February 27, 2020 at 09:51PM by CWC I often wonder how we would distract ourselves from the trials of modern life without astrology which, fortunately, offers endless opportunities to (literally) space out. Tonight the skies are doing their best to attract our attention by showcasing a “kiss” between Venus and the crescent moon. Just after sunset on Thursday, Venus will appear to touch the moon. I say appear, because in actuality they will be nowhere near one another; the moon is 249,892 miles away from Earth whereas Venus is more like 84 million miles away. But love keeps them together. So what does this apparent celestial kiss mean for your own love life? Intuitive astrologer and healer Rachel Lang explains that the moon and Venus are, astrologically speaking, “good friends,” so when they conjoin, we tend to feel more positive about our relationships and experience a stronger desire to connect to one another. “[This event] means romance, passion, and pleasure,” she says, noting that Venus is actually the planet of pleasure. It’s also good for our individual wellbeing which, of course, will positively influence your relationships, too. “The moon represents our emotions and internal state of equilibrium, so if you are normally prone to self criticism, fear, or worry, this transit offers you a reprieve,” says Lang. “It is important to remember, though, that many of the difficulties you might face in relationships, like not feeling seen, harboring resentment, or feeling out of your power, all start with how much
Month: February 2020
What Black doulas are doing to keep women and children alive
February 27, 2020 at 09:00PM by CWC A doula is a trained professional who provides emotional, physical, and educational support to an expectant mother throughout the pregnancy, during labor, and in the weeks following the birth. A supportive member of a birthing team, they work to improve health outcomes. While doulas may be ever present (and accepted) now, the concept wasn’t quite as ubiquitous in 2006, when Brandi Sellerz-Jackson first became a mother at the age of 23. Now the mother of three boys—Jax, 13, Jedi, 4, and Jupiter, 1—she only learned what a doula was, and could do, by her second pregnancy, when she hired a birth doula. With her last pregnancy, the Los Angeles-based mother opted for both birth and postpartum doulas. “I did things so very different this time, and it was amazing,” Sellerz-Jackson, co-founder of Moms in Color and creator of #NotSoPrivateParts, says. “For postpartum, there were literally just women coming in and out of our home for six weeks almost, just loving on us, bringing [us] food. My job at that time was just nursing Jupiter.” The 37-year-old has seen first-hand the life-saving advantages of having a birth worker present throughout one’s pregnancy journey (and after). After feeling the pull to enter women’s work in 2015, Sellerz-Jackson hosted a breastfeeding event with her now business partner, Kelly McKnight. When a friend and birth worker approached her about becoming a doula, she decided to become a birth and postpartum doula herself, undergoing an initial four-day intensive with reading, homework assignments, and hours of
I’m ready to retire my self-appointed ‘I’m bad at cooking’ label for good
February 27, 2020 at 08:00PM by CWC I have some pretty embarrassing stories in the kitchen, like the time my situationship was coming over and I needed to clean my apartment quickly, so I shoved a bunch of things in my oven, forgot about them for a couple days, and then preheated my oven with everything still in there. Or the time I decided to make my high school boyfriend hot chocolate, and it made him violently ill. For pretty much my whole life, I’ve been convinced that I’m just bad at cooking, like I don’t have the gene for following recipes or being competent enough to dice veggies into pieces that are the same size. There are many, many other kitchen incidents I could cite as evidence. I’ve caused the smoke detectors to go off more times than you can count, overcooked chicken to the point that it’s almost jerky, and sliced off part of my thumb while using a cheese grater to make cauliflower rice. I thought I was completely hopeless in the kitchen. So instead of trying to learn, I made it my thing. I’d say, “I’m so bad at cooking” with the same inflection as a woman saying, “I don’t have any girlfriends, I just get along better with boys.” (See: Amber from Love Is Blind.) It certainly didn’t help that my most recent ex-boyfriend was a major backseat chef, often just taking over from me—so I’ve internalized this notion that I need help in the
IDK WTF happened to my skin this February, but this $11 moisturizer saved me
