Sea Salt

Post detox, Doug and I are are continuing to do our best to eat the healthiest we can. We found it interesting that salt was allowed on our detox. Natural sea salt, that is.

Like sugar, the conventional way salt is processed is what makes the ingredient problematic in the diet. Jon Barron sums it up:

"Only 7% of salt goes for food; the other 93% goes to industry. Industry requires chemically pure sodium chloride for manufacture of explosives, chlorine gas, soda, fertilizers and plastics. In effect, table salt represents a "cheap" production overrun."

"In today's market, we now have two distinct choices when it comes to salt: unrefined and refined. Unrefined salt (sea salt) is 84% sodium chloride and 16% other minerals. Refined salt is 97.5% sodium chloride and approximately 2.5% chemical additives."

Unrefined sea salt

• Natural salt is a prime condiment that stimulates salivation and helps to balance and replenish all of the body's electrolytes.
• The natural iodine in these salts protects against radiation, atomic fallout, and many other pollutants.
• Unrefined sea salt supplies all 92 vital trace minerals, thereby promoting optimum biological function and cellular maintenance:
  • Here is a partial list of the minerals found in unrefined salt and their function in human metabolism:
    • Sodium: Essential to digestion and metabolism, regulates body fluids, nerve and muscular functions.
    • Chlorine: Essential component of human body fluids.
    • Calcium: Needed for bone mineralization.
    • Magnesium: Dissipates sodium excess, forms and hardens bones, ensures mental development and sharpens intelligence, promotes assimilation of carbohydrates, assures metabolism of vitamin C and calcium, retards the aging process and dissolves kidney stones.
    • Sulfur: Controls energy transfer in tissue, bone and cartilage cells, essential for protein compounds.
    • Silicon: Needed in carbon metabolism and for skin and hair balance.
    • Iodine: Vital for energy production and mental development, ensures production of thyroid hormones, needed for strong auto-defense mechanism (lymphatic system).
    • Bromine: In magnesium bromide form, a nervous system regulator and restorer, vital for pituitary hormonal function.
    • Phosphorus: Essential for biochemical synthesis and nerve cell functions related to the brain, constituent of phosphoproteins, nucleoproteins and phospholipids.
    • Vanadium: Of greater value for tooth bone calcification than fluoride, tones cardiac and nervous systems, reduces cholesterol, regulates phospholipids in blood, and a catalyst for the oxidation of many biological substances.
    
    

Refined table salt

• Inorganic sodium chloride upsets your fluid balance and constantly overburdens your elimination systems, which can impair your health.
• When your body tries to isolate the overdose of refined salt you typically expose it to, water molecules must surround the sodium chloride molecules to break them up into sodium and chloride ions in order to help your body neutralize them. To accomplish this, water is taken from your cells, and you have to sacrifice the water stored in your cells in order to neutralize the unnatural sodium chloride.
  • This results in dehydrated cells that die prematurely.
• Refined table salt contains added iodine, which may indeed have helped eliminate the incidence of endemic goiter, but has conversely increased the incidence of hypothyroidism.
• Refined table salt lacks all trace minerals.
• Refined salt contains anticaking agents such as ferrocyanide, yellow prussiate of soda, tricalcium phosphate, alumine-calcium silicate, sodium aluminosilicate. All work by preventing the salt from mixing with water, both inside the box and inside the human body. This prevents the salt from doing one of its important functions in the organism: regulating hydration.

"Truth be told, all refined table salt is actually sea salt at heart, either refined from the sea (brine sourced) or found in salt mines created by ancient seabed deposits known as halite. Refined salt is processed at high temperatures altering the molecular structure of the salt (not good) and removing the beneficial trace minerals. The human body doesn't like it."


Looking in the cabinet, all my "sea salt" is the processed kind. So much for spending extra money getting what you think is better. I'll be heading to my Central Market for real sea salt.

Recommended:

Celtic Salt aka French Grey Sea Salt
Fluer De Sel
Himilayan Sea Salt
New Zealand Organic
Matiz Salts

Hill Country Mountain Laurel Blooming

Spring signals its arrival to San Antonio with fragrant purple flowers sprouting on our Texas Mountain Laurel. The blooms are wisteria-like in how they drape in clusters and some compare the smell to grape kool-aid.




We have several that are beginning to show their lavender blossoms, beckoning us to enjoy the patio as the weather warms.

Dinner with Dana

Pilates teacher and friend, Dana Gardner, came to dinner last night. We opened a Sterling Chardonnay and had some cashews - french style.

We're still following our gluten -dairy free nutritional plan. I made Broiled Chicken Tomato Relish, adding zucchini to the relish. I made the simple salad of spinach, almond and cheese with a Spanish Idiazabal, which is similar to Manchego but made with sheep milk.

Dana brought a fruit salad for dessert.

The detox was a success. We are lighter at the waistline and lighter in spirit. Made better by a surprise celebration with Dana.

Detoxification

Doug and I have made detoxification a part of our annual health regimen for many years now. He routinely goes away for a week at the Optimum Health Institute (I've been twice) to detoxify with raw foods, fasting, colon cleanses and exercise. Our education at OHI has had a life altering effect on how we eat and live. I recently did a 4 day fruit fast to get back on track with good nutrition after the holidays, which is based in part on what I learned there. This year, we're staying at home and committing to a 28 day program.

Designs For Health offers a health professional administered detoxification plan. We are to take detox packets twice daily, drink fresh detox smoothies and follow a gluten/diary free diet during the program. Since we pretty much eat this way, we're adding in the Designs For Health products to detox organs and such.

