Tell It Tuesday: Between a Rock & a Hard Place? Here's How to Get Away!

20th anniversary of Lenny Kravitz's hit 'Fly Away' 

By Ta-ning Connai

This year marks the 20th Anniversary of a song that broke down barriers between Rock and R&B simply by coining a popular lyric we've all sang at least once or twice in our lives. Lenny Kravitz is the King of Cool and when he brazenly strung his guitar while chanting “I want to get away” back in 1998, he had no idea that both Headbangers and Hip-Hop Heads alike would give homage to the words from Fly Away in over 50+ songs (whew, I literally got tired of counting). And in 2010, he even stumbled upon the Voices of Praise Choir belting out a churchy version on the streets of New Orleans! No, he didn't exactly invent the term, but he sure as heck made it his own. Lenny, you da man!

What about you? Ever feel like getting away? No, I don't mean like a vacay getaway, although that would be nice. I'm talking about getting away from the things that hold you hostage. If I'm talking to you, just keep on listening, I wanna help you solve that problem...

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Have you ever been "between a rock and a hard place?" Oooh chiiiile, I know I sure have! And whenever I think of that well-known expression, the well-known story of Moses and the Red Sea always comes to mind.

When Moses and his enslaved people were given the miraculous news that freedom had finally arrived, they were greeted with an insurmountable obstacle that literally took their breath away. With their ferocious captors chasing behind them and the Red Sea violently tossing before them, it's an understatement to say they were in a jam. Death surrounded them on either side and it was nearly impossible to decide which would be the most painless surrender. It's like choosing between being hung or drowned, being shot or stabbed, falling off of a cliff or breaking a bungee cord! Sorry to be so graphic, but you get my point. And I'm sure we can all agree, all these options suck BIG TIME. Yet there they stood, paralyzed with fear, facing what looked like doom and gloom.

Now here's the confusing part...since God is the one who gave them the ok AND the directions for their Exodus (departure), didn't He know there was a roadblock up ahead??? How in the world were they going to get out of this alive? Well, in Exodus 14 :13, check out what Moses had to say in response to their mass hysteria...

“Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians (enemies/obstacles) whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever. The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.” - Exodus 14: 14-15. Enough said! So they went in the direction of The Promised Land with God's promise in hand.

Egypt was a type and shadow of a tremendous burden that the Israelites had to overcome. Many of them were born into hardship, and had never experienced independence before, let alone had to fight for it. Their mindset was of such that slavery had its perks, while freedom had its struggles and uncertainties. As you can see, it was more than literal chains that had to be broken off of this pitiful little bunch. And that's why God put them between a rock and a hard place. It forced them to trust in Him. His final word of encouragement helped them to KEEP MOVING FORWARD. Now, because of their demonstration of faith, God was willing to perform the greatest miracle ever recorded...the parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14: 21-22).

Sometimes God allows hurdles, haters, bum deals, bad news, problems and even pain to thrust us out of our comfort zone and into the place where He wants us to thrive. The Israelites had to be chased out of Egypt in order for them to get up and go. You'd think they'd be happy to be free, to live in their own land, to provide for themselves. But how many of us stayed "enslaved" even though there were no literal chains keeping us bound? Hey, it happens to the best of us. But now it's time to get away.

So the key is, when you're between that rock and that hard place, go in the direction of God's promise no matter how scary it seems. Get far, far away from things like abuse, unhappiness and mediocrity and run towards the peace, joy and sure reward that God had in mind. When it seems impossible to get away, He can create a way of escape and guide you on a path toward complete freedom and victory, never to return to those old bondages again. Remind yourself of God's love and willingness to help you by reading His book of promises (the Bible). If He can part the Red Sea, what can He NOT do!

In what area of your life could you get away and allow God to pull you through?

TA-NING is a former model and clothing designer who one day got the "call" to leave the fab world of fashion behind. While in Bible College, she discovered her knack for mixing her quirky style of writing with her gift to teach. TA-NING'S TELL IT TUESDAY is a weekly column (originally launched on Facebook) that uses doses of pop culture to tear down the walls of churchy tradition, change the face of Christianity, and present it's message in a lively way. Ta-ning resides in Santa Monica (by way of BK), is obsessed with dogs, and is an old school Hip-Hop junkie!

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Primal Starter: How To Eat Well On Less?

I get frequent requests for ideas on working Primal eating priorities into more frugal budgets, and we’ve done a good number of posts on the topic over the years. It’s one of those issues, however, that deserves more attention because it’s really a significant intersection for Primal “theory” and day-to-day practice. In fact, we’ll be putting together a new resource page this year, however, that brings together more on the subject. For today though, let me share some ideas, and I hope you’ll offer your questions and suggestions, too.

