3 things to prevent Breast Cancer (that your Doctor may not be aware of to tell you.)

A pharmaceutical representative asked me what I was doing for breast cancer awareness month.  She was wearing her Breast Cancer T shirt and had brought lunch in to the cancer clinic where I am working to build an Integrative wellness center.  It caught me off guard for a Nano second and then I went into my spiel on what we are doing here in the clinic:

1. 1.     Discover Diversity in the Diet; Eat Real Food

First, this week, I made liver pate, homemade chicken and vegetable soup, rainbow kale salad and cauliflower “cheese” garlicky bread sticks, for our nutrition support group.  These are easy to make recipes that are fairly inexpensive.  See my book or free app for recipes.  Diversity in the diet is the largest differentiators of the 20% of women with BRAC 1 and BRAC 2 genes who did NOT get breast cancer. This is data from one of the largest studies done, the Framingham Nurses study, per Victoria Wood, RD, MPH, CNS, and a monthly guest speaker at our Nutrition Support Group.  www.victoriawoodnutrition.com

Rainbow kale salad has the colors of the rainbow which means it is full of protective flavonoids and phytonutrients and includes the “queen” cancer fighting cruciferous vegetable red cabbage, sweet baby kale, sunflower seeds and more. It makes a beautiful presentation on a buffet table. I offer these recipes as part of a package for our patients, families and friends who want to help in healing from within and with cancer prevention.

Why try “cheesy” garlicky bread sticks? Anyone who is on chemotherapy or merely eating the SAD (standard American diet), taking birth control pills, aspirin or NSAIDs, antihistamines, or drinking lots of alcohol has an inflamed gastrointestinal tract.  Do you ever experience gas, bloating, diarrhea, or constipation? If so, this means you. Gluten and dairy are the number one food sensitivities that can lead to and exacerbate a condition called intestinal permeability (aka leaky gut in layman’s terms). These bread sticks are made with cauliflower and Daiya cheese, (the only processed food I include in my recipes for this reason.) Do you have an autoimmune disease? Then you must put gluten free and dairy free as a top priority until you can heal your gut. Do you have brain fog, anxiety or depression? Ditto. 

There is a reason why every culture and cuisine has their own version of chicken soup.  Need I say more?

The liver was from Polyface Farms, Joel Salatin’s model sustainable farm in southern Virginia. Polyface offers free range, organic, happy chickens that eat their natural diet without the need for pesticides, growth hormones or antibiotics www.polyfacefarms.com . This is vitally important because, liver like many foods can be a health food, or not. The liver filters toxins from the body; you do not want to eat conventionally grown animal livers that are full of toxins. Liver is an excellent source of bio available vitamin A, D, zinc, iron (and healthy fat for absorption). These are essential vitamins and minerals for a healthy immune system. The immune system is our police force, it is what protects us from bad bacteria, viruses, toxins and foreign bodies, (like GMOs found in our food along with chemicals, pesticides and preservatives).

   2.  Check your vitamin D level. 

I asked the pharmaceutical rep if she knew what her vitamin D level was.  I then explained that vitamin D is a vital pre-hormone that turns on and off the expression of cancer genes at the stem cell. Not even chemotherapy does this. It decreases mortality of all dis-eases. It is essential to close the gaps in the intestine and heal leaky gut and all dis-ease. Normal range for lab tests is between 30 and 100.  It is now predicted that every 2 men and 2.5 women born after 1980 will get cancer.  I certainly do not want to be normal. We need levels to be at least 60 ng/ml to be protective of both cancers and autoimmune dis-ease. Ask your doctor to check yours or better yet, come get a total micronutrient test from Spectracell laboratories at our office on October 19^th and see for yourself if you have any common nutrient insufficiency that need to be corrected. If you are on any medication, then the answer is likely to be yes. 

       3.  Consider Thermography as a breast health-screening tool. 

     I never even heard of this until my daughter’s oncologist in Arizona recommended this to us. Thermography is an FDA approved, safe, non-invasive scan that can be done on the breasts for any “hotspots”.  Get a baseline screening and then compare every year. If positive, follow up with a ultrasound or MRI. No radiation and no excruciating crushing of precious breast tissue. I believe a kinder and gentler, way to go.  I am having mine done this weekend through a member of my Wellness Inspired Network (WIN) group @www.neckbackandbeyond.com

Most of all, my favorite offering this month was teaching Carpe Diem Movement, (movement to music) at our New Self Health Movement, (#NSHM Self Health Retreat at Asilomar Retreat center in Monterey, California), and for the patients at the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland.  As I always say (and quote my MIT cellular biologist and functional medicine guru, Tracy Harrison),

   “Optimal Health is NOT complicated. We need to:

1. Maximize Nutrients, 
2. Minimize toxicity and inflammation and 
3. Prioritize self-care.”

As a born Washingtonian, living in a city of type A workaholics, prioritizing self-care is indeed the most challenging of the three.  Find time for fun, rest and relaxation.  Eat real food that is yummy and nourishing. Love your body like you love your baby, your lover and your best friend.  In return, your body will love you back.

