The Irritable Bowel Syndrome Sourcebook
Laura O’Hare
Contemporary Books (a division of McGraw-Hill)
Published 2001
Excerpt Chapter 6
Stress Strategies
Walking
No other exercise is better for you than the one you can do anytime, anywhere, if you’re blessed enough to have the use of your legs: walking. Walking may be the most natural of exercises imaginable, but you wouldn’t know it from the articles, videos, and instructors detailing how to do it. Chin up, arms bent and pumping, heel-toe-heel-toe – no doubt these instructions provide optimum cardiac benefit, but they may also take some of the fun out of your daily stroll and diminish some of its less obvious stress relievers.
I love to walk in my Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Clearly the uphill climb does good things for my lower body, but it’s the benefit to my mood that I really miss when I can’t take my usual outing. No matter how tense I am, by the time I’ve enjoyed the many distractions of my walk – observing the improvements on my neighbor’s property; greeting the local dogs; or hearing snatches of music and conversation floating out of open windows – I’ve relaxed and begun to find some perspective on my troubles and my day.
This is the kind of walk I’m suggesting – the kind that frees your mind as well as moves your body. The walk can last fifteen minutes or an hour. It can take place indoors or out. All it requires is good shoes; comfortable clothes that are appropriate for the weather; some water, and, if your walk is going to be long, a snack.
To really reap the calming benefits of a good walk, include the following:
- Seek solitude. This is not the time for rehashing problems, comparing symptoms, dishing the dirt, or trying to adjust to someone else’s mood. Make your walk a time to let your mind wander, and allow yourself to be happily distracted. If you are just not comfortable being alone, try to find someone of like mind – someone willing to be quiet and open to the sights and sounds around the two of you.
- Put the concept of exercise out of your mind. Forget about heart rate, weight loss, and all the other buzzwords that have become associated with aerobic activity. Instead, focus on the pleasure and good fortune you enjoy from being able to put one foot in front of the other. Dawdle when you feel like it, and move faster when you feel a burst of energy. Take a moment to appreciate the genius that is the human body, as well as the gift of your ability to take a good walk.
- Look for beauty. Even the grittiest urban neighborhood has undiscovered treasures that most people pass by every day. When you start noticing the unexpected rose bush, the beautiful antique ironwork on an otherwise rundown building, the loveliness of kids playing in a schoolyard, you stop focusing on – and fretting over – your life’s everyday problems and as a result feel more relaxed and less stressed.
- Visit someplace you’ve been meaning to go. It could be the beach, or a block of historic buildings, or a park you haven’t been to since childhood. Walk, take your time, and really look around. Not only will you have a wonderful and relaxing outing, but you’ll also fulfill a wish – maybe a small one, but rewarding nonetheless. You will have one more positive experience that helps reduce stress and promotes well-being.
- Walk like a child. Kids see things we don’t. Partly it’s their size – the hedge we tower over offers children hiding places, potential pets, and a wealth of stimuli for active imaginations. But more than that, they don’t have our pressures of time or responsibility. If you don’t remember how children view the world, take one on a walk with you. Don’t pull her along; adjust to her pace. She’ll teach you a great deal about the joys of staying in the moment.
- Leave the iPod at home. Your walk isn’t just about exercising your body, it’s also about the relaxation that comes from keeping your mind and eyes open, enjoying the peacefulness of a neighborhood in the early morning or the hustle and bustle of the afternoon. Headphones, even those playing your favorite music or books on tape, keep the world out. You then lose the many distractions and delights it has to offer.
The Power of Pyruvate
Ronald T. Stanko, M.D. and Laura O’Hare
Keats Publishing, 1999
Excerpt Chapter 2
Secret Weapon Against Free Radicals
One of the most exciting discoveries about pyruvate is its ability to scavenge and stop the production of free radicals. To fully understand the significance of this discovery, you need to understand what free radicals are and how they affect you.
Free radicals is a term that’s probably familiar to you. You may have recently read an article linking free radicals to heart attacks, or heard a talk show discussion during which experts hypothesized that free radicals contribute to the development of cancer and other diseases. Familiarity, however, is not the same things as understanding. Because you’re constantly bombarded with new information and terminology, it may still be unclear exactly what a free radical is and what it does.
