Sharon Howard, R.D.:
Without knowing very much about your current diet, weight, and medical situation, I can only make some general comments. Research shows that spreading the same amount of calories over three meals is more beneficial than eating them all at once. However, it may be difficult for you to prepare food, so you might be limited to once a day. If you try to spread the calories, be sure you track them carefully so you really are not adding more.

When you are so inactive, you are losing muscle mass, which also means your metabolism is decreasing. In order to keep muscle, you may want to be evaluated by a physical therapist and perhaps be able to do some work with exercise bands or light weights. If you have more muscle, you can eat more and still maintain or even lose weight. If you cut too many calories, your metabolism slows down because your body thinks it is in a state of semi-starvation.

Question:
What foods will help build healthy red blood cells?

Sharon Howard, R.D.:
In order to produce enough and healthy red blood cells, you need an adequate intake of iron, folic acid, vitamin B12 and protein. Here are some common food sources of each.
Iron — beef, chicken, fish, pork, eggs, bran, soybeans, spinach, kidney beans, lima beans, prune juice, peanut butter, enriched rice and bread, fortified cereals and other food products
B 12 — meat, milk, eggs, fish, poultry, yogurt, sardines, cheese fortified cereals, and vitamin supplement
Folic Acid — leafy vegetables, orange juice, legumes, broccoli, yeast breads, fortified cereals

Notice that the highest blood building nutrients are “housed” in protein rich foods, which supply the amino acids to build cells. Vegetarians can obtain important nutrients from soy products and legumes, which will also provide amino acids. Fortified cereals and vitamin supplements can be used if you do not eat these foods.

If your blood count shows you’re low on red blood cells, be sure to talk with your doctor to get a diagnosis and a treatment plan that’s best for you.

Question:
I am 44 years old, five feet four inches tall and weigh 250 pounds. I am trying to lose weight, but I am hungry all the time. I rarely feel full. I do not eat a lot of fruits and veggies; I do eat a lot of bread, rice and meat. What are some things that I can do to feel full and how can I get more energy to exercise?

Sharon Howard, R.D.:
The foods you don’t eat much of are what you should eat. Fruits and vegetables are the lowest calorie foods you can eat, but they give you fiber, water and nutrients. The bulkiness of vegetables and fruits can help you feel fuller, so you can eat smaller amounts of meat, bread and rice, which are high calorie-density foods. If you eat a cup of vegetables with meals, and finish each meal with a piece of fruit, you will eat fewer calories and feel full longer.

You might enjoy the book, Volumetrics, by Barbara Rolls, which outlines foods that have high volume but low calories. There is also a new product called, satietrol, that reduces your hunger by stimulating satiety hormones.

Your low energy level could stem from your weight. Two hundred and fifty pounds takes a lot of work to carry around. As you lose weight by controlling your food intake, you will have more energy and find it easier to exercise. At the beginning, you need to take short walks daily, to build your stamina.

In case you’re searching for way to improve weight loss or look younger, human growth hormone has been the easy, successful and safe method to implement it.

Teachers place children into work and play groups throughout the school day without regard to their appearance or backgrounds. Many elementary-school teachers refer to the children as “friends” instead of as boys and girls. Thus, they become friends at school and it would not occur to them that they could not be friends outside of the school as well. That is, until we adults teach them differently.

This is not to say that you should ignore your responsibility of protecting your daughter from harmful situations. Unfortunately, we have heard too often of the tragic consequences when children are left without responsible adult supervision.

Your dilemma is to find a way to preserve the caring spirit that your daughter is developing without ignoring her safety and security.

Here are some suggestions that I believe will do both:

• Ask your daughter’s friend to play at your house. Communicate directly with her mother and discuss the plans, including the specific times. Make clear arrangements for pickup and return-home trips.

• Arrange with the friend’s mother to take the girls together on an outing to a park, swimming pool or shopping mall for lunch. Use the time to get to know the mother, which may make you more comfortable in allowing your daughter to visit their home another time.

• Invite the girl’s mother to join a school committee with you. Use your daughter’s friendship to make your own connection. Although the woman might not become your best friend, this may help you decide if you can allow your daughter to play at her house sometime in the future.

Ashley Abbott was once a dynamic, exciting character that was always at the forefront of storylines, but no longer. Ashley can now be found on the very back burner with almost no storyline to speak of. Her current storyline is even less than that other Genoa City resident busybody, Katy Williams. What has happened?

Ever since Ashley married Brad and gave birth to her new baby she has been placed at the farthest back burner with only intermittent storyline. Every few weeks she pops up to poke her nose into Jack’s romantic affairs or wonder why her father seems stressed out and then it’s back to the back burner. A supposedly very smart, high powered business executive, Ashley seems to have fallen off the face of the Y&R story board.

Even the storyline involving the questionable paternity of her child has been dropped. Disappeared into thin air just like the rest of Ashley’s storyline. Will the fans ever find out who is the real father of Ashley’s child or will that be a secret that never comes out? What a great storyline this would be and no one seems to want to go forward with it.

