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Seduction by Marketing Interests
- POSTED ON: Sep 30, 2012

Marketing interests foster the belief that all we have to do is use their product to “get the excess weight off”. They'll kiss our behinds, not because they care about us, but to get our money.

I use the term “marketing interest” to define someone who has a product or an idea that they would like to make financially profitable. It could be a food, a drug or supplement, a book or other publication, a diet organization, an exercise machine, an event such as a marathon, personal services like a trainer or nutritionist, a politician, or even …. gasp!… a medical doctor or facility with a specialization involving the condition of obesity.

Advertising also now gives a more positive spin on this process by substituting the term “get healthy” for “lose weight”; thereby making certain that the concept Slim equals Healthy, and Fat equals Sick. During the past several decades, this language has been adopted by popular culture, which was an extremely successful marketing ploy. It has resulted in the majority of society … including those in the medical profession …now accepting that concept as an absolute Truth of Life. An informed person who dares to question the basic reality of that premise now faces mass opposition.

Most of us who struggle with obesity, desperately want to be “normal weight”.
We want to be “attractive”, “trim”, “fit”, “toned” and “healthy”.
We want an easy way to accomplish that goal. A way that doesn’t take much thought or a lot of time and effort. We want it to come “naturally”. So, we are easily seduced by the false promises of a simple, effortless way.   We can also be seduced into agreeing to make a lot of effort for a very limited time.

Phrased anyway you like, essentially, this is a lie.
And, not a “harmless” lie, but to use a term I frequently heard as a child…
It’s a lie “straight from the pits of Hell”.
As long as we believe there is….somewhere….an easy way, it becomes almost impossible to commit oneself to the hard work and constant struggle that it takes for weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.

People who are clearly fat commonly express the concept that that they
don’t want Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise to "Rule their Life".

I have no way to help anyone toward that Goal of Mindlessness,
because Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise have ALWAYS "Ruled MY Life."
I'm not a person with the genetics it takes to be naturally thin, or even naturally normal-weight.  I did not spend any less time Thinking about those issues when I was Fat than I do now.  The difference is that when I was Fat my Thoughts were not accompanied by consistent Action, while during my weight-loss period ...and now inside Maintenance...
my Thoughts about those issues now tend to be productive and positive.

Sometimes, ... if we choose to ...  we can make hard work enjoyable, and that is the direction I’ve chosen to take with my dieting hobby.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good
- POSTED ON: Sep 29, 2012

Most people sometimes feel a strong inner drive to be “perfect” despite the fact that perfection is an impossible and often self-defeating goal.

Just like in every area of life, whatever diet, food plan, or way-of-eating, that one chooses can never be followed perfectly. Each of us makes many independent daily food choices based on what we feel best fits with our own lifestyle and personal eating philosophy. We aren’t all the same, and I believe that we shouldn’t try to be. However, there are a few helpful things that we might want to keep in mind while making those daily food choices.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good.

Everywhere we read conflicting information about what foods we should eat, which micronutrient or chemical contained in food should-we-choose-to-eat-or-not-eat to make us normal weight, and keep us from illness or death (i.e. healthy).

Our modern world will never be perfectly free of contaminants.

Okay, it’s the collective fault of society, but there is no going back. Also, life-spans here in the modern world are longer and more disease free … overall for more people … than life-spans were in our recorded past. So since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available food choices are acceptable for me to realistically consume in my own life? What won’t make me fat, sick, or kill me?

Risks outside our control tend to get exaggerated.

We are frequently told that we should not eat this or that food substance, AND we are frequently told that we should eat these specific food substances.

People tend to get very worked up over what is perceived as the latest “chemical threat” in our food. Instead, we need to focus on the large risks that are within our control, … like focusing on the AMOUNTS of the readily available food that we eat … rather than exaggerating the smaller threats of what specific foods contain, just because the way that these micronutrients or other chemicals are handled often appear to be outside of our personal control.

New in the news is not new in the world.

When the news media highlights a “chemical threat” the tendency is to think the threat itself is new; that the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if some chemical in foods does actually contribute to the risk of disease, it’s been doing so for years. That risk isn’t something looming in our future, it’s already in the present, and already part of the life we now live.

Perfectly pure food is not available on this planet. Instead of focusing on the latest news media hype, we need to do the best we can with the food supply we've got.

So lets focus on eating readily-available food in ways that will provide us with a personally satisfying lifestyle while understanding that EVERY person cannot achieve a slim, shapely, fit and toned body; that most diseases are simply a risk of life; that our bodies are designed to wear out; and that death will eventually arrive for everyone.

What is Junk Food?
- POSTED ON: Sep 28, 2012

What is “Junk Food” anyway?
Is it an "edible food-like substance"? The opposite of:

“real food”
“proper food”
“healthy food”
“organic food”

Not necessarily.
Junk food is slang - an informal term - for food that contains a high level of calories from sugar or fat, with little protein, vitamins or minerals.

The definition of Junk is anything that is regarded as worthless, meaningless, or contemptible; trash. The definition of Trash is anything worthless, useless, or discarded; rubbish, So Junk or Trash is something worthless. The opposite of that would be Treasure, as the definition of treasure is a valuable or precious possession of any kind.

There’s a wise old proverb that says: “One man's trash is another man's treasure”, meaning that something that one person considers worthless may be considered valuable by someone else.

Whether something is trash or treasure is a matter of an individual’s perception. This proverb is applicable to current popular culture and its food issues.

The most common viewpoint is that junk foods include salted snack foods, candy, sweet desserts, fried fast food, and sweet carbonated beverages. Although every person has their own list of foods that they call junk foods, society uses the slang term “junk food” as though we all agree on exactly what these specific foods are.

White sugar and white flour are carbs that become glucose when ingested, and will provide life-sustaining physical energy, just like other carbs. This, when used together with a bit of protein, some fat, and an added multi-vitamin-mineral pill, is a diet that many modern humans use to sustain reasonably healthy lives. We see the term “Healthy” everywhere nowadays, but “Healthy” really only means not-sick and not-dead.

Recently I saw an article headlined: “Junk food is an issue of national security”. And in fact, there appear to be foodie terrorists everywhere ... People who insist on forcing their strong opinions about which foods are trash, and which foods are treasure.

Nowadays, one can’t go for long without being exposed to the assertion ... (everything seems to be believed by someone) ... that some specific micronutrient, such as carbs, or animal proteins, or fats  cause heart disease, cancer and/or Alzheimer’s disease.

Assertations abound that chemicals used in processing foods, or genetic changes in the way food is now grown, or foods fed to the animals providing protein products make many of the major foods unhealthy and unsafe.

There are many opposing opinions on which food micronutrient, or which of the chemicals within foods, will kill us or make us sick. People can’t even totally agree on which ones will make us fat.

In my lifetime, I’ve personally experimented with a great variety of different food plans. Some were labeled “fad” diets. Some were labeled “crash” diets, Some were labeled “healthy” diets. Some were labeled “balanced” diets. Some were labeled “low-fat” diets. Some were labeled “low-carb” diets. Some of these food plans tried to distinguish themselves by redefining themselves … insisting that they weren’t “Diets” at all.