What is a Free Radical?
Humans must take in oxygen constantly to survive: In this chemical process, oxygen, along with the food we eat, is turned into energy. During this positive conversion, an intermediate and undesirable product is created. This product is an unstable oxygen molecule (O*), or free radical, as opposed to O2. While the other, properly processed oxygen molecules go on to serve your body, the unstable free radical molecules head out to create havoc. Most free radicals don’t work to build up your body; they work to break it down. Like most radicals, they can attack anywhere.
So why are most of us healthy despite the daily production of free radicals? Because the body, with uncanny knowledge, naturally produces free radical neutralizers.
Antioxidants: The Free Radical Scavenger
Antioxidant is yet another term that may be familiar to you. Commercials exhort consumers to take antioxidant supplements to safeguard against disease; dieticians lecture on the importance of antioxidants, touting them as one more reason to eat a balanced diet. You’ve gotten the message that you need antioxidants, but do you know exactly what they are? Essentially, antioxidants, is the populist, all-encompassing term for those entities your body uses to rid itself of free radicals. Acting as scavengers, antioxidants essentially try to “gobble up” the free radicals before they escape into your system. Antioxidants exist in the body at all times. Many are vitamins, which explains why some vitamin supplements are now labeled antioxidant. Pyruvate is an antioxidant.
In a healthy person, antioxidants consume most of the free radicals created every day, and most of the remaining free radicals are apparently handled by our systems without causing any visible damage. However, when free radical production increases or the body’s scavenging ability is reduced, the excess radicals roaming about the body can start to do damage and can do it very quickly. Free radicals have been associated with everything from heart disease and inflammatory diseases (such as infections, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus), to DNA breakdown possibly leading to cancer. If free radicals are associated with a multitude of diseases, it stands to reason that control of these free radicals might reverse certain diseases and, even better, prevent disease.
Now that we know this, commercials for antioxidant supplements start to make sense. How better to make sure free radical production doesn’t get out of hand to guarantee we’ve always got plenty of antioxidant scavengers on hand to fight them? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Once an oxygen molecule has become unstable, it becomes the very definition of that word. It goes where it wants, it attacks where it wants, and getting it in check is not as easy as you’d hope. Also, the fact that there is no visible free radical damage does not mean that the body is 100 percent normal. Cancer and heart disease, for example, do not develop overnight.
Excerpt Chapter 2
Q & A: Free Radicals
If antioxidants such as vitamins E and C are proven free radical scavengers, why haven’t they yet tested successfully in the treatment of disease?
The problem probably lies not only with the antioxidants themselves but also with our continued ignorance of exactly how to use them. We may be asking vitamin C to do a job that only vitamin E can do. With pyruvate, this might not be a consideration. We don’t have to figure out how best to attack free radicals with pyruvate around – it has already stopped them from forming! The difference between pyruvate and other antioxidants is that other antioxidants come into play once a free radical has been formed, while pyruvate actually stops the free radical from forming at all (as well as scavenging once its shown up).
Sample “Careers in Criminology”
Ghostwriter
Credited author Marilyn Morgan
Lowell House, 2000
Excerpt Chapter Four
Keeping a Nation Safe
“The FBI”
Given the status and respect afforded today’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it’s difficult to imagine that its earliest incarnation in 1908 was as a minor one. Originally an unnamed force of special agents (appointed by then-Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte under President Theodore Roosevelt), the squad was created to relieve the Secret Service of lesser federal investigations such as bankruptcy fraud and neutrality and antitrust violations. It took two legislative actions designed to inhibit vice, and a man whose mission in life was to catalogue the vices of others, J. Edgar Hoover, to bring what we now know as the FBI to the prominence it holds today. The Mann Act of 1910 made it illegal to transport women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” while ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment made alcohol illegal (popularly known as Prohibition).
The Rise of the Modern-Day FBI
America was a mass of contradictions in the 1920s. Wild Jazz Age youth flouted the temperance-obsessed promoters of Prohibition; money flowed on Wall Street while hard times hit rural areas promoting racism and the Ku Klux Klan; and citizens who never before would have broken the law were selling liquor to gangsters. In the midst of this chaos, the then-title Bureau of Investigation flourished. Public outrage over the expansion of organized crime (which, ironically, was funded largely by the monies made violating Prohibition) resulted in the agency’s 1934 empowerment to do more than investigate, agents could now carry guns and make arrests. In 1935, Hoover was promoted from assistant to director of the FBI, a post he held until his death in 1972.
