Elizabeth Yarnell, Author, Innovator, Naturopath, Speaker
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Manage stress naturally with visualizations

On Oprah a few days ago, Dr. Oz asserted that Americans would be significantly healthier if they could just find effective ways to manage stress without drugs.

I’ve been thinking about this statement recently as I find myself pulling out an old visualization stress-relief technique to calm those feelings of being overwhelmed with life. It helps me to remind myself that there are times when I can’t be everything to everyone, and sometimes I just have to let some things go for the moment until I get back to a space where I can manage them again. (You may have noticed an ebb in my posting schedule lately? Too much on my plate right now.)

Visualization is a form of self-hypnosis where you will yourself to change your mental and/or physical state. When I practiced Hypnobirthing as my birth method, I leaned heavily on visualization and guided imagery to keep me in a zen-like state during labor. In regular life, I use a different visualization to calm myself when it feels like my life is slipping into chaos.

Here is my calming visualization. It works best when paired with belly breathing (as in yoga), but can be pulled out anytime its needed by just remembering to be the leaf:

I picture a perfect green leaf, like one off a maple tree, floating on top of water in a gently moving stream. I am the leaf, I tell myself.

The leaf floats effortlessly by on the current without struggling against it. It swirls briefly in the eddies along the edges, but continues on its way downstream. Rocks poke out of the water signaling rapids ahead… does the leaf struggle? No, the leaf continues trusting that the water knows the path of least resistance through the deepest channels. The leaf veers near the rocks, right alongside them in fact, maybe even bumps them, until the leaf relaxes and allows the water to choose the safest course. I am the leaf.

The sunlight dapples through the trees overhead, the water laughs and gurgles, and the leaf clears the rapids and floats easily into calm and safe water. The path ahead is clear and obstacle-free.

I am the leaf. I am the leaf. I am the leaf.

How I Try to Get My Boys to Eat Their Veggies

Renee Martinez posted a great article recently on the helpful blog, MothersRaisingBoys, about getting her kids to eat vegetables. I’m excited to have her permission to share it here with you and hope that it can help you with your own quest to raise healthy eaters!

How I Try to Get My Boys to Eat Their Veggies
by Renee Martinez

My 3 year old is not a fan of veggies. Basically if the food has color, he won’t touch it. Unless of course we’re talking about a cookie with colored frosting on it – well now that’s fine for him.

The other day when he refused to eat the one carrot I placed before him, I paused for a moment to reflect on what I had done with the two older boys at this time. They eat their veggies. Or have they always? No. They too initially rejected them…so what did I do?

Then it dawned on me. I told them what any mother would tell her child. If you want you want to become a super hero, you need to go through super hero training. All super heroes are required to eat veggies as part of their training. Green vegetables give you extra points to earn you extra super powers. Of course, how did I forget that!

It really worked with the older two; at least they made me think it worked. Or maybe they ate their veggies just to shut me up. Who knows? Now they even order salads when we go out to eat. They make me proud!

#3 on the other hand is an entirely different breed. He doesn’t seem very willing to give in. I really can’t seem to convince him at all. He just pushes his one sad looking carrot toward me and says, “I no like mommy, I don’t want to eat it.” He’s so cute, what can I possibly say to that cute face?

I bought some yummy carrot soup that I’ve added to things so he doesn’t know he’s eating his vegetables. This works, but it kind of bothers me. Sure he’s eating carrots, but I’m disguising them so he still rejects the real vegetable. It doesn’t seem to help.

When I make dinner, I don’t make special meals for him. What I make is what I expect him to eat. if he chooses not to eat, then he doesn’t eat. I will not make special meals. I know several people who constantly make separate meals for their children. They make wonderful healthy meals for the parents and processed garbage for their children.

When questioned about this, they simply offer that they know their kids won’t like what they make and they don’t to deal with the drama so they make a special meal for the child.

What a pain in the butt!

Since I’m the one making dinner, I’m not interested in spending more time than necessary cooking. So making one meal is practical in terms of time. In terms of the stress-level, sure there are times when one of the boys doesn’t like what I prepared. Sorry. I know they’ll find something on their plate to eat. Once you make one special meal for a child whining about not wanting to eat what you’ve prepared, you’ve set yourself up for having to continue the trend. If on the other hand you resist, you’re children will know that you mean business. They might even taste what you made – and gosh who knows, they might like it!

Kids are smart. They know how to work the system when they see a loophole.

As a side note, #3 ate a bunch of cucumbers tonight with his dinner. He would touch his carrot at lunch, but we’re making small strides toward eating veggies. He may even get approved for super hero status after all.

Natural Petroleum-free Mascara

I’ve been searching for a good mascara that wouldn’t coat my lashes with a film of petroleum. Recently, a salesclerk at Vitamin Cottage pointed me to No Miss Natural Mascara.

I have to say that I’ve been very pleased not only with how it goes on, but also with how it stays on and how easily it comes off with soap and water.

Other natural mascaras I’ve tried have left me with heavy black smudges below my eyes as the makeup sank off of my lashes. Some have gone on so gloppy that I’ve had to use several cotton swabs to mop up the mess when my upper lashes flicked wetly against my eyelid.

