By the weight-loss experts at Mayo Clinic and Donald Hensrud, M.D., M.P.H.
Authors of The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat well. Enjoy life. Lose weight.

***The first person with a U.S. shipping address to comment on this post will win a copy of the book!***

Healthy cooking doesn’t mean you have to become a gourmet chef or invest in special cookware. Simply use standard cooking methods to prepare foods in healthy ways. You can also adapt familiar recipes by substituting other ingredients for fat, sugar and salt. 

Use these methods 

• Baking. Besides breads and desserts, you can bake seafood, poultry, lean meat, and vegetable and fruit pieces of the same size. Place food in a pan or dish (covered or uncovered) and bake. You may need to baste the food with broth, low-fat marinade or juice to keep the food from drying out. 

The above is an excerpt from the book The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat well. Enjoy life. Lose weight., by the weight-loss experts at Mayo Clinic and Donald Hensrud, M.D., M.P.H. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Reprinted from The Mayo Clinic Diet, © 2010 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. Published by Good Books (www.GoodBooks.com). Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For more information, please visit www.goodbooks.com/mayoclinicdiet and www.mayoclinic.com/diet.

(McGowan has taken flak for her perspective. After cutting to commercial during a TV interview, an anchor called her a “bad Christian.”)

Here’s her take on The Law of Attraction. The first person to comment will receive a free copy of the book.

THE REAL SECRET:
ABUNDANCE DOESN’T COME FIRST (BUT IT WILL COME AND STAY IF YOU FOLLOW THESE STEPS )
By Kathleen McGowan,
Author of The Source of Miracles: 7 Steps to Transforming Your Life through the Lord’s Prayer

Instant Manifestation. Unlimited Abundance. Ask, Believe, Receive!

So many books, DVDs and other programs have promised all of these things over the last few years. Millions of people have flocked to the teachings of “The Law of Attraction” in hopes of transforming their lives and attracting love, money and fulfillment.

And millions of people are also finding that these programs don’t work. And if they do work, the effects are temporary. Why? Because the lessons of these programs are incomplete and totally out of order. They skip the important steps, the elements of personal and spiritual transformation which are necessary to provide a solid foundation to build upon.

Most “Law of Attraction” techniques do not require any kind of accountability and therefore they do not work.

One great truth of the law of abundance is this: We cannot manifest something that is not in the best interest of the world around us. We do not live in a vacuum, we live on a planet with almost seven billion other people. In order to manifest everything that we desire, we must learn how to live in harmony with the bigger picture, and find our own place in God’s plan as a member of the human family. Of course, becoming aligned with our own spiritual nature and destiny will likely change the specifics of what it is we truly desire, making it that much easier to attain.

What we are reaching for here is something that endures in our lives. That is the essence of transformation. Before manifesting abundance, we must dig down into the deepest recesses of our hearts and souls. We must examine our beliefs about ourselves, about a Higher Power (whatever we choose to call it — God, Spirit, the Universe, the Goddess, Divine Intelligence) and about our fellow human beings. Because it is in understanding the synergy of those relationships — that we are all connected and must work together — that we will find dramatic results. It is not enough to know what we want, you must also know why we want it, and what we will do once we have it! All of those elements impact the world around us, and therefore must be considered.

The real secret to changing our lives dramatically and permanently is service: service to something that is greater than us, whether that is God, our community, the planet or its people. And it is not until we embrace our place in a world of seven billion people, and make a commitment to better this world, that we will gain access to our own personal — and lasting — abundance.

Jesus did, indeed, say “Ask and it is given, knock and it is opened to you.” But that phrase has been misinterpreted and taken out of context in a way that diminishes its ultimate power. Unfortunately, those who quote the “Ask and it is given” verse for the purposes of instant manifestation rarely discuss it in the context that Jesus, our master teacher, presented it. The passages that precede “Ask and it is given” contain extensive instructions for living a good and responsible life first, so that we may then “ask” — and subsequently “receive” — as a reward for living in harmony with God’s plan.

There is extraordinarily good news here, even if it takes a little more work to find it than we may have originally been led to believe. Jesus was giving us the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe through perfecting our souls and answering to God. He did teach us that we can manifest everything we need and want in our lives, if we follow the rules set out for us. And he also gave us the tools to use for that purpose: it can all be found within the fifty or so words that make up the Lord’s Prayer.

