Be totally glad for red men

I read a quote from someone from a book about a book about to come out, somewhere. Said quote touched on the idea of using the things that so irritatingly slow us down to…slow down. And to be grateful for the prompt.

Image via flickr.
Image via flickr.

The red man at the pedestrian crossing.

A red traffic light.

A queue at the Post Office.

The slow walker.

The delayed train.

We can use such modern irritants as an instant prompt to pause and reflect and sit calmly and look around and breathe deep. And to smile at our little impatient selves. Because there’s nothing like smiling at a little vulnerable, pained, simple version of ourselves to put things into an expansive, settled perspective.

I’ve written before about how smiling at ourselves is a great meditation technique.

So much of the “pain” – physically, psychically and energetically – in my life stems from my neck-strained, forced, rigid “plunging forward” into things.

I plunge forward with my dominant right leg, and have had multiple accidents on the right side of my body as a result.

I’m in a constant state of straining forward with my head, and have incredible issues with my neck (which is relieved whenever I “sit

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Slow Food and Outdoors Guide to Perth and Fremantle

I’ve just come back from a jaunt over West. It was a quick one, but I got a very good feel for the scene there in just a few days. My bro’ Ben and I scouted the joint together.

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Riding the Kalamunda Circuit – possibly the best mountain bike trail I’ve done.

Perth and environs has some incredible produce and wine that fits to the “whole food”, locavore etc vibe. Interestingly, I’d say the city doesn’t really promote its paddock-to-plate wares as much as it could. Which, to be honest, is quite refreshing. The whole “local, hand-foraged basil leaf” palaver can wear a little thin after a while (isn’t a basil leaf just “picked”?).

As I say, I was there briefly, so my recommendations are limited. Thusly, I called on a few local hand-foraged “friends” to share their favourite spots, too.

Fremantle

* Bread In Common.  Even if you don’t eat bread, this place offers so, so much: slow-cooked options, locally sourced and house-made; communal tables; and a lovely heat coming off the big bread ovens where they make their very authentic sourdough (based on a mother culture that’s 25 years old). Check out the Bread In Common site. PS. Every full moon they have a long table communal dinner.

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What I eat on planes

This is another one of those posts I do when the questions on a particular topic roll in too thick and fast for me to respond to on an individual basis. Every time I travel somewhere I cop this one: but what do you eat in the air?

Image via Favim.com
Image via Favim.com

I’ve covered off what I eat when I’m travelling, that is, what I eat in foreign countries when I don’t have access to a kitchen and familiar foods.

I’ve also touched on what I eat on the run, including toting my breakfast and lunch to work. But today we’re going to cover air travel in all its hyper-packaged, processed, over-salted glory.

I mostly don’t eat on domestic routes

On short flights I simply don’t eat. Honestly, all of us can survive 1-2 hours without food. Snacking is a confection of the food industry to get us eating more of their food. Up until the 1990s common wisdom was to eat three square meals a day. This is what our bodies are designed to do. They like to rest a good 4-5 hours between meals. But in the early 90s nutritionists modified this to the “5-6 small meals a day” prescription in response to their client’s crazy blood sugar issues (from eating too many sugars and cheap carbs).

My issue with snacking is also this: snack food is mostly crappy. And always so on planes.

Know this:

Because our sense of taste dilutes at altitude, plane food is jammed with extra flavourings and salt.

On international flights

On long flights, or if my transit and flying time is right on a meal time, I will generally pack my own food and eat it at the airport or mid-flight. This is what I do:

  • I use up veggies that will go off in the fridge while I’m away. I chop up red capsicum, beans, snow peas etc and put in a ziplock bag (these can be rinsed out, dried and rolled up taking up less room in my suitcase than a lunchbox). I tend to always have a wedge of avocado or cheese lying around. I put that in the bag, too (I always eat fat

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How to plan a great hike

It’s kind of funny being asked to explain something that comes as second nature to you. “Um, you just do it,” comes the reply from the nuclear scientist who splits atoms for a living.

Screen Shot 2014-07-23 at 10.04.09 AMBut given I’m so often hike-bragging (hagging?) all over social media under the pretense of encouraging more people to hike on their weekends and vacations (in lieu of shopping), I feel it’s my responsibility to actually break things down for those who are wanting to give it a go, some of you for the first time. Anyone doubting the incredible benefits of hiking it’s worth my flagging:

*Research shows that spending time outdoors increases attention spans and creative problem-solving skills by as much as 50 percent.

