Joyful Health

Healing weeds

5/26/2016

I had a HUGE Burdock weed in my front flower bed that was beginning to seed. What to do. Well, I've been reading about how beneficial it is for liver health, and in all earthy honesty liver health helps monthly cycle health and I'm still trying to get all that sorted. Anyway, I dug up the burdock root.
Ha. It sounds so simple doesn't it! Just dig it up. Pah! Those suckers are called tenacious weeds for a reason! A spade, garden knife, moved flower-bed and a few new callouses later, I had a broken bedraggled burdock root. Apparently digging up weed roots gets easier with time. I'm hoping its true! If not, Mountain Rose Herbs has it for sale. (Altho I have a couple of friends who would justifiably smack me for frugal failure if i did so. PAYING some hippies in Oregon to dig up weeds for me?!)
I then proceeded to decoct a tea. Decocting is the method of boiling roots and barks of medicinal plants until a nice stout tea is brewed. A more intense brewing of tea if you will.
I based this tea off of Rosemary Gladstar's herbal root beer, and in that recipe she very clearly states to NOT add too much dandelion root. Did I listen? Ha! Of course not.
So equal parts of dandelion, burdock, sarsparilla, some sassafras just because, a little fo-ti, and enough ginger to pickle the faint of heart. Aaaand a little cardamom, because I couldn't resist. Oh and cinnamon. And just a dash of nutmeg... and at that point I had to force myself to stop sprinkling a little of this and a little of that in. It gets bad sometimes. I hope when I take my herbalism course it will cure me of my 'a pinch more of this and just a dash more of that!" thing I have going on. I've tried drinking just raspberry leaf tea... and then five more herbs end up in the teapot, so I still don't know what JUST raspberry leaf tea tastes like...

So this particular herbal tea was not one of my most favorites, nor on the list of amazing successes. It is incredibly bitter, and I simply cannot drink it straight. I added about a quarter cup of raw honey to about 2 quarts of tea, and then had to cut it with raw milk by about half. THAT made it into a delightful iced chai tasting concoction, so maybe its not a complete failure after all. And every sip I've taken I can almost hear my liver, gallbladder and gut thank me. So there's that plus too...

However I am NOT introducing this blend to my husband without a huuuuuge 'taste this at your own risk, dear!" disclaimer. I really am blessed with how cooperative he is about trying my new concoctions!

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Fats and cells

3/20/2016

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I wrote the following for a school assignment. For the time being, this portion of my blog may be getting a lot of that - school assignments I mean. I hope to be posting some recipes on here as well, but I also think its important for people to understand WHY they are eating what nutritionists say they ought to eat. Or conversely, I think its very important for people to question why they are being instructed to eat things that turn out being rather toxic for the human body! The essay was written in response to the question, "how to trans fats, rancid oils, and hydrogenated fats and oils (like crisco. Not to name names. But hydrogenated means vegetable oils that used to be liquid but are now solid. SO margarine, vegetable shortening, etc.) effect the body on a cellular level, and so therefore effect the health of an individual?"
Here is my response. Enjoy!

The protective, outer layers of cells are comprised of lipids, amino acids, and cholesterol. Or, in laymen’s terms, the skin of our cells is made with fats, proteins, and cholesterol. Therefore the quality of the types of fats, proteins and cholesterols that we consume are important, because these directly influence the quality of our cell’s outer layers. Our food also impacts the cytosol quality of our cells. Cytosol is the liquid contained inside a cell that surrounds the organelles – the parts and pieces that let cells function. Cytosol is comprised of water, ions, glucose, amino and fatty acids, proteins, lipids and the waste products our cells create. All of those ingredients are found in the foods we eat; therefore, the quality of the food we consume directly impacts the quality of the building blocks our cells are comprised of.
If we consume low fat products then the skin of our cells will be weak or severely compromised. If we consume trans or hydrogenated fats, then the building blocks of our cytosol will not be as full or healthful for out cells organelles to reside in. If our very cells are weak or compromised, this will directly impact our organs, which will not be able to function properly. If our organs cannot function properly, then our body systems will not be able to operate together in an optimal fashion. If our body systems cannot operate as designed, why are we baffled when we don’t feel well?
For example: Let us examine the cells of the villi inside the intestinal walls. Because of poor diet, the cells of the villi are weak and compromised, and so therefore are unable to break down food appropriately. So the food remains in chucks and tears up the already weak villi. This damages the intestinal walls, which in turn makes the colon function poorly, which slows digestion, which creates a backup along the intestines into the stomach, which makes the person in question’s abdomen feel incredibly uncomfortable.
The mindset of our modern society seems to be that one must consume a set amount of food in order to be full, because the stomach must be filled for satiety to occur. However this is not the case. The body requires food in order to have the building blocks for cellular construction and energy. A smaller amount of high quality fat and oil may be consumed to meet the needs of cells and give the individual satiety, rather than a large amount of non-fat products that will not give the cells what they need, which will keep a feeling of satiety from occurring, which will spur the individual to keep eating, which will cause unwanted weight gain and bad health on the side. In summary, the non-fat products or foods containing rancid or hydrogenated oils are marketed as providing slim bodies, healthy hearts and arteries, and a general feeling of wellness. The truth is quite the opposite. They do not provide the body the building blocks necessary for happy cells, and if the cells are not happy the individual certainly won’t be happy.

