Over the summer I’m going to do a number of Friday giveaways. So stay tuned! Last giveaway, Lisa Corduff won free tuition with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition course in NYC. (Sorry to everyone else who was keen to win…for those of you still thinking of doing the course, if you enrol between now and November 24, you get an ipad2!). This week, I’m giving away

10 double passes to We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

Simply subscribe to my newsletter before Monday 5pm AEST.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is screening in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra, starting from the 17th November and the 10 double passes will be valid for all these locations.

I’ll announce the winners on Monday, and send your tickets next week.

The film is based on the book by Lionel Shriver and stars Tilda Swinton, which is enough for me! It’s the story of a Mum coming to terms with the murders her son commits. Every single review I’ve read of the film gives it a full-star rating. It was a critics’ and audience favourite at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and…did I mention is star’s Tilda Swinton? Shriver describes the adaption as “stunning”.

And happy 11.11.11 !!

Check out more here and some reviews here. Here’s a wee preview….

You know I quit sugar, right? And you know I’ve stuck to it? And you know I’ve written an ebook on how to do it?

photo via pinterest

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, the main thrust of my 8-week program is replacing sugar with fat. It’s an approach I really find worked for me, and for many others. But I keep getting asked:

“is it really ok to eat fat?”

“how can you say saturated fat is OK?”

“how much fat do YOU eat?”

Alright. Let’s clear a few things up, then…

1. This short video sums up a fair bit of the misconception around saturated fat:

The gist is this: in the 1950s, a random scientist called Ancel Keys published a dodgy study that told us saturated fats were bad. The study was a total furphy. But we latched on to it. It’s important to realise that at that time the edible oil industry in the US seized the opportunity to promote its polyunsaturates. The industry did this by developing a health issue focusing on Key’s anti-saturated fat bias. With the help of the edible oil industry lobbying in the United States, federal government dietary goals and guidelines were adopted incorporating this mistaken idea that consumption of saturated fat was causing heart disease. This anti-saturated fat issue became the agenda of government and food industry groups around the world.

I would like to share this poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mary Oliver. I read an interview with her a while back in Oprah magazine and was touched by Mary’s authenticity and gentle approach to life. She’s always taken her time. She lives in a forest. She fell in love with her agent Molly and they lived together for 40 years until Molly’s death in 2005. Her poem The Journey is my favourite. My ginger thoughts, this morning, below…

Photo by Michela Heim

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough,

I discovered a wonderful world out there the other day. A world I had been oblivious to (I’ve been oblivious to a lot of things recently). A world where some beautifully talented and curious and dedicated food bloggers have quit sugar and taken to experimenting with sugar-free recipes. I’ll be profiling a few here going forwards, so stay tuned.

photo via scandi foodie

• 100g quinoa flakes
• 50g coconut flakes (no sugar added)
• 50g rolled oats*
• 1 tablespoon raw pure cacao nibs (total sugars 3.6g/100g)
• 80g virgin coconut oil
• 2 large egg whites (free-range,organic)

Filling

• 200g rhubarb, cut into 1 cm slices
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Top

• 3 large egg whites (free-range, organic)
• 50g fine desiccated coconut (no sugar added)

* You could make this totally gluten-free by using uncontaminated oats, or simply replacing the 50 grams of oats with more quinoa flakes.

Preheat oven to 180C and line a 25cm x 15cm baking tray with baking paper.

For the filling, place the rhubarb and ground cinnamon, along with a dash of water (a couple of tablespoons) into a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to boil, then let simmer while you make the base and the filling. Stir the mixture every now and then and just let it cook until quite thick. Set aside to cool.

For the base, place the quinoa flakes, coconut flakes, oats and cacao nibs into a food processor. Grind the ingredients into a fine-ish mixture, then add the coconut oil and grind until the mixture comes together. Beat in the egg whites. Spoon the dough in the baking dish and, using your hands, spread on the baking sheet into a 1-2 cm thick base.

For the topping, beat the egg whites in a clean bowl until thick. Carefully fold in the coconut.

This week in Sunday Life I find my sweet spot

Photo by klaus pichler

It always surprises me when I come back as a “glass half full” type in aptitude tests because there are few people more down on positive thinking than me. I blame it on vision boards. Seriously, those silly craft projects geared at manifesting husbands and mansions really sullied the whole movement.

But there’s also this, and it’s something the psychology fraternity is coming around to: shape-shifting our thoughts – turning frowns upside down and all that jazz – takes too much energy. And seems pointless, in the wash of it all.

