Well kiddos, its about that time. Time for my 7:30 bedtime, that is! I am SO 97 years old

But first of all—my appointment with Anisha, the Ayurvedic Physician, was SO interesting. We talked for an hour on my particular imbalances and how diet and nutrition play an active role in correcting them. I HIGHLY recommend, if you are interested, searching out a physician in your area. Its really such a different way of looking at things….but Ayurveda has been tried and true for the past 5,000 years so it must be doing something right! Anisha is going to India for the entire month of February to obtain another yoga certification so the office will be closed but I’m hoping that in March (my budget willing) I can do some acupuncture treatments. As for right now, I have TONS of reading material that she gave me so I’ll be busy with that for awhile!

It took quite a long time to get home due to rush hour traffic and busy expressways. I snacked on a mango in the car—

And then once I got home I decided to just take it easy and shower and make dinner instead of yoga. When I practice yoga I don’t like to feel rushed or stressed and I was feeling sort of a tired time crunch going on when I got home because I was starving for dinner and ready to fall asleep at the same time. Tomorrow afternoon looks a lot better time wise so I can do a nice long practice then. As for today, I think my job was my exercise. Lifting heavy sheet trays full of bread, kneading dough, working the ovens, cleaning the floors….I highly recommend this type of exercise!

My mommy bought a nice organic roasted chicken today at the health food store so that’s what dinner was based around! I wasn’t going to actually copy this spur of the moment recipe down but it was SO good that I decided yall need to know about it! I just eyeballed all measurements and I suggest you do the same according to your preference. It’s terribly simple. Here’s what I did:

handful chopped or shredded organic roasted chicken breast

1/4 cup brown basmati rice cooked

1 garlic clove, minced

1 inch cube of fresh ginger, minced

2 tsp minced shallot

1 tsp-ish ghee

little cheddar cheese to top

sea salt to season

Basically I just sauteed the garlic, ginger and shallot in the ghee and then added the cooked chicken breast and rice. Topped it with the cheese and voila! SO simple yet very tasty.

And then after dinner I made a super quickie batch of Super Charge Me cookies of Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. The homemade vanilla extract and new special cinnamon really did the trick! I made these because I thought they would be a good pre-breakfast snack at work. I just had to taste one after dinner to “see if they were okay”:

And I also had a cup of skim milk, heated, with some fresh grated nutmeg. This is supposed to calm you and make you sleepy. I’m ready!

(don’t you love my mug?? I do!)

I’m off to fold my uniforms and then hop into bed to read. The weather guy said tonight it will be cold enough to SNOW here!!!!!!!!!!! However, there won’t be enough moisture in the air to make it happen. Do you have any idea how cold it will be at 3:30 in the morning when I go to work??!!!!! Blah!!!!! I’m all for the cold but I’d rather be snuggled in my bed.

© Jenna for Eat, Live, Run, 2009. | Permalink | 32 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chicken and rice, mango, milk, Super Charge Me cookies

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Well, 7 hours of yoga later, I am back.

Actually it wasn’t 7 hours—but my noon workshop class went waaaay overboard and lasted a solid 3 hours! Never have I done yoga for such a long period of time. It was great though! The class was focused on balancing vata, and it was one of those classes where you hold crescent moon and warrior one for, like, 10 minutes. The class was very slow but sometimes the slow classes are the ones that work you the hardest!

I had a veryyy early lunch at 10:30 of this:

With a half cup of cottage cheese (gotta keep eating soft foods!):

Yummy and it did a good job of holding me through such a long practice!

I didn’t get home until 3:15 and had to be back at the studio for a lecture at 4, so needless to say there was no time for blogging, let alone a shower! I did manage to throw together a quick smoothie though—

This is a combo of a 2% fage, a whole mango (minus the pit of course) and a big squirt of agave. After all that asana, I needed a major boost!

