In my quest to make sugar-free life, well, sweeter, I’ve been scouting different fructose-free sweeteners for you. It’s a minefield. There are a lot of sugar-free chocolates and treats out there…but the sweeteners read like something from a box of Ratsak.  I’ve shared on the safe and not-so-safe alternative sweeteners before. One or two alternatives do exist. One of them being stevia, which is extracted from the leaves of a South American plant.

via pinterest.com

It’s a stack sweeter than sugar and is fructose-free. Native Americans used it medicinally as a digestive aid. I first read about it via Donna Gates’ Body Ecology and have been trying it out in a few recipes. It’s great with berries and yoghurt…it has a slight licorice tang to it. Anyway… For this sponsored review, Natvia asked to share three of their stevia recipes. To give you a taste of the stuff. Cut’n'keep!

Natvia is a natural sweetener made from Reb A stevia, and erythritol. Reb A is the purest and sweetest parts of the stevia plant, and erythritol is a naturally occuring nectar in some fruits, such as melons and grapes.

Things you should know about Natvia:

• it’s 100% natural
• it has 95% fewer calories than sugar
• it’s fructose free
• it contains no aspartame, or saccharin
• it’s great for baking and cooking

almond Tea Cake Loaf

This recipe makes one tasty, coconuty loaf. It’s made denser with the almond meal.

So, in yesterday’s Sunday Life column, I shared how I tested the toxicity of my body following an extended period of wearing a shit-load of VERY toxic makeup and other beautifying guff. And then decided to clean up my beauty act. It’s been a long process. I’ve been investigating it for months.  Thinking of learning more? Know this: it’s a VERY complicated issue and answers are not definitive.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people about how you and I can best act on the very real fears we have that our foundations and hair dye’s and deodorants are not good for us.

There are three things we feel we can all do:

1.Learn a little more.

Follow the debate and support groups that are agitating for the government to police these chemicals better. The Environmental Working Group’s Campaign for Safe Cosmetics should be followed. In Australia, sign up with National Toxics Network.

2. Use less stuff.

Reduce the chemical load where you can. It takes some getting used to – wearing less makeup and less products. But, hey, the natural look is back in.

3. Use the stuff the experts recommend.

This topic is waaaaay too hard to navigate without a chemistry degree. Best to be inspired by women in this realm who’ve researched their choices. This way you also make a difference with your shopping $$$s.

So. To this end, I’ve asked my contacts for their best buys. It’s not a definitive list. It’s not perfect. Talking to

Sunday Life: This week I detox my cosmetics

a little note: in my next post I will be listing the safe products I’ve decided to use as result of this week’s experiment, as well as those used personally by the top experts in safe cosmetics around the world. Check in tomorrow!

In 2009 Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie, two Canadian environmentalists locked themselves in an unventilated apartment and polluted themselves with household items like hand sanitiser and antiperspiran, which saw their triclosan levels rocket, and tinned tuna, which led to mercury poisoning after just seven serves. They offered themselves up as guinea pigs and emerged with a bestseller, Slow Death by Rubber Duck, their toxic tales influencing the Canadian government to ban BPA from baby’s bottles.

This week I share with you a similar experiment. This time I’m the intrepid guinea pig and my poison of choice is beauty products. My aim is this: to find out whether my makeup is making me sick. And what I should be using instead.

I meditate every morning. Some mornings I also do yoga. At the end of both-either I have a ritual.

Illo by Geoff McFetridge

I finish.

I send out an intention – to be truthful during the day.

Then I surrender forward.

I gently flop my torso over my crossed legs, or over my lap if I’m sitting in a chair. And consciously release myself to the earth, to the day, to the forces that are much larger than me that will steer things regardless of my efforts. I surrender to what the day will bring.

OK. Still on the hunt for fructose-free sugar substitutes. Jo and I came across coconut sugar this week – a health food shop here in Byron had a bunch of very wholesome treats using coconut sugar. I reckon you’ll start seeing it everywhere. A few of the health food companies are starting to market it.

Via David Anderson/Glenn Allsop 2011

I asked the chick behind the counter about it. She said it was evaporated coconut water. Which would make it fructose-free. Hoorah!

But, alas, I got home and discovered the truth.

Personally, my bike comes with me everywhere. It travelled with me into the Apple store in Sydney the other day. The security beef looked after it for me. I bath it. What more can I say…

I’m often asked where I keep my bike at home. Most places I’ve lived, inside. Mostly for security. And rust. I found these lovely shots of bikes-as-interior-accessories the other day. Why not work them into your decor? You got any clever ideas? Send them in…

A few posts back Julie Cowdroy wrote about the Below the Line campaign – a program in May that sees well-fed westerners live on $2 a day to experience what it’s like for the world’s poorest. And to raise $$. I promised to give it a crack and did so for a day. As, it seems, with most people who did it, I resorted to lentils.