No matter which food plan I was currently on, there were always plenty of “nutritional experts” around to tell me that my current plan was wrong. “Nutritional Experts” across the board have delighted in telling me that my diet-of-the-moment was providing me with too few calories to meet my body’s nutritional needs, and that I absolutely MUST eat at least 1200 calories or more every day. The reality is that I’m a short, light, elderly, sedentary “reduced-obese" female and my body requires LESS than 1200 daily calories to sustain my current normal-sized weight. Despite my low-calorie intake my body isn’t shrinking into nothingness, and my recommended daily multivitamin seems to work well to effectively correct any potential nutritional deficiencies.

One common question that the “experts” all seem to find unique and meaningful about any specific diet is: “Are you going to continue to eat like this for the rest of your life?” As to any one specific diet, I find that question irrelevant, because there are literally thousands of different food plans possible. My personal choice is to engage myself in serial diet monogamy which has brought me from morbid obesity to a normal size, and allowed me to at normal size for quite a few years. Although I’m over age 60, all indications are that I’m still in excellent health.

The truth we all need to face is that the human body is designed to wear out, and even if we are fortunate enough to avoid the major diseases, we will eventually die of old age… Probably by our mid 80s, but perhaps not until we are in our 90s. The time I’ve spent visiting the elderly in nursing homes has taught me that the stretch between death in one’s mid-80s and death in one’s 90s, seldom comes with years of excellent health, and practically speaking, it might actually better to avoid an attempt to extend one’s life span for an extra 5 or 10 years.

So, are the following pictures Junk Food to YOU?

The majority classify the above foods as Junk Foods,
but would you agree with the people
who classify the foods below as Junk Foods?

Bread  (carb)  -   Butter (saturated fat)

Hot Dog in Bun with ketchup and mustard & fried Onion Rings (carbs, processed fatty meat, sugared condiment & fried food) - - - Cheese, crackers & Grapes (animal based fatty protein, wheat-flour carbs & high sugar frutose carb)

Roast Beef Sandwich  (fatty red meat, wheat carbs) -  Tuna Salad Sandwich (wheat carbs - mercury tainted protein source?, mayo- fat & carb, chopped eggs - cholestrol)

Beefsteak, green beans, carrots & roasted white potatoes  (fatty red meat, high starch vegetables) - - crisp fried bacon (processed fatty meat with nitrates).

The examples above demonstrate that almost every food seems to contain some micronutrient or substance that SOMEONE can find objectionable.

Going to the Gym
- POSTED ON: Sep 26, 2012

I often hear people who want to lose weight say,
"I need to start going to the gym."

It’s true that most people need to be more active and less sedentary.
I’m not against exercise or the health benefits it can give one.
However, the idea that a bit more physical activity will reduce one’s body weight or prevent weight gain is a modern myth. It takes a lot more than regular trips to the gym to combat obesity.

In more ways than one, people just have “too much on their plate”.
Too much food, and too many activities.

Food intake determines body size as related to weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.  Exercise determines  how physically "fit" one's body is ... at whatever size it happens to be. One cannot outexercise a bad diet.  To see an example of diet vs. exercise, watch the video at the bottom of this article. Most people with limited time who are struggling with obesity would be better served
to focus on their food issues.

For the majority of people, … especially parents with young children, … it isn’t the expense of the gym fee that keeps them away. It’s the lack of time, low self-esteem, poor body image, depression, and sheer exhaustion from their stressful days. The last thing needed is yet one more obligation (meaning: visit to a gym or fitness center) in their already busy and overscheduled days.

If there was an extra hour or so to actually dedicate to going to a gym it might be a more "healthful" choice for them to get an extra hour of sleep or do something more enjoyable and relaxing.

The problem is not that people are too lazy or too cheap to pay for gym membership. The problem is that they are too busy, too stressed, too short of time, too exhausted, spend too much time in their cars, and are too caught up in everything else that makes a “healthy lifestyle” virtually impossible.

Changing one’s lifestyle is more about changing one’s ‘life’ than one’s ’style’.

Perhaps a life in which there is actually time to stop and smell the flowers would do more for busy people to better manage their weight than a workout.

See below for a video on Diet vs. Exercise.

Points Worth Considering
- POSTED ON: Sep 25, 2012

I don't have to personally agree with every word that another person says
to appreciate and enjoy their viewpoint.
And, every so often, I run across an article in someone else's blog that is so amusing and clever,
that despite any minor points with which I might personally disagree,  I wish I'd written it myself.
Here's an example that I find worth memorializing at DietHobby:

  "The weight loss conundrum

Disclaimer: this post expresses my personal opinions. Fancy that. On my personal blog too. And guess what, this opinion may even be different to yours. You can let me know if you agree or disagree with the views expressed here. You might even go as far as to tell me that I am wrong. I may or may not care about that. Enjoy reading.

Phew. Now that we got that out of the way let’s talk weight loss. Everyone on the internet knows that the best way to get traffic is to tag your pearls of wisdom “weight loss tips” and “Jessica Biel’s diet secrets”. I have neither. Sorry. But this post was mostly brought on by the frustration that the topic of losing body mass is still a priority not just in conventional women’s magazines but in the ancestral health community.

You know the one: “Yes, I’ve given up grains because Robb Wolf told me to, I don’t eat refined carbs after reading Gary Taubes, I stopped sugar after watching that Lustig’s video and I force down a tablespoon of fermented cod liver oil since attending Weston A.Price conference. I feel great but… How do I lose another 10kgs?”
And of course there is no shortage of available experts on the interwebz:

- eat less carbs
- eat more safe starches
- introduce interval training
- stop HIIT to salvage your burned out adrenals
- eat sauerkraut for healthy gut
- calories don’t matter
- calories matter
- start IF
- use FitDay to track your daily intake
et cetera.

It’s all very sad.

In the meantime the average long term success of most weight loss strategies is around 1%. Yeah, sure, most people do it wrong. They choose the wrong diet (Lemon Detox, anyone?), they choose the worst possible exercise (if you are a female with a cup size C and above, for god’s sake stop running). And they just don’t have the willpower that the new dieter has (sarcasm font). Because the new dieter knows that he/she will be different. I will be in that 1% who does it right and stays skinny ever after. The End.

There are numerous reasons why weight loss strategies fail. And there are numerous reasons why they succeed. Temporarily. You can lose weight in literally thousands of different ways: Paleo, low fat, low carb, low calorie, ketogenic, vegetarian, aerobic exercise, HIIT, IF, bariatric surgery, liposuction…

That’s why the to and fro arguments on which approach is better for weight loss is kinda pointless. YES! YOU CAN LOSE WEIGHT EATING MARS BARS AND DRINKING COKE! (feel free to leave this page at this point and celebrate).

We have this love and hate relationship with a number that determines our body mass. Lily Allen famously said: “And everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner”. There is another number that we have become very preoccupied with in the last few decades: serum cholesterol. Chasing that number (down) is the name of the game, mostly by pharmacological means. Of course, you could tilt this snow globe upside down and decide that the number per se is not very meaningful and in fact represents some other pathological process in the body. Ideally you would choose an intervention that both addresses the cause of the problem and pushes that number in the direction you want. A nutrient-rich diet free of processed junk and pro-inflammatory toxins accompanied by reasonable physical activity is likely to address the chronic inflammatory state that leads to dyslipidaemia and therefore drop the dreaded cholesterol numbers down and please your conscientious doctor.

