My favorites..

I have some pictures of my Wai Lana favorite juices and some of Wai Lana's yogi bars:

Cooking for the season

My grandmother always emphasized the need to eat according to season. Now that fall is here, I have gotten out my new Wai Lana Favorite Soups book I got from Amazon. I love the colors, aromas, and flavors so far. I am excited to try everything.

I've always been a soup person, and this is just the book for me. I've tried many other soup recipes before, in fact, at least a third of all my recipe books are soup books! I do love variety too, and that's one thing that I love so much with Wailana yoga's favorite soups. It's like, all in one type of recipes. There are over 300 recipes in this book, making it worth every penny. Besides, you know how there are some books which are just no good? Like you can try and try the recipes but they come out horribly. That's one thing I don't have to worry about with Wai Lana's books, and, just like any other buyer, I want to get what I am paying for. This is what I call a deal.

Happy Yoga Month!

September has always been one of my favorite months. Minus the starting of flu season- I just love seeing all the beautiful colors coming in... and now that it's been declared national yoga month, all the more I love it!

Wai lana is offering free shipping for all CDs, Dvds, and yoga mats until the 30th. Great stuff!

This morning I went to the park to join about 300 other yoga practitioners. It was fun and a nice way to meet other like-minded people. We plan to do it at least once a month now!

I ordered another bunch of Wai Lana yoga dvds for gifts and for myself. :)

Happy yoga practice everyone!

Baking out of debt

Great work Angela Logan!

I'd like to send her a gift from Wai Lana. I wonder if I can get her address somewhere...

She baked her way out of foreclosure
‘Mortgage Apple Cake’ and a not-for-profit bakery helped her save home

July 28: TODAY’s Ann Curry talks to Angela Logan about how her cake, known as the “Mortgage Apple Cake,” helped her keep her home.

During the Great Depression, people sold apples in the streets to get enough money for their next meal. Fast-forward 80 years to another recession and meet Angela Logan, who is selling apple cakes to friends, neighbors and total strangers over the Internet to get enough money to save her home from foreclosure.

Like so many great ideas, it was born of sheer desperation, Logan told TODAY’s Ann Curry Tuesday in New York. After 20 years of living in her home in Teaneck, N.J., a double financial whammy pushed her to the brink of losing it.

Double whammy
The first hit was a home construction project to repair storm damage and make other improvements. The contractor turned out to be less than honest and hit Logan with thousands of dollars in overcharges she hadn’t planned on. Then an agency that represented Logan in her work as an actor went under, taking thousands of dollars she had coming to her with it.

Logan’s fiance and one of her three sons exhausted their savings trying to help keep her afloat. Finally, she applied for help under President Obama’s Making Home Affordable plan. After three months of waiting for a response from the holder of her mortgage, she learned just two weeks ago that she had 10 days to make a $2,500 mortgage payment that would begin to qualify her for the federal program.

“We were in limbo for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, bam, we had to have this amount of money three months in a row in order to have our mortgage,” Logan told Curry. “I didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to come out of foreclosure.”

Logan, the 55-year-old mother of three sons, is also a substitute teacher and is studying at Bergen Community College in New Jersey to become a nurse. She hit on the idea of selling the scrumptious apple cake her grandmother taught her to bake when she was a child in Atlanta.

“I asked the kids, ‘What do you think about me selling this cake to pay the mortgage?’ ” Logan related to Curry. “The kids — who usually say, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea ’cause Mom said it’ — said, ‘Yeah, we love your cake. We think it would be a great idea.’

“So we said, ‘What will we call it? We’ll call it Mortgage Apple Cake.’ ”

Selling like (hot) cakes
The cake is made with organic ingredients, and after some research, Logan decided that $40 was a reasonable price. She figured if she could sell 100 cakes, she could keep her home.

TODAY
Angela Logan was in imminent danger of losing this home before her Mortgage Apple Cake helped her bake her way out of foreclosure.
The next day, Thursday, July 16, Logan started spreading the word. “I set out to ask family and friends. I stood up in class and asked my classmates. I told them about the situation and they just gave me money for cakes. I went to my church; they gave me money for cakes. My friends from organizations I have worked for doing nonprofit fundraising events — they told all their friends. And between the Wednesday when I started and the next Thursday, I sold 42 cakes from my home with four pans, one bowl and one mixer.”

