I spent my days as a practicing physician teaching people to be kinder to themselves, and that kindness manifested itself in three spheres: 1) eating patterns, 2) activity patterns, and 3) rest & relaxation patterns. The goal is to make small, incremental changes that result in nourishing your heart and soul with better food, more movement, and quality rest and relaxation. Continue reading
Category Archives: Activity
Your Health is in Your Heart
Good morning, and happy Sunday. Today I am sharing a conversation I had with a patient once some years ago. She was someone I had never met before, and was, like many before her, completely flummoxed about what to try next. With a personal goal of weight loss, she had already done everything she could think of, and then some. I know you know this story. I myself have told it many times before. There is a good chance you may even have experienced it yourself. Maybe you have experimented with practically every diet, including the dreaded cabbage soup diet, denied yourself your favorite foods, carved out time you didn’t really have to get more exercise than was comfortable at the time. Of course none of this is sustainable. You can’t eat cabbage soup for breakfast forever. So what comes next? Continue reading
There Is So Much You Can Do To Make It Better
Sometimes I think this blog should have a category called “It’s worse than you think” or “I’m really not exaggerating,” or maybe just “More scary news.” Sometimes I even get the feeling that people think I may be overstating the urgency of the diabetes epidemic. So I gathered together a few statistics for you. Continue reading
Learning to Keep Your Blood Sugars Normal
As a doctor, it’s easy enough for me to think I understand a disease state, and then to know how to manage it with medication to be taken two or three times daily. I spent hours and hours studying that problem. I talked with patients who were diagnosed with that illness, and learned how it changed their lives. But it’s still not the same as having someone close to you diagnosed with it. Continue reading
Strategies for Improving Your Blood Sugars
This week I’d like to talk about the concept of diet-controlled diabetes. Sometimes, when a patient’s most recent bloodwork demonstrates a mild elevation in their blood sugars, their doctor offers them an opportunity to try to improve their sugars without medication. If the patient is able to bring their blood sugars into the normal range through changes in the way they eat, perhaps along with increasing their activity levels to some extent, the doctor diagnoses this patient with what they term “diet-controlled diabetes.” Continue reading
Slow Living & Horseradish
A few years ago I received a message from a friend asking if I knew where she could find some fresh horseradish. Now, as it happened, I had planted a horseradish root, a left over from our Seder plate, a few years prior. Then I had forgotten about it completely until I got her message. So I happened to know the answer to her question. Continue reading
Walking With Wellness
Some time ago, I received my first pedometer with which to track my daily steps, and I could not have been more thrilled. Attached unobtrusively to an elastic wrist band, it ventured forth with me every day as I plotted my path, set my course, stepped up, or took a hike. Continue reading
The Effects of Lifestyle on Function
Recently I wrote about a patient I met many years ago. Like most people, he spent a fair amount of time thinking about medical expenses. That was understandable, as his elevated blood pressure required treatment with four medications.
I explained to him that if he could make a couple of lifestyle changes, there was a good chance that he would be able to reduce the number of blood pressure medications he took. Could he take a short walk when possible? Could he cut back on ultraprocessed food items, like Ritz crackers and cheese whiz, and substitute homemade popcorn and a slice of Jarlsberg or cheddar on wasa crackers? What about more fresh fruit and vegetables? Maybe, but he was worried about the cost. Continue reading
Can You Slow Your Rate of Aging? by Guest Writer Gary Miceli
Dear readers:
Recently I received an email from Gary Miceli, a health writer with a story of his own to tell. I hope that he will return in the future to share that story, as I believe you will find it inspiring. I am happy to share with you today his thoughts on aging. Have a good weekend, and I’ll see you Sunday! –Dr. Roxanne Sukol
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If you have read a science magazine, been to a health website or even checked out articles in the popular press, you know that human aging is a hot topic. So what is aging? Aging is the consequence of inevitable molecular and cellular changes to the structure and composition of the body. These are consequences of normal metabolism and operation. Continue reading
Gratitude and Wisdom
When I was eleven years old, my parents, always “early adopters” of the latest technology long before this kind of thing had a name, bought a brand new stove with a smooth white ceramic top. It was called a Corning Cooktop, and its most memorable feature, at least to me, was that its elements remained white even when they were hot enough to boil water. Was it really that hot? You had to take it on faith — or not. No matter how long I stared at it, I could not convince myself that the white ceramic stovetop was hot. And that is why I still remember, all these many years later, the perfectly oval burn on the tip of my right index finger. I only touched that hot stove once, but that was all it took. I did not cry, even though it hurt a lot. I just stared and stared. I could not take anyone else’s word for it; I needed to see for myself. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even tell anyone in my family. I just needed to know. Continue reading