Smoothie in hand, I rushed back to the studio for Kishan’s three hour lecture. Now, he is actually a philosophy and Indian studies teacher at UCLA (as well as in training to be an Ayurvedic physician) so listening to him was actually just like being in college again! He spoke for almost 4 hours on Ayurveda and he had me the entire time.

Here are some notes I took during the lecture. Now please keep in mind that you can agree or disagree with what he says. Its definitely very “out of the box” for us westerners to hear and its good to be open to what different people have to say. I’ve been interested in Ayurveda for awhile actually and after hearing him talk, I think I’m going to see an Ayurvedic doctor for my migraines since clearly traditional medicine doesn’t work for me!

Ayurveda is the science of life, way of being, looking into the body, mind and spirit—a holistic system of living and medicine

• Primary goal is to keep the healthy “healthy”—- Food IS medicine
• You are what you eat.
• Keeps the healthy healthy by helping us maintain balance with diet and lifestyle
• Like increases like. We need to balance everything.
• Some people aren’t meant to be vegetarians. We are meant to eat to our body type and keep it in balance. In Ayurveda, meat is sometimes even used as medicine. Depends on our activity level and our metabolic rate. ANYTHING can be medicine. Depends on your body.
• Shift your diet and lifestyle toward your imbalance
• Prakrati and Vikruti—–our states of health
• Prakrati is our current state of health. Vikruti is where we want to be!
• Prakrati often depends on our parents and their imbalances when we were born. Looks at internal state of the mother’s womb even as well as seasonal factors, food we’ve been eating, ect. Ideal setting would be for both parents to get really balanced and then conceive so that the child is born Vikruti instead of in a Prakrati state.

• The Universe is made up of 5 elements—-space, air, fire, water, earth. If there is a decrease in one, we need to pull another one to balance it off.
• From these 5 elements, the doshas (intelligence in the body) hails. When they are in a place of balance, they are invisible. When there is a weakened tissue in the body, they have the ability to manifest in the body in some sort of form

Your pulse is really the only way to tell what dosha type you are. Quizzes are sort of bogus. Only a certified Ayurvedic doctor can tell what you truly are.

• Ayurveda says allergies do not exist. Something is imbalanced. We need to look at the root of the problem. Western medicine covers up the problem yet does not heal it from the inside out. Stop bandaiding your symptoms. Find the root cause.

• all disease processes come from low digestive fire (agni)

• NO COLD DRINKS —-causes the stomach to contract and shiver
• ice water shocks the stomach and creates toxicity in it. Food cannot digest properly when the system gets shocked by cold. All drinks should be room temperature to hot.
• Ice cream at night is “the worst thing ever”.
• Also only warm foods at breakfast and no fruit because fruit is heavy and more difficult to digest in the morning. Cold milk and banana is NOT the right way to start your day in balance!

He went on to further elaborate on the different doshas and creating balance so we have zero health problems. I always thought of myself as a Vata but after talking to him and the Ayurvedic physician there, I think I have more of a Pitta imbalance. Very interesting. It lasted almost 4 hours! Afterwards he led us through some seated meditation and chanting.

I was STARVING by the end of the lecture (it didn’t end until about 7:30). Ryan was still in St.Pete and all this yoga made me really crave Indian food so I stopped at this tiny hole in the wall place only about a mile away from the studio that one of the girls in the workshop told me about. Turns out I wasn’t the only one with the same craving—I ran into Stacey, a girl I met in yoga, there!

I ordered channa masala with naan:

Ahhhhhhhhh it was amazing!!!!!!!! I was so hungry and even though I’m not supposed to eat bread for a week because of my mouth (bleh), I demolished the entire thing in about five minutes flat (well except for the veggie salad thingy…..no crunchy things right now!). Don’t worry. I was careful and chewed the bread slowly on the opposite side of my mouth. It was freakin’ amazing. The best naan I have ever had. Hot and buttery and chewy.……….so good. The channa masala was great too. I asked for a little bit spicier (you can get it mild, slightly spicy or HOT) and it was perfect. I’m so glad I found this little place and will definitely be back in the very near future!

