This recipe is an adaptation of one I first made about 30 years ago (in my vegan days) from The American Vegetarian Cookbook from the Fit for Life Kitchen by Marilyn Diamond. Better hot but also good cold IMO!
There have been many incarnations of this soup in my life, including as a staple at the health food deli where I worked–along with a catering job–to finance an 8-week trip to an ashram in India (that, my friends, is a story for another time.)
Lately I’ve simplified the soup to the bare bones for a quick and delicious low allergen side dish. Sometimes I have this with a side of tempeh, sometimes chicken, and it’s a really great side with salmon.
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Jeremy and I have been working together off and on for decades. He’s a rockstar personal trainer here in PDX and truly knows his stuff. I asked him to put together a short post with some ideas about home strength training. It turned out he already had a few downloadable cut sheets so we just linked them here! Each exercise includes a modification but please, start slowly, and make sure to run it by your doctor before starting any kind of program. especially if you have a history of musculoskeletal injuries. Enjoy!
Guest Post by Jeremy Hyatt
Strength training is something we can almost all agree we don’t have time for. With work, family and all that cardio we do – who has time? However, it has huge benefits that we all would love to enjoy like improving weight management by building lean muscle mass, increasing ease of daily activities, building better bone density, easing pain and increasing overall energy.
Most convincingly, once most anyone has given proper strength training it a try for a consistent period of time (say three months), almost all of them will say it is just as important to them (maybe more) as their sacred cardio. They feel better, stronger, and healthier. These changes bleed into all the other aspects of their life. To boot, if you do strength training with enough intensity, it’s also a cardiovascular workout.
The following links contain 10 at-home strength exercises complete with modifications to make them easier or harder as needed. The goal is to make full body strength training available to anyone at any time without equipment or large space requirements. The exercises are designed to hit all major muscle groups and move the body in all planes of motion. Ideally, you would run through 2 sets of 10-20 reps per exercise a couple times a week in conjunction with your cardio and flexibility work. Click to download. 🙂
strength 1.0
strength 2.0
Jeremy Hyatt of Hyatt Training has 18 years of experience working one-on-one with clients. Jeremy holds a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) credential and has a master’s degree in kinesiology. Hyatt Training is a collective of certified, enthusiastic, and innovative personal trainers who blend art and science to create programs that are applicable to life and sport.
If you’ve been visiting the blog or opening my emails of late you know I’ve been working on a new project…The Stress Less Strategy. It’s currently a workshop and a talk, soon to be a webinar and and course, and finally, in the coming year, a book. As part of the project I recently released a set of adult coloring pages. Or so I thought!
Last weekend I was on the way home from an appointment and my nine-year-old son called me sobbing. He was in a fight with his dad (usually the chill one.) The child was a wreck. Clearly tired and hungry but mostly livid that his father was being so “unreasonable.” He went on to tell me that his dad was just sitting on the front porch on his phone and ignoring him. I explained that I was sure he was just taking space and cooling off because he was angry and upset too.
When I arrived home my husband had moved from the front porch to the kitchen and my son was on the couch hiding under a blanket. I sat with him on the couch while he wrestled with his emotions. Some crying and deep sighs. Clearly very, very sad. I rested my hand on his back and waited.
After a bit he popped his head out, tear-stained. “Can we color?” (I hadn’t even realized he’d been aware of what I’d been working on.) Sure, I said, do you want to draw, or get a coloring book, or color in one of the pages that Allison drew for my book? “Yours.”
I grabbed a copy of the pages and set them down on the table, I pulled out my fancy pencils- I usually don’t let him use them- and we started to color. He was very focused. Quiet. I felt him calming down, anger dissipating. I pointed out the phrase on the page he was coloring and asked him to read it-
“There is magic in changing your perspective.”
I asked him if he knew what that meant. He did not. I explained. And we talked about it. We talked about how most people feel they are right during an argument. And how often, they both are. We talked about how as parents, we sometimes say no to things because we think it’s the right thing to do. We talked about how he feels when we say no, and how it’s fine for him to get angry but not fine for him to be disrespectful or unkind. We talked about how the people we love are on our team, even when we fight or get angry at each other. That changing your perspective is both thinking about how other people might feel, and knowing there are many ways to come at a problem. He listened thoughtfully. He told me he was still angry but I could see that he was shifting.
