Need some support with a health-oriented New Years resolution? Check out this webinar with Thrive Founder Katie Engels featuring strategies and tools to support sustainable behavior change.

Visit the MGH Division of Internal Medicine Healthy Lifestyle Program website to learn more about this webinars series and other initiatives. 

Watch Thrive Founder Katie Engels discuss her Health & Wellness Coaching Program at Mass General Hospital as part of the MGH Healthy Lifestyle Program’s “Think Outside the Pill” Stoeckle Center Seminar Presentation. As an introduction, she shared "it is so inspiring to be part of this team and today featured many opportunities to promote broader access to Health & Wellness Coaching throughout the Department of Internal Medicine." 

According to Beata Souders, MSPP, ACC, "when we replace giving directives and commands with working patiently and diligently to see the situation from the other person’s point of view, when we ask the other for input and suggestions, and when we then pull all that information together to offer some constructive goals and strategies, we often find that we tend to have better success in motivating others.

Daniel Pink, in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, explains why in today’s world extrinsic rewards do not work because most of us don’t perform rule-based routine tasks (2009). He argues, rather convincingly, that we need to create environments where intrinsic motivation thrives, where we can be creative and gain satisfaction from the activities themselves.

If autonomy is our default setting, giving us a choice in terms of tasks, time, team, and technique is one way to increase it. When coupled with opportunities for growth and mastery, our intrinsic motivation increases through engagement.

Pink tells us that mastery is a mindset, that it demands effort, and that it is like an asymptote where we get close to it but never fully realize it. He also reminds us of the importance of striving toward something greater than ourselves. Purpose, according to Pink, is not ornamental, but a vital source of aspiration and direction (2009)."

Read more from the full article How to Motivate Someone, Including Yourself. 

Unwind this evening with this short guided mindfulness meditation And We Must Be Content With Stillness, featuring the Charles Tomlinson poem Farewell to Van Gogh. 

Being mindful entails practicing being present and nonjudgemental, and when you commit to a regular mindfulness practice you strengthen your skills and ability to calm and center yourself in the face of life's challenges. Schedule a free thrive wellness coaching session to learn more about working with a wellness coach to develop a mindfulness practice. 

Farewell to Van Gogh

The quiet deepens. You will not persuade 

One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darling 

Chestnut-tower to displace itself

With more of violence than the air supplies

When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly 

And we must be content with stillness.

Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes 

Into their central calm. Stone by stone

Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth 

Becomes once more the earth, the leaves

A sharp partition against cooling blue.

Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy 

Gratitude. The world does not end tonight

And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow 

Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.


Charles Tomlinson 1960

Overeating is as much about psychology as it is about biology – many people eat, or drastically control their eating patterns, to soothe emotional problems. Clinically speaking, 65% of women have eating disorders, but as Mary Pipher, Ph.D. asserts in Hunger Pains: The Modern Women’s Tragic Quest for Thinness, “recent psychological research indicates that virtually all women are ashamed of what they consider inferior bodies. Women also distort their body images – 90 percent of all women overestimate their own body size. Most try to control their eating and consider themselves fat.” The eating disorder reality is not about just about who has one, but that every woman, and increasingly men, all have their own uniquely disordered eating because of our culture’s intense pressures to control our weight and body composition. Eating disorders are clinically diagnosed when these common attitudes and behaviors reach an extreme level.

Pipher continues, “We are living in a culture that promotes a monolithic, relentless ideal of beauty that is quite literally just short of starvation for most women. For so many of us, thinness equals attraction, which equals value. This formula has created a generation of women whose behavior is self-destructive and whose thinking about themselves is punishing. To be a woman is to have a body image problem. For women, harmful eating patterns are becoming the norm. Women diagnosed as bulimic or anorexic are merely the extremes on a universal continuum.”
​

Have you noticed the disruption in the traditional dairy market due to consumer demand for plant-based alternative milks? The trend has emerged based on demand for plant-based options by those driven by health and wellness concerns, and it has been so pervasive, the dairy industry has (thus far unsuccessfully) lobbied to prevent plant-based milks to even call themselves "milks," reflecting the market share threat these products represent. 

One of our greatest powers as individuals to cultivate the food system we want is to vote with our spending power on high-quality whole food plant-based foods and products. Vote for sustainable, organic, plant-centric eating with your spending habits. 

If you would like to shift your diet closer to a predominately whole food plant-based pattern, learn more about working with a thrive wellness coach to set medium- and short-term goals to support your change process. 

​The Transtheoretical Model of Change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) is an integrative, biopsychosocial model to conceptualize the process of intentional behavior change. Whereas other models of behavior change focus exclusively on certain dimensions of change (e.g. theories focusing mainly on social or biological influences), the TTM seeks to include and integrate key constructs from other theories into a comprehensive theory of change that can be applied to a variety of behaviors, populations, and settings—hence, the name Transtheoretical.

Transtheoretical Model Stages of Change

1. Precontemplation – the person is not ready to make a change. He or she is not ready to make a change. He or she does not see that his or her behavior is a problem. 

2. Contemplation – the person is considering making a change but not right away. He or she knows the behavior is a problem bit is nit ready to make a change yet. 

3. Preparation – the person is getting ready to make a change soon.
 
4. Action – the person has already taken steps towards making a change. Generally, only about 15% of people you initially meet will be in the action stage.

5. Maintenance – the person made the change and has been successfully working on it for at least the past 6 months. 

6. Relapse – the person has returned to their old behavior. 

7. Termination – the changed behavior has become a habit, and the person is absolutely certain the relapses will not occur.