But sometimes it doesn’t get you to the magic 5.5 mmols that your doctor wants to see. Just like your 6 month foray into the Paleo diet fails to get you to that elusive number that determines your weight, size and consequently happiness. Time to go on PaleoHacks and shout for help.

I am not having a go at the desire to be slimmer. Sure, I wouldn’t mind losing a few kgs. I also wouldn’t mind losing my freckles or having bigger hands (it sucks trying to find surgical gloves that fit). Neither affects my sense of self worth.

So for what it’s worth, these are my ideas in relation to weight loss (note, doesn’t say FOR weight loss):

I am overweight? Oh thank you, kind sir, I wish I knew this earlier!
Let me just switch to a healthy diet and start running.

1. If your primary focus is weight loss you are already behind the eighth ball. If being skinny was a powerful motivator we wouldn’t have 2/3rds of the Western world overweight or obese. Wanting to lose weight tends to screw with people’s heads even with the best foundation: they start stressing (excess cortisol=bad), they start reducing/counting/starving/hating their bland food/exercising at 5am and generally stop listening to their bodies.

Things are quite different when you eat to nourish every cell in your body. Shift your focus to wellness and flip the switch.

1a Unless you have congestive heart failure or chronic kidney disease, chuck your scales. Like now. Get up and throw them in the bin.

2. Start with having a nutrient-rich diet and get rid of junk. Use whatever framework takes your fancy: Paleo, primal, perfect health diet, whole30, Mediterranean, vegetarian (gasp! ). Minimize the “healthy” versions of unhealthy food, you don’t want any food holding you emotionally hostage.

Until you have that down pat, forget the words “Do you have these pants in a smaller size?”

3. Find a regular consistent physical activity you enjoy. I know exercise is supposed to be about torture. That’s ok if you enjoy torture, no judgement here. Do something you can see yourself doing regularly in a year. Or five.

3a. Do not ramp up the volume/intensity of the said activity to accelerate weight loss beyond the level you see yourself comfortably doing long term. Did I hear you say “bootcamp”? Pfft.

4. You cannot fix self esteem issues with weight loss. The two have very little to do with each other.

4a. In the same vein, having weight loss as a dangling carrot in the future can derail your enjoyment of today. Don’t put off activities, clothes or happiness until you get thinner. See point 1.

5. It seems that the thoughts of weight loss frequently return when people are still longing for a six pack in spite of measurable improvements in their physical and mental health. This is where we hit a little snag.

Let’s say you start off in the obese category. Up to a certain point weight loss and health gains go together. Then you reach a state where your body is happy, healthy and well-nourished. To lose more subcutaneous fat from this point will not gain any further health benefit. In fact, you may dip down into negative territory. If you are body builder, dancer, gymnast or any athlete dependent on low body mass this is the risk you have to take. If you are a suburban mother of 2, disappointed she doesn’t look like her graduation photo any longer, you may be playing a dangerous game. If you still choose to continue down this path that’s cool. Your choice. It’s way harder to shift the happy-healthy weight so you may have to pull out all stops. Some of those deviate even further from the path to long term health and wellness. Obviously if you are naturally lean and small you have to flip this scenario 180 degrees. Getting massive past the point of diminishing returns may not be optimal for your body either.

When I see an obese patient I do not have an overwhelming desire to help them lose fat. To me their weight is nothing more but an external manifestation of serious internal issues. I worry about their risk of heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune conditions. I feel the same level of concerns for the skinny-fat: normal BMI with little muscle and obvious visceral adiposity.

Incredibly sexist and quite offensive to naturally thin women.
However we don’t think twice when the ads are turned the other way around.

For a health-conscious and somewhat rebellious community we are still remarkably superficial and eager to conform to the current body image stereotype."
               by Anastasia on Primalmeded.com

   All good points that are certainly worth consideration.

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Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects

Difference Between USA and Canada

 USA vs. Canada

The major difference between USA and Canada of a political nature. Perhaps it is more politically correct to say that the major difference is political involvement? Comparing the two countries effectively would take a very long article, one that you’re probably not interested in reading all the way through. Besides geographic and climate differences, and differences in predominant languages, there is a strong difference in world interaction. Some may see this as a good thing, while others interpret it as a bad thing.

Geographic and climate differences are rather obvious. There is more cold arctic air in Canada, and the US has portions that extend close enough to the equator to be considered subtropical. This is also the reason for difference in national pastimes, as winter sports are more traditional in Canada.

Canada also has regions with people who speak predominantly French, while the US has areas of inhabitants who speak predominantly Spanish. Both countries have areas where immigrants from all over the world have settled, creating their own subculture within the culture.

Canada has abolished the death penalty for all crimes, including capital offences. The United States has a state by state allocution, that allows each individual state to make its own determination about the death penalty. Ironically, Canada’s murder rate is lower than the United States’, and convictions for murder are higher (when comparing percentages not numbers) than in the United States. Canada also allows for legal gay marriages, while this is considered a state by state issue in the United States.

Abroad, Canada has more of a voice than most people believe. However, the United States takes on a stronger political position, and has an increased vested interest in foreign affairs. Canada is willing to get involved in political maneuvers only when it is necessary. They tend to do so quietly, and are less intermingled with ongoing political problems throughout the world than the United States. This makes the country more autonomous, and able to stay much more neutral when it comes to difficult political issues and the responding actions.

Both countries are held to a high standard, and both countries have their own benefits. Each country operates on a voting system for political power, albeit there are major differences in each system. There is a political check and balance system in play for both countries. Canada has spent its energies, and time, building a country filled with its own resources, where it has been possible. The United States has an outreach budget for countries outside of its jurisdiction, which often conflicts with the needs of its own people. Being bordering countries, each share in an agenda of peace, and have managed to keep differing political practices from interfering with their peaceful agenda.

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  1. I was wondering what the differece in cultures were the two, could you please elaborate a little futher? Thank You

  2. who is the publisher of your website?

  3. What options for gay community in USA and Canada?

    • I know I’m, late, but for anyone else stumbling upon this, Canada is very progressive (More so than the US), in that it has legalized gay marriage, among other things.

      • Progressive? This is a matter of principle. We as American have what Canadians do not have. For example: We have our inspired Constitution, and its amendments. And the very first one is: Freedom of religion. This entitles Americans to fight for their own believes. Gay marriage goes against this amendment. Because it forces to all religions to accept it. A church will lose its power to decide if they denied the gay couple to be married in their chapel or cathedral. That is unfair for Christians or any other religion or practice. That is just like giving the smokers the right to smoke on peoples faces at the time. So lets isolate the problem, smokers can only smoke in designated areas, so gay people build your own chapel and keep yourself in your own bubble rather than forcing your ideals on our society. Many will accept this so call new style of living, but not everybody. So that tells you there that something is wrong on that picture. If you have to force things into our society rather than following the pattern of nature, which is: Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of GOD. And by this covenant between the two, children will be coming in a natural way, without “adopting”. By doing so, our society will continue to exist. Other wise, will ceased to exist.

