There’s a lot of hype about the benefits of eating a live or raw food diet. This post defines living food, it’s health benefits and why some say that it’s not as healthy as some would have us believe.

Living food is all-natural and uncooked.

We know about the powerful health benefits of natural food, but what’s wrong with cooked food?

In general, food heated over 46°C (116°F) destroys it’s enzymes and alters the molecular structure of the food, creating toxic elements which must be eliminated or stored to protect the body from damage. It’s this internal damage that causes the external effects we label as aging.

What’s the difference between live and raw foods?

Live foods contain high concentrations of “active” enzymes. Raw food, on the other hand, has sleeping or “dormant” enzymes. These unactivated enzymes are awakened when raw foods are sprouted, like nuts and seeds, which then become “living food”.

What’s so great about enzymes?

Enzymes are catalysts which activate chemical reactions. In food, they’re called digestive enzymes because they facilitate digestion and food absorption.

Living food proponents contend that enzymes are the “life-force” or “energy” of food. Cooking food, in effect, kills or suffocates the potency of food.

One major criticism of a living food diet is that these enzymes are destroyed by stomach acid which render them useless to us since nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestine. Proponents maintain enzymes are merely deactivated in the stomach and reactivated when they reach the small intestine.

Health benefits of living food

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“It’s all about moderation and balance.” We hear that a lot, don’t we? But what does that mean? In this post we investigate the definition of the ever so elusive and attractive `balanced living’.

So far on Live Lighter, when we talk about balanced living, we’ve meant attending to our health in all areas of our life: body, mind and soul. But this definition falls short. Real short.

Or so I found out after reading The Law of Attraction: Making It Work For You by Canadian authors, Deborah Morrison and Arvind Singh. (Click here for the authors’ Facebook fan page.)

The Law of Attraction has been described and popularized in the hit movie, The Secret. However, many critics have suggested that the movie message is misdirecting and only skims the surface of how this Universal Law really works.

This is where Ms. Morrison and Mr. Singh come in. They clear up many of the misunderstandings resulting from The Secret and provide practical exercises to integrate the concepts of prosperity into every aspect of your life.

It’s their definition of `true prosperity’ that hit me like a brick: they’re describing the end result of balanced living!

The authors contend that true prosperity is composed of the manifestation of abundance in 5 key elements of your life:

1. Physical
2. Intellectual
3. Emotional
4. Social
5. Spiritual

If you’ve ever wondered why you feel unhappy or that there’s something missing in your life, despite having much to be grateful for, then the following excerpt from The Law of Attraction: Making It Work For You may be as revealing for you as it was for me: Read the rest of this entry

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“Love Hurts” Nazareth

All relationships have their ups and downs. When you’re experiencing a down, it can seem unbearably painful at times. So how do you know when you should stay and work through it, or throw in the towel?

If it’s a healthy relationship, then it would be worth it to stay. Right? We need to define a healthy relationship and this may hold a clue:

A conscious marriage is a marriage that fosters maximum psychological and spiritual growth; it’s a marriage created by becoming conscious and cooperating with the fundamental drives of the unconscious mind: to be safe, to be healed, and to be whole.

In the first half of “Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples” Dr. Harville Hendrix describes what it’s like to be in an unconscious committed relationship. It’s when the honeymoon stage ends and all the wonderful traits in your partner that first attracted you to them start to irritate the hell out of you.

You bicker and fight, throw blame around, hurt one another with thoughtless actions and words, and generally live an unstable existence wrought with pain and anguish.

What ever happened to `happily ever after’?

Reality Bites

From the psychological perspective, Dr. Hendrix explains it’s at this point where reality sets in. When you met your partner, sparks flew and you couldn’t get enough of each other. You felt as if you had met “the one”. You found your soul mate and now you’re complete.

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Everyone is unique. Each one of us has our own specific biochemical makeup so what’s good for one person isn’t necessarily good for another. But how do we know what our bodies need until we try things out or go to a doctor and get tested? Muscle testing is the answer!

Our bodies know what promotes health and vitality. Many say the body communicates with us via our intuition but who can hear that with all the noise in our heads?

Instead, we get aches, pains, itches and the like, and by then it’s too late. These are the effects of damaging the body.

Muscle testing: a non-invasive method used to communicate with the body in assessing imbalances and needs using a large muscle, usually the anterior deltoid or shoulder muscle. When the muscle stays strong, the body is saying “yes” or “it’s beneficial for me”. A weak muscle response is a “no” or “it’s harmful to me”.

At it’s most basic, muscle testing is biofeedback without all the bells and whistles!

Related to applied kinesiology (which was developed by chiropractor Dr. George J. Goodheart, Jr.), muscle testing is used by a wide variety of health practitioners and is used to “evaluate structural, chemical and mental aspects of health”. (Source: The International College of Applied Kinesiology)

Before you jump the gun and dismiss muscle testing as new age hooplah, check out this published study which helps validate muscle testing in chiropractic care.

What part of the body are we communicating with through muscle testing?

This answer is a tad confusing since everybody seems to have their own thoughts on the subject. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• The subconscious – as in PSYCH-K
• Our energy field in relation to the energy of the objects or ideas being tested
• Our electrical system
• The autonomic nervous system which, interestingly, controls the parts of our body functioning below the level of consciousness
• Our heart instinct or emotional center
• The Superconscious or what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. The spiritually-minded folk might call this our `Higher Self’ or `Creative Source’, the part of us that connects all life.

Keep in mind that it’s highly possible several or most of these are actually describing the same thing! On review of this list, muscle testing appears to detect physical, emotional, mental and spiritual stress in the body.

