Adult Coloring Books

I have a confession to make: there have been times when I have looked at kid’s coloring books and thought, I would like to have that. Now, thanks to the adult coloring book craze, I have my very own coloring book, and I absolutely love it.

So, what’s so great about coloring, you might ask. For me, the first great thing about it is that it is NOT WORK! Between ministry, writing and publishing, and trying to keep my home looking vaguely as if it is inhabited by a human, it sometimes feels as if almost every minute of my day is taken up by things related to work. Don’t get me wrong, I love everything I do (except for the housework), but nonetheless it all carries the burden of “purpose.” Coloring, on the other hand, serves absolutely no purpose other than relaxation and enjoyment.

Coloring causes you to focus. We hear a great deal today about the importance of being “in the moment” – not fretting about what is past or anticipating what is to come, but really enjoying the “now.” Coloring produces that state very effectively. For the time given to it, the rest of the world fades away and all that exists is that beautiful, intricate design and the question of which colors should go where.

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Intermittent Fasting

I first discovered intermittent fasting around 20 years ago, although back then I had no idea what it was called, or even that it actually had a name. I simply found that my body was happier if it wasn’t being stuffed with food from morning to night.
In those days, my intermittent fasting took the form of breakfast and dinner, with nothing in between. My body responded well to this routine, and it also had the benefit of freeing up a chunk of time in the middle of the day when I would otherwise have been preparing and eating lunch.
However, it ran totally counter to the advice of the “experts”, who said that eating small meals throughout the day was the way to go. The younger me was a bit more inclined to listen to “experts” than the older, more cynical me is, so I gave up my two meals a day routine and tried to cram in the six small meals they wanted me to eat.

SIX SMALL MEALS DID NOT WORK FOR ME!

Firstly, it meant that virtually my whole day was taken up with food. I love cooking, but this was ridiculous.
Secondly, I found it almost impossible to make a small meal interesting. There is simply not enough scope for ingredients. I either had to cook a larger meal, divide it in half and reheat the second half later – not very appetizing and doesn’t work for everything – or settle for bland.
In practical terms, I ended up eating six larger meals, which was definitely not what the doctor ordered for weight loss.
So in the end I gave up and retreated to the “standard” three meals a day. A few times over the years I tried the two-meal regime, but it never seemed to work the same, and always life got in the way and I ended up back with three meals a day.
Now I have resumed an intermittent fasting lifestyle, but different from my previous one. I have now totally dismissed the “experts” insistence that breakfast is essential (after all, these are the same “experts” who told us that we had to be low fat everything, and look where that got us.) I really don’t feel like food first thing in the morning, and I don’t see the point of eating just because I “should.” My first meal is now around 1pm. I might have a small snack around 3pm, then dinner is timed to finish no later than 7pm. That means that I am fasting for around 18 hours each day. However, it takes between 8 and 12 hours for the body to digest each meal, so that means that my body is in a fasted state for between 6 and 10 hours.

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Getting Back Into Fermenting

My journey with fermented foods has been something of an on-and-off love affair. I have been making my own yoghurt for quite a few years now. It’s a very easy process which I will go into in detail in another post, and it means that I know exactly what has gone into the finished product (which is not always the case with commercial products.) Life sometimes gets in the way and I go back to buying the commercial stuff for a while, but I always end up coming back to the home-made version.
Around twenty years ago I made kombucha for a while, but then I had to move house and the scoby got lost in the process, and I never got around to replacing it.

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