Welcome to mind and body education and mastery!
Want to learn about why you may be at risk for diabetes, why you store extra weight, why you crave certain foods, or why you overeat or over drink? Learn about your mind and body in an entertaining, practical and easily-understandable format by browsing the collections below.
What are insulin resistance and diabetes, and how do you reverse them?
How and why do you store body fat, and how do you decrease how much fat you store?
What are urges, cravings and habits and how do you stop them?
What is emotional eating, and how do you stop doing it?
How does sugar and alcohol addiction happen, and how do you get over it?
Scroll through the posts to see what catches your eye!
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What do you know about the effect of artificial sweeteners on your blood sugar and insulin level?
If you thought that “sugar-free” also meant “it won’t affect either blood sugar or insulin”….well, that turns out to be false information, and the reasons are surprising!
Want to read more?
Just One Teaspoon!
That’s all the glucose you should have circulating in your bloodstream! How does your body keep it from going lower? How does it keep it from going higher? What happens if it DOES go higher? I think learning about your body’s physiology can help you make more mindful choices.
Want to read more?
Cholesterol! The Good, The Bad, The Truth
What is “cholesterol” exactly? And how does it interact with heart disease risk?
I've been thinking about cholesterol and heart disease lately.
One thing I appreciate about my own journey is that I've been able to separate my weight from my health. You can be overweight and healthy, and slender and unhealthy.
A much stronger and more sustainable motivator for a healthy lifestyle is better health, not how much you weigh or what you look like!
I am a normal weight and have been for several years. I have a pretty healthy diet most of the time. The way I live is not "perfect" from a disease-fighting perspective, but it is sustainable, and that's far more important than perfection.
And I have heart disease. Will I change anything in my diet? Nope. And I'll tell you why.
How is your blood sugar connected to your heart health?
How is your blood sugar tied to your heart health?
Your heart depends on you to give it the best tools to function well.
How does your blood sugar play a role in the best health of your heart?
Want to read all about it?
What is the Glycemic Load?
What is the “Glycemic Load” and why does it matter? This article might be surprising!
It is helpful to understand this term, “Glycemic Load,” even though in no way do I ever recommend doing complicated food math on the food you are deciding to eat!
But understanding the physiology of our interactions with food IS useful.
Want to read more?
Intuitive Eating
Why can’t pretty much all of us eat intuitively? There are a lot of reasons!
When I first heard about eating intuitively, I had high hopes that there was some secret that I could learn that would suddenly help me tap into my innate ability to eat when hungry, stop when full, and follow my body’s natural cues to choose healthy foods.
Boy did this NOT work for me! And I am not alone.
Want to read more about why this fails? And what we can do about it?
Survival by FAT!!
Survival by FAT! This answers those confusing questions about why we gain weight so incredibly easily! And how to reverse that scenario!
How do humans, just like bears, turn on the emergency fat storage systems?
And why are most humans in the US always in this emergency mode when bears are not?
Prepare to have your mind blown when you read all about it.
Are you the lucky one?
Have you ever felt that if you were “scared straight” you could quit all kinds of habits?
One of my clients recently said he “wished he would have a heart attack” so he would finally take his health seriously. He wanted to be “scared straight.”
Does this approach work?
Mitigating Risk
Your lifestyle choices account for almost half of how healthy you are! That means you have LOTS of control, not only on whether you develop diseases, but also how well your body functions and feels right now. Want to learn more?
The statistics vary on how much control you have over your own health through lifestyle behaviors, but we do know for sure that you have at least 40% ownership over the state of your health.
Your lifestyle choices account for almost half of how healthy you are! That means you have LOTS of control, not only on whether you develop diseases, but also how well your body functions and feels right now.
Want to learn more?
Forgetfulness….wait, what?
Forget remembering, it’s forgetting that is powerful when it comes to lifestyle change!
We are forgetful. And that’s a good thing!
As the era of Covid moves from “pandemic” to “endemic,” just as influenza has done in the past, we will all notice our memories of these difficult years will fade. Just lately I have dealt with some very difficult times in my own life, apart from the pandemic, and it comforts me to remember that forgetting is a normal and necessary part of our mental health, and that my memories will become less acute over time, exactly as mother nature intended.
I will wait patiently.
So what does this have to do with lifestyle change? Quite a lot, actually!
Why do you need a coach?
If all it took to make effective changes to your health were the information on how to do it, we would have no lifestyle-related health problems in the United States. It takes something more. Enter Coaching!
What is the difference between a Nurse Practitioner and a Coach?
I have been a Nurse Practitioner for over 30 years, and in that time I became a skilled medical provider, an expert in the exam room.
