It is time to choose your battles: It is all about balance.
We cannot all be perfect. Perfection in others is more than mildly irritating and always an illusion. It is much more rewarding to strive for something achievable, perhaps ‘as good as is possible given the current circumstances?’ is more realistic.
So with this in mind it is worth choosing the areas you are going to try to be good at and allowing yourself space to have some things you will not budge on and are not willing to change just yet.
For example: Organic food is too expensive for you right now (where do I even get that stuff on the way home from work anyway!?) and having something sweet late at night is a must. Ok, so if organic is a ‘no go’ then just try to add as many fresh vegetables to your diet as you can and make sure you wash them all thoroughly. If something organic is on offer or in the reduced section then get in there quick and just make the best choice you can given the ‘current circumstances’. Something sweet? Try and make a natural choice such as yoghurt and honey with chopped fruit. Surprisingly satisfying (Ok, you can have a second bowl this once, but make it a small one.)
You get the idea, just give it your best shot. So often we make sweeping resolutions about reaching perfection, starting tomorrow. These are destined to fail and make our goals even harder to reach. Remember we are on a ladder to better health and we can only take that ladder one rung at a time. A good way to start is deciding what you can do and what you are willing to do and take it from there.
I like to keep my cosmetics natural and organic wherever possible. I drool over essential oils and paraben free ranges. I go into Lush and feel orgasmic about the possibilities as I pop smelly organic goods in my basket. But I ADORE nail varnish, so many colourful opportunities to be had that it is simply irresistible. It is probably one of the most toxic things you can put on your body. I know! It is a terrible deal I am making here.
So, why spend so much money on organic goods when I ladle a new colour on every week? Because it makes me happy, because my life is balanced, because 90% of the time I am making the best choice for my body and mainly because I am still just a girl who needs to match her accessories and life is too short. If I can do most things good and choose a few things bad that make me happy then I think that’s ok. I like to give my nails a regular rest with sunshine and coconut oil and a week of fresh air (before I smother them in the next luxurious shade.) I think my honesty here is important, there is no use pretending to be perfect, too bleedin’ boring.
Lifestyle is about achieving balance with our choices and making sure they even out, especially when it comes to diet. Gillian McKieth suggests 80% good to 20% naughty balance which I think is achievable for most of us and if some weeks you slip over, just make sure you make up for it the next week. We should however try to avoid regular binges, attempting to maintain some equilibrium along the way. The bad stuff is irritatingly addictive so we need to limit it if we want to achieve a good balance without cravings pulling us down the ladder.
So my message here is to be reassured that getting started on getting healthy does not have to be a massive lifestyle change where you give up everything you love. It does not have to be one massive boring leap into deprivation. Naturally you will get addicted to feeling good and looking better as you move up the ladder, but you don’t have to force it and it is ok to slip down a rung every now and then. Each of you will know your own balance and when you feel your best. If being healthy, slim and glowing feels unachievable and too far away to even think about embarking on? Remember, that being one rung higher will feel better and rather than look at your goal, just look at tomorrow for now.
Feel free to send me any questions about your goal and how to start.
Sending Smiles.
Josie
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Apologies for Absence: The Monkey Bite Story
I have let my blog take a well deserved rest the last two months and hopefully some of you have missed it. I am back to explain why I have been absent and I think you will find it interesting...
Allow me to set the scene just a little. It is my one day off a week on Koh Samui and I am strolling down the road. This is the large Samui ring road and not a dusty track, I hasten to add. I am visiting one of the many 711 corner shops which are littered around Thailand. My aim is to get some hard earned cash from the ATM. When you have one day off a week spending money fast is a must.
I don’t even see the coconut truck at first, which was part of the problem in retrospect. I am stuck in my own scrambled thoughts about who, where, what and why in life and mainly how I should spend my life as well as my money. If only I had seen the monkey it might all have been very different. If I had been present and correct, in the moment and mindful of my steps I would have given it a wide birth, but I was simply scrambling inside instead: fatal error.
Suddenly I feel an impact on my left side. As I wrestle the weight off and jump back I see it is a monkey and before I have even registered the creatures audacity I realise I have been scratched and bitten. It is too late, these things happen so fast. The bite is deep, I can see the muscle and the tendon. The monkey was surely hungry, I know this because he took a mouthful and I sincerely hope he ate it, as it is now missing. Strangely the wound although deep, has no venous bleeding so I am forced to look into my arm and marvel at how it still moves despite its sudden lack.