        • You’re an idiot! Just another stupid religious fool! America is a great county aside from the morons (like yourself) who inhabit it. You need to focus on something else like the terrorism in the world and not gay marriage. Who gives a fuck!

        • i agree with you sir .. and don’t listen to jami who responded to you by insult just because you are a part of america and have the right to say your opinion
          i apologize for you

  4. And Canada has free health care! hello!!

  5. what are canada and USA differences and similarities???

  6. Canada and the USA have many similarities:

    – both are predominately English-speaking, and their political origins were as colonies of the UK
    – both have democratically elected governments at the national, regional (province & state, respectively) and municipal levels
    – both use the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system
    – at the national level, both have bicameral legislatures (Parliament & Congress), and both legislatures include a Senate
    – both have a codified their citizens rights, and in both these include freedom of speech, assembly, conscience, etc.
    – their education systems area very similar, and diplomas and degrees are generally accepted as equal in either country.
    – both countries’ populations are mainly Caucasian and descended from immigrants, but are ethnically diverse.
    – both countries have a minority indigenous population, with whom treaties were signed to establish legal control of the lands, leaving the original inhabitants with only small areas of their own. There is a history of conflict and neglect, to say the least

    – both were founding members of the UN, the IMF, the OECD and NATO. They also cooperate with each other in NORAD and as members of the OAS
    – Canada and the USA have fought together in WW1, WW2, the Korean War, the liberation of Kuwait, Afghanistan and against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Both sent peacekeepers to Somalia and Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.

    – both are wealthy countries, rich in natural resources and with advanced industrial/post-industrial free-market economies
    – both call their currency ‘dollars’. Their equivalent coins (1, 5, 10 & 25 cents, and 1 dollar) are the same size, though not exactly the same weights.
    – the two countries economies are tightly linked, and follow nearly identical technical and industrial standards. Appliances, automobiles, etc. are essentially interchangeable

    However, there are also many differences:

    – The USA has about nine times as many people as Canada
    – as mentioned in the original post, Canada’s primary linguistic minority is French (mainly in the east), while the USA’s is Spanish (mainly in the south and west)
    – indigenous people are a larger proportion of the population in Canada than in the USA
    – Asian minorities, especially Chinese and Indian, are a much larger proportion of the population in Canada than in the USA, while the reverse is true for the African-American and Latino populations

    – in Canada, the Head of State and Head of Government are different people (the Prime Minister & the Governor General*), while in the USA they are one (the President).
    *technically, Canada’s Head of State is Queen Elizabeth, shared with fifteen other countries including the UK, Australia, Jamaica, etc. An appointed Governor General normally performs all the duties of Head of State.
    – Canada’s Prime Minister and Cabinet sit in the legislature, while neither the American President nor any of his Cabinet do so.
    – the separation of powers between the national and regional levels is also different. For example, criminal law is a national responsibility in Canada, but is a regional (state) responsibility in the USA. Cannabis legalization has occurred in several US states, and is under consideration at the national level in Canada (2018)
    – election dates are fixed in the USA , but not in Canada
    – Canada is a member of the post-colonial organizations the Commonwealth of Nations and La Francophonie, while the USA is not.

    – Canada has public health care for all, administered by the provinces but following national standards. Many Canadians also have private health insurance to help with expenses such as dental, eyeglasses and prescriptions not covered by the public system. The USA has public health care for only a minority of the population, and most citizens rely on private insurance.
    – American citizens are guaranteed a Right to Bear Arms by their constitution, while Canadians are not. Firearms are legal in Canada, but subject to fairly strong gun control laws.
    – Gay marriage is legal in Canada, as is abortion. Individual churches and doctors are free to follow their own consciences with respect to providing these services. Neither is still considered a major public policy issue as they are in the USA.
    – inequality of wealth & income are greater in the USA than in Canada (the rich are richer and the poor are poorer)
    – Canada did not suffer as badly as the USA during the 2008 global financial crisis due to stronger regulation and to Canadian bankers being generally more risk-averse
    – defence spending, the military industrial complex and the armed forces are much more prominent in the USA than Canada. Canada generally seeks to avoid conflict and to act within coalitions when conflict is unavoidable. During the latter half of the 20th century, Canadian troops most commonly went abroad as UN Peacekeepers.

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Tea & Letter Writing: care for the kids

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Jun 20219
6:00p.m. - 7:30p.m.

Gather with us in the comfort of your own home to share tea and conversation! This month we will be exploring self and community love through creative prompts provided by traci kato-kiriyama, former Little Tokyo +LAB Artist-in-Residence at JANM, and Mya Worrell, zine maker and writer. We will also be taking time to write letters of support and affirmation to migrant children currently held in influx facilities in Pomona and Long Beach, California. Make yourself a cup of tea, get comfortable, and join us online for this interactive bi-monthly program! All ages are welcome to participate.

This series was launched through the +LAB Artist Residency program presented by the Little Tokyo Service Center in partnership with JANM and continues now in partnership with Tuesday Night Project’s TNTalks initiative.

You will be emailed links and instructions to join our conversation on Zoom. Please confirm that the email that you register with is the best way to reach you. Contact publicprograms@janm.org if you have any additional questions or specific access concerns.

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Category Archives: Creativity

Overcoming Resistance – Part 1

I haven’t posted for over a year. I could say it’s because I’ve been otherwise productively engaged or I haven’t had anything pressing to say or my focus has been more inward than outward.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

The deeper truth surfaced today in a short dialogue with my Muse, a.k.a. The Creative Consuela.

D:     I’ve committed myself to writing a blog today – tomorrow at the latest – and I feel totally stuck. I don’t have a clue what to write about.

CC:  That’s because you don’t want to write the damned blog.

(insert potent “I’ve been busted” pause)

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Creativity is Love

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! This is not just a day for people in romantic relationships to exchange sweet somethings, but a day for celebrating love in its many forms. It’s been a real joy today to say “I love you” to my mom, my sister, my friends; to this fiercely windy rainy day here in Vancouver; to everyone with whom I’ve come into contact today (internally, please! – if you say “I love you” out loud in Canada, people will think you’re hitting on them) – and to mean it. Wonderful!

Continue reading

Every Month is Creativity Month

I began this year by honoring my creative urges in a way that I’ve done all too rarely in my life. Returning home from bringing in the New Year with creatively inspiring friends, Claudia Holt (who picked up the fiddle for the first time in her 50s and is now playing in a band) and her husband, Bryan Singleton (innovative permaculture maven) in Petaluma, California, I paid a visit to my friend, Elfa Gisla, actress, film and theatre director, impresario, passionate supporter of The Arts, and chatelaine of The Conway Muse, Northern Washington’s go-to destination for live music and good times. I heard myself telling her that I’d love to write a one-woman stage play. We talked about it for a bit and moved onto other subjects, but in the car on the way home, I got an idea for a story on which to hang the play.

