If you are going to use CBD, this is the only way

CBD is a non-psychoactive phytocannabinoid that has reportedly helped a number of people with a variety of symptoms as well as conditions. These range from muscle spasm and chronic pain to intense anxiety and inflammation. Due to the increasing popularity of CBD and CBD oil products, many are asking… Is CBD safe and what is …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2SAPrE7

12 Healthy Pumpkin Recipes for Fall

These healthy pumpkin recipes are total crowd pleasers: from dessert recipes like oatmeal cookies to main dishes like pumpkin gnocchi and stuffed shells!

Are you a pumpkin fan? Even if your answer is no, you might enjoy some of these healthy pumpkin recipes! Because pumpkin puree is doesn’t have a distinct flavor, it can be used in many different ways without tasting overly pumpkin-y. It makes a fantastic substitute for egg in our vegan pumpkin oatmeal cookies, and a creamy, cheesy pasta sauce in our pumpkin penne. Of course, we’ve also got pumpkin dessert recipes: but not the traditional pumpkin pie! Try our healthy pumpkin parfaits with pecan granola or pumpkin mousse shooters. In all cases, healthy means made with real, whole food ingredients that are full of nutrients.

Chewy Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies

Let’s start with these chewy pumpkin oatmeal cookies,  one of our most popular pumpkin dessert recipes! The flavor is reminiscent of oatmeal cream pies, but a healthier spin. Though they might not qualify as a health food, they can fit into the healthy definition since they’re made with nutrient dense rolled oats and are plant based. Made with coconut oil instead of butter, they’re topped with a powdered sugar icing. Omit the icing if you’d prefer less sugar, and they’re just as good!

Pumpkin Gnocchi Bake with Goat Cheese

Here’s our personal favorite of these pumpkin recipes: our pumpkin gnocchi bake! It’s got a savory pumpkin sauce made creamy with a little Greek yogurt. Doughy gnocchi pillows are baked in the sauce along with gooey goat cheese. It’s probably one of the coziest comfort foods we’ve baked up, and it consistently gets rave reviews! Last year we served this as a vegetarian Thanksgiving recipe and it very quickly disappeared.

Pumpkin Yogurt Fruit Dip

This one’s the simplest of the pumpkin recipes in this list: in just 5 minutes, you can make a killer fruit dip that’s pumpkin spiced! Just stir together Greek yogurt, pumpkin puree, maple syrup, and some pumpkin spices, and you’re in business! Served with sliced green apples, it’s a tangy and delicious snack. We’ve served it at fall parties and book clubs and it’s the perfect fall treat.

Penne with Pumpkin Pasta Sauce

So remember that pumpkin gnocchi bake? This pasta uses the same pumpkin sauce, but this time pairs it with penne pasta and Parmesan cheese. It cooks up in just 30 minutes and tastes like a sophisticated take on mac and cheese. Said one reader: “You NAILED IT! The whole family loved this pasta dish. So creamy and flavorful!” That’s what we like to hear.

Pumpkin Baked Steel Cut Oatmeal

This one is our most popular of these healthy pumpkin recipes: pumpkin baked steel cut oatmeal! It tastes like pumpkin pie—really!—but is made of steel cut oats. Who doesn’t want to eat pumpkin pie for breakfast? It’s also fairly healthy, with a minimal amount of maple syrup as a natural sweetener, it’s a nice gluten-free whole grain option for mornings.

Pumpkin Vegetarian Stuffed Shells

Vegetarian stuffed shells are always a crowd pleaser: especially when they’ve got pumpkin inside! This pumpkin recipe has pumpkin puree mixed with ricotta and fresh sage as the filling for these jumbo shells. Bake them, topped with gooey cheese, in a quick marinara sauce and you’re in business.

Pumpkin Scones with Maple Glaze

These vibrant pumpkin scones are made with pumpkin puree and pumpkin spices, making them the perfect flaky, cozy biscuit for cool mornings or tea times! The topping is a maple cream, maple that’s heated until it becomes creamy and concentrated. You can make them without the glaze for a healthier treat, or use the glaze from the pumpkin cookies above.

Healthy Pumpkin Mousse Shooters

Instead of pumpkin pie, why not…a pumpkin shot glass dessert? This unique take on pumpkin pie makes the filling into vegan pumpkin mousse made by whipping coconut milk. And let’s just forget the crust: serving the pumpkin mousse in shot glasses topped with pumpkin seeds is cuter and easier!

Pumpkin Parfaits with Pecan Granola

In our list of pumpkin dessert recipes, this one’s a keeper! Greek yogurt that’s lightly sweetened with maple syrup is layered with a pumpkin filling made of pumpkin puree, pumpkin spices and mascarpone cheese. Add a bit of pecan skillet granola, whipped up in just 10 minutes in a skillet, and you’re in business. This one also works as a healthy breakfast or fall brunch recipe.

Easy Pumpkin Hummus

Have you tried pumpkin hummus? If you’re a pumpkin fan, this one’s worth a try. It takes just a few minutes to whip up, and adding pumpkin puree makes it extraordinarily creamy. Don’t worry, in contrast to some of the other pumpkin recipes this one’s got no pumpkin spices! It’s strictly savory: serve with pita chips for a tasty fall snack.

Pumpkin Spice Fruit and Nut Bars

Speaking of snacks, these pumpkin spice fruit and nut bars are a healthy snack fit for fall. Made of Medjool dates, cashews, and pumpkin spices, they’re full of protein and flavor. Make up a batch and keep them handy for when a craving hits.

Pumpkin Pancakes with Maple Mascarpone

To round out our healthy pumpkin recipes are these pumpkin pancakes! When Alex and I breakfast, we like oat pancakes: they’re made almost fully of oat flour, they’re heartier and more filling than the typical pancake. These oat pancakes are made with pumpkin puree and pumpkin spices, and for a little flair: a dollop of mascarpone cheese mixed with maple syrup. You can omit the topping for a healthier take and go with just a drizzle of real maple syrup: these pumpkin pancakes can hold their own.