Many people working alone to improve their health by adopting new habits don't realize that change is nonlinear and inevitable backslides lead to giving up. Learn more about working with a Thrive Wellness Coach trained in change theory and lasting lifestyle change to support your goals. 

Thrive Wellness Coaching founder Katherine Engels shares tips to improve sleep quality by experimenting with evidence-based lifestyle behaviors in this sleep hygiene video. 

Take a 4 minute Mindfulness Break to calm and center yourself in the wake of stress.

Mindfulness skills gain power when you practice them regularly.

Spend some time weekly on anything that pulls you into the present moment. This can be meditation, yoga, walking in nature, cooking, gardening, being active or even playing with young children. Spend some time each week on something that makes you lose track of time. When you commit to a regular mindfulness practice, you will have strengthened your ability to calm and center yourself, and this ability can be called on when you find yourself in an acutely stressful situation.

Most of our Thrive Wellness Coaching clients have recently been weighing their responsibility to shelter and distance, and their need to connect with nature and experience open space. This is particularly tricky, but very important, for those that live in smaller spaces in more densely populated areas. Below are suggestions from the National Park Service on how to recreate safely and responsibility. 

"Avoid high-risk outdoor activities, practice social distancing, stay in your local area and follow leave no trace principles. If you do head out, follow CDC guidance to prevent the spread of infectious diseases: maintain a distance of at least six feet from others, cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze, and stay home if you feel sick.

Check with your local national park for the latest information on service and operations available. Updates about the NPS response to the coronavirus will be posted at www.nps.gov/coronavirus.

Connect with national parks online through digital opportunities and activities to do in your own home. To learn more, visit find your virtual park."

#SlowTheSpread #RecreateResponsibly

Set up a free coaching session with a Thrive Wellness Coach to talk new year's resolutions for a better you in 2020. 

According to Dr Zali Yager, a researcher at the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University, an expert in body image, and the Director at Well Researched, "decades of research has indicated that, even brief exposure to ‘idealised’ images in the media and advertising has a negative effect on body image and mood. Recent research has also confirmed that viewing fitspiration leads to increases in body dissatisfaction, and is worse for body image than viewing idealised thin images. In some studies, participants reported that fitspiration inspired them to exercise, but this did not translate into increases in exercise behaviour.

In contrast, viewing images of average-sized models has been found to enhance body appreciation, or positive body image. Evaluations of media campaigns that use real women of all sizes, such as This Girl Can, and #jointhemovement found that these campaigns increased appearance satisfaction, and intentions to exercise."

Schedule a free thrive coaching session to learn about developing authentic and inspiring personalized fitness goals. 

According to the New York Times article, "To Treat Chronic Ailments, Fix Diet First," several studies around the country are using the food as medicine approach, using nutrition to care for chronically ill patients. "Medically tailored meals represent a shift in thinking from a problem-based medical delivery system to a holistic, wellness-focused preventive maintenance.
 
Last year, California’s version of Medicaid, Medi-Cal, introduced a three-year pilot study that’s already showing what experts in the health care field have seen anecdotally* — that tailored nutrition can improve health and lower medical costs for the chronically ill. The pilot includes specially formulated meals and in-home visits for patients who suffer from heart disease, which has caused some of the highest rates of hospital readmissions." 
 
*Note: We have far more than "anecdotal" evidence that whole plant foods can improve health and lower medical costs for chronically ill patients. See the research of T. Colin Campbell, PhD, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr, MD and Dr. Dean Ornish, MD. 
 
The article continues, "another body of research is showing that medically tailored meals can go a long way toward reversing that downward health spiral. A retrospective cohort study headed by Seth Berkowitz, M.D. at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and published in April concluded: 'Participation in a medically tailored meals program appears to be associated with fewer hospital and skilled nursing admissions and less overall medical spending.'
 
Tanvir Hussain, a clinical cardiologist and board member of Project Angel Food, said he is impressed by the preliminary results of the Medi-Cal study. If the numbers hold up and Medi-Cal chooses to add medically tailored meals in its coverage, he said, it could be a game changer for the lower-income populations he serves in southern Los Angeles.”
 
Learn more about the science and execution of whole food plant-based eating with this Guide from the T. Colin Campbell Foundation. Working with a coach can be helpful when looking to makes changes to your eating habits. 

"Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later," according to a recent Atlantic article. 
 
British psychologist Raymond Cattell introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence in the early 1940s. He defined fluid intelligence as "the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower." In contrast, crystallized intelligence "is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past, [like] possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom." 
 
"Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s." Older people can find innovation more challenging. Crystallized intelligence is enhanced by "accumulating a stock of knowledge, and it "tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life." 
 
This contrast is illustrated by two example careers. "Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets—highly fluid in their creativity—tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians—who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge—don’t reach this milestone until about 60." 
 
The good news is that "no matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life."
 
For example, "teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65—more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he’d ever considered retiring. He laughed, and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically." 
 
Are you craving a career change but don't know where to start? Work with a Thrive Wellness Coach to plan your next move. 
 

Work on your future with a personal Thrive Wellness Coach. The grass is greener where you water it. 

"Diet culture has made food and health a performance. Healing from diet culture and weight stigma means untangling from the performance and finding your way into a place where your needs, wants, desires and boundaries are louder than the  externalized rules that demand adherence in exchange for worthiness."

​From the Be Nourished Blog