Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Cinema therapy – it’s a thing
My partner says that I sometimes have a tendancy to get down about the world’s problems. Sadly, it’s true. It’s possible that yesterday I burst into tears while cooking dinner because of “the state of the world”. After dinner, I parked up outside the gym to wait for my booked session to begin, and it…
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Lockdown getting you down? Get cooking!
I smoothed the homemade berry pie filling over the top of the New York cheesecake I had made. My chef’s knife slid carefully through the berries, dragging streaks of purple and read over the creamy lemony middle, and then crunched through the biscuit crust. I gently tugged the slice free from its cake prison, tipped…
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There’s vegan and there’s vegan
Many years ago, I visited a friend of mine for a few days while she was staying at her parent’s place over summer. Her mother had recently gone back to Weight Watchers, and her father was enthusiastically supporting his wife. They were the most welcoming, delightful family, but I was devastatingly hungry the entire time…
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Seven ways to spot a dodgy dietitian/nutritionist
“A dietitian came into work to talk to the personal trainers,” he told me. Even over the phone, his voice had a certain strained-quality about it. I pictured a group of fit trainers, eager for solid nutrition advice to pass on to their clients, gathered around a young, white lady (my imagination went with the…
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Turn up the music, but choose your song carefully
I was driving on autopilot when it happened. Alone in the car, I was in a small queue leading up to a roundabout. My eyes had slid slightly out of focus staring at the brake lights of the four wheel drive in front of me, and the gentle tick-tick of the indicator was slightly out…