Morning:

I found the first few minutes of today’s meditation extremely difficult. As much as I wanted to sit, my mind just wasn’t in it and tried to convince me to skip the morning meditation. I almost gave in. During the meditation I felt very restless and couldn’t sit still. My back was very sore and I had to hunch over a few times to relieve the pain. Eventually, my mind settled down a bit and I was able to complete the full 10 minutes, but it wasn’t easy.

Evening:

My back was still very sore and I had quite a difficult time sitting up straight due to the pain. I only sat for 5 minutes tonight, and I have to admit that I was quite relieved to not have to sit for the full 10.

Morning:

I didn’t meditate until almost noon. I kept coming up with excuses as to why I couldn’t do it. I told myself that I had to eat first because my stomach was rumbling and it would probably distract me, but I didn’t get a chance to eat until after 10am because I was busy with laundry and chores. My excuse after I ate was that my stomach was full, and I wanted to wait for the food to settle first. I ran out of excuses at about 11:55am, and dragged myself and my ipod itouch (I use the countdown timer on it) to the bedroom. This session was surprisingly a lot easier than my last two. I knew that I didn’t have anything pressing to accomplish and that all my chores had been completed, so I was free to just sit.

I am happy to report that during this session I only opened my eyes once, at the third minute mark. I wanted to open them so badly and had to fight with myself to keep them closed. I daydreamed a little bit, but it was fairly easy to bring myself back to the breathing. At one point I told my mind to shut up because as much as it did not want to do this, I wasn’t getting up and was going to sit for 10 minutes, no matter what. Amazingly my mind listened and the last bit of my meditation went by quickly, and easily.

I don’t know if it is simply because I am returning to Canada soon, but I am feeling more optimistic than usual right now and my to-do list doesn’t appear as daunting as it did yesterday.

I will add the evening’s session to this entry after I have completed it.

Evening:

This evening’s session was uneventful, until the last 12 seconds when Steve walked into the bedroom after his shower and tried to distract me by sticking his naked butt in my face. Since there were only 12 seconds left on my timer, I forgave him.

Morning:

I was originally going to sit for 5 minutes because I didn’t think I could sit still for longer than that, but after the first five minutes were up, I added another 5 minutes for a total of 10 minutes. By about minute 7, I started to feel a bit restless. My left ankle and back began to hurt, and I started to have conversations with myself in my head. I was a bit distracted as the washing machine was running and there were pigeons squaking right outside my bedroom window. By minute 9, the back pain got worse, and I wanted to stop. However, I pushed through, and successfully completed the morning session. Next time I will need to try harder to keep my eyes closed and not peek at the time every few minutes.

Evening:

My mind was pretty restless during this meditation. I was busy and had things to do, so I kept opening my eyes and checking the time to see if the 10 minutes were up. I kind of feel like I rushed through the evening meditation, even though I sat for the full 10 minutes.

I have meditated on and off for the past few years, but never long enough to notice any considerable changes in my attitude or mental well being. I’ve decided to do the 30 day meditation challenge because by posting about it online, and knowing that I have a goal to meet, I will be more inclined to complete it. I have suffered from depressoin and anxiety for over fifteen years, and after trying nearly everything, I want to give meditation a sincere effort. Everyone talks about how great it makes them feel – how much calmer and more productive it has helped them to become. I would like to see what all the fuss is about.

To start, I will be meditating for ten minutes twice a day, once in the morning and a second time in the evening. I will be sitting cross-legged, with my eyes closed and focusing on the “So Hum” mantra and on my breathing.

I will try to post an update every day.

You can read all the 30 Day Meditation Challenge entries by clicking on the “Meditation” heading in the left column under Categories.

I was always under the impression that salmon was good for you & I never really bothered to research it, but after coming across the following article I may need to re-evaluate my opinion.

From www.fishinghurts.com:

Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Salmon

1. Salmon Are Smart
Fish are smart. Oxford University scientist Dr. Theresa Burt de Perera recently discovered that fish learn even faster than dogs. Fish learn from each other, have long-term memories, and can recognize one another. They gather information by eavesdropping, and some species even use tools, which, until recently, was thought to be a uniquely human trait. Like the dogs and cats with whom we share our homes, they also like to play, investigate new things, and hang out with friends.

2. Arsenic and Old Waste
Mmmm, want a plate full of poison? Fish have extremely high levels of chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, PCBs, DDT, dioxins, and lead in their flesh and fat. You may even get industrial-strength fire retardant with that catch of the day. The chemical residue found in salmon flesh can be as much as 9 million times that of the water in which they live.

3. Harm at the Farm
Four-fifths of the United States’ most popular fish flesh, salmon, consumed in the U.S. is farm-raised. These fish, who are raised by the millions in cages made of nets in coastal waters, are killing off wild fish populations as well, since it takes 5 pounds of commercially caught fish (species not eaten by humans) to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.

4. Sea Lice Aren’t So Nice
No one wants to wear a “death crown,” but thanks to chronic sea lice, a parasite that eats down to the bones on a fish’s face, salmon commonly suffer this condition. Salmon also routinely go insane and sustain sores and other injuries from intense crowding, as they are made to live their entire lives with as many as 27 fish in a space the size of a bathtub.

5. Slammin’ Salmon
No, we’re not talking about a baseball player—but fish farmers do often use bats to beat large salmon to death. All methods used to slaughter fish are grotesque and cruel. Fish have their gills slit while they are still alive, and smaller salmon are often packed in ice and left to slowly suffocate or freeze to death.

