Parents are leaders, and I’d love to see parents take a stronger leadership role in teaching their children to be well. If I ruled the world, here are some of the things I’d have parents teach their kids: – There is nothing good about smoking. When my daughters were young, we’d play a little game […]
Category: Nurturing Yourself – Wellness
The journey to looking, feeling, and being your very best isn’t necessarily long and hard. Small shifts in our behaviors and thoughts often bring profound results. Keep in mind that the path is not the same for each person. Your choices, your actions, and your lifestyle need to work for you. So let’s explore your options so that you start nurturing yourself.
The Efficacy of Popular Weight Loss Programs
People frequently ask me what I think of various weight loss programs. Marie Osmond endorses Nutrisystem, Valerie Bertinelli lost her weight with Jenny Craig, and Charles Barkley credits Weight Watchers for his weight loss. How about Sensa, HCG or Alli? I’m always skeptical about weight loss products, because they are usually not regulated and have […]
Wound Care Basics
Have you noticed how high tech band-aids and wound care have become? Yesterday, I dropped an enormous chopping knife on my toe. Thankfully I had recently read about wound care in the February 2012 issue of the Wellness Letter, published by the University of California, Berkeley, so I knew just what to do: Stop the […]
Obesity is Costly and Getting Costlier
Eighteen months ago, I wrote about the high cost of being overweight or obese. George Washington University researchers had estimated the cost of being overweight for women as $524 annually and for men as $432. (While overweight and obese women earn less than those at a healthy weight, men are not disadvantaged this way.) Their […]
Must You Exercise?
In a word, yes. If you want to be healthy, you really must exercise. You may manage to be disease free, but you cannot be truly healthy – experiencing physical, mental and emotional soundness, vitality, and proper functioning – without it. While there are many, many reasons why exercise is essential, let’s consider just this […]
Alignment Enhances Wellness
“Alignment” is our theme for the week and the definition is: the correct position or positioning of different components with respect to each other or something else, so that they perform properly. When it comes to wellness, the concept applies to many things. Consider eating and activity. When calorie intake equals calorie expenditure, there is […]
Eat Less, Lose More?
The idea that the less you eat, the more weight you’ll lose has been around a long time. So has the opposing starvation mode theory. In the early 2000s we in the weight loss industry used to talk a lot about starvation mode, the idea that eating too little slows down the metabolism, because the […]
False Ideas about Fat
There are many misconceptions about obesity, such as most people can’t lose weight. The problem most Americans have is not losing weight, it’s keeping it off. However, just because most people aren’t successful maintaining a healthy weight doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Just as the alcoholic in recovery knows it will take a daily […]
In Wellness Terms, the “F” Word is “Fat”
In my world of wellness consulting, “fat” is the bad word no one wants to hear. We don’t want be fat, eat fat, or have our fat measured. We’d rather not look at it on our plates or in the mirror. And perhaps most of all, we don’t want to be called “fat.” So health […]
Closer to the Goal
I recently heard a variation of the adage, “practice makes perfect.” It went “practice makes progress.” This new version appeals to me because perfect sounds very intimidating and something we may never achieve (or sustain anyway), whereas progress can be experienced daily. I also relate to practice and progress because they are what creating new […]