Muscle testing has many potentially diverse applications and implications

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Have you ever blown your nose and experienced crackling and popping in your ears, followed by the glorious sounds of the outside world coming in crystal clear? If you hadn’t noticed before, this is when you realize that your ears are plugged.

If you’re lucky, your Dolby digital-like surround sound hearing stays. If you’re like me and really congested, the crackling happens again almost instantaneously and it’s like you pushed the mute button on your ear drums.

So after two weeks of this and wanting to try an alternative method to the walk-in clinic’s ear flushing with warm, salt water, I decided to try ear candling (a.k.a. ear coning). But what is ear candling?

Ear candling is a highly debatable alternative therapy where ear candles are used to draw wax and impurities from the ear, sinuses, and some even believe, from the brain itself.

Proponents for ear candling suggest that it has many health benefits, including hearing improvement, curing earaches and swimmer’s ear, purifying the mind, stabilizing emotions and reducing stress and tension. Check out this QuackWatch.com article for a list on more purported health benefits.

However, research and respectable sources (like Health Canada in this article) say that ear candling fails to provide any health benefits and is dangerous in that it poses a risk of fire, burns, blocked ears (with the candle wax) and punctured ear drums.

Despite these warnings and feeling the need to experiment, I booked an appointment with my trusted neighbourhood health spa. The procedure went well and was actually quite relaxing. While she held the burning candle to an exposed ear, my ear candler massaged that side of my neck, shoulder and head.

After the candle had burnt close to the bottom, she removed it from my ear, cut off the still burning piece and cut it again closer to the end where it was placed in my ear. In each candle, I saw about an half an inch of what was obviously ear wax!

She then finished the treatment with a full face, head, neck and shoulder massage. It was heaven.

Unfortunately, my ears are still blocked and crackle when I blow my nose. I feel the only health benefits I recieved for my $40 was stress and tension relief… from the massage, of course!

Have you any experience with ear candling or coning? Please share it with us in the comment section below.

Conscious living is what I’ve been missing in Living Lighter. Living unconsciously is what’s been getting in my way of total, sustained happiness all this time, even after achieving success in my weight-loss goals and despite all my progress in acquiring total health. I also believe that my resistance to conscious living is the ultimate reason for my two accidents last year, my digestive woes, and why I started smoking again after 11 glorious months of being smoke-free.

It’s really hitting home for me as I read one of the best Christmas presents ever, the book by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. (Thank you, Honey!) This book promises to free your mind of the past and all the emotional baggage that comes along with it, as well as anxiety and worry of the future, and will teach you practical methods to live without pain and suffering. Now that’s what I call Living Lighter!

So What is `Conscious Living’?

It may mean something different to you, but with a little help from Eckhart Tolle, this is what it means to me::

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It’s that time of season in the Northern Hemisphere when that nasty cold virus comes out to play. We usually get colds, especially in December, because of environmental conditions and internal stresses from the holidays that compromise our immune systems (read this post to stay stress free during the holidays).

Colds are minor annoyances but will set you back, at best, a few days, and at worst, two weeks. There’s wisdom in the adage, “Know Thy Enemy” so here’s a description of the culprit:

From Prescription for Nutritional Healing, 4th Edition by Phyllis A. Balch, CNC.

• The common cold is an infection of the upper respiratory tract caused by a virus.

Myth: cold weather causes colds. Fact: most cold viruses thrive better in colder temperatures, when there is less humidity in the atmosphere. Read the rest of this entry

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No, ear seeds are not for growing flowers or vegetables out of your head, though they are real seeds from the Vaccaria plant. These tiny black beads, which I now have taped on different points along both my outer ears, are used in ear acupuncture or auricular therapy.

Apparently, different ear maps exist. As in the hands, feet and head, some believe that different areas of the ear correspond with different parts of the body. These acupuncture points along the ear help regulate the body’s internal organs, structures and functions. This treatment is used for many conditions, such as pain, mood disorders, obesity and addiction.

If you’ll remember back in August, after being 11 months smoke-free, I played Russian roulette with a cigarette – and lost. In last week’s post, “What is Traditional Chinese Medicine?” I mentioned my interest in trying acupuncture. So on Saturday I saw my Naturopathic Doc and we started the Clinic’s smoking cessation protocol.

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Did you know that in old China, doctors were paid to keep people well? Makes sense if we’re calling it healthcare, right? But get this: if their patients got sick, the doctors treated them for free!

In Staying Healthy with the Seasons, Dr. Elson M. Haas combines Eastern and Western healing traditions to form, Integrated Medicine. His basic philosophy is that humans and nature are inextricably linked. There is a two-way communication between us and the natural world and this affects both inner harmony and growth, and physical well-being.

Haas follows the Chinese health and wellness philosophy closely in his book. His total health guide focuses on education and prevention, and “explains the Chinese Law of the Five Elements – Fire, Earth, Metal (or Air), Water, and Wood – and how this system relates to specific seasons of the year, organs in the body, and experiences of activity, emotions, color, and flavor.”

This is only one small part of Traditional Chinese Medicine. From Wikipedia: Read the rest of this entry

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Are you an exercise phobe looking for an activity that doesn’t seem like work? What if I told you that I knew of a low-intensity, highly effective workout that if practised, would give you the long, strong and lean body of a dancer or gymnast?

Developed by Joseph Pilates in the 1920’s while incarcerated in a WWI German internment camp , Pilates is a series of muscle strengthening floor exercises. Many people like this form of exercise because there a very few repetitions, easily preventing boredom. And, you barely break a sweat!

Pilates is based on a holistic perspective and is a mind-body method that requires slow and controlled movements. The participant purposefully moves in and out of poses, strong from their core, concentrating on contracting and stretching the necessary muscles to perform each exercise.

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