As I write this, we have just finished watching our friend Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ excellent documentary about aging models: "About Face." Tim was the director of XXX, a documentary about porn stars that Whitley appeared in.
I grew up with these ladies, thumbing through the pages of fashion magazines, while wondering if I would ever look anything like them or be able to own the stunning clothes they were photographed wearing.
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I have been doing the ‘Compassion Walk’ meditation that is in our subscriber section, and am finding that it offers a profound change of energy. For those of you who are not subscribers, it’s quite simple. You do it by directing your attention to your physical sensations and away from your mind while walking among other people, say in a mall or along a sidewalk. (Don’t run into anybody or fall over anything, and certainly don’t do it while driving.) It causes you to turn off, however briefly, the ‘judge’ that is in us all and dominates our functioning when we are among others.
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We have a problem: We’re just too clean! The rise in allergies and autoimmune diseases during the past few decades may be at least partly due to our lack of exposure to the microorganisms in dirt.
We once walked barefoot in the dirt and washed it off of our food. Now we wear shoes and buy pre-washed vegetables from the grocery store, covered in plastic wrap. Even the increase in the rate of Caesarean section births means a potential loss of the germs that are usually passed from one generation to the next. The microorganisms in dirt establish "normal" background levels that keep our bodies from overreacting to germs.
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Exercise seems to be a "cure" for certain kinds of depression, and so along with a dose of fish oil, you may be able to throw away your pills.
And while some people "work up an appetite" when they exercise, so they eat MORE (which kills some of the reason for exercising in the first place), other people eat LESS, and these are the people scientists are studying.
Exercise may change your DESIRE to eat by altering the way parts of your brain respond to the sight of food. Researchers tracked the activity in the parts of the brain known as the "food-reward system,"–the regions that control whether we like and want food. The more cells that fire off in those parts of the brain, the more we want to eat.
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