While I confess that I am not a mascara expert — my lashes used to be so long and thick that they would brush the lenses of my sunglasses so I never wore mascara until recently! Alas, they thinned after childbearing. Sigh. — I have tried the top pick by many beauty magazines (Maybelline) and many other brands both conventional and natural (including Prescriptives, Aveda, CoverGirl, EyesLipsFace, Clinique, Loreal, etc.).

The thing is, I have been concerned about conventional mascaras for a while. Why? Let’s take Almay’s Amazing Lush Lash mascara, as an example. Almay claims to be “hypoallergenic,” which I have often interpreted as “cleaner.” My mistake.

This Almay mascara garners a 7 (10 being the most dangerous) in the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics Skin Deep database of cosmetics and includes this warning:

Ingredients in this product are linked to:
yes Cancer
yes Developmental/reproductive toxicity
yes Violations, restrictions & warnings
yes Allergies/immunotoxicity
yes Other concerns for ingredients used in this product:
Neurotoxicity, Endocrine disruption, Persistence and bioaccumulation, Organ system toxicity (non-reproductive), Multiple, additive exposure sources, Irritation (skin, eyes, or lungs), Enhanced skin absorption, Contamination concerns, Occupational hazards, Biochemical or cellular level changes

Yep: I find those pretty frightening words for something I intend to paint onto my eyelashes and let soak in all day. Hence my search for a better mascara.

No Miss All Natural Mascara is as good a product or better then the conventional kind, and ever so much better for my body and the environment. Let me know if you’ve found some other great natural mascaras!

Blue Sky Natural Soda Pop

I’m not a regular soda pop drinker by any means. In fact, in January when Dr. Oz suggested on Oprah that a simple way for people to start losing weight was to stop drinking soda pop, I scoffed. Do people really drink that much soda pop that simply cutting it out could cause weight loss?

Apparently so. We Americans love our soda pop.

Two weeks later, callers left testimonials for Oprah. “I’ve already lost 14 lbs.!” one caller reported excitedly. Others had similar stories.

I started to pay more attention to the soda drinkers around me and realized that some people start drinking soda pop first thing in the morning, instead of or right after coffee, and continue all day long. I counted more than three people I know who nurture a 6-pack-of-Diet Coke-a-day habit. I watched a 20/20 special on Appalacian Mouth, the high incidence of rotting teeth in Applacia due to high consumption of Mountain Dew.

Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a good soda pop now and then myself. But there’s a lot of stuff in mainstream soda pop I don’t enjoy: high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors, and caffeine, not to mention other synthetic sweeteners like Aspertame in the diet or low-cal versions.

So I was excited to see Blue Sky soda
on sale recently at our local Vitamin Cottage natural grocery store. When I lived in Santa Fe in the early 90s, Blue Sky was the little local company; now you may find Blue Sky sodas almost anywhere that carries natural products.

Get the Toxins Out of Your Make-up

It’s an unpleasant reality that many of the products easily available on store shelves today are actually harmful to our health.

The cosmetics and skin care industries are some of the worst offenders, adding carcinogens, hormone disruptors, immuno-modulators, and other scary chemicals to their formulas of supposedly benign things like shampoos, lotions, and sunscreens.

I’ll grant that when these companies first began making their cosmetics, the toxic effects of many of these chemicals were not known or understood. Petroleum byproducts became cheap and widely available commodities as the global demand for fuel increased. How else were the oil companies going to make a profit on all that waste from drilling and refining?

But now we know better, even if the mainstream cosmetics and skin care products industries think we’re too stupid to care about what we put on our skin to be absorbed into our body systems.

The Environmental Working Group’s top six ingredients to avoid in cosmetics and skin care products:

  • Fragrance
  • alpha & beta hydroxy acids (AHA, BHA, lactic acid, glycolic acid)
  • parabens (methylparabens, propylparbens)
  • triethanolamine
  • lodopropynyl butylcarbamate
  • triclosan (anti-microbial liquid soap)

Here are some other ingredients the EWG says to avoid:

SUNSCREENS: Avoid padimate-O and paba. The low risk ingredients in this category are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

NAIL POLISH: Avoid dibutylphthalate, formaldehyde, and toluene. The safer way to use: In well-ventilated areas, but “don’t use when pregnant.”

HAIR DYE: Avoid dark permanent hair dyes. The low-risk hair dyes are light-colored hair dyes used infrequently. (See my post about natural hair dye!)

SKIN LIGHTENERS. Avoid hydroquinone and sodium nitrate. The EWG recommends avoiding altogether or at least using skin lighteners infrequently.

ANTI-AGING. Avoid lactic acid and glycolic acid, AHA (alpha hydroxy acid), and BHA (beta hydroxy acid). The EWG recommends avoiding products in this class altogether or at least using infrequently.

SUNLESS TANNING. Avoid coumarin and dihydroxy acetone. EWG recommends using products in this class infrequently, if at all, and using a sunscreen even though you look tan. Cosmetics, as a class, are not as potentially dangerous as drugs. Nevertheless, you should approach their purpose and use with caution, and not assume that some government regulator is looking out for you or that cosmetics are perfectly safe or perfectly harmless.

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