Regular exercise usually increases vitality, but a lot of people just don’t have the energy or motivation to get started on an exercise program. Although different factors can be involved, such as low thyroid, inadequate nutrition, or trying to force yourself into a boring exercise routine, a 2013 study showed that genetics can encourage either a love of movement or for your favorite recliner. Fortunately, there are ways you can compensate for couch potato genes.Rats given running wheels usually put them to good use, but scientists observed that some rats choose to run more than others. They separated high voluntary exercising (HVE) rats from low voluntary exercisers (LVE), and bred them through ten generations to produce final generations of super-HVE and super-LVE rats. The primary differences found between the two groups had to do with genes that control the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The researchers believe that humans have similar genes that make them avid exercisers…

“Self care is really important in tough times, but I think we often get the self care wrong. We think it’s only about a nice bubble bath or a glass of wine alone, but the research shows that effective self care often looks a lot more like community care.” — Laurie Santos, PhDThe importance of friends and community is often omitted from discussions about self care, but apparently that’s changing. According to Well+Good, a website devoted to wellness, these troubled times of pandemic, hate-politics, and reckoning with our history of systemic racism have increased our need for reaching out to others for mutual support.Dr. Laurie Santos, PhD, a professor at Yale University, whose course, “The Science of Well-Being,” has been seen by nearly 3.5 million viewers since it went online in mid-March, cites research showing that relationships are a vital part of self-care, for example, buying gifts for others yields more happiness than buying things for oneself. The Well+Good a…

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going!”—a quote attributed to Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne—is great for those times when you want to pull out all the stops to meet a challenge and attain a worthwhile goal, but what about when every day is tough, and it keeps getting tougher?That’s life for a lot of us in the age of COVID. And when stress is unrelenting, it goes from being eustress—stress that’s challenging and beneficial, to distress—stress that wears you down and causes all kinds of disease.The challenge is to balance stress with relaxation; switching off the “fight or flight” mode, and switching on the recuperation mode.One problem is that our culture values and rewards the “fight or flight” mode far more, and most of us are even addicted to it. Our American culture teaches us that anyone can and should be “a winner” by trying harder and working smarter, so like caged rats on a running wheel we keep plugging away hoping to come out on top. Rarely are we encourage…

Years ago we heard an intriguing story. A frail, elderly gentleman in India, bent over with age, left his village to wander into the woods to die. Several years later he returned, vigorous, upright and tanned from the sun, claiming he had been rejuvenated by communing with the rocks, the trees, and the mountain streams.This story came out of Asia’s ancient tradition of nature therapy recently revived in Japan under the name of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Forest bathing is immersing yourself in a forest environment. This means leaving your cell phone and daily concerns behind and spending several hours deep in the woods, walking on trails or sitting with no other purpose than to experience your surroundings through all five senses: smelling the woodsy air; feeling the ground beneath your feet or the bark of a tree or the texture of a leaf; tasting a blackberry or wild mint; listening to bird calls and the sound of the wind rustling through the trees; and taking in the varied si…

When I first found the second-floor flat in San Francisco that I’ve called home for the past 25 years, I was thrilled that it had a backyard and that I could see neighboring yards with trees and gardens as well as distant green hills from my back windows. I didn’t know then that scientists had begun investigating the benefits of nature and greenery to the human body and psyche. I just knew that looking out on or being in my backyard fed my soul.More recently, when a Chinese Massage (Chi Nei Tsang) therapist found my liver was tight and congested, she recommended a daily practice of looking at something living and green—as close as possible to the color of new grass—with my palm over my liver, and visualizing inhaling the color into my liver to soothe and heal it. Was it just my imagination or could I actually feel the color filling my liver, releasing and revitalizing it?As the world’s population has exploded, cramming more and more of us into crowded cities, we’re getting less and les…

Most of us spend a lot of energy avoiding uncomfortable feelings. Why on earth should we welcome them?Well, for one thing, suppressing anger, guilt, envy, fear, shame, grief and other painful feelings doesn’t really work; the more we try to numb them, the more demanding they become, draining our energy and creating tension, stress and dis-ease!Another reason for welcoming feelings is that they convey information that’s helpful to hear and digest.Finally, the strategies we devise for suppressing them—our various addictions to food, drink, exercise, overwork, shopping, TV-watching, internet surfing, or just getting into our heads and losing touch with our body and senses—create additional problems.So how can we welcome our various feeling “guests,” even the unpleasant ones?Psychologist Abby Seixas, who recommends “befriending feelings,” says: “Befriending a feeling means neither indulging nor repressing, nor trying to manipulate it in any way.” Rather she recommends the following step…