In the past, I would have let the idea disappear into Neverneverland in order to attend to habitual homecoming tasks like unpacking, watering the plants, and checking the 487 emails, most of them spam, that had accumulated in my absence. But not this time. This time, I walked in the door, put down my bags, dropped my coat, headed straight for my laptop, and yes, gentle readers, I started writing the play. I worked on it for about an hour – long enough to get a decent start on it but not so long as to completely freak out my inner neatnik, who is used to running the show.

I’ve been continuing with the play ever since. I have every intention of finishing it, showing it around, marketing it, and seeing it performed on stage. As one of my creativity coaching clients, a wise woman of 80, said to me recently, “If not now, when?” Picasso puts it even more pointedly, “Only put off tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

On my 2011 Brush Dance calendar, I noted that the month of January is International Creativity Month. In honor of this grand occasion, here are twelve things that you can do to harness creativity’s revitalizing, transformative power.

1. Make a bucket list of the creative projects that you would like to complete and post it somewhere prominent.

2. Mess with the warden of your Comfort Zone. Change working hours, get to work or go home in a different way, take another route to do your errands, listen to a new radio station, read a magazine or book you wouldn’t typically read, go to a cafe you wouldn’t normally go to, vary what you eat for breakfast, follow someone on Twitter whose worldview is antithetical to yours, etc.

3. As I did when I started my play, act on your creative impulses. Stop whatever you’re doing – especially if it’s something potentially draining and mind-numbing like watching a reality show, surfing the web, gossiping, whining or complaining – and spend 10, 15, 30 minutes on a creative project.

4. Remind yourself that recognizing our creative capacities and those of our children may save us from destroying ourselves and taking our planet with us, by giving a few minutes of your time to Sir Kenneth Robinson.

5. Go for a walk on your own. As Raymond Inmon famously said, “If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.” I can personally verify that Angels whisper to solitary female walkers as well. (By the way, if anyone knows who Raymond Inmon is, let me know – his quote appears to be more famous than he is.)

6. Do absolutely nothing for 10, 15, 30 minutes. Lie down, listen to music, and close your eyes. The best ideas come when the mind is relaxed. (Keep a notebook handy.)

7. Get offended. Watch the politically incorrect, brilliantly nimble-minded, creatively unbound, dangerously funny contemporary mystic, Billy Connolly, who has rightly declared, “There are people who need to be offended on a regular basis, I’ve always felt, and I’m the very boy to do it.”

8. If you have a problem, state it in reverse. If the statement is positive, make it negative. If it is negative, make it positive. For example, if you want to improve a relationship, list all the ways to make it worse. If you want a story to be less shallow, consider all the ways to make it more so. If you want to remedy a bad situation, make a list of all the ways the situation could be interpreted positively.

9. Take a poem, painting, short story, photograph, dramatic monologue, etc. that you love and create a tribute piece in which you emulate the artist’s style. Conscious imitation will enrich your own work and your unique slant will naturally emerge. Originality is an inherent outcome of sincere creative pursuit.

10. Recall and celebrate your moments of poor judgment. Picasso has said, “The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” Such moments may inspire your next creative work. Great works of art don’t tend to be about people behaving sensibly.

11. Book a coaching session with The Creative Consuela to help you define your creative goals and overcome the barriers to carrying them out. Email

12. Enroll in my upcoming six-week “Stoking Your Creative Fire” workshop that starts at 7 PM on Wednesday, January 26. The $180 fee includes a 30-minute creativity coaching telephone session with The Creative Consuela.

Remained attuned to subsequent blogs as I offer more suggestions for making our creativity matter.

“When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.” Madeleine L’Engle

Dreaming Your Life

This dispatch comes to you at an auspicious time, the Winter Solstice, described by my Solstice-born friend and songspinner, Pauline LeBel, as a time when “the womb of darkness reaches its fullness…when we rest, when our dreams are seeded, when we ready ourselves for the lengthening days.”

Traditionally this is a time when we make resolutions for the coming year – to get fit, get out of debt, quit smoking, finish the manuscript, learn Spanish, etc. Such resolutions have a notoriously poor success rate – 10% according to one source. (That’s probably a generous estimate.) And yet year after year, many of us keep making them, hoping that this time the outcome will be different. But as Einstein has said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.”

Maybe it’s not a fatal character flaw that prevents us from keeping these promises to ourselves. The calendar is after all a human creation, not a natural one. Maybe Jose Arguelles, author of the international bestseller, The Mayan Factor, is right when he says, “It is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit.”

What if we were to attune to the darkness of this time of year instead? What if we were to heed these words of the essayist, Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams: “real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it”? What if we were to follow the example of David Whyte, as expressed in his poem, The Willingness to Rest:

In my tiredness
and willingness to rest
I slipped so far down

I felt the earth
embraced me
and knew me once again.

Perhaps instead of soldiering on and doggedly resolving to better ourselves in the coming year, we need to allow our emerging self to meet us in the sweet darkness of these winter days and nights, and to whisper its secrets.

All night
the dark buds of dreams

In the center
of every petal
is a letter
(from “Dreams” by Mary Oliver)

As this year ends and the new year dawns, hold this question in your heart: “What is my dream?” Maybe you have several of them. Allow them to emerge out of the bounds of time. Take note of them as they occur to you.

Pay attention to your dreams on these long winter nights. They have more potency now than at other times of the year. Write them down if you can.

And in the coming days, when you have some moments alone, you may want to try this Eric Maisel exercise that I adapted from his book, Fearless Creating:

Light a candle and sit quietly. Have paper and pen and/or a musical instrument close at hand.

Attend to your breathing without trying to change it. When your mind starts its inevitable ranting, gently tell it to “Hush” as you would a restless child. As the thoughts keep recurring, keep hushing them. The intent is to descend to the place of no thought. This may take time. Be patient.

When you’re as quiet as you can be, gently say, “Deeper” and wait. As you feel your breathing deepen, go silently into the darkness. Be as still as you can be.

Pay attention to what comes to you – images, words, gestures, melodies… Gently hold these messages until they begin to come into focus.

When you feel ready, write, draw, play, or dance these images, words, phrases in whatever way feels natural to you.

Be patient with yourself. The silence may not come at all. You might not get a single idea – this time. It’s not about doing it right. The effort alone is a balm for the soul.

In the coming year, beginning on January 26, I am offering a series of Wednesday evening workshops, “Stoking Your Creative Fire,” to support the kind of creativity that gives your life significance, richness, and intentionality. It is for artists or would-be artists of every description who wish to create more authentically, more frequently, more deeply. Or for anyone who wants to live with greater, passion, and joy. Be prepared to encounter your deepest yearnings and to discover practical ways to make them a reality. Discover how you might have sabotaged your creative intentions in the past, and learn tools and approaches to advance them instead.

For those of you living in the Vancouver area or close by, “Stoking Your Creative Fire” could be your chance to give form to those dreams that beckon to you in these dark winter days and nights.

For information, email me at

“Each person has access to a rich creative world that demands expression. Without it, life becomes a single note longing for its melody.”
Jean Houston

Grief and Creativity

Below is a talk I gave at the launch of Cathy Sosnowsky’s book, “Snapshots – A Story of Loss, Loss and Life,” on Sunday, October 24, 2010.