Let’s focus on thriving, not just surviving!

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.

What do YOU want for Mother's Day?

My husband asked me what I want for Mother's Day.  This is always a tough question for me.  I’ve spent my life caring for others, my first career as a Registered Nurse and then a young mother raising four children.  As women, mothers and caretakers we are conditioned to put others needs first before our own.  Many of us come from puritan backgrounds and taught to always be selfless and accommodating to others needs.  We were taught to fit in, to play well together in the sandbox and to not compete.   But we also live in a competitive capitalistic society with high expectations, particularly if you are from Washington DC.  If you are like me, then you may have an innate competitive nature, maybe one of your strengths is ambition and competition.  If your learned belief is not to outshine others, to play well in the sandbox, you may work well collaboratively while internalizing that competitive spirit.  How many of us are more critical of ourselves than others?  How many of us hold higher expectations of ourselves than we do others?  Being born a twin, in a family of several generations of twins, competition was frowned upon.  If you want to fit in, you must be average; otherwise you risk being verbose and or vain, both shameful characteristics.  I learned to love competition on the tennis court and yet paradoxically noticed how if I started to win by too much of a margin, I would instinctively back off, let the other person win a few games so that we could both feel good and have fun together.  Also interesting to note is that I lost a couple of partners when I didn’t do this.  One friend said she wouldn’t play with me again until she got better, which so confused me.  Wasn’t that the point, to play with someone better so that you could improve your game? How do you get better if you don’t put yourself out there and play? Sports and competition teach us a lot about others and ourselves. 

Someone called me Super Woman yesterday.  I’ve been told before that I had the biggest case of “Super Woman Complex” ever seen.  You see as women, we often internalize that competitive spirit and strive for an unrealistic goal of perfection.  We have to look good, act good, our homes have to be spotless, we have to always be kind, loving, compassionate and giving, with a smile on our face.   We buy the perfect gifts and serve the perfect meals at family celebrations and then wonder why we have a migraine headache and our exhausted when we should be happy and grateful for all that we have.  Yet we ignore our own needs until the pain in the neck or the back or the head gets so big that we have to stop, usually with a cold pack and in bed. 

When asked, what do you want for Mother’s Day, I used to always say, I want everyone to be healthy and happy.   What I didn’t realize was that as a Mother, I had to set the example.  If I was healthy and happy then my children, family and friends were more likely to be healthy and happy.  In fact, I’ve had to learn that I can and must break the puritanical pattern if I want my children and grandchildren to thrive.  Sacrificing the self can not only cause “dis-ease” in the body (as the body tries to send us messages to stop, slow down and treat ourselves well), but it causes sadness, resentment and negative energy and pain to those around us too.   

The antidote, the secret sauce is that self-love and self-compassion allows for self-healing, not only for us but for others too!

It’s really taken me years to truly understand this.  It’s taken a road to recovery with my children and myself to learn this.  I now understand the profound difference between the words caretaker and caregiver.  I now understand that we either react out of fear or respond out of love.   Often my actions were fueled by fear of not being good enough or not fitting in, instead of motivated by what would make me feel better.   I now understand that self-care and self-compassion really is the most loving thing that you can do not only for yourself but also for your family and your friends.  That when you give to yourself first, when you are your best first, then you have more to give to others and you attract others to you.  You attract those who want what you have, which are ultimately more joy, more peace and more love. 

So I wish today for all Mothers a very Happy Mothers Day, one that is filled with celebration and acknowledgement of your love and your actions and the gifts that you have given to others.  Most importantly, I wish for all Mothers the ability to really answer, “What do YOU want for Mother's Day?"  Will we love ourselves today as we love our children?  Will we speak kindly and softly to ourselves and recognize and hush the harsh critic inside?

If you are challenged with this, will you schedule a Discovery Call with me so that we can discuss how coaching or yoga dance or the free Carpe Diem App might be a guide or support tool for you?   Go to my website, www.carpediemwellness.org and download my app and/ or join me on Monday morning in Vienna Virginia at 10am for a fun joyful Yoga Dance class.