A Couple Cooks - Recipes for Healthy & Whole Living

from A Couple Cooks https://ift.tt/2zeZUft

When Adolescents Give Up Pot, Their Cognition Quickly Improves

Marijuana, it seems, is not a performance-enhancing drug. That is, at least, not among young people, and not when the activity is learning.

A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry finds that when adolescents stop using marijuana – even for just one week – their verbal learning and memory improves. The study contributes to growing evidence that marijuana use in adolescents is associated with reduced neurocognitive functioning.

More than 14 percent of middle and high school students reported using marijuana within the last month, finds a National Institutes of Health survey conducted in 2017. And marijuana use has increased among high schoolers over the past 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

At the same time, the percentage of teens who believe that regular marijuana use poses a great risk to their health has dropped sharply since the mid-2000s. And, legalization of marijuana may play a part in shaping how young people think about the drug. One study noted that after 2012, when marijuana was legalized in Washington state, the number of eighth graders there that believed marijuana posed risks to their health dropped by 14 percent.

Researchers are particularly concerned with use of marijuana among the young because THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, most sharply affects the parts of the brain that develop during adolescence.

“The adolescent brain is undergoing significant neurodevelopment well into the 20s, and the regions that are last to develop are those regions that are most populated by cannabis receptors, and are also very critical to cognitive functioning,” says Randi Schuster. Schuster is the director of Neuropsychology at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Addiction Medicine, and the study’s lead author.

Schuster and the team of researchers set out to determine if cognitive functions that are potentially harmed by marijuana use in adolescents – particularly attention and memory – improve when they abstain from marijuana.

They recruited 88 pot-using teens and young adults, ages 16 to 25, and got some of them to agree to stop smoking (or otherwise consuming) marijuana for the month.

Schuster says the researchers wanted to recruit a range of participants, not just heavy users or those in a treatment program, for example. Some of the young people smoked once per week; some smoked nearly daily.

The researchers randomly assigned the volunteers into an abstaining group and a non-abstaining group. They delivered the bad news to those chosen to be abstainers at the end of their first visit, and Shuster says, they took it surprisingly well.

“People were generally fine,” she says. “We kind of went through what the next month would look like and helped them come up with strategies for staying abstinent.”

One motivation for the non-tokers to stick with the program? They received increasing amounts of money each week of the month-long study.

The researchers urine tested both groups on a weekly basis to make sure that the THC levels for the abstinent group were going down, but that the levels for the control group were staying consistent as they continued using.

Also at each visit, the participants completed a variety of tasks testing their attention and memory through the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery, a validated cognitive assessment tool.

The researchers found that after four weeks, there was no noticeable difference in attention scores between the marijuana users and the non-users. But, the memory scores of the non-users improved, whereas the users’ memories mostly stayed the same.

The verbal memory test challenged participants to learn and recall new words, which “lets us look both at their ability to learn information the first time the words were presented, as well as the number of words that they’re able to retrieve from long-term memory storage after a delay,” Schuster says.

Verbal memory is particularly relevant for adolescents and young adults when they’re in the classroom, says Schuster.

“For an adolescent sitting in their history class learning new facts for the first time, we’re suspecting that active cannabis users might have a difficult time putting that new information into their long-term memory,” Schuster says.

While this study didn’t prove that abstaining from cannabis improves adolescents’ attention, other studies have found that marijuana users fare worse in attention tests than non-users. Schusters hypothesizes it might take more than four weeks of abstinence for attention levels to improve.

Interestingly, most of the memory improvement for the abstinent group happened during the first week of the study, which leaves the researchers feeling hopeful.

“We were pleasantly surprised to see that at least some of the deficits that we think may be caused by cannabis appear to be reversible, and at least some of them are quickly reversible, which is good news,” Schuster says.

One weakness of this study is its lack of a non-marijuana-using control group, says Krista Lisdahl, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee who was not involved with the study, but also researches the neuroscience of addiction. Because of this, it’s difficult to conclude whether the improvements in memory brought the participants back to their baseline levels prior to using marijuana.

Also, because the study lasted only four weeks, it’s impossible to draw conclusions about the long term effects of marijuana usage for young people, such as how marijuana directly affects academic performance or sleep patterns or mood.

Lisdahl says that longitudinal studies like the NIH’s Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, could provide more information about what marijuana does to the adolescent brain. It might also reveal what happens if adolescents stop using marijuana, and if their brain functioning can completely recover.

Lisdahl is helping with the NIH study, which has, to date, enrolled over 11,000 children ages nine and 10, and will follow them over into young adulthood. It’s the largest long-term research study on child brain development in the U.S., and it assesses how everything from screen time to concussions to drugs affect adolescents’ brains.

In the meantime, Lisdahl says the findings from the new study – that abstinence from marijuana is associated with improvements in adolescents’ learning and memory – sends a positive message.

“I remain optimistic that we can show recovery of function with sustained abstinence,” she says.

Rachel D. Cohen is an intern on NPR’s Science Desk.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2Q9q22z

Tomato Basil Gnocchi Soup

The 13 Best Deskercise Moves to Keep You Feeling Good

Office jobs can be exhausting even though you're comfortably seated all day. And when you spend all hours slumped over your desk and keeping yourself awake with caffeine, there's nothing more exciting than finally lying on the bed to go to sleep. Aside from reoccurring back pains, sitting at the desk all day can also …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2Az0uqh

Penne with Pumpkin Pasta Sauce

Colder Months? How to make your indoor workouts more effective

As autumn and winter come around, rolling out of bed for that early alarm becomes harder and harder. The thought of getting out of bed for an early run rapidly becomes rather unbearable – and making it to the gym before the sun is up?

