Dear Buttoni:

You certainly could pass for younger than 62, so it bodes well for your journey through natural living.

As far as my yoga mat, I don't do yoga myself, but I just utilize this yoga mat. But I do do stretches with my legs straight sitting in a "V," and with my knees bent Indian style, always keeping my lower and upper back as straight as possible. I just bought a jute braided rug sitting atop the yoga mat now, so it's even more padded and looks nicer in the livingroom. A FAVORITE toy for working out on the floor is my foam roller (from my physical therapist's office). But you can buy them online just about anywhere. Mine is about 8 inches in diamater and about 4 to 5 feet long. Laying on it lengthwise under the spine and doing knee drops/raises (alternating knees one at a time) for about 4 minutes will really help the back. That move is for the abs, and will help stabilize the low back so that low back pain will be reduced.

Then I also turn it perpendicular to my spine and lay over it with it behind my waist to start, then roll down the foam roller until I get to my neck.

I suppose since you're in Temple, TX you might benefit from mail-order hormone testing/hormones. Some more prominent naturopathic offices in the country have a service they provide of helping patients out of the area to get hormone testing and hormones via mail or UPS or FedEx. You might check with Theresa Ramsey, NMD of Scottsdale, AZ to see if her office can do so; or you might ask her if she can recommend anyone in the Temple, TX area who you could either go see or receive hormone testing/hormones via mail from them.

With your rather low body temps, I bet you could benefit from some natural OTC/online thyroid booster to normalize your TSH to something closer to 0.5. Your TSH is probably something like 6 right now, which isn't really optimal. The typical ranges used by doctors, although recently updated, are STILL too high to be in the patient's best interests. I get mine from www.greenwillowtree.com; it's called Thyodine (tablets). When someone is in need of a thyroid product, they sometimes get a sense of euphoria in the beginning, a sort of child-like feeling that one had when the world was fresh and new and the sky was the limit. This is how people who have normal thyroids feel all the time, but they are used to it so they don't refer to it as euphoric. However, ppl who have a slow thyroid feel foggy all the time, and since the onset can also be slow, ppl may not realize they have a slow thyroid. Then, when they go to their doctor, their doctor tests their TSH and uses invalid ranges and tells them they don't need thyroid supplementation (when they absolutely do). So the patient will spend lots of time, effort and money trying to find the solution in other areas for the way she feels that may or may not pay off, when a lot of the symptoms could be resolved by actually targeting the truly existing problem because indeed some of those symptoms are just caused by that truly existing problem.

Something I don't think I mentioned in my original message to everyone was that the single simple change of taking an anti-candida OTC natural herbal remedies and avoiding sweets/refined carbs/sodas/starches at the same time can drastically reduce belly fat and help with weight loss efforts already in play to be more effective, causing a sudden loss of weight when such an anti-candida OTC natural herbal remedy is begun. This is without adding any new weight loss efforts to the ones you were already doing. The more consistently sweets and starches are avoided while taking the herbs, the better the results. Wonderfully, the anti-candida herbs help to reduce cravings by virtue of the change in the toxic blood sugar activities that had been going on prior to starting the herbs. The lack of cravings gives one much more control over food choices and one can go hours with eating out of forgetfulness. Then when you do decide to eat, there isn't that "urgency" that causes bad decisions. Also, you seem to be satisfied easier with whatever you choose to eat, so even if you eat something vorboten, you won't want much of it quantity-wise anyway. Anti-candida treatment almost sounds like a cure-all and I suspect it hasn't been marketed much or with enough importance or emphasis on its effectiveness by the diet industry for obvious reasons. The one drawback it has is that it requires an initial period of reduction in one's habitual level of sugar/starch intake, which depending on one's current levels, may cause a sense of deprivation. However, starting the herbs a few days prior to even starting to reduce one's sugar/starch intake, seems to help recude this sense of deprivation markedly, so that it is almost undetectible. As you can see, the anti-candida approach is not emphasized enough in diet/medical culture for obvious monetary reasons.