I was the authority, the educator, and the problem-solver, focusing on what was wrong and coming up with appropriate treatment plans. If we were discussing preventative health, such as weight loss and diabetes prevention, I would define the visit agenda.
I felt responsible for the patient’s health, and sometimes found I was working harder than the patient was at pursuing the health goals I outlined for them to help prevent further disease. I enjoyed excellent rapport with my patients, and I felt I was an effective provider of excellent medical care.
And yet, I was no more effective at helping my patients prevent the major lifestyle-related diseases than any other random medical provider.
And then I discovered coaching!
Coaching focuses on helping clients grow into becoming the unique experts in their own well-being and personal behaviors. The client is helped to become the decision-maker, to blossom into the role of personal expert on the way forward.
Coaching fosters personal responsibility, reflective thinking, self-discovery, and self-efficacy.
Clients have their own answers if they are simply given a reflective environment in which to see and listen to themselves. The coach is a partner, focusing on what is right, eliciting the client’s agenda, co-discovering the answers, and facilitating change.
I’ve been thinking about “body love” lately.
I’ve been thinking about two related concepts lately: “loving your body at any size,” and “can your body be healthy and also overweight?” Why are these concepts interesting? Why do they matter?
I’ve actually been thinking about the two related concepts “loving your body at any size,” and “can your body be healthy and also overweight?”
Want to read more?
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Inflammation! It makes me hurt just thinking about it!
Inflammation! It can cause body pain, fatigue, memory loss, as well as contribute to cancers and heart disease. But there are things you can do about it! Learn what causes it, what to avoid, and what to try. You can feel better!
Last night, I had a terrible time trying to sleep - I hurt all over!
I could tell my body was suffering from widespread inflammation. So, of course, I had to examine what I did during the day that might have contributed to my pain. And boy oh boy, did I find some things!
Want to read all about it? Including what can cause inflammation, the dangers of inflammation, and what you could do to decrease it?
Time for Problem Solving!
Three little questions can change your whole game.
Lately I have been loving and using the following phrases with myself:
Does this solve a problem I do not have?
Does this fill a void that does not exist?
Does this fill a need that is not there?
These three little phrases have been a Game Changer for me! Want to find out why?
Welcome that BURN!
Are you wondering what bodybuilding has to do with you? You might be surprised by what you learn!
I have a couple of clients right now who are competitive body builders, and it has gotten me to thinking about what it takes to build that “holy-cow-that’s-amazing” kind of muscle.
Are you asking right now what this has to do with you and me, the average Joe with the average muscles and no desire to make them bigger??? Read on!
Abdicating Responsibility
How does it feel to avoid taking responsibility for your own decisions? It’s easy to do, but does it help?
Have you ever thought something like: “If I had a personal chef who did the grocery shopping and cooked everything for me, always had healthy food prepared and fresh chopped vegies in the frig, then I would be able to stick to my eating plan.”
Or maybe this: “If I had a trainer who would come over to my house every day, then I'd exercise regularly.”
That does sound like it would be helpful. You think that if someone else took over for you and just made it happen for you, then you would be successful.
Yeah, not so much.
Reading Food Labels
Food labels are at best misleading, at worst outright lies we are falling for. Want to learn how to interpret them?
Do you think you can interpret food labels and nutrition information well enough to know what you are really eating?
You may be incredibly surprised by what you will learn about those food labels - I sure was!
Food is my Pleasure Center
What do you do when food is your major source of pleasure, but you also want to get healthier and maybe lose some weight? How do you have a happy life? Well, the very first thing you do is to get more pleasure from your food!
One thing that comes up regularly with my clients is this:
They tell me they get a lot of pleasure from food, and they express worry that their lives will be less pleasurable without it playing the same role in their lives.
Sometimes the worry is so strong that it is an expression of genuine grief over the loss of a major source of pleasure in their lives. They are feeling lost at where they might get their pleasure if they could not eat whatever they want.
But you know what? There is hope for a fulfilled life even when you say “no” to eating all the things all the time.
How, you may ask?
Well, the very first thing you do is to say “yes” to getting more pleasure from food!
Wait, what? Didn’t you just say…..
Would you like to read more on this topic?
Emotional Fasting
Emotional Fasting. What is that? And why is it a horrible thing to do?
I have been thinking about fasting lately, including our daily motives for doing so.
I had a conversation recently with a client who was talking about her urge to change-up her fasting routine, to fast longer, because she had overeaten the day before. It got me to thinking, so of course that got me to writing!
Our motives to engage in ANY activity come down to an emotion we are having. And those emotions come from thoughts and directly lead to our results. How we are thinking about fasting has an enormous impact on our health!
Interested in reading more?