New Battles Ahead!

May 15th, 2012 | Posted by Lunar in Babies et al | Health | Myself - (0 Comments)

I ended up getting sick over the weekend. The kind of sick that makes you feel  weak all over and puts a cloud over your head and chest area. I tried looking up online the safest meds that pregnant women can take and Robitussin seemed to be a decent enough of a diversion from regular cough syrups. My mom made a trip to the pharmacy only to be told by the pharmacist that really no cough meds are considered “safe” at this point.

I don’t know if she simply didn’t want to look up the active ingredients of each of those syrups or she really was concerned but I wonder where the line is drawn between what’s best for the mom and the baby? Is it really better for the baby if no meds enter the system and the mom feels like shooting herself for weeks at a time? I remember working with a girl who had a hereditary condition: diagnosing pregnancy was nearly impossible for doctors with her until very late in her term. She only found out at 6 months along! She happened to go to the hospital for food-poisoning-similar symptoms and after 8 hours of tests and scans, they sent her home saying that they couldn’t find anything that was wrong with her. The doctor had to chase her down in the parking lot asking her to return because they noticed in the ultrasound she may be pregnant! But all up until that point she’d have negative blood tests and all that entailed. Then she says that she was really worried about her baby because just a few weeks prior to it she drank a whole lot of alcohol celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday. Her baby was already 1 or 2 years old when we were having this conversation and healthy as a clam. So I’m wondering how much control do we really have over these things? You could do everything by the book, eat the most organic vegetables and exercise as prescribed, and still end up with sketchy test results if you were really meant to be confronted with it. And you could also do everything they tell you not to do and have your fairytale happy ending.

Now I’m not promoting drinking / smoking / using drugs in pregnancy by all means. But I’d say a little cough syrup to ease the suffering of the mother might also be good for the baby? Just a thought. Off for bed rest once again. Wish me luck with the natural remedies.

Natural Remedies & Personal Discoveries

January 20th, 2012 | Posted by Lunar in Health - (0 Comments)

Back in March / April of 2011 a friend had introduced me to the idea of self-made shampoos. Each time you get online or turn your TV on, you get bombarded with messages like that everything you touch, eat, smell, and so on contains toxins, carcinogens to the point that it almost feels like a death trap to go on with your day. And shampoos are no exclusion to that category: many of their ingredients are “not that good” for your health, to put it mildly. So my friend set out to create her own cocktail to wash her hair with. And the end result actually ended up working for her. Her hair loss dramatically decreased; moreover, it seemed that her hair doubled in volume. And what is this magic shampoo made of? Egg yolk and mustard powder, dissolved. That’s it. The way it works is that mustard, when it starts to “burn” slightly, gets the blood in the skin come to the surface. And while the increased circulation in your scalp is already a beneficial factor for hair growth, the egg yolk contains all the nutrients your hair needs and they end up penetrating the skin at this very moment when mustard does its magic.

Now when I tried it, it seemed too tedious of a task. You ned to part your hair every cm or so to apply this shampoo because egg is quite sticky and it doesn’t really “soap up” in order to be applied in one area and to get into other areas with the help of water. Where you place it on your head is where it will be. Secondly, it becomes a little messy if you don’t have one of those tube-looking bottles that are often used for hair dying. I didn’t, so each time I washed my hair in this manner, my bathroom had mustard and egg all over it. Not a pretty picture to clean up afterwards. Thirdly, my hair didn’t feel / look as nice when it was washed and dry after this mustard shampoo in comparison to how it looked when washed with the commercial shampoos. Mustard does get rid of the oils in your hair; in the olden times, they even used it in place of soap to wash dishes. And even though I knew the commercial shampoos had all the wrong ingredients in them, at the end of the day, you still want to enjoy your hair, right? And the fourth reason that broke the camel’s back for me was that oftentimes mustard had a really hard time to get washed out of the hair. Imagine that, you don’t use any conditioner on your hair, so when you brush the hair – it gets tangled and stuck. And now there’s flaky mustard in there! I got frustrated, jumped into the shower and washed my hair again with Pantene. That was the end of the road for me there.

But then winter came. I have dry skin, which I’ve discovered over the last couple of years. Before that, it was classified as “normal”. It first started on my legs, now it’s my face, and this season, worst of all… it’s my scalp. There’s nothing more embarrassing than dandruff. And I tried *everything* I could get my hands on: all the dandruff shampoos, tea tree oil, and nothing worked. The dandruff shampoos didn’t seem to do much for the scalp but instead they made my hair look and feel like straw. And then you start to weigh out the pros and cons: regular shampoo & slightly more dandruff but nicer hair or dandruff shampoo with slightly less dandruff but mongrel hair? At the back of my mind, I kept remembering mustard. And although I was so not looking forward to starting to put egg in my hair again, I thought mustard might save the day. And so I came up with my own version of the mustard shampoo.

1 tbsp of mustard dissolved in warm water to make a liquidy paste

+

1 tbsp of your favorite shampoo, no conditioner

I had to repeat it three times for the dandruff to be fully gone. And it’s now fully gone. Fourth wash :) Now, you do still get a bit of mustard left over sometimes but it’s easy to brush out of your hair once it’s dry because you used the commercial shampoo in combination, which makes the hair soft and silky, even without conditioner. I noticed that conditioners tend to make matters worse for dry scalp, no idea why. My hair stylist once said that most of the time, what’s good for the hair isn’t good for the scalp and vice versa when it comes to commercial shampoos.

Try it, maybe you’ll like it too. Just one last tip: After you lather the shampoo into your scalp, try to leave it in there until it starts burning. Don’t give yourself a skin burn either because mustard can leave an actual skin burn and it won’t be pleasant. But the point here is that if there’s some kind of bacteria that’s causing this disbalance for you, mustard needs to burn a little to get rid of this bacteria.

I’m only sharing this little discovery of mine because I know it felt very awkward and uncomfortable to be confronted with this condition. I searched far and wide online looking for a decent remedy but as it turns out, for me mustard was the answer all along.

Recipe: Sour Apple Sorbet

January 8th, 2012 | Posted by Lunar in Recipes | Sewing & Culinary Creations - (0 Comments)

An easy concoction if you’re in the mood for something sweet and sour!

Ingredients:

  • 3 green apples, peeled and cored
  • 1 can of Sprite (or any other lime-flavored can of pop)
  • 2.5 tbsp white sugar
  • 8 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 1/3 cup apple juice

Directions:

  1. Put a pot on low heat with apple juice, white sugar, and lemon juice. Let it stand until all sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat.
  2. Grate the apples into a puree (or you could use your food processor for that, but I don’t have one yet, so I do the manual labour of grating).
  3. Pour the warmed juices into the apple puree, stir to combine and put it into the freezer. After the mixture has cooled off significantly to form crusts of ice on the side of the bowl, mix in the Sprite.
  4. Every 40 minutes (or for however long you can manage to do so), take the bowl out of the freezer and break in the ice. It makes the blending process easier in the end.
  5. When frozen, blend the puree and put it into the freezer until ready to serve.

If you like it less on the sour side, obviously less lemon juice is key but also – if I had to do it over again – I’d add less sugar too since Sprite and apple juice I used is sugary enough. What I like about my recipe in comparison to others of apple sorbet I’ve seen is that I use fresh apple puree while others boil the apples and then puree them in the blender, which ends up taking more vitamins and nutritional value out of your dessert. Hope you try it :)

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