Hoover, who began his government career in the Library of Congress, used his lifelong love of keeping files on others (a habit he started while keeping diaries as a youth) as a ladder to the top. After a transfer to the job of file clerk in the Justice Department, Hoover was the focus of much attention for tow reasons: he was one of the few young and vital men in Washington, D.C. (most were serving in World War I), and he possessed extraordinary attention to detail combined with an immaculate appearance. He caught the eye of fervent antiradical Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who put him in charge of the General Intelligence Division, an agency charged with seeking out communism. Palmer’s successor, Harry Daugherty, was happy to discover that Hoover was as good at keeping records on the attorney general’s political enemies as he was on anarchists. So Hoover’s rise continued, unabated, until he took over as director of the Bureau of Investigation (the name was changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) under President Coolidge.
Hoover’s tenure started with a clean sweep of the remainders of the corrupt Harding administration. He fired dozens of agents and established standards for spit-and-polish appearance and by-the-book law enforcement that remain to this day. Over the decades the agency has grown in scope as an investigator of espionage, sedition and draft violations during wartime; a watchdog of the Black Panthers of the 1960s and the white supremacists of today; and a monitor of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition to this, the FBI plays a prominent role as the last, and some might say best, line of defense against the worst kind of felons, serial killers, kidnappers, pedophilia rings, and violent criminals who cross the country leaving destruction behind them.
Public scrutiny and revelations of Hoover’s secret files have made today’s FBI a less autonomous and better-reviewed agency than it was under his reign. Still, the agency is not without its detractors. Questions remain about how hundreds of FBI files were transferred into the hands of the then-new Clinton administration’s inexperienced head of security. FBI Chief Louis Freeh found himself the subject of some controversy for his outspoken public support of independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
In most organizations, those in charge deal with politics, and the FBI is no exception. And like most agencies, it is the long-term and often unsung people running the day-to-day functions that make the FBI the effective crime-fighting force it is today.
Restaurant Training Manual Sample
From the moment a guest arrives at the restaurant, we have an opportunity to make a good impression or a bad one. As a general rule, guests arrive planning to have a good time. Consider it a well of good well. To best understand it, imagine these two scenarios:
In the first, the guest arrives, is greeted warmly by the valet. A smiling host quickly locates their reservation. They are led to a table with sparkling glassware and crisp, fresh linen. The server greets them promptly and is able to suggest a reasonably priced glass of wine they’ve never tried before. It’s delicious, as is the coddled egg they begin their meal with. The entrees arrive and one entrée is a little underdone. The server quickly returns it to the kitchen where it is refired and brought back to the table by the manager. The likelihood is that the experience has been so good so far that the guest brushes off the delay as a minor inconvenience and leaves ready to return again soon.
In the second, the guest arrives and waits for the valet who brusquely thrusts the valet ticket at them and zooms off with the car. They come in and wait for the hostess to finish telling the bartender about her date the night before, and then fumbles about before finally locating their reservation. They are led to a table where one of the place settings is missing a knife and there are a few crumbs on the chair. The waiter comes promptly but has little to offer in the way of recommendations. The wine they choose is good, but the glass it comes in is spotted. They order starters but due to the waiter’s lack of knowledge their selections are a little richer than they’d like. Now the entrees arrive and, as before, one is underdone. After a minute or two of trying to get the waiter’s attention they are finally able to get it back to the kitchen. By the time the manager brings the food back to the table he/she is likely to encounter a very unhappy guest, a guest whose reaction may even seem a little over the top. But it wasn’t the one thing, or even any major thing. It was a series of small missteps that added up to a big problem. The restaurant is not likely to be a destination any time soon.
Now, nothing horrible happened. Each negative experience, unfortunately, happens in almost every restaurant almost every day. The cumulative effect, however, is to leave the guest feeling uncared for and cheated – both of the time and the money that they committed to your care for the evening.
