Cleansing

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The word cleanse can offer up as many different emotions and reactions as the word salesmen can. Depending on our past experiences and any information we have digested (pun intended), as well as our friends past experiences, our own impressions may skew all over the board. Let the cleanse debate percolate...

Fads, Trends and Nonsensical BS  

The problem with getting a bead on words like cleanse (and salesmen) is that we tend to group all of them into the same category. How is the kind, gentle, honest person who helped you effectively and affordably solve a problem (by selling you something) the same as the sleazy, caustic dude we picture as the used car salesman? Not.

The same goes for cleanses, my friend. They range from solid science to freaky fad, and as always it’s buyer beware. We’ll hopefully assist in your attempt to weed the contenders out from the pretenders, but let’s first focus on the three pillars of physical health: exercising to your capability level, eating whole foods (as little processed as possible), and using supplements to fill in the inevitable nutritional gaps.

If you incorporate these three components to ~ an 80% consistency level, your own organs (liver and kidneys) should be more than capable of filtering out most of the toxins that invade your system. Doing a gentle, science-based cleanse 2-4 times per year, one that doesn’t compromise the three pillars of physical health, is usually great and can often reset good health practices and stop wayward, bad habits from creeping in.

So, what does one look for in a cleanse program? First, check your intuition as you read the requirements. Does it resonate with what you know about how your body works and what it requires for fuel? A BIG red flag for me, and I do four gentle, scientific-based cleanses a year, is when a cleanse program asks you to reduce physical activity for the duration (translation: this is going to severely restrict something your body needs to perform).

Juice Cleanses – Hero’s or Zeros?                                            
The most popular of the plethora of cleanses is the juice or all liquid cleanse. Again, to be fair, we’re lumping them all together as I asked you not to do earlier, but you’ll see the commonalities in a moment. Juice cleanses range from 3-5 days to longer, with differing rules and content.
Regardless, many inform you that exercise needs to be reduced during the program, and in what way would this help you create new, better eating or activity habits? And what about the eating whole foods part of the three pillars of physical health? Some juice cleanses may increase your sugar load (depending on the fruit to vegetable ratio of the juice blend) to the point of spiking your glycemic index, setting you up for future carbohydrate cravings. And finally, many of the juices used in cleansing are cold pressed, meaning they contain no fiber, therefore inhibiting nutrient uptake as fiber is necessary to facilitate nutrient absorption.  
Some may restrict calories, sending your body into “shutdown shock”, or starvation mode. Once you resume eating whole foods, the body stores the calories rather than burning them for energy. Couple this with the flawed premise that our body is full of toxins to begin with, and that juices haven’t been proven to detoxify, and we have a recipe for nutritional dysfunction.

Look Better, Feel Better, Live Better

Let’s be clear, juices are not bad as part of a balanced, whole food eating plan. But as most bodies (if you are a junk food junkie this may not apply) are not the toxin farms they are made out to be, it is wise to use common sense and apply the three pillars as well as your own intuition to any cleanse that comes across your path. And while we may sound negative here, we still believe that the right, science-based cleanse, done bi-yearly or quarterly, can be a very valuable reset for your body and health!

         “Cleansing is like my meditation. It makes me stop, focus and think about what I'm putting into my body. I'm making a commitment to my health and hitting the reset button.”

                                                                                   Salma Hayek

PS: Please, tell us of your cleansing experiences...the good, bad, and ugly!

Confidence (Pt. 2!)

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In our last blog it was clearly established that a gap in confidence exists between men and women, and while men are affected by confidence blips, they seem to recover and bull onward, mostly unscathed. Women too often get discouraged, and this becomes a major stumbling block to success on many levels.

So what to do with this problem? Or rather, this challenge, as we prefer to call it. Isn’t it always how well we make lemonade with the lemons we’re dealt that dictates our character and further, our path to success?

Attitudes and Inspiration Start at Home

Hopefully our generation, as well as our children’s generation, is moving towards closing this confidence gap and the inherent inequities it causes. Confidence building starts in infancy and progresses into and through early childhood. It is incumbent upon us as parents to love our little girls unconditionally, smile and coddle them, and lend positive reinforcement as well as well placed corrective guidance, giving them a "leg up" as much as is possible. 

This self-esteem nurturing can take many different forms. Keeping doors of communication open are essential, but more than anything we need to teach through our actions. Women are by nature, nurturers, and have the innate capacity to shape their children’s early lives, but men have this responsibility as well.

Fathers usually have a special relationship with their daughters and little girls learn firsthand how men treat women from dad. Men need to teach their daughters that they can command respect, but also walk away from any situation if it need be.

As parents, we need to form a united front, together reassuring our daughters that they, too, can reach for the stars.  If you can dream it, it can become your reality. At the same time, sons need to be taught to respect women, as they are just as competitive, smart, talented and deserving as men are. For all kids, when small goals are achieved, they should be celebrated.

Role Models for Secondary Inspiration

In a world where competition abounds and survival of the fittest is the norm, women now comprise 50% of the working population. More than ever, this confidence gap between the sexes needs to be narrowed.  

While not the first by any stretch, Mary Tyler Moore comes to mind for me as an early media pioneer who showed that women could be equals, if not even supersede their male counterparts in a competitive industry. And it needs to be noted that with all her successes came many failures. Obviously she persevered, paving the way for other females like Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, Marlo Thomas and Hillary Clinton to name a few, to make their mark in various powerful, male dominated arenas.

In a more recent success story, Sheryl Sandburg became the COO of Facebook, is listed as one of Time 100’s most Influential People, and is now a billionaire and the author of “Lean In”. Her book targets the professional woman, encouraging the achievement of her career goals, as well as men who want to contribute to a more equitable society. Sheryl also explores barriers like discrimination, sexism and sexual harassment that prevent women from taking leadership roles in the workplace.

