The Fear Factory

'Ello lovelies!  (Go back and try again in a British accent if you didn't do that the first time around.)

What a year so far, amirite?

It's been enough of a wild ride on the free-flowing, wavy scrolls of hoarded toilet paper, diving deep into the deepest depths of oceans of hand sanitizer for any of us to likely want to climb aboard the crazy train again any time soon.

I am sure that many of us have had significant time to ponder and reflect on many new things (including - but not limited to - what you might trade toilet paper for and if you were going to be adventurous enough to make your own hand sanitizer from your liquor cabinet).  There are a few things that I have been rolling over in my head and I thought to share one with you today.  Are you ready for a ride into my brain?  It's wilder than the life of a Costco toilet paper roll.

I think that if there was one emotion that could be collected and weighed across all of humanity starting somewhere in late winter, fear would come in first place.  In many of our lifetimes, we have never had to deal with something that had such a wide span, affecting so many all at once.  One day we woke up and schools were closed.  And then the next day, they were closed for the year (three months out).  The next day, people were afraid of airports.  The next day, people were working from home.  The next day, we watched Italy singing from balconies, locked in their homes.  The next day, we were locked in our homes and high fives and hugs were essentially declared illegal.  The next, they took away baseball.  The next, people started wearing hazmat suits and disinfecting their groceries.

There is absolutely no reason that you could have ever gotten to a hazmat suit and a pile of $37 N95 masks that you burn inside out in your driveway on the way in and tossing your Rice Krispies into a bathtub of bleach without being completely terrified of something.  Three and half months ago, if you would have done that, they would have called 911 and put you into a mental institution.  Today, you're asked for your bleach concentration recipe and stared at for your tremendously stylish hazmat outfit.

How did it get that way?  It was that a lot of people truly believed the worst of what they were seeing in the media, and not only that - they believed it was probably going to happen to them and to their loved ones.  Imagining dangerous things happening to you and your loved ones is probably one of the strongest catalysts for change and wild unnatural behavior that you could ever find on the spectrum of humanity.

As people dove in headfirst, the media felt the exhilarating rush of clicks.  They upped the coverage.  The clicks went exponential.  The media stood in their quarantined offices with their fingers spread out to the sky, eyeballs flickering, purple-blue electricity pouring out of their wrinkled fingertips,  voices suddenly strengthening, and erupting with, "No, no!  YOU WILL DIE! Unlimited power!" while launching Samuel L. Jackson into the sky.  In a few short moments of our life, all news turned into coronanews.  In fact, in the first few weeks, I saw an infographic that showed the amount of times a word had been mentioned in the news.  Ebola was in the millions over the course of the entire epidemic.  According to Sprinklr, a company that tracks language and trends and helps manage social media images and brands, just on one single day - February 28 - 6.7 million people mentioned the rona on Twitter and on social media platforms.

 Personally, I am not one who likes to submerge myself into the news machine.  I don't want to support the media getting ad revenue for their hysterical hype, leveraging the novelty of a pandemic to benefit themselves financially. As they play on people's vulnerability and panic, they push others into a downhill spiral, scouring the world to shock them daily with more terrors and horrors, digging up the most random one-off experience you wouldn't find unless you were on page 19 of a google search, and then making it front page news.

I don't know if you noticed this, but it seemed that all of the media everywhere only had about six stories to pick from to broadcast on any given day. No matter what news outlet it was, they were all saying the same thing.  It was like it was either completely lazy journalism (and I use that term very loosely) or otherwise a very united front to decide what stories were going to make it to your homepage.  Those headlines would sit on top, ready to be gobbled up by the eager clicking masses who had barely just opened their eyes for the day, and then re-spread in various degrees across social media, infiltrating every crack and corner of life, giving people the Next New Thing To Freak Out About.

(And then their cortisol levels from stress tanked their immune systems, and they worried more into a perpetual spiral, making themselves more vulnerable to the thing that they were most worried about. SLOW CLAP.  Awesome job.)