Lentils are cheap. And Dr Weston A Price considers the little buggers the most nutritious of all legumes – high in minerals and they help assimilate protein and iron absorption. But they can be bland and horrible and really crook on the gut. If you don’t play right.

Here’s some tricks for eating them.

Just mine. It’s not a comprehensive list.

1. Add red lentils to soups and casseroles and curries…

for extra bulk and fibre and protein. A cheap way to spread out a meal. Simply rince a handful and toss in 15-20 minutes before the dish is cooked. They disintegrate and you’ll barely know they’re there.

2. Soak your green and brown lentils a few hours.

Most recipes will say you don’t need to at all because they’re quite low on phytic acid. Soak in warm water with a bit of lemon juice. Seven hours is good.

3. I make dahl…
by boiling  soaked brown lentils (1.5 cups)  in water to cover, adding a tsp of turmeric (a great anti-inflammatory), pepper and garlic. I simmer for an hour  (covered) and then whisk the lentils til creamy. In a pan I saute cumin seeds and 2 small hot chillies in butter (or ghee) and then fold that through the lentils with some coriander.

4. I sprout lentils.

I wrote yesterday in Sunday Life about going retro with my work habits…that I write out things longhand and that I’ve taken to using index cards to map out ideas before sitting down to a computer screen. It gets me closer to my creativity and slows things down to the pace at which I create and think.

By Neil Stewart

So happens I was reading David Malouf’s essay The Happy Life in The Quarterly Essay yesterday. He writes longhand, too. Then types. And he discusses – beautifully -  the idea that part of our unease, our contemporary unhappiness, comes from having so much our life occurring at a speed that our bodies are not aligned with.

He writes that it is integral to our happiness to be curious and to delve and to investigate. And that our bodies are our reference point, to determine direction.

“We start always from the body, and relate all thing back to it.”

And indeed everything about our bodies are in relation – think of Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci’s figure that shows every bit of our body is  proportional and symmetrical.)

But life goes so fast now.

“These days we can travel around the globe at hundreds of kilometres an hour and project ourselves into space at several times that speed; but in some part of ourselves we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth, lumbering along as our great-grandfathers did…at four hundred paces, and tiring.”

Yes, and tiring.

The question,  he writes, is:

“whether emotionally, psychologically, we can feel at home in a world whose dimensions so largely exceed …what our bodies can keep in view.”

Sunday Life: This week I work a little “retro”…and it worked!

via Gala Darling

A week or so ago “#RIPTypewriters” was trending. Which, for those not of The Twitterverse, means a stack of people were commenting on the death of the typewriter following news the last manufacturer in the world had closed shop. I entered the nostalgic Twitter fray to reminisce about work life pre-Ctrl Alt Delete:

Remember Liquid Paper? Remember doing actual research in a library? The metho smell of the stat machine?

The commentary, as with all things particular to Boomers and Gen Xers, was tinged saturated with a certain “see how hard we had it back then?” message to young folk. But there was also a distinct longing to it. Not for the usual “simpler times” (because they weren’t; navigating the Dewey system to check what year Tupperware was invented was not an elegant process). But for…well, this week I tried to capture what it was. And replicate it.

Turns out there’s a community of hipster typewriter fetishists out there. In March the New York Times ran a feature on Brooklyn 20-somethings who hunt down vintage Remingtons at flea markets. “Type-ins” are being held around the world (cool typers hang out in pubs and…hit the keys) and there’s an emerging “typosphere” (a blog scene for typewriter nuts). One Gen Y fan summed the appeal thus: “It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete”.

This is just a small trick the lady next door shared with me last night. She said she focuses on following her breath when she’s anxious. Stops for two minutes. And follows it in and out.

By Anna Hatzakis

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. It’s what everyone says. But she added this:

Follow your own breath. Draw it in for you, air that’s not muddied by other people’s energy.

In that little bit of simple advice, I discerned something fresh. It’s one thing to follow your breath. It’s a super focusing technique that brings you into the present. But it’s something extra to follow a breath that’s especially for you, the you on the inside. The quiet you that sits somewhere around the lung/heart cavity where the air is drawn in. It gives the “task” an extra sense of purpose. And don’t we all respond to that!

When I focus on breathing in I feed that quiet part of myself. My inside people. Just for a few minutes.

Nice.

In other news…