Could it be that all the rumors surrounding Eileen Davidson’s supposed talks with NBC and Days Of Our Lives about reviving the character of Susan Banks have finally pushed Y&R over the edge? Surely it couldn’t be something like that? I would hope not. For Y&R to waste a wonderful talent like Davidson on the back burner certainly makes no sense but I don’t think they would do it out of hurt feelings over her possible exit from the show or wanting to do another soap.

Ashley is such a great character and has so many storyline angles and secrets left to be told. I think a summer build up to the paternity secret being revealed during September sweeps makes a lot of sense and the fans would definitely tune in to see that story played out. Get Ashley off the back burner and onto the front lines where she belongs! Ashley is too good a character and Davidson too good an actress to be playing the Abbott family busybody!

Magic is such a nebulous term. I believe everyone possesses their own unique ability to create “magic” in everything they endeavor to do. One may “cast spells”, use guided imagery, meditate, or engage in other numerous activities that all in my opinion qualify as “magic”. I feel that magic is the essence of making things happen, making changes. In the art of perfumery too, magic plays no less a part. I would like to quote one of my favorite texts here on this point,The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes. “The essence of magic lies in psychosensory evocation or stimulation of the mind and body in a highly specified manner. The magicians use of ritual and an elaborate correspondance system is actually a form of communication with higher levels of being.”(1)

One day I was approached (rather confronted!) by a self-proclaimed high priestess of one order or other which I can’t recall. She outright told me that unless I ascribed to some set of beliefs or approved path of discipline I would fail in any purported “magical” undertaking. She then suggested a series of books that I could read to set me straight so to speak, and she proceeded to point them all out to me as I was browsing through the esoteric bookstore which I learned she was the owner of. Well, I thanked her for her recommendations and I did buy some of the books and promptly left.

After I had read through them, I found only further confirmation of my view that indeed, magic of itself is not based on a belief system, but is a personal experience based upon practice and applications. Unbeknownced to her, she had succeeded in affirming for me my own intuited understandings. ( I suspect her goal was the exact opposite!) Needless to say, I am indebted to this person for bringing forth the circumstance that enabled me to trust my own inner guidance. To this day I proudly maintain a most “bohemian” approach toward this subject!

I have found that intuition plays a major role in the perfume arts and the application of scents. Why? To my view, scent is the invisible key to the doorways of higher consciousness and greater awareness. They are as an etheric catylist for creating a new energy and vibration in any endeavor and help one to attain their objective. Scent by nature of our perception of it, has the ability to transform one’s environment, and even ones own inner psyche. “Odours are potent in their influence because they operate on us at a subconscious or subliminal level. Thus, their influence on our emotional nature bypasses the critical mind“(2)

I find this critical or analytic mind to be most demanding, and it permeates every area of our life when we are unaware of it. The critical mind is always exacting from us “qualifications”, comparisons for judgments; and it expects logic and reason to rule. It is forever seeking validations before it will allow us to open to new possibilities. I believe this quality of our mind is the most detrimental one and in regards to magical practices of any kind, it is quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful imaginings that have no merit.

With respect to the preparation of perfumes, it is most helpful if one can get beyond the boundaries of their own mind. At least this is what my experience has shown me. Didn’t you ever notice that smells affect how you feel and perceive things? I recall taking vivid note of this phenomena even as a child. I believe all people have had the same experiences also. Perhaps walking into a room where a scent evokes a remembrance of a time, a place, a person. I find scent evokes memory. Not only that, it also evokes in that memory a sort of re-experiencing of the recalled event. This is a different thing altogether than visualizing things. In visualizations, there is an element of abstraction…where one is removed and observing an idea or picture in their mind. I find that the affect of scent however does not possess this element. When a memory is recalled via the olfactory senses it seems to almost take on a life of its own, it seems more real, more personal. If you use these simple insights as a tool for working with scents, you will find many ways to create useful combinations of them all on your own.

About Employing Scent for
Ritual Purposes

What is a ritual? Well you could look it up in the dictionary I suppose, but to me a ritual is a much more personal thing. I believe a ritual can be any activity repeatedly carried out with a particular intent behind it. To refer again to my favorite text on this subject, “In ritual you are trying to align yourself with some higher quality or resource you seek to infuse into your personality…it is a very potent tool for changing yourself in a prearranged direction…that can be quite useful in your daily life…scents in particular open up direct access to the emotional part of the brain, which has the greatest impact on the autonomic nervous system and the subconscious mind.”(3)

I find that in the application of scent it is the scent itself that becomes the carrier for the experience one is seeking. In gaining familiarity with the quality of a particular essence, one becomes adept at employing it for creative purposes. Scents evoke memory, and each scent carries its own vibration. By using scents in combination specific environments can be facilitated. “Each item in the repertoire of perfumery materials has specific properties that come from their odiferous molecules or volatile oils. A property can be defined as an effect that a material object or substance has on another object or one or more of the senses of an observer. Clearly, the most important biological property of an oderant is that it has an odor that effects the human sense of smell.”(4)