Blessed Herbs offers a program you can order directly online.

These are two programs that my alternative health practitioners offer. Best to check with your own for recommendations if this seems interesting to you. Whatever you do, "be divine in 2009" and endeavor to be as healthy as you can be.

Happy New Year 2009!

HIGHTLIGHTS OF 2008

• Graduating from the Pilates Conservatory
• Awarded Certified Pilates Teacher designation by the Pilates Method Alliance
• Pilates Room At Synergy
• South Beach, FL, the Ritz and Dave's Cuban Cafe
  
• Charleston Girls Getaway
• Southern Lady Celebration in Savannah, GA
• Belly dancing
• Living and loving on three lakes
  

POSSIBILITIES FOR 2009

• Beach rental - Panhandle FL
• Kim and Brandon's Wedding - Northern CA
  
• Newport RI with McArthurs
• Getting Jessica settled in her new life, post graduation
• Pilates continuing education
• Supercuts alumni reunion
  

READING IN 2008

• Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat - Walsh
  
• Fearproof Your Life - Bailey
  
• The J Curve - Bremmer
  
• You; Staying Young - Roizen and Oz
  
• Speaks The Nightbird - McCammon
  
• What Would Audrey Do - Keogh
• Invisible Acts Of Power - Myss
  

WATCHING IN 2008

• Heroes
• The Unit
• Becoming Jane
• Enchanted
  
• The Other Boleyn Girl
• Prince Caspian
• P.S., I love You!
  
• Waterhorse
• Forbidden Kingdom
• House Of Elliot - netflix
• The Tudors - netflix
  
• Criminal Minds
• John Adams
• Sam Kinison - netflix
  
• Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed
  

LISTENING IN 2008

• Agrafa - Muzeki
  
• Light. Life. Love - Chris Pfeiffer
  
• Frontiers and Nomad - Jesse Cook
  
• Don't Ask - Tina Arena
  
• Cafe Brazillia - Various Artists
  
• Cafe Roma - Various Artists
• Cafe Arabica - Parklane
• Brotherhood, Vida - Del Castillo
• Wonderfall - Farish
• Eagles
  

Turning The Page

Christmas Day, Doug and I spent a couple of hours initiating our 2009 calendars. Opening our new books to each month, we shared commitments we each had as well as opportunities we hope to take advantage of. Our minister speaks of this time as the "in between point", our "being pinned down between two places", the outgoing and incoming year. We are all figuratively and literally turning the page.

Those of us in the west turn the pages of a new calender on January 1. This date was part of reforms made by Julius Caesar, becoming known as the Julian calendar, and was maintained with the Gregorian calendar - the one we use today. In Caesar's time, the Romans worshiped Janus, deity of doors, doorways, gates, beginnings and endings. Janus symbolizes changes and transitions and is associated with resolutions. Janus is depicted as having two faces, able to see into the past with one face and into the future with the other. January emanates from his name.

In today's time, we do not offer Janus sacrificial honey to "ensure that the future would be sweet" with good fortune. Rev. Tudor does suggest we turn back through the pages of our calendars before heading into our new ones. Who were the people we met, what places have we been to, what has changed, what did we worry about, what did we hope for and how did things turn out?

What's most noticeable in my own calendar is how many more Pilates clients I have AND where I conduct business. There are accomplishments such as passing my profession's national certification and disappointments such as not as many visits with my daughter as in years past. There are bright spots such as our Valentine's celebration, the weekend I spent in Charleston with girlfriends and my activities as a Lululemon Athletica Ambassador. It is apparent that I am attuned to my health, indicated in the massage, check ups and routine visits to alternative health practitioners. This time last year, I was sure I would be a guest teacher at Cascina Papaveri, where they host Pilates and Cookery Vacations. Things didn't pan out.

Rev. Tudor asks that, upon looking back on where we've been, we give thought to what we will take with us and what we will leave behind as we proceed into the new year. When we take the time to remember and reflect on our recent past, we give our selves the chance to reevaluate things. After all, we are becoming more of who we already are, on the spiritual realm at least.

I bought my spanking new calendar a few weeks before Doug and I had our "meeting" on Christmas. I must reveal that fresh, untouched calendars are a bit invigorating to me. It reminds me of the same feelings I used to get just before the start of a school year when I got my supplies. You can just sense opportunity for making improvements and meeting challenges within the crisp, clean sheets of paper. A virgin calendar is filled with promise; places to go, ceremonies to participate in, events to be apart of, elaborate celebrations or simple gatherings to mark special occasions, good works to be done. My filled-to-the-brim calendar gets filed away; sometimes for record keeping, sometimes to come across in a year or several to revisit that time and place.

New years are like containers to Rev. Tudor. "...new container. The old one doesn't hold us any more." She encourages us to step into the open, unscheduled future that is fresh with opportunity. We are are at a touchstone. Dr. Phil has said: "Your life is either going to be better or worse this time next year. It will not be the same. You'll either be happier or unhappier, thinner or fatter, wealthier or poorer...". I'm thinking I'd better take a look back now before I proceed in turning the page.



"Are you doing today what you want to? Or, are you just doing the same thing as yesterday?"
- Dr Phil McGraw

“Things can always get worse or better. We are all moving on, letting go of what’s over.”
- Alexandra Stoddard

"Always have a place to go." - Robert Fritz

"Life is lived forward. Life is understood backwards." - Katie McGill
inspired by Søren Kierkegaard

"Go forward and be all that you can be." - Karen Tudor

"He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." - Luke 4:16-21

Christmas '08