Luckily I am near my friends tattoo shop, so I run over in shock to get some reassurance that this hole can exist and I can still be alive and moving. Suddenly I am so far removed emotionally from my alien arm. It is not mine, it is torn open, it cannot be mine? My friend hails a taxi after I convince him that the pharmacy is not going to suffice, Thai people have a tendency to make less of a fuss than us, but I know this time my urgency is warranted. His customer is left mid-tattoo, half standing, half sitting and baffled. She got bitten by a monkey?
The hospital is beautiful, I have been here before with Typhus fever and my friend Nick for a week, so it feels like home. Do not attend the Bangkok Samui without insurance, in fact do not travel at all without insurance.
This time they take too long. They leave me with my uncovered wound so I am forced to spend more time peering in with disbelief. Ten minutes feels like an hour. Rabies shots into the hole, necessary? It seems so. Stitches in the muscle, stitches in the skin. I am being sewn up like a rag doll and I do not feel entirely comfortable about the way my body suddenly seems so material, flesh being pulled about to compensate for flesh missing. It reminds me of my own stitching, large and wonky.
After being sent home with a half cast to keep the muscle in position (big white arm) I sit and reflect. My day off over, my arm has a hole. Thankfully I can no longer see it but I know what lurks within the big white arm and I don’t like it one bit.
The next day I am admitted to hospital with an infection, monkey’s mouths are not clean places I can now confirm. I spend a week in the Bangkok Samui, it really does feel like home now. Where do my ‘no pharmaceutical’ feelings stand in this scenario? They flop aimlessly. Please give me as many antibiotics as you see fit as this is one of the situations where modern medicine has its place. A fellow nutritional devotee calls me to ask how I am doing,
‘Let’s just hope you survive from all the drugs they give you’ he preaches ‘That will be truly amazing! I would have filled the wound with comfrey’.
‘How ridiculous’ I thought, ‘If he had that hole in his arm I bet he would have fled to the Bangkok Samui hospital as quickly as me, and if not? Then quite frankly, he is silly.’
Although he was certainly silly, he was irritatingly right as I had a reaction to the drugs and ended up covered from head to toe in a horrible red lumpy rash which lasted about four days. It makes you wonder what it might do to other areas of the body we cannot see so clearly. But, as I said before, in some situations, antibiotics are necessary and nasty infections are what they were designed for. It is our tendency to overuse them that causes problems. The allergy was unfortunate and gross. A month later I followed this antibiotic laden time with a one week fast, to clear out the toxins and start a fresh; I will go in to that more on a future blog.
So I now come around to where this story ends and a new one begins. It is where my blog also ended temporarily due to the ‘big white arm’. I had to leave my job as I could no longer work with the pain and only one useful arm was not sufficient. I already suffer physical problems from my tumbling descent down the stairs all those years ago and losing use of my arm highlighted old problems and created new imbalances. Physically and emotionally draining when you are so far from the reassurance of home.
My arm is much better now (two months on) I am swimming every day and doing yoga to get strength and flexibility back. It is going to take time and patience before I get full use of it back. The skin and muscle pull and tug strangely where the tissues now move as one instead of independently, a seam out of place that twists awkwardly. A scar with a story.
This period was difficult but it opened new opportunities for me and I am now living on an organic coconut farm in Khanom with my friend and his family. My little wooden hut is simply heaven to me right now and I finally have the time to enjoy this fantastic country. When one door closes, another one always opens and for now, I am enjoying each moment of what feels like freedom and learning to be mindful. After all, you never know where a monkey might be lurking and being present is terribly important if you want to remain intact.
I am back.
Stay tuned for more health tips and reassurance that feeling great is not rocket science.
Josie
Allow me to set the scene just a little. It is my one day off a week on Koh Samui and I am strolling down the road. This is the large Samui ring road and not a dusty track, I hasten to add. I am visiting one of the many 711 corner shops which are littered around Thailand. My aim is to get some hard earned cash from the ATM. When you have one day off a week spending money fast is a must.
I don’t even see the coconut truck at first, which was part of the problem in retrospect. I am stuck in my own scrambled thoughts about who, where, what and why in life and mainly how I should spend my life as well as my money. If only I had seen the monkey it might all have been very different. If I had been present and correct, in the moment and mindful of my steps I would have given it a wide birth, but I was simply scrambling inside instead: fatal error.
