Bikes On My Mind

Urban bicycling has been at the center of several conversations over the past few weeks.  As a lover of cycling, but only occasional cyclist, I have participated in each of these conversations with great interest.  Part of my fantasy life includes regular biking to work and to do errands.  My reality, however, is 35,000 miles added to my odometer each year because of my suburban New Jersey, working mother of 4 existence.  Don’t get me wrong.  I cherish the time I spend in the car with my kids, listening to their latest iTunes downloads, sharing a laugh over “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” on NPR (my daughter and I have geek-crushes on Peter Sagal and Carl Kassell) or discussing the latest challenge in school.  However, I love the wind-in-your-face feeling and the boost of energy I get each time I ride my bike.  I also like being independent of my car, gas prices and fossil fuel burning.  So, I continue to fantasize.

My most recent conversations were with my daughter, who recently traveled to Holland and my friend Claire, who lives in England. My daughter had spent a week in Holland with a group from school participating in a Model UN conference and living with a host family.  She learned quickly that Holland is an anti-car culture.  She and her friends rode bikes everywhere, even when they were dressed in business attire for their meetings at the conference.  By her account, they rode over 20 miles each day (in pencil skirts, stockings and heels).  She wrecked 3 times!  While I felt bad that she wasn’t prepared for this challenge with more accommodating attire and certainly was concerned for her injuries, I was intrigued by the possibilities.  How can we get more areas of the U.S. to embrace biking as a legitimate means of daily transportation rather than just a weekend leisure activity?  True, a country with miles and miles of dikes, massive water management issues and serious land constraints fosters creative transportation thinking, but I don’t think we should shy away from the effort simply because we are blessed with vast amounts of open roadway and a well-developed interstate highway system.

My next biking case study came when my daughters and I were in London over Thanksgiving break.  London, like Paris, has implemented a bike rental scheme.  Bikes are locked up to small vending machines and Londoners rent bikes, ride them across town and return them to another vending machine.  For £45, you can buy an annual pass and then ride for up to ½ hour at a time with no additional charge.  I’m going to study a London street map before my next trip and give it a go.  Further, the number of regular bike commuters in London is astounding.  While taking a taxi from our hotel to the Kings Cross train station (we had a lot of baggage), we sat at a traffic light at Pall Mall behind 20 or so cyclists, dressed in business clothes or carrying knapsacks or panniers with work clothes stuffed inside.  I was in awe and very jealous.  

While New York has seen a surge in cyclists in the past few years because of bike lane designations on several streets, people who regularly ride on NYC streets are considered a bit loony.  The traffic in New York is still terrifying to me, and the potholes could swallow me up in one bite.  Even in less congested areas, Americans haven’t completely learned to respect bike lanes.

I often talk about small, simple steps that we each can take to improve health and quality of life.  Is the growing interest in urban cycling an important step, a bit of lunacy or a passing fancy?  I feel like I’m going to redouble my efforts to integrate cycling into my regular about-town routine, but I haven’t quite figured out the practical aspects.  Treehugger.com has a dozen great bike’s for about town riding or commuting.  This is my plug for the pink cargo bike.  If anyone in my family is reading, it would look great under the Christmas tree!  A week’s worth of groceries for 7 doesn’t fit so well in my back pack.  Assuming the pink bike doesn’t appear under the tree, I think I’ll just adopt some of the driving tricks of “hypermilers” as explained in a treehugger.com article and drive as if I were on my bike.

What’s the state of the bike culture in your city?  Do you think it has a chance of taking hold in the U.S or will we continue to favor cocooning in our SUVs, minivans and sports cars?  Is this a small, simple step you can take?

Trust, Love, Hard Work: Farewell Steve Jobs

Millions of us paused in a moment of reflection and sadness yesterday when we heard the news of the death of Steve Jobs.  For me, there was almost a peace in that moment.  We’d known for years that his time on Earth was very limited so I didn’t find the news jarring.  Since then, I’ve reflected on the peace that comes when one succumbs to terminal illness (and excruciating grief, I’m certain for his loved ones) and on the impact he has had on the rest of us. 

First, full disclosure:  I typed my senior essay for my history major on an early Macintosh.  I’m writing this post on a MacBook Pro with my iPhone4 at my side and my iPod shuffle on the coffee table.  My kids use Macbooks and iPads for school work and fun. With my strong encouragement, the Puristics team has successfully made the transition to a Mac and iPhone-only company.  Yes, I’m a fan and blessed to have access to such terrific products. 

But that’s not the point of this post.  For me, the lessons from one’s life are not in the “what” was done but rather in the “how” it was done.  I honor Steve Jobs today for the “how”.

