Tip #9: Remember the Power of Now

Some years ago I bought the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It was when he was in Oprah and it seemed like everyone was talking about it. I didn't have time to actually watch Oprah, but I found the title intriguing enough to buy the book. I started reading it, felt totally lost and bored after 10 pages and that was that. Still, the words in the title, the power of "right" now, were very alluring. I just had a bit problem with the idea of "But what if "now"actually sucks?" In any case, I decided to give it a try last year. I needed to know there was power somewhere, and the power of now started to sound good again.

Well, I have to say that now I'm a convinced believer and that book  is one I love to recommend. I think everyone should read it, at least give it a try (more than 10 pages). But you should particularly read it if you are going through a crisis.

I will tell you now my super short version of what I learned from it, with the hope that you find it interesting enough so you read it, or at least consider it. Here it goes.

In our daily lives, we tend to be accompanied by a voice inside our heads that is constantly talking like a mad person. The voice tells us things like "You should do that instead," "Who do you think you are," "I cannot believe she said that. She really is pushy," "Does this dress make me fat?," "What are we going to have for dinner? I forgot to buy the salad dressing." Or, much, much worse things. You all know what I'm talking about. Well, we need to pay attention to that voice (who he calls "ego"), listen to it as if it were other person talking and realize that it is not reality, and then proceed to stop it completely or minimize it as much as possible. Reality is what's in front of you, in my case the computer where I'm typing. Nothing hurts me as I type. Nothing bothers me as I type. And, as I'm quite distracted with this activity, that is, I am consciously typing, there are no voices in my head telling me anything. Of course, I can stop typing and then I can hear it: "Writing a blog post? How stupid is that? I still have to make dinner. I forgot the laundry. How can I make plans for the summer? My PET scan is in May, I'm getting nervous already. What if I'm not in remission any more?" We need to learn to say STOP to this voice that we all have. What we have is now, pure and simple. The past is not there any more. We can remember it, if we want to, but we cannot go back. And the future does not really exist either. No one can assure us tomorrow (or even five seconds from now).

So, what to do? I have trained myself now, more or less, to be in the moment as much as possible. I love that sentence: "be in the moment" (my yoga teacher says it in every class and it is such a great reminder). In this "moment" you can plan for the future, for things like "I need to go to the grocery store before I go to school." Maybe even retirement, or long term plans like that. But make those plans part of your now, that is, enjoy making them as much as getting there.

Remember this one thing: make this moment count as much as possible. It is what we have. Don't waste it listening to that voice that teaches you nothing. In my weekly walks to school, I often hear that voice telling me a million things. I then remember to say: STOP! And you know what happens every time? I see my surrounding with new eyes. I notice the trees, or a flower, or a bird, or a cloud and I see their beauty and wisdom and I feel peace.


And, together with this idea of the power of now, come the concepts of acceptance (instead of resistance) and surrender. But I will talk about them in other tips.

PS: What do you think of the sign my eleven year old son made me for this post on Photoshop? Pretty cool, isn't it? I love it!

Let me know if you have read the book and what you thought about it!

Tip #8: Learn about inflammation, maybe even yours

Before last year, I had never really heard of inflammation. Or if I had, I don't remember. But I instantly perked up when I read the following:

 "At the Glasgow Hospital in Scotland, oncologists have been measuring inflammation markers in the blood of patients with various cancers since the nineties. They have shown that patients with the lowest level of inflammation were twice as likely as the others to live through the next several years. These markers are easy to measure, and to the astonishment of the Glasgow oncologists, they are a better indicator of the chances of survival than the patient’s general state of health at the time of diagnosis".  

Servan-Schreiber MD PhD, David (2009-12-31). Anticancer, A New Way of Life, New Edition (Kindle Locations 926-931).

In fact, I found out that your level of inflammation (as measured according to the The Glasgow Prognostic Score) at the time of diagnosis is a better indicator of survival than the stage of your cancer. Thus, you may be diagnosed with a Stage IV cancer but, if you have low inflammation, you will probably live longer than somebody with Stage I with high inflammation. This was great news! There was something I could do: Keep my inflammation low. I learned most of this through my nutritionist (I'll talk more about her in another tip) and, with her help, I follow now a plan to control my inflammation.