Suddenly I feel an impact on my left side. As I wrestle the weight off and jump back I see it is a monkey and before I have even registered the creatures audacity I realise I have been scratched and bitten. It is too late, these things happen so fast. The bite is deep, I can see the muscle and the tendon. The monkey was surely hungry, I know this because he took a mouthful and I sincerely hope he ate it, as it is now missing. Strangely the wound although deep, has no venous bleeding so I am forced to look into my arm and marvel at how it still moves despite its sudden lack.
Luckily I am near my friends tattoo shop, so I run over in shock to get some reassurance that this hole can exist and I can still be alive and moving. Suddenly I am so far removed emotionally from my alien arm. It is not mine, it is torn open, it cannot be mine? My friend hails a taxi after I convince him that the pharmacy is not going to suffice, Thai people have a tendency to make less of a fuss than us, but I know this time my urgency is warranted. His customer is left mid-tattoo, half standing, half sitting and baffled. She got bitten by a monkey?
The hospital is beautiful, I have been here before with Typhus fever and my friend Nick for a week, so it feels like home. Do not attend the Bangkok Samui without insurance, in fact do not travel at all without insurance.
This time they take too long. They leave me with my uncovered wound so I am forced to spend more time peering in with disbelief. Ten minutes feels like an hour. Rabies shots into the hole, necessary? It seems so. Stitches in the muscle, stitches in the skin. I am being sewn up like a rag doll and I do not feel entirely comfortable about the way my body suddenly seems so material, flesh being pulled about to compensate for flesh missing. It reminds me of my own stitching, large and wonky.
After being sent home with a half cast to keep the muscle in position (big white arm) I sit and reflect. My day off over, my arm has a hole. Thankfully I can no longer see it but I know what lurks within the big white arm and I don’t like it one bit.
The next day I am admitted to hospital with an infection, monkey’s mouths are not clean places I can now confirm. I spend a week in the Bangkok Samui, it really does feel like home now. Where do my ‘no pharmaceutical’ feelings stand in this scenario? They flop aimlessly. Please give me as many antibiotics as you see fit as this is one of the situations where modern medicine has its place. A fellow nutritional devotee calls me to ask how I am doing,
‘Let’s just hope you survive from all the drugs they give you’ he preaches ‘That will be truly amazing! I would have filled the wound with comfrey’.
‘How ridiculous’ I thought, ‘If he had that hole in his arm I bet he would have fled to the Bangkok Samui hospital as quickly as me, and if not? Then quite frankly, he is silly.’
Although he was certainly silly, he was irritatingly right as I had a reaction to the drugs and ended up covered from head to toe in a horrible red lumpy rash which lasted about four days. It makes you wonder what it might do to other areas of the body we cannot see so clearly. But, as I said before, in some situations, antibiotics are necessary and nasty infections are what they were designed for. It is our tendency to overuse them that causes problems. The allergy was unfortunate and gross. A month later I followed this antibiotic laden time with a one week fast, to clear out the toxins and start a fresh; I will go in to that more on a future blog.
So I now come around to where this story ends and a new one begins. It is where my blog also ended temporarily due to the ‘big white arm’. I had to leave my job as I could no longer work with the pain and only one useful arm was not sufficient. I already suffer physical problems from my tumbling descent down the stairs all those years ago and losing use of my arm highlighted old problems and created new imbalances. Physically and emotionally draining when you are so far from the reassurance of home.
My arm is much better now (two months on) I am swimming every day and doing yoga to get strength and flexibility back. It is going to take time and patience before I get full use of it back. The skin and muscle pull and tug strangely where the tissues now move as one instead of independently, a seam out of place that twists awkwardly. A scar with a story.
This period was difficult but it opened new opportunities for me and I am now living on an organic coconut farm in Khanom with my friend and his family. My little wooden hut is simply heaven to me right now and I finally have the time to enjoy this fantastic country. When one door closes, another one always opens and for now, I am enjoying each moment of what feels like freedom and learning to be mindful. After all, you never know where a monkey might be lurking and being present is terribly important if you want to remain intact.
I am back.
Stay tuned for more health tips and reassurance that feeling great is not rocket science.
Josie
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