Spinach and Yoga

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The Best Holiday Ever!

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you are all enjoy this wonderful holiday! Whatever you choose to list in your grace be honest and let it come from the heart. Feel the grace, don’t just say it.

Here is mine: I am grateful for my partner who supports me in anything I do, for my parents who understand me and love me no matter what, for the community of teachers and healers who share their wisdom and advice, for the students who inspire me to become a better person, a mindful listener, and an educated teacher, and for my readers who share their honest opinion and take time to read and comment. I am grateful for my creative and hard-working brain that always gives me new ideas to explore and for my strong intelligent body that carries me through daily life and provides wisdom through constant feedback.

What are you grateful for this year? Please share if you have a minute!

Restoring Post Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is customary celebrated around the table. Usually, it is a very rich and abundant one. No matter whether it is a traditional TG table, a vegetarian, a vegan, or a gluten free one, there is more food than we eat on a regular basis. With so many delicious dishes on the table it is difficult not to overeat and to stick to proper food combinations. A few too many second helpings, heavy desserts, and chatting at the table can upset even the strongest tummy. Top of it off with travel anxiety and you are heading for trouble unless you know how to balance your body out the next day.

After the Thanksgiving meal, most Americans feel overly stuffed, bloated, and hangover. Hangover not necessarily from alcohol but from too much salt, sugar, and heavy foods. Not a pleasant feeling but quite manageable with some simple techniques.

Recovering after Thanksgiving should start right after the main meal with a steaming cup of cumin and cardamon tea. In the evening before you head to bed take some triphala and the next day follow the menu below.

Before bed: Take 2 pills of triphala or 1 tsp of triphala powder mixed in a glass of hot water with a little bit of honey. You can buy Triphala at Whole Foods or any other health food store. Literally meaning “three fruits”, Triphala is a traditional Ayurvedic herbal formulation consisting of three fruits. Triphala is most commonly known for its use as a gentle bowel tonic, helpful in digestion and supporting regular bowel movements. My favorite one is from Banyan Botanicals.

In the morning: Start your day with a cup of hot water with lemon juice and sliced up ¼” of fresh ginger root with 1 tsp of honey

Also make a thermos of this cleansing tea to drink throughout the day.

Herbal Detox Tea
8 cups of water
4 teaspoons each of cumin and coriander powder
8 cardamom pods
4 teaspoons of crushed fennel seeds
2 pinches of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of ginger powder (or 3 slices fresh ginger)
Mix all ingredients in a pan and bring to a boil. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from heat and keep covered for another 15-20 minutes. Strain through a sieve and drink it warm throughout the day.

Breakfast: Keep it very light and gentle with a bowl of baked apples or pears with nutmeg, cinnamon, and cardamom or this amazing pumpkin gingerbread smoothie.

Lunch: Pay attention to your hunger level. If not hungry, skip lunch or have a bowl of homemade miso soup. Another great option is a green detox soup. It is filing, warming, but very easy to digest. Here is my version of the green detox soup that tastes amazing.

Dinner: Light and gentle ayurvedic kichadi like this one. It is an amazing healing dish and it tastes surprisingly good. I was very unsure about it first since I am not a big fan of rice but it blew my mind taste buds. It became a regular dish that I make at least once a week.

Try not to snack too much and drink lots of herbal detox tea.

It is ok to break the rules from time to time, as long as you know how to keep consequences to the minimum.

Grace and Light to you!

Nadya

Related articles

• Ayurvedic Ideas for Your Thanksgiving Table (spinachandyoga.com)
• Cures for a Bloated Belly (spinachandyoga.com)
• Thanksgiving Cinnamon Applesauce (thegrassskirtblog.com)

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It is almost Thanksgiving. A few posts ago I told you why I really like this holiday besides the tasty food. It is fun to hang around with family and friends and to enjoy plentiful food. The food doesn’t have to be bad to be delicious!

If you don’t have your TG meal planned out yet, here are some ayurvedic ideas:

Appetizer: Curried Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Entree: Chilean Corn Casserole or Cranberry, Apricot and Pecan Wild Rice Pilaf (GF + vegan)

Sauce: Ayurvedic Cranberry Apple Chutney Sauce

Sides: Curried Yams in Coconut Milk or Rice Pilaf and Coconut Green Beans or Caramalized Brussel Sprouts

Dessert: Raw Chocolate Caramel

Digestive: Spicy Buttermilk Lassi to settle the stomach – works wonders!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoy every bite!

Nadya

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It Feels Good To Stretch!

I am finally back in New York after my 2.5 weeks-long family visit to Russia and can’t wait to get back to my regular teaching/writing schedule! NYC yogis, I hope you are ready for some new mindful-flow classes!

I finally mastered my forearm stand

While at home I wasn’t teaching as much as usual besides a couple of fun classes with Italian new friends but I was practicing more than usual. I even described my inspiring sunrise practice! All in all my major focus was flexibility and relaxing into discomfort to reduce anxiety. Interestingly, my practice was as much emotional and mental not just physical. Of course, yoga has the potential to increase physical flexibility and make muscles strong and supple but so does simple stretching. Yoga has a less visible but a very powerful benefit of stretching our mind and teaching us how to relax into the most uncomfortable situations.