Recently in this magazine New York writer Sara Eckel wrote about her time in the single wilderness bombarded with those messages about sunnier-fying your outlook to attract the bloke. Eventually she found her bloke. Not because she shape-shifted, but because she simply met the right bloke, the one who loved her for her sometimes cloudy outlook.

Sure, it’s no fun dragging around a ball and chain. But nor is trying to turn said ball into a bunch of bouncy pink balloons.

What about simply mustering strength, picking up the damn ball and continuing forward, carrying it close to your chest?  Yes! Continuing forward!

Crudely, this is the gist of the “new wave”of behavioural therapy. Called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it goes beyond the positive psychology model and gets us to accept (rather than challenge) our emotions via mindfulness exercises, and to commit to life by identifying and following our values. Dozens of controlled studies show ACT to be more effective than other form of therapy for everything from eating disorders to schizophrenia.

I’m running an occasional series with creative people I admire who have a spark of unique “dive-into-life”-ness that I think we could all learn from.

pic via sandstone flies

This week Kate Grenville is my guest. Kate is one of Australia’s best-known authors, having written eight books of fiction and four books about the writing process. Her best-known works are the international best-seller The Secret River (my Mum’s favourite book) The Idea of Perfection, The Lieutenant and Lilian’s Story, which I reckon every kid of my generation read at school. Her latest book is Sarah Thornhill…you might’ve read it? Her novels have won many awards both in Australia and the UK, several have been made into major feature films, and all have been translated into European and Asian languages.

She shares some lovely thoughts on how she does what she does….

Kate Grenville podcast [ 21:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some points I loved:

* She doesn’t wait for inspiration. She just sits and writes and trusts that this process alone will produce.

* She writes to a routine. She sets the alarm for 5:30 and writes for an hour. She doesn’t care what comes out, but again trusts that some of it will be useable. She then goes back and collates all the bits and pieces and jig-

I get asked rather often what therapies, of all the ones I’ve tried – and I’ve tried a few -  I personally use and recommend. So I thought I’d post on it.

I’ve tried just about every therapy in Christendom. It’s an occupational hazard. From the noise of it all I’ve distilled things down to a bunch of smooth routines and approaches.

Photo by Steven Klein

As a general approach, I keep to a morning routines. Routines are good.  They create a firm launch pad and determine the tone of the day.

I also do some regular maintenance stuff. Sometimes I think to myself, “my parents would never do this kind of thing…they’d just get on with it”. Also, it can get expensive, all this “maintenance”.

But I justify it thus:

I do a lot, am engaged in a lot, and I need help to ensure I can keep doing what I love to do.

An athlete gets regular physio. TV stars get blowdries. A rally car driver gets their car serviced. I get regular treatments to keep me well and open and energised.

I rotate the various therapies, according to what continues to keep me open and intimate with life. I’m also a little challenged by the idea of taking good care of myself (I forget and burn out very easily) and so some of these healings are about getting into that space. Being intimate. This is important. I don’t buy nail polish or magazines or shoes or throw cushions. I prefer to do this kind of thing.

My daily practice:

Meditation. I practice the vedic style (with a mantra, 20 minutes  twice a day). I’ve blogged about it here. My teacher Tim can be found here.

Exercise. I move every morning – a mixture of walking, jogging (I’ve taken to barefoot running), yoga, ocean swimming and home weights. I also ride a singlespeed bike. My thing is this: I set out to move every day for 20 minutes minimum. It’s the “every day” bit that matters to me, and my aim is to simply get blood flowing and to feel fresh and to get into the outdoors. I don’t focus on “getting fit” or losing weight. It’s also about flow and agility and feeling vibrant.

Coconut oil is getting a lot of very good press lately…much of it from me! I thought I’d clear up WHY it’s good and WHAT I do with the stuff. This first post will tick off the former.

Coconut oil roasted sweet potato...recipe below

So, know this:

It doesn’t make you fat

Coconut oil is a short-medium chain saturated fat. But saturated fat is bad, right? No. Not the naturally occurring saturated fats, like coconut oil. It’s the artificially adjusted trans fats you want to avoid, like vegetable oils and seed oils. I’ll be posting on this next week, if you’re not quite convinced! Also, when I mention coconut oil, I’m talking virgin coconut oil, not the hydrogenated version (which is bad).

In fact, it helps you LOSE weight

How so? Coconut oil is mostly made up of medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), also called medium-chain triglycerides or MCTs. These types of fatty acids produce a whole host of health benefits:

• MCFAs are smaller. They permeate cell membranes easily, and do not require special enzymes to be utilized effectively by your body.
• MCFAs are easily digested, thus putting less strain on your digestive system.
• MCFAs are sent directly to your liver, where they are immediately converted into energy rather than being stored as fat.
• MCFAs actually help stimulate your body’s metabolism, and increases the activity of the thyroid,
  leading to weight loss.