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2OVUZuI

What Does Improvement Science Look Like In Real Classrooms?

Allergy Symptoms, Sinus Relief and Making the Best of a Not-So-Awesome Situation

Although allergic rhinitis sounds like a strange exotic animal that you might encounter at the zoo, it’s just another word for nasal allergies. In fact, allergic rhinitis is associated with symptoms such as; dust, animal dander, or pollen, which affects the nose. It can manifest as an annoying stuffy nose, but it can be debilitating …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2qeubHs

What Teachers Can Do To Be More Inclusive Of LGBTQ Students

Back in September, teacher Mary Gilreath’s first-grade class was asked to wear blue for Peace Day. An adult worried the girls might not own blue shirts, and Gilreath saw an opportunity for her Boulder classroom. She shared the story with her students.

“What do you all think about that?” Gilreath asks them.

“Maybe it’s because girls mostly wear dresses?” a girl wonders.

“Oh, is that true?” Gilreath replies. “What do you all think?”

The first graders erupt in a chorus of “No!”

Gilreath goes out of her way to address gender identity in her classroom. She says it’s “a safety issue and a mental health issue for kids,” pointing to the recent suicide of a 9-year-old Denver boy who was bullied after he came out to his classmates.

Studies have shown LGBTQ students are more likely to be bullied at school, which can lead to missed classes and a higher risk of suicide. For those kids, a teacher who knows how to be inclusive — or how to “queer” the classroom, as some refer to it — can make a big difference. But many teachers aren’t sure how to do that. Over the years, gender and sexual identity have evolved, and not everyone has kept up.

“When they [teachers] realize, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ you know how vulnerable it feels? It’s a big deal. They need support,” says Bethy Leonardi, co-founder of A Queer Endeavor, an initiative of University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. A Queer Endeavor helps teachers navigate questions like how to intervene when they see anti-LGBTQ bullying, how to be there for students who identify as gender-fluid and how to address kids who use gender-neutral pronouns like “they.”

The organization has put out a list of tips for making classrooms more LGBTQ-friendly. They include:

• Let students identify themselves on the first day of class. Ask them to fill out index cards with their preferred name and pronouns, then be sure to update the class list and share that list when there’s a substitute teacher.
• Avoid using gendered language to address students (“ladies and gentlemen,” “boys/girls”). Instead, use words like “scientists,” “readers,” “athletes,” “writers,” “artists,” “scholars,” etc.
• Avoid grouping students by gender. Instead, use birthdays, ice cream preferences, pet preferences, etc.
• If there are all-gender bathrooms, make sure students know where they are and that they are for everyone.
• Make your ally status known by hanging a rainbow flag, sharing your own pronouns and/or supporting the school’s LGBTQ groups.

“I just didn’t know the questions to ask”

Lisa Durant teaches health and physical education at a high school outside Denver. She says when she started hearing students use words like “asexual” and “gender-fluid,” “I had no idea what they were talking about.”

Then in June, Durant attended A Queer Endeavor’s teacher training. She learned some new terminology (“C-I-S; binary, non-binary; the umbrella of transgender, pangender”) and reconsidered an interaction with a student who transitioned from male to female while at Durant’s school. She remembers talking to that student about which pronouns to use and the lesson material she’d missed. But Durant now looks back at that conversation with regret.

She says she didn’t ask, ” ‘How can I support you? What do I need to do to make you feel more comfortable in a group setting in this classroom?’ I just didn’t know the questions to ask.”

A Queer Endeavor also encourages teachers to validate who their students are. Before the training, Denver high school teacher Kari Allerton had always lived the mantra that it doesn’t matter who you love or how you identify: “You’re all my students and I love you all.” But the training gave her an insight.

“Saying [to a teenager] that I don’t care if you’re gay or straight or trans, it’s almost like when people say, ‘I don’t see color,’ ” she explains. It’s dismissing them instead of “validating the beautiful people that they blossom into at our school.”

She remembers a student who, by the end of the year, had dyed his hair pink and started wearing earrings and lipstick. “I didn’t say anything to him,” Allerton says — she didn’t know what to say. At the training, a fellow teacher made a suggestion: “It’s so much fun watching you become who you are.”

“We don’t talk like that in my classroom”

As an LGBTQ teacher, Meghan Mosher brings a different perspective to her Louisville classroom. She says she works hard to make her high school science class a place where kids feel free to ask uncomfortable questions. Once, during a lesson about chromosomes, she heard a student put one such question to his classmate.

“He was whispering across the table and said, ‘Is that what makes you gay?’ ”

For Mosher, it was a chance to clarify that many factors determine sexual orientation and gender identity.

But Mosher has also struggled with how to address slurs like “That’s so gay.” In the past, she talked to kids individually; but that didn’t stop other students from uttering the same slurs. Then one day she heard it in the middle of a lab.

“And I stopped everybody. And it was dead silent. And I said, ‘It’s not OK to use someone’s identity as an insult.’ And I finally brought my own identity into it.”

The slurs stopped after that. She knows not all teachers can bring their personal lives into the classroom, but she says it’s important to tell kids what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Asher Cutler agrees. A recent Denver high school graduate, Cutler identifies as gender-fluid. At the training, they said they know it can be uncomfortable to intervene, but, “Don’t fear that. Go for it, please. Your role as an authoritative figure means that you can save someone’s life. … These comments are the little things that build up over time, and you have to, as a teacher say, ‘No, we don’t talk like that in my classroom.’ ”

When a teacher makes their classroom a safe place where a student isn’t bullied for an hour out of the day, “That is so important,” Cutler said.