And then we colored more.
I was wrong, they aren’t just adult coloring pages, they’re also family coloring pages.
When we were done he called for his dad. And apologized. I’m not sure if it was time, or that he calmed down, or that he actually changed his perspective. Any way you slice it, perfection.
Yours in Health,
* Note the exception here is of course clinical depression and anxiety, those things are a result of a brain chemical imbalance in most cases– and it’s important to watch for these signs in children so they can get help if needed.
The fact that I just released a free set of printable coloring pages might lead you to believe I’ve been into adult coloring from the get-go. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’d say I was wary, but it was more than that. I hate a bandwagon and anything that is all the rage makes me cringe. But I had a persistent friend who kept telling me to try– I’d been having some trouble sleeping and she was confident it would help. I wasn’t inclined but she insisted, “There is even scientific proof!” So of course I went digging.
It turns out the science proving a benefit to coloring is a little sparse. And by a little sparse, I mean practically non-existent. The one study I could find, from 1995, had participants coloring mandalas, plaid designs, or simply free-form. The results showed that indeed the first two did indeed decrease anxiety, while the free form coloring did not, for this group of 84 undergraduates, anyway. Given how coloring is being touted as a panacea I expected more. One small study done twenty years ago is hardly proof.
Still, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
Coloring has a number of things going for it that could help calm the mind.
1. Coloring takes your focus away from your worries and directs it towards the page.
Our minds tend to either loop on things that have happened in the past or think about things that may (or may not) happen in the future. The fundamental problem with this isn’t necessarily the fact that we do it– though in some cases it can certainly spin out of control– the problem is that it keeps us from experiencing the moment we are in. The deliberate practice of focusing the mind makes it easier to be in the moment at other times.
Click here to download eight free coloring pages!
2. Coloring is a conscious decision to step away from whatever other non-relaxing other thing you might be doing.
This can be work, cleaning, surfing on the phone, following rabbit holes on Facebook, organizing files, whatever your poison is. Don’t get me wrong, I think the connectedness we get from the internet, to other people, other places, and information is amazing (I’m not one of those people who vilify our new world order.) I do, however, think it’s important to use it for good rather than evil. And by evil, I don’t mean plotting to take over the world, I mean escaping from the physical and emotional world around us.
3. There are often repeating patterns which you focus on that draw you in.
This is a common approach that is part of many different kind of meditation techniques across cultures. Mandalas, labyrinth walks, japa (mantra meditation,) focusing on the breath, focusing on a part of the body, these are all types of meditation that include repetition. This repetition is an easeful way to quiet your mind.
4. It’s art.
Art has been shown in many studies to help people. Although coloring is hardly art therapy, the benefit of making and looking at art has been studied extensively. Our minds can be calmed by beautiful things. Colors can elicit emotions as well as help us express them. Just look at kids doing art and see the focus and joy. We can get that back too…grownup style.
5. It’s fun. It’s playful. It’s easy. It’s creative.
Being a grown-up has its advantages. It can also suck. I’m very lucky that I have a job (two, actually) that I love, a doting husband, an easy kid. I have privilege in my life and good health. And yet I’m often overwhelmed. I can get anxious, and sad, and sleepless, despite my wonderful life and my expertise on the topic of stress. We can all, after all, use a bit of fun to remind us that it’s ok to relax and take a break from all of the adulting.
So I tried it.
And studies or not, I have to admit she was right. Is coloring a magic bullet? Of course not. Does this take the place of systematically figuring out what things are impacting my overall stress load? Certainly not.
Is coloring a fun way to de-stress? Absolutely. And I don’t need a study to tell me that.
Once I was in, I went in search of some free coloring pages to download. There were a few I liked but not many. The ones I did like were often not full sized, or not actually free in the end. So I imagined exactly what I would want to download:
Free pages that are original, beautiful, and have thoughtful ideas that support me to decrease my stress without making me feel like I’m reading some cheesy FB meme or missing the boat by not doing more to take care of myself.
