Posts Tagged: Anxiety

Laughter and Health

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laughter best medicine

By Julia Gumm The word “humor” comes from the ancient Greeks. It refers to the practice of “humoral medicine,” a school of thought that proceeded from the notion that the four fluids or “humors” of the body, in balance or not, were responsible for the ups and downs of human health. These four humors and their corresponding organs and elements were black bile (gallbladder, earth), blood (liver, air), yellow bile (spleen, fire), and phlegm (brain and lungs, water). If a person had a tendency towards excess of one of those humors, it was believed that that was what determined their personality type, or as the term was at the time coined, their temperament- from the Latin temperāmentum, a mixing in proportion. Someone with excess of black bile was “melancholic”- introverted,… Read more »

Anxiety – A META Medicine Perspective

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Anxiety Meta Medicine

By Bella Dodds of Higher Mind Health There have been great posts written on adrenal fatigue so I thought we could expand on this topic and look more closely into the body’s bio-logical purpose and response to stress… which then leads to symptoms like anxiety and adrenal fatigue. But before we jump right into looking for the bio-logical purpose, we first need to address the nebulous mind-body-emotion connection. At this point in 2013 we are finally starting to make the slow and steady mass migration away from the 1600′s Descartes belief system that the human body and mind are separate – to the present day scientific understanding that yes in fact, the brain is actually inside the body affecting the physiology, (rocket science here!) and that emotions are neuropeptides –… Read more »

Adrenal Fatigue: Getting Back to Basics

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Adrenal Fatigue Sugar

By Julia Gumm Adrenal Fatigue is one of those shadowy - is it real or isn’t it, kind of dis-eases that sort of hangs around the periphery of medicine. Sure, it’s often an accessory to the crimes of high blood pressure, back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia and allergies- but for some reason, doctors are loathe to pin the patsy on these inconspicuous perps. Nope, they’re off the hook. Sweet deal the adrenals have, unless they’re all in on the crime, they get away scot free. Blame the pancreas, blame the heart, blame the immune system! Don’t blame us! Nothin’ to see here but us chickens! Or uh, glands! So that’s how come you can show up at your doctor’s office with a laundry list of symptoms- weak ankles and knees, muscle aches,… Read more »

No Diets in 2013!

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no more diets

Happy New Year everyone!  It’s usually around this time every year that I encourage and empower people to, instead of gearing up to set goals in opposition to oneself (New Year’s Resolutions), especially as it pertains to exercise and dietary habits - to actually commit to spending a whole year without being on some kind of diet.  Instead of writing some passionate essay about it, I defer to what is arguably the most popular post I’ve ever written – Weight Fixation: “Waist” of Time. 2012 was a big year.  Just last week I was reading through an old book of mine, and it was like I was reading the writing of a stranger.  It made me think about just how far I’ve come since the days of paddling through the sea of conflicting ideas and… Read more »

The Peat Whisperer Whispers Paleo

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dannyroddy

By: Danny Roddy; author of The Peat Whisperer Matt Stone and I have a lot in common: we both hate that sleepy-eyed bozo from Coldplay, we both had a crush on Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes from TLC, and we both agree that not since Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ has there been a film as important as Bay’s ‘Transformers II: Revenge of The Fallen.’ In addition to the above, we were both convinced early on that the metabolic rate (as defined by body temperature and pulse) was a compelling factor in health. Well, Matt was convinced before I was, and Dude probably saved my life by introducing me to the potato, but I digress. I credit Matt for turning me onto the relationship between the metabolic rate, the thyroid… Read more »

Overcoming Psychological and Emotional Stress

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STRESSED MOM

In reading more than 300 books on the subject of health, perusing thousands of articles, websites, and studies, and communicating with thousands of people all over the world for the last 6 years on the subject… I have been funneled increasingly in one universal direction.  Like it has for many others, stress has emerged as a repetitive theme in the causation of all kinds of illnesses.  Until now, I’ve stayed away from the psychological and emotional triggers of stress because the purely physiological side is greatly underappreciated.  I mean, just say the word “stress” and people naturally think about work stress, divorces, family deaths, and other things that everyone considers stress.  Very few think of lack of sleep, attempts at dietary purity, pregnancy, fatty acids, or inflammation as forms of… Read more »

What Gets YOU Hot?

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lois

Oh yeah baby.  You know what I’m talkin’ bout!  That’s right sugarplum… I’m a health nerd.  I’m talkin’ about what makes your hands and feet warm. I’ve been playing around with all kinds of different breakfasts lately to see what type of breakfast makes my hands and feet wicked toasty at 10am – the time of day, give or take a half hour, that I am most prone to feel that chilly dip in peripheral circulation.  I’m noticing this to be a fairly universal time to experience a drop in mood and metabolism – especially coldness in the extremities.  I’ve been telling people to really get breakfast right, use it to GET warm, and then, for the rest of the day, eat and drink to STAY warm.  When you really eat… Read more »

The Diet Merry-Go-Round Twirls in Norway Too

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Here’s another top-notch story from Scandinavia, home of the famous twice-daily slab of margarine on white bread.  My comments throughout are in RED.  When I grew up I was the skinny one, and my little sister, who ate exactly the same food as me, and had the same rules at home as me, was the chubby one. We have a fairly similar body type, but she kept gaining weight, whereas I couldn’t gain weight, no matter how much I tried. She was always hungry and seemed to never get full. I was hungry fairly often, but even a very small meal would be enough, and then I just couldn’t eat more. Aha! Appetite, metabolism, and energy-partitioning are controlled by hormones and heredity! I was also fairly anxious and depressed from an early age…. Read more »