Elizabeth Yarnell, Author, Innovator, Naturopath, Speaker
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3 Ways to Improve Your Mood Naturally

Depression affects a huge number of people in our country and prescriptions of anti-depressants are so common that I’ll bet you can name at least two people off the top of your head who take something to feel happier. That’s to say nothing of all the people you know who haven’t told you that they are taking a drug for anxiety, depression, or unhappiness.

Heck, antidepressants are so common that you’ll find traces of them in most municipal water supplies.

But there are more natural ways to lighten your outlook on life and help you find a happier disposition. Here are a few to try:

1. Dance! I love starting off my day with a Jazzercise class and it never fails to put a smile on my face even when I’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed. I have a friend who simply cranks the disco music at her house and dances in her own living room to put the spring into her step as she enters her sixth decade. Check out some of the great free dance class offerings on YouTube for a fun time. Here’s a reggae dancehall workout with Keaira LaShea that will put a smile on your face.

It’s hard to nurture hurts or grudges as you become engulfed in music and movement. Not only does dancing offer cardiovascular benefits, it works your muscles and your brain as well, which can keep those synapses flowing as we age.comedy 103.1 radio station

2. Laugh! I’ve become addicted to the new 24/7 comedy channel on the radio: 103.1 Comedy. They play a continuous stream of stand-up comedians ranging from classic Bill Cosby on raising kids and Eddie Murphy’s hysterical “I’ve got some ice cream,” to current comics like Kevin Nealon, Dana Carvey, and Jeanine Garrafalo. I’ve laughed so hard in the car on my way to pick up my kid’s carpool that I’ve arrived with smeared mascara from the tears. I don’t mind when I’m stuck in traffic because I’m so entertained by what I’m hearing.

Laughter releases endorphins like exercise does, and endorphins give you a natural high while putting a smile on your face. They have mobile apps, and are online, too. Give it a listen and see for yourself if you don’t arrive at your destination a little happier from having laughed all the way over.

3. Go on an Anti-Inflammatory Diet! What? This doesn’t sound exciting or mood-lifting? Here the fact: depression and inflammatory conditions like MS, heart disease, diabetes, etc., go hand-in-hand. When there is inflammation in the body, it’s not limited to wherever you notice the symptoms (joints, bowels, skin, etc.). Many inflammatory actions are systemic, meaning they extend throughout our body’s systems, and include the brain. When the brain swells, brain function is disrupted and higher thoughts processes like reason and logic are affected. The stronger, more primal and emotional brain functions – fight and flight, lust, anger, hunger, etc. – can supercede rational thought in an inflamed brain.

Many of my clients report a lifting of “brain fog”, a return of a sense of humor, and a sunnier outlook as the inflammation in their brain recedes on a customized anti-inflammatory diet. It’s much easier to be happy when you feel better and your brain is not inflamed!

Recycle Your Underwear!

We compost, recycle papers and plastics, and limit our water usage, but one way to help the earth that never occurred to me was to recycle old underwear.

Rodale.com offers five surprising ways to recycle underwear, including cutting it up and adding it to your compost bin (only if the underwear is 100% cotton, of course!).

These tips come at a good time in our house as I just noticed a few pairs of my husband’s underwear that should be retired from active duty. Have you noticed that men will wear underwear until it literally falls to pieces?!

The New Urbanism: Hawks in the Alleyways

My great Earth Day experience yesterday was watching a hawk wing through the  heavy spring snowstorm into a nesting box mounted on the third story of a town home wall across the alley from my kitchen window.

The hawk's nesting box mounted on the 3rd story of a town home wall.

Lately, in the last three weeks or so, we’ve been coming upon piles of pigeon feathers in various locations in our front and back yards. While our 16-year old cat has caught quite a few baby birds in her day, and even snagged one last summer (you go, girl!), she’s not as spry as she once was and, besides, she hasn’t spent a lot of time outside lately with all the snow. She was only 9 pounds at her peak fighting weight, and many pigeons and squirrels outweigh her to begin with, and her hunting was usually limited to baby rodents and baby birds.

A hawk pauses in our backyard tree with its prey.

So, we had assumed it was a coyote that was leaving the crime scenes as our neighborhood is built around a natural habitat corridor that weaves throughout the development and through several wildlife sanctuaries. We are several blocks in from the greenway, however, and don’t usually see those animals running down our street.

