Tag Archives: july 2017

Whole Beauty: The Holistic Body

By Halcyon

Whole Beauty took a break while we introduced you to new features, but it’s back in force now! In this issue, Halcyon delves deeper into the nuances of holistic care. Please remember that it’s always advised to discuss changes in your regimen with your doctor or other health care provider, as he or she will be in the best position to address not only your personal needs and special concerns, but also the safety of alternative treatments, as herbs and supplements may interact not only with medications, but also each other – however, if you’re interested in holistic care, we hope this article will provide you with some opening discussion points!

The Holistic Body

In this edition, we’ll look at ways in which the entire body can be treated naturally. These methods are also known as alternative healing or alternative body treatment, and may include:

• Eating Whole Foods
• Acupuncture
• Aromatherapy
• Cupping
• Juicing
• Vitamin Therapy

Allopathic vs Holistic

Allopathic (traditional) medicine focuses on attacking one particular symptom. For example, if you have an allergy, the allopathic approach would be to suppress your body’s immune system to stop the sneezing (ex. giving an antihistamine). The problem with this is that sneezing is your body’s defense mechanism, ridding your body of harmful toxins. Suppress that sneezing and the toxins will go deeper, causing greater harm to your body in the long run. However, the holistic method treats the person as a whole by trying to combat symptoms without suppressing the immune system (source: www.joyfulhomesteading.com).

Let me give you a brief glimpse into why some of these holistic methods are advantageous to your health and why you may want to give it a try.

Whole Foods

I could write an entire series of articles on the benefits of whole foods and why we should be eating them, but for the purpose of this article, we’re just going to cover Powerful Food Combos (source: www.lauraconrad.com).

10 Powerful Food Combos

• Tomato + Avocado = Fights Cancer
• Sweet Potato + Coconut Oil = Healthy Skin
• Oatmeal + Peanut butter = All Day Energy
• Black Beans + Lime = Healthy Lungs
• Apples + Dark Chocolate = Heart Health
• Almonds = Yogurt = Bone Strength
• Hard Boiled Eggs + Banana = Energy Boost
• Lemon + Kale = Muscle Strength
• Kombucha + Cashews = Immunity Boost
• Garlic + Salmon = Anti-inflammatory

Acupuncture: Five Reasons To Give It A Try

• Head: 20 sessions of electroacupuncture (where a small electronic current is applied to the needle) can reduce the number of monthly migraines.
• Immune System: Well placed needles can boost immune activity and cells and destroy infections.
• Sleep: Acupuncture can rev up the production of neurotransmitters associated with relaxation and sleep, helping with those with insomnia.
• Weight: Acupuncture helped obese adults shed up to 9lbs over a span of 2 weeks to 4 months.
• Back: About 10 sessions of needling was found to retrieve lower back discomfort for 6 months.

Aromatherapy

This is a type of holistic treatment aimed at the physical body and soul. It includes healing with both scent (aroma) and touch (body massage).

Scent triggers an area in the brain called the limbic system. When stimulated, the limbic system releases endorphins and other “feel-good” chemicals. You can achieve this effect through either direct inhalation or diffusion.

Aromatherapy also works through the absorption of essential oils by the skin and into the blood stream. The best way to experience this is through massage therapy, which sometimes combines carrier oils with specific essential oils.

Five Ways Aromatherapy Can Help You

• Relaxation and stress relief
• Create balance and well-being
• Boost immune system, respiratory and circulation system
• Enhance mood
• Aid cardiovascular system and digestive system.

Five Ways To Utilize Aromatherapy

• Bath
• Compress
• Massage
• Inhalation
• Diffusion

Three Of My Favorite Oils

• Lavender: Improves cognitive performance as well as mood. It has also long been known for its mild sedative and calming effects.
• Lemon Oil: Has some anti-depressant type effects, making it a good choice for stress relief and elevating mood. Some also say it can help improve focus.
• Rosemary: With its distinctively woody fragrance, rosemary has been used for centuries for a variety of health and beauty benefits from mental clarity to skin care. My favorite use for rosemary is for migraine. Apply directly to the temples and forehead, or cup oiled hands to your face and breathe in.