Copyright 2018 CPR News. To see more, visit CPR News.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2CHLVlW

4 Awesome Benefits Why Sleeping With White Noise is Good for You

Have you ever considered clearing your thoughts from all of your distractions? Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Well, that's exactly the essence of the white noise. Composed of sounds at different frequencies, white noise manages to mute the background sounds and provide you with a cozy and peaceful sleeping environment. The method of adding more noise …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2PYHHtS

13 Delicious & Healthy Tahini Recipes

These 13 tahini recipes are healthy and delicious ways to enjoy the popular sesame paste, from Buddha bowls to sweet potato fries to cookies!

Do you use tahini? You might have bought a jar of tahini if you’ve ever made homemade hummus. But tahini is not just for hummus! Common in Middle Easter or Mediterranean dishes, this sesame paste is becoming very popular: it’s used for dressings, dipping sauces, and even desserts! Tahini is one of Alex and my favorite ingredients to use in recipes, and we realized we have a long list of tahini recipes. Keep reading for 13 tahini recipes that make healthy eating undeniably delicious.

First, what is tahini sauce?

What is tahini sauce (tahini)? Tahini is a paste made of sesame seeds, typically used in Middle Eastern or Mediterranean dishes. Tahini is vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, Paleo, keto, and Whole 30 friendly, so it works for many diets. It’s purely sesame seeds and salt! Tahini is perfect for making creamy sauces for salads and Buddha bowls, and it’s also fantastic for desserts like cookies or as a replacement for peanut butter for peanut allergies. It’s perfect for use in vegan dishes as a creamy alternative to dairy.

What does tahini taste like?

On its own, tahini has a bitter flavor. It’s not sweet like most nut butters or seed butters! So, tahini is best when mixed with other flavors, especially an acid like lemon juice which brightens it. If using tahini in a dessert, it works well mixed with a sweetener like maple syrup. Ready for our tahini recipes?

Best Lemon Tahini Sauce

Our top tahini recipe is easily this Best Lemon Tahini Sauce! It’s a creamy, savory sauce that’s totally versatile: use it on salads, nourish bowls, tacos, fries, veggie burgers, and sandwiches. Since it’s vegan, it adds a creamy savoriness without the use of dairy. This one is so good we’ve used it on several different recipes: our Chickpea Couscous Bowls, Raw Falafel Buddha Bowls, and Roasted Nourish Bowls (not pictured).

Dark Chocolate Tahini No Bake Cookies

These vegan no bake cookies use tahini instead of the typical peanut butter, and they’re over the top delicious. Created for our friend with a peanut allergy, we made these no bake cookies with tahini instead of peanut butter, coconut oil instead of butter, and maple syrup instead of sugar. Using dark cocoa powder brings in a dark chocolate flavor, and a sprinkle of sea salt on top makes them salty sweet. These no bakes are a must make!

Moroccan Sweet Potatoes with Lemon Tahini Dressing

This tahini recipe is from a vegan cookbook, Power Plates by our friend Gena Hamshaw. It’s a hearty vegan main dish: roasted sweet potatoes are topped with Moroccan-spiced lentils and nourishing veggies. To take it over the top, a lemon tahini drizzle that’s similar to our Best Lemon Tahini Sauce above. It’s so flavorful, you won’t miss the meat or dairy in the slightest.

Cauliflower Shawarma Pita

This simple pita sandwich features one of our favorite veggies: roasted cauliflower! It’s nestled in a pita with crunchy romaine and drizzled with a yogurt tahini sauce that brings the entire sandwich together. This one’s from Kristin Donnelly’s book, Cauliflower.

Chickpea Couscous Bowls with Tahini Sauce

Want our favorite way to use that Best Lemon Tahini Sauce? It’s these couscous bowls! Couscous cooks up in just 5 minutes, so it’s a quick base for this bowl meal. To accessorize, cumin scented chickpeas, tomato and cucumber, and a bed of greens. Slather on that tangy, creamy tahini sauce, and it’s a heavenly vegan main dish in just 30 minutes. It’s one of our top recipe picks!

Five Ingredient Classic Homemade Hummus

A list of tahini recipes wouldn’t be complete without hummus! The most well-known way to use tahini is for making hummus; the sesame paste adds a creaminess and body that’s essential to homemade hummus. While we have many variations on hummus flavors, our best hummus recipe is this one: 5 ingredients make that classic, creamy hummus that’s endlessly versatile.

Fudgy Flourless Brownie Pie

This brownie pie isn’t technically a tahini recipe, until you consider the drizzle. Yes, that’s a salted tahini maple sauce, and it’s insanely good. From Jerrelle Guy’s cookbook Black Girl Baking, the sauce becomes almost caramely after mixing tahini, maple syrup, espresso powder, and salt. Here it’s drizzled over brownie pie, but it would be great on just about anything: vanilla ice cream, a skillet cookie, or vegan brownies. Healthy might be a stretch here on this pie recipe, so let’s just consider the tahini drizzle!

Raw Falafel Buddha Bowls

Here’s another tahini recipe that uses our Best Lemon Tahini Sauce, and this one is a tried and true favorite. Based on a dish from a fantastic vegan restaurant here in Indianapolis, Ezra’s Enlightened Cafe, this Buddha bowl features a raw version of falafel. Falafel are a popular Mediterranean chickpea fritter that are typically served in a pita: here, the falafel is deconstructed into raw vegan energy balls full of Mediterranean spices. It might sound strange, but the concept is seriously satisfying. Garnish with that Lemon Tahini Sauce and you have a bowl bursting with nutrients and flavor.  

