Know Any Literary Animal Lovers?
Hi there PureJeevan readers! We wanted to let you know that Jim's new novel CHROO is available on Amazon. It's a crazy adventure involving a billionaire heiress, her Chihuahua BFF ("Chroo") and a host of human and animal characters. Find out more on Amazon! Here are some links:
Today I am thankful for the small things in life that often go overlooked. I'm thankful Jim made some sweet dessert last night when I wanted it. I'm thankful KDcat is having a fun time with some of her friends right now. I'm thankful that: the trash collectors just picked up the garbage (we don't produce a whole lot since going raw); the older woman across the street has started smiling and being nice to KDcat; the sun is out and the snow is melting; I have another computer job to work on for some income.
What fun do you have planned for yourself today, this weekend, or sometime in the near future? If the idea of having fun feels a bit foreign to you, then we sure are glad you found our blog. We'd love to encourage you to have some fun every day, but to especially have extra fun on the weekends (or whenever you have a couple of days off in a row).
What makes the weekends so special? For most people the weekends are a time when your schedule isn't dominated by weekly work commitments. It's a time when you can (no matter how busy your life is) probably arrange your days the way you'd like. So, why not arrange some time for fun? If you can manage it, try to arrange an entire weekend of fun for yourself!
We've spent some time on this blog talking about how much fun you can have via the meetup.com web site. If you search that site, you can probably find raw food meetups near you!? But, a few readers have asked us some follow-ups, such as What should I bring and What should I do if I'd like to host a raw foods meetup
*Attending* Raw Foods Meetups
Okay, so you signed up for a raw foods meetup group, waited patiently for the next event to come round, and now it's time!? But, wait... this is your first such outing. What should you bring
Read more: Raw Meetups: What to Bring, How to Host Them (Part 1)
Jim here... Okay, the title and graphic, above, may be a bit silly, as are a few of the remarks I made in the video, below. But, within this rather odd piece a few hopefully noble and economical ideas exist -- especially the ridiculously simple and obvious notion about reusing glass beverage bottles. I'm embarrassed to have lived on this planet for so long and not to have adopted this fun and environmentally friendly practice much sooner.
We really do take things like glass containers for granted, when we probably shouldn't. Their ubiquity aside, it still takes a fair amount of energy and resources to make a single glass bottle. On the mass scale that they're made, they're obviously super cheap. But, if you had to start from scratch, it would take ages to make a single one, so we should at least appreciate them more and do all we can to make their continued existence as sustainable as possible.
Read more: If Keith Richards Is Still Alive, Then Can I Have a Little Tea?
Okay, we promise that, once the "Know Your Food" series normalizes (hopefully by next week), we'll be posting daily 3- to 4-minute segments, not these gargantuan bandwidth- and free-time-hogs! But, it's a decent 8 minutes of solid entertainment (kind of/sort of). So, hope you enjoy. We call this "Episode 1 (sort of)." You'll see why. Includes a few bonus minutes of discussion on goals & synchronicity.
As you saw, we didn't air the entire APPLE show. So, a few notes are in order:
We have something special for today s Makin? It Monday! Remember Terilynn, the brilliant chef behind The Daily Raw Caf , whom we introduced you to not long ago? Well, this weekend she posted a recipe challenge open to anyone willing to participate. We here at Pure Jeevan are always up for an adventure, so thanks for the challenge, Terilynn!
The rules were simple: Use the list of possible ingredients, create a raw vegan food dish, and send pictures and information about your dish to The Daily Raw Caf . Here s the list for the challenge, with the items we didn t have available crossed out:
Here's an older post, from August 2008, about modifying one's diet to experiment with attaining even greater health. ?I know the before/after pics, alone, are inspirational enough to live a raw vegan lifestyle!
*blows kisses to everyone*
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Want to have a little bit of fun today here on the blog? We'd love to hear your list of favorite foods for each color of the rainbow! I wonder how many of us will have similar fruits and vegetables on our lists, and how many of us will come up with vegetables and fruits that others have overlooked?
Jim here... Recently, a commenter on this blog, Lannette, mentioned being a cardiac rehab nurse. For some reason, reading this set my wheels spinning in various directions, among them onto the topic of meat consumption in the world. To begin, I'd like to recap something I'd said in response to her:
... it *astounds* me how people joke about heart health where I work. People around here routinely return from medical exams and actually adopt rather mischievous grins when they reveal how high their bad cholesterol levels are. It's like they're saying, "I know meat and dairy are bad for me, but I'm going to keep on eating it anyway. Isn't that funny ??!!!" Ummm, no. It's sad. They laugh it off as though there could be no possible future reckoning for them. It's reminiscent, IMHO, of Dr. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning," in which he describes a psychological phenomenon he termed the "delusion of reprieve." For anyone unfamiliar w/ that, the term describes the phenomenon via which those faced with certain death (or near certain death) mentally construct some way out of it. They are deluded into believing that they'll have a reprieve from the inevitable. So, it's exactly the same to me -- these people see the heart attacks coming. They simply refuse to do anything about it, refuse to change their habits, deny what their blood work says to them. Why? Because they think "I'll be okay. Sure, this leads to heart disease in most people, but not in *me* because I'm a strong guy, I'm macho, I'm not as fat as some other person here, etc." Mostly, it's the meat, I think. It's got a powerful hold on our society...
So, today I wanted to write a little bit on the topic of meat consumption. This is an enormous issue, in my opinion. If you're reading this, it likely means you're already at least a vegetarian, so I do not need to quote you any saddening statistics on the horrors of the meat industry. In fact, before writing this, I decided to visit the PETA web site quickly in order to glean a few slaughterhouse facts. But, in no time, I became markedly depressed, so I'll largely avoid focusing on specific negative imagery here.
In writing and researching our previous two posts, we came across a number of articles mentioning the benefits of chlorophyll for those who have been exposed to radiation. Nothing seemed to go so far as to call chlorophyll a cure-all. But, many sources cited clear benefits -- and it's great to read about potential preventative measures and treatments available through natural means. For example, the best source we found mentioned some specific studies:
This is a recipe for the coconut shake that brought my cholesterol levels from very unhealthy down to extremely healthy within the span of one month!
Young Coconut Shake
Flesh and water from one young coconut