In my own journey as a writer and researcher, I came across an amazing prayer practice that was taught by a Christian sect in France during the Middle Ages. For these medieval Christians, the Lord’s Prayer was not only the cornerstone of their faith, it was the guidebook to living a perfect life. They understood that every word of the prayer was carefully considered by Jesus, and given to us as a loving and careful instruction for building our faith while living a joyous life through God. I began to work through this prayer as a spiritual practice in the medieval manner, which breaks the prayer down into seven lessons about life: Faith, Surrender, Service, Abundance, Forgiveness, Overcoming and Love — in that order. The results were astounding and immediate. My faith was strengthened and my life transformed in ways I could never have imagined prior to learning how to live through this prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer is now, as it was when Jesus lived, the incorruptible formula for personal and global transformation. But the lessons must be accomplished in order or they do not work.

Only after working through the first three lessons found in the prayer — Faith, Surrender and Service — will the request for Abundance be effective. We cannot have effortless abundance unless we earn it — and it is earned through getting clear on our faith, surrendering our ego and embracing our place as a member of the global human community through a commitment to service.

There is a reason that abundance is the fourth teaching, and not the first. Putting abundance first is similar to sending a teenager into a master’s or doctoral program, before he completed basic college courses. The student is simply not ready and doesn’t have the foundation necessary to master the more complex teachings to come. Manifestation programs that tell us to skip directly to asking for whatever we want are not only misleading, they actually set back our spiritual growth and make it much harder for us to find enduring abundance.

While this prayer was first taught by Jesus Christ, one does not have to be a practicing Christian to use it. One of the more revolutionary aspects of Jesus’ life was that he did not discriminate in his teachings, and preached that the kingdom of God was for everyone. Jesus found everyone worthy as he recognized us all as his family under God. Thus there is a pure, universal nature to this prayer and the practice that accompanies it. It is essentially non-denominational, and I have shared this approach to friends from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and even pagan backgrounds.

In Jesus’ time, his words inspired people who lived amidst great chaos and disillusionment. In the 21st century, we find ourselves in trying circumstances of perhaps a similar nature: war, famine, genocide, crime, economic collapse and corruption fill the headlines of our newspapers. Jesus provided a tool of grace for his own embattled world and he provided one for us in our time. The Lord’s Prayer is timeless, and yet it has as much application now, if not more, than it had when it was first spoken in Galilee and Jerusalem.

The Lord’s Prayer is our instruction manual for creating heaven on earth, and while the prayer is only a few lines long, the layers of meaning within it could fill volumes. The greatest of the medieval minds knew how to find that meaning, and they have left that gift to us as their legacy, in the stone of their cathedrals and in the memory of their teachings.

There is no mystery here, no secret. Jesus literally shouted from a mountaintop the only magic words we will ever need, to live a life of perfect joy and unlimited abundance!

Two thousand years later, isn’t it finally time that we listened?

©2009 Kathleen McGowan, author of The Source of Miracles: 7 Steps to Transforming Your Life through the Lord’s Prayer.
Author Bio
Kathleen McGowan, author of The Source of Miracles: 7 Steps to Transforming Your Life through the Lord’s Prayer, is an internationally published writer whose work has appeared on five continents and in at least fifteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three sons. Kathleen is a dedicated activist, and commits a portion of her time and royalties to causes that protect women and children from the horrors of human trafficking and sexual slavery. She has teamed with The Emancipation Network and Made by Survivors to fund and participate in programs which provide shelter and safety for victims of abuse, and raise awareness of this global epidemic.

For more information about the book, please visit www.KathleenMcGowan.com.

 By Ed and Deb Shapiro 

You must be the change you want to see in the world, as Mahatma Gandhi so eloquently said. In other words, change has to start within ourselves; we cannot expect the world to change if we do not. Instead of focusing on the problems, we can start to live the solutions.

 If we want more love in our lives, we must become more loving; if we genuinely want to end terrorism and to bring real and peaceful change to the world, then we have to change from being concerned with our own needs to reaching out and helping each other. As Ed often says, when we make peace with ourselves, there is one less person suffering.

 For kindness and compassion to become a natural expression of who we are, we may need help, guidance, and support. Meditation in its many forms is the one method we have found that does all of this. When we get to know ourselves more deeply we discover that we are more than we thought we were, that we have the resources, strength, and wisdom to not only make changes but to become the change we so long for.

