Here, a few extra pics and some that you lot sent in (thank you!). Also, our friend Joyce from Cyclestyle has VERY kindly offered to giveaway an oval wicker bike basket (see below). As an aside, Joyce just gave birth four days ago, 10 days late! The criteria will be…hmmmm…someone who’s just embraced bike funesss…a new recruit! Send in a pic via the comments of your new wheels (and a cute outfit) if you can.
I found these pics of Baba – an Australian stylist living in Paris who I interviewed years ago when I was a feature writer at Sunday Magazine. Gala Darling posted them on her blog recently and did a wonderful write up on Baba. A gorgeous read.
Baba uses black leggings creatively. Have black leggings. Will travel (even in f*ck off stillettos in the snow).
“I’m an anxious person, very annoying, but you have made me feel like maybe I can deal with it. Thanks!! How do you deal with anxiety and enjoy things when you’re feeling anxious. Please! I would love to know what you do.”
I’m a very anxious person. It’s the background soundtrack to my existence. When you’re an anxious person, you notice things a lot. I’ve noticed there are different types of anxiety. But regardless, I reckon the beat (or buzz) of the soundtrack is the same. It’s common to the human experience.
At different stages in my life anxiety has ruled, and crippled, me.
The thing is, you can struggle with it. Or you can work with it. I don’t think we’re not meant to be anxious. I don’t think we’re not meant to be anything. We just are.
Happiness is generally impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.” Alain de Botton
Worrying about worrying is very familiar to the anxious person. Constant monitoring of your level of “Hey, I’m cool”-ness is too. Ditto, thinking that everyone else goes home content and anxiety-free, jumps into bed and sleeps sound.
I reckon we all get to the bathroom mirror on our way to the bedroom at night and look at ourselves and wonder if we’re doing this caper called life right. None of us are. All of us are.
I love Stephen Fry for the fact he reminds us of this, constantly sharing on Twitter his doubt and anxiety and sadness. Dave Eggers, too, in interviews.
Anxiety has made my life good
I don’t particularly feel like dwelling on the anxiety bit of Cammy’s question. The “how do I enjoy things” bit is more interesting. I think anxiety pushes us. It exists to do so – it’s part of the flight or fight mechanism and helps us friggen fire up.
I’ve been sugar-free for 16 days now. With a minuscule exception.** Huge. I’ve employed a range of tricks for quitting.
What’s been trickiest? Chocolate? Dessert? Nope. Breakfast.
Breakfast is dripping in sugar. Cereal, muesli, muffins, banana bread, fruit salad, yoghurt, jam, peanut butter. Even Promite!!! If you eat out or on the run, it’s worse. Try ordering even a porridge (in summer)… you have to specify no honey, no compote. And then it’ll come out drenched in low-fat yoghurt, which is brimful of sugar.
A tub of low-fat yoghurt (200ml) contains about 6-8 teaspoons of sugar. That stuff they serve at cafes? Even more…
Me, I’ve been mostly eating:
* poached eggs on toast, sometimes with bacon
* millet toast spread with cashew and turmeric spread from Suveran.
* avocado and vegemite on toast (gluten free)
* porridge “sweetened” with a little coconut milk and cinnamon, with yoghurt and nuts
* haloumi cheese grilled with sardines and olives
* smoothies made with a handful of frozen berries or a frozen banana…WHAT?! **Yes, bananas are full of sugar (berries are OK). But here’s the thing. My principles take over. I had 5 bananas in my freezer and given the shortage and given I don’t waste food ever (not even the stalks on spinach. Or sweet potato peel), I’ve been eating half at a time. My little bourgeouis experiment is not that important!
I’ve also been on the look-out for fruit and sugar-free muesli. I’ve posted a few below.
Other things to look out for:
* Chai tea – they often put honey or palm sugar in the mix
* drink full-fat milk with your coffee…the fat helps with sugar-cravings
* don’t drink juice. Veggie juice is ok, so long as it’s got no fruit juice in it (carrot and beetroot also contain a lot of sugar…be careful). A good substitute is coconut water.
* nuts are good! I eat a few after breakfast to curb the sugar grasp
But first.
I got David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison, to share his thoughts:
Sugar avoidance can eliminate whole food groups, not just chocolate and ice-cream. Take a walk down the breakfast cereal aisle and you will be struggling to find a single product that doesn’t have significant amounts of sugar.
Breakfast can be an enormous source of sugar in a ‘healthy’ diet.
Eating a heart foundation approved cereal (like Kellogg’s Just Right) and a glass of apple juice for breakfast will add up to almost half a kilo of sugar by the end of the week.
That’s half a kilo of sugar in your diet before you even push back from the breakfast bowl, before you crack open a chocolate wrapper and before you tuck into an energy drink at morning tea time.
My Dad just sent this email update. I’ve written before about his group emails. I thought I’d share because it made my day. Bear in mind, this from a man who bought my mum an iron for her 21st. Hey kids Look at the terrific present I made mum for Valentines Day. It will be … Read more
I’m not sure why, but I think I’m going to feel better for sharing the following with you. I’m writing a book. But here’s the thing. I was commissioned almost a year ago. It’s due next month. But, oh my, I’ve not written a word. At least not one fit enough for print.
Seriously, a whole year has passed as Henry David Thoreau once said (about life in general),
“frittered away by detail.”
That is, getting back to people, paying parking tickets and working through bottomless to-do lists. And that magical day when I “finally get on top of things” and can focus on creative outpouring keeps getting pushed back and back.
