A special welcome to all our faces from the Confident Women Rising summit. We are a community of curious skeptics with rebel hearts. Make yourself at home 8-)
Eça turns six months today! I knew having a baby would change our lives…I didn’t plan for a global pandemic too!
The calm I’ve maintained amidst these circumstances has clarified for me how important it is to become what the adult development literature calls “self-authoring” with our body and health choices (an easy baby and my privilege has also helped immensely).
Becoming self-authoring isn’t about how intelligent you are. It’s being curious enough to question what you’ve been taught about your body and to discover what’s true for you.
Next Wednesday, May 6, Insatiable Season 11, “Sugar Rehab”, begins with a focus on the rebel who writes her own playbook. Together, we’ll question the ideas about “good” foods for your body and the “good girl” stress reactions and why they make us turn to processed foods. Tune in with the question: how can I be more rebellious? It just might save the quality of your life.
How Can We All Breathe Easier? While the media coverage points to a vaccine as a panacea to coronavirus, researchers are finding more complex and varied root causes like pollution: People breathing polluted air for a long time are more susceptible to contracting and dying from COVID-19, which may be why more than 70% of coronavirus cases and about 80% of all deaths have occurred in the top 20 polluting states. This would make sense as researchers have identified smoking as a risk factor for Coronavirus fatalities and current air pollution levels may be as harmful to your lung as smoking cigarettes which makes us “all smokers now.” Need some good news? A drop in coal power plant emissions saw asthma issues improve.
Gasping for Fair. Structural racism forces people of color into the most polluted environments and disproportionately into professions labeled as essential workers. This helps to explain the disproportionate impact of the effects of COVID on Black and Latino communities and how the pandemic is further emphasizing glaring racial inequalities. While COVID-19 reactions can appear more polarizing than the 2016 election, if enough of us look at coronavirus root causes, we can come together to see this isn’t a right or left issue but as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, a top to bottom issue of Corporations profiting off destroying the environment and externalizing their costs onto the public. While public policy and the voting booth (or mail in ballots) are the best ways to address these systemic issues, here’s something you can do in the meantime to fight systemic inequalities.
COVID and Weight Stigma. Numerous outlets have reported that obesity is a major factor in COVID complications and deaths. With this news, the French noted they were worried about their “American friends” and British doctors blamed processed foods for the inflammation that creates immune susceptibility, a major factor not in who COVID infects, but who it kills. Christy Harrison digs into the research to show why COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate based on weight and digs into the root causes of poor health outcomes such as race, socioeconomic status, and/or quality of care as the social determinants of health. She also poses some interesting questions about how people who are moderately overweight sometimes have protective benefits from COVID.
You may have been reading all of the articles about people discovering the joy of baking bread in quarantine?
That will never be me.
Still, quarantine stir craziness has driven even me to culinary experimentation. While I’m yet to make anything that actually requires turning on an oven, I whipped up these easy cookie dough balls by my friend Lindsay Smith before Eça had time to be bored and needed a new activity.
My adjustments: I used peanut butter instead of almond butter, skipped the vanilla powder and reduced the honey to ¼ cup.
Sugar Rehab
Insatiable returns on Wednesday, May 6 with an entire season dedicated to #SugarRehab.
To prime you for the season, check out my most recent season’s episode on Sugar Rehab. In this episode, I go over the physical and emotional root causes and solutions of how to reduce sugar in your life. Unlike Overeaters Anonymous, I don’t think you have to cut it completely out of your diet, especially if you do the emotional work around sugar (processed foods included). The more we try to resist something, the more it persists (and controls our life!).
In this episode, we will discuss:
- Why sugar is so dangerous and yet it comforts us
- 5 easy food swaps and additions to your diet to naturally prevent cravings
- The four emotional triggers that cause sugar cravings and how to work through these triggers without sugar
Read the transcript
Be well,
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