Reading the text of the commencement address he gave at Stanford a few years ago, I see a few key themes:  trust, love and hard work.  Overall, he talked about living life on your own terms and how a death sentence (pancreatic cancer) brings the important things into focus.  I was talking with a colleague over dinner last night about this.  We began to wrestle a bit with how we determine what’s important, when to let go and when to focus a bit harder.  I would feel somewhat hypocritical if I wrote about the importance of jettisoning all worldly trappings and simplifying in order to focus on the few most important things.  I’m in the middle of what feels like a whirlwind as I fly from coast to coast, meeting with retailers to convince them to place Puristics on their shelves in 2012.  (I’m pleased to report that you should find it fairly easy to locate Puristics Totally Ageless at a retailer near you beginning in March 2012).  Is what I’m doing my highest and best calling?  Would I be truer to my words and thoughts to chuck it all?  I don’t think so, and I don’t think I’m at odds with the words of Steve Jobs.  I’m trusting while I do what I love, surround myself with people I love and work hard.

Here’s how. 

Providing a better, safer, healthier life for my family has been a passion of mine since the kids were born (beginning nearly 19 years ago).  I’ve written previously in this space about the impact of chronic illness on our family (our oldest), acute illness (my mother’s ovarian cancer) and the impact on choices going forward.  Making better choices for my family has turned into a passion and a business.  Puristics was developed to make it easy to choose personal care products that are devoid of harmful chemicals, proven to be effective and available in regular retail outlets at reasonable prices.  At least in this aspect of my life, I’ve combined trust, love and hard work and ended up focusing on what’s really important.  I’ve also been able to demonstrate for my kids that you can have work that you love and still be a good and available mom. 

Trust, love, hard work.  As I write this from a hotel room in California just before I meet with Safeway and work to persuade them that Puristics will be an important addition to their shelves in 2012, I am trusting that it will all come together, loving the fact that I get an opportunity to talk about our terrific product line and working hard to stay on top of the millions of details needed to bring a line of products to market across the United States.  Bob (my co-founder) and I started in late 2008 with nothing more than an idea. We trusted and worked hard and are now looking forward to shipping our products to more than 20,000 retail stores early next year.  We had very lofty goals and very high standards, and it is extremely gratifying to realize that we didn't compromise on our goals and standards.  I am tired; the gray hair is coming in too quickly; I haven’t run in 3 weeks; I am happy. 

Aside from Puristics, Steve Jobs’ passing has caused me to reflect on 3 personal anecdotes that I think foreshadowed the trust, love and hard work that have fueled my current passion.  In 8^th grade, I was practicing my foul shots on the school basketball court when my teacher told me to move closer to the basket.  He clearly didn’t know me very well because he thought I’d be satisfied by the easy basket.  I was determined to improve my free throw percentage and that was not going to happen if I moved closer to the hoop. I went on to be the starting center on my high school basketball team for 3 years.  Four years after that free throw practice, I found myself in the exact same situation.  I was a senior and the captain of our high school soccer team.  Toward the end of the season, I found myself staying after practice each day to practice my corner kicks.  My coach was also my advisor so he knew about my heavy course load and suspected I had better ways to use my time.  He encouraged me to knock off early.  I didn’t.  During the final game of that season, against our archrivals, the score was tied.  I took a corner kick in the final moments of the game.  The ball curved just right and sailed into the goal over the goalie’s head. We won the game, and I was named to the All-State and All-League teams that year.  Flash forward over 25 years to my most recent example.  I was managing the Mucinex business.  The business had been successful because of our single-minded focus on the “mucus out” communication and our long-acting product benefit.  In order to rush a new product to market, I was encouraged by an executive senior to me to launch a product that would not be consistent with our strategic imperative.  I fought hard even when I was accused of spouting “marketing purist bull$h!t”.  I stood my ground and now Mucinex is one of the top choices for cough/cold relief in the U.S. 

It wasn’t until I sat down to right this post that I realized the consistency in these stories over my life and that each of them comes from trust, love and hard work.  Steve Jobs’ words from the Stanford commencement address ring true for me: 

            “ . . . you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.  So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. . . . This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

The dots have connected for me and led me to Scerene Healthcare and Puristics, but who knows how the dots will lay out for the future.  So, I’ll just trust, love and work hard. 

Peace, Steve Jobs (1955-2011).



God Bless Gilda Radner and My Mom

September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness month.  I really wonder if ovarian cancer would ever have made it on the cause-of-the-month hit parade, if it weren’t for Gilda Radner.  Sadly, she lost her battle with the disease in 1989.  Back then it seemed ludicrous that the “silent killer” could take the life of such an ebullient woman.  While her somewhat nasal, sharp voice was lost that day, her legacy lives on with memories of riotous laughter, occasional references to Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna.  I owe Gilda Radner a personal debt of gratitude.  She helped to save my mother’s life.  Six years ago, through some miracle, my mother decided that the stomach pain she was feeling deserved a trip to the doctor.  I think both she and her doctor paid a bit more attention because of Gilda Radner.

