Getting Back on Track

My son and I went to Family Camp at a Meditation Center in Vermont last week. Along with 50 or 60 other families, we slept in tents, used the outhouses, ate in the dining tent and tried to not melt in the 95˚F heat. In the mornings, Griffin would go to the “Tiger Tent” for [...]

The Purpose of Junk Food

I talk all the time about how your relationship with good food goes in cycles. You eat well, then some thing happens and you get derailed for a while, eating crap. That eventually gets really old and you clean it up again, and so it goes. On and on. For years.
Sometimes, when you “bottom out” [...]

Stress? Try Broccoli Rabe and a Mosh Pit

I had seriously one of the crappiest days I had had in years about a week ago. A royal suckfest. I was really busy, as usual, but I was dragging my butt through my tasks, heartsick and bummed out. I also happened to be totally out of food and really hungry. So I found myself [...]

Eat Food for Power

This interview is the first in a new monthly series called “Ask the Power People.” To preregister for the whole series, get an MBN Community Membership here.
This interview is from April 20th, 7:30pm EST with David Gershon, founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on behavior-change and large-system [...]

Transformation

I feel like I’m in a Chrysalis. I’m living in a little cottage in the Maine woods while I renovate the house I just bought in Camden, Maine. I’m fast approaching the threshold of busting out of my little chrysalis cottage and moving into my new life.
My friend just taught me how to tile floors [...]

Dig Deep into Life for Weight Loss

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 [...]

How to Get Hooked on Good Habits

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 [...]

Addicted to the Light

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 [...]

Surviving the Holidays Without Gaining One Pound

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 [...]

Trick or Flu! Is the Sugar Worth it?

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 [...]

Empty Nest Comfort Eating?

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 [...]

Open Letter to Congress

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 [...]

How to Grow While Overwhelmed

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 [...]

Collapsing Health Care System

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 [...]

What’s Your Skin Drinking In?

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 [...]

Travel Food Hell with Kids

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 [...]

My New Favorite Book

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 [...]

8 Ways to Get Your Kids to Eat Well

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 [...]

Videos of the Paradigm Shift

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 [...]

Guilt- Does it Work?

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 [...]