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." 

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. 

Cold-Brewed Ice Coffee

Yield: Two drinks

1/3 cup ground coffee (medium-coarse grind is best)

Plant milk (optional)

1. In a jar, stir together coffee and 1 1/2 cups water. Cover and let rest at room temperature overnight or 12 hours.

2. Strain twice through a coffee filter, a fine-mesh sieve or a sieve lined with cheesecloth. In a tall glass filled with ice, mix equal parts coffee concentrate and water, or to taste. If desired, add plant milk.

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. 

Find a Farmer's Market near you for fresh and local produce and whole foods. 

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

Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the chronic diseases that afflict us can be controlled or even reversed by rejecting animal-based and processed foods.

The major storyline traces the personal journeys of Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist from Cornell University, and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a former top surgeon at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. On separate paths, their discoveries and groundbreaking research led them to the same startling conclusion: Chronic diseases including heart disease and type 2 diabetes can almost always be prevented—and in many cases reversed—by adopting a whole-food, plant-based diet.

The idea of food as medicine is put to the test. The film follows everyday Americans with chronic conditions as they seek to reduce their dependence on medications and learn to use a whole-food, plant-based diet to regain control over their health and their lives.

Watch Forks Over Knives

"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

Smoothies are a great way to sneak more servings of fruit and vegetables into your day. Browse these 8 recipes for whole food plant-based smoothies that will cleanse your system with fiber, water and micronutrients. 

​"What works with weight loss is if you choose water or a non-caloric beverage over a caloric beverage and/or eat a diet higher in water-rich foods that are healthier, more filling, and help you trim calorie intake," says Penn State researcher Barbara Rolls, PhD, author of The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan.

Food with high water content tends to look larger, its higher volume requires more chewing, and it is absorbed more slowly by the body, which helps you feel full. Water-rich foods include fruits, vegetables, broth-based soups, oatmeal, and beans.

As any parent of a picky eater knows, getting children to eat for health can be a challenge. Check out Sharon McRae's tips for transitioning your little ones to a plant-based diet. 

1. I explained to my three children why we were making the transition to a plant-strong diet. We watched the fabulous movie “Forks Over Knives” together.
  
2. We explored recipes from some amazing recipe books including “Engine 2 Diet” by Rip Esselstyn, “Unprocessed” by Chef AJ, and “Super Immunity” by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, among others, and I began experimenting with new foods with family input.

3. I found delicious substitutes for the kids’ favorite foods. We used Daiya “cheese” initially and later transitioned away from it. See our recipe for pizzas made with pizza-hummus. The kids say it’s the best pizza they’ve ever eaten! And see the recipes for raw brownies from Chef AJ and black bean brownies from Dr. Fuhrman which are all huge hits with the kids.

4. I encouraged my family to help with choosing recipes and with food preparation.

5. Our new kitchen tools include a huge salad bowl, a rice cooker to make big batches of grains for the week, a pressure cooker to quickly cook beans (some of which otherwise take 45 minutes to boil), and for a big batch of some type of bean vegetable soup. A blender makes quick, delicious salad dressings, sauces & smoothies, and a food processor makes bean spreads and nut butters for sandwiches and snacks. 

6. Our motto: Be prepared and plan ahead. Having grains, beans and veggies on hand allows me to throw together a meal in minutes. We always have hummus or another bean dip, nut butters, and plenty of fruits and vegetables in the fridge. We never travel without snacks like fresh or dried fruits, kale chips, hummus and sprouted grain bread, carrot and celery sticks, so we are never caught hungry without plant-strong, unprocessed options. 

7. I shared plant-strong recipes with the kids’ friends when they were here for play dates, everything from kale to black beans, and shared the recipes with their parents. It was good for my kids to be able to share healthy foods with their friends, and that they taste great for everyone! When extended family is over, exclusively plant-strong meals are popular with everyone.   

8. I began sending the kids to parties with a plant-strong dish to share for everyone. I call or email the host/hostess in advance and explain that we do not eat animal-based products, including dairy, and I offer to send the kids with a dish. Almost every time, the dish is a huge hit and the host/hostess asks for the recipe!

As Geneen Roth explains in her book Women Food and God, "In an April 2007 UCLA study of the effectivness of dieting, reseachers found that one of the best predictors of weight gain was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started. Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost. Another study found that people who went on diets were worse off than people who didn't.

Failing is built into the weight game. There is no way to play it and win. [To be healthy, we need to move beyond being] brainwashed by a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year diet industry."

At Thrive Wellness Coaching we support lasting lifestyle change by working with clients to establish permenant healthy habits; no diets allowed! Learn about our personal coaching services and leave the dieting yo-yo cycles behind on your path to sutainable healthy living. 

