Monthly Archives: October 2018

Every Breath You Take:
How Breathing Affects Whole Health

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Every Breath You Take Whole Health Living

Most of us take our breathing for granted. We generally do not think about how our amazing brain automatically regulates the most urgent and important bodily function we have. If we do not breathe we do not live beyond a few short minutes. The ability to breathe and the quality of our breathing clearly has an important impact on our ability to live, but also expresses a great deal of information about the state of our nervous system and emotional health.

Breathing is such a critical function that in addition to being under the automatic control of our brain stem it is also a physical function we can control at will. We know that our breathing is affected by and directly affects our emotional states, exertion levels, nervous system fluctuations and overall whole health.

The affects of emotion on the respiratory system can readily been seen during an asthma attack, which can be very frightening and further reduces the individual’s ability to “catch their breath”. Many of us do not breathe freely. We are breathing freely when we breathe in and out through the muscles of our bellies. We tend to breathe through the chest muscles because we are tense and “holding our breath,” which starves our cells of energizing oxygen.

Deep breathing or relaxed breathing exercises can make an enormous difference in our health and vitality. By changing our breathing from shallow to deep,  we can experience many whole health benefits:

Every Breath You Take: Whole Health Living

> Breathing deeply rather than shallowly creates detoxification within our cells, bringing oxygen rich blood into our cells and cleansing out carbon dioxide.

> Breathing deeply into our bellies rather than our chest muscles produces a greater sense of calm and relaxation brought about through the increase of oxygen to the nervous system.

> This form of cleansing, nourishing breathing is conducive to whole body health and brings about a sense of inner peace.

> Deep breathing can help you sleep better and also feel more energetic because of the increase of oxygen to the brain

This is a great subject to review in your patient education. If you would like to re-train your breathing so that you derive the most benefit each day from this life-sustaining, automatic body function – start slowing. Take just five minutes twice a day to sit quietly in your chair with eyes closed, body relaxed. Allow yourself to focus on your breath. Rather than tensing your shoulders and back muscles, let your breathing rise and fall from your belly muscles. Slow, relaxed breathing for five minutes each day, twice a day, can re-train your automatic breathing patterns and help you to feel better, sleep better and be healthier and more energetic.

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Food and Mood Are Intimately Connected: A Whole Health Perspective

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Food and Mood by Dr. Georgianna Donadio of The National Institute of Whole Health

After completing an interview for a national magazine on “Food and Mood” I was reminded about how intimately our mood and our food are connected– a topic explored more deeply in our Accredited Whole Health and Wellness Nutrition program. The magazine article was about “what foods help our moods.” But maybe the larger question is: “What do our moods have to do with what we eat?”

It’s interesting that the emphasis is usually on how things from outside of us affect our inside. In reality so much of what is going on inside of us affects our outsides. This is really evident in terms of weight loss and weight gain. The way we feel about ourselves, work, life, and whether we are fulfilled or dissatisfied has more to do with what or how much we choose to eat, than eating a food has to do with how it “makes us feel.” In Whole Health, everything affects everything.

One of the reasons diets don’t work is because the “work” is being done on the outside of the problem instead of the inside. I have been a nutritionist for over 30 years and have seen tens of thousands of patients who want to change the way they look or the way they eat. When we start to “work” on the goal, within a relatively short period of time, they become aware that there are underlying feelings and emotions associated with not eating foods that help them to “medicate” or mask their feelings.

They often become discouraged because the feelings are uncomfortable and sometimes painful. It is human to avoid pain and move towards pleasure. It takes courage to truly tackle and confront the underlying issues of food and mood, focusing on the inside of the problem, instead of the outside.

Here is an exercise you may find some value in. If you are dealing with mood or food issues, keep a journal for 10 days. Write down everything you eat. Include how you feel when you don’t eat what you want and how you feel when you do eat what you want.

Just becoming more aware of what you are putting in your mouth and how it translates to how you feel after you eat can be the start of a healthier and happier relationship with food and mood. This is just one of many benefits associated with taking a whole health approach.

Food and Mood Are Intimately Connected: A Whole Health Perspective

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Are You Consuming Too Much Sodium?

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Are You Consuming Too Much Sodium? Here's What The Experts Say.

Sodium is a naturally occurring, essential mineral that helps regulate body fluids and kidney function. Of concern to many is the fact that high doses can cause hypertension, kidney damage, and decrease of calcium absorption. It can cause bloating, fatigue and increase your risk for strokes and heart disease.

The Right Nutritional Value

The recommended daily intake of sodium is 2,300 mg per day. A low sodium diet is considered between 400 – 1000 mg a day. A normal sodium diet is considered between 1500 – 2,300 per day, and a high sodium diet between 2,500 and 4,000 mg per day. The average American diet contains over 3,500 mg per day, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control. Experts agree that damage of high sodium accumulates and can have a long term, life threatening effect.

Even those of us who think we are eating well and are careful about our food choices, may not realize how much sodium is lurking in our foods. Processed, canned, jarred and frozen foods have high levels of sodium, as do most restaurant prepared meals and certainly “fast foods” where sodium and flavor enhancers are added for taste and texture.