6. Open Waters Are Open Sewers
Everybody loves the Big Apple, but would you eat something fished out of the city’s sewer system? According to the Norwegian government, the salmon and trout farms in Norway alone produce roughly the same amount of sewage as New York City. The massive amount of raw sewage, dead fish corpses, and antibiotic-laden fish food sludge settling below farmed salmon cages can actually cause the ocean floor to rot, destroying vital habitat for the already strained marine ecosystem and turning coastal waters into open sewers.

7. Breeding Brain Damage
Usually when Moms pass things on to their children, it’s a good thing—but when pregnant or nursing moms eat fish, they pass the toxins they consume on to their babies. Studies have also shown that children born to mothers who eat fish are slower to talk, walk, and develop fine motor skills and have weaker memories and shorter attention spans. Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health have found that fish consumption can cause irreversible impairment to brain function in children, both in the womb and as they grow.

8. Don’t Forget About the PCBs
Feeling forgetful? There could be something fishy going on. Scientists have proved that people who eat only two servings of fish a month have difficulty recalling information that they learned just 30 minutes earlier. The culprit is high levels of mercury, lead, and PCBs in their blood. PCBs, synthetic chemicals polluting water and concentrated in fish flesh, act like hormones, wreaking havoc on the nervous system and contributing to a variety of illnesses beyond forgetfulness and vertigo, including cancer, infertility, and other sexual problems.

9. For Your Health
Would you like tartar sauce with those cancer-causing toxins? If you’re feeling green around the gills, salmon could be making you seriously ill. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 800,000 people in the U.S. face an excess lifetime cancer risk from eating farmed salmon. Plus, salmon flesh contains high amounts of artery-clogging cholesterol and fat.

10. Faux Fish
Fake it for salmon’s sake! Tempt your taste buds without tempting fate by trying faux fish. Your local Asian food mart or health-food store likely carries vegetarian mock seafood products that have all the flavor of the “real thing” but none of the contaminants or cholesterol.

“Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days is an independent documentary film that chronicles six Americans with ‘incurable’ diabetes switching their diet and getting off insulin. The film follows each participant’s remarkable journey and captures the medical, physical, and emotional transformations brought on by this diet and lifestyle change.”
- www.rawfor30days.com

A clip from Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days:

Posting what I eat every day is becoming a little redundant as the majority of my meals (with the exception of dinner) are nearly identical. I eat a bowl of Special K with soy milk for breakfast every morning, a bowl of fruit for my morning snack, and a salad with either leftovers or a piece of brown toast for lunch. I will occasionally throw in a veggie dog if I’m feeling hungry.

The last few days have been a little up and down. I’ve felt more tired & run down than usual, but that could also be due to PMS. I haven’t had any cravings for dairy or meat, nor do I miss those foods.

I’m having a bit of a difficult time coming up with things to make for dinner, though. I’ve never really enjoyed cooking in the first place, so having to be creative in the kitchen tends to make me feel a little overwhelmed at times. Plus, many ingredients are just impossible to find in South Africa.

I’ve been looking at vegan cookbooks and think I’m going to order these:

Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen – Ani Phyo
Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen – Donna Klein
Veganomicon – Isa Chandra Moskowitz
Vegan Planet – Robin Robertson
Vegan Brunch – Isa Chandra Moskowitz

As much as I’d love to switch to a raw vegan diet, I don’t know if it would be possible for me. Some mornings I have to force myself to eat my bowl of fruit. I find most fruit to be bland and not very satisfying. I love berries and could eat those all day, but they are a bit on the expensive side and are not as readily available as other fruit. I do love smoothies, however, so perhaps investing in a blender would make the transition a bit easier.

I felt pretty terrible when I woke up this morning. I had a headache, a bit of a stomach ache, and I was so exausted I could barely manage to get out of bed. My muscles felt a bit tighter as well. I know those are common symptoms of withdrawal, but I didn’t expect to experience them to this extent as I’ve never really been a big dairy consumer in the first place.

According to www.healthdiaries.com, dairy actually contains opiates:

Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies — they also hide inside cows’ livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal’s bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese’s appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them “cheese cravers,” and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a “Cheese Forum” held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry’s scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, “What do we want our marketing program to do?” and then gave the answer: “Trigger the cheese craving.” He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy’s Cheddar Lover’s Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the “Ultimate Cheese Pizza,” which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, ‘”If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”

I woke up yesterday morning feeling pretty good. I went for a 30 minute walk at 5am, and on the way back, walking uphill, I noticed that I wasn’t as tired as usual. Our laneway is very steep, and I’m always huffing & puffing as I make my way up, but this morning I felt much lighter, and wasn’t breathing as heavily. I didn’t feel sleepy after my walk, like I normally do, and was feeling quite bouncy and happy. I even sang to myself as I was vacuuming!

At around 8pm I started to feel pretty exhuasted, so I went to bed shortly after. I couldn’t fall asleep right away, and felt a bit anxious and overwhelmed. I don’t know if those feelings were due to PMS, or if I’m simply stressing out a little bit about our flight back to Canada next week. At one point I had to get up to eat some crackers because I was starving.

Breakfast:

1 cup Special K, 1/2 cup soy milk

Snack:

1 apple, 1 peach, 2 apricots

Lunch:

Leftover eggplant lasagna (lasagna noodles, tomato sauce, eggplant, breadcrumbs, celery, carrot, onion, mushroom, garlic, basil)

Snack:

Soy chocolate pudding

Dinner:

Stir Fry (vegetarian strips, celery, onion, tomato, brocolli, garlic, carrot, alfalfa sprouts)
Bruschetta (olive oil, garlic, tomato, onion) on brown toast

Snack:

2 crackers

While browsing Peta’s website recently, I came across a video titled “Meet Your Meat.” The video is narrated by actor Alec Baldwin, and covers each stage of life of animals raised for food.