You can get people to do anything if you work up enough panic.  Rational, thinking, level-headed people will turn to bleaching their cereal boxes, turning their masked faces 180 degrees away from other's in terror, afraid to pick up a box of pasta without a gloved hand.  These small things are the proof that you can get them to do big things.

This is the place that we stand and wonder at society.  Where are you?  Is it possible that the media may have their own interest in mind?  Do you believe everything that you're told?  How much do you question?  What if you weren't afraid?  Wouldn't you like to feel that way again?  (I ask that knowing that there are some people who totally get off on panic, so even though it could be rhetorical, it isn't.)

You know what?  You don't have to watch the news.  You don't have to read the headlines.  You don't have to know every gory detail of what someone is putting out for you.  You don't have to wake up and throw yourself into panic and depression.  You can just do your thing.  You can avoid any scrolling through facebook.  You don't have to open it up at all.  You don't have to argue with those who disagree with you.  You don't have to read the news before you go to the grocery store.  You can just go.  You can go outside.  You can call your friends.  You can smile at people at the grocery store and interact like they are a human being instead of the Black Plague personified.  You can refuse to drown in it.

Do you know what happens when you do?  You feel a lot better.  You're not fueling people who don't have your best interest in mind.  You're not giving them power over your day and your emotions, creeping into your subconscious, prying one thing after another away from your once much happier life.  When something wild happens, you will be clearheaded enough to react appropriately to it, and not with a knee-jerk survival mode.

I just thought that you should know that you're not obligated.  Maybe you could try it for a day and see how you feel.  Or don't.  Whatever.  It's a free country.  Kinda.

Peace, love, and take back your brain,

Ms. Daisy

How to Increase Your Covid Risk of Death Tenfold

I really did not want to write an article about covid.  

The simple act of reading the word for a lot of people piles on anxiety and contributes to a disruption in mental health.  The media has never talked about another issue as much as it has with this one; it is ultra-saturation overboard and I did not want to contribute to any of that.  Most of the articles that are scrolled across are full of panic, fear, death, OCD-handwashing, isolationism, potential poverty, job loss, economic collapse, and political fights.  It is no wonder that people are stressed out and on high alert, living around the clock in fight-or-flight mode.  Something as simple and seemingly benign as a trip to the grocery store has people behaving as if every other human being is a threat to their life - strangers hiding behind masks, gloved up, and eyeing each other suspiciously or not at all. 

As the weeks and months have crawled on at a snail's pace, we have thankfully been able to gather quite a bit of data regarding many things surrounding this issue to understand it a bit better.

I have recently come across some information that may be initially a little scary for some of you, but I intend to give you a workaround and provide you with some hope.

Here's the thing, lovelies - we're not afraid of a regular virus.  We're not afraid of the flu, we're not afraid of a cold.  

We are, however, afraid of a virus that we think is going to kill us haphazardly.  We don't want to die.  We don't want our loved ones to die.  We don't want to be a statistic.  We don't like the thought that just going to the grocery store could end our lives.  Many are paralyzed with fear that they could be carriers and kill of their parents, their children, and all the old people in the grocery store, out on the streets going for a walk, and all of our neighbors.  What seems like a random chance of a very unpleasant death alone in a hospital bed is a nightmare that none of us want to participate in.  Nobody wants to play Russian roulette with this.

This is understandable.  

But what if it's not exactly that way?

We have read the numbers about how it significantly affects the elderly population more strongly than the youth.  This is still not a relief, of course, but with this we are able to see a pattern.

New information is coming out that is showing an overwhelming and shocking link to the severity of covid with several underlying comorbidities.

Data from the first 2204 patients admitted to the National Health Service in Europe revealed that 72.7% were overweight or obese.  That is an incredible number!  This number speaks only of obesity, and not even of age.  (Please note that this number is the percentage of those who were admitted to the hospital, and not of those who died.)