Politics block accurate health info from reaching the public because of money. Americans are very confused about what type of food they should eat and its no wonder since the media is flooded with contradictory and reductionist health and nutrition information. This is an issue created by the way collusive capitalism allows the tremendous influence of the industrial food industry, the diet industry and the pharmaceutical industry to influence food policy and medical education. Why is this so? Frankly, there is no money in the simple message that a whole-foods plant-based lifestyle and physical activity lead to health. Also, in the decade of post-grad medical education doctors receive, most physicians are only exposed to a few hours of nutritional science. Mush of their education, and the education for nutritionists and registered dietitians, is funded and/or facilitated by the food and pharmaceutical industries. 

Perhaps to best understand the situation, lets consider what money is LOST to these industries when an American is healthy. 

• A healthy person does not require monthly medications such as statins or insulin to treat chronic conditions over decades of their adult lifespan. 
• A healthy person does not require chemical or radiation therapy for cancer or high-risk surgery to treat heart disease. 
• A healthy person doesn’t pay for one unsustainable yo-yo diet program after another year after year, convinced the issue is their willpower. 
• A healthy person doesn’t spend money every single day to buy processed foods made from our commodity crop surpluses of corn, soy and wheat. 
• A healthy person dose not consume multiple sodas a day at a 90% profit margin to the manufacturer. 
• A healthy person does not eat fast food every day for lack or time or money to make better food consumer decisions. 

The food industry, which devotes vast sums of money to advertising, lobbying and political contributions, wants everyone to believe exercise is the key to health and weight maintenance. Because of this influence, our collusive federal government has adopted the food industries party line asserting that “all foods fit” and exercise is the primary avenue to attain health. This bias is regurgitated into national food guidelines and school lunch programs. Dr. Richard Carmona, former surgeon general during the Bush administration has even testified before Congress that bureaucrats routinely silenced him against speaking out against obesity. 

The kind of food we eat is the food that is most profitable. The profit margins for soda are 90%. The profit margins for produce are 10%. Fresh fruits and vegetables comprise only 2% annual U.S. food sales. 

Toxic food is cheap and good food is comparatively very expensive, as it is not artificially subsidized by the federal government. People with the least amount of money eat the most calories in our society because we have created a system where the most calories are the cheapest. Most processed foods are man made concentrations of sugar, fat and salt that contain way more calories than any food found in the natural world. These foods can easily contribute to a diet so high in calories, burning them off in a single day is actually impossible. With soda, the body has a hard time recognizing liquid calories. The worst part of these foods is that they are also addictive - foods high in fat and sugar provide the release of opioids in the brain. Nature delivers whole foods as nutrient complexes on purpose, not concentrated isolates like high fructose corn syrup that wreak havoc on our blood sugar control mechanisms. 

Because many people fail to see the correlation between quality nutrient dense foods and good health, they cannot justify the investment of money and time to buy and prepare the foods we need. Cooking in the home – the best single thing you can do to improve your health – is not commonplace or valued in our society. Quantity has become the most important measure of food quality but as long as you are starving on a nutritional basis, you will remain hungry regardless of the amount of calories you consume. People tend to eat based on the amount served to them on a plate and restaurant portions are 5-7 times the amount of food we need. We need a paradigm shift to value eating for nutrients, not calories. 

In America’s toxic food environment, only 1 in 3 people can maintain a healthy weight. Regional differences are different shades of terrible. A child born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of being obese. If that child is of color the chance in 1 in 2. In America, less than 1% of citizens qualify for the 7 factors of ideal cardiovascular health. 

In Clean Food, Terry Walters explains the differences between what we now eat and our Grandparents' food supply by stating “their food supply was not as adulterated as ours is today and likely did not travel as far or as long to get from the farm to the grocery store to the table. They did not eat processed or fast foods. Their meals were balanced and prepared fresh daily.

Fields were not sprayed with herbicides and pesticides to the extent that they had to be unfarmed for entire growing seasons in order to be brought back to life. Animals and fish were not fed steroids, growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticide-laden foods.


​
​Produce was not genetically engineered or grown with pesticides so that it could be harvested at reduced cost and increased productivity; nor was it picked and then shipped across the country, tossed around in cases, placed on grocery shelves and intended to appear unblemished and freshly picked weeks later.”

Our industrialized food system has been a major contributor to the obesity crisis in this country, which now costs $190 billion annually in treatment costs alone. According to United States Department of Agriculture data, the average American now consumes 600 more calories per day than in 1970. Most come from the added fats, sugars and refined grains commonly found in highly processed foods and junk foods—soda, frozen pizza, donuts and scones, burgers and fries, and the like. These additional calories have overwhelmingly come from corn (corn starches, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, feed corn fed to livestock), soybeans (soy proteins, vegetable oils, salad oils, partially hydrogenated oils, and fryer oils in fast-food restaurants) and wheat (refined flour). These three crops account for the vast majority of crop acreage planted in the United States.

