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. 

"Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was one of the world's most influential Zen masters, spreading messages of mindfulness, compassion and nonviolence, died on Saturday at his home in Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam. He was 95." Read more about his life and legacy. 
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Katie Engels is the Health & Wellness Coach at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Beacon Hill Primary Care Practice, the founder of Thrive Wellness Coaching, and she teaches Vinyasa yoga locally. Since 2018, Katie has focused on building a scalable and financially self-sustaining wellness coaching program embedded within primary care at MGH. As a member of MGH’s Division of Internal Medicine Healthy Lifestyle Program, her work also involves establishing the practice of healthy lifestyle as the standard of care for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.

Katie is a national board-certified health and wellness coach (NBC-HWC), holding coaching certifications through Wellcoaches and the Center for Coaching Certification. She has been working with coaching clients since she founded Thrive Wellness Coaching in 2014. Katie is also certified in whole food plant-based nutrition by the T. Colin Campbell Foundation at Cornell University. She studied Vinyasa yoga at Radiant Yoga Boston, and has been teaching yoga since 2016. Her classes weave the physical and philosophical aspects of yoga together with music to cultivate a warm and welcoming atmosphere for both beginner and experienced students. Katie is also certified in lifestyle medicine by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and in culinary medicine by The Institute of Lifestyle Medicine. Prior to starting her wellness coaching business, Katie spent ten years in marketing and project management in the financial services industry. She holds a B.A. in English from Boston College.

Katie’s personal wellness formula involves helping others pursue lasting lifestyle change, spending time with family and friends, reading, cooking, being active outdoors and daily yoga practice. To learn more about her work and coaching style, read more here on the Thrive Wellness Coaching Blog. 

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.”
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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. 

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We miss our in-person yoga community at Thrive Wellness Coaching, so we are taking our practice online this Fall. Check out these resources to begin a home yoga practice, starting from any level. 

THE 15 BEST ONLINE YOGA WEBSITES IN 2020

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.

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.

Dreaming of days when we can again take in the hum of the deep forest. 

Happy Earth Day from Thrive Wellness Coaching. 

The grass is greener where you water it. Set goals with a thrive wellness coach for your Spring renewal. 

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 the mood for some home yoga practice as you shelter with this 60 minute flow playlist, featuring mellow vibes, gradual wind down tunes from the peak pose to some supported last shapes, and chimes and rain at the end to frame your savasana. 

Lifestyle medicine is the evidence-based practice of helping individuals and families adopt and sustain healthy behaviors that affect health and quality of life. Examples of target patient behaviors include, but are not limited to, eliminating tobacco use, improving diet, increasing physical activity, and moderating alcohol consumption. Download this the PDF above to read more about the 6 Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine: Eating, Exercise, Sleep, Stress Management, Supportive Relationships and Avoiding Risky Substances. 

Schedule a free thrive wellness coaching session to discuss setting lifestyle goals to improve your health and wellness. 

​“Enlightened trail and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

Working with a Thrive Wellness Coach entails identifying your challenge, using experimetal goals to find solutions with trial and correction, and then forging routines, consistent routines, and finally permenant habits to elicit change. 

Much of the coaching work centers around scoping practical short-term goals, with a loose and experimental approach. You want the fluidity that comes with prototyping. "The goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take." 

​Learn more about Design Thinking by watching this video.