Cathy Sosnowsky’s Snapshots inspires, supports, exemplifies, sustains, and celebrates the mysterious relationship between grief and creativity.

As she describes so beautifully, we’re helpless in the face of our grief. She writes about Ian, their minister, arriving the night of her son Alex’s sudden death falling from the roof of a tennis court at age 17: “He sat between Woldy and me on Alex’s bed, holding us each by a hand. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating, expressing what each of us felt, but were now too numb to utter.” In its simple humanity and in its expression of our utter defenselessness before death, especially the sudden death of a child, this scene says it all. As the shock wears off, Cathy describe feeling such profound grief that she didn’t want to survive it. She didn’t want to live.

Excruciating though it must have been, in acknowledging these feelings, Cathy did herself a favor. Sorrow may hurt like hell, but disregarding it annihilates us. We may be able to function and appear to be getting on with our lives – but a large part of us is absent. I often quote Stephen Levine who, in Unattended Sorrow says that ignoring our grief, “inhibits intuition. We come to trust ourselves less. We cannot ‘feel’ the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as ‘a bit unplugged’… This quality of grief can slow our creativity and ‘dumb us down’ a bit.”

Cathy didn’t allow herself to be dumbed down by grief and, because of her courage, which I can only describe as breathtaking, creativity came calling. It showed up as a kind of wise, nonjudgmental, reliable companion through those dark early days: “Writing out my grief gave me some sense of owning it. I felt less the helpless victim. Even when I was writing about my darkest thoughts (I wrote suicidal poems–I wanted to be with Alex in death), the expression of them gave some relief.”

The psychotherapist, Alexander Kennedy, who wrote The Infinite Thread: Healing Relationships Beyond Loss, a book about sustaining a relationship with a loved one who has died, says, “People who are grieving find that they have little energy or enthusiasm for external reality: their energy is drawn inward. And as grief dampens their outer senses, it can open inner senses, giving them new acuity in seeing, hearing, and feeling what is inaccessible to our senses during normal times.”

Cathy tells us about this mystery: “All of a sudden, everything had significance and demanded that it be shaped into a poem.” Grief revealed itself to be more than an eternally patient shoulder to cry on — it was her Muse. Here’s an excerpt from her poem, “Lament”

“One dark night in December,
death and poetry
entered our house,
shaping my lips forever
in a song of lament.

I could not cry alone,
had to shout my sorrow
hear it right through the aisles
of canned tomatoes, boxes of rice
frozen burritos–Alex’s favourite.”

As Cathy says in the book, she wrote 140 poems in her first year of grieving – and continued writing poetry daily for most of the second…and much of the third, fourth, and fifth years… “If a day went by without producing a poem, I would slump into an even deeper depression.”

I heard about an essay, Life Begins Today by Jacques Lusseyran, who had been in the Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald, during World War II. One of the things he did was organize poetry readings for fellow inmates. Picture a group of starving, freezing, uprooted, terrified human beings on the edge of death huddling in a washroom reciting poetry to one another. It diminished their suffering. It helped them remember what was worth living for. As Lusseyran said, “To nourish the desire to live, to make it burn; only that counted… You couldn’t let yourself forget that it is always the soul that dies first–even its departure isn’t perceived–and that the soul brings the body down with its fall. It was the soul that had to be nourished, first.”

Instinctively Cathy knew that, and she describes how, at Poet Olga Broumas‘ Hollyhock workshop, “Poetry: Transcribing the Soul,” which she attended when he started to get serious about her poetry, she not only deepened her artistry but also discovered how much she had to live for. This is the last verse of a poem she wrote about love and about Woldy:

“love carries on
bearing our dead son within and between us
listening for his song
seeing the chip in his front tooth
scar over his right eye
callous on thumb

love doesn’t let go”

The subtext of Cathy’s trials through grief was her conception and ultimate delivery as an artist. Her final words in Snapshots are powerful: “My dead child gave birth to a new mother.” Cathy the artist, the poet, the writer was one dimension of this new mother. With the publication of Holding On – Poems for Alex, Cathy’s private grief became a public benediction. Through the crucible of her suffering, Cathy was able to forge an authentic path for other bereaved people, especially bereaved parents. She was able to articulate their grief in a way that made them feel less alone, but she did more than that, she gave it grace, dignity, and a kind of terrible beauty. I found this short poem, “Grief and Dreams,” in her Holding On collection:

“let me tell you about grief:

a bathtub full of stinging nettle
a deep dark hole
a chasm

but the hole is full of rats
no sweet oblivion

only regret    rage

oh let us bathe in stinging nettle!
the pain will be distracting

those surface itches
better than the hole

where despair waits
a ravenous rat

to feed upon
our sweetest dreams”

I asked Cathy recently if it had ever been her dream as a child to be a published author but she said no. In fact, in Snapshots, she says” “Since Holding On was published, I’ve read from it at many poetry readings. Early on, I often felt that I was somehow betraying my grief, betraying my love for my son. Maybe my Scottish mother’s unspoken criticism (“Who do you think you are?”) was still operative, on some level, in my brain. Was I showing off? Only the heartfelt thanks I received from many bereaved parents kept me going”… and as she says a bit later, “Everywhere I went, I took Alex with me. I couldn’t write, or teach, without him.”

Alex is here with us today – I have no doubt about it – and he would be so proud of his gifted “new mother” and of what she has created in this courageous, honest, beautifully written page-turner of a book.

No Not Having Fun

I recently heard about a little girl whose number one rule for a new club she was forming with her friends was “No not having fun.”

Can anything be more fundamental than this simple piece of wisdom? There is nothing less fun than not having fun.

By fun, I don’t necessarily mean going through life with a lampshade on one’s head, but with a sense of joy, of feeling connected to ourselves and others, of being content with what is. Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, says it well:

“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”

Living by the “No not having fun” dictum requires discipline and creativity because life is not a continual amusement. Its challenges, many of which originate in the mausoleum of the mind, can be real killjoys.

But as the 19th century philosopher, mystic, and psychologist, William James, observed, the mind can also be fun’s number one event planner: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can change his life by changing his attitude of mind.”

One of the biggest gifts I ever gave myself is to attend a 10-day Vipassana meditation boot camp in which I explored the mayhem of my mind. According to the teacher, S.N. Goenka: “Practice of Vipassana reveals that mental action precedes every physical and vocal action, determining whether that action will be wholesome or unwholesome. Mind matters most.”

On the final day of the course, we were all glowing with joy. Not because our lives were perfect. Most of us were there because we were in some kind of crisis, and we were all on our way back to deal with it. As we were waiting for the bus, one of the women said to me with shining eyes, “Life sucks so you may as well be happy.”

Fun is way more possible if we don’t make it contingent on things being perfect or even passable. Pema gets the last word on this: “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

And fun. Have yourself some fun today.

Creativity in the Mourning

Yesterday began well. I had a big to-do list – and felt inspired when I created it. I had planned to glean through my old journals, work on articles for my creativity coaching business, make strides in some of my projects-for-hire. But instead I spent the day making soup, watering plants, contacting family and friends… I don’t usually accomplish everything on my to-do list but I rarely completely ignore it. What the heck was wrong with me?