In the last 75 years we have industrialized our food system based on commodities. If you look around the supermarket, there is the illusion of food diversity and choice, but really, almost all packaged foods are clever rearrangements of our commodity crops: corn, soy and/or wheat. 
​
In “Our Unhealthy Food System,” David Wallinga, M.D., M.P.A. explains, “When talking about our [industrial] food system, we are referring to everything from the farm to the plate—food production, harvesting, processing, marketing and distribution. Industrialization describes the increasing tendency of economists, policymakers and agribusiness companies to treat farms as rural factories, with off-farm inputs (energy, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, genetically modified seed) marshaled in the service of producing caloric energy (feed corn and starches, soybeans and refined flour). Industrialization also describes a system in which economic return is paramount—more important than concern for the public’s health, the potential health effects of pesticide exposure, the long-term resilience of the land where crops are grown, and the methods by which food is processed and delivered.”

Why Does America Struggle with Such a Preventable Health Crisis?

The answer is very complicated and most frustratingly, it has a lot more to do with our environment than failings or lack of willpower on the part of the individual. As many have observed, if you “go with the flow” in America, you will be overweight or obese. 

This does not mean, however, that individuals are powerless or that we should accept this with certainty as our assured fate. Education and wellness coaching can go a long way in empowering individuals to swim against the current towards better health and wellness. 

This blog post will explore some of the issues that tangle together to make healthy living in this country so elusive for the majority. 

The more you learn and know about the environment in which we need to make food, activity and ultimately health decisions each day, you more you realize weight issues and obesity can not be blamed on a failure of individual agency or willpower. We are not doomed, but understanding the issues described below is imperative for the individual to have a chance of navigating themselves and their families towards health. In America, health is the ultimate “knowledge is power” issue of our time. 

Our Very New Toxic Environment is at Odds with Our Evolution
In the last 75 years, we have created a toxic environment in America that is incompatible with the way our body’s needs have evolved. Our modern world is characterized by excess energy reserves hard to avoid and this abundance of calories is evolutionarily new. For 4 million years humans have inhabited an environment of food scarcity so we are programed to eat as much as possible when calorie dense foods, such as meat, become available. 

This hardwiring allowed us to survive food insecurity, and even famine, but in our current landscape of overabundance, the instinct becomes disadvantageous. Food is now obsequious everywhere in America – we see it at gas stations and bookstores and vending machines are present at every school and workplace. This is another new development and it provides us with unrelenting external cues to eat. 

We are also designed to walk several miles a day in search of food, water, and firewood—as indigenous people do to this very day. Since our bodies depend on this activity to function properly, our new sedentary, indoor lifestyles cause chronic discomfort, pain and arthritic conditions for the 1 in 4 American adults that get no physical activity at all. 

Additionally, up until the very recent past, people lived and worked in dwellings without the consistent temperature control of central heating and air conditioning. That meant that many calories consumed in past generations where expanded to maintain the body’s internal temperature. 

These biological factors put us at odds with our new food supply, which has become completely industrialized during the same period of time. Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts that take a deeper dive into the health and wellness issues that arise as a consequence of our industrialized food system. 

Explore Wellness Coaching to Combat These Issues 
Learn more about developing your own personalized formula for heath and wellness to combat these issues by working with a Thrive Wellness Coach.

In a recent Forbes article, Noma Nazish breaks down why self-care is so important for wellness, and includes a list of simple ways to introduce more into your life. 

Work with a Thrive Wellness Coach to develop your own custom formula for health and wellness. 

“No matter how indulgent or fancy the term may sound, self-care is crucial for our physical, emotional and mental well-being. You shouldn’t neglect self-care and here's why:

• Know your worth: Self-care is important to maintain a healthy relationship with yourself as it produces positive feelings and boosts your confidence and self-esteem. Also, self-care is necessary to remind yourself and others that you and your needs are important too.

 

• A healthy work-life balance: Contrary to common belief, workaholism is not a virtue. Overwork, and the accompanying stress and exhaustion can make you less productive, disorganized and emotionally depleted. It can also lead to all sorts of health problems, from anxiety and depression to insomnia and heart diseases. Professional self-care habits like taking intermittent breaks (for lunch, calling your mom, or taking a stroll), setting professional boundaries, avoiding overextending, etc. ensures that you stay sharp, motivated and healthy.

 

• Stress management: While a little dose of stress is a healthy way to give us a nudge that we need to meet the deadlines or finish that overdue task, constant stress and anxiety can have an adverse effect on your mental and physical health. Smart self-care habits like eating healthy, connecting with a loved one or, practicing meditation cuts down the toxic effects of stress by improving your mood and boosting your energy and confidence levels.

 

• Start living, stop existing: Life is a precious gift. So why waste it when we have the choice to have a more meaningful existence? Yes, you have a lot of responsibilities— fixing the dryer, mowing the lawn, paying bills. But it’s important to remember that taking care of yourself is also your responsibility. Little things like sipping tea while looking at the raindrops racing down the window glass, enjoying a bubble bath, or reading a book are essential for your daily happiness. While things like taking up a new hobby or learning a new language can make your life more purposeful by giving you a new reason to get up in the morning.

 

• Better physical health: Self-care is not just about your mental health. It’s also about caring for your physical self, by eating healthy, taking adequate sleep, caring about your hygiene, exercising regularly, etc.”

 
Click here to read the full article.