• Learn to cook thriftier cuts of meat to be just as tender and flavorful as more expensive cuts. (We have an upcoming post on this one.)
• Hunt around for sales and stock up whenever something good (organic/grass-fed) reaches a price that works for you. Store in the freezer. Wrap tightly in freezer-safe ziploc bags, making sure to suck out all the air to prevent, or at least limit, freezer burn. Better yet, get a vacuum-sealer.
• Keep your eyes out for Australian or New Zealand lamb (the former is usually pastured if not entirely grass-fed and the latter is almost always grass-fed). Uruguyan, New Zealand, and Australian beef are also widely available and usually grass-fed.
• If you’ve got any friends or family interested, combine your funds to purchase an entire cow, or half or a quarter of one, from a local farm. This is also called cowpooling, so keep your eyes peeled for that term. You can check EatWild.com for local ranches that offer bulk purchases. I’ve also seen bulk purchasing listed on Craigslist.
• Check out farmer’s markets in your area. Even the “non-organic” produce is often organically grown, just without the pricey certification. Don’t be afraid to ask the people manning the stands.
• Skip cold cuts, which are expensive when you consider the actual price per pound, and slice your own whole meats for use in salads, wraps, etc.
• Frozen produce is an excellent and often affordable way to obtain high-quality (frozen right after picking to limit degradation of nutrients) organic fruits and vegetables.
• Join a big box store like Costco, which often has great deals on organics and grass-fed meat.
• Quality trumps quantity. Stick to smaller amounts of high-quality meat rather than loading up on cheap, CAFO-raised meat.
• Plan ahead. Plan your meals for the week. Plan your shopping trips so you can make an extra stop or two for really good deals. Eliminate the random spontaneous stuff you pick up because you walked into the grocery store without a plan in mind.

For more ideas, check out “99 Ways to Save Money on Food.”

Want to make fat loss easier? Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Primal Starter: How To Eat Well On Less? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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And The Winners of a "Celeb" Matte Liquid Lipstick by Ferya Cosmetics Are...

Ferya Cosmetics 

Alright Ladies,
We asked you to comment on all articles this past week and you came through! Thanks for participating and sharing your thoughts with us! We love to hear what you think! Soooooooo, without further ado, the 5 winners of a 'Celeb' matte liquid lipstick by Ferya Cosmetics are...

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"Celeb"

TyaD 

Native

Yolanda England 

Natural MiMi 

nylse

Congrats Winners! You have 1 week to claim your prize. Please email nikki@curlynikki.com with your full name and address with 'Ferya Lipstick Giveaway' in the subject line. Enjoy your lipstick, and stay tuned for our next giveaway! Past winners are still eligible! 

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Walking Bass Guitar

Dear Mark: Improving Exercise Stress Tolerance, Stress and Athletic Performance, My Stress Practices, Non-Negotiable Stress, and Distractions

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering five questions about stress. First, how can someone handle the stress from training five days a week, assuming they don’t want to cut back on gym days? Second, what are the negative effects of chronic stress on athletic performance? Third, what do I do when I’m stressed out and Primal Calm isn’t cutting it? Do I have any practices? And fourth, how can a working mom with three little kids deal with non-negotiable stress? Fifth, can distractions like TV or movies help us deal with stress, or are they just ways to ignore the problem?

Let’s go:

I’d like to know more about how to best combat stress from HIIT other than just don’t work out 5 times a week. Don’t know that I’m willing to sacrifice days at the gym. Thanks!!

My first suggestion—and the best one—is to sacrifice days at the gym. Five days is excessive for most people, and since you’re complaining about too much stress, you appear to be most people. Drop a day or two and you’ll get better results and experience less stress.

My second suggestion is to keep going training five days a week but make your workouts longer and easier and shorter and more intense. If you’re doing 5 days at that moderate-high intensity, moderate-high volume setting so many assume is the path to fitness, you will crash without physiological enhancement. Do 2-3 days of intense strength training—quick, dense, hard workouts using full-body movements—and sprints. Do 1-2 days of really long, really easy aerobic work. That could be a hike, a long bike ride, or even time on the elliptical, exercise bike, or treadmill.

Third, you can start playing around with supplements and foods and practices to speed recovery.

Beets are probably best here. Beet juice has been shown to reduce muscle pain after training, speed up recovery after hard training, and improve muscle phosphocreatine depletion rates during intense efforts.  Beets even reduce sympathetic over-activation of muscles, promoting more resting and relaxing.

Take tart cherry. Tart cherry juice/powder/concentrate can  speed up recovery after intense, prolonged training. Tastes good, too.

Cold water immersion can improve short term muscle recovery, especially in the heat where tissue cooling is a big impediment to getting back at it, but it may hamper hypertrophy and long term strength development.

This is a big topic. I should probably cover it more in depth.