Happy Mothers Day and Carpe Diem, seize the day because we only have this moment and this day to live life to its fullest.

With Love & Gratitude,

Lisa

Are you Ready?.... to Release?

We are in the middle of our 21 Day Cleanse and my friend Gretchen Hogg reminded me of something this morning which is that as we are releasing toxins and lowering inflammation, we are also releasing the weight and with that comes emotion and sometimes fear.  Yes, we are giving our bodies loving messages that it is safe to let go, we are learning that we have to get out of our “fight or flight” stress mode and activate our parasympathetic nervous system in order to both digest our food as well as rest and repair. 

What often arises during this time, is a release of emotions.  After all, we hold our issues in our tissues and often we put on our weight as a protective mechanism.   If we take time to journal, we might uncover what was going on in our lives the last time we were at this weight, or the target weight that we are hoping to accomplish.  Did something happen that evoked strong emotion?  Often our subconscious self is “ruling the roost” and is based on a fear that we embodied sometime in the past and often as a child or during a time when we were less empowered.   To overcome this, we need to look at the fear and then reassure our subconscious self that we are now safe to let go of the fear as well as the weight.   Having a safe and confidential sounding board can help you process some of these thoughts as well as make the choice to reprogram them into thoughts and beliefs that will better serve you now and your goals moving forward.  This is where a health coach can be invaluable.

In the same vein, are you allowing the ANTs to creep in?  The Automatic Negative Thoughts that come from our most primitive part of our brain, the amygdala?  The ones that say, “Who am I to want to be thin? Or I can never look like that? Or this is too hard….”  We all have self-limiting thoughts that lead to self-limiting behaviors, what are your thoughts that are starting to creep up?   Anytime, we are trying to change or move out of our comfort zone, we are prone to self-sabotage.  Our ego brain likes us to stay the same.  Often our friends and family want a status quo too, after all if you change too much, must they change too?  The only thing constant in life is change, so why are we so afraid of it and what can we do to embrace it?  Again, this is where health coaching can help to keep you on the road and help you get out of your own way when these human thoughts and tendencies arise.

The biggest way we self sabotage ourselves is to tell ourselves that we are too busy, that we don’t have enough time.  Deepak Chopra says the fastest way to a heart attack is to say, there isn’t enough time which has been my mantra for years (and why I suffered high blood pressure for years too!)  How do we stop, take a deep breath and say, There is enough time, I am worth the time to make my green juice and/ or smoothie and/ or healthy meal to nourish my mind, body and soul.  How do we learn to put ourselves back on our to do list and how do we celebrate our successes no matter how small?  Download my app so you can have daily self-care reminders and a place to prioritize YOU.  Please comment or contact me if you would like to discuss further.

Have a glorious day, Carpe Diem, because we only have this day and this moment to live life to its fullest!  What are you going to do today that is yummy and nourishing? 

With Love, Lisa

Why Cleanse?

Why Cleanse?

This morning I was reminded of something one of my friends and old neighbors told me when she saw me a year or so ago.  She said, “Lisa I read your blogs and if I ever get cancer you will be the first person I call”.  She missed the point.  I don't want you to wait until you GET Cancer, I want to show you how you can prevent cancer and chronic illness and if not, how to begin to heal yourself from within, hence the title of my blogspot Healing From Within.  My mission in life is to inspire wellness. To teach you how to THRIVE, not just survive! To do so is empowering.

For this reason, I am offering another FREE Webinar tomorrow night titled, “Why Cleanse?”  My cleanse will show you how to create an environment that is healthy for normal cells and inhabitable for cancer cells.  Just like the health of our plants is dependent on the health and nutrition of our soil; the same is true for our bodies.

My daughter Margo sent me the following link this morning to the following website that outlines a lot of what we will be discussing and that is in my cleanse program.  http://cancercompassalternateroute.com/cancer/cancer-cannot-survive-in-an-oxygenated-alkaline-environment/

And no, you don't have to have a chronic illness to join the call!  All you need is the desire to feel and look your best at any age.  Or maybe you just want to find your optimal weight or eliminate your seasonal allergies, or to have more energy and less stress...

I so hope that you will join me Thursday night, April 3rd at 5pm ET! 

Carpe Diem!  Why? Because we only have this day and this moment to live life to its fullest.

Click here to Register for Thursday night’s free webinar or to listen to the replay:

http://webinarjam.net/webinar/go/replay/7000/4e5aeaaad5/accessok/--

Lisa