A non-carby toast :)

I hate sending forwards.  Along with unpunctual people, another one of my pet peeves is receiving/sending chain letters which present an ultimatum: “If you don’t send this email to 10 people, you’re going to have a lifetime of bad luck.  Your time starts now”.  Give me a break! 

Although every now and then, I receive a few good ones- some hilarious, some sentimental- and I can’t help but pass them on.  But I try to only send out the ones that I’m sure others will appreciate.  Yesterday, my sister from another mister sent me the forward below, and I really felt the need to share it.  As it basically sums up the importance of emotional health, I thought it was quite relevant to this blog:

“I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection-the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married but for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.  Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences.  Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create more serotonin-a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf?  Yes. But their feelings?-rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.    There’s a tendency to think that when we are “exercising” we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged—not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking! So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. So, let’s toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it’s very good for our health.” 

With that being said, I wish you a very happy Diwali. Hope you’re day is filled with spending time with your loved ones…and of course getting in your 7 veggies 🙂