomatoes, I’ll enjoy other vitamin rich vegetables and fruits. A diet full of vegetables and fruits is a diet that will improve our bodies and make us healthier than ever. And it’s so scrumptious, too!

It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone speak about the negative aspects of diet soda. In fact, not just the diet soda but the sweetener used in the production of said soda and other products. Fake sugar. Saves us calories, so how could it be bad?

On the one hand… there are numerous reports that studies are finding it harmful. Poisoning from the sweetener can mimic MS and other illnesses, causing misdiagnoses. One report notes that it suppresses serotonin which makes us crave carbohydrates. Other reports state that it messes up our metabolism, causes Metabolic syndrome, and breaks down into some pretty nasty toxins.

Metabolic syndrome includes risk factors for the increase of heart disease and diabetes. Such factors include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood glucose levels.

To be fair, I flipped over to the people who support the alternative sweetener. They claim that it is perfectly safe and FDA approved. Of course, noting that these praises are coming from such places as The American Beverage Association and The Calorie Control Council, one has to wonder what they benefit from taking that stand.

They are quick to note studies that have deemed the sweetener safe. However, these studies are outdated, in my humble opinion. Current studies are just that… current. The studies they point to are in the late 1980’s to 2002- and I believe one in 2004. Even taking into account a study from 2004, that was 4 years ago. Research is ongoing and new things are learned all the time. What was safe in 2002 may no longer be as safe due to the knowledge we have gained through research.

I can’t help but think of a certain diet drug that was once tossed around like candy. It, too, was FDA approved. I don’t think anyone will forget the devastation it left behind. People got sick. People died. People are scarred for life. It was once a “safe” thing to put into our body.

One of the most recent studies was done by Purdue University. Their report was published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience in Febraury of 2008. Their study showed that artificial sweeteners caused weight gain in the lab tests done. I don’t think we can turn a blind eye to such a recent study done by respectable researchers.

I drink diet soda all the time. In fact, I eat many things that are sweetened with artificial sweeteners. After doing the research and listening to what other people have experienced, I am going to pay closer attention to the products I purchase.

I won’t lie. Giving up diet soda makes me sad. Inside, I am rebelling like you would not believe. I don’t want to give up my soda. If I could paint a picture of how this makes me feel it would include a toddler throwing a tantrum. However, I was just doing the research myself, and I can not deny the things I’ve learned. I would no more eat a poison laced muffin if someone told me it was poisoned. Eating that muffin would be crazy. Continuing to ingest diet soda and other artificially sweetened products would be equally as crazy.

Farewell diet soda… I will mourn you, but I would rather hang out on the safe side and improve my chances at a healthy life.

My grandmother used to tell me that pets make good folks. I’m sure I didn’t understand what she meant at the time; I just knew I loved pets. I’ve had cats, dogs, birds, guinea pigs, rabbits, and fish, and I’ve loved every one of them. But I know now what Granny meant. She meant that the responsibility of taking care of a pet makes for a responsible person in general, and the love that is given to an animal develops our ability to love in general. Pets are funny and comforting and unconditionally loving.

I always had a pet or pets growing up, but in my first marriage, my husband didn’t want any pets. He had never had pets growing up, and he felt they were aggravating and a general nuisance. That viewpoint was that of his parents, and once our three year old son asked Santa for a kitty cat for Christmas, he gave in and we had our first and only family pet. We unimaginatively named him K. C. (for Kitty Cat) and the abbreviation seemed to give manly character to an otherwise “girly” sounding name. My boys always wanted a dog, but their dad wouldn’t give in on that. But after we separated and he moved out, one of the first things I did was get a dog. My next door neighbor at the time, who was also a United Methodist minister, told me that for every hard event in her family’s lives, they had always gotten a dog, which made the bad seem not so bad. That’s how I came to get Kojak, my 10 and 1/2 year old pug. And the first thing that my present husband had to pass muster on before I took him seriously was his agreement that Kojak was like my child, and if you love me, you have to love him, too. And he did, and he does, but what’s not to love about Kojak? My younger son, who was 14 when we got Kojak, also had and still has a great bond with him. Kojak came into our lives when things were all topsy turvy, and both of us took great pleasure in that little ball of furry energy. He seemed to restore normalcy in our hearts. And my older son, who was 17 at the time, used Kojak unabashedly as a “chick magnet.” He said that Kojak was more attractive to girls than a snazzy car!

