An Invitation to BEGIN:

Friday, I shared with you my daughters good news in Celebrate today, Just Breathe, blog and introduced my seven steps to optimal health and wellness with this invitation on the first step (which is to begin with an honest personal assessment.)

Won’t you BEGIN by joining me  for a Kickstart to Wellness? Starting Thursday, October 16^th at 7pm.  If you cannot make the call, don’t worry, you can listen to the replay, but only if you register. 

Today I would like to share more on the first of seven steps to optimal health.  I began last week’s blog with this picture:

STEP ONE - BEGIN: Make a commitment and invest in yourself. Take an honest personal assessment and inventory.

How to become the leader of your life? Take action. To be the most effective leader, you have to have control of your health! Make the same investment in you that you have made in your family, friends, and career. Give yourself the gift of self-care; find new ways to energize and empower yourself.

First, take an honest personal assessment and inventory. Understand your WHY. I begin my discovery calls with my clients with the following questions:

What would it mean to you to be the best that you can be? What is your biggest obstacle or challenge? What have you tried—what has been successful and what has failed? How do you want to feel and see yourself in three months, six months, and one year from now as a result of working together?

We then look at your entire health history. Many falsely believe that because chronic illness runs in families that it must be genetic and that we are doomed. I used to believe this too as a practicing nurse when I took health histories. Fortunately, the study of epigenetics, or the study of the expression of genes has proven that genes can be turned on and off through diet and lifestyle changes. Do you know of any identical twins where one looks older and has more chronic disease than the other? This is an example of identical genes yielding different outcomes. This exemplifies the power to heal from within.  Again, don’t beat yourself up; instead get inspired to explore new options.

Give to yourself so you can give to others. Give yourself the same investment that you have put into your family, friends, and career so that you can continue to give to others.

Commit to small obtainable steps, one to three small “digestible bites” every two weeks and then celebrate your success.

Set SMART Goals:

•         Specific & Simple

•         Measureable & Motivational

•         Actionable & Accountable

•         Relevant & Realistic

•         Time Bound

Savvy Secret: A first SMART goal might be to simply keep track of what you are eating in a diary. If you did that and nothing else, you are likely to lose weight. Simply being conscious of what you are eating and more importantly how you are feeling before and after eating can have a transformational affect.

One reason I believe that it was hard for my daughter to initially stay on the diet regimen was that we really did not fully understand why the diets and supplements were recommended, nor did we know how to keep it up. For most of us, food preparation is a new skill. When Dana told me the diet was unsustainable, I said, “Then we have to make it sustainable!” We needed to really understand why the diet was important and find simple ways to integrate this into an active, social thirty-year-old’s schedule. Her life depends on it. This was my motivation for starting the cooking classes and for reading and studying so much about the thyroid, gluten, and hormones, and the lymphatic system and cancer, causes and cures.

This is where personal responsibility and a mind shift in thinking must occur. You have to understand the powerful connection between food and your mood and health. What nutrients are missing from the standard American diet (SAD) and how and why to heal the gut in order to heal your immune system.

Savvy Secret: Knowing your why is imperative to keeping you motivated towards positive change.

What is your WHY? Please take time to think and to share.

Carpe Diem, Lisa

What Can Our Beloved Pets Teach Us?

Have you ever heard about the canary in the coal mine? When a canary bird dies in the coal mine, the miners know that they need to get out of the coal mine or risk dying too. Animals, like birds, have been known to be early indicators of disease.

Dr Weston Price experimented with cat’s diets and witnessed how certain diets affected their offspring. Like humans, what an animal consumes matters.

Like many of my clients, my cat, Jewels, has seasonal allergies. Every spring she would scratch like crazy and lose her fur. For the first several years the vet would give her prednisone shots to mask the symptoms.

Two years ago when I spent 3 months in Arizona with my daughter for a complementary cancer clinic, Jewels had a double whammy. The combination of the lack of attention along with her allergy caused her to lose half of her fur. I tried everything for about 6 months until I discovered a supplement that included blue green algae, probiotics and digestive enzymes. Within two weeks her fur returned.

This year, I ran out of the supplement and failed to order it for about a month and then when I started using it again she did not have the same immediate response. So I called the veterinarian and after testing her, it was decided that she was hyperthyroid which the Vet claimed was normal for older cats. The treatment? Either to kill the thyroid with radioactive drugs, remove the thyroid, or put her on medication for the rest of her life.

“Really?”  I asked, “what about treating the cause of the disease?” I thought about all my clients with Hashimotos or thyroid and hormone imbalances who I was able to help through diet, why would it not work for my cat? So I started to look at what ingredients are in the cat food. Not surprisingly, the same processed GMO corn, wheat, and soy that have proven to cause leaky gut in other animals (like cows in CAFOs and farm raised salmon) where we are feeding them unnatural diets.

So based on my knowledge, I changed her diet again, this time eliminating all grains. Jewels’ fur has started to grow back, dramatically, within a week.

Unfortunately, this connection between diet and health is not well known in conventional medicine as current medical students still only get up to 7 hours of nutritional training in their years of medical school (one of my clients, an MD, questioned whether if it was even that much.)

After further prodding, my Vet said that we could try an unproven, prescription-only diet for thyroid health for cats. I ordered the special diet that I had to buy through her and when it arrived one week later (after my cat was already improving) guess what the top ingredients are for the dried food? Corn Gluten meal, Whole grain corn, soybean mill run and a whole bunch of supplements. No thank you!

When will I learn to trust my own gut and inner wisdom? Unfortunately, I had to spend hundreds of dollars on testing and special food before I realized that my gut instinct and newfound knowledge was correct all along. Live and learn. Each day, each meal, we have the opportunity to choose either life affirming foods that nourish us or artificial food that can cause discomfort and disease. 

After all, we are constantly moving towards one of two states, either living or dying. Unlike our pets, every day we get a choice.

We can either focus on the three L’s: Love, laughter and living

Or three D’s: Diet, Deprivation and Death. 

We can react out of fear or respond out of self-love. Which will you choose today? I’m choosing Love, laughter, and living.

For me and Jewels.