Entries Tagged 'Being Uber Healthy' ↓

I’ve become a victim of healthy peer pressure. I have a good friend who is a complete health freak and I find her healthiness is rubbing off on me. I almost feel like I’m trying to keep up to her standard. I’m thinking it’s a good thing though, perhaps everyone needs to hang around a few healthy people to get a bit of a kick to healthy it up.

I’ll give an example. This particular friend of mine has decided to give up all forms of caffeine. This includes tea and chocolate, two of my favourite treats. There’s no way I’m giving up chocolate, but for some strange reason, I automatically started drinking herbal tea instead of my normal caffeinated English tea every day at 10:30am. Why did I break my routine so easily? It must have been the peer pressure!

I’ve also found myself trying to keep up with everyone else’s yoga routine. So, you’re doing yoga and meditation twice a day? Well, so can I!!

Quite frankly, this is the kind of peer pressure I’m happy to have. My advice to you is to go and find yourself a healthy friend and start talking about health stuff. In my opinion it’s the most effective and easiest way to be healthy. The conversations you have with this friend will get you motivated and you can share how much better you feel for each change you make in your life. I’ve started to surround myself with very health conscious people and it’s definitely making a positive impact on my life. Who knows what I’ll be giving up next!

Frances Kerr

I feel really lucky to have a few close friends in my professional and personal life who are very health conscious, probably even more health conscious than me! One of the great things about these friendships is it gives me someone to talk to about being healthy, someone to shop with at the markets or health food stores, and even someone to be a little bit competitive with. Last night I made myself a really healthy dinner of organic steamed veges and brown rice. When I was cooking I was thinking, ‘ha, I bet I’m the healthiest one tonight!’.

My point is, get yourself a health buddy. Someone who can give you encouragement, someone you can share tips with and maybe even someone you can compete with to be the healthiest. If I was the only healthy person I know, I would feel a little bit like a crazy health freak. But at least I have a few people in my life who I know are just as crazy as me.

A few reasons why you need a health buddy

• Whatever your motivation is to being healthy, whether you’re just starting out or maybe you’ve always been healthy, having support from another healthy person is great. The support can be things like sharing tips on how to deal with junk food cravings, help with what exercise to do or maybe sharing tips on what natural body products you’ve tried.
• I’m not very motivated when it comes to exercising on my own, unless it’s a very solo sport like swimming. I love combining social and sport together so I skate with an inline skating group a couple of times a week, go to the same yoga as a couple of friends and walk or cycle with a girlfriend when we’ve got time. The best part of social sport is stopping into a cafe after and sharing a meal (super healthy food or not, you just did some exercise!).
• My work health buddy has been really handy too, especially during my sugar free diets. At times when I’ve been eyeing off that cake for somebody’s birthday, she’s looked at my sternly and said ‘no Fran’. Not that I have to listen to her, but geez it helps keep me focused.
• I’m a little bit of a competitive person so I find the competition to keep up with my healthy friends a great motivator. When I get a bit lazy with my diet or can’t be bothered to start that regular yoga and meditation I keep meaning to do, I think of my healthy friends and how their great diets or daily yoga has paid off and I want to be just like them! Note, I’m still working on this one.

So, thanks health buddies - you know who you are. Thanks for the chats on spirituality, thanks for the motivation to switch to organic foods, thanks for showing me that I’m not a freak for almost completely giving up alcohol (yeah, it’s the new black, didn’t you know?) and thanks for all the support when I’ve needed it :-).

Frances Kerr

I’ve talked about my weak digestive system in previous posts. This problem is partially due to allergies and partially due to an energy blockage around my solar plexus, or Manipura chakra. One of the many physical symptoms I get from this weak digestive system is a production of a lot of ear wax, it’s a bit gross I know. Apart from being a bit yuck and really annoying, this overproduction of ear wax makes my hearing not as good as it should be.

I’ve always considered ear candling to be a good solution. For those of you who are not familiar with the process of ear candling, I’ll refer you to about.com which has a great pictorial. If you’re a little bit squeamish, be careful there’s ear wax in these photos!

Ear Candling Pictorial
http://healing.about.com/od/earcandling/ig/Ear-Candling/?once=true&

How my appointment went

What I wasn’t prepared for was how relaxing the procedure would be. The warmth from the candle and the beautiful little crackling noises were incredibly relaxing. Each ear took around 20 minutes so by the time the practitioner was half way through my second ear I was fighting to keep my eyes open, all I wanted to do was fall asleep! There was no pain at all and I couldn’t feel any kind of suction or vacuum. Occasionally I felt a slight warm liquid feeling in my ear as if wax and liquid were moving around but it wasn’t unpleasant.

Even though ear wax was successfully sucked out of my ears, the procedure didn’t work as well as it should because I have small ear canals. Apparently ear candling doesn’t work as well for those with smaller than average ear canals. It still moved a lot around though and I did feel a bit clearer in my ears, nose and sinuses. I also felt quite light headed after the procedure and waited about an hour before I felt confident enough to drive. I was advised by my practitioner to drink a lot of water to prevent a throat infection from post nasal drip.

The not so good part

That evening my sinuses felt quite sore and continued to be sore on and off for the next few weeks. I blame my small ear canals, I’m sure it moved everything around but didn’t do a good enough job of getting everything out. Unfortunately the sinus problem will probably prevent me from getting ear candling again which is a pity because the procedure was so beautiful and relaxing and I know it works incredibly well for a lot of people.

My practitioner advised me to put two drops of tea tree oil into each ear then put a cotton wool ball in my ears to stop the oil from running out. This softens the ear wax which helps it to come out by itself. She thought this may be a better alternative for me than ear candling and all the other over the counter ear wax products on the market. I haven’t tried this yet but I definitely intend to.

The appointment cost $50 and lasted about an hour. I recommend ear candling to anyone who has a problem with blocked ears from too much ear wax, except for those like me who have small ear canals. I also recommend trying the drops of tea tree oil, it’s practically free, natural and you can do it yourself. I’ll definitely be giving it a go.

Frances Kerr