“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” — Dalai LamaIn these distressing times, kindness and gentleness can be an antidote to stress, a balm for body and soul. When someone is kind to us, especially when we’re feeling vulnerable or it’s unexpected, it feels like Grace. We breathe a sigh of relief and begin to release accumulations of tension that have built up throughout our tissues. We can even feel ourselves expand from a contracted state and resume our natural shape, come alive in our senses and become more fully present, more fully who we really are. As we release inner tensions, air and blood circulate more freely throughout our bodies, bringing fresh nourishment to our cells and removing toxic debris. If lack of nutrients and the presence of toxins are the two sources of all disease, tension and stress increase both. No wonder stress is linked to so many diseases. Dis-ease is the absence of ease. Ease comes with that sigh of relief that we are not deserving of…

Beyond Health’s approach to weight loss, presented in Raymond Francis’ Never Be Fat Again, (NBFA) is based on the theory of one disease and two causes. We say there is really only one disease—malfunctioning body cells, and two reasons why cells malfunction—they are deficient in needed nutrients and/or they are being poisoned by toxins. Overweight is a type of disease, and as better health is achieved, the body will naturally lose excess weight.Intuitive eating (IE) is an anti-diet approach to weight loss which seeks to help people regain a lost or weakened ability to “hear” and respond to body cues relating to hunger and satiation. Regaining this ability, it is hoped, will lead to losing excess weight. Both IE and NBFA agree that diets don’t work. Thought they can lead to short-term weight loss, most of this weight is regained over time. They also agree that diets are usually harmful and enforce the bad habit of overriding internal body cues. Following the strategies of IE that we…

Slow Food, an anti-Fast Food movement that originated in Italy in the late 1980s, now has 1,500 Chapters in more than 150 countries and millions of members.Although Slow Food is about slowing down to enjoy good meals, it’s about a lot more. It asks of us to slow down from our fast-paced culture and take a good look at how crazy, unsustainable and inhumane our food system has become. And then to participate in changing it. Our relationship with food is being corrupted by the speed of modern life that forces many of us to grab “fast food” on the fly. It’s also being corrupted by agricultural, processing and distribution systems that devitalize, standardize and restrict our food options (for example, franchise restaurants that make one town look like every other) and are even changing the very nature of food.Conventional food today is much less nutritious (grown in nutrient-deficient soils) and more toxic (with pesticides and GMOs) than it was even decades ago. But more than that, vario…

Our bodies are designed to maintain us at a weight that is perfect for us (although perhaps not perfect by fashion model standards) by telling us when we’re hungry, what we’re hungry for, and when we’ve had enough. But while some people just naturally eat this way, many of us have become desensitized to our body’s signals and need to relearn Intuitive Eating (IE).In the past twenty years, IE has been the subject of many of scientific studies. They’ve found that rejecting diets, being supported to love and accept ourselves as we are and learning to trust our own intuition when it comes to food choices lead to substantial gains in emotional well-being and quality of life. IE also greatly reduces risks for compulsive eating, binge eating and other eating disorders, and it’s been linked to lower weight, lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels independent of weight loss, and increased glycemic control in type 2 diabetes. For those who are re-learning IE, Dr. Steven C. Straus, MD, sugge…

Have you ever stood before an open refrigerator feeling you need something but not knowing quite what? Then you zero in on that leftover chocolate cake and eat the whole thing only to still feel dissatisfied only now you feel guilty and sick to your stomach as well.Psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, Sasha T. Loring, author of Eating with Fierce Kindness: A Mindful and Compassionate Guide to Losing Weight, gives this as an example of “the wanting mind,” a state of fundamental dissatisfaction that leads to cravings. Cravings can be caused by different things, such as allergies, lack of sleep, and nutritional deficiencies. But, as Loring observes, there is also something in our nature that leads to cravings. And once it gets a toehold a craving is difficult to tame. However, she gives three steps for gaining release craving’s grip:1. Examine the Wanting Mind. If you can identify and name the “wanting mind”—that sense of being fundamentally unfulfilled even when basic, ordina…

Do you find yourself eating most of your meals and snacks in front of a TV or computer screen?Do you grab food on the go, gulping it down with a beverage before you’ve had a chance to chew it?During meals, are you also talking on your smartphone, or is your mind preoccupied with your next project or concern so much that you barely notice what you’re eating?All of the above are examples of “mindless eating,” the opposite of “mindful eating.”“Mindful eating” is a concept that comes from Buddhism, a religion that cultivates mindfulness not just in eating but in all aspects of everyday life. Although books have been written about mindfulness, very simply it is noticing, in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way, what is happening in the present moment. Although it’s called mindfulness, it necessarily includes the senses, because it is through the senses that we experience the present—through what we see, smell, touch, hear and taste. The practice of mindfulness requires that we slow down, quiet our…

