Year: 2011

artificial sweeteners…are any ok?

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Honesty corner: I’ve been trying to cheat the system and find a way to eat sugar-free chocolate. A cup of tea and chocolate at 3pm. Real tea. Fake sugar… sadly it’s tougher than the idea suggests.

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I figured there had to be one out there that was OK.

The fake chocolate scenario:

  • Loving Earth chocolate  contains agave, which is 90 per cent fructose. Which is not what you want to be eating. Health food shops are awash with agave-sweetened, “sugar-free” products. Be very aware!
  • Cocoa Farm chocolate is sweetened with Maltitol which is one of the common sugar alcohols. More on them in a minute. But note, they’re bad.

So are any fake sugars OK? Yep.

  • Dextrose and glucose are both pure glucose, containing no fructose, so your body will detect it and process it.
  • The “maltos” – maltodextrin and maltodextrose. These are another variant of glucose, in a longer chain of molecules. When they hit your saliva, they break down to maltose, which is digested as if it were pure glucose.
  • Lactose – the sugar in milk products. Again, no fructose and surprisingly sweet once you’re off fructose.

This is a list, from David Gillespie’s “Sweet Poison Quit Plan“:

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Growing up in the 70s: what was it like for you?

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I’m a Gen Xer, a child of the 70s, and oh, don’t I just love to tell young folk how much better it was when I was a kid. I’ve reached that age. I came across an interview with Salon’s Heather Havrilesky. She’s just written a memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” about being a child of the … Read more

vibram fivefingers…I’m a convert (Sunday life)

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This week I run in weird frog shoes

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I think it’s a particularly Australian thing to not want to appear too earnest when partaking in sporting pursuits. Blaring lyrca and customised sweats make you look like you care too much. Which is fine if you’re the best. But anything less? You’re a try-hard. I mean, what could be worse than being accused of having “all gear and no idea”?

For this week’s column I succumbed to trialing possibly the most earnest sporting accoutrement on the planet: Vibram FiveFingers, those odd little foot gloves made from rubber that allow you to run barefoot without getting glass or twig injuries. They were originally designed in Italy as a non-slip boating shoe, but a few years ago were adopted by the rather parochial and fast-growing barefoot running community. You might have seen such folk about at your gym, down at the park, running past you in a marathon. And you might have thought, “Cripes, what an earnest little frog-footed person he/she is!”.

Well, I’ve turned into just such a person. You know, it’s lucky I offloaded my pride long ago (shortly after I wrote about getting a colonic and just before tap-dancing out of a plane with Sir Richard Branson for this column). Adjusting to the FiveFingers takes a good few months and Australia’s Vibram importer Max Delacy from Barefoot Inc told me I must walk around in them as much as possible until my feet strengthened. I wore mine walking through the city to meetings, to the supermarket and into a pub when I had to drop something off to a friend. I got looks. But I held my head high.

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what if i can’t be the nerd anymore?

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Since I was four I’ve worn glasses. Before hipsters wore glasses, being a four-eyes wasn’t cool. It wasn’t like wearing braces. You were ostracized not so much for having a defect but for looking bookish and – god forbid – intelligent. At my bogan school it was rad to be slightly dim.

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I think I became a nerd from wearing glasses. I was never bookish, but spent a lot of time on my own in the library. It meant I had plenty of time for homework. Glasses also force a certain aesthetic upon you – a slightly awkward, intense, reflective one. I’ve worn it as a guise ever since.

But yesterday I was told I didn’t need glasses. I’m affronted. Threatened. I already feel naked. My ego is attached to being different via my glasses, bold enough to wear them, not-caring-enough about what others think. I wear big, brash glasses, unapologetically. This has become my stamp.

But when German vision trainer Leo Angart visited me he took one look at my eyes and told me glasses were not required. He identified my eye issues in one glance and said  that he could fix them with simple muscular exercises in….weeks, if not days!

I’m a four-eyes because I have:

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Tolstoy’s rules of life – what are yours?

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Leo Tolstoy was something of rigid, draconian, self-flagellating type.

