Posted by Joe Wheeler on April 20, 2012 under Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
Finding your best health isn’t always easy but it’s do-able and worth your time. Understanding your past and present influences, as well as cause and effect helps. We know that obesity and lifestyle choices are at the root of most chronic illness in the US. Yet having that knowledge is only the beginning. Although it seems illusive in our hectic lives, some simple insights and heightened awareness can help you make your best health a reality without the drama.
Let’s take a deeper dive together:
1) What choices were made for you as a child? How did movement and food play a role in a typical day? If it helps, record your observations. It’s not about blame or getting stuck in the past. For me, as a kid I was encouraged to spend time outside and mealtime was a sit-down affair with others where I wrestled with eating certain foods (like vegetables, fish and beans).
2) Become aware of the choices that you make for yourself each day and understand why you make them. Again, no judgment – simply acknowledge what you do and write it down. Notice any connections from past to present? In my past, I ate lots of mac and cheese to save money, but avoided foods like fish and beans. That’s a big connection for me that I needed to work on to build better health.
Often, as said recently by musician Bonnie Raitt, we’re on a quest for authenticity. Peers and cultural influences play a role in our choices. Do you feel you need to go to extreme measures to prove something to yourself or others? Maybe a diet or product or activity is all the rage with your peers so you try it too. The search for authenticity takes many forms and the reality is that extremes are rarely necessary. Whatever your past choices – they are not your future. Each day offers you a fresh start – if you’re willing to choose it.
3) Plug this new-found awareness into your choices going forward. Where do you want to go in terms of your health and fitness level? What reasons do you have to get or stay healthy? Maybe you want to experience life to it’s fullest each day. Maybe you want to get off expensive prescription meds with harsh side effects. Maybe you want to stick around for people who love and rely on you. Whatever the reason(s), find and record the ones that get and keep you moving.
4) Redefine your future in ways that keep drama to a minimum. What if cause meant choosing to take action in your life – and effect meant choosing between peace or its opposite, drama. What choices force you to live with lower energy, greater stress, additional worry and fear? What choices empower you? For me, life will throw enough curve-balls on it’s own. In the meantime I’ll skip the drama by choosing a more healthful – read: peaceful path.
Actively choosing health really matters – not just because it saves us all big bucks but because it improves the quality of our lives immeasurably. Poor health isn’t an inevitable part of life or of aging. The fact that you’re reading this is a living testament to your body’s amazing resilience and ability to rebuild and heal itself, sometimes with a little or a lot of help from those around you. Find your best health by becoming aware and getting the help you deserve. You don’t have to go-it alone.
Posted by Lynn Polmanteer on March 22, 2012 under Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
As a Registered Dietitian at the Friedman Diabetes Institute in New York City, I participate in many outreach events to raise awareness about diabetes. Without a doubt, the most common questions I get during these events are:
“What exactly is diabetes?” and
“Am I at risk for developing diabetes?”
These are important questions to a nation dealing with an explosion of prediabetes and diabetes. So let’s get started by covering the basics and you can follow-up by taking a quick, informative, online test from the American Diabetes Association’s website.
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Posted by Karen Kaplan on February 26, 2012 under Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
We all want to feel liked, loved, happy. And we should. The US Constitution guarantees the right to pursue happiness, yet most of us think the key to bliss is somewhere outside of ourselves where we’re richer, prettier, thinner, different. Advertisers know this and aim all manner of products, movies and even food packaging at us, implying that we can have happiness by trying the latest quick fix. Even reality shows taunt us with the possibility of overnight fame and fortune – happiness and bliss implied in the story-line. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines bliss as a state of complete happiness – even using words like “paradise” in the definition.
Sounds like quite a destination. So how can you find it?
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Posted by Melanie Beach on January 19, 2012 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Making choices, Nutrition
Each new year brings people to well-intentioned resolutions to eat better, lose weight, get more active, cleanse and more. These resolutions can keep us motivated for weeks, but many are tossed by the wayside within days or even hours. How many of us have joined a gym in January and worked out regularly for a week or two, then don’t make it back for months? Or promise ourselves to stop eating our favorite junk foods only to gorge on them a few days later? Making these sorts of resolutions can be very motivating for a while, but they’re often too big or restrictive to be true goals for lasting change.