The year was 1968. The watershed event: a protest march at the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey, launches feminism as a national movement. Inspired by the civil rights movement in the American South, American women had begun to question the limiting roles assigned to them as “the second (and unequal) sex.” Women in the crowd were invited to dump their bras, hair rollers and pots and pans into a “freedom trash can.” Some women burned their bras.In this environment, it was probably inevitable that women would turn their attention to the oppressive fear of fat and preoccupation with body size that permeated most women’s lives.In New York City, a young woman named Carol Munter used her awakening feminist consciousness to adopt a new approach to a problem that had plagued her for most of her life—compulsive eating. She threw out her diet books and her scale, and decided to eat whatever she truly wanted. More than 50 pounds over her ideal weight, s…

Do you eat to live or live to eat? Neither could be called a healthy relationship with food. Eating to live—using food simply as fuel—takes the joy out of one of life’s great pleasures. On the other hand, giving food too much importance, either by living only for our next meal or obsessing lest we eat too much or eat the wrong things, isn’t a joyful or healthy relationship either.In a healthy relationship, we would look forward to our encounters with food. We would respond appropriately to our hunger cues by supplying ourselves with nourishing and tasty food (in the words of nutrition expert Mark Hyman, MD, “foods we love that love us back”), and we would eat until satisfied and no more. We would trust our body cues to maintain a weight that is perfect for us (although it might not conform to the latest fashion). But according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), almost 10% of our population is struggling with one or more of the thre…

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours"  – William Wordsworth, from his poem “The World is Too Much With Us”The English poet William Wordsworth wrote these lines around 1802 at the time of the first industrial revolution, when he felt himself and the people around him to be out of tune with nature. If “the world”—the worldly world of making money so we can spend it to buy more things—was too much with him in 1802, what would Wordsworth have thought about life in the 21st century?Not only are we immersed in overwork and commercialism, but we choose to spend a good part of our discretionary time glued to mobile phones, smartphones, computers and TVs. A 2018 Nielson report found the average US adult spends 11 hours a day listening, watching, reading or interacting with electronic media.Studies have shown that heavy tech use can be addictive, and that it increases stress and anxiety levels, interferes with sleep, and fosters depressi…

5G is coming to your neighborhood, unless it’s already arrived. What is 5G exactly? It’s the 5th generation of telecommunications technology. Although this technology is changing all the time, at certain junctures it’s taken a qualitative leap forward, from 1G to 2G to 3G to 4G until now we have arrived at 5G.To some extent, 5G is just a continuation of what’s already been going on for the last 200 years since humans figured out how to generate, store and transmit electricity. Ingenious humans have been figuring out more and more ways to use electricity to satisfy our needs and desires, until we arrive today at the “Internet of Things,” with which, lo and behold, we’ll be able to “receive a message on our phone from a chipped diaper letting us know that our baby needs changing . . . [and] . . . a toilet will be able to analyze stool samples and send the data to your doctor. “The problem with electricity is that it emits something called electromagnetic fields (EMFs) also known as e…

Osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee is the most common form of arthritis and a major cause of disability and pain. Yet not all sore knees indicate that you’re developing arthritis. How can you tell the difference?Researchers sought to answer this question by following a group of 5,000 men and women who had or were at high risk of developing knee OA for seven years, on average. The researchers determined that the very earliest sign of knee osteoarthritis showed up as knee pain while going up and down stairs. This symptom showed up even before x-rays showed any evidence of arthritis. Osteoarthritis is a progressive disease, so without intervention, it progressed from pain on the stairs, to pain while walking, then in standing, and finally in sitting and lying in bed. No one wants to wind up being kept awake by pain when they’re trying to sleep, so what can you do if you find your knees hurting each time you walk up and down a flight of stairs?The good news is that there is a lot you can do…

Glucosamine is primarily known as supplement for supporting joint health; in Europe it’s even been approved as a drug for treating osteoarthritis. But researchers have found that people taking glucosamine supplements for their joints have been getting additional benefits they weren’t aware of—benefits to their hearts! Specifically a lower risk of cardiovascular disease events, coronary heart disease, stroke and death from heart disease.Although glucosamine is found in high concentrations in joints, it is a naturally occurring molecule found in almost all body tissues. It’s the first biochemical component of connective tissue and plays an important role in the non-muscular component of blood vessels and also in heart valves. It’s also found in the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts. Throughout the body, glucosamine exerts antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.Utilizing data from almost half a million participants in a large database in the United Kin…