Mom had always ignored aches and pains and tossed them off as minor annoyances.  If the pain got really bad, she would pull out a heating pad or pop a couple of Advil.  I think she assumed that whatever pain she had was a normal part of the human condition, and I’m certain that she thought that there was honor and grace in bearing it.  She often quotes the nuns of her childhood when things were tough.  “Offer it up” she’d say.  Something nagged her this time.  The pain was different.  It wasn’t in her stomach like an ulcer (from her Advil habit) might be.  It was lower, and she knew somehow that it needed to be checked.  Shortly after that check-up (about which my siblings and I knew nothing), she called to say that 1) my sister was in labor with her 2^nd child, and 2) I wouldn’t be able to reach my parents at home the next day because she was going to have surgery.  In a fashion that is so typical of my mother, she slipped in the part about the surgery just after she told me that my niece Olivia was about to be born.  She might as well have told me that she was going to Stop & Shop to buy milk.  She went on to explain that the surgery had been planned for later that month, but the doctor’s office had called on Friday and told her to come in Monday morning.  “They had some scheduling issues, I guess”, she said.  “They’re having a gynecological oncologist do the surgery.  The regular surgeon must not be available.”  Yup, just scheduling issues. 

That was the beginning of my mom’s journey into and thankfully through the world of ovarian cancer.  After the surgery and chemotherapy, she was declared cancer free and has remained so for 5 years.  That day was also the moment, for me, when I went from being a child in her life to truly being a grown up.  I think she’d thought of me as a grown up for many years (I had 4 children after all), but I still thought of myself as her child.  When hit in the face with her mortality, I also had to face my own mortality.  Was there anything that allowed the cancer to take hold and grow in her body?  How could I learn what it was, help her and help to protect myself, my sisters and my daughters?  As much as my mother has always been stalwart in tough situations, she has accepted many things passively.  There was no way I was going to take a passive approach to my well-being.  From that moment on, my generally healthy lifestyle shifted into a higher gear.

As I think about my mother’s fight against ovarian cancer, there are some “unknowns” and some “knowns”. 

The Unknowns:

-       Were there “rogue” cells in my mom for years waiting to turn cancerous?

-       Did years of poor nutrition, overloaded with synthetic foods and diet products plant the seed?

-       Did 6 formula-fed children make her odds better or worse?

-       Was the ovarian cancer related to her sister’s “female problems” or the benign breast lump found years earlier?

-       Was this the beginning of a family trend?

The Knowns:

-       I tested negative for the BRCA1 gene

-       My pelvic ultrasounds have been negative each year

-       I eat a nutritious diet, low on inflammation causing foods and high on antioxidants

-       I’ve learned the signs of ovarian cancer:

• Abdominal pressure or bloating.  Enlarged abdomen or waistline
• Constantly feeling full or loss of appetite
• Pelvic discomfort or pain
• Indigestion, gas or nausea that sticks around
• Constipation or other changes in bowel habits
• Low back pain
• Lack of energy

Whether you have some of these exact symptoms or others that concern you, see your doctor and ask if it might be ovarian cancer.  Without being excessively paranoid, think about sources of potential carcinogens and other potentially harmful chemicals in your life and make a plan to get rid of them.  And as always, pay attention to your body.  Like my mom, you'll know first when something isn't as it should be.  

Gilda Radner helped to make us all more aware of ovarian cancer.  We owe it to her, my mom and all of the other women who have fought against this disease to learn the signs and symptoms.  This month, when you see a teal ribbon, let it remind you to check yourself for symptoms and tell a friend what signs she should check.  For more information on ovarian cancer awareness, visit www.ovarian.org.  For more about Gilda Radner and her fight with ovarian cancer, check out her book It's Always Something. 

With Climate Change, Think Globally; Protect your Family Locally

I sometimes worry that Global Climate Change has become such an enormous issue that it is too big for us to handle.  Because it is such a big and complicated mess, we must rely on lawmakers and regulators to take action on our behalf.  If we decide that governmental bodies and NGOs are the only ones who can make a change then we may decide that we no longer have any personal responsibility.  Separating recyclables, taking shorter showers or switching to biodiesel may seem like such trivial steps that we decide to just forget the whole thing.

I just became aware of a new tool from the NRDC that helps to personalize climate change.  I think this approach has the potential of re-energizing each of us, because the worries and solutions are local, and each of us will be able to feel that we're making an impact, at least on the health of our families.  I submit that there are very few of us who are able to think altruistically of the greater good for a long period of time if there's not a visible, palpable benefit for our own lives.  The NRDC Climate Change tool enables you to look at the specific risks where you live and what you should do to protect your health and safety.