Mexican Loaded Sweet Potato Fries

Tahini recipes aren’t just salad bowls: in this recipe we’ve used tahini to make a Cumin Lime Crema sauce without the dairy! This vegan crema sauce relies on tahini, lime juice, Mexican hot sauce, and cumin to bring big flavor. The sauce brings together our crispy sweet potato fries and Mexican style toppings (black beans, salsa, corn). You could serve it as an appetizer, but we prefer this as a vegan dinner recipe: so we can have it all to ourselves!

Baked Falafel Salad Bowl

Falafel, those fried Mediterranean chickpea fritters, are in our hall of fame of favorite food. And they’re traditionally served with a tahini sauce, which makes them a natural fit for this list of tahini recipes. Instead of deconstructed like in the Raw Falafel recipe above, here the falafel are baked in a patty shaped and nestled into a bowl of fresh veggies. It’s served with a Creamy Cilantro Dressing made with yogurt and tahini (for vegan, use that Best Lemon Tahini Sauce instead).

“Get Your Greens” Naan Pizzas

This tahini recipe is a vegan version of pizza so flavorful you don’t miss the cheese! Naan pizzas are fitting for weeknights, so you don’t have to bother with making and shaping pizza dough. Instead, simply spread toppings onto purchased naan bread or pitas and bake. These naan pizzas are spread with hummus and topped with broccoli, chard and artichokes. And the best part: a flavor-popping drizzle made of tahini, miso, and orange juice.

Baked Tofu Tacos with Chipotle Tahini Sauce

Back to Mexican-style flavors with this tahini recipe: tacos! Here we’ve baked tofu with a zesty marinade, then topped them with crunchy fresh veggies. What brings it all together is a chipotle tahini sauce that’s perfect for tacos of any kind. The magic ingredient is adobo sauce from a can of chipotle peppers; it’s readily available in most groceries and adds a smoky flavor and bright orange color.

Go Green Bowls with Lemon Yogurt Sauce

For our last tahini recipe, tahini teams up with yogurt to make an ultra savory creamy sauce! To up the savory saltiness, we’ve used capers to blend into the dressing to balance the tangy lemon. The tahini yogurt sauce is perfect for salads and Buddha bowls, or as a dip for roasted veggies (like those sweet potato fries above). Here, we’ve created a custom “Go Green” bowl with quinoa, broccoli and greens to make eating your greens intensely satisfying and delicious.

More tahini recipes

For more tahini recipes, here are a few from around the web:

• 36 Tahini Recipes | Bon Appetit
• Tahini Sheet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting | Molly Yeh
• Hasselback Potatoes with Tahini Sauce | The Lemon Bowl

A Couple Cooks - Recipes for Healthy & Whole Living

from A Couple Cooks https://ift.tt/2RfnekK

3 Tips on Designing a Kid’s Playroom

Create a fun, creative environment for your child by designing the playroom of their dreams. Here are useful ideas to get you started:

Photo by Tanaphong Toochinda on Unsplash

Design your kid’s room based on their interest

At one point they would love playing chess or cricket or enjoy playing with barbies and G.I.Joes. Sometimes they will stay calm in front of books or may be the boss of their fake business or school assemblies. Or they can have all at once. In short, design the room the way you would design other home interiors. Know their requirements, understand the scale, match the wall and use effective colour palettes. Source: HomeOnline

Add more storage units

If there’s one universal truth, it’s that kids come with lots of stuff. The best playrooms are those with plenty of storage available to keep all of it out of the way while making it seem part of the design.

Your first step is to consider what kind of storage will work best for your family. Do you need lots of bookshelves for an avid reader, a tricked-out entertainment center for a video game aficionado, or cubbies to hold a menagerie of stuffed animals? You’ll likely need to use a combination of pieces to accommodate all of your child’s interests. Source: Freshome

Discard kid’s unused toys

This is the best kept secret of designing a playroom. In order to avoid chaos you need to make sure to donate toys or furniture your kids outgrow (or get bored with).

Think about how you would decide to donate clothing. If your child hasn’t used or played with something for six months, donate it.

Or if you’re nervous your child will come looking for a specific toy, just set it aside. If they don’t ask about it donate it! Source: CrateAndBarrel

If you’re thinking about the type of flooring to use, carpet is a perfect choice. It protects your kid by cushioning falls and providing a good footing. We’ll be glad to help you with installing it. Call us today!

The post 3 Tips on Designing a Kid’s Playroom appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.

from Curlys Carpet Repair https://ift.tt/2q6B0dM

To Boost Mental Health, Try Team Sports or Group Exercise

Ryan “China” McCarney has played sports his entire life, but sometimes he has to force himself to show up on the field to play pick-up soccer with his friends.

“I’m dreading and I’m anticipating the worst. But I do it anyway. And then, it’s a euphoric sensation when you’re done with it because you end up having a great time,” says McCarney.

McCarney was just 22 when he had his first panic attack. As a college and professional baseball player, he says getting help was stigmatized. It took him six years to get professional support. He still struggles with depression and social anxiety, but says exercising helps him — especially when it’s with his teammates.

Research shows exercise can ease things like panic attacks or mood and sleep disorders, and a recent study in the journal, Lancet Psychiatry, found that popular team sports may have a slight edge over the other forms of physical activity.

The researchers analyzed CDC survey data from 1.2 million adults and found — across age, gender, education status and income — people who exercised reported fewer days of bad mental health than those who didn’t. And those who played team sports reported the fewest.

One of the study’s authors, Adam Chekroud, an assistant adjunct professor at Yale’s School of Medicine, thinks team activity could add another layer of relief for sufferers of mental illness.

He says there are biological, cognitive and social aspects to mental illness.

“Some sports might just be hitting on more of those elements than other sports,” he says. “If you just run on a treadmill for example, it’s clear that you’re getting that biological stimulation. But perhaps there are other elements of depression that you’re not going to be tapping into.”