How does chronic stress impact athletic performance?

In many ways.

Chronic stress increases the chance of injury. During intense “life events”—deaths, illnesses, divorces—an athlete’s risk of getting injured goes up. You can’t perform if you’re injured.

Chronic stress increases the risk of burnout. You’re adding stress to stress, and something’s going to give.

Chronic stress decreases performance. Consider how the stress of a game coming down to the wire with everything on the line affects athletes differently. Some rise to the occasion, sink the free throws, make the catch, complete the final push. Others shrink against pressure, miss the free throw, drop the catch, fall back at the end. Those for whom pressure increases performance simply haven’t reached their stress tolerance threshold. Those who buckle have reached it. If an athlete is suffering from chronic stress, they have reached their stress tolerance threshold.

Other than primal calm(used before and love it!) what physical practices do you use to help reduce the affects of stress?

I’ve tried meditation. Doesn’t work for me. Or rather, I don’t work for it. At this point in my life, I’ve pretty much accepted that it’s not going to happen.

Moving meditations work. My absolute favorite is to get out on the open water and go standup paddling. Some of my most awe-inspiring moments have happened on the board, like coming upon a pod of dolphins who proceed to frolic under, around, and with me, or having an up-close experience with a mama gray whale and her two calves.

Good fiction helps. You temporarily inhabit another world, live another narrative. It’s a reset. If I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’ll make a point to carve out an hour or two for time with a good book.

Exercise usually works. It never hurts. Let’s put it this way: I’ve never regretted deciding to hit the gym, run some hill sprints, or go for a hike when I’m feeling the effects of stress coming on.

Going outside wearing as little clothing as you can bear is another. This is the advantage of working from home. I can slip outside in shorts and no shoes, make contact with the earth and sun, and almost immediately feel better. I don’t know if it’s the vitamin D or nitric oxide from the sun, or if “grounding” is doing anything on a physiological level, but it sure does work. Things are a little different now that I’ve moved to Miami, so I’m still figuring all that out.

what can we do with stressors that absolutely cannot be eliminated from our lives while maintaining a high level of energy for our life’s demands?… coming from a mom of 3 under 3, breadwinner, full time working outside the home, special needs parent.

Find the wiggle room. There’s always some lurking around. Go home a little early one day a week. Did your world crumble around you? Did the business fail?  Probably not. What probably happened was people didn’t even notice and got on with their work normally. Try that. See how it goes. See if it affects your status at work or ability to get the job done. I suspect it won’t.

There may be some wiggle room with the kids, too. Three under three with special needs is intense. I won’t discount that. I only ever had two at the most to deal with, so I can imagine. But see what you can do. Set up a cordoned off play-area or playroom that you can dump them in for a few minutes here and there for some alone time. Be willing to let them work things out themselves from time to time instead of immediately rushing in to mediate, as long as the screams aren’t too bloodcurdling. Be tolerant of a bit of discord.

How much do distractions (playing games, watching movies) help against stress? Ignoring issues is not a long-term solution, but do they help in delaying the negative effects of stress?

Great question.

We can do great things with these complex brains, like plan years in advance, make predictions, solve complicated problems. We can also do bad things with them, like ruminate. We can fall into recursive thought loops. Take the uniquely human affliction of stressing about stress, or even worse, stressing about stressing about stress. You won’t ever see a dog doing that.

Sometimes, a distraction is exactly what you need to break out of the cycle, disrupt the thought loops, and cut through the stress.

It’s not ignoring it, actually. It’s dealing with the stressful thought loop the only way you truly can—by arresting its progress.

Now, should you engage in an endless series of distractions to avoid thinking about the bills you should be paying, the life you should be leading, the marriage you should be saving? Definitely not. But certain types of mental stress definitely benefit from the occasional injection of distraction.

That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading and thanks for asking such great questions. Take care!

Be sure to chime in down below if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.

The post Dear Mark: Improving Exercise Stress Tolerance, Stress and Athletic Performance, My Stress Practices, Non-Negotiable Stress, and Distractions appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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Primal Starter: Small Wins

They say it’s the little things, and maybe it is. Success isn’t honestly built by daily yearning for a dramatic goal after all. It’s constructed by the small wins we plot along the way. Teresa Amabile, author and Professor at the Harvard Business School, calls this the “progress principle.” Amabile and her associates studied employees’ daily diaries that her team designed. They found the efforts of tracking small achievements each day (as well as reflecting on challenges) enhanced workers’ motivation as well as creativity. The chance to consider and record one’s progress, she explains, helps us appreciate our “small wins” and boosts our sense of competence. We can then “leverage” that confidence (as well as lessons learned from the reflection) toward subsequent, larger successes. Amabile stresses there’s always some progress to recognize in a day, even on the most challenging or discouraging days.