Then I remembered that Abdul died. Taken away without warning by a heart attack at age 64. Abdul, the patron saint of used car owners as I used to call him, had kept each of my ancient cars on the road for the past 20 years – Harriet the Honda, Tallulah the Toyota, Tina the Toyota… “Only two cars,” Abdul would often say, “Honda or Toyota.” The only two makes worth having. He was barely five feet tall and his motor was always running. He never overcharged me, he never made me feel stupid for being mechanically dyslexic, and he never let me down. He was savvy, efficient, and sharp as a tack. A shy, humble man of few words who ended conversations before they had barely begun, his good heart resounded like a temple bell and still does. His heart tolled his love and pride for his family, his gratitude for and pride in his home, his caring for me and his other clients. His heart tolled so loudly that his bereaved family has been besieged by visitors and well-wishers, and my mother who’d never met him, upon hearing of his death, felt as though she’d lost him too.

Such losses must be honoured. Luckily, my instincts to do the simple, life-giving things like make chicken soup, fertilize my orchid, light a candle and call Abdul’s son, Shahreem, and speak about the gift of his father’s life, spoke loudest yesterday. When we take the time to mourn, we pay homage to the living as well as to the dead.

My favourite spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, says that grief is “an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent. We don’t know what to do with our pain, and we never have. We have been told to bury our feelings, to keep a stiff upper lip, to ‘get over it and get on with our lives’ as though loss were not an inevitable part of life.”

According to Levine, disregarding our sorrow “inhibits intuition. We come to trust ourselves less. We cannot ‘feel’ the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as ‘a bit unplugged.’…This quality of grief can slow our creativity and ‘dumb us down’ a bit.”

Our creativity demands that we pay tribute to our grief. It is no accident that great loss often gives birth – or new life – to the artist within. In my book, Did You Know I Would Miss You?, written after my brother, Steve, died by suicide in 2004, I speak of how acknowledging our unattended sorrows can free up our life force and our capacity to create. If you sense unattended sorrows clouding your heart and blocking your creativity, you might want to try this exercise:

Reflect on your own unmourned losses, using some or all of the following:

I have never acknowledged the loss of…

I had forgotten the loss of…

I can begin to heal the loss of…

And in the meantime, may you be inspired by the Abduls of this world. May the temple bell of your heart and of your creativity toll loud and long.

Write into the Sunrise

Lately I’ve been in the habit of spending my days fulfilling my commitments to other people – writing assignments, creativity coaching sessions, responding to correspondence, etc. It’s all good work that I enjoy, but there’s been a nagging sense of something missing – a barely perceptible existential cloud. Not serious but not great either.

So last night I made a date with myself to get up at 6:00 AM, go to my dining table (as opposed to my computer, which is associated with “real projects” – my own or someone else’s), light a candle and just write for 20 minutes – about nothing in particular. When the alarm went off this morning, it felt like an act of utter futility. But I gently urged myself out of bed, sat myself down with tea and timer, and just started writing. The phrase, “Write into the sunrise” popped into my head so I let it lead me. I wrote about the gulls and crows that seem to greet each day with the same level of noisy unnuanced enthusiasm, about the silver sheen of the water, about the glimmer of apricot light on daybreak’s indigo clouds… Nothing in particular, but I found myself paying more attention than I usually do. The morning light moves swiftly – it’s impossible to track it – but the glide of my black pen across the gleaming white page made me realize how important if not essential it is to make the attempt. It expanded my sense of possibility. It dissolved my existential cloud.

I’ve done this kind of exercise before – many times – I have the mounds of notebooks to prove it. I’ve often enjoyed it but there has always been a vague sense that it wasn’t real writing. There was no purpose. No one was going to read it. I’m beginning to think that that mode of thinking is a kind of madness – as though nothing has meaning unless it has been so decreed by some ego – whether it’s our own, someone else’s, or a cluster of unexamined socially endorsed assumptions.

We write or we make music or we make art because we can, because it’s a vital part of our humanity. We don’t need a reason. Just write into the sunrise, for heaven’s sake. Fall in love with your day.

Whatever Your Heart Desires

As a child growing up in the 1950s, the phrase, “Whatever your little heart desires” was one of my first encounters with irony. What was really being said was, “Dream away, kiddo, but dreams have no place in this world.”

The adults surrounding me were dutiful, conscientious people whose life force was devoted to fulfilling society’s expectations, which, at that time, were very clear. Man, breadwinner. Woman, housewife. Children, clean, obedient, and unheard. No questions asked.

Within that tribal construct, Heart’s Desires were what lured the lazy and the naïve into NeverNever Land and turned them into starving artists and drug addicts. If you wanted to survive in “the real world,” you didn’t dream. You didn’t ask yourself what you really wanted. You just got on with it.

While the Revolution Road scenario holds less sway now, it and other tribal configurations that offer clear-cut, unassailable rules and beliefs to live by, still hold many of us captive, to varying degrees. The abyss unmasked by the endemic breakdown of social structures, can make any externally imposed certainty seem preferable to the hard inner work of thinking and feeling for ourselves, releasing what no longer serves us, discovering what can never be destroyed, and allowing The Eternal – I would also call it Love – to shape our lives.

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Clutter and Creativity

Before incarnating, I distinctly remember requesting the life of a “Beatnik,” but some distracted functionary at Divine Shipping and Receiving apparently heard “Neatnik,” thereby ruining my life before it had begun. I’m a Neatnik. I always try to wash my dishes before eating dinner. I can’t stand a full email in-box. My office needs serious decluttering at the moment. And. it. is. BUGGING! me.

To complicate things further, I have a Beatnik within who will not be denied. Not the cartoony beatnik that says, “Daddyo” and can’t string a coherent sentence together because he’s so stoned, but The Beatnik brilliantly characterized by Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in words that still stir my soul:

“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way – a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners on Times Square and in The Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America – beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.”

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Dr. Graham Hutt, Ph.D.,MF.Phys.,IGPP,ITEC,FRIN has a background in electronic engineering, psychology and a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology. He studied psychology first at Bristol University and then the theory and practice of Clinical Theology under Prof Frank Lake in London before completing psychology with the State University of NY Regents College programme. Further studies in the UK and USA led to completion of a doctorate in Medical Anthropology majoring in natural healing practices with comparisons across different cultures.

 He has accreditation and diplomas in Anatomy and Physiology and holds seven further diplomas and accreditation in physical therapy modalities from respected institutions (MIPTI, ITEC and IGPP), including Aromatherapy, Reflexology and Therapeutic Massage and Nutrition. He is currently involved in toxicity chelation research having studied live blood analysis and darkfield microscopy with Dr. George Georgiou. He is a practitioner of the ‘Jade’ electrodermal / electromagnetic system of therapy as taught by Prof. Charles McWilliams.

Qualified with the International Therapeutic Examination Council in 1991, he is also a Member of the Faculty of Physiatrists (London) and is a member of the International Guild of Professional Practitioners and of the Association of Medical Anthropologists.

Hobbies include being a keen yachtsman and Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation as well as an active member of the Royal Yachting Association.