So, what is inflammation? The way I understand it, your body has an inflammatory reaction when you get a bruise or a cut and this is good, as it your body's way to heal that bruise or cut. But, in our modern world, we attack our own bodies with the food we eat, the little exercise we do, with stress, etc and cause systemic inflammation that affects the whole body. This inflammation is actually at the root cause of many diseases: Type II diabetes, heart disease, some autoimmune diseases and, possibly, also cancer.


From what I've learned, I feel that everyone should have an idea of how "inflamed" they actually are. There is a simple blood test that can actually tell you. It is called the C-Reactive Protein test (or CRP). I'm not suggesting that you go to your doctor right now to have it done. But maybe, next time you have a check up, you can ask for this. It is normally used to predict the risk of cardiovascular disease, but I think it is good to know for all the other things mentioned. If you have a high CRP it may indicate an underlying problem you may not even be aware of.

Here is some more information about it:

• From the Huffington Post, from Dr. Mark Hyman: Is your body burning up with hidden inflammation?
• From (yes) Oprah.com :The simple blood test that can save your life

And to keep your inflammation low, the same things that you always hear apply here too: have a healthy diet (lots of greens, organic products, not processed foods), avoid stress, cultivate friendships and connections with others, you know, everything I've been telling you. :)

And, just for reinforcement, here's a 2 minute video about it:

You know, you still can have low inflammation AND cancer, like it happened to me. The first time I was tested for the CRP, about three months after my diagnosis last year, my inflammation was extremely low. But, that number still gave me lots of hope, and, who knows, maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm responding so well to my treatment. 

To your health(y CRP)!!

Tip #7: Love

As next week is Valentine's day, I decided to write about love. In my own life, this past year I have re-discovered the unbelievable power of love. The love of my husband, the love of my family, the love of my old friends, the love of my new friends (whom I met in my new journey, in my online support group, in my yoga for cancer patients class), the love of strangers in many countries praying for me. All this love carried me through in the hard times, gave me the strength I needed and provided me with an immense joy. I now know that I matter to so many people and I am extremely thankful for it.

Scientifically too, this power that I felt this year has been studied. Here's the Amazon review for Dr. Dean Ornish's book Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy:

"Ornish demonstrates that personal intimacy and other aspects of emotional well-being--all the elements that make up what we call "love"--are as important to our physical condition as to our mental health. Not only do these positive emotions motivate us to make better lifestyle choices, Ornish argues, they also have a powerful direct effect on our bodies, giving us stronger immune systems, better cardiovascular functioning, and longer life expectancies. But the benefits of opening our hearts to others go beyond curing our bodies of disease; it's also the first step toward healing our entire lives".

And, in his website, there are more resources where we can learn about the importance of creating connections, by spending more time with family and friends, listening, touching and meditating, among many things.

This week I also listened to a story on NPR that made me reflect on how love is, indeed, powerful. It is part of StoryCorps, where anyone can record another person so they can tell the story of their lives. You can hear them on the radio every Friday morning, or you can just go to their website. All the stories are preserved at the Library of Congress. I have always loved this project, and every single time I hear one of these stories I learn something, about love, about strength, about faith in humanity.

So, for all of you, here's a 3 minute story that teaches us that, if we have love, we should never give up. I hope you like it.

This week go ahead and give hugs, kisses and love. To your kids, family, friends and everyone. What you give, you'll get back, I promise, in health and in happiness.

Tip #6: Walk

Exercise is one of those things everyone agrees on: we need to do more of it. The human body was not built to sit around all day. But that's just the problem. Our modern world makes us sit around for huge chunks of our days. We sit at the office and then, we sit at home, exhausted from sitting at the office all day. Here's an article I read just last week about how by living in the suburbs our lives have become much more sedentary and the risky implications to our health that this has ("Communities learn the good life can be a killer"). During my own research about cancer, one thing I discovered is that exercise is as important as diet when it comes to preventing and slowing the disease, if not even more important. For middle-aged women, it is particularly important, as estrogen can hide in fat cells (but not in muscle) and excess estrogen can provoke breast cancer (like the type I have).

But now the question is, what kind of exercise and how much of it. In the book Anticancer (see Tip#5), I learned about the fascinating studies of Dr Ornish on early prostrate cancer (PDF link), and how some lifestyle changes were able to affect very favorably the progression of the disease. In that study, the patients were recommended, among some other changes, like a vegan diet, stress management techniques, etc, to walk 30 minutes 6 times a week. The more the patients adhered to their programs, the better their results.

