Things are moving along maybe faster than what I am capable of handling right now. But it seems ok still, time is ready for this...While the storm is ranging outside our house, I feel relaxed and filled with the energy from the full moon.
My thirst for knowledge has brought me into new areas again. Had already decided that I will not open up Pandora's box of vaccinations before I am ready for it. It just felt too loaded with "bad energy" - and conflicts, and bringing me more problems with my closest and dearest surrounding. Well, guess what? As I am pregnant again, and Kidtwo is soon up for some shots, I decided that time has come to take on the bull fight. Today both hubby and I participated in a Pandora's box opening lecture on how the whole vaccine paradigm works. I might give you the details at some point but right now I've decided to let myself get accommodated with the new information. Actually, I can tell I was ready to receive this information because nothing of what I heard was shocking or unexpected. In fact, it was the part of the health puzzle that was missing for me. Now I understand more clearly why kids are so sick these days, and why people of my generation go around with so many autoimmune diseases. What I still cannot understand is the blindness of the practitioners in the field of medicine - how on earth has this been possible?
The second thing I wanted to share is that I am looking into "painfree" delivery through hypnobirthing. This is exciting stuff - learning to connect to the inner you, breath well, prepare for a fearless delivery, and thereby also a painfree delivery. I might tell you more as I move along my preparations. Not sure yet if I will be able to release all that subconscious fear hiding inside of me to be able to pull this through when time comes. But tomorrow I am having lunch with a friend that happens to be a doula - and I will definitely ask her advice on this subject!
This morning I had an early departure, heading for a Nordic conference on Development held in Helsinki these days. On the way to the train I remembered that I forgot to pack my dark chocolate for the road. Then my next thought was: well, do I really need it? I have two eggs, a gluten-free sandwich (with my new obsession: Philadelphia cheese...), and avocado and some water. That will keep me in good shape until the conference coffee somewhere around ten o'clock. Besides, the chocolate I had bought (Marabou) is not "clean" - it contains at least soy lecitin, which most probably is derived from genetically modified soy. So why do I insist buying these products for consumption, although they contain substances that I in principle do not support? The question becomes even more relevant as I think of the long term effect on the child that I am bearing. How do I know that strange substances that are not natural are not affecting my off spring? This should be the most dominant human drives of all, to produce healthy off springs so that the genetic code is passed on into the future. Then I think of my laziness to bring food for lunch lately and instead eating at the university canteen - well aware of all the strange extracts and substances like maltodextrins that hide in the food-like stuff served during lunch. Or the fruits for that matter - we have "fruit week" this week for the personnel at the school. Nice beautiful fruits fill up the teachers room and everybody is indulging - also I am enjoying this extra treat, although I know that there must be pesticide residues on and in them - they are not organic. Why do I do this when I have a choice? Why not just stick to my home-cooked meals, make an extra portion each day and be happy with the organic fruits that we buy for our local veggie dealer? Why isn't that enough?
Well, first because I hate fanaticism (yeah, really - who could have imagined? Me, the sugar busting fanatic number one!). In case of products that I have not found a direct link to health concerns,I just can't stay away all the time. Particularly not when we talk about chocolate....Second, eating habits are very hard to change! Just take the example of Philadelphia above, I have been off dairy products for a considerable amount of time and just recently reintroduced raw milk to my body - after noticing that this was fine I am now also indulging in Phillly-cheese... it is just sooooooo gooooooood, and so is chocolate, did I forget to mention? Third, my lack of planning ahead with any other meal than our dinner is just beyond my capacity right now. In the morning we have oatmeal and eggs in some form and I get the kids to day care, to still remember to pack down my own lunch is just too much, really, come on, I am only human. And so it goes, I have a choice to eat according to my best of knowledges, I even have the capacity to turn raw real food organic ingredients into nutritious food, and I have the motives - but I lack the coordination and the determination. There is long road from principles to practice... but at some point I might be getting there. And in the mean time I just tell myself that I am way better off than during that first pregnancy when I blindly trusted both the state dietary recommendations and the authorities that are supposed to guarantee that the food-like products on our supermarket shelves are indeed: safe.
And then, as I am finalizing this writing, I see a post on Facebook on a new study on the side effects of the most popular herbicide in the world, glyphosate, the most popular herbicide in the world today. The abstracts starts off nicely: "Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise." And the conclusions aren't that hard to understand either: "Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins."
So what was I saying again about my choices and the future health of my off spring? Maybe I should really start using that choice of mine in a more coordinated and determined way...
I need to keep the flow going here on this blog, although I mostly working locally now, blogging in Swedish on my other blog. But I still think this blog is worth keeping alive: just to focus on food and well-being and dismantling myths about the two.
So here are some significant news from over here:
1. My rashes are GONE!!! It only took 10 months but they are gone. And you can't believe how happy I am to look myself in the mirror and not see a snorting-kind-of-face staring back at me. I still think my gut needs some more healing but at least it doesn't seem to be so acute anymore.
2. I stopped eating maca. Two reasons: you are not supposed to eat it for a prolonged time according to the research I did for the previous post, and maybe more importantly, several of the sources I used mentioned that pregnant women should not consume maca. Before I have talked to any indigenous health experts from Peru on the subject, I thought I'd better be safe than sorry because, yes, this is my other big news of the day: I am pregnant. A little bit of a surprise but as the tummy grows and the kicks get stronger I can feel the love building up inside of me.
3. Because of my "blessed situation" I am now both freaking out and embracing the situation. During my two previous pregnancies I have not been remotely aware of all the things I know today. This is both empowering and scary. I am trying to deal with my knowledge so that it is mostly empowering and I am glad to say that my health care sister is quite understanding of my increased knowledge on most subjects. Last time I paid here a visit I had to fill in the papers on my eating habits. As I ticked the "saturated fat" boxes I said to her "you will probably kick me out after this", and when she said that if I wanted she could book me an appointment at the dietitian's office I politely declined. I said that appointment will only end up in a debate on who is right and wrong, I'd rather see a dietitian that follow the same stream of "belief" as myself. So then I turned to another one, just over the chat, checking whether what I am eating is ok... and it should be - in the end, who knows really what is ok and what not?!?
4. I am going into the "next level", from mostly being concern about food related stuff to achieve well-being I am now stepping into the mental awareness phase. We laughed with a colleague the other day, because we have both done the same journey, we agreed that this is how it goes, first you become aware of you body and from there you move over to the mind. So with the mental thing comes this next thing, which I hope I will be blogging more about in the future: Hypnobirthing. I have discovered a book by this name and it is all about going through labor without fear and pain - just as women used to do it thousands years back. Fascinating stuff and I am determined to at least give it a chance. I have the book, I am learning every day, and if it won't give me a painless birthing experience, at least it will give me tools on how to relax - and already that would be a tremendous victory in my life!
So these were my updates for today. Let's see if I can start squeezing in some more informative posts in the near future again!
Until then, I thought I should let you know about the new lecture from Robert Lustig that was recently released on Youtube. I watched it today and feel a little be more informed once again on the connection between sugar, obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome! And above all, in his lecture he shows that it is the processed foods (not the sodas) that are the number one reason to this obesity epidemic. This is what I have been trying to say all the time: stay away from that stuff, you never know how much sugar they manage to hide in there! He talks especially about the unhealthy sweetened yogurts. This is also why I feel we are so misinformed in this country, most people think that our eating habits are so different in comparison with those fast food eating and soda drinking North Americans... but really, if we give processed food the space it really deserves in this debate, then we are not that much better off than what they are on the other side of the big pond...
