Healthy Life Lessons

Oh my Monday! I say this not because it is Monday, but because we have been having endless days of 30 Celsius weather and our A/C is broken! Our air people came and patched it up as a temporary fix last Tuesday, but by Friday it conked out again. That means, for the whole weekend we fried our asses off! They are here now to install a new system, and all I have to say is that if it isn't fixed by tonight. I will seriously cry. Very hot tears! Anyways... As you know, I am a stalwart hardcopy reader. No Kindles, no e-readers, no reading things on devices, I like paper books, newspapers and magazines, thank you! Paper books seem to be sticking around, but print magazines and newspapers have been dying for a while now, much to my dismay. As I wrote about a few months ago, we gave up and went digital for our Globe and Mail subscription and will be going to the PDF version of the Toronto Star soon. Its just becoming prohibitively expensive to buy the print versions! I have al...

You know I hate heat so usually avoid the sun, but the summers here are so brutal, you can hardly be outside for minutes without feeling like a roasted chicken (though with all the rain this year we got off thankfully easy...unfortunately, fall so far has felt more like summer 😠). Not only do I hate heat, but I am concerned about skin cancer, so I do everything possible to avoid skin damage from the sun. Even in winter I always have sunblock on my face. Three of my close friends have been diagnosed with basal cell carcinomas, and a woman I went to highschool with has had melanoma twice!! I am also prone to getting uneven skin tone which can be exacerbated by the sun and UV damage. So I was thrilled to receive Nerium International  IllumaBoost TM  Brightening & Shield  to try. The product: Works to brighten the skin’s appearance and help even skin tone Helps shield the skin from environmental stressors Helps plump and moisturize the skin Fights the appear...

The causes of obesity are numerous. They also differ from person to person. Contributing factors include poverty, mental or physical illness, parents (their weight status, genetics, behaviour modelling, what they fed you, etc.), and, of course, lifestyle. Another contributing factor is culture. You've heard me say it before, we live in an obesigenic culture (i.e. is encourages obesity). How does it do so? Here are a few ways: 1. Abundance of high calorie, highly processed food available 24/7, that is cheaper than healthier food; 2. Mechanization of physical tasks (you don't have to churn your own ice cream now, you just open the freezer); 3. Social cues encouraging us to consume (advertising, social pressure, etc.) 4. Focus on productivity/consumption/materialism at the expense of spiritual/emotional/psychological fulfillment 5. Fat phobia Numbers 4 and 5 are what I believe fuels one cause of being overweight for a lot of people: emotional eating. Our culture has...

Its almost a cliche to say, but, man did summer ever fly by! My counselling practice was pretty busy all summer, which is fantastic, but also means I just cannot devote more time to posting here 😢😢 But I really can't complain, its been good. The girls were in camp almost the entire time. Mostly Harbourfront Kids Camp, but Little A also did a week of sleepaway camp, and loved it. She wants to go for a month next year. We gotta start saving now!! Both girls also went to Kingston and stayed with my parents last week. So last week was really the summer holiday for Adam and I. No driving the girls anywhere, no preparing food for them, no listening to them fighting...it was glorious! Tomorrow Big A starts grade 6 and Little a starts grade 3. I am probably more nervous than they are. There will be more homework, and so many extracurriculars, that just thinking about coordinating everyone's schedules makes my head hurt! Big A insisted on having us sign her up for 4 different...