OK, so I have to bite my tongue. I just mentioned I’d have to give up ice cream in my first post about clean eating, but I was wrong.

Here is a fast and easy

recipe to make ‘clean’ banana ice cream!

Ingredients

• 1/2 - 1 Banana
• 1 scoop vanilla or chocolate whey
• 1/2 cup skim milk

How it’s made

Slice the banana, place slices in a container and freeze.

Once frozen, add banana slices and all other ingredients in a blender. Blend thoroughly and put the mix back into the container, place in the freezer until you’re ready to enjoy it!

How easy is it to give up ice-cream, cakes, bread, or even power bars? Although I’m already avoiding sugar laden foods, and the general ingredients of the Standard American Diet (S.A.D), giving up those last few cookies, candies and treats that pull my through the day will not be easy.

The clean eating life-style is certainly not a diet, it is a different way of looking at food and goes back to our foodie-roots: from scratch cooking using un-processed ingredients. In other words: healthy eating to a mild extreme. Clean eating can be summarized in just a sentence: if it’s processed or made in a factory, don’t eat it. Basically it calls for more culinary involvement in the food that goes into your body.

Interestingly enough, unlike many other “self-help” crazes, there are countless successful people using the same principles and attribute their happiness and success to the strategies taught in ‘the secret’.

James Arthur Ray, author of ‘harmonic wealth’ says you have to think, feel and act what you would like to achieve. A video of an interview with James Arthur Ray is posted below:

When you commute an average of three hours a day, you soon start to feel like most of your life is eaten up by travel. Traveling that far to a less than exciting job makes the entire matter even more depressing. It’s easy to see the point of traveling for ten-twelve hours to an exotic location for an even more exotic job, but getting on the road, bus and train for your day to day office-grind is not the most stimulating.

Psychy.org is not a gossip blog, and will never become one. However, when we stumbled upon this video of Tom Cruise talking about scientology (supposedly, this video is BY scientologists, ONLY FOR scientologists…). It make psychy wonder if Tom Cruise is mentally unstable?

Personally, who I feel worst for is his daughter; she will grow up as a scientologist, thinking of aliens as a fact of life rather than an unconfirmed scientific possibility. Scientology may have a similar root as “science”, but it has nothing to do with science. In fact, this is the most unscientifically supported religion that exists!

This video was created to support London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic games. Although everyone can, and should, interpret it in their own way to me this video sends an important message. The message I take from it is different from the message that was intended; London tried to convince the IOC that hosting the Olympic games in London would inspire the youth of the world.

Sometimes our lives seem ruled by “to-do’s”.

How will I ever get done
I can’t get to sleep early, I have a million things to do
I’m exhausted and the dishes arn’t done, the bills are not paid yet, and the laundry also needs folding

These are common thoughts and frustrations keeping us up at night, putting strain and stress on our relationships and depriving us from enjoying our lives. Compound any regular person’s responsibilities with the crippling inability to be efficient because you are so bogged down by the many things that need to get done, or by natural causes such as depression or other mental illnesses, and it is easy to understand why bills are past due and the laundry is piling up.

Food for your courage: it’s OK to be bogged down and cry, but remember that this is not the time to give up. It may be time to rest, but success is failure turned inside out. Look at a problem from the one positive angle you may be able to find, however insignificant it may seem.

I found a study today on how children of depressed mothers are affected. The study interviewed adults who had lived or were living with a depressed parent.

Turns out, we kids are throught to be at increased risk of psychopathology and disturbed relationships.

Here is a link to the study, that’s it for today but tomorrow more will follow on this topic.

There are cases where depression is related to a sense of not having achieved what one wants to achieved, or acquired what one wants to acquire. Thus, for many people being depressed is related to a sense of failure. Whether “failure” preceded depression, or feelings of failure are a symptom of depression is like asking which one came first: the chicken or the egg. In this case, the answer is highly personal.

Here is a very inspirational and positive video on leadership. These are the bite-sized inspirational pick-me-ups that can make all the difference in your day. If you see one every day, or think a few positive thoughts, it can make a big difference in your life.

‘Lighten up!’
‘Think positive!’
… and ‘it could always be worse’

Just some of the ‘positive encouragement’ thrown at negative people. Thousands of books have been written about ‘positive thinking’, and if we are to believe ‘the secret’, you are a few positive thoughts away from wealth, success and delirious happiness.

In Britain, studies have been conducted that have shown physical exercise to help combat depression. Watch the video for yourself:

My mother is clinically depressed, and has been on and off for as long as I can remember. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was depressed before I was born, and she probably had PPD without even knowing it. Now we’re 20-some years ahead, and living with a depressed parent brings many challenges.

According to my therapist I’m not depressed, but I do think I am a “depression cameleon”; whenever my mother has a good day, I have a good day. When she has a bad day, mine couldn’t be worse. I suck up part of her sadness and internalize it, simply because I do not know how to built a shell to protect myself against these negative feelings.