Those with type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome have a ten times greater risk of death than those who are metabolically healthy. 

Because this virus strongly affects lung function, it is no surprise that a study from China found that smokers were fourteen times more likely to get severe disease than non-smokers.   

Other staggering comorbidities reflected that hypertension (high blood pressure) was a prevalent partner in those who were dying from the novel coronavirus.  

With only 12.2% of Americans metabolically healthy, how could this ever be hopeful?

It is hopeful because of something called nutrigenomics.

Nutrigenomics is the study of how our genetic expression is affected by the food we eat and how the food we eat affects our genetic expression.  This branch of science, biology, and medicine offers a tremendous amount of hope to all of us, but especially to those who are living in fear of death by "the rona".  

Here's the deal.  Food is the language of our cells.  Every single bite is information to our bodies.  Every single bite delivers information that turns on or turns off genetic expression.  Maybe you are among those who are suffering from type 2 diabetes or obesity - right now, your body has those switches flipped on.  But it doesn't have to stay that way!

When we think of making a difference in our bodies by changing our diets, many of us think that it takes months or years of nonstop suffering and kale to see effects.  We think with targets out that far away, it's not even worth it - there's no hope.  It will take too long and it will cost us too much joy.  Weight loss may be something that does take a while, especially if you don't have a lot of testosterone and if you are over 40.  But weight loss is not the same as genetic expression.

All of this means that you can do something about it.  It means that you can drastically cut (or increase) your risk of death by the novel coronavirus.  It is not an unknown monster hiding in the closet.  It is not Russian roulette.  You have access to actions that can decrease or increase your risk of death.

Every single bite you take makes a difference.  Every. Single. Bite.  Within two weeks, your body will begin reflecting significant change in genetic expression.  You may not see that in weight loss and you may not see instant toned abs and a six-pack, but at a level that you cannot see, change is happening and it is drastic. 

Type 2 diabetes and obesity can be changed drastically with diet.  It is a wonderful, glorious, and hopeful fact!  It is not easy and there is no magic pill to take, but it will bring results that you will be thankful for.  

If you find yourself in this position and you want to make change, I urge you to do a few things that will significantly affect your genetic expression, pushing you farther and farther away from risk in each bite that you take.

1.  Only eat real food.  

This sounds dumb, but most food in the grocery store isn't real food.  I mean that you should be eating only fruits, vegetables, meats/fish/poultry, and very minimally processed dairy.  You should not be eating food that comes out of a box.  You should not eat foods that have bright colors.  Eat food that grew on trees, grew out of the ground, walked on the ground, swam in the water, and is recognized in nature.  

Cereal is not real food.  Tortilla chips are not real food.  Granola bars are not real food.  At least, none of those are real food for this purpose.  Eat only real food that you put together to make other food, not food that a factory made for you. 

Yeah, I know.  I lost you when I spoke disparagingly about tortilla chips, but since this is a life or death kind of thing, I'm going to tell it to you straight because you need to hear it and because you really can change your life.

2.  Avoid sugar and carbs like the plague.

You already know this, especially if you have diabetes - sugar cranks up your levels like crazy and makes you get into a downward spiral for insulin sensitivity.  That's the problem and that pushes you deeper into metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes, and obesity.  

The other thing is that sugar destroys the good guys in  your immune system and paralyzes them.  That's the last thing you need when there is a psycho virus on the loose.

This includes liquid sugar (which is the absolute worst of all) - soda, juice, energy drinks, and coffee drinks that pretend to be coffee but are actually just dessert.  It includes cookies, cakes, pies, candy, ice cream, and every single thing that you love.  (I know.  I'm just going for it all today, aren't I?  Sorry, not sorry.  I will risk hurting your feelings if it will save your life.)

Bread?  Nope.  Not right now.  Not for you.  Pasta?  Sorry, it's not on your team, either.  I wish they were.  I get it, I really do.