I think it’s a fact of modern life that no one gets anything done anymore. Anything of worthwhile, creative value.
Productivity expert Jason Fried spoke at TED.com recently about how work doesn’t happen at work now; it gets done on the train, on weekends and when we come in two hours early before the email avalanche descends. I was talking to my friend Kerry, a CEO of a charity organisation. “I need a long plane trip to come up soon,” she said. “So I can get my mid-term report finished.”
This is how we get our meaningful work done, because our “working days” are completely shredded up by interruptions and meetings and we never get the momentum and locked-out languid space required for creative stuff. But it’s the creative stuff we’re all crying out for, isn’t’ it!
I thought I’d share this interview with you. As you know, I was sick for quite a while. Getting better now. But it’s been a struggle to do what nourishes me – being creative – during this time. At the same time, it’s what’s kept me going. It’s been the grist to my mill. This … Read more
Today I’m going to answer a question I get asked a lot.
Tanya emailed me this:
“I don’t wanna have to cart my office clothes with me on my bike, nor is my body fit for the great outdoors in tight lycra! Help!”
I hear you Tanya. I ride in what I’m wearing for the day. No need to complicate life with changes of clothes…seriously. Here are some tricks I employ:
1. Embrace dressy shorts. I love these ones below from Sass and Bide. I buy them a size or two too big.
2. Yes, you can wear heels. I do all the time. Just buy ones that support your foot in some way – eg boots or ones with straps over the arch of the foot and around the ankle. The heels below are from All Saints – they’re like a laced-up desert boot. When riding with heels you do need to be careful you don’t slip…but this extra psychological pressure actually makes for some nice hyper-aware and aligned riding. What about wedges? They don’t work, really. I’ll scoot down the road in them, but there’s no grip to be found. Save them for walking.
Here’s Lucy from Love at 1st Sight (Lucy builds single speeds in Bondi, if you’re interested) wearing booties:
3. Short dresses with stockings in winter are great. A scarf you can tie to your bag is good too. I rode to this red carpet event in the city back in winter (much to the shock of publicists), wearing this:
Boots are good. When riding in skirts or dresses, I just tuck the fabric under me and try to keep seated. I think this is quite a clever way to deal with skirts:
It’s a movement that hasn’t really struck here in Australia. I’m seeing signs. In LA and New York it’s huge.
*This blog post has been updated on February 5, 2016 and now reflects my current stance on eating raw foods.
I’m talking raw. And it’s very much a movement. When I was in New York I checked out a few. My favourite whimsical person Gala Darling and I met for raw spanikopita made with almond feta at One Lucky Duck in Gramercy. Beyond good!!
Possibly it’s most colourful proponent is David Wolfe. I’ve heard David Wolfe speak a few times. He quite possibly has too much energy for this lifetime. Turns out I spoke to him this week about going raw.
Here’s the podcast. You’ll have to bear with me…it was my first time using Call Recorder on Skype and it’s full of typically awkward Sarah-ish glitches. It goes for about 15 minutes:
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Now. Not everyone wants to go completely raw. I don’t. But there are a few things to know about eating MORE raw food that might pique your interest. The gist is a little somethin like this:
* There are two main sources of enzymes for digesting food and turning it into energy. They’re found inside the food itself, and in us.
* According to the raw foodies, food enzymes are destroyed when food is heated over about 116 degrees F or 46 degrees C. Which means we have to use our own enzymes to break down cooked food.
* BUT our bodies have a limited supply of enzymes. And when they deplete, we age faster. So the less we use (and get from food instead) the better.
Raw foodies ferment and soak grains and nuts to make them digestible. Or slow cook food at low temperatures. And cure meats with lemon and other acids (as in carpaccio)
Me, I personally like warm mushy foods… An argument can also be made about some vegetables requiring heating in order to make their vitamins and minerals available, such as starchy veg like potato. The valuable nutrients are contained in the starch and in order for out bodies to absorb them we need to cook the vegetable to make it easier for our body to break down.
I suggest having a combo of both raw and cooked veg so you get the best ban for your buck.
If you’re interested in learning more hear him talk during his Australian tour next in February and March. He’s talking on permaculture, doing workshops and sharing his raw chocolate recipes (I’ll share these in a bit).
I’ve just finished this sweet little book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. It’s the memoir of a woman who gets sick and waits out her illness watching a little snail that a friend delivered to her in a flowerpot. She learns from the snail about slowness, although the snail moves faster than she does while she’s bedridden. Her understanding of the snail’s stillness over the course of 12 months mirrors her acceptance of her illness “standstillness”.
“The velocity of the ill, however, is like that of the snail,” Emily Dickinson.
If you’ve ever been sick or held back from everything that’s defined you for some reason, I reckon you’ll get this sweet journey. Elisabeth Tova Bailey was struck down with a particularly virulent strain of flu while travelling and it developed into a much more serious illness – something akin to CFS – which left her debilitated for almost twenty years. It was in the worst period that a friend gave her the little woodland snail as a (pretty weird!) gift.
The book opened me up. And it was beautiful to appreciate that some things have an inevitable pace. Meaning can be found in not moving, in being quiet. And that nature can find us and teach us what we need to know.
Happily, I was able to contact Elisabeth, who shared with me some thoughts on her illness.
I found these pics of Baba – an Australian stylist living in Paris who I interviewed years ago when I was a feature writer at Sunday Magazine. Gala Darling posted them on her blog recently and did a wonderful write up on Baba. A gorgeous read.