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rule #7 find what makes you different from everyone else

He wrote these rules of life when he was 18:

  1. Get up early (five o’clock)
  2. Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
  3. Eat little and avoid sweets
  4. Try to do everything by yourself
  5. Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for evry minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater
  6. Keep away from women
  7. Kill desire by work
  8. Be good, but try to let no one know it
  9. Always live less expensively than you might
  10. Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

(Thank you to Gretchen at The Happiness Project)

I like many of them. Not so much #6! I like the bottom three specifically. The bottom two even more so. I think living as simply as you can, regardless of income and wealth, is a rich way to live. Expensive stuff is annoying and complicated. And wanting “stuff”, reaching out for “things” externally is distracting and a recipe for an endless yearning that gnaws at you relentlessly. Upgrading never satisfies.

Some of my rules of life are:

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David lynch on meditation: water the root

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There’s a saying that goes along with the vedic style of meditation that I do:

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water the root, enjoy the fruit.

Which is to say, put focus and care into your core every day and then the rest of life will simply flourish and express itself. Can I just say? It works.

I’ve been meditating in the vedic style for two years and I’ve gradually, and exponentially, become a sturdier tree with better fruit. It’s really working for me at the moment as I write. What’s coming out isn’t so nervous and false and flimsy. It’s grounded. I hope!!

Below is a montage of highlights from the Change Begins Within benefit gala held in December by the producer David Lynch who’s been meditating twice a day for 37 years. Lynch, who adheres to the transcendental style (very similar to the vedic style) teamed up with Martin Scorcese, Clint Eastwood, Katy Perry and Russell Brand to talk about meditation for this fund-raiser which raised $$ to teach 10,000 war veterans to meditate. Lynch raises $$ to expand the technique to disadvantaged kids and veterans and homeless people. The David Lynch Foundation is committed to teach 1 million kids to do meditation. Lynch  talks about watering the root…

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sunday life: what am i good at?

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This week I do an IQ test

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A gnawing feeling that we’re big, fat frauds is common to the human experience, I believe. Mostly we’re just waiting for someone to work out that, actually, we have no idea what we’re doing and that we’re crap at what we do.  Michelle Pfeiffer once said, “I still think people will find out that I’m really not very talented. I’m really not very good.”

Stephen Fry is the pin-up for fraud complex, and confesses in The Fry Chronicles that behind his mask of ease and assurance he is “chronically overmastered by a sense of failure, underachievement and a terrible knowledge that I have betrayed, abused or neglected the talents that nature bestowed upon me”.

I have another theory: those who seem least fraudulent, determined to never reveal their mask, are in fact the biggest frauds and the most crappy at what they do. They just have more at stake in putting on a convincing front.

For the more transparently fallible among us, though, the question, “am I actually doing what I’m meant to be doing?” can plague us our entire lives. Is there anything more despairing than being an accountant for 45 years when you were actually destined to bake novelty birthday cakes? I don’t think so. As an annoying 16-year-old I tried to avert such a calamity by cold-calling people working in professions I thought might suit me and asking them if they liked their job and did they think it would suit a young person such as myself (cringe!). I rang a bunch of lawyers, local MPs and an architect. (Please, if you’re a teenager thinking of doing the same, can I advise command you don’t. It’ll be clear why in about a decade.) I clearly didn’t heed their responses – I set off and studied law and politics.

Thankfully today there are smoother ways to assess your vocational destiny – Aptitude tests.

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Things YOU love to love

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My ‘love what you love’ post a few days ago has been getting great suggestions and ideas for loving what YOU love. I wanted to share some with you. As well as a fun pic of Juliette Lewis playing drums. Because it’s Friday.

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The very amusing Adam Cordner said “I LOVE Comics and the Delorean(car) from Back To The Future! There, I said it. I’m going to find a Delorean and restore it to the film standard, then when I stop at the traffic lights I’ll scream at people “what year is this!”

Mel shared: tanned feet, camping sans luxury under big trees, boogie boarding…the kind u did when u were 10 resulting in lots of sand in the gusset of ur cosies, French romantic comedies, riding fast down hills with the wind in my hair, swishy dresses, second hand everything, dancing by myself, men with soul….

Ella‘s list included “napping with my head at the foot of my bed. Catching the train in the middle of the day, when it’s quiet, through the city and watching the skyscrapers slide past. The apple and peanut butter combination!”

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