Now, this study only shows an association between group exercise and improved mental health, and can’t prove that the one causes the other. But, given what is known about depression in particular, it adds up, says Jack Raglin, a professor in the department of kinesiology in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, Bloomington.

People who are depressed often isolate themselves, he says, so exercising in a group setting, “can help alleviate symptoms and deal with this very pernicious symptom of depression.”

Group exercise or team sports might also have an edge over other forms of exercise because they add an element of accountability, says Raglin. He did a study finding that couples who started an exercise program together had a lower dropout rate than those who started one on their own.

The study showed that “very simple forms of social support can be beneficial,” he says.

Scientists don’t know the exact mechanism that makes exercise elevate mood and decrease anxiety, but there is a body of research to show that it does work on the short and long term.

“If you conceptualize exercise as a pill it means, well it’s a rather small pill and easy to take and easy to tolerate,” says Raglin.

One limitation of the Lancet Psychiatry study is the data is based on patients self-reporting their symptoms. Dr. Antonia Baum, a psychiatrist and the past president of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry says patients don’t always give an accurate picture of their mental health. She says the study is an important step in this research field, but the conclusions shouldn’t be taken as scientific gospel.

“We are animals. We are meant to move and if we don’t, a lot of systems slow down, including our mood and cognition,” says Baum. “So it makes intuitive sense that exercise is beneficial, but it’s nice to try to start to wrap our arms around being able to quantify and qualify that in some ways.”

Baum says she works with each of her patients to incorporate exercise into their lives. And she says this study will be a good jumping off point for more research on team sports and mental illness.

But, Baum and other researchers say getting someone who is depressed to start exercising is easier said than done.

“It’s all well and good to conclude that exercise whether it’s done as a solo or a group pursuit is beneficial, but to get patients to do it is another matter and when you have a depressed patient motivation is often lacking,” she says.

Chekroud says getting patients in general to stick to any kind of therapy is challenging.

“It’s not just exercises that people stop doing, they also stop taking medications. They stopped showing up for therapy,” he says. “Adherence is a big problem in health care right now,”

He says the study’s findings could lead to more tools to help people reduce the overall burden of mental illness, now the leading contributor to the global burden of disability.

“The field is really crying out for things that we can do to help people with mental health issues,” says Chekroud.

For McCarney, team sports have helped him get a handle on his symptoms, he says. Before social gatherings, he often feels claustrophobic and panicked, but when he works through the anxiety and gets onto the field, he says it’s always worth it.

“It just gets you around people which I think is another huge thing when you’re trying to maybe break out of a depressive cycle,” he says.

How to get started

For some people, the idea of joining a team or any kind of group fitness activity is terrifying. Here are a few tips for getting started.

Find a sports ambassador. Raglin recommends finding a “sports ambassador,” a friend who can connect you with a group sport or activity. The friend can get you up to speed on the sport and what’s expected of you. Team sports may feel like a leap of faith, says Baum. But, she says the rewards are worth it. “It’s like playing in an orchestra — the sum being greater than the parts — truly thrilling when it all comes together,” she says.

Match your skill level. It’s not hard to find amateur sports teams to join, on sites like meetup.com. A lot of workplaces also have team sport activities, but Raglin says you make sure the skill level is right for you. You’re more likely to have a good experience and want to go back. “There is nothing worse than being on a team where the skill or intensity of the players is way above or below your own level or the level of competition you were looking for,” Raglin says.

Join a run or bike club. If you’re not into team games, go to your local run shop or bike shop to find run communities, bike clubs or community rides to join. Raglin recommends the November Project, which is a free fitness program with chapters in major cities around the world that hosts workouts.

Put money on the line. If you really aren’t into team activities, Baum says getting a personal trainer or signing up for a gym can “help add a social element, and that all important accountability.”

Try the obvious thing first. Baum says to look at the activities you’ve done throughout your life and think about which ones worked best for you. She says she sometimes takes her patients running or walking with her for a therapy session to start modeling the types of exercises that could work for them.

---

Sasa Woodruff is a freelance radio reporter and producer based in Los Angeles.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2q8k6M9

The Role of Community in Creating and Healing Trauma in Kids

When kids live in violence-prone neighborhoods, the environment can enable trauma in their lives. The RYSE Center in Richmond, California, is seeking to change the community’s culture by providing something to young people that’s sometimes missing in their schools and home lives: love and support.

The youth center is intentional about listening to the young people it serves, which means providing services far beyond typical after-school activities. In addition to offering classes, computer labs, recording studios, community garden, free food and a place to hang out until it closes at 8pm, RYSE spreads a culture of caring by showing youths what it  means to care.  

“When we ask, ‘How are you doing?’ we really want to know,” said Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, RYSE’s associate director. “We are a witness and we are validating and we also, when it makes sense, want to push and challenge you with love to think about what could be different and what agency might you have even in a world where everything is sort of forced and you don’t have much control.”

Gemikia Henderson and Dalia Ramos came to RYSE as teenagers about seven years ago. Gemikia came reluctantly for an internship and Dalia was looking for a place to be during the long hours after school. They were assigned to be “balance buddies” who check in on one another on a regular basis. Their experiences with mentors and peers at RYSE helped open them up to the possibilities in their world.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts to hear how the RYSE Center is teaching a generation of young people — and adults — what it means to have a path for improvement for themselves and their community.  

“At RYSE we want to build that with each person but also collectively and in our community so we’re building loving power in a way that really shift the conditions that brought about RYSE,” said Dhaliwal.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2q66xN3

6 Reasons Why Gaming is Bad for Your Health

With an increasing number of people inclined toward high-tech VR systems and other devices, what would happen if everyone in this world gets addicted to gaming? The reality would go to shambles.