Her local newspaper, The Record of Hackensack, N.J., heard about Logan’s efforts to bake herself out of foreclosure and wrote a story about her. Other newspapers followed up, along with local television stations. Before Logan knew what had hit her, she had orders for 500 cakes.

She was getting up at 3 a.m. to bake the cakes one at a time in her own kitchen, but there was no way she could fill so many orders. She also didn’t know how she could deliver cakes to addresses all over the United States as well as overseas.

Angels to the rescue
Into the breach stepped two angels. The Hilton Hotel in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., read about her efforts and offered her the use of its kitchen, free of charge. That was vital, because health officials in her hometown had decided she couldn’t run a commercial bakery from her home.

The second angel showed up on her doorstep, also after reading about Logan’s story. He is Josh Kaye, founder and president of Bake Me A Wish, a not-for-profit bakery that sells delicious goodies for charitable causes. He volunteered his organization’s kitchens to take over the bulk baking, as well as to deliver the cakes.
“She was staying up all hours of the night trying to bake cakes,” said Kaye, who joined Logan on TODAY. “I said, ‘Bake Me A Wish is going to come here and we’re going to bail you out. We’re going to help you pay your mortgage.’ And we started to bake cakes for her.”

Logan delivered her first mortgage payment on time, and expects to make the next two payments, which will make her eligible for a renegotiated loan that will knock $1,000 off her monthly mortgage payment.
Meanwhile, she and Kaye are working to make her success help others.

“We’re going to give a portion of all the sales we have to giving back to other people in need,” Kaye said. “We’re negotiating with a charity right now to enable them to do that.”

Said Logan as Curry dug a fork into a big wedge of the moist and delectable Mortgage Apple Cake, “It’s all so fast, I cannot believe it. It’s like a dream come true. It’s surreal.”

On side note, Wai Lana's asana of the week is out!

Natural cough and flu cures

With all the sick people around here these days, I've been making everyone in the house take extra loads of Wai Lana's immune system boosters. I've also been reading more about natural flu and cold remedies:

Top 7 Natural Cold Remedies: Do They Work?
herbal-remedies-cold
Americans spent $1.5 billion on cold and flu supplements and other "immunity boosters" in 2007.
(ISTOCKPHOTO)
Bob Martin says he hasn't caught a cold in years, not since he discovered echinacea and goldenseal. For the past decade, the 60-year-old teacher from Placitas, N.M., has taken the herbal supplements in megadoses three times a day at the first sign of a sniffle. Now he only gets sick if he doesn't dose himself in time, he says.

"It's been years since I've had a cold," says Martin. "I take the herbs, climb under the blanket, and I'm fine the next day. They nip it in the bud."

Martin is not alone in his faith in herbal remedies, which he also takes for toothaches, earaches, and other ailments. According to the Nutrition Business Journal, Americans spent $1.5 billion on cold and flu supplements and other "immunity boosters" in 2007, and the market is growing at twice the rate as that of the standard, over-the-counter, cough-and-cold-remedy market.

But do these alternative treatments actually work?

Martin and plenty of other consumers answer a resounding "yes," but experts say that, overall, there's little evidence-based scientific literature on the subject. In fact, the makers of Airborne, the ubiquitous "effervescent health formula," settled a class-action lawsuit to the tune of $23.3 million in 2008. The charge? The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which helped litigate the suit, and the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a separate complaint against the manufacturer, said the company made false and unsubstantiated claims when it said its product could fight germs or prevent colds.

"Only a very, very small number of compounds have undergone peer review," says Frank Esper, MD, member of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, in Cleveland. "What you see is anecdotal."

And the ones that have undergone peer review generally come back with mixed reviews.

The evidence is often not strong, and it can be conflicting. "But there is some good evidence that some of these things can be effective," says David Leopold, MD, director of integrative medical education at the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine and a faculty member with the Scripps Natural Supplement Conference, in La Jolla, Calif.

Herbal remedies don't seem to prevent colds, but they may help curb symptoms or shorten their duration, he says. "The things I talk about will reduce duration 24 or 36 hours, which is significant if you're out doing things," Dr. Leopold says. "They also seem to decrease severity of symptomology."

Here's what's known about the efficacy of some of the most well-known alternative cold remedies, in alphabetical order: View slideshow of natural remedies.

Good news is Wai Lana yoga's got all these sales now! I'm going to get some halloween gifts together!

Great brain foods

My aunt was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. I've been researching a lot about brain-friendly foods. I got out Wai Lana Yoga's juice book. I'm going to make my aunt drink a lot of fruit juices.