Editor’s Note: Essential oils are highly concentrated, packing many compounds into small doses. Even those originating from edible sources may become toxic at the levels found in pure oils, resulting in anything from skin irritation to acute poisoning. Because of this, nearly all essential oils must be diluted with a carrier oil as mentioned above. Please do your research to be sure you’re using essential oils safely!

Cupping – What Exactly Is It?

Cupping is essentially a form of body therapy that uses suction from the cups to achieve the desired result. This stimulates blood flow and provides many other health benefits. There are two methods of cupping:

• In a single area (static cupping).
• By moving the cup around to several places (similar to massage, but with the addition of suction).

Does It Work?

In the theoretical sense of what cupping does and how it is performed, it makes sense that cupping can reduce pain and support healing. However, when it comes to clinical evidence, things are inconclusive. There have been few quality, large-scale trials, and it is difficult to use information from trials because the focus on a collective group may ignore individual differences. This means that while cupping may work for someone with tight back muscles or a herniated disc, it may not be as effective for someone with sciatica or joint problems, but the trials do not look at those specific differences.

A Few Of The Benefits Of Cupping

• Release illness-causing stagnation: Allergies and colds are often said to be a result of stagnation of the lungs. The darker the color of the cupping mark, the more stagnation is released.
• Pain and inflammation: As massage techniques manipulate blood flow to muscles to release trigger points and flush out inflammation, cupping therapy can do the same for areas of the body with less fatty tissue, like the back and shoulders.
• Increase circulation and speed healing: Cupping can sometimes stimulate blood and lymph flow to areas of stagnant injury.

Juicing

Experts recommend at least six to eight servings of fruist and vegetables a day. Sadly, most of us don’t get that amount regularly. It’s not necessarily because we don’t like it, but because busy schedules often mean we’re eating on the run. There is also, in some cases, an inability to wolf down that amount of fruit and greens in one sitting. Juicing to the rescue!

• Juicing allows more nutrients to be absorbed without throwing a huge monkey wrench of fiber into the works for you to digest. If you struggle with IBS or IBS-D, then you understand what I am talking about.
• Similarly, juicing helps to lower blood sugar by allowing you to consume more fruits and vegetables without overloading your digestive system.
• You may be able to consume a wider range of vegetables, which allows your body to get more nutrients.
• Juicing helps fight cancer. Okay, I’m in no way saying it cures cancer, but it can only help your overall health and definitely boosts your intake of the antioxidants known to be cancer fighters. Besides, prevention is better than a cure!
• Juicing is great for lowering cholesterol. There’s much more involved to lowering cholesterol than juicing alone, but if you include it in a diet of no saturated fat, no beef, and no pork, while adding more fruits, oats, seafood, and chicken, it can provide further assistance.

Vitamin Therapy (AKA Vitamin Drips)

This delivers vitamins, minerals, and amino acids directly to the body for maximum absorption at a cellular level that would not be tolerated orally. Some benefits include:

• Increases energy
• Aids weight loss
• Improves mood
• Decreases anxiety
• Improves chronic pain and migraine
• Boosts the immune system
• May help PMS

I hope some of these ideas and methods for treating your body holistically have helped, and if so, that it gives you a start to setting you on a path for a healthier and happier life!

Food Drive

By Stabz

The line for the food bank is longer today. It’s a quarter to six and the windows aren’t even open yet, but there are already a good forty, fifty people ahead of us, and I can’t begin to guess how many behind. I heard the trucks last night, dropping off another load of needy fuckers. They don’t even turn off their engines anymore – it’s just pull up, idle while the gates roll back, and peel out as fast as possible once the last feet hit the ground.

You’d think they’re afraid of us.

Beside me, Janie whimpers, hugging her chest. I know she’s hoping we’ll get a donor meal today. It’s been a while since we’ve had one. They’ve never been easy to come by, but these days, it’s just as likely the bank’ll run out before we even get to the window as that they won’t have any at all.

The fence rattles and a spray of snow hits my sleeve. When I turn to look, there are a pair of boys parked on the other side, their bikes teetering dangerously as they scoop up another handful of the white stuff. Ten? Twelve? It’s hard to tell. They’re bundled up. One cocks an arm, ready to let his arsenal fly, while the other leers and jeers.

“Get a job, ya zom-bums!”