This year, how about resolving to eat more healthfully, so that you can nourish your body and life and not just feed it?
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Posted by Joe Wheeler on November 30, 2011 under Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
Life goes on for us day to day. We get caught up in work, family, friends and another year flows by like water. As time passes we assume our health will be there until one day – an emergency. At iBeamforLife we know the vast majority of chronic health issues are due to lifestyle choices – not genetics. A fair portion of our clients confront health that breaks down after years of neglect.
This is a complex form of self abuse that’s sadly synonymous with American culture and no-one is to blame, yet as adults we are all responsible for making choices about self care each day. If we don’t make the choices that embrace prevention in an effective way – someone else will, often at a hospital during a stressful emergency situation and at a cost much higher than simpler preventive methods. That’s why a periodic reality check-up is so important. The private client stories we regularly hear are poignant, frightening, filled with drama and sadly – preventable.
Can you see yourself or someone you love in what follows?
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Posted by Lynn Polmanteer on November 7, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Fitness, Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices, Nutrition
We all have different holiday traditions. I’ll bet that despite any differences your traditions, like mine growing up, were centered on cooking and eating. As a teen, after seeing my Grandmother’s challenges with Type 2 Diabetes, I became an MS, RD, CDN, CDE – ultimately specializing in patients with diabetes at the Friedman Diabetes Institute. That alphabet of acronyms that usually follows my name these days simply means that I know a lot about diabetes and can help you, with diabetes or not, to ride the holiday train and navigate those fast-approaching plates of food, healthfully.
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Posted by Caitlin Quinn on October 5, 2011 under Making choices, Nutrition
Increase your Energy!
Improve your Memory!
Strengthen your Immune System!
All it takes is this… pill?
Did you know that supplements and multivitamins will cure whatever ails you? What, you don’t believe in magic pills? When I was a kid, my parents would periodically decide that I should be taking a multivitamin. The chewables were chalky, and the pills were humongous. I thought surely no one but my parents would ever consider taking one of those things!
I was wrong.
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Posted by Tracy Ilene Miller on September 22, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Lifestyle
Louisa Kasdon, a former economist, is also a former restaurant operator turned food writer and editor, most recently of Stuff magazine. And that’s only the short list. Kasdon is always busy, recrafting and reshaping her relationship with the topics she writes about and food — as much as it is changing in our culture.
A member of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Round Table and founder and CEO of Boston’s Let’s Talk About Food Festival (in partnership with the Boston Museum of Science) , Kasdon has become a staunch advocate for public education around food and health. In conversation with iBeamforLife blogger Tracy Ilene Miller, Kasdon reveals how shifts in our culture are galvanizing forces in the restaurant world, departments of public health, the educational system and beyond, creating a movement worth watching — and joining.
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Posted by Tracy Ilene Miller on September 9, 2011 under Lifestyle, Making choices, Parenting
This summer, my daughter proudly crowed a phrase she picked up in first grade: “I’m a scientist, Mama!”
Scientists, she learned, observe, gather information (and specimens, which could account for the 20 different bugs she’s collected in her outside “workshop”), ask questions and then make decisions or come to conclusions.
For a mother continuously gearing up to shield her daughter from those forces that beckon her to develop poor eating habits, this proclamation was one key to my summer strategy for continuing to develop my daughter’s internal compass about food.
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Posted by Caitlin Quinn on August 11, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
People I meet are surprised to hear that, as a dietitian, I adore dining out. “Isn’t restaurant food bad for you?” is the question I often get.
Eating out is very American, and in my case nicely linked to my family. As a kid I spent summers with my grandmother who believed in a three-hour lunch at a good restaurant. And to this day, my mother and I do our catching up at our favorite restaurants. Dietitian or not, in my family a restaurant table is equivalent to a kitchen table.
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