Ryan just got home and we are relaxing on the couch. I actually cannot even move after so much yoga but tomorrow is the final day of the workshop and class goes from 11-1:30. Phew! I wish yall could be here and do this with me—its so interesting!

Have a wonderful evening and I’ll see you for breakfast! =)

ps—Kishan recommended this website if you interested in learning more!

© Jenna for Eat, Live, Run, 2009. | Permalink | 37 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Amy's, Indian take-out, mango, smoothie, yoga detox weekend, yogurt

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Wooohooooooeeeeeeee my body is feelin’ loose now!

I am SO GLAD I went to my detox class tonight!!!  I even met Courtney, a blog reader, there!!! Here’s a play by play:

I arrived at the studio at about 5:40 to find the room already PACKED with mats, bags and waters (there were 50 of us in there!). I was nervous because one of the only spots left was a tiny corner on the far side of the room. Not good if I had to leave suddenly! I unpacked everything and rested in child’s pose until it was 6:00.

Kishan talked to the class a little bit about his history with yoga and led us through some breathing exercises as the room began to warm up. They were cranking the heat to 95 but with 50 people in there, it seemed like 105. We then were handed small cups of oil and Kishan led us through running the oil all over our body (in a flow away from the heart). I know, sexual right?! Rubbing oil all over our bodies! It was more like a hot mess but kinda neat in a way!

Around 7:00, the flow part of the class started and it was very powerful. I listened to my body though and took tons of child’s poses and resting postures. I didn’t want to pop a stitch on the yoga mat or start bleeding profusely! Kishan had us to these “cardiovascular spurts” where we jumped up in the air, dropped down to chatarunga and jumped back up in the air…..over and over and over and over. I think I only did about 5 though before dropping down in child’s pose. Tonight was a night to listen to my body! I wish I could have participated more fully but this was definitely what I needed! I think my heart rate was going through the roof though and by this point I was dripping in oil and sweat so its all good.

We did a series of DEEP spinal twists and then shavasana was a-ma-a-z-i-n-g. He shut off ALL the lights in the room so it was pitch black and then he did a series of chanting and singing in sanskrit. Afterwards, there was a plethora of every fruit you could ever imagine (I had a napkin filled with raspberries, blueberries, watermelon and pineapple but was sans camera—sorry!!!) and then we all went home around 9:20.

Kishan told us instead of gulping cold water, we should be sipping on hot water with lemon throughout the weekend, so when I got home I made some of that to sip on. I also ate a mango:

This afternoon I relaxed and watched Atonement and then decided I was feeling good enough to go outside for awhile so I took about a 35 minute bike ride. It was glorious. The weather was perfect and it felt great to be outside instead of laying around for a change. However, when I got back inside I immediately fell asleep for about an hour on my bed. I guess my body is still pretty weak from surgery!

I made a large snack/very early dinner around 4:00. I wanted to eat about 2 hours before yoga and was getting pretty hungry anyways. I heated up a sweet potato that my mom baked for me yesterday and topped it with a half cup of 2% cottage cheese. I also had the rest of my Amy’s soup from lunch on the side.

Tomorrow the workshop continues with another yoga class from 12-2:30 (my mom is going with me this time!) and a lecture from 4-7. I am SO PUMPED for the lecture! Kishan is going to talk all about diet, nutrition and lifestyle according to dosha types and I have a burning question about migraines I plan to ask him.

I was so worried I wouldn’t make it tonight or run out of the room throwing up (haha its true though) but I am so proud of myself for making it! And, I feel so much better! My mouth is still sore (obvi) but my head feels clearer and I feel strong again. Wonderful.

‘Night!

© Jenna for Eat, Live, Run, 2009. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cottage cheese, fruit, mango, sweet potato, yoga

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