I’ve read a lot about the value of pets as far as healthy living is concerned. From placing fish tanks with beautifully colored swimming fish in a dentist’s waiting room to taking pets on trips to nursing homes, medical professionals recognize that being around animals is calming and has many health benefits for patients.

First of all, pets help reduce stress. Many people use special techniques to reduce stress because excess stress can wreak havoc on our health, including increasing our chances of heart disease or stroke. Yoga, exercise, meditation, and journaling, among other things, can help us manage the excess, harmful stress in our lives, but so can petting a dog or cat! There have been medical studies that showed that having a pet, particularly a cat or dog, could reduce spikes of high blood pressure caused by excess stress and reduce heart rates even better than ACE inhibitors.

Having a pet can also help relieve depression. Having been diagnosed with clinical depression myself, I can testify to how much the companionship of cat and a dog helped me with my inexplicable feelings of loneliness. Although human companionship and exercise also helped me a great deal, there was something special about coming home to K. C., who would meet me in the driveway and roll over for a belly rub and then wind loving around my legs all the way into the house. And it is beyond special to come home now to not only sweet, little Kojak, but also my big, robust Elvis, the two pugs that greet me with tails wagging and are all but frantic to touch me and have me touch them. I have humans who love to see me, too, and mostly greet me with a hug and a smile, but there is something so incredibly endearing about those little dogs who never show anything but absolute adoration when I walk into the house. I wish every person suffering from depression could have a pet to take care of, a pet who is warm and soft and needs the human. There is something so healing about unconditional love, and a cat or a dog know how to give it.

Pets can make you laugh, too. My pugs keep me in stitches with their antics and the cute looks they give me. Sometimes when I’m a little grumpy, all it takes is a comical cock of the head when one of my dogs looks at me to chase away the irritation. Pugs are like little clowns sometimes, and they can chase away blues like nothing else. A friend of mine, who doesn’t really care that much for dogs, but does tolerate mine, was over at my house recently. She was politely recognizing them, but for the most part shying away from them until Elvis stuck his whole head into her purse, and she broke out in laughter and actually petted him! Not many people can resist the charm of a pug, who is bred solely for the purpose of being a companion to a human.

Finally, a dog or a cat is a good listener. Kojak has sat patiently with me while I cried or worried out loud over situations in my life. He never offered unwanted or unsolicited advice. He just sat there and listened and heard me out. There is nothing more helpful to a woman sometimes than just having someone who will listen to her. My dogs never tell me to just get over it. They just sit and look lovingly at me, and then they curl up with their warm, soft bodies against mine, and all seems okay again. Therapists get paid big bucks for much less.

I must admit that a dog or cat is not for everyone. Some people just don’t like animals. Some don’t want to be bothered by the extra work that having a pet entails. And for those people, I say that’s okay. But maybe they could heed the advice of my grandmother when she told me what I seemed to know instinctively: pets make good folks. And now I can add more to her philosophy: pets make healthier folks, too.

Sleep away your excess weight:  sounds like a “dream” cure for weightloss, doesn’t it?  Don’t we all wish it were that simple?  It’s not, actually; there are several important things we must do to lose weight, including eating fewer calories, eating nutrient rich foods instead of empty calories, excercising more, and strength training.  But as it turns out, lack of sleep may indeed be an influential factor in weight gain and in sabotaging our weight loss.  Therefore, getting adequate sleep could really help our weight loss.

The reason for this appears to be linked to our hormone levels, which can become disrupted from their natural balance when we don’t get enough sleep.  I first heard about this when Dr. Oz mentioned it on the Oprah show several months ago.  Then, my husband gave me Dr. Oz’s book You on a Diet for Valentine’s Day, and I was able to get more detailed information on this phenomenon there.  Since then, I’ve read numerous similar accounts in books, magazines, and on Web sites.

