Category: Uncategorized
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Boo! Is Halloween good for your health?
I gently, deliberately, pushed my blanket aside. I softly rose from the bed and leaned my head around the doorway. No one there. The chill of the tiles on my bare feet sent a shiver through me as I padded over to my son’s room. He was sleeping peacefully. The front door made a sharp…
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From weight loss to health gain
I once ran a six-week course about making small sustainable changes to your lifestyle. Things like eating breakfast, parking further away form work, folding the laundry while standing up, etc. I had a wonderful group of participants and they were really vulnerable and great about helping each other on their journey. BUT Almost every single…
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Vegetable oils: a food industry wet dream
Looking back at my childhood, there are a great many things I am thankful for. From running barefoot in the grass and climbing tress, to carting my baby sister around on my hip and dressing my little brother up like a pixie. And one thing I’m very thankful for is butter. My parents aren’t always…
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Investigating ‘science’
It’s sort of the hot thing to bandy about words like ‘experts’, ‘science’ and ‘evidence’ right now. Throwing one of those words in your sentence is meant to make people take you seriously. Citing a study has become the holy jackhammer of “See? I know what I’m talking about!”. But research can be corrput, biased,…
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Time to ditch daylight saving
As every parent knows, daylight saving is a bitch. The twice-yearly ritual of shifting the clocks is rife with sleep deprivation and bad moods. I have been rubbing my eyes blearily every morning this past week as my four-year-old adjusts back to standard time (I feel like he only recently got used to daylight saving…
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Fitbit – friend or foe?
I was recently gifted a smartwatch. And the first thing I did with it was turn off all of the health tracking features. Seems a bit of a strange move, I know. Having something so fancy and expensive on my wrist but only using it to alert me to select calls and messages… Why not…
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An explosion of eating disorders
I’ve worked in the grey area of disordered eating for a while, often seeing young athletes who reluctantly come to see me with their concerned parent. It’s an area that I love, because seeing these teens get better is so rewarding. It used to be that occasionally a parent would drag their teen along for…
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Stressed out? Change your mindset
A while back, I wrote a small piece on stress management as part of a larger resource. I started off by writing all the usual stuff about how chronic stress kills. But as I was writing, I was thinking to myself how utterly unhelpful it is to tell people to just avoid stress. It’s totally…
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What is lifestyle medicine?
Today I received confirmation that my fellowship to the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine has been approved: I’m officially a fellow. While it’s a big deal to me, I know it means next to nothing to most people, because most people have never heard of lifestyle medicine! Let’s change that. Lifestyle medicine is a branch…
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Laughter is no joke
It was weekly ritual. The giant bucket of popcorn was balanced precariously between the cinema seats. Even with my brother’s monster appetite there was no way we’d make more than a small dent in it, but that wasn’t the point. It was time to relax. Sweat beads slipped down the shiny glass beer bottles in…