Janie grits her teeth. I start to tell her it’s not worth it, but then I realize that’s not worth it, either. They’re old enough to know better, but still young enough to blindly repeat what they’ve heard their parents say. Lazy, draining our resources, a plague on society; a plague, a plague, a plague. But what do they expect?

Zombies aren’t allowed to work.

I don’t know who first started calling us that, but I guess it makes sense. What do zombies do? Shamble around mindlessly looking for brains. And what do we do?

Well, it depends on when you got infected, and where you are in the course of the disease.

The idea of a zombie virus has been around forever, but not quite like this. For one, we’re not dead – and when we do die? We stay dead. We’re still infectious, though, which is why no one gets buried anymore – no one can prove without a shadow of a doubt that they’re clean, even if they’re not showing symptoms, so it’s straight to the crematorium. No autopsies, no embalming, no funerals. If you’re still on the outside, you might get a memorial service with a portrait and some pretty flowers, though probably not an urn. But in here? No one remembers you. No one wants to remember you, because no one knows what to do.

It’s a prion disorder. The same as mad cow or chronic wasting disease. All it takes is for one protein in your brain to fold the wrong way – the rest copy it like rich girls with new purses, and that’s it. Your grey matter turns to sponge and your sponge turns to mush. But there’s a period in there where some deep animal instinct takes over, screaming brains brains brains, gotta have some brains. As best anyone can figure, it’s like a cat eating grass or a horse licking salt – your body knows it needs something even if your conscious mind doesn’t. In this case, it’s healthy prions, and they’re not even a cure – all they do is stave off the inevitable end that much longer. But when a twitching, staggering lunatic grabs you by the neck and starts trying to pop off your head so they can scoop out your skull like a Saturday morning cereal bowl, well – What are most people going to think?

You don’t have to be bitten to contract it, either. All you need is to come into contact with someone who’s shedding those misfolded prions. That’s the reason for the camps – to keep the sickies separated from the rest of the populace. But it only does so much good. You don’t start showing symptoms right away, and by the time you realize you’ve got a craving for cranium, it’s too late.

There’s a groan from the head of the line, and Janie sobs into her mittens. No donor meals today – it’ll be the canned stuff, sheep or pork or even beef. You wouldn’t find beef brains on anyone else’s plate now, for fear of mad cow, but for us? It doesn’t matter. We’re already there.

It’s not as good, though – and I’m not talking about the taste; I’m talking sheer nutrition. That’s what makes donor meals so important. A human brain needs human prions. It’s no different than any other organ that has to be replaced – sure, you can rig a pig heart or a dialysis machine to get you by for a while, but in the end, you need a transplant from your own kind. The longer you have to go without, the faster you go downhill. So there’s a new box you can tick off when you go to renew your driver’s license – Donate Heart? Lungs? Kidneys? Brain? It’s been harder for people to come to terms with, though, because the brain is so strongly associated with all the things that make you you. It’s one thing to know you’re giving away a lump of cells that’s going to save a life. It’s another to imagine someone shoving your very being into their mouth, knowing that in the long run, it won’t even do any good.

I know, because I didn’t check that box.

It wouldn’t make a difference now if I had.

Janie needs it more than I do, because she’s had the disease longer than I have. It gets a little more obvious every day – a little hollower in the cheeks, a little more white around the eyes; the twitch in your hands that turns them into claws, and the wobble that means you’re finally breaking down. And then it’s just the madness – the blind rage that has you lashing out at everything within reach and some things that aren’t, tearing into whatever your hands hit first, feasting on anything with the slightest scent of blood and meat. After that, they drag you to the heart of the camps, where you and everyone else in the final stages can rip each other apart. They can’t put you down, see, because zombie or not, you’re not an animal. You’re still human, in the most base and pathetic way. So they’ll let you die in your own way, your own time, because somehow that’s more dignified.

Fuck that. Give me a bullet right between the eyes, the way all those good old horror flicks taught you.

We reach the window, where they’re handing out already opened cans for the victims who can’t manage a pop-top anymore, and Janie’s shaking so badly she can barely take hold. What’s in the cans is pale, gelatinous, floating in a grey-tinged soup, and I know that Janie’s going to gag on it, because she does every day. It’s worse when she brings it all the way back up and has to choke it down again because there’s not enough for second servings, though. It’s not even that it’s brains – it’s that it’s an animal’s brain, and she was a goddamn vegan before all this started. She actually does better with the donor meals, because she knows whoever gave it, gave it willingly.