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2CADokN

Skillet White Chili Cheese Dip

How to Make Sourdough Bread: The Simplified Guide

How to Make Sourdough Starter

How to Feed Sourdough Starter

Want to Offer Internships At Your School? A Tool To Make It Easier

How to Stay Keto with Fast Food on the Go

One of the real challenges of the ketogenic diet is the amount of preparation needed to be successful. If someone on the keto diet forgets to pack their lunch, it’s going to be very difficult to track something down that goes along with the diet. In this article keto on the go options will be …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2OCPdhq

Small Bites: A Couple Cooks Podcast Is Back!

Looking for a cooking podcast or food podcast? Our Small Bites podcast gives you bite sized food for thought in just 15 minutes! 

After a brief hiatus while we launched our cookbook Pretty Simple Cooking, the A Couple Cooks Podcast is back! And this time, it’s reformulated to fit into your busy lifestyle. All our episodes in Season 2 are just 15 minutes, featuring short form interviews and small bites of real food. We know you’re busy, so we cut out the small talk and get right to our bite sized food for thought!

Who do we feature on the podcast? Authors, entrepreneurs, personalities, and leaders in the wide world of food. We want to inspire you with the big ideas, stories, and people behind what we eat: as well provide ideas for everyday recipes! Our first episode of Season 2 is called Team Leftovers: it features cookbook author Julia Turshen, who shares with us how to reinvent leftovers and how to cultivate community through food.

Want to join us? Here’s how to listen: 

• Best way: Open the podcast app on your phone, search “A Couple Cooks”, then Subscribe!
• Listen online here.
• Listen on Spotify here.

Giveaway: Also, we have a small bites themed giveaway to celebrate our launch! Head over to our Instagram post about the giveaway.

A Couple Cooks - Recipes for Healthy & Whole Living

from A Couple Cooks https://ift.tt/2EERww2

How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Primes Students for Interdisciplinary Learning, Including STEM

A group of Grade 9 students in Texas who substantially outperformed their district on a statewide standardized test all had one surprising thing in common: they all were members of the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club.

A coincidence? Otherwise, how does a fantasy role-playing game produce improved test scores? The obvious explanation is that the club draws the bright kids who are already academically inclined. But many of the kids in the club at the Title I school had histories of struggling with academics.

For Kade Wells, the teacher who runs the club at Davis Ninth Grade School outside Houston, the answer is simple: “Playing Dungeons & Dragons makes you smarter.”

The declaration is bold, but the scholarly support and anecdotal evidence is compelling. Studies have shown that the highly social and collaborative nature of the popular fantasy role-playing game cultivates a range of social-emotional skills, which can lay the foundation for improved learning. In addition to these crucial soft skills, teachers and professors who have used the game also claim it directly benefits core academic competencies.

David Simkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is an expert on games and learning. His research indicates that role-playing games (RPGs) can boost learning and stimulate intellectual curiosity and growth.

“Dungeons & Dragons, and other narrative role playing games of its kind, provide many opportunities for learning,” said Simkins. “Participation in narrative role play can open up interests in topics such as mathematics, science, history, culture, ethics, critical reading, and media production. When D&D and its cousins are played in an inviting, encouraging, compassionate, and intellectually engaged environment, play opens the door to truly amazing possibilities for learning.”

A Multidisciplinary Dungeon Crawl

Countless video games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons are rendered with immersive, graphic rich environments, but the tabletop original demands that players conjure the three-dimensional world in their mind’s eye. Books, maps and many-sided dice govern the rules of these kingdoms of the imagination, and the players are guided by a Dungeon Master, or DM, who is the narrative architect and referee of the emerging campaigns. The open-ended game can last for months, or even years.

It’s not difficult to see how collaborative world-building involving storytelling, decision making, invention, research, calculations, negotiation, role-play, and active spatial visualization can stimulate a developing intellect. And, despite the burnish of fantasy, invented realms are derivative, and thus applicable, to the real world.

“Geography from maps, recursive math from die rolling and adding/subtracting modifiers, philosophy, logic from the ever-present need for decision making, science in regards to the ecology of an environment, the weather, the climate of different terrains, as well as many scientific details learned from monsters, which were almost all taken from mythology or reality in one way or another,” said Wells, cataloging what his kids learn from the game.

Dungeons & Dragons is an innately multidisciplinary and multimodal experience, which is why scholars and educators like Wells tend to describe its learning benefits in terms of lists and inventories. Its implementation as an instructional tool, then, is not only fun, but also becomes a sort of curricular node with the capacity to engage students in a wide array of skills and subjects.

In one striking example, educational researcher and teacher Alexandra Carter used a student-modified version of Dungeons & Dragons as the centerpiece of a yearlong program with a Grade 3 class that combined math, reading, writing, and social studies. Many students in the class struggled with academic and behavioral challenges, but rooting their core subjects in the game produced remarkable results.

In a paper she authored recounting the experience, Carter describes a wealth of student success stories, both behavioral and academic. “I was able to see progress in all of the students,” summarizes Carter, “and was especially impressed with the work that those who struggled the most produced.”

Carter observes that a great deal of the project’s success hinged on students being motivated to learn and practice skills that applied to the game. Students often have trouble appreciating the value of what they learn in school when it is abstracted from its real-world purpose. In this case, learning was meaningful for the students because it had traction in a fantasy world that stood in as a facsimile for the real one, the central dynamic of play and a key feature of its value for development and learning.

Sorcery for STEM

Although Dungeons & Dragons seems better suited to teach humanities, every shield block and fireball relies on a little bit of science and lots of math.

“It may seem odd, but in a fantasy game with magic players often have to learn about basic physics and chemistry to determine what to do,” said Ian Slater who teaches at York University and runs Black Dragon Games. “Not to determine how a magic-user can shoot a lightning bolt from their fingers, but rather to determine, for example, if a suit of plate mail would be magnetized by the strike of a lightning bolt.”

