Being a “holistic health counselor” means that I deal with all aspects of my clients’ lives. That means from emotional eating after a hard work week to looking at test results. I’m not a medical practitioner, however. I’m a lifestyle-change-agent.
When people come to me frustrated by their long-term inability to lose weight and keep it [...]
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For those of you who were on this teleclass (How to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits) did you go to the place you thought of in our visualization? Did you really go there?
There are places that just hold a special place in your heart. Here in Maine, we have the blessing of living by the [...]
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On the eve of this holiday, I have been trying to teach my son that Christmas is about giving and about feeling and expressing gratitude. Of course, he’s five, so it’s mostly countdown to presents, but we’ve created some cool Christmas cheer, too. Check out this collage he put together to be our Christmas card.
Holidays [...]
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Here they come! The holidays. A mixture of excitement, joy, overwhelm and reckless abandon. It creeps up on you every year, doesn’t it? And yet you can see it coming.
Thanksgiving is first. The old standards come out, there’s so much emphasis on the food… you actually try not to eat and then you get hungry [...]
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The time is here when we give ourselves permission to go to town with those mini candy bars “just for a few days.” It just happens to be coinciding H1N1 hitting our state.
Yet we know that sugar is one of the triggers for lowering our immune system, along with alcohol, stress and lack of sleep.
While [...]
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Empty Nest?
Did your youngest just leave home? Wow, it’s SUCH a perfect time to go all-organic, exercise and finally focus on taking care of yourself.
But…yet you might find yourself longing for comfort foods, even misting up at that box of mac and cheese that you weren’t very interesting in before. What’s going on??
Give yourself some [...]
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Dear lawmakers-
We are witnessing a moment in history when massive, fundamental shifting is possible. There are very powerful people in this country who are interested in preserving the status quo of profit-driven politics that keep millions of Americans uninsured and underinsured, not to mention addicted to processed food and sick enough to require medication. It [...]
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I have a renewed respect for single parents after the week I just had. My husband was just away for a week on an incredibly-well-deserved vacation (solo kayaking at Moosehead Lake.) I got everything done. I fed the dog and gave her her meds. I emptied the dishwasher and the dehumidifiers under the house. I [...]
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No one is happy with their current health care benefits (except, perhaps, Congress who have blessed themselves with lavishly complete medical benefit plans,) but according to a recent article in AARP magazine, we in the US are now spending about $8000 per person per year and we’re getting crappy results for that exorbitant investment. Our [...]
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A friend of mine recently had a skin irritation in her armpit that turned into an abscess that had to be surgically removed. OUCH! A course of antibiotics followed. She had been using an antiperspirant for 20 years and apparently her pores just clogged up. Antiperspirants work by using aluminum to stop the functioning of [...]
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For school break, my son and I flew to Grammy and Grampy’s house in Ohio. Oh what fun we had! The Aquarium! The Train Museum! The Children’s Museum of Cincinnati. It’s good fun heading to a big city, but boy is it a wilderness of whole food.
This is modern America. Interstate 95 runs from Maine [...]
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My New Favorite Book
This is one of those books that I swear I want to clear my schedule so that I can just sit down and read it til I’m done. My good friend Elizabeth told me about this book that was written by her doctor– that I might be interested in it. WOW! It’s [...]
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1.) Eat well yourself. If your relationship with food needs some work, there is nothing that will have a greater single impact on your kids’ health for the rest of their lives than for you to eat well and feel good yourself right now. (Need help with that? Hire a health counselor!) The “do what [...]
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My proverbial cup runneth over with optimism. It’s not just because Barack Obama finally took the oath of office, but boy did that help! His inaugural speech moved me deeply and it feels as if we have palpably turned a corner in history. The problems are still there but our capacity to meet them has [...]
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Does guilt work as a motivator to change your life for the better in a longterm way? Both my observation and my experience tell me that, at best, it’s an unnecessary expenditure of precious energy, and at worst, it can lead to bad backlash. Backlash is when you find that you’ve just eaten/drunk/done the very [...]
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I learned this week about a Dentist in Bangor, Maine named Jonathan Shenkin who proposed that people should not be allowed to purchase soda with their taxpayer-funded foodstamps. The roars of indignation that followed his letter online at the Bangor Daily News were quite fascinating. Some people see the proposal as an effort to usurp [...]
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It’s a common refrain that good food is not affordable food, and unfortunately, it’s often true. This is, however, the first time in human history that nutrient-depleted food is cheaper than nutrient-dense food. This is a twisted fact that stems from none other than the industrial revolution. Once machines could process our foods, we started [...]
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If you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s October 9th Open Letter to the Next President in the New York Times, I can’t recommend it more highly. This champion of food writers, a man who has been one of the great heroes of illuminating the unfortunate realities of our food supply through his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma [...]
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In 1944, in the wake of World War II, our government issued an appeal to American citizens to grow their own food. 20 million Americans did it! People who had no experience with gardening planted up their front yards with vegetables and took over derelict urban lots in order to alleviate pressure on our agricultural [...]
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Ireland Rocked
We got back from 2 weeks in Ireland this past weekend. Snapshot of my impressions:
1) Boiled cabbage and carrots; no wonder people think they don’t like vegetables!
2) I had heard that Irish people have a higher incidence of celiac disease. Well, in St. Nicolas’ cathedral in Galway, there was a sign that read “Coeliac [...]
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