Me, I grew up southern and poor. Momma fed us feet and gizzards and tongue and tripe, and when we had a pig for butchering at the family reunion, someone would whip up liver’n’lights, and to the old folks, that was a feast fit for a king. I guess I ought to be grateful, because the dis- has come right off and now I’ve just got an advantage.

I gotta tell you, though, I envy the vampires down at the blood bank something fierce. Those anemic bastards get a donor meal every damn day.

New Releases

July

Accel World Vs. Sword Art Online (PS4, Vita) – July 7
Gorn (Steam Early Access – PC) – July 10
Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age (PS4) – July 11
Black the Fall (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – July 11
Serial Cleaner (PS4, Xbox One, PC – July 11
Defenders of Ekron (PC, PS4) – July 11
Minecraft: Story Mode – Season 2 Episode 1: Hero In Residence (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – July 11
The End is Nigh (PC) – July 12
Destiny 2 Beta Early Access (PS4) – July 18
Orcs Must Die Unchained (PS4) – July 18
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles – (PC, PS4) – July 18
Destiny 2 Beta Early Access (Xbox One) – July 19
Splatoon 2 (Switch) – July 21
Destiny 2 Open Beta (PS4, Xbox One) – July 21
Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star (PC, Switch) – July 25
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire (PS4, Vita) – July 25
Nioh Defiant Honor DLC (PS4) – July 25
Pyre (PC, PS4) – July 25
Fortnite Paid Early Access (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – July 25
Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (PC) – July 27
Namco Museum (Switch) – July 28
Hey Pikmin (3DS) – July 28
2DS XL console launch – July 28

August

The Long Dark full release (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 1
Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 8
Tacoma (PC, Xbox One) – August 8
Ark: Survival Evolved full release (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 8
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (PC, PS4) – August 8
LawBreakers (PC, PS4) – August 8
StarCraft Remastered (PC) – August 14
Agents of Mayhem (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 15
Sonic Mania (PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One) – August 15
Matterfall (PS4) – August 15
Cities: Skylines (PS4) – August 15
Conan Exiles – Xbox Game Preview (Xbox One) – August 16
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (Uncharted 4 standalone DLC) (PS4) – August 22 NA, August 23 EU
F1 2017 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 25
One Piece Unlimited World Red (PC, PS4, Switch) – August 25 EU/ September
Call of Duty: WW2 private beta (PS4) – August 25
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Legacy (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 25
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Trilogy (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 25
Warriors All-Stars (PC, PS4) – August 29
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (Switch) – August 29
Hello Neighbor (PC, Xbox One) – August 29
Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition (PS4, Xbox One) – August 29
Dead Alliance (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 29
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen Expansion (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 29
Absolver (PC, PS4) – August 29
Yakuza Kiwami (PS4) – August 29
Everybody’s Golf (PS4) – August 29
Life is Strange: Before the Storm – Episode One (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – August 31
Axiom Verge: Multiverse Edition (PS4, Vita, Wii U, Switch) – August
Madden NFL 18 (PS4, Xbox One) – August
Hidden Dragon Legend (PS4) – August
Hearthstone – Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion (PC, Mobile) – August (unconfirmed as of now)

September

Knack 2 (PS4) – September 5
Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth (PS4, Vita) – September 5
Destiny 2 (PS4, Xbox One) – September 6
Monster Hunter Stories (3DS) – September 8 (EU)
PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) 2018 (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One) – September 12
Divinity: Original Sin 2 Full Release (PC) – September 14
Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS) – September 15
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – September 15
Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite – (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – September 19
NBA 2K18 (PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One) – September 19
Pokken Tournament DX (Switch) – September 22
Project Cars 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) – September 22
Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2 (Switch) – September 22
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (PC, PS4, Vita) – September 26
Blue Reflection (PC, PS4) – September 26
Cuphead (PC, Xbox One) – September 29
Nintendo SNES Classic Mini console launch – September 29
Total War: Warhammer 2 (PC) – September 29
FIFA 18 (PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One) – September 29
Gundam Versus (PS4) – September 29
NBA Live 18 (PS4, Xbox One) – September
Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy 15 (PSVR) – September