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Joyful Health!

3/12/2016

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I really don't know what I'm thinking, starting a whole new section of my blog, when I don't even update the other portion of my blog nearly enough!! However, I am trying to get organized in every area of life, so why not my blog too? I'd like to keep my more personal stuff organized away from the more 'professional' side of things, and I also want a place where, if I see a cool recipe or read an interesting fact, I can quickly share it without having to make sure to tag it differently from my other posts. And I don't really want my personal blog to become another sterile, impersonal health journal or cookbook. But I do like sharing what I've learned and praying it helps convict others to live their lives to the fullest through health. And I think sometimes it helps to distinguish between what is helping emotionally and spiritually, and then what is helping physically. They all interlap quite a bit, hence the fact that this is still the same blog, just a different page on the blog. So here I go, organizing between personal and professional and experimenting with how they can overlap.
This post probably is just going to be more introductory, and then we'll see what happens in the future!
I guess a good way to introduce this portion of the blog would be to share my bio from my school website. Hopefully you've read my 'green and gross' post, but this also gives a good quick summary.

This is my profile on the school website. My husband loves this picture!

Hello! My name is Rachel Hester. I am 29 (yiikes!!) and if you sang the Johnny Cash song, 'I've been everywhere" that basically answers the question 'where are you from?' I was born in Connecticut, moved to California, Ohio, New Mexico, South Dakota, lived in Romania for about a year doing mission work with orphans and Gypsies (yes they are a real people group) and then moved to Kentucky for College. I have a Bachelor of Science in International Missions and Church growth, which basically means I know how to talk to people from all different cultures, get them organized to cooperate for a few mintes, and quote applicable Bible verses while doing so. Nutrition really wasn't a passion of mine until while in college I had the Swine Flu that went around. After that my health really wasn't all that great if I ate anything processessed, so I used the cooking skills I learned in Romania to whip up stuff from scratch on a reeeeeally tight college budget. Some of those first concoctions were... scary. I also was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and the thought of taking pills the rest of my life really wasn't my favorite. But life went on, I married my husband of now 2 1/2 years, and we started the end of our Fairy Tale. That is until he started having major digestion issues. He'd always worked in Emergency Services and had struggled with GI challenges but just figured they were no big deal and moved on with life until they got so bad he couldn't hide them anymore. We went to our family doctor who referred us to a specialist, who said they would screen for colon cancer and if it wasn't that they didn't know what it was. IBS - Doctor speech for "I'm Basically Stumped!" I had a very good friend who had struggled with Lupus for years, but was now able to fulfill all her duties as the Director of the ministry that ran the orphanage I volunteered at, live overseas 6 months of the year, run events and travel around the country. So I figured whatever diet changes she'd been making were probably working. I gave her a phone call and she told me she'd learned about the changes through her mom getting a certification through NTP. Within a few weeks, my husband and I had driven to Indianapolis to get assessments, were scouring the countryside for raw milk and haunting farmer's markets looking for grass fed, free range meat products. I read anything our NTP friend suggested and searched for more besides. I learned about essential oils, herbs, how stress can effect the body, etc. Now I work for a massage therapist, have a cabinet full of essential oils and herbal infused oils, make my own salves, have a cabinet full of herbs and various flours of low or no gluten, and feel so much better! Obviously this was a huge learning curve, and as you can tell I'm a bit of a talker/storyteller, so when I would gab my head off about the latest evils of soda when eating out with friends, they'd say something like, 'hey while you're researching stuff for you and Kyle, would you mind looking up this issue I've struggled with for years? I'd love to hear how you can fix it.' Eventually it dawned on me that health and nutrition is a topic I'm very passionate about, can explain easily, love teaching people, is an excellent platform to offer help and healing to people on so many other levels, AND I could get PAID to do it! So I talked to my husband and we agreed that this would be a good way to spend 2016. So here I am, so excited to learn and grow and meet new friends!

So there you have a descent introduction to my interest in Nutritional Therapy! Sorry about the color change halfway through the post.... not sure what is going on with the javascript but it won't let me change the color halfway through the post... grrr!!!

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Healing weeds

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