Tip for the Week: Shut Up and Listen

Every Sunday I will post a quote, thought, or tip to ease you into Monday and carry you throughout the week.

Being a good listener is completely underrated. Everyone is so focused on getting their 2 cents in to make sure they sound intelligent or to make sure their opinion is heard. When is the last time you had a real conversation with someone? One where you were speaking and the other person was looking you in the eye and actively listening?  Been a while hasn't it? Don't you wish that when you spoke, you were heard? 

Well in the spirit of a fresh start to the week, let's make a concerted effort to work on genuinely listening to our friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else we encounter throughout our busy days. Look them in the eye, nod, and show them that you are listening.  Ask clarifying questions. Be interested in what they are saying. This will make you appear not only intellectual but also genuinely caring and engaged and in turn, the other person will feel special.

Let's start using BOTH of our ears and listen! And hope that person pays it forward and so on. Then we'll have a world with fewer disagreements and more understanding.

Here's to a week of truly connecting!

What's Your Purpose?

"I’m gonna find my purpose…I gotta find me!" Princeton from Avenue Q

When I signed up for IIN, I thought of it would help my diet and health and possibly enable me to change my career. I signed up for my classes in July 2009-on my birthday actually. I saw it as a very nice (and generous) birthday present for myself. Looking back halfway through my program, I realized that it was very symbolic for me to sign up on my birthday. That day was the start of a whole new life-a rebirth of sorts. It was the start of a fundamental shift in living my life. The past 10 months have reinvigorated me. I have been able to find and redefine myself, to strive for what I believe to be my life's purpose, and to finally be excited and fully engrossed in developing my future. Since starting the program, I have worked harder than I have in a while, maybe even ever, but am happier than I have ever been. The greatest change has been a gradual shift in alignment of my personal beliefs and life to my career.
By shifting my focus to something I am truly passionate about, I feel vibrant, whole, and fully nourished-more than any amount of vegetables and fruits can do for me. I spoke of primary foods last month as a foundation of our health and happiness. To review, primary foods are our career, spirituality, relationships, and physical exercise.  When we are happy with those four elements, our lives are enriched.  As for our careers, it is really important to have a job that is fulfilling. We spend many hours in a day, week and most of our lives working. More often than not, we spend more time developing our 'careers' than our relationships, bodies and minds. Why would you spend so much time doing something that does not feed your soul? Back in the day, people defined themselves by their careers and took pride in it. Most notably is the last name Smith deriving from the occupation of blacksmiths. We have come very far from that alignment and our career has become one compartment of many in our lives. We no longer see the need for our careers to match our life's purpose.
Our career is a very sensitive subject mainly because it is the source of money, our income. It is not easy to walk away from an unfulfilling job if it pays nicely. And I am not telling you to do that. Ideally, we would all work jobs that we completely identify with and can live comfortably off of. Reality is we live in a world where money is a necessity and we can't just up and leave the source of it. However, we can always make small changes.  In the spirit of embracing primary foods, I would like for you to take a look at your career. How does it align to who you are today? How does it align to who you want to be? What are the missing pieces and how can you fill them? Can you change your career without sacrificing other components of your life that are important to you (e.g., standard of living, paying rent, feeding your puppy)?  Can you add something to you job that aligns with who you are (e.g., join the wellness committee, form a lunch group with other parents, start a company dodgeball team)?  Can you address who you want to be through your hobbies, spirituality, relationships or physical exercise? 
What have you done with your career to better align yourself with it?

May Newsletter

I wanted to announce that I launched my May Newsletter and encourage you to take a look at it.  I speak about dieting and sprouts in this issue.  I would love to hear feedback from you to learn what topics you would like covered and anything else you'd like to tell me.  You can check it out here or in my Newsletter section.  I do not plan to devote a whole post to it in the future so join my mailing list to stay in the know!

Announcing June Events!

I'm so excited to announce 2 new, awesome and educational events in June!  They are:

FLOW the Film Screening

FLOW stands for For Love of Water
South End Branch Library in Boston

Rutland St. & Tremont St.

Saturday, June 5th 11:30AM-2:00PM

Click here for more information!

Grocery Store Tour

Shaw’s Prudential (Boston)

Sunday, June 6th 8:30AM – 10:00AM      OR     Saturday, June 19th 8:30AM – 10:00AM

Learn how to shop for your health at the grocery store!

For more information and to RSVP (space is limited!), click here.

Tip for the Week: Pick your battles

Every Sunday I will post a quote, thought, or tip to ease you into Monday and carry you throughout the week.


You win some, you lose some.