February 27, 2020 at 07:00PM by CWC I can count the number of “good” skin days I’ve had this month on one hand. Thanks to constant weather flip-flopping here in New York City (where it’s 20 degrees one day, 56 and sunny the next), my sensitive, rosacea-prone skin has been freaking out more than I was the time I saw Harry Styles in concert. All month, I’ve battled redness, major acne breakouts (because fun fact, rosacea can manifest as whitehead-looking bumps), and itchy, cracked, dry skin all over my face. I tried everything—doubling down on my prescription topicals, avoiding foundation, slathering on various moisturizing masks—but nothing really helped. After three weeks of this, I was ready to book an appointment with my dermatologist when I tried one last-ditch effort: Cetaphil Rich Hydrating Night Cream with Hyaluronic Acid ($11). I’ve used various versions of the OG drugstore brand’s cleansers and moisturizers before and liked them, but since my skin is typically oily, I hadn’t ever sought out a cream specifically designed for dry to extra dry skin. But given how parched my complexion was, I knew I needed a different kind of moisturizer to help calm things down. This one has hyaluronic acid in it, which is one of the best hydrating ingredients that’s also safe for all skin types. Plus, unlike some other nighttime moisturizers, this option didn’t have any exfoliants or other ingredients that would further irritate my already very angry skin. I was sold. Photo: Cetaphil Shop now:
Why you don’t want to become a ‘butt-gripper’ in your workouts
February 27, 2020 at 06:00PM by CWC No matter what type of workout you’re doing, there’s a very high chance that you’re instructed to squeeze your glutes at least once during the class. That’s all well and good (and even encouraged in certain exercises) but a physical therapist says that you can actually overdo it. And overdoing it can lead you to become a “butt-gripper,” which can wreck your body’s alignment (and your workout). “If you’re constantly training your glutes to contract, eventually, they’ll never let go,” says Vinh Pham, PT and founder of Myodetox. “Over time, they become stuck in a posterior tilt.” The contraction of the glutes leads to a domino effect of a tilted pelvis, extended hip flexors, and excessive flexing of the lower spine. Over time, he says this can make you a buttgripper and lead to injury. This isn’t to say that activating your glutes in certain exercises is completely wrong—but Pham stresses that overdoing it can lead you to remain in that tilted pelvic position, even once the exercise is completed. “That leaves you more vulnerable to injury, especially in your lower back, because your pelvis isn’t moving when you’re walking, sitting, or doing other things,” he says. The key is to “go half way,” says Pham, aka don’t clench your glutes as if your life depends on it but make sure the right muscles are activated. “People tend to squeeze as hard as they can, which can feel satisfying in the moment, but that’s
Use the Gottman Institute’s Anger Iceberg to resolve conflict more quickly
February 27, 2020 at 05:00PM by CWC Anger in a relationship reduces us all to toddlers. You know what I mean—tantrums, tears, screaming, throwing clothes out the window, and then having nap. Anger isn’t an invalid feeling, but seeing the Anger Iceberg in time will keep your relationship from sinking faster than the Titanic. The Gottman Institute‘s Anger Iceberg suggests we visualize anger as—you guessed it—an iceberg. Above the water, all you can see is a small chunk of ice you’ll happily crash your relationship into (that’s anger). Below the surface, though, we hide more sensitive, vulnerable feelings like jealousy, fear, or sadness. “Almost always anger is a sign, a symptom, that underneath we really afraid, afraid that something has is threatening our well being and we feel vulnerable and scared,” says relationship therapist Tammy Nelson, PhD. “When someone cuts us off on the highway, we might flip them the bird or scream and yell or experience a flood of anger. Swear words we didn’t even know we knew tumbling out of our mouths. But the split second before all that road rage? We feel fear. Fear that we’ll smash into that car, that our safety will be at risk, that we would lose our physical well being, that we’ll be killed.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Gottman Institute (@gottmaninstitute) on Feb 25, 2020 at 8:01am PST //www.instagram.com/embed.js In essence, you can translate that toward getting angry at your partner. We use as a
I’ve swatched hundreds of foundations—here’s how to tell you’ve got a good one
February 27, 2020 at 04:00PM by CWC Odds are good that everyone has swatched at least one foundation in their life. It’s the easiest route to tell if a foundation will agree with your skin and whether or not a shade is the right match for you or not. And while it can feel playful and fun to test and try, for Huda Kattan, makeup artist and founder of Huda Beauty, it’s just another day on the job. She’s tested hundreds of foundations, and in doing so has gotten a sixth-sense for what makes a good foundation. “If I had to guess how many foundations I’ve used in my entire life, I’d have to say around 250 to 300,” she says, though has definitely swatched exponentially more before landing on those. “Nowadays, there are so many out there.” As one of the very few beauty influencers with global name recognition, Kattan is extra selective about which products and tips she shares with her millions of followers (her Instagram alone has 41.4M fans watching her every post). Since Kattan is also a professional makeup artist—and has been for over a decade—she’s well-versed in what makes a makeup product work, and how to find a good foundation that’s perfect for your skin. So when I asked her for her secrets to snag the just-right foundation, I listened right up. Keep scrolling for her three pro tips on how to find a good foundation below, and take note. 1. Check the texture “I have pores. I
