Making Love in the Kitchen

I am asking for a great big favour. On this blog, I have roughly 4,000 readers a day. That’s a lot of potential power and I am working on harnessing every last drop. Today my father is undergoing a radical prostectamy to have his prostate removed, and ideally with that, his cancer. Though doctors call this procedure routine, no matter how many people have had a surgery done, it is never routine to cut someone open, dig around and slice out an organ. There are always risks, not just during the operation, which in this case is slated to last five hours, but in the days, weeks and months that follow.

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Does anyone else remember that news story a while back about how people found rat poop in their Cracker Jacks? There’s an opener for you. Well, as you may well know if you have a cottage or older homes, where people are, there are often mice. My thoughts: gross. Nothing makes me scream and flail quite like a rodent spotting. Even more disturbing is that FDA has an allowable limit of rodent poop and fur in our food. For example, you can have a couple rodent hairs per 100 grams of peanut butter, and about 9 milligrams or 2-3 pellets of poop per single kilogram of flour. Sickatating right? (Get the full list here).

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Essentially, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything since Thursday when my editor, Bhavna, came by the kitchen to pass off my fully laid out book for FINAL, final, final review. I swear, at this point, I could recite this book by heart, while in the deepest of Peaceful Spirit Sleep Masked slumbers. But then- since getting the page layouts, I have been too excited to sleep. Given your shared enthusiasm when I posted a pic to my Facebook last week, I thought I’d share a few pics here.

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Hellllooooooooo sunny weekend! Well, it is in Toronto anyway- and though there may be some rainy rain, it is still nice and warm, so we’ll take it. (Sorry to our peeps in Western Canada- we heard it’s been snowing. Hang in there…the sun will come for you, too! Hopefully.) We are getting our sip ooooon this weekend and thought you may want to partake in the fun. That is why we are offering a super special feature package for the week that includes a BRAND spankin’ new product we’ve never sold. What is this magical product, you ask?

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Offer the planet what you want the planet to offer you.

About a year ago now, I had a great interview with our resident Natural Beauty Superhero Nadine Artemis about sunscreen. She said something rather profound that really resonated with me. It was in regards to our relationship with the planet, in terms of what we are presenting. We were chatting about sunburns and skin care and Nadine explained that it’s a reciprocal relationship- where, as a part of nature and this planet, we have to consider what we are offering up to the planet. See- if we fill our bodies with toxic oils, bad food, chemicals, drugs, stress and aggression, it is likely the what we will get in return is likely sickness and disease.

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Everyone seems to be jumping on the “cleansing” bandwagon, and why not? The benefits from participating in a healthy cleanse are remarkable – both mentally and physically. But, the act of cleansing doesn’t need to be just for your body – once you take on the more challenging task of changing the way you think about things, you can start to cleanse your life. This may take a dedicated effort (as does most things that are worthwhile), but the result of embracing a more conscious lifestyle will make the effort well worth it. You’ll be freeing up space (that’s both mental and physical space) for new opportunities, challenges and healthier habits.

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Written by Christopher Paton-Gay

Just before last Christmas, I had a scheduled full checkup with my doctor. That was when I discovered that my blood pressure was getting dangerously high (165/124) and so I was immediately referred to a cardiologist for stress tests and a MRI. A week later my cardiologist had finished the tests and prescribed two types of blood pressure pills. I filled the prescriptions and never took a pill; feeling that I could control my BP and pulse rate by making some substantial changes to my lifestyle and more particularly, what I was eating. At the time, I weighed 224 pounds, drinking 16 cups of coffee a day on average, smoking (1 pack a day), travelling constantly and eating in restaurants in Europe and the USA.

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We’ve got a new feature here on the Love in the Kitchen blog- we asked some of our all time fave peeps and superheroes the same five questions and asked for their heartfelt responses. The result? A super sweet glimpse into the inner workings of some of our UnDiet vibrant living rockstars! The questions will not change, though we can only imagine how the answers will. FUN! You must know Josh Gitalis by now- he is our Clinical Nutrition Superhero (among other things) and all around superstar. We asked him to answer our Five Qs we love to ask and he happily obliged. Enjoy this little sneak peak into the world of Josh- and yes, the photo above correlates perfectly with his dessert island response. Coincidence? I think not.

