Veronica Shukla

Random Musings

Category: Health

  • The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Fast Metabolism

    The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Fast Metabolism

    People talk about fast metabolism like it’s a gift given to skinny people. I think it’s assumed that if you have a slow metabolism, then you’re doomed to be overweight and if you have a fast metabolism, then you’re gifted with a perfect body while eating pizza and Cadbury eggs to your heart’s content. So…

  • Winter Running for Those Who Run Cold

    Winter Running for Those Who Run Cold

    I live in South Dakota, and I hate cold. I fell in love with running a few years ago, but I always stopped in the fall and didn’t start up again until late spring. I don’t like cold air touching my skin or breeze chilling my sweat. It is miserable to me. In fact, even when I…

  • What if you’re in your 30’s and haven’t found the right career?

    What if you’re in your 30’s and haven’t found the right career?

    Recently, a fellow group member asked this question: “Raise your hand if you’re 30 (or in your 30s) and not yet in your right career, financially unstable, or generally feeling like you haven’t found the right track yet for where you wanna go and who you’re supposed to be? I felt like my 20s would guide…

  • The Food Allergy Stigma

    The Food Allergy Stigma

    Imagine you are traveling for a wedding. You brought your weight in food so you don’t have to eat out. Restaurants are expensive, yes, but more importantly, it’s almost impossible to eat at a restaurant and avoid a reaction if you have food allergies like me. No, you want to look and feel good so…

  • Tackle Mini Goals in 5 Minutes a Day, Plus Push-up Mini Goal Plan

    Tackle Mini Goals in 5 Minutes a Day, Plus Push-up Mini Goal Plan

    Do you have mini goals? Mini goals are small goals that build up to the accomplishment of larger goals. Mini goals are great because they help you feel more accomplished. People tend to want results immediately, and when that doesn’t happen, they often get discouraged, sometimes quitting altogether. But when we break larger goals up…

  • Choose your Suffering

    Choose your Suffering

    There was once a miser who lived alone aside from some servants and a dog, whom he hadn’t bothered to name, in a large draughty mansion. He had no friends and had never even given anyone a present. He spent his days alone counting and recounting his money, never leaving his house for fear of…

  • 4 Examples of the Power of the Breath

    4 Examples of the Power of the Breath

    We all know how important breathing is. It’s so important, it’s an involuntary action of our bodies, carried out without having to think about it. Our body just does it, because if we stopped breathing long enough, we’d die. Since our body does it involuntarily, we often just forget about it, but the breath is…

  • How to Save Money on Hair Care Products

    What if I told you you don’t have to wash your hair? By the end of this article, you’ll believe me. You know, sometimes when you think about things, like really think about them, they start to make no sense. Well, about a year or two ago, I started really thinking about the current norm for hair…

  • Sustainable Eating

    If you want to make a huge difference in your environmental impact, a good place to start is being responsible for what goes in your mouth. I don’t have all the scary facts, and I don’t intend to include much of them here, but I do encourage you to research more. Here I will simply…

  • Choose to Enjoy It

    I am extremely lucky to be vacationing in the Black Hills this week, but perhaps even luckier to have found a gem of wisdom while here. Yesterday morning, my husband and I were outside the hotel with Forrest. Something about having a baby seems to open up conversation with about everyone. This time it was…

  • Use Your Dreams to Stay Sober

    I’ve all but started a completely new life since then, and some things are easier left unsaid. You know, it’s easy to make a good impression when certain pieces of your past are left out. But we all have our demons, and I’m happy to share mine if it means I might be able to…

  • Cleaning a Bathroom the Easy Way (and without chemicals)

    Cleaning a Bathroom the Easy Way (and without chemicals)

    My working past is rich in cleaning experience. None of it until the past few years was without toxic chemicals, but I did learn some fun techniques that still make things easier. The bathroom is my least-deplored room in the house to clean, maybe because I don’t have to vacuum it. But when our family switched…

  • I Love Dandelions

    I Love Dandelions

    Do you remember, as a child, picking a bouquet of dandelions for your mother? I do. I genuinely thought dandelions were beautiful and that I was giving a beautiful gift to my mother. I did not consider them a weed, something worthy of destruction. In fact, not only were they beautiful, but when they went…

  • Being Green

    For today’s post, I thought it would be fun to list the things we do to minimize our impact on the environment. Hopefully I can give you some ideas you may not have thought of yet. Many of these items fit in more than one category, so I just picked the most obvious one. Reduce…

  • How to Conquer Irritation

    How to Conquer Irritation

    Annoyances. Aggravations. Irritations. We all have them. We all get annoyed. Some suffer from few grievances, while some have peeves streaming out of their ears, ready to jump out of their chairs at the sound of a co-worker clicking his pen or the sight of a grammatical error. But why? Well, irritation is an emotional…

  • When I Found Buddhism

    It was around 2009 when I started longing to belong to some sort of group. I was no longer Christian, but I missed belonging to a congregation. I didn’t need a group of people or a religion in order to be a good person. I learned morals growing up, and I generally knew to follow…

  • The Three Poisons and Their Antidotes

    A few years ago, when I was just starting to study Buddhist philosophy, I learned about the three poisons and their antidotes in this documentary. This concept immediately clicked with me and has been a part of my daily thought process ever since. The three poisons are the root of all suffering. Every bit of…