If you don't hate me yet, I'll get you with this - alcohol.  You probably should significantly limit that, also.  

3.  If you have type 2 diabetes, you should consider looking into intermittent fasting.

That looks like eating within an 8 hour window in a day.  This helps regulate insulin levels significantly. 

Here are some things that you should be doing:

1.  If you're not taking zinc, you're out of your mind and you need to get on that immediately.  Research is coming out solidly showing how zinc works with your immune system to fight covid before it can even get in and cause damage. 

2.  Drink your water.  Hydration is huge for helping your body work optimally.

3.  Get outside and get vitamin D on your skin.  This is huge for fighting this virus.

4.  Exercise at least 150 minutes a week.  Go.  This is not for vanity anymore.  This is to save your life. 

5.  Take and eat probiotics.  This includes naturally fermented foods like brined sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, miso, tempeh.  You can also take it in supplement form.  These not only help digestion and weight loss, they boost your immune system.

I know that many of these things are hard.  I know that reading through this might feel like I am a huge jerk who is raining on every fun party that ever existed in the history of the world.  I understand why you would think that - these changes are difficult! Not drinking wine and whiskey while simultaneously having to suddenly homeschool your children is for some a rather monumental task.

But lovelies, difficult is not impossible.  You can do this.  And with the risk that is out there, you owe it to yourself and to your family to have a fighting chance and to get yourself out of those categories that push you much closer to death.

Feeling out of control and hopeless is a very disturbing place to be.  Certainly life comes with wild things and we cannot control everything, but with what we know and understand of this virus, there are some helpful things that can be done to mitigate significant risk.

Let us not panic.  Take charge and do something about it.  If you are concerned with the death rate, begin taking action that will separate you from being a person of high risk.  

Do hard things.  We're in this together and I'm cheering for your success.

You've got this,
Ms. Daisy

The worst sick ever.

I am slowly wading out of the worst sickness I've ever had in my entire life.  I would say it felt like a cross between the plague and ebola.  But worse.  But probably not actually, but for me it sure did.  

I would describe it as what most people call the "flu", but I have a friend who is an infectious disease specialist and she said that the flu really is lethargy, sore throat, and fever.  Um, no.  Those - and I can be VERY clear on this - were NOT even remotely my symptoms.  

I would describe my symptoms as what happens when you periodically and involuntarily fall asleep on your cold, hard, bathroom floor and crawl around putting hand towels on your bare skin because you just broke into a sweat five minutes ago, ripped off your sweating clothes and now are freezing, but can't put your clothes back on 1) because of the effort it would entail, 2) because you probably puked on them somewhere, and 3) because they are waaaaaay over there (definition: anything farther than directly in front of you).  

But then you get a great idea to fill up the hot water bottle that is (luckily) there in the bathroom so you could get warm, unfortunately getting up onto your knees to reach your arm into the sink and see if the water is hot also makes you puke, and you have to abort mission and go back to your faithful position sitting dejectedly in front of your toilet.  When you get enough determination to fill that stupid water bottle up again, you get too tired holding it up, so you yank it away and put the top on it, realizing too late it has only about 3 oz. of tepid water in it.  BUT WHO CARES, because you are freezing your butt off now and clinging to it like a delirious mother gripping an infant in the middle of a nuclear war zone in a distorted, twitching fetal position.  You wish blankets would magically appear, but then you consider that that would mean doing so much laundry (a blanket touching the TOILET??!) that you realize it is far better to suffer and convulse on the tile floor.  (Yet you have - ironically? - no problem at all using your luxurious blankie [hand towel] as a quasi-pillow directly on top of the toilet seat lid.)  

What could be worse?  

Oh, but then you find out.  Don't ever even wonder that question in the throes of such things, my dears!  