SuperFoods for Your Brain
Posted Thu, Sep 03, 2009
September means that many of us are getting back to school or back to work or back to looking for work -- all of which require a whole lot of braininess. To support this big brain storm, I checked in with our friends at EatingWell, to see what they suggest for smart eating. They got back to me with the best brain food to eat during each stage of life...

The Best Brain Food for Infants and Babies:

Iron. By 5 or 6 months, babies have used up the iron stores they're born with and need to get iron from food or supplements to support brain development.
Food solutions: Iron-fortified cereals. Try these iron-rich recipes.

The Best Brain Food for Children and Teens:

School-aged children should start their day with low-glycemic-index breakfast foods. (They need morning fuel.)
Food solutions: Bran cereals, oatmeal or whole-wheat bagels. Try these oat-filled recipes.

The Best Brain Food for Young Adults:

Got iron? 10 percent of women are anemic, and new studies show that being even mildly iron-deficient affects learning, memory, and attention. Luckily, restoring iron levels to normal also restores cognitive function.
Food solutions: Dark leafy greens, beans, meat or soy. Try these leafy green recipes.

The Best Brain Food for Older Adults:

Eat your antioxidants. People who eat more brightly colored fruits and leafy vegetables have less cognitive decline than those who don't; antioxidants in produce may mop up free radicals and protect neurons from damage.
Food solutions: Berries and other fruits, greens and turmeric (which contains curcumin). Try these antioxidant-rich recipes.

The Best Brain Food for Pregnant Women:

Pregnant women who eat fatty fish, such as salmon, during their third trimester of pregnancy have babies who tend to perform better on cognitive tasks. Researchers think the omega-3 fatty acid DHA is needed during this time to build neurons and their connections.
Food solutions: Salmon and other fatty fish, DHA-fortified eggs and yogurt. Try these healthy salmon recipes.

-Check out these brain-boosting recipes to incorporate all the foods above into your diet.

-But smarts are not everything. Here are some of Wai Lana easy rules on how eat for happiness.

Chiwalking?

After doing my daily Wai Lana Yoga session today, I was reading about Chiwalking and chirunning this morning. Pretty interesting stuff!

Health magazine’s story “Walk a Little, Live a Lot (Longer)” proves that you don’t need to run a marathon (or even a half marathon) to stay fit. In fact, you don’t need to run at all: Squeezing in some extra walking every day is a great way to burn calories, boost mood, and lower your risk of disease.

One type of walking, called ChiWalking, can even cut down on aches and pains by incorporating elements of tai chi, yoga, and pilates. By emphasizing good posture, loosening joints, engaging core muscles, and relaxing the arms and legs, this approach makes walking easier on the body and helps eliminate the discomfort of moving incorrectly.

According to ChiWalking.com, you can learn (and then mix and match) 12 different types of ChiWalks depending on your goals, including a Cardio Walk, an Aerobic Walk, a Flexibility Walk, a Loosening Walk, a Focusing Walk, an Energizing Walk, a Walking Meditation, and more. These walks focus on the body-mind component inherent by incorporating what the folks at this site call the Five Mindful Steps.

1. Get aligned: physically with your posture, mentally with your intentions

2. Engage your core: physically with your lower abdominals, mentally by using your will power

3. Create balance: physically between your upper and lower body and also between the right side and the left side of your body, mentally by creating a balanced fitness program

4. Make a choice: physically to walk in a new way, mentally to create health

5. Move forward: physically with grace and ease, mentally by focusing your mind on the next mindful step

ChiWalking originated from ChiRunning, a practice invented by ultramarathoner Danny Dreyer to help runners learn to land on their mid-foot (the most efficient way to run long distances) and prevent shin splints and overuse injuries by putting less strain on their lower legs and toes. A recent survey conducted by West Virginia University showed that 90% of ChiRunning students reported that the technique prevented injuries and improved ease of running.

With ChiWalking and ChiRunning gaining popularity, New Balance has unveiled a running shoe (both men’s and women’s versions, created with Dreyer’s help) specifically for mid-foot strike runners.

ChiRunning and ChiWalking clubs and workshops are springing up around the country, and of course, the website offers books and DVDs as well. Give this a try and let us know what you think.

When it comes down to it though, I think I'll just stick to Wai Lana. She's got something for the whole family, and that's a major plus in my household.