Going to Russia I was a little scared of not having my daily dose of chia & hemp seeds, kale, spinach, and excess to all kinds of berries and fruits. While you can find most of these items in Moscow, Orenburg‘s food/grocery selection is still very limited due to its geographic location and a traditional demand for local foods. No one is dying to buy avocado in supermarkets and no many care about quinoa in the place where buckwheat rules.

Instead of worrying about my changing menu, I decided to embrace it and watch how my body would react. It was an interesting and useful experience!

Often we base our decision to eat or not to eat something on some magazine article, research or expert advise. We hear that dairy is bad and we start cautioning all our friends of its dangers. We read that soy can lead to hormone imbalance and we avoid it as a plague. I am not even talking about a new-found enemy – gluten, that seems like a major reason behind all the inflammatory conditions and has a growing army fighting against it!

Rarely do we stop and ask our own body about what works and what doesn’t. We look for super-foods and for miracle supplements without paying attention to our body’s feedback on food combinations, eating times, and nutrition requirements which might be more important than anything else.

So my goal was to pay attention to my body and to create a better feedback loop to determine what I actually thrive on and what dulls my energy. My findings were quite surprising!

First let me show you my food creations from Russia. I used only local ingredients and lots of spices. Out of the 2 weeks, I spent almost every day in the kitchen creating hearty vegetarian dishes using locally bought/picked ingredients.

My frequent go-to meals included a variety of:

Lentil Soups

Curried Lentil Soup

Chickpea stews
Herbed Tomato soup from my mom’s garden

Having Tomato Soup in the Garden

Buckwheat Kasha
Oatmeal cookies
Cous cous salads

Curried Cous Cous with Nuts, Raisins, and Parsley

Russian traditional borscht
And way more dairy than I eat in NYC
(Actually, I barely have any dairy in NYC because I never crave it but at home I love Kefir that last only up to 1 week (even non-organic varieties!) And raw unhomogenized milk chai with a tsp of raw honey)
I even made my own Un-sweetened Raisin Hazelnut Granola to go with kefir:)

Homemade Granola

My surprising findings:
1. Dairy didn’t make me feel slow, heavy, or bloated. Actually quite the opposite! It felt light, satisfying, and refreshing in a 100 degree heat. I had kefir, syrniki, and raw milk chai! I don’t know if I will crave as much dairy back in NYC but if I do, I will get it from farmer’s market to make sure it’s fresh and not the kind that lasts for months even after opening.

2. Super foods are everywhere – just keep your mind open. For the lack of spinach, kale, collards or other dark greens, I searched my moms garden to find smth similar. I found a plant that my mom used for the looks actually possessed quite a superman health reputation – amaranth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranthus_cruentus). It is a dark green/red plant used in Russia mainly to feed cattle. Similar to spinach it is incredibly rich in protein – 25% of it’s calories are much-searched for muscle builder. It went well in lentil soups, cous cous salads, and even buckwheat kasha

Another super nutritious treasure I found was my mom’s freshly picked honeycomb. It was still in beeswax and with pollen. It is quite a treat! I had it with my milk chai!

My grandma had a treasure of her own – homemade kombucha. if you ever read about the origins of kombucha, you might know

Grandma's Kombucha in the Making

that it comes from Russia. My grandma’s variety was very light, perfectly fermented and un-sweetened.

3. It felt good not to have as many fruits as I do in NYC. It might sound surprising or not as healthy but it is true. Due to a much smaller variety of fruits in Orenburg markets, I limited my fruits to our garden apples and market-bought plums. Of course you can find imported pineapples, grapes, and other fruits but for some reason they didn’t appeal to me. Since there were not that many fruits to choose from, I wasn’t craving so many of them. The more variety of taste you have access to, the more you will tend to taste all of them. So if your fridge has 7 varieties of fruits you will tend to eat more of them rather then if you had just 2 varieties of fruits. Undoubtedly, fruits are an amazing source of nutrition and are good for us, don’t misunderstand me. But sugar is sugar! We, humans, like it’s taste but our body does better if there is less sugar, even the one that comes from fruit. Upon arrival to NYC and my first trip to Whole Foods I wasn’t craving fruits as much. For now I will try to keep it down to 2-4 pieces of fruit a day.

4. I didn’t gain weight even with though my eating schedule was very irregular. Sometimes I would have breakfast at 2pm and dinner at 9pm. Sometimes I would skip dinner all-together and sometimes I ate 5 times a day. When you are traveling it might be difficult to stick to your regular schedule so be prepared for it and don’t let anxiety to build. Instead just let your body dictate when to eat. Rely on your hunger. It might be weird, especially if you are changing time but it won’t mislead you as long as you listen carefully.

5 My last finding was not about food but still health-relevant. In NYC I do at least 2 1-hour-long weight classes a week and 45 mins of cardio 5-6 times a week, at home I didn’t lift weights once instead I just played around with a band and did 40 mins of jogging in the forest 4 times a week. It was a lot less intense than what my body is used to. I thought my muscle tone would go down and that my endurance would not be as good but it didn’t change! Today I did an elliptical at level 16 for 45 min without once glancing at the time and without getting tired! Conclusion: don’t be afraid to change your workout routine, your muscles won’t disappear in 2 weeks!

Lesson learned: don’t be mentally and emotionally frigid! Let go of expectations and be open to new experiences! To learn from the new experiences, stay mindful and present in your body. The more you listen, the more you will hear!

Let me know how do you go about your diet and exercise routine when you travel. I would love to hear your tips and try them out during my next trip!

See you in class!
Nadya

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