Then, last Friday, we saw a hawk clutching a hapless pigeon in his talons in the tree in our backyard and wondered where he lived. I saw another winging by down the alley shortly afterward, so I believed there was a nesting pair. Part of the mystery of the dead pigeons was solved, but where were they coming from?

Now I know. And when the snow stops falling, maybe I’ll be able to snap a picture of the birds entering this nesting box, like I spied yesterday  through my window.

I applaud our neighbors for cleverly mounting a nesting box: painted the same color as their trim and so camouflaged that I have looked out the  window above my kitchen sink for eight years and never noticed it. We’ve speculated on how (and when!) they hung it: Did they use a cherry picker? Did they repel down from the roof? Was it placed by the original builders? How did the hawks find it?

My husband snapped a picture on his iPhone as the hawk paused in our tree with his prey. Can you spot the big bird in our tree?

As urban homesteaders at heart, we are thrilled by the arrival of the hawks and look forward to getting the pigeon population under control.

Happy Earth Day! Some Tips to Help the Earth

Happy Earth Day! A few ideas to love your planet earth today and every day:

  • Drive less. Combine your errands and map your route for the most efficient car ride.
  • Use a bike for transportation. Denver has a great B-Cycle system, with bike depots all over the city where you can swipe your card and grab a bike for a few hours, and then drop it off at any other B-Cycle station. There are great bike lanes and off-street, scenic routes you can use to traverse the city by bike.
  • Take a bus. My elementary-school age son would much rather I drive him the six miles to school every day, but as I remind him, the yellow school bus carries ninety kids and my vehicle would only carry a single child… Him riding the school bus is a much better use of our non-renewable resources.
  • Carpool. I am so grateful to the mother that I remembered vaguely from a kindergarten class at a different school four years ago, who approached me and offered to share the driving of our combined kids back and forth to an extracurricular activity. So much of my time seems to be spent as a chauffeur to my kids that reducing the number of car trips benefits in personal as well as environmental ways.
  • Reduce, reuse, recycle. Our goal is to collect less than one bag of garbage each week; everything else gets recycled, reused, or composted. Which leads to the next suggestion:
  • Compost. If you don’t have land to do it on, petition your city to include composting in its citywide recycling program.
  • Eat local. A lot of our food travels 3,000 miles to get to our plates. That’s a lot of petroleum used in transport. Choose foods grown or produced locally when possible. Check out Barbara Kingsolver’s book about spending a year doing just that.
  • Use less water. Water is the oil of the future. It will be easier to invent sustainable energy sources than it will be to find and bring potable water to all the corners of the earth.

More Vegetables in Glorious One-Pot Meals

Just bought your book (Version 1. Didn’t realize there was a revised edition).     Anyway, this seems like a dumb question but the book doesn’t make it clear to me if I always top up recipes with vegetables to fill the dutch oven.     For instance, in the “Glorious Macaroni Cheese”, there are veges already layered in the pot. Do I still fill it to the top with other veges?     Are all recipes topped off to fill the dutch oven with veges in this way? Like, for instance,  ‘Fish Chowder’ or ‘Fish Florentine’.    Thanks for your time.  ~Peter K., Australia

Hi Peter. Thanks for writing! I’m tickled to hear that you recently purchased the 2005 edition of Glorious One-Pot Meals – that went out of print in 2008; now it is definitely a collector’s item.

Your question might be cleared up in the 2009 edition of the cookbook as every recipe in that book benefited from an excellent professional editor courtesy of Random House, but let me see if I can help you out.

Glorious One-Pot Meals seem cook better if the cast iron Dutch oven is filled to the brim. Most of the recipes begin with a layer of grains, then call for protein, and then finish with vegetables. The Glorious Macaroni and Cheese recipe does the same thing, beginning with pasta, only for this one the cheese is interspersed with the veggies, because, after all, it’s cheese.

If you have extra room in your pot, I always recommend filling it with more vegetables than may be called for in the original recipe. Why? Because… why not? Some recipes only call for, say, half of a bell pepper; might as well use it up if you have the space in the pot. Besides, it’s usually a good thing to have more vegetables in one’s life.

Must you always top off your Glorious One-Pot Meal recipes with additional veggies? No, of course not. The Dutch oven doesn’t have to be filled to the brim for the infusion cooking method to work. As long as you follow your nose as to when your meal is ready, you’ll never go wrong.

Be sure to check out the Glorious One-Pot Meals category on this blog for more tips and info on GOPMs, and here’s a video demonstration of one of my favorite recipes, Cajun Fish, to give you a clearer picture of how it all works. Happy cooking!

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