Look Better, Feel Better, Live Better

Old fashioned, male-dominant attitudes are beginning to be challenged and brought out into the open. Women have a long journey and a lot of work ahead of them to even the score, but it begins with baby steps, many of which are being taken as we speak. For those of us who don’t aspire to be Corporate Titans, raising a generation of children who expect equality and will settle for nothing less can be our humble first step.

         “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our      countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”

                                                               Sheryl Sandburg, from “Lean In”   
                                    

PS: Who is your female role model and why? Tell us about your inspiration...

Confidence

UP Beauty Online

“Even as our understanding of confidence expanded, however, we found that our original suspicion was dead-on: there is a particular crisis for women—a vast confidence gap that separates the sexes. Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities. This disparity stems from factors ranging from upbringing to biology.”         

             ~ from The Confidence Gap, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipmen

Discrimination, Male Alliance, or Something Else?

We all know women have been discriminated against in the work force, sometimes in society, for eons; they’ve been fighting an uphill battle, butting heads with the proverbial glass ceiling for decades and many, over time, have blamed “the good ole’ boys” network that invariably exists in Corporations and Government, or wherever high-level, top management types in male form seem to dominate.

So why, exactly, are women not closer to their male counterparts in status and job standing? The chances are that some of our pre-existing ideas and bias on why women are not equal are partially valid, but is that all there is? Could it really just be some men’s collusion effort, an underground, covert conspiracy secretly on the books to keep females down? Some would now argue that a self-esteem gap definitively exists between men and women, a chasm in confidence separating the sexes that may be a contributing factor towards this incongruence in equality.

Why the Gap?

Some attribute this confidence gap between the sexes to simple genetics, some to biological (maternal) factors. Others will point to the institutional and cultural barriers that women grow up with. But the lack of confidence is now evolving as a common, underlying problem with other factors overlaying in various degrees of magnitude.

And let’s make something perfectly clear – the same self-confidence deficiency tendencies also manifest themselves in men, just not to the degree women seem to suffer from them. Men also seem to get beyond their doubt much quicker, easier and more often than their female counterparts. And one thing has been found to be undeniable: confidence and success are as equally intertwined as competence and success are.

What is perhaps even more shocking, the fact that even the women who have “made it” to the top, those considered successful and powerful in each of their individual areas of expertise, also seem to suffer from the same confidence gap malaise as the more general women’s population pool. Top female producers interviewed used comments like, “I feel like a fraud some days”, or questioned, “Was I the best choice for that promotion?” to stating, “I’m not sure I’m the one to lead this company”.

Look Better, Feel Better, Live Better

So what to do? First, stop trying to be perfect. Perfectionism takes a lot of time and kills productivity and confidence. Second, somehow, through genetics and cultural conditioning (sports maybe), men take failure and turn it into perseverance, while females link failure to quitting. Do not stop trying. And finally, YOU, and only you, are responsible for your own confidence and self-worth – do not let ANYONE steal that from you!

         “Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels.”                                         

                                                               ~ from The Confidence Gap

PS: Questions, comments, suggestions...look for our companion blog, part II, on women who have beaten and defied all odds and bridged the gap!

Mother's Day

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In thinking about this, Mother's Day signals the beginning of optimism, of spring and all good things to come. Winter is in the past, summer just a whispered promise.  Put another way, if Mother's Day doesn’t bring a smile to your face, frankly we’re out of ideas.  

Everyone hopefully has fond memories of their mother or someone who's played a significant motherly role in their upbringing.  If for some odd reason you don’t have the appropriate appreciation, consider this from Elizabeth Stone: “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Wow, well said.

Dual Roles

For most of us reading this, as we are more likely than not, females, we may both be a mom as well as have a mom. Hopefully our mother’s are still with us. If we are both, we understand first-hand the full cycle of life. For us, Mother’s Day comes at us from both directions.

If you’ve lost a mother, or God forbid a child as I have experienced, sometimes Mother’s Day can come with a bit of a cloud on an otherwise sunny day. Mixed emotions, confusion, and loss, coupled with joy, memories, hope and family all tend to intermingle on defining days such as these. The good news is, for me, family and hope always win out!

Memories (and Creating New Ones)

One of the ways my mom showed her love and care was through cooking. Just recently, as I was preparing our Passover feast with her recipes, I had some flashbacks to our holiday celebrations, including Mother’s Day. My mom’s been gone for 7 years now, but I still remember her food tasting better than mine. I miss her a lot.

She used to say “cooking (food) has to just feel right”, meaning to me that cooking is one part intuition and one part love. The recipes are just a framework until love and personal feel are added by the cook. Somehow that brings me comfort and peace.

Our Mother’s Days were, and continue to be centered around food and family gathering to enjoy each other’s company, in essence, memory making. Sure there are cards and gifts, and they are really nice and appreciated (especially the home made gifts from the kids, and yes, now from the grandkids). But my experience is that the core joy and satisfaction is derived from just simply ‘being’ with those you love.

Look Better, Feel Better, Live Better

Happy Mother’s Day to all and much joy and happiness to you as you spend time together with your families. Be sure to appreciate your time together, take mental snapshots that will be your cherished memories for another day, and please, please, don’t let petty family grievances poison a beautiful day. Life is too short...

We close with two quotes today, as Mother’s Day is definitely worthy of multiple quotes!

         “A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future, but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.” 

                                                                     Honore de Balzac

“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

                                                                   Abraham Lincoln

PS: We’d be honored to hear your Mother’s Day memories and traditions if you’d care to share...