Incorporating games of any sort into the curriculum generally requires that teachers create context to direct play towards the learning objectives. RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons are pliable systems that lend themselves to be creatively modified, which makes them ideal to serve diverse curricular purposes. UK educator Chris Leach, for example, reworked the game and leveraged the fantasy motif to instruct Grade 6 students on the basics of algorithms and binary, the foundation of computational thinking.

“If you are at all ‘science enabled’ as a DM there are ample opportunities to discuss scientific topics, even if magic bends reality in ways that science would not allow,” said Slater. “Even examples of scientifically impossible magic can be used as tools to discuss what science actually does say about a subject.”

With a little ingenuity, chemistry can be applied to the existing alchemy scheme; physics operates in every projectile, fall, and collision; biology lurks in the countless flora and fauna that populate the world, and the game’s engineer class is an open invitation to justify contraptions with hard science. And math is the low hanging fruit.

“Math is constant, and completely necessary to play the game,” said Wells.

D&D is fundamentally a numbers game, and players must consult charts and tables to modify their rolls of dice, and calculate everything from currency exchanges to their projected experience points. Those who want to be masters of their destiny can leverage math, especially probability and calculus, to bend the numbers in their favor.

“D&D is full of this sort of basic mathematical stuff, and players soak it up as they play,” said Slater. “Indeed, since knowing how these mechanics work has direct implications for the survival of their character, players tend to learn the mathematics pretty quickly.”

There are numerous websites, forums and online calculators to assist players with mathematical assistance to further their progress. With no coaxing from parents and teachers, players are motivated to research and access these resources to optimize their play, an inevitable boon to their numeracy skills. Carter observed many of her previously demoralized students become invested in math due to the game.

“One student, who frequently demonstrated an apprehension towards math that translated into poor performance in class, on assignments, and during assessments, made significant progress as we worked through the project,” wrote Carter. The student offered answers to questions, she writes, “and slowly transferred this confidence in math as it applied to the project into a confidence in regular math.”

The Benevolent Subversions of the Chaotic Good

These intriguing case studies point to what a comprehensive learning program might look like if subjects and skills were not taught in isolation from each other, but integrated into a single cohesive system where students are intrinsically motivated to participate. It combines project-based learning, game-based learning, social-emotional learning and any number of other hyphenated initiatives that aim to invigorate an education system that is too-often out of step with the world it hopes to service.

The teachers and professors who have experimented with D&D in their practice are also players who have experienced the force of shaping and reshaping stories. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, they use the power learned in the realms of fantasy to hack an all too real educational narrative. In Dungeons & Dragons parlance, their race is Human, their class is Pedagog, and their moral alignment is clearly Chaotic Good, whose description in the Player’s Handbook is eerily suitable:

A chaotic good character does what is necessary to bring about change for the better, disdains bureaucratic organizations that get in the way of social improvement, and places a high value on personal freedom, not only for oneself, but for others as well.

Dungeons & Dragons is a salient example of an imaginative and timely intervention, but sword-and-sorcery is not for everybody. The plasticity of RPG systems allows for the implementation of any theme or setting, and students can be enlisted to help design the games around a specific topic. Also, teachers like Kade Wells are not only using RPGs in their classes, but turning their classes into role-playing games which further restructures the operations of a traditional education system.

Ultimately, whether using games, RPGs, or any other initiatives, teachers have an unprecedented opportunity to exercise and model creativity, passion, problem-solving, and courage to re-author their personal and institutional narratives. With these mildly subversive but benevolent grassroots interventions they can rewrite the story of student, teacher and school into a legendary epic for the ages, and perhaps save the world along the way.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2COLTJG

How to Make the Best Instant Oatmeal

All About Nylon

Having a choice is great. But, when there are so many options to choose from, picking the best type of carpet for your home can become a puzzle. Get to know more about the reasons why Nylon is a great choice as you read below:

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

What’s great about Nylon?

Chemists have formulated synthetic carpet fibers from petroleum for decades. Some of these synthetics did not work well. Nylon was the first commercially successful synthetic carpet fiber. It wore extremely well.

But earlier generations of nylon fiber also stained badly. Chemists spent years figuring out how to make nylon fiber more stain resistant. Stainmaster brand nylon hit the market in the late ‘80’s and changed the carpet industry. Suddenly you could put light colors of carpet in heavily used rooms and maintain it much more easily.

Today, virtually all synthetic fibers are stain resistant. (Note: none of these fibers claims to be stain proof). The trend is towards ultra soft fibers.

Besides stain resistance, there are other reasons why nylon fiber has the largest market share of the man-made fibers. Nylon carpet comes in a wide variety of colors and styles. It is very resilient. This means that when you walk on it, the fibers “bounce back”. Nylon is tough- it wears well. Besides resisting stains, it cleans easily. It has low static levels. You can use it in any type of home and anywhere in the home — low traffic rooms, high traffic areas, budget homes, fancy homes. Source: HuffingtonPost

Disadvantage

One drawback of nylon is that it tends to build up a static charge, which is transferred to a person walking across the carpet. You can accumulate as much as 12,000 volts, enough to sting your fingers when you touch a doorknob [source: FacilitiesNet]. The charge can also harm electronic gear like computers. Most nylon is now treated with an antistatic coating and may include carbon fibers to help dissipate charge. But you might want to avoid nylon carpet in your computer room. Source: Home.HowStuffWorks

Cost

Nylon is readily available at all price points. It is a versatile fiber that can be used in lower grade (entry-level) products for added durability over other inexpensive fiber types (such as polyester and olefin) but it is also suitable for higher-end products with longer warranties. Source: TheSpruce

Let our experts help you install the carpet in your home. Call us today!

The post All About Nylon appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.

from Curlys Carpet Repair https://ift.tt/2NM9U59