HealthEdge

Day 4: Why I write about health?...because I believe we all hope to live our days without pain and in full vitality. I know some things you may not. I've seen some things others may not have noticed. If I share these things perhaps we'll all benefit. By writing I hope to keep my children safe and spare them some of my own suffering. Because if I write often enough, and hard enough, and long enough my voice will become clear, unique, and vital. I write because I must. I'm writing to clear the fog from my thinking. To describe...to describe so carefully that I am really seeing. I am writing to transform this life. To transform other lives. Today my friend and I listened to a woman, a very angry woman, pretend she had transformed by alchemy the cancer death of her husband and the miserable indignities he suffered during his brief and horrible illness into paintings. She feigned power and happiness as she shrieked unprocessed anger and grief. When the presentation was ove

So the behavior change folks tell us it's easy! Change is easy if you give it the right conditions. And the right conditions aren't so hard to cultivate, you only need to change any five things in your life to unglue stuckness; that's the word from the work of Robert Kegan, researcher and expert in the world of adult learning. Changes seem to propel development if they involve a number of different development areas including both internal and external shifts. For example, beginning a consciousness practice is an internal process. Going for daily walks is an external process. It would be more likely to create developmental movement to simultaneously take up new internal and external practices in a selection of developmental areas, called lines. Music, cooking, physical fitness, story telling, travel, languages, haunting used clothing stores, represent different kinds of growth lines. So now think of a list of five changes, new areas of growth, you could make. Do you nee

More on the fascinating topic of why we are gaining weight and what we can really do about it. I get the feeling that we are being protected from the hard news that we'll have to eat less and exercise vigorously after all. Why do we avoid looking straight at this reality? Cultural denial? http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-obesity-ess.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

For the first time in human history in the year 2000 more of us became overweight or obese than were underweight (Caballero, 2007). Today if any one of us in the developed world lives the life served up by the dominant culture we will sooner or later become overweight and inexorably creep, over time, to obesity. This is because the teetering balance between the food energy we ingest and the physical energy we use up has in the last forty years come crashing down on the side of excess food energy. We evolved to eat primarily edible leaves, tubers, scarce fruits and grains, and even scarcer meats and fishes while our lifestyle traditionally required so much walking, carrying, and hand labor that all but the most wealthy and gluttonous of us were perpetually lean. Those who observe our world’s food supply note that we produce enough calories worldwide to feed us more than two times over. And these calories are not evenly distributed among the world’s peoples. The majority of these excess

This blog is born as from a clinical project undertaken in my final year of Nurse Practitioner school. Here are some articles, quotes, ideas, pertinent studies, whatever, the work of others. What these far-flung works have in common, is a particular relevance to health issues today. Our times demand educated minds, collaborative methods, and cultivating the practice of awareness. Our country's collective health problems are grave. The answers to these problems are being born in diverse disciplines right now. Unfortunately, conversations rarely occur across disciplines. The purpose of this blog is to start a multi-disciplinary health conversation, to inform those who need to know, and ultimately, to create change. I invite your comments and contributions to this effort.