Welcome Changes!

Welcome to the Windy City Diva Blogs!
They are on the move with shifting articles and new looks! Stay tuned and look in the right column to navigate to and follow them all to stay up to date.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Healthy Eating Requires Healthy Thinking...

When foods are described as "low fat" or "no fat" please think about how do they take the fat out of there, or worse how do they make ice cream sugar free?  Have you taken a few minutes to look up sucralose, aspartame and the other non-sugar sweeteners? 
Would you sweeten your coffee or tea with pool water because one of these listed above has chlorine in it?
How about formaldehyde?  Would you bake a pie with it?  Or sprinkle it over your healthy yogurt?

How about the difference of using organic foods? Do you know there are degrees of organic? 

I will stay on this topic for some time, so check back, but while you're away, do some homework and chat with me.  Which sweetener has chlorine in it?

Windy City Diva

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Time Waits for No One - Breast Cancer

Another lost to Breast Cancer… 

An update to this post from earlier... today, 10/16/12 my little dog lost her fight with breast cancer.

There are some things we get to choose in life and so many others that we don’t.  It is our responsibility to ourselves, our spirit and our development to make wise decisions with every second.  Time is not to be wasted.  Breast Cancer took another beautiful light from our world yesterday.  She was a Mom and a friend.  Seconds count.  Those seconds lead to minutes, to hours, to days, to months and yes to years.  Live your life with authenticity and be true to yourself, your values and what is right every second of every day. 
·         Who are you?  Who do you want to be? 
·         Where are you in life?  Where do you want to be?

I say to you again... if the answers to those two lines of questions do not sync, then begin today to change that. 
It has been said so many times but bears repeating, “tomorrow is not promised, so live today to the fullest”.
Windy City Diva

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Biofeedback – A New Experience

I attended a BioFeedback session today.  When I shared a brief version of the result to a great friend who is knowledgeable in physiology she responded as if was a "good" thing that I was in parasympathetic mode. That was not the way it was described to me by the doctor who had performed the BioFeedback analysis.  While I was already planning to research it, this confused me.
This started because last year I experienced an infection of some sort in my colon/stomach area.  It remains undiagnosed beyond a belief that I picked up a parasite during my time in Mexico and it resides in my ileo-cecal valve.  I call it my stomach critter.  I have been managing it with natural supplements.  I thought I was better so I laid off the supplements.  It seemed to be alright for weeks, but it is currently irritated again.  I decided to try this biofeedback analysis since I saw a location where the analysis was free.

It was an interesting experience.  She put a band on my head to measure brain waves and a fiber optic electrode which I was to hold in my thumb & forefinger tips. The point was to measure blood flow starting at the base of the brain moving through the various sections of the brain. Next would be organs.
My blood flow was so low throughout my brain that it did not measure, or meet the threshold. She could see it, but it was not strong enough to ring the bell, shall we say. (Needless to say, it is good she was not measuring my blood pressure because it must have skyrocketed.) The doctor said this indicated to her that my body was in repair mode as if I were sleeping, or parasympathetic mode.
The same was the case when it measured blood flow near my major organs. She could see the blood flow but it did not reach the threshold. She said it was suppressed by inflammation that was creating friction which will not allow blood to flow normally.  This lowers oxygen to the body,
We covered my lack of sleeping recently, waking still feeling tired, low energy, more than 10 pound weight loss since July 26th or so and the various pains that pop up out of nowhere.
With that in mind, she believes the ileo-cecal valve in my colon has a fungus rather than a parasite, virus or bacteria. She believes when I stop with the supplements which keep a flora balance in my colon and keeps down inflammation naturally, that the fungus grows and creates the inflammation.
This led her to ask about acidic levels and cancer in my family, which I have quite a bit of.

For now, she gave me some acid strip tests to see what the levels are, suggested getting some Kosher baking soda to try to calm the acid in my gut (which I do not feel), and said my supplements seem to assist me, but the goal is to find the fungus and kill it.

The parasympathetic nervous system seems to be the healing one, rather than flight or fight (sympathetic), so I am not finding the correlation to what she described in my research. It makes sense in theory, but I am still looking for the scientific links, which I may have just come across, but I need to qualify it. This parasympathetic part of the nervous system and biofeedback seem to be psychological in nature that manifests physically but I could not manifest fungus in my gut from my brain. 

Still looking...
WCD