It stops sugar cravings and energy slumps

Your body sends medium-chain fatty acids straight to your liver to use as energy. This means that coconut oil

Ever come across Yasmin Boland‘s astrological insights? The other day she wrote about how things right now are primed for quitting sugar. Or, more to the point, right now we can’t tolerate sugar….we’re all wanting to quit. Which would explain why a few of you have quite liked my  I Quit Sugar ebook. Which, by the way, is still $15. You can catch up on the health changes and weight loss others have experienced here.

photo via browneyedbellejulie.blogspot.com

So. Yasmin very kindly offered to explain the deal… it’s fun and weird and got me thinking in different directions. I thought you’d like to know about it, too. Basically, Yasmin reckons we are in the biggest Smash Sugar Forever cycle that we’ve been in for 30 years, which is the length of one Saturn cycle. And Saturn is the planet of wisdom and hard facts and truths.
I’ve asked Yasmin to share a little more:

“In astrology, every planet represents certain qualities or parts of life. Saturn is about teaching and wisdom among other things. Saturn is the mean old headmaster and the strict parent, as well as the representative of the truth in the horoscope. Right now it is in the sign of sweetness Libra. Just as with the planets, each sign governs certain parts of life. Libra is about balance and harmony, art and luxury. And sweetness, including anything made of sugar.

If you’re wondering how these classifications came about, the short answer is that astrologers have observed the movements of the planets for literally thousands of years and noted what happens when and how it coincides with events on the planet and in peoples’ lives. This is Astrology 101. If you want to know more, delve into Secrets From A Stargazer’s Notebook by the awesome Debbi Kempton-Smith.

This Saturn in Libra transit continues until October 2012. (If you happen to be a Libran, now you know why the past couple of years have been so intense! The harder you work between now until October next year, the easier the rest of this Saturn in Libra transit will be).

So if you take the keywords for Saturn and Libra, it’s easy to see that Sarah really has tapped into the skies.

We are all learning (Saturn is all about learning) the truth (Saturn is all about truth) about sugar (Libra is all about sugar) and it’s not pretty (Libra is all about All Things Pretty).

The truth about sugar is coming out. I’ve even read that sugar is more addictive than crack. People who give it up say they feel amazing. It’s everywhere and it’s hard to kick. However since I found out that the food industry actually puts sugar into our foods as a way of hooking us, it’s become a little easier to just say no.

This week in Sunday Life I drop certainty anchors

By mind on fire

So lately I’ve become increasingly distrustful of the overly certain.

When someone puffs out their chest at the head of a dinner table to emphatically declare climate change isn’t happening or that their son will grow up to follow Collingwood or that the only smoked small goods worth buying are from such-and-such-purveyor-of-such-things, it sets off alarm bells. Because nothing is certain any more. No one knows anything for sure.

We can’t be certain we’ll knock off work at 5 tomorrow or that we’ll be having Irish stew on Wednesday night or that our plane will turn up. The only certainty, beyond death, is uncertainty. Oh, and the fact that uncertainty in the world is on the up and up.

So when a leader or some blinkered commentator issues a black or white pronouncement these days I immediately think, “Hmmm, you’re sooo struggling with the inevitable anxiety of these doubtful times”. Far from giving them credibility, their surety comes across as cringefully out of step. As evolutionary epistemologist Jeremy Sherman wrote recently, today “self-certainty is weakly correlated with veracity.”

Uncertainty is the new fear. Twenty years ago we felt fear and did it anyway.

Now we accept we don’t know, and use this to humbly grow ourselves forward. 

Or at least we do if we know what’s good for us. The research shows, over and over, that uncertainty – or an ability to flow with it – goes hand in hand with true creative success. It’s the very act of being in the unknown that sees us strive to know more, and thus stumble upon fresh ideas.

What distinguishes the new entrepreneurs from the rest of us who sit back waiting for our “moment” is an appreciation that we can no longer wait for a perfect understanding of a situation before acting. As Jonathan Fields, author of new book Uncertainty, reasons, “The only time we have perfect understanding before launching into something is when it’s already been done before”.

I spoke to Fields this week. He became so fascinated by this new not-knowing that he studied hundreds of successful creatives to determine what they were doing differently, culminating in his book, published this month. What did he find? “Happy, successful entrepreneurs ritualize everything in their lives but their creative work.”