And in this other article from the New York Times, "What's the single best exercise?" one of the answers is this: brisk, interval-style walking: three minutes of fast walking, followed by three minutes of slower walking, repeated 10 times. That is, 30 minutes walking.

So, armed with this information, I started going to the gym around 5 days a week and did the 30 minute interval in the treadmill (as in the pic) and then I would take a stroll with my family on weekends. But that was when I took the semester off and had a lot of time. When I went back to work, this was not going to work, so this is what I have been doing now. Three days a week, I park my car about a bit less than a mile from work. I then HAVE TO walk about 15 minutes to get to work and 15 minutes back to my car. I bought a cute, little backpack for my laptop and books, so I'm also doing some weight bearing exercise for my bones at the same time (more on this on another tip). Then, on two days I go to the gym and do the 30 minute interval. One day a week, I do yoga.

Last semester, this wasn't easy and I ended up not going to the gym at all. So, this year I learned about an iPhone App called GymPact and you make a "pact" with your own money to go the gym as much as you decide or you lose that money. I have to say, it has worked for me so far (I've been using it for 5 weeks now).

One more thing I'll say about walking is that I definitely feel an improvement in my mood when I'm able to walk like this. There is also a very strong link between exercise and mild depression and if not for anything else, I do believe it can really help to make you happier. Here's some more information about it.

I think this is easy and can be rewarding. So, remember, just walk!

Do you have any other tips we may all use?

Thanks for reading!

Tip #5: Read the book "Anticancer"

OK. This is a bit hard to explain. I mean, it's not hard to explain why I think you should read the book Anticancer by David Servan Schreiber, even if you don't have cancer. In a very compelling way, the author tells you about exciting research that shows that some simple lifestyle changes can have a huge impact in whether you develop cancer or not in the future. And, for those of us who already have it, those changes can slow it down. I liked that the book is full of scientific references that can be checked and followed and that he explains how cancer starts and develops in very simple terms, for someone like me, with no medical background. But the book is also compelling because he is telling us his own story, of how he discovered by accident that he had a brain tumor when he was a (somewhat arrogant) young researcher and what led him to research the topic and changed his own lifestyle when the cancer recurred five years later. And we learn a bit about his love life, how he met his wife, the birth of his son, his family back in France, which makes the book actually very entertaining as well.

The part that is harder to explain is that, unfortunately, he did die of his cancer, 19 years after his first diagnosis. This book was a lifesaver for me a year ago when I learned about my own diagnosis. It is full of hope, which is what we need most often in life. He gave me the hope I needed to stop crying and start moving. If the people in the research cases he described could do it, why couldn't I? I gave the book to everyone I knew needed it, saying "Look at him, he's doing so well." So, needless to say, it was very hard to hear about his death this past summer. What had happened? Well, Dr. Servan Schreiber was a remarkable person in every sense and he knew we would all be asking this question, so he wrote another book, Not the Last Goodbye, when he was diagnosed with the third recurrence of his brain tumor. In his view, he didn't follow his own advice about reducing stress in your life. But we also have to think that he was given at most 6 years of life with his first cancer, so the fact that he lived 19 is indeed a testament that his methods did work.

Well, in any case, I don't want to make this too long. What I really want to share here is that the changes that he proposes are related to not only diet, but also stress reduction (through contact with friends, family, support groups), exercise (so much more important than we think) and, all those things, if followed, will give you a much happier and healthier life, no matter what, so that's why I highly recommend reading that book.

And, for those of you who may be curious and cannot wait to read the book, here is a one hour lecture that the author gave some years ago where he explains why there is such an epidemic of cancer now and what kind of things we can do to prevent it. Like I said, it is an hour, but it is also entertaining and completely worth your time.

Many of the posts that I write here have their origin in this book. It changed my life. I hope it also helps you. Do you have another book recommendation we should know about? I'd love to hear about it! And thanks for reading!

Tip #4: Use a high speed blender

I have owned my Vitamix for over 5 years now and many people ask me if I think it is worth it. A high speed blender like the Vitamix or the Blendtec is quite expensive, with most models at around $500, so it is an understandable question.I also have read some criticism that drinking your food may not be good for you because it may raise your blood sugar faster than if you eat the food whole. I have to say, though, that, in my experience, my Vitamix has been a wonderful addition to my kitchen and to my health and worth every penny.