I live in New Jersey.  When I used the Climate Change tool for my area, I was able to read about the impact of climate change in New Jersey, see that the counties where I live and work are affected by flooding (knew that) and that there's potential for exposure to dengue fever due to mosquito bites (didn't know that).  As an asthma sufferer, I was most interested in the air pollution information.  It's an interesting tool and will certainly make you more aware, in an empowering way, of climate change and it's impact on you.

A few months ago, I did a Pure Talk video blog on a similar web-based tool called Scorecard, The Pollution Information Site.  This is another useful tool for understanding the hazards near your home or workplace.  The Scorecard tool includes information on the prevalence of hazardous chemicals in your zip code.  Check out either or both sites just to know a bit more and to breathe a little easier, perhaps.

Feeling overwhelmed by the potential hazards awaiting you each time you step outside?  It certainly can be overwhelming if we allow ourselves to get pulled into all of the "might happen" scenarios.  I like these tools because they give me a general awareness of what is going on right around me, what I might do to be reasonably prepared/protected and what small steps I can take in my daily life to make sure that I'm part of the solution rather than being part of the problem.  They're meant to inform, not alarm - - no need to build an underground bunker just because you learned that your areas watershed flows are a bit low!

Generally, my focus is placed on the hazards most within my control - - what am I eating, drinking or putting on my skin.  Many of us have answered the "what am I eating and drinking" question well enough, but have we spent enough time pondering the "what am I putting on my skin" question?  You know I have, and you know what I recommend.  Instead of taking my word for it, click on one more link, check out the ingredients and make the choice that's best for you.  www.puristics.com.  What are you using?  What's working for you? What new or different products would you like?   If you've already made some changes in your personal care product regime, I'd love to know about them.  And keep the information coming. 

What Do You Really Look Like?

Maybe the inspiration came from the Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty" (very smart campaign; not sure why/how Dove dropped the ball on that one).  I just discovered a website called My Body Gallery:  What Real Women Look Like.  The site offers a tool that’s so cool that I almost posted a photo. Relax.  I said I almost posted a photo.  You put in your height, weight and body shape and the site returns pictures of real women with approximately the same stats.

Like virtually every woman I know, when I look down at the scale, I don’t see digits.  I see letters: F-A-T.  Well, maybe that’s overly harsh. What I mean is that I always have this idea that the numbers on the scale are embarrassingly high, regardless of what size clothing I wear, how fit I am or how I look in a swim suit.  It seems impossible to ever see myself objectively (I think that’s an oxymoron anyhow).  And yet, I work really hard to make sure that my teenage girls have positive body images. I've known so many women with eating disorders, that I'm acutely aware of the dangers of negative body images, particular among teenagers. 

When I put my stats into the Body Gallery tool, it returned pictures of women who were basically shaped like me.  I know . . . duh.  The real surprise is that I didn't think they looked that bad.  Somehow, I was able to see them as they actually are, something I'm not able to do when I look in the mirror.   I was fully expecting to see much heavier looking women because of my warped view that the numbers on my scale were embarrassingly high.  I think this is a better outcome than if the search engine had returned pictures of heavy women or stick thin super models.  It reminded me that I feel better about virtually everything in my life when I'm dealing with clear facts viewed through an objective lens. 

Body issues seem to be a never-ending competition among women even if we don’t speak about them.  We might go on a secret diet because we’re afraid that our efforts will trigger the competitive instinct in our friends or we might fall off the wagon and be judged harshly.  I never tell my (overly thin) mother when I'm making an extra effort to shed a few pounds because I fear either a knowing nod or subtle sabotage.  Nuts, right?  Why do we do this to each other?  As an athletic teen with a pretty good metabolism, I didn’t think much about dieting.  But metabolisms change and 4 children change things even more. I'm so focused on my healthy lifestyle that I feel that the perfect shape should just be an added benefit.  It seems hypocritical to think of vanity rather than or above health.  But sometimes I do. 

So, I continue to focus on good health and "compressing morbidity" (thanks Dr. Weil).  And the “My Body Gallery” site will help me to keep my focus on health.  Sure, I’d like to lose 10 lbs (who wouldn’t), but I can now see that there are others out there with my height and weight proportions who not only look like me, they look pretty good.

Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

It’s interesting that I stumbled across this tool the same week the world was passing judgment on the physiques of fit women like Cameron Diaz and Serena Williams.   Maybe it’s time to take a step back and acknowledge that each and every one of us is a real woman.  We need to support each other so that we can, someday, live comfortably in our bodies, whatever their shape.  With type 2 diabetes rates soaring, we need to support each other to be healthy and strong and to focus on what “normal” looks like. How do your clothes fit? Do you eat “clean”? Do you feel strong and healthy?  If you use these as your guides, I can promise that you’ll be a great, real woman.  In the meantime, I may just put my proportions minus 10 pounds into the Body Gallery tool . . . just to see.