* Just one hour of trekking can burn well over 500 calories (if calorie counting is your caper).

* Hiking can lower blood pressure by four to 10 points, and reduce the danger of heart disease, diabetes and strokes for those at high-risk.

* Another study found that long distance hiking trips may improve antioxidative capacity in cancer patients.

* And this bit of boffinism shows that using hiking as an additional therapy can help people with severe depression feel less hopeless, depressed and suicidal.

In a semblance of order, here’s how I do it:

I make it all about the hike.

Some people travel to a city or region for a museum, or the café scene, or for the wineries. From there they experience other things (great food, sights, smells). When you really want to give hiking a go, go to where the best hike is and build in other experiences from there. It’s not a bad formula to adhere to. Great hiking scenery generally attracts great food and culture and other experiences. And like-minded people.

I use hiking as the raison d’etre of my travelling. That and eating.

Research your hike thus:

Google: “Best hikes in [insert name of area]”. If you’re really happy to travel anywhere in the world for a rippin’ hike, check

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Being creative can be a lonely path

I loved reading about this new study into the connection between creativity and mental illness. It effectively found that creativity has little correlation with genius. While there is a connection with a highish IQ  (the “average” creative has an IQ around 120), the real nexus is with a touch of madness. But more specifically (and interestingly), a particular ability to see things others don’t.

Image via Favim.com
Image via Favim.com

The author’s final conclusion on the Thing that denotes creativity is this:

“Creative people are better at recognising relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

He goes on to say that this ability to see things differently can be a very lonely experience…which, in turn, he feels, explains the mental illness nexus.

A quote from his own writing on the subject:

“When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.”

It would appear mad to go to the cutting edge if it were only painful. But here comes my favourite bit, the bit that made me

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Beautiful brave men

A little tale. One day, a few months back, I found myself in Somerset killing time after a three-day hike across moors and dells. I visited an antique fair where ladies with purple hair sold things that smelled of mothballs and the shoppers looked like a crooked-toothed host from Antiques Roadshow. It was perfectly quaint.

I just chatted a bit. A lady heard my accent and said, “I’ve saved this for you.” She grabbed my arm and dragged me to her pile of plastic boxes behind her stall of war memorabilia. “I promised I’d offer this to the next Australian I meet,” she said handing me this tatty little book…

Padre Gault's Stunt Book
Padre Gault’s Stunt Book

Padre Gault was an Australian Methodist minister who wandered the trenches in World War I providing guidance and solace. His Stunt Book was a collection of wisdoms and witticisms geared at providing solace to soldiers. I accepted the book, and paid her a few pounds for it and have been reflecting on it, sharing it with friends, since.

My favourite bits are where Padre asks the soldiers a question about life. The responses are so raw. He asks them about the sky:

“Why don’t they keep the moon for a dark night?” – Anon

And being a man:

“If the Australian soldier could attain a moral standard equivalent to his fighting abilities, it would approach closely to

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300 “typical” thyroid symptoms (yep, that many!)

As many of you know, I have thyroid disease. I’ve been meaning to compile a list of various symptoms linked to thyroid issues for a while, in part to highlight just how multifaceted, unpredictable and nebulous the disease is.

Image via Favim.com
Image via Favim.com

It’s worth remembering that every cell in our body has thyroid receptors (the only other substance with receptors on every cell is Vitamin D). This really does explain why a dodgy thyroid can manifest in so many different ways. It’s an illness of the entire body.

It also explains why autoimmune thyroid disease, or Hashimotos, is so often misdiagnosed as 93847 other conditions and why so many Hashi sufferers finally arrive at the correct diagnosis exhausted from trying all kinds of different supplements and treatments for 93847 unrelated conditions. Oh, and it explains why we can be left feeling like a crazy hypochondriac. Right?

When I reflect on the sheer number of symptoms linked to Hashimotos  it reminds me just how fruitless it is to try  fix symptoms (which would take several lifetimes even if such fixes existed) and that focusing on a broad healing is far more productive. This is what I do now. I steer my efforts to modulating my stress. This is the core “fix”.

I’ve since seen an extensive list on Hypothyroidmom.com and Dana has kindly given me permission to share it with you kids (I recently shared one of her posts on constipation which you can explore at your leisure. Good toot reading!).