 Today is a special day for us as our book, Be the Change, is published (see below). And so Deb felt that this week we should highlight seven great women in the book, women who are movers and shakers and who are deeply influenced by the invaluable benefits of meditation. There are many other brilliant and wonderful women who are also contributing to change in this way who are in the book as well.

 We begin with Marianne Williamson, uplifting and inspirational speaker, and author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including The Age of Miracles:

Einstein said that we cannot solve the problems of the world from the level of thinking that we were at when we created them. A different level of thinking means a different level of thinking. It does not mean just a different kind of thinking. It does not mean a different emphasis in our thinking. It does not mean a more loving kind of thinking. It means what he said, a different level of thinking, and to me that is what meditation brings.

Meditation can change the world because meditation changes us. That is the point. It returns us to our right mind, and until there is this evolution in consciousness, we will stay locked in a fear-based perspective in which we continue to see ourselves as separate from each other, and in which we continue to think that we can do something to someone else and not reap the result ourselves.

First yoga changed my body; then meditation changed my attitude. Then I realized that whether my practice was fifteen minutes or four hours was irrelevant because it was not about how yoga can change me, but how I, through this practice, can begin to change the world. What I really felt was how dare I not step into the world and hold that space?

If what is happening on a global level is representative of what is happening on the individual level and if I want to transform what is happening globally, then I have to look within myself and see where I am separating myself from other human beings and from the earth. Where am I living in blame, in hate, in terrorism, in war, in any negative capacity toward another being? For if I am not willing to clean up the fear or the disconnect that is within myself, then I am responsible for what is happening on a planetary level.

The formal practice of meditation is, for me, very important. It serves as a truth-teller, for without it, I can easily fool myself. As a driven-achiever kind of person, before I started meditating, I was unaware that most of the time I was driving situations, trying to push to do more. What I have found through the practice of meditation is that I can actually choose, at any given moment, to lean away from that need to be pushing and to rest in the back of myself. When I do that, I create the space for all kinds of things to happen, and for other people to be heard, and for the whole world to actually be heard through me, instead of living some sort of ego-driven self-centered existence.

A long time ago, I came across a definition of meditation that it comes from the root meaning ‘right balance.’ That rang true for me because, personally, my attention is often so fragmented, egocentric, narcissistic, or self-concerned that there isn’t a whole lot of inner balance or alignment with what is. Rather, I am stuck in a state of non-balance. Right balance is when my mind is not spinning out endless movies and delusions, or maybe it still is but I am just not so attached to believing them. Meditation is when I can watch stuff go by and the part of me that usually interrupts and says, ‘That’s a good story, or that son of a bitch, or I’m guilty and awful,’ that part sits back and sees it as just one more story but without attachment to it.

 There are practical reasons for dividing everything up. It makes things easier to manage and to solve, especially technical matters: the us and them, the either-or, the man versus nature, mine and yours. Life is simpler to deal with. But we have applied this fragmenting mindset to all of life so that it has become our reality, which has led to further fragmentation and chaos and planetary destruction. The challenge is to figure out how to deal with our day-to-day life, while at the same time changing our mindset so that we see reality as the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence, an undivided, flowing movement without borders. Meditation connects me to a great inwardness and unity, and at the same time there is a great expansion into everything.

Meditation is connecting to something bigger than myself. We meditate to have a shift in consciousness, to take us out of the limitations of our individual self. You know that to walk by somebody starving is to walk by yourself. You know that to judge somebody else is to judge yourself. In this place hope exists, possibility exists. This is where you know that we are here to have this human experience. Meditation is a process that makes the trip not only possible but also a little gentler.

I grew up in the south, so I was profoundly conditioned to be racist. In meditation, my conditioning became more visible, but so did the ability to discover what was behind that conditioning, which I saw was fear. Fear is about survival. When you drop under that and experience the fear without trying to change it, just letting it be, then it becomes still. When you open your heart to fear, rather than trying to fight it or deny it or even overcome it, then you find it is just energy. There is a deconstructing that happens quite naturally of our racist and nationalist views, our gender or religious views. Then we are left with what cannot be either deconstructed or constructed.

For more information please visit www.EdandDebShapiro.com.