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Friday, February 06, 2009

Prime Rib, Method X, with Parsnips and Brussels Sprouts

Oh. My. Look at that!

We're not really "beef roast" people, usually opting for steaks instead. At least, we've tried roasting hunks of beef and it never gave us the same satisfaction. Except, of course, for prime rib. We've roasted prime rib at home several times before, and they were always delicious, even if we didn't always cook them perfectly.

But, of course, for such a huge hunk of beef and at its expense (I can barely get myself to buy it!), I thought we should come up with a fool-proof prime rib technique.

Method X
I was going through my blog reader a while back and saw a post from Chef John of Food Wishes Video Recipes titled Perfect Prime Rib of Beef with the Mysterious "Method X".

Needless to say, I was very intrigued.

(This was the same site from where I got the method for making Fried Green Tomatoes.)

So, what is Method X?

Method X is used for bone-in prime rib roasts that you want to cook to medium-rare. It works for any size. However, using boneless prime rib roasts has not been tested, nor has changing the doneness.

Let's proceed.

First thing, the prime rib roast must be brought to room temperature. 6 hours was the time allotted for this. However, we couldn't be home early enough for that, so I only had ours out on the counter for 2 hours or so (and hoped that it would be all right).

For seasoning, we simply did salt and pepper. Anything works.

Before putting the roast into the oven, I preheated the oven to 500F.

Next, some math. See, one really does need math out of school!

Take the weight of the hunk o' beef in pounds and multiply it by 5. Ours was 8 pounds, so the resulting number was 40.

This number is the number of minutes that the prime rib cooks for in the 500F oven. So, we put our prime rib roast into the oven and let it cook at 500F for 40 minutes.

Then, after that time is up, one turns off the oven and does not open the oven door for 2 hours.

After the 2 hours, pull out your meat. I don't even know if it needs to rest because essentially, it's been "resting" all this time. But, I let ours rest for a bit.

We wanted to keep the sides simple, so we roasted off some brussels sprouts and parsnips.

Oooh, parsnips!

I've been a fan of parsnips ever since we bought them that very first time and roasted them alongside (or underneath, I should say) chicken and olives. They were so good, slightly sweet like that, with a hint of banana. I've been nagging JS to buy more parsnips... actually, to include them in our rotation of vegetables. But apparently, she says that they're actually "expensive" when compared to other vegetables. Oh well. [sigh]

Back to the beef.

As you can see, the prime rib had a very nice crust. How about the interior? Well, as I was slicing the prime rib, I couldn't help but exclaim out loud with EACH slice: "Ooooh! Wow! It's soooooo juicy!"

Exclaim out loud.

With each slice.

We're Method X believers now. Of course, we would have to think of sides that don't need the oven. (Being us, though, we have no problems just having prime rib with rice.)

The video by Chef John of Food Wishes Video Recipes:
Perfect Prime Rib of Beef with the Mysterious "Method X"

  1. That prime rib looks perfect! And soooo simple. I wouldn't need anything else either.

    I've never tried making it myself. Too expensive vs. too much worry about messing up an expensive cut of beef.

  2. Wow! That looks great!! That Chef John sure is good, and quite handsome as well. I'm a big fan.

  3. Holy Smokes! You cooked your prime rib PERFECTLY!

    It seems like a lot of food... next time if you need an extra belly, you just let me know ;)

  4. I like your style! You always go good meat and loads of vegetables :P

  5. Wow!!! What a beautiful piece of meat... :)

  6. Holy Frig. That looks awesome.
    I've been somewhat intimidated by roasting...well that and I'm just one person....

    You're first sentence was the first words out of my mouth when I saw that.

    Awesome (the meat..the get the idea).

  7. I'm salivating at the look of this Prime Rib...perfectly done.
    You certainly make a good argument for trying this method out.

  8. Oh that looks so perfect & you served it with two of my favorite winter vegetables! I should send you some parsnips, we get so much from the farm

  9. I've never attempted a prime rib, but if I ever do, I'm using Method x!

  10. That is a serious piece of meat. There is a talent to getting it right, and you definitely got it right on the money. Impressive! I have to try your method!

  11. Exactly! I made my first Prime Rib 10 years ago and came across a similar method of preparation, high temp, turn it off, leave in the oven. It has turned out perfectly EVERY time, even the times when dinner guests ran two hours late. I just left it in the oven.....

  12. Method X looks pretty awesome. This rare meat used to scare me in the past, but now I really love it!

  13. this looks amazing. i'm really trying to cut down on my red meat intake, but when i see pieces like this, i really rethink y even bother!

  14. do you know i've never, ever considered making prime rib at home. this post is getting me to seriously reconsider. it's perfectly cooked. and it doesn't need to remind us all of some rubbery, uber-fatty piece of $8.99 special at the local diner.

  15. Ooh thanks! I'm going to try this. I love juicy medium rare meat! Yum!

  16. Oh man that looks incredible! Thanks for sharing the "method". I've never tried making PR at home because 1) it seemed to complicated and 2) it doesn't come in 2 person sizes.

    I think I just need to have a dinner party and invite people over.

  17. Oh. My. God. That looks absolutely ravishing.

    I have only once had prime rib (in a restaurant in rural Illinois) and that blew me away, but now I'm thinking this could be my next dinner party trick...

  18. u roast it so perfectly, the way I like - pink in the center. I'm drooling now ;p

  19. Wandering Chopsticks:
    I know what you mean. It almost hurts to buy a prime rib roast. I try not to look at the price. ;)

    Chef John:
    Hahahaha. Entertaining, as always.

    Hehe, thanks. =)

    Yeah, I guess the being only one person is a good reason not to make prime rib at home. ;)

    Peter M:
    Lori Lynn:
    Before trying it out, I was both optimistic and scared. I'm sold now.

    Wow, "SO MUCH PARSNIPS"!!!

    Ron Merlin:
    Oh, that's good to know! (re leaving in the turned-off oven with no ill effects)

    That medium rare meat was soooo juicy!

    Haha... yeah. I know we're all supposed to eat more fruits and vegetables. But hey, this is an occasional splurge (both tummy-wise and wallet-wise).

    we are never full:
    Prime is the only "roast" I like, I think. Otherwise, I just got for a teak if I need a beef fix.

    Jessica@Foodmayhem said...
    Would love to hear how it turns out for you!

    Marc @ NoRecipes:
    Don't need a special reason to have a party at home, but the prime rib would be a good one! ;)

    Oh man that looks incredible!

    Yes, yes, make it, make it! (And really, only once?)

    Drooling is always a good sign.

  20. Dear Piece of Prime Rib,

    You don't know me but I'm in love with you. It was salivate at first sight.

    May I take you to dinner, if I pick you up at seven would you be rare, I mean ready?

    Beautiful piece of meat!

  21. Kathleen:
    This is the bestest comment EVAR! ;)

  22. I make prime year for my family ever year for Christmas, and the Method X method is the one I have ALWAYS used. It's stupid easy and it renders the most beautiful piece of meat you could ever imagine sinking your teeth into. Perfecto!

  23. Anon:
    I was quite happy to have discovered it as well! Mmm, prime rib!

  24. Making this right now in 2016, with a 6-pounder from RCSS :)

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