Your guts decide that they have had enough of doing just one thing at a time, so they want to multitask that puppy of a germ out of you.  Yes, that's right!  Gastro-intestinal multitasking.  That picture is really cute and it looks like you, now seated on the toilet, gripping a bucket in your lap, closing your eyes and praying for Jesus to come back and take you to heaven right now.  You get to repeat this exact same multitasking project every five to fifteen minutes for 3 hours, as if the first 2 hours of the toilet hugging were not fun enough for you, because DANG IT, your guts want you to know that they are hard-working and efficient!!  

At 2:00 a.m., you imagine that you literally could not possibly have a single ounce of anything left inside your whole body, so you crawl in droopy sluglike fashion to your bed, whereupon you realize that you are still freezing cold and just lay there shaking while your legs have their own mini-seizures independent of you, which mostly just irritates you because you are SO. DANG. TIRED.  

Finally, you fall asleep, mostly in order that you can wake up every single hour for no reason, except to think of how thirsty you are, and start dreaming about drinking the amount of water that is in one of those Gatorade coolers that they dump on coaches when they win the Rose Bowl.  After the fourth time waking up for this reason, you realize you really ought to get a drink because JUST MAYBE you MIGHT be dehydrated or something.  But it's all the waaaay over theeere and how can you drink without lifting your head up?  Can you pour a cup sideways into your mouth?  Let's try it.  Not super successful, but good enough, and who cares, this drool of water isn't anything compared to the tornado of chaos that you left the night before in messes.  

The next day comes.  You're supposed to do stuff.  

Yeah.  Right.  Bite me, stuff.  

Whatever those children were doing for that entire day, you are not sure, but they sounded like they were probably fine (the coma-like state you were in prevented you from deciphering reality and dream world, anyway, so it's anybody's guess).  I mean, they can make sandwiches and everything, so they can totes survive a day!  There was no getting out of bed that day.  No lifting of the head.  Just the lovely alteration between being drenched in your own puddle of sweat and freezing your guts off to pass the time.  The night came again, and so hey, why not sleep some more.  Sleeping for 30 hours is always the pinnacle of success for winners, that's what I've always heard, so blam - go for it!  

do not drown, lifeguard cannot hold breath long enough to save you

Alas, what a winner I am.  (I'm like the kind of winner who tries to win warm up at a practice.)

But hey, on a positive note, I found a great way to get that BMI down to 17.9 and it's all natural and organic!  It does have some bad side-effects (as described previously) but I mean, come on, think of the benefits.  Obvs.  

Now, coming out of it, my house seems to have creatively rearranged itself (Question: how is it that the people who have lived here for their entire lives don't know where things go?  Does this seem weird to anyone else?  And I'm totally not bashing my hubby, because he held up the fort.  I meant the offsprings.  Baffling.).  

Anyway, I'm going to go wash some door knobs and take another nap.  

Peace, love, and someone should totally invent a cozy bathroom bed (bet it would just sell like hotcakes!),
Ms. Daisy

Don't Get Sick!

'Tis the season for sick to swirl amongst the masses.  With many family gatherings (and you have no idea what "many" is until you've met my peeps) and work parties, and boogery sniffling children at church who sneeze on the people in the pew in front of them - you have quite the chances of exposing yourself to utter plethoras of germy wonders.  Why just last week, I got to hold a small actively barfing child.  It's pretty much everywhere.

Must.  Resist. 

Must.   Stop.  The.  Germs.

But how?

Well, I am not a doctor, although I pretty much pretend that I am, and in fact, at certain points in time I feel that I am at least 70% more awesomer (this grammatical structure is nearly proof of it RIGHT THERE) than doctors, so take my little plan of wonders however you want to take it.

But I digress.

Okay, so last week I was exposed to the boogery-est, most coughing in your face offsprings, and as I previously mentioned, as an extra bonus, I got to hold onto a barfing little.   (Please mail all Awesome Mom Awards right this way.)  I was pretty much bathing in germs, wearing them on my clothes, styling my hair with them, pushing them into my eyes and drinking them (tastes great with kombucha and chia seeds).  Now it is okay to occasionally get sick, but it is not okay to get sick when you are supposed to have a weekend of double parties and host twenty something people in your eleven square foot house.  You have to be legit healthy and halfway to crae crae with energy.  I needed all of my faculties and then half of someone else's to pull this off.  No sicky allowed!