I searched. And I searched. They didn’t exist, so I commissioned my dear friend Allison Jones to do the art and I put words to them that I use with my patients and clients often.
If you want a full set, I’d love to share them with you. Just CLICK HERE enter your email, and download all eight!
Enjoy!
Are you stressed? Overwhelmed?
I know that it’s hard to make the time for self-care. Life gets in the way, and there are so many other things to do all the time. Even if you lived on Mars and could capture an extra hour in every day (fun fact, Mars has 25-hour days!), you’d still be hard pressed to get everything done.
The good news is that you don’t have to do it all!
What you can do is take the time to identify what is most important to do so you can make the most of your time and effort. Ultimately this means removing things from your plate that are keeping you from feeling your best, whether that’s cutting back on sugar or letting go of one of your volunteer positions at your kid’s school. But in the meantime, taking just a few minutes here and there, where you can, to give yourself a break from the chaos, or even give yourself a break within the chaos, goes a long way to feeling healthy, happy, and productive.
And it doesn’t have to be hard.
I came up with the idea for these coloring pages as part of a book I’m working on called The Stress-Less Strategy which holds that if you think about stress differently, as the accumulation of both big and small things, you play a much more active role in controlling your health, energy, and state of mind. In other words, small changes lead to big results.
These small changes might be removing stressors, or they might be adding in little things here and there that relieve stress without being an additional burden to your already overwhelming to-do list. And they should be fun, not tedious.
Adult coloring fits that bill, and I was excited that through this medium I could also present some of the ideas in The Stress-Less Strategy- “be gentle with yourself, you can’t fail at self-care,” “growing takes time,” “there is magic in changing your perspective.” It took me about a minute and a half to figure out who to ask to do the art- my lovely friend Allison Jones. She drew me a sample page, it was perfect. The final art concepts were drawn from my own instagram feed and specific ideas from the book.
Coloring is a great way to quiet your mind and give yourself a break. And any break is a helpful break.
Click here to get a free copy of the Stress-Less Coloring Pages.
Print them out and plan a little break in your day today or tomorrow.
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, whatever might work for you. I like to color before bed because sleep is always a challenge for me and it helps to turn my brain away from the day, but really any time is fine. I’ve also found it can feel particularly good to steal away a little bit of time to do something fun in the middle of a particularly busy day. In the end, paradoxically, it helps me accomplish even more. Give it a try, what do you have to lose?
Enjoy!
Just like everyone doesn’t need breakfast, everyone doesn’t need to snack!
Just like everyone doesn’t need breakfast, everyone doesn’t need to snack!Some people enjoy snacking and some people don’t- you’ve got to keep that in mind when you’re deciding about snacking. That said, whether it’s best for your health to snack is very individual (I know, I know, I’m a broken record.)
And of course what you’re snacking on is important. Snacking on a snickers bar is a ‘don’t need’ for everyone. Let’s assume from here that we’re talking healthy snacks…
Reasons that snacking might be good for you:
- Your meals aren’t big enough to give you the calories you need for the day.
- You have nutritional goals you’re trying to meet, such as more protein or more vegetables.
- A tendency toward low blood sugar or high blood sugar.
- You’re hungry.
- There is a need for immediately accessible protein (weightlifting) or carbs (endurance sports.)
- You have gone a long time without eating and you want to eat something healthy so you don’t overdo another less healthy thing while you’re waiting for your meal (bread at a restaurant, chips while you’re prepping dinner, etc.)
Reasons that snacking might not be good for you:
- You have digestive issues. Generally we want to make sure your digestive system gets a rest between meals!
- You’re eating because you’re bored or otherwise trying to manage your emotions.
- You’re eating because it’s ‘there.’
- It’s difficult to make healthy snack choices.
- Total calorie intake for the day is running too high.
If you are going to snack I typically recommend higher protein snacks (or higher fat, as long as it is good quality fat) so your blood sugar stays nice and steady, unless of course you’re shooting for meeting that veggie goal.
Click here for 13 of my favorite gluten-free & paleo approved snacks!
Let me know on Facebook what your favorite snacks are and if you want any suggestions about how to make them healthier!
Yours in Health,
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