You can catch up on the peculiar and nebulous symptoms from some previous posts I’ve written on hashimotos disease.

Also, Dana provides a few interesting points stemming from how confused people get by the knotted cluster of symptoms thyroid disease presents:

If you’ve got constipation, it could be thyroid disease.

If you’ve suffered a miscarriage, your thyroid could be to blame.

But now to the list. I don’t suggest you start a comparathon here, nor self-diagnose based on having a few of the symptoms below. Nor get alarmed, especially when you get to the list of cancers at the bottom.  This list is more to comfort those with the illness who feel entirely ridiculous about “always having something wrong” with them. It’s not you, it’s your thyroid!! That said, if your undiagnosed

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Please. Turn back the bread.

Want to get me cranky? Over order in restaurant and leave a ton of perfectly good stuff on your plate to be chucked out. Oh, and then not see this as an issue.

A food wastage poster from World War 1.
A food wastage poster from World War 1.

I’m really rather myopic about food wastage. Just to drum it: The biggest pollution issue on the planet is food wastage (surpassing industry and car emissions). And the biggest contributors to food wastage? Consumers (not manufacturers or restaurants or farmers).

Just because I’m a little cranky today, I’m going to outline a few ways folk can do the right thing in this regard, and in regards to wastage in general. Mostly it’s about communicating – voicing up.

Say “no bread thank you” when you place your order if you tend to pick your poached eggs off your sourdough. Or “only one piece of bread”, if that’s your fancy.

Ditto, when the bread basket and oil arrives. Reject it before the waiter plonks it (if you’re not going to eat it). If you don’t, and you let it sit there while you eat, the waiter will have to chuck it when they clear your plates.

Order on the stingy side when doing little shared plates. Then add to it, rather than over-ordering.  Apply this to sides

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With family, we revert to age 12

Family hurts. They are the hardest reminders of the gnarliest, unprettiest bits of ourselves. They hold up the rawest reflections. No smoke, just mirrors.

Family dinner wine and accompaniment hustle
Dinner with my wonderful family last weekend

And so we revert to our 12-year-old selves in defensive response. I don’t know about you. I was 12 when I really started to hurt. I was 12 when I was first really bludgeoned with the realization, “Holy shit, my parents might just be wrong”…in their outlook, their values, their take on life.  This was a lonely feeling.  (I was also 12 when I started my first business and took up my “investigation of God”, trialing a different church every Sunday.)

I was 12 when I really felt abandoned, left on my own to define myself. And my reference point was my family.

Last weekend I was in Canberra visiting my large, raucous family. It’s not often all eight of us are in the same place at the same time. We tell ablutions jokes (me: “When we’re 70 what do you think we’ll talk about? Them, in unison: “Fart jokes”) , pay each other out, test each others patience, wrestle and compete physically (to climb trees, ride faster, jump rocks). You

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Really know (and trust life from there)

This is a nice little tale I hope you’ll enjoy. You might have noticed a few weeks back an I Quit Sugar social media call out looking for a mural artist who’d like to get expressive with the big blank wall on the deck of our new office (which we move into today!).

xxx
Tamara with her mural at IQS HQ

I have made it a policy since I began this whole “sugar quitting e-xperience to e-business” journey to recruit within our crew. I generally find the right answer (to most things) is always closer to hand than you think. I like to keep things close. As this tale illustrates.

We had hundreds of applications for the gig. But one entry jumped out. Both Jo and I agreed straight away: “We like Tamara”. Yep, we just liked her and her application. We couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. But it didn’t matter; we just knew.

And so Gold Coast artist, mum and part-time teacher Tamara Armstrong got charged with our blank wall. And this is how it unfolded.

Tamara's design mock up
Tamara’s design mock up

Tamara sent in her design. We couldn’t fault it. It was perfect. The colours were perfect. We’d been umming and aghhing (read: consulting Feng Shui expert Lizzie Wiggins) about the right colours for the space. Suddenly we had our colour palate right here – closer to hand than we thought – with Tamara’s mock-up.

Tamara flew down with her husband Matt and three month old baby Thea and got to work. It was done! dusted! in a few days. We still couldn’t fault it. And didn’t. We knew.

It was the same with the ridiculously impressive Richie Northcott – the Fresh Prince – who offered to build a hanging

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