What to do?

I pretty much went ballistic with every single immune boosting thing I could possibly think of.  Let me share the list.

I started feeling the tickle thing in the back of my throat and then the weakness and the cold sweaty thing and I "oh no you didn't-ed" right over to my awesome non-pharmaceutical medicine cabinet and started with Cold Calm and a few squirts of Sovereign Silver.  I popped Cold Calm every twenty minutes or so for two hours and I started feeling better - just in time for party #1 with the divas.  I then proceeded to drink boiling water poured over chopped ginger, half a squeezed lemon, and a spoonful of raw honey (which probably wasn't "raw" anymore after I dunked it in that hot of water.  Yeah.).  Now you can't just waste that ginger, you gotta eat those spicy bits.  Down the hatch.  Luckily, my dear sweet friend made a turkey and she had roasted an entire bulb of garlic - so I threw a clove of that down the hatch too.  Breath what?

The next day was filled with organic food sourced vitamin C, homemade chicken broth, more garlic, more ginger and a nap.

I was feeling better and better.  I think I floated over and past the coughing, boogery wonders, and then the feeling in the stomach hit me.

Oh crap.

No-no-no-no-no-no-no to the exponential infinity power.  It was T-minus twenty hours until the party at my house.  Stress + lack of sleep = lowered immune system = I am in trouble.  I was not going to restore loads of energy because there were still a pile of things to do (um, throw self across the floor playing volleyball in a league full of uber-competitive players, for one) and clean the house.  This. Cannot.  Be.  Happening.  WhatamIgonnado?

Don't panic.  Eat a pile of ginger, drink a giant bottle of Kevita coconut kefir, and alternate chugging down the kombucha.  Basically, ingest every probiotic possible.  And pray to God for help.

God helped.

So far, I've made it out okay.  If you ever are starting to feel sick, that is the time that you should boost your immunity, increase your probiotics, and consider it a serious job to get yourself some true nutrition (and see your food as serious instead of for fun - no sugar, just nutrient dense goodies). 

Here's my quick cheat sheet for some suggestions to think about if you come across any of the common winter yucks.

Sore throat:
- Sovereign silver squirts in the throat (Seriously?  You don't have this yet?  Run.)   
- shots of organic apple cider vinegar (with water if ya' ain't manly enough to take it straight) - and then slam down your cup and make a breathy, growly, manly sound while squinting your eyes in a way that may or may not be considered dramatically necessary
- gargle a mixture of hot water, salt, and vinegar
- netipot (stainless steel preferred, let's not BPA the inside of your brains) in case you have nasal drainage, which affects your throat
- up the Vitamin C dose (>1000 mg/daily)
- no sugar in your diet until it's gone (don't give the bad guys bullets)

Stuffy nose:
- netipot (mine is here )
- Sinu-orega nasal spray (HOLY COW this works.)

- sniff at eucalyptus and peppermint essential oils
- no sugar in your diet until it's gone
- homemade chicken broth with onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and celtic grey sea salt

Yucky stomach:
- drink a mazillion ounces of kombucha (this is an approximate dosage)
- alternate with a bazillion ounces of coconut kefir (also approximate)
- chomp up some whole ginger bits
- avoid high fat/dairy or whatever else makes you feel worse
- Bieler broth (steamed green beans, zucchini, parsley and celery with the water it steamed in, dropped in a blender until it is green soup mush)

The best way to float over the sickies is to have a good immune system in the first place.  Keep exercising, eating well, getting enough sleep (>8 hours per night), and having a positive attitude.

In no time at all, you'll be up for secretly (or overtly) racing the other people in the pool and on the sidewalks.

Peace, love, and have some more garlic,
Ms. Daisy