I would say that I use my Vitamix practically every day. I start my morning usually with a green smoothy (like the one in the picture, with those ingredients, or similar). I also use it to make delicious salad dressings, soups and desserts. Let me explain each in more detail:

• Salad dressings: I like that you can use natural ingredients to create amazingly rich and creamy dressings. For example, a simple one is an orange (or a banana), 4 tablespoons of vinegar, a handful of walnuts (or any other nuts) and a handful of raisins.So, so good. 
• Soups: One great thing about the Vitamix is that it will heat your soups, so you can just put any ingredients you want and blend for 3 to 4 minutes, and voila, you have warm soup. For example, you can try a can of beans, a tomato, some pepper, a carrot, spices like cumin, you can add a bit of cashews to make it creamier, and you have another delicious concoction with no preparation in less than five minutes.
• Desserts: You can make amazing ice cream like desserts just with frozen fruit, a bit of (soy) milk and cashews, with some dates added for sweetness. No nasty, unpronounceable ingredients that are bad for you. For my husband's latest birthday I made this delicious raspberry ganache fudge cake from Ani Phyo, no cooking involved. It was amazing. (By the way, in her video, she uses a food processor. I have never had one, so I don't know how it compares to the Vitamix, but I've never felt the need for one).
• Flours: Lately, I have been grinding chick peas to make garbanzo bean flour that can be used for Falafels, for example (particularly good for anyone with gluten issues). Here's a great recipe for them.
• Milks: If you are trying to avoid dairy, or even soy, you can just make milks out of nuts or rice easily in this machine. Here are the recipes for seven of them.
• Chop: I also use my Vitamix to chop onions in seconds and, with newer models, you can also chop cabbage easily. You can chop other hard veggies, like carrots or celery, but I personally don't like them that small, I prefer bigger chunks.

I will add that it is very easy to clean, which is very important to me, as I always have lots of things to do (just like everyone). In general, some of the things I have mentioned can be made in a regular blender, but the Vitamix will still be faster no matter what. I really think that by using all natural ingredients and avoiding processed foods, you definitely contribute to your health, and the Vitamix is perfect for that.

And, as far as the criticism about raising your blood sugar levels too fast, I have to say that that has not been my experience, as I actually need to have my blood sugar tested every month. Of course, I definitely do not recommend smoothies full of fruits only, or adding too many sweeteners. Or even the cake I showed before, I would only have that very occasionally. But, the truth is that dates will always be better than any sugar, as they are much less processed and they are the real fruit. And with the Vitamix, dates are very easily ground.

So, I definitely think it is worth spending that money and my friends who have bought one are all pretty happy with theirs. There are refurbished models that are cheaper and still perfect and also big stores like Costco have specials once in a while.

So, what do you think? Do you have any questions or comments? I'd love to hear them.

PS: That picture shows my attempt to talk to Kris Carr, my hero, through Twitter. It hasn't worked yet (I stalk her, she ignores me), but one day I know she will finally say hi! (I'm just going to keep trying!).

Tip #3: Smile

One of my 2012 New Year's resolutions (by, the way, this is the first year I made them, and so far, so good. This blog was one of them.) was to watch a TED TALK every day (or, at least, 5 a week). I had already watched some, and I always liked them, so I just wanted to do it in a more systematic way. I figured that they are short (most of them are around 20 minutes), so it would not take too much of my day, and I could feel that I was actually learning something, as they are always interesting and informative. I also like the fact that the topics are very varied but the speakers are always compelling, no matter their subject. So far, I have seen some great ones about education, the power of games, or even spaghetti sauce. I watch them on my TV, instead of the computer, which I also like better, thanks to our ROKU machine (something else I highly recommend). So, my "must see TV' this year are these TED talks and even my kids are enjoying them immensely (and that has been an added bonus).

In any case, the point of the tip is that one of the talks I saw really made me think about the power of being positive. You know, we always hear "be positive, think positive, smile at your cancer" and things like that and I do feel that, in general, yes, it is much better to be positive, but, how do we even start? Well, what about with a simple smile? In this TED talk (it's only 7 minutes, you have to watch!), Ron Gutman tells us about fascinating research done about smiles and how just a simple smile can influence our life course and many other tidbits. And, it will definitely make you smile.

So, next time you feel a bit down, just try to smile! What do you think?