Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Yoga of Fasting

In the 1990s, I used to fast one day a week, as recommended in the yoga I do (and used to teach), and, while it was hard the first couple of weeks, once it became a habit, it seemed to increase my overall energy, not just physically but emotionally.

Once a year or so I also used to go to my cottage alone and fast for 3 days, water only, no food. The days following the 3 day fast were, I recall, radiant.

When I fasted, it had nothing to do with my weight - I did not want to lose weight, it was more of a spiritual quest.

Fasting on a regular basis for a short while, a day, a 24 hour period, seems, from the article copied in below, a very healthy thing to do.

I wonder if I can manage to fast one day a week again?

Not going to try immediately, but I will mull it over and give it a go in a few weeks. If you're going to do this, and have never fasted deliberately, teach your body to fast slowly. Choose one day a week to fast. Begin with a morning only, then eat normally for the rest of the day. The next week go from waking to dinner without any food - do drink lots of fluids of course. Following that, the next week try to fast from waking to bedtime, and if you can't sleep because you're hungry, have a snack. By the fourth week, you should be able to make it through a day of abstinence from food to a great breakfast the next day.

Fasting can help protect against brain diseases, scientists say
Claim that giving up almost all food for one or two days a week can counteract impact of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
Fasting can help protect against brain diseases, scientists say
A vertical slice through the brain of a patient with Alzheimer's, left, compared with a normal brain, right. Photograph: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library
Fasting for regular periods could help protect the brain against degenerative illnesses, according to US scientists.

Researchers at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore said they had found evidence which shows that periods of stopping virtually all food intake for one or two days a week could protect the brain against some of the worst effects of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other ailments.

"Reducing your calorie intake could help your brain, but doing so by cutting your intake of food is not likely to be the best method of triggering this protection. It is likely to be better to go on intermittent bouts of fasting, in which you eat hardly anything at all, and then have periods when you eat as much as you want," said Professor Mark Mattson, head of the institute's laboratory of neurosciences.

"In other words, timing appears to be a crucial element to this process," Mattson told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Cutting daily food intake to around 500 calories – which amounts to little more than a few vegetables and some tea – for two days out of seven had clear beneficial effects in their studies, claimed Mattson, who is also professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Scientists have known for some time that a low-calorie diet is a recipe for longer life. Rats and mice reared on restricted amounts of food increase their lifespan by up to 40%. A similar effect has been noted in humans. But Mattson and his team have taken this notion further. They argue that starving yourself occasionally can stave off not just ill-health and early death but delay the onset of conditions affecting the brain, including strokes. "Our animal experiments clearly suggest this," said Mattson.

He and his colleagues have also worked out a specific mechanism by which the growth of neurones in the brain could be affected by reduced energy intakes. Amounts of two cellular messaging chemicals are boosted when calorie intake is sharply reduced, said Mattson. These chemical messengers play an important role in boosting the growth of neurones in the brain, a process that would counteract the impact of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"The cells of the brain are put under mild stress that is analogous to the effects of exercise on muscle cells," said Mattson. "The overall effect is beneficial."

The link between reductions in energy intake and the boosting of cell growth in the brain might seem an unlikely one, but Mattson insisted that there were sound evolutionary reasons for believing it to be the case. "When resources became scarce, our ancestors would have had to scrounge for food," said Mattson. "Those whose brains responded best – who remembered where promising sources could be found or recalled how to avoid predators — would have been the ones who got the food. Thus a mechanism linking periods of starvation to neural growth would have evolved."

This model has been worked out using studies of fasting on humans and the resulting impact on their general health – even sufferers from asthma have shown benefits, said Mattson – and from experiments on the impact on the brains of animals affected by the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Now Mattson's team is preparing to study the impact of fasting on the brain by using MRI scans and other techniques.

If this final link can be established, Mattson said that a person could optimise his or her brain function by subjecting themselves to bouts of "intermittent energy restriction". In other words, they could cut their food intake to a bare minimum for two days a week, while indulging for the other five. "We have found that from a psychological point of view that works quite well. You can put up with having hardly any food for a day if you know that for the next five you can eat what you want."



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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Tulips and Daffodils, Painting 4



Because the flowers, which I was given exactly a week ago, are ready for the compost, this is my last painting of these tulips and daffodils. It is quite abstract. Likely it's mostly finished, except for some minor tinkering maybe tomorrow.

Tulips and Daffodils #4, 12" x 16", acrylics, oils on canvas.




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Friday, February 17, 2012

Self-Portrait Study 3, a painting


Self-Portrait Study 3, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite, oils, India and acrylic inks.

In the Moleskine, the earlier sketch in this blog this month. (No, I never ever wear eyeliner like that, not in my whole life. Anyway, it's a self portrait that is its own painting and only has some resemblance to me.)

I wanted it to have something beyond itself, be piercing somehow, and even be hard to look at. Somewhat disheveled and distorted, a sadness there, the more difficult realities of our experience, I guess.

In the initial sketch, I wasn't trying to draw a 'self-portrait' for anyone else, only trying to draw what I saw in this little, round magnifying mirror that was somewhat distorting but at least I could see detail without readers. The woman in the sketch had a 'sad and stricken' look, as one commenter wrote.

In the finished painting you see here, in her eyes I hope there is  concern, compassion, fear, sadness, hope, love, remembrance, and the wild ride that life is, with its inexplicable ups and downs, its times of plenty and times of drought.

Leonard Cohen, in a CBC interview I heard last Sunday afternoon, spoke about how we are all, in one way or another, trying to align our will with Divine Will. I'd call the latter, fate, fortune, life, the way it goes, the Tao.

The woman in the painting is caught right in the crux of moment between individual will and that of the life force, aligning an acceptance of fate, of karma, of whatever the forces are, and perhaps learning that allowing the horror of the pain is an empowerment in itself.


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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___