Dear HLife: I’m a college student at Sonoma State University California, I only get about $200 a month for food, and it is hard to budget and eat healthy. Do you have any suggestions for healthy eating on a small budget?
Dear HLifer: First of all, we want to congratulate you on your desire as a college student to take responsibility for your health and well-being. You’re way ahead of the pack already. Now, to the point. The best way to eat healthy on a budget is to cook. And this comes with a reward, which is the fun that you can have getting creative in the kitchen and really satisfying your taste buds because nobody can make what you like as well as you. Also, you will make a lot of friends by being the one guy who cooks both tasty and healthy food!
So, here are some suggestions to eat healthy on a budget: Read More…
Cilantro Brown Rice by HLife Photography
This is veganized version of a very popular Peruvian dish Maryl and I grew up with, called Arroz Con Pollo (”Rice and Chicken”). This version is basically a rice-no-chicken dish. We usually replace the chicken part of the Peruvian dish by serving it with a homemade mixed herb/tandoori tofu, but the rice is so delicious on its own that you can just snack on it solo. My favorite way to eat it is to pair it up with a very limey dark green salad with lots of chopped red onion. The flavor of the mix of the rice, lime, and red onion is what we call “Peru.” Read More…
Ah, the scent of a flower, the sight of a sunset, the sound of the ocean. The taste of fresh fruit…the touch of a loved one. Your senses – smell, sight, hearing, taste and touch – are your tools to experience the external reality on this planet, and while you may not think twice as you use them daily, you would definitely notice if one of them were impaired. Read More…
Re-decorating is one of my favorite creative activities and mind-cleansing techniques. It is also one of my personal forms of meditation, so, while in the process, I channeled some thoughts to share. As I grabbed a blade to clean out gunk from a tile slab that I couldn’t stand every time I looked at, I thought, “wait a minute – why did it take me so long to change this if it feels so good to do something about it?” As I brought it back to its original pristine state, I realized: There are so many little things that bother us, things that are under our control to modify – like remove an object we dislike or paint a table with a color that we like better – and we complain but don’t do anything about it. WHY? Read More…
Everything we experience, we have created. Thoughts and actions go out into the universe and, like a boomerang, come right back to the originator. Taking responsibility for your life means understanding that all the situations, people, things, and feelings you attract, have all first been created by YOUR thoughts and actions. What you experience today has, at some point in time, been originated by you. This is what we call cause and effect. Cause: the origin/creator/generator. Effect: the result or consequence of the cause. The Principle of Cause and Effect is a tool for conscious, healthy living, a key idea that needs be understood and mastered. We introduced you to this principle in our Universal Laws article, through a rough overview on each of the principles/laws. Using the principle of cause and effect will help improve the quality of experiences you have in life. Here, we’ll hone in on this principle and explore it further. Read More…
Magnesium is an intracellular nutrient and metabolic electrolyte. It’s a very important essential macro-mineral, not only the fourth most abundant mineral in the body, but also involved in several hundred enzymatic reactions, with cardiovascular functions being one of them. Known as the “relaxer” mineral, magnesium is an alkaline earth metal, involved in more the 300 biochemical reactions in the body such as energy production, synthesis of essential molecules, cell signaling and ion transport across cell membranes. This anti-stress mineral is the central component in the “blood” of the plant world just like iron is to our own human blood, because the central atom of the chlorophyll structure is magnesium. I’m in love with it already – aren’t you? Some highlights: Read More…
Nutrition: Drinking tart cherry juice daily could help reduce the severity of insomnia and time spent awake after going to sleep, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medicinal Food. In an experiment, adults who drank eight ounces of tart cherry juice in the morning and evening for two weeks reported significant reductions in insomnia severity and saved about 17 minutes of wake time after going to sleep on average. The researchers suspect tart cherries’ natural benefits could be due in part to their relatively high content of melatonin – a natural antioxidant in cherries with established ability to help moderate the body’s sleep-wake cycle. Melatonin is produced naturally by the body in small amounts and it plays a role in inducing sleepiness at night and wakefulness during the day. Cherries may help boost the body’s own supply of melatonin and increase sleep efficiency. Read More…
We often talk about dreams as goals but today we wanted to share some thoughts on the kind of dreams that take place when you sleep. If sleeping serves the purpose of cellular regeneration, dreaming serves the purpose of thought reorganization. On average, we sleep eight hours a night – spend a third of our lives sleeping – and of those eight hours, it is said that we only need three to six in order to restore our physical health. So, why eight? Eight hours is what we’re told we need for our minds to do their job of “filing” all the information that was received throughout the day, past thoughts that were reactivated, future ideas that were generated. Eight hours is what it takes to maintain mental health through the process of dreaming, and depriving us of our daily dose of this necessary process has resulted in hallucinations, nervous disorders, neurosis, and even death. Read More…
A new friend and I had a bet going on how to pronounce famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s surname, and this prompted me to do a little research and revisit some of this visionary’s landmark concepts. Maslow is the father of humanistic psychology (I say it’s “maslov”, that’s how my college psych teacher pronounced it – Maslow’s parents were Russian immigrants after all, and we’ve all heard what happens to ‘w’s in Russian accents; my friend says it’s “maslow” as in “low price guarantee” – he was born in Brooklyn, which makes him American and likely to have adopted that pronunciation). Unlike Freud, who focused on studying mental illness, Maslow researched and developed theories about the healthy aspect of the mind and human potential, which of course is so very HLife of him (our focus is optimal-centered, not on a sick or barely functional concept of health), so I had to share some of his less-talked-about work with you, which I found fascinating: The humanistic concept of values. Read More…
Mint Veggie Touiller by HLife Photography
In my latest CSA (Farm Fresh To You) box I received a whole bunch of zucchinis. Inspiration quickly took over me and I thought: Ratatouille. The thing about being me is that I don’t follow recipes and more then anything I love recreating and inventing new ones based on inspiring old recipes. I just go with the flow of my excitement for flavor, the variety that the plant kingdom has to offer, and I let my creativity run the rest of my culinary and nutritional experience. So, obviously ratatouille didn’t happen, BUT, even better (for me), Mint Veggie Touiller did. Enjoy. Read More…