Yet, too often we downplay our progress or even talk ourselves out of it for the sake of guilt, unworthiness, or misguided modesty. Why? We’re taking the wind out of our own sails instead of leveraging, as Amabile suggests, our daily successes toward continuing motivation. Charles Duhigg, author of acclaimed book The Power of Habit explains the durable impact of these small achievements: “A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.” In other words, it makes no difference how minute our day’s achievement is because—when we allow ourselves to recognize the wins and leverage these “tiny advantages,” as Duhigg calls them—the power we absorb from each small win will always be more substantial than the original event. Progress takes on a life of it’s own—like motivation gone viral within our brain.

And luckily, our day’s routine is ripe for subtle but transformative shifts. Duhigg writes about the power of “keystone habits,” those habits that, while seemingly modest and self-contained, have inordinate sway over other choices we make and actions we take throughout the day. Adopting a single new habit, if it’s of a pivotal keystone variety, can enact widespread change in our lifestyle. Among the examples Duhigg highlights is food journaling. In an NIH study of some 1600 obese people, those who were asked to write down a day’s food intake one day a week ended up losing twice the weight as other groups. The request was enough to get many of the participants to extend the habit into other days of the week and, as Duhigg explains, “created a structure that helped other habits to flourish.”

The key here is to discern what habits can become “keystone habits” for your health journey. As the principle suggests, it’s unnecessary to overload yourself with a laundry list of changes to your routine. That’s the principle behind the “keystone” approach: you don’t need to upend your life or turn yourself inside out working toward change. You just need to be strategic about what to shift. Ultimately, it’s about letting these few changes build momentum in your life and then fueling that momentum with the energy of celebrating each small win. It’s the snowball effect at its multidimensional best.  The end result can be achieving that ultimate goal you set as well as successes you may have never envisioned.

For more on small wins, check out “11 Small Wins to Help You Kick-Start Your Primal Life.”

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Should You Charge Men For Your Number on Dating Apps?

By Veronica Wells

I’ve always thought the conception of online dating was an interesting one. And if I didn’t have such a fear of strangers, it might have been a nice option for me when I was still accepting applications. But that’s not the way the cookie crumbled. And while there are some experiences that I wish I’d had, like swiping or matching with someone who also thought I was attractive, I’ve also heard more than a few horror stories.

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Mainly that the people, specifically the men on dating apps, are either only trying to get you to have sex with them or they’ll send you daily “wyd” texts for three weeks, taking no sort of initiative to plan a date so he can meet you in person.

Just like the real world, there is struggle.

So, when women venture back onto these apps, sometimes after having been bruised or burned a couple of times, they want to make sure that they’ve come back new and approved. They want a strategy to ensure that no more of their time will be wasted.

It might be hard to do but one woman had a bit of a solution. She shared that she makes men pay for her phone number…literally.

She explains:



Turns out, Mecca was making way more than $5.00 in the process.





Full disclosure, Mecca is not accepting this money with the most honest intentions, in fact, she shared on Twitter: Not only is Mecca using the money for her boyfriend, she’s not even giving out her real number. 

If you know how Tinder works, you know that you have to first match with someone before they’re able to even ask for your number. That was a bit of a downer for Mecca but she soldiered on, saying that the best people to match with were “pasty republicans” and “ballers.” Mecca assures us that we’ll be able to tell the difference.

When a woman said she would feel too bad doing this to someone, Mecca said, she felt bad at first until, “…this White guy said I looked like [a] “classy black girl.” After that, taking his dough was no problem.

But aside from the scamming part, is it wrong that I don’t see that much of an issue with Mecca’s idea? Earlier I mentioned accepting applications. Why couldn’t the $5 serve as an application fee? Hell, if the first date goes well, it could even be reimbursed. 

I know any time a woman talks about taking money from men, she’s labeled as a gold digger; but, for better or worse, money is a consistent part of our romantic interactions. From paying for dates, to deciding how you’re going to split bills in the same household, money and the ability to talk about it are a necessity in any healthy relationship.

Furthermore, I’m sure the requirement of five dollars is not only a conversation-starter, should you make it to an actual date, it is a clear indicator of the man or woman’s interest in getting to know you. Meaning the quality of your initial communication will be better because there’s a vested interest. Folks aren’t going to want to spend five dollars on a number and never make plans to see this brazen woman in person. The fact that people have paid Mecca for this information on a free app, is incredible. And maybe that’s what I like about this idea the most, a woman who recognizes that there is worth associated with just having access to her.

What do you think about the idea of making people on dating apps pay for your number? 

Veronica Wells is the culture editor at MadameNoire.com. She is also the author of “Bettah Days” and the creator of the websiteNoSugarNoCreamMag. You can follow her on Facebook and on Instagram and Twitter @VDubShrug

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