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It’s patio season and since most patios I know of aren’t serving guacamole flax crackers with a kombucha mojito, looks like I’ll just have to create my own patio. And so I did- mostly with stuff we found on the street that other people were discarding. Seriously. We made the decision that last Sunday we were going to plant our greens garden and set up a sweet patio and on our to the plants store, we keep seeing old patio discards that were just what we needed. How about that?

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Happy long weekend, Canadian lovers (and sorry to our international peeps)! And happy Victoria Day, almost? Yay for the 193rd birthday of ol’ Queeny Vic. Still don’t really get the point of it all, but am I going to raise a stinkeroo about a long weekend? Nopers. May 24 really has become more to Canadians than just a celebration of Victoria Day- it is kinda like our celebrated right to a long weekend. I like that. We come together and cottage, sing by campfires and play in lakes and forests all weekend long. Very Canadian, if I do say so myself. For the international peeps- you should come play! We really do it up right.

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When was the last time you woke up in the morning and instead of either dreading what the day would bring or being excited about what was to come, you actually took the time to reflect on the goodness bits that remain pretty sweetly constant? See- it’s easy, oh so easy, to get caught up in the fleeting moments- the good ones and the bad ones, to recognize that for the most part we are blessed to be stressed about whatever it is we are stressing over. I tell you this today, on the Friday before the long weekend, as I pack up for a weekend with my family at our cottage together, that things are pretty sweet. And with that being said, it’s mostly ’cause of you. And because the sweetness is mostly ’cause of you, well, that’s why I’ve been working my tootsy tail off.

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Written by Amy and Kim Sedgwick, two sweet, sweet members of Meghan Telpner’s Superhero Posse. They are our Superhero Eco Sexperts. Read their bios here. If you’ve ever speculated that there is a connection between your diet and libido, you’d be correct. Diet and lifestyle have all sorts of effects on our mood, our energy, how we feel about our bodies, the amount of sex hormones our bodies create, and yes, our libido. While whole books could be written on the topic (and have!), here are just a few points to get you started in thinking about what’s on your supper plate in a whole new way. As Marrena Lindberg points out in her book, The Orgasmic Diet, there are basically three main ingredients to libido. The first is feeling good – if you feel depressed or stressed, you’re not likely to want to engage in sexual activity.

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You probably think I’m nuts. Sickness can be painful, ugly, stressful, agonizing, tragic, wretched, humiliating, sad. So what’s to be grateful for? I used to whine a lot about having Crohn’s disease. I felt sorry for myself. I adopted a ‘Why me, why does my body hate me so much?’ kinda attitude. It was me against my intestines – and it seemed as if my intestines were always winning. Sure, Crohn’s disease sucks. I’ve been on loads of medications, I’ve spent countless hours doubled over in hospital ERs, I’ve had a foot of bowel removed. It took me a long time to recognize all of the amazing gifts having this disease has brought me, but here I am, talking about illness like it’s a blessing and totally meaning it.

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I have been just about bursting at the seams over excitement wanting to share with you every last sweet detail of our forthcoming FIRST EVER online course. We had so much fun around the kitchen getting our outline together for the course, deciding what recipes to include, what would be part of the wicked awesome meal plan and then of course planning and prepping out each and every one of the 20 videos. Deciding what course would be the first, well that was easy. We did have nine to choose from and every one of those nine that I have been teaching over the last four years will soon make their way into video form too. For the first one, we had to go with the one we get the most demand for.

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We know you love our classes (checked out the fall semester yet?) but we are THRILLED to see Travel To Wellness magazine picked the Love in the Kitchen Academy as one of the Top 10 Best Cooking Classes in Toronto. Yipeeeeeeee! How exciting. We are flattered..and blushing. And all the fun things that come along with a sweet, sweet compliment such as that. You can read the whole awesome write up right here. (Also- check out this article I wrote for Travel to Wellness a little while back that is very seasonally appropriate: “8 Wellness Things to do in Toronto”)

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