Calm versus Headspace: The 3 best ways to use each leading meditation app
February 27, 2020 at 03:00PM by CWC A few years back, a close friend gifted me Yumi Sakugawa’s There Is No Right Way to Meditate: a doodle-filled love letter to meditation that’s basically a mindfulness picture book. As much as I love what’s inside its pages, the book’s title itself has always struck me as the most profound nugget it offers. That is, when it comes to meditation, there’s no single right way to go about it. I’ve taken that notion to heart as I’ve allowed myself to explore methods of mindfulness that don’t necessarily involve sitting on a cushion: Enter, the booming sector of meditation apps, where two specific apps—Calm and Headspace—have pulled ahead of the rest of the pack, as the only two top 10 apps in the Health & Fitness category of the AppStore focused on meditation. And while neither seems to be going anywhere, the question of deciding a winner between Calm versus Headspace is tricky to answer, especially for someone like me who swears by both for different reasons. Ten years after its 2010 founding, Headspace raised $93 million in new equity in February 2020. And as of February 2019, Calm (founded 2012) raised $88 million dollars. On paper, it would seem that the two are competitors, but it’s hard to classify one as “better” or more useful than the other. Doing so would be decidedly un-Zen, and—in the words of Sakugawa—there’s no right way to meditate. Furthermore, since both apps offer different but still-useful features,
We asked a registered dietitian to rank the top 5 best frozen cauliflower pizza crusts
February 27, 2020 at 02:00PM by CWC It’s hard to remember a time before frozen cauliflower pizza crusts were as ubiquitous in the frozen food aisle as their doughy counterparts. Yet walk into virtually any grocery store and you’ll see not only one cauli-crust option, but likely many. Healthy eaters have voiced their request for a curst made of the veggie and brands have delivered. In fact, there are actually so many options to choose from now that it can be tricky figuring out which one to buy. “Many consumers today looking for alternative crusts, think cauliflower! But not all cauliflower pizza crusts get my stamp of approval,” registered dietitian Melissa Rifkin, RD says. “Some tend to have a great deal of carbohydrates and sodium and lack protein.” Her point: Even a crust that’s primarily made of the cruciferous vegetable can have not-so great ingredients in it. Here, Rifkin ranks five of the most popular, best frozen cauliflower pizza crusts in terms of how healthy they are. (Taste was not part of the ranking.) Keep reading for her thoughts and to see which one she deems healthiest of all. The 5 best frozen cauliflower pizza crusts, ranked by an RD: 1. REAL GOOD FOODS Cauliflower Crust, $6 for 2 Rifkin says Real Good Foods’ product is, nutrition-wise, the best frozen cauliflower pizza crust. Besides cauliflower, it’s made with almond flour, eggs, coconut flour, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, xanthan gum, and salt. “Of all the brands, this one is the highest
Ever feel sad after sex? Here are 4 reasons you may experience postcoital dysphoria
February 27, 2020 at 01:00PM by CWC Even when I have super-satisfying sex with a partner I trust, I often feel a sense of sadness afterward—but I’m never sure why it is that I feel that way. It turns out, though, I’m not alone in this experience, as licensed psychologist Heather Z. Lyons, PhD, points out that research has found that nearly half of women experience postcoital dysphoria (PCD), or sadness following otherwise satisfactory intercourse, at some point in their life. And for 5 to 10 percent of women, that rate of incidence jumps to having occurred within the past month. “Individuals who experience PCD may express their immediate feelings after sexual intercourse in terms of melancholy, tearfulness, anxiety, irritability, or psychomotor agitation,” according to research published in International Journal of Sexual Health. “Individuals who experience PCD may express immediate feelings after sex in terms of melancholy, tearfulness, anxiety, irritability, or psychomotor agitation.” —International Journal of Sexual Health Finally feel seen but still not sure why it’s happening or what you can do about it? Below learn four reasons why you might experience postcoital dysphoria, along with expert-informed methods for overcoming it. And, of course, seeking the guidance of a licensed sexologist or sex therapist can help you navigate a personalized course of action that’s tailored to your specific needs. 1. Your need for post-sex care isn’t being met Post-sex pillow talk is a ritual sex experts and educators want you to adopt for every sexual relationship you have—even the casual