Life is full of disagreements, lessons in disguise. Sometimes we are the ones to give these lessons, others come to us in due time, and many are thrust upon us-by strangers, bosses, family and friends. When evaluating how to respond to these circumstances, pick your battles carefully. Life is full of difference in opinion. Evaluate the consequences of your words and actions before acting upon your emotions. Know that what you do and say affects the relationships you have with the others involved. Sometimes you have to let things go. And other times, you will feel so passionate about a matter that you will have no choice but to voice your opinion.

For the week, identify the battles-large and small-and weigh the consequences before acting.  Know that there are larger ones ahead and choose carefully.

Brown Rice is Nicer!

continuation of yesterday’s post on rice…

So rice is certainly nice, but brown rice is nicer! Take some time this weekend and have some brown rice. Brown rice is healthier than white rice for two reasons. First are the vitamins and minerals that I mentioned previously. According to The World’s Healthiest Foods, “The complete milling and polishing that converts brown rice into white rice destroys 67% of the vitamin B3, 80% of the vitamin B1, 90% of the vitamin B6, half of the manganese, half of the phosphorus, 60% of the iron, and all of the dietary fiber and essential fatty acids. Fully milled and polished white rice is required to be "enriched" with vitamins B1, B3 and iron." 

Second, there is the fiber in it! Fiber is an essential component to our diets and for good reason. Fiber is essential to our digestive health-ensuring proper digestion and elimination. Additionally, it is important in regulating our blood sugar. When eating a whole grain, like brown rice, we eat the starch and the fiber. The latter which enables our bodies to slowly digest the starch and slowly release the resulting sugar into our bodies. White rice is a pure starch. When ingested, it is quickly digested by the digestive system because there is very little fiber to slow down the process. It causes a spike in energy as the carbohydrates are instantly converted to sugar. 

Dr. Walter Willet, a professor of Nutrition and Medicine at Harvard, spoke in class about refined grains in terms of the glycemic index, which is a measurement of the effect of carbohydrates on our blood sugar levels. The quicker a carbohydrate breaks down in digestion, the higher the number in the glycemic index. Eating foods high in the glycemic index is linked to diabetes. As mentioned above, white rice was very popular in traditional diets, but their population did not have diabetes. This spike in blood sugar did not cause an issue to the traditional cultures because they performed a lot more physical labor. Their jobs and lifestyles required for them to be more active. They used the energy they got from the rice before the sugar took a toll to their insulin levels. White rice is not appropriate for our sedentary lifestyles. We do not use the instant energy that the grain gives us and our bodies have to produce insulin to reduce the sugar level. 

Eating more fiber is really important to our overall health. There is no need to add foods into our diets. It’s all about upgrading the foods you are already eating. Switch the rice you get from the Thai take-out place with brown rice. Or use brown rice when making your rice and beans instead of white.

Have you noticed how you feel after eating white rice vs. brown rice? Do you have a favorite brown rice recipe?

Rice is Nice! (Part 1)

I love rice! Especially jasmine rice. It's really fragrant, fluffy, and pairs well with a nice stir fry. I grew up having rice and rice porridge for dinner every night. It's my ultimate comfort food. The equivalent to many's bread and pasta. However, white rice, which includes long grain and jasmine, is processed. *gasp* I know! My world sort of turned upside down when I found this out several years ago. For a very long time, I thought I was doing well for my body by eating a grain and whole food so often. But in actuality, white rice is really only part of a whole food and it is stripped almost entirely of the original grain’s nutrients and fiber. Yikes!

Grains are seeds and like any seed, it has built-in, natural mechanisms to ensure it will grow.  The multiple layers protect the endosperm from external threats like the environment and animals. Rice is naturally encased in a hull and under that are multiple other layers (see the awesome picture below). The layers underneath, particularly the bran and germ, contain a lot of the vitamins and minerals that these seeds would have used to sprout. When we eat the grain with the bran and germ aka brown rice, we provide our bodies with those vitamins and minerals. 

 picture from Britannica Encyclopedia

So if brown rice is such a better alternative, why is white rice so popular? Well, there are actually many reasons that traditional cultures eat white rice. The biggest reason is probably that white rice is more shelf stable. Brown rice contains the bran and germ which have natural oils in them. If stored for too long and/or at too high of a heat, the oil and thus the grain will go rancid-spoiling the grain. In the olden days, this would have been a much bigger deal as food was scarcer. Other reasons are that white rice cooks more quickly, many think it tastes better (brown rice has a chewier texture and nutty taste that some people don’t like) and it looks better-kind of vain but white is considered a purer color.

Look for part 2 of this post tomorrow covering different reasons why we should all switch to brown rice part, if not all, of the time.

Do you eat white rice?  Brown rice?  What is your preference?