Here is what appears to happen.  When we get enough sleep, our bodies produce adequate amounts of a hormone called cortisol, which controls appetite, allowing our bodies to naturally recognize when we’re hungry and when we’re full.  When we don’t get sufficient sleep, our bodies do not produce enough cortisol to effectively control our waking appetites.  Also associated with sleep are the two hormones ghrelin and leptin.   Ghrelin, which is produced in the gastrointestinal tract, stimulates appetite, while leptin, produced in fat cells, sends a signal to the brain when we are full.  When we don’t get enough sleep, it drives leptin levels down, which means we don’t feel as satisfied after we eat.  Lack of sleep also causes ghrelin levels to rise, which means our appetite is stimulated, so we want more food.  Even after consuming adequate amounts of food, we still feel hungry if there is too much ghrelin being produced in our bodies.  So, it is easy to see that if the we have too much ghrelin and too little leptin, the stage can be set for overeating, which can lead to weight gain.  Another thing about too much ghrelin is that it gives us a desire for high carbohydrate, sugary, calorie-dense foods, which are the best sources of the empty calories I mentioned earlier, and eating too much of that kind of food leaves our bodies “starving” for nutrients, which makes us even hungrier.  So, it seems that inadequate sleep can set us up for a hormonal train wreck leading to tireder, fatter bodies for all of us.

That leads us to two questions:  1) How much sleep do we need to have normal hormone levels reached? and 2) How do we manage to get that amount of sleep? First of all, I read somewhere that each of us individually needs different amounts of sleep.  Sleep experts say we need anywhere from 7-9 hours of sleep a night, and sleep researchers studying the sleep/weight loss connection say that there is typically only a fifteen minute difference in amounts of sleep gotten by normal weight people and overweight people.  So, it seems that increasing our sleep to optimum levels might not be as big of a challenge as we might fear.  That is, it’s not that big of a challenge if we’re within 15-30 minutes of our ideal sleep levels to begin with.  So, we have to figure out how much sleep we really need and compare that to how much sleep we actually get.  Sleep experts show that few of us actually get the minimum of seven hours, but to see how much is natural for us individually, we should find out in the following way:  Sleep as long as we want for several days (best done on vacation). Then, our sleep should stabilize, and we’ll find ourselves waking up after the same number of hours daily, within 15 minutes or so. That is our optimum level that we really need.  I don’t know what we do to tell how much we need if we have severe sleep problems and can’t sleep as much as we need whether on vacation or not.

I qualify as a sleep expert when it comes to knowing why certain of us don’t sleep well since I have had a history of not sleeping well and have undergone two separate sleep studies more than 10 years apart to see why.  Here are some reasons we don’t sleep enough:

• Stress or anxiety
• Illness
• Noise
• Light
• An over-committed schedule
• Caffeine
• Alcohol
• Stimulant medications (such as diet pills, cold and allergy remedies, asthma medications)
• Depression or anger
• Fear

There are remedies for all of the above, and if we’re not getting enough sleep, we owe it to ourselves to try to solve these problems.  I usually sleep quite well myself if I take certain precautions (see my article entitled “I Just Wanna Sleep!” in the Helpful Remedies Category) to make sure I do.  But my most recent biggest obstacle to getting a good night’s sleep is voluntarily staying up too late.  I naturally feel very sleepy between 10 and 10:30 every night, but if I don’t go to bed then and push past that natural sleep cue, I get a second wind and can stay up for hours past that before I get tired again.  I still must wake up at the same time, though, so this causes me to have a sleep deficit.  The only answer to my problem is to just stop doing it!

It’s very clear from my own experience and from a lot of things I’ve read and viewed that inadequate sleep can really sabotage a weight loss regimen, and even if we’re not on a weight loss regimen, lack of sleep can cause problems maintaining weight loss or can actually make us gain weight.  It may not be as simple as just sleeping away our excess weight, but it’s all too obvious that we all need to make getting adequate sleep a part of our healthy living style.   When our bodies are not hungry for sleep, maybe we won’t be so hungry for excess food either.