Few of us realize that foods we eat every day are loaded with sodium. In considering the examples below, it becomes clear that, once again, the best foods to eat are fresh and unprocessed, which not only contains more nutrients, but contains much less sodium.

High Sodium Foods To Avoid:

> One cup of cocoa has 950 mg of sodium.
> A chicken fillet sandwich has 940 mg of sodium.
> Tomato ketchup has 1042 mg.
> Parmesan cheese contains 1862 mg.
> Processed cheese has 1189 mg.

The list goes on. The more processed the food, the more likely it is to contain high sodium levels. On the other hand, Fresh fish, fruits, nuts, eggs, beans, meats and vegetables have low levels of sodium.

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Parents Model Behavior and Self-Esteem

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Lessons In Whole Health: Behavior and Self-Esteem

One day I noticed my daughter was watching a reality television show about high school students. The lack of respect that many of them showed towards other students was stunning. What was even more disconcerting was their lack of awareness that the people they were taunting and verbally abusing had the same range of feeling they did; wanted to be accepted and valued as they did; and wanted to belong within their peer groups, just like they did.

The main theme of the program was having a facilitator come into the school and educate the verbally abusive students on the basics of how to have appropriate relationships. It was portrayed that these young people had never seen respect or compassion modeled for them at home. They were not “aware” that other students, young people like themselves, had essentially the same need to belong and the same feelings and desires that they did.

My daughter commented that it was obvious that these insensitive high school students were suffering from low self-esteem to be treating other people that way. This started a conversation about “where do we develop healthy self-esteem from” and why do some people develop it easily and others not at all.

Self-esteem is so intimately connected to whole health and how we treat ourselves; which is also connected to how we treat others. The role of a patient advocate is to instruct a patient on “how to be in the world” and to provide the training, if you will, to have the skills, tools and awareness to develop a strong sense of self and self esteem.

“Roots and wings” was the expression many years ago, which refers to the stability, discipline and security that allows us to go out into the world and have the confidence in ourselves to “spread our wings” and fly.

As parents we have the profound responsibility of modeling to our children what they need to learn to be both healthy and happy. Children learn with their eyes, their ears, and their hearts. It really does not matter what we say to our children, or what we say to others, it is what we do that counts. When we take the easy way out as parents and do not provide our children with a strong example and foundation of learning responsibility, integrity and how to respect others, we fail them and we hurt them.

To educate our children to be healthy and happy we must advocate the number one rule of liking themselves, which leads to liking others: When our behavior is congruent with our values, with what we know intellectually and intuitively is right and good, we like ourselves. When our behavior goes against our values and what we know is the right way to behave, we have low self-esteem. We don’t like ourselves when we behave in a way that directly or indirectly hurts ourselves and others.

I remember talking one time with one of my children who was complaining that they “didn’t like themselves.”

I asked them an appreciative inquiry question: “Do you think that feeling might come from something you know about yourself that the rest of us don’t?” Several days later he shared with me that it “was one of the best questions anyone had ever asked him” and that it helped him to stop doing something that he felt really bad about doing.

This is a question to ask ourselves and to model to our children, who learn more from our non-verbal communication than anything we might “tell” them about how to live a happy life and support their own whole person health.

For more whole health discussions, listen to Dr. Georgianna Donadio’s radio show Living Above The Drama.

Doctors Taking Control of Healthcare

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Doctors Taking Back Control Of Healthcare

For those us of old enough to remember Marcus Welby, MD and Dr. Kildare, the beloved TV docs we grew up with, we also remember a time when physicians ran healthcare. They set policy, budgets, insurance coverage guidelines and pretty much, back then, “everything healthcare” was directed by the doctors.

The insurance carriers, growing tired of paying for unnecessary surgery, warned the physician groups who ran the show that if they did not clean up the medical abuses taking place, the insurance industry would take away their decision making by enforced second opinions and limit paying for procedures that were being unnecessarily performed. Back in the 1970’s, there were millions of hysterectomies. Of these, 66% were deemed “unnecessary” by what has become the Medical Review Board watchdog.

Now in the U.K., to quote an article from English.news.cn, “The new British coalition government revealed on Friday that it planned to put doctors in charge of funding for frontline services in England’s National Health Service (NHS), in a change hailed as the biggest in 60 years.”

This is big! If this were to be enacted in the U.S., we could see a return of physician driven healthcare that is provided, determined and distributed by the same medical type of physician groups that were unable to police themselves a mere 30 years after the establishment of the American Medical Association and the mainstreaming of the pharmaceutical industry.

Granted, we have in place excellent watchdogs peer review boards and medical review requirements, but this works because of the lack of conflict of interest with the way these structures have been put in place.

The healthcare reform bill has yet to flex its muscles and most of us feel pretty much in the dark about what we can expect. No surprise since an overwhelming majority of politicos who voted on the bill had little to no idea what the bill contained!

The issues we see with today’s healthcare delivery simply reinforce the Whole Health vision of taking control of your body, preventing disease with common sense health hygiene and limiting the use of acute care medicine we as Americans are blessed to have available to us. Every day the news contains articles identifying the long-term use of even over the counter medications and caution us to realize we cannot repeatedly put these chemicals into our bodies and not experience consequences.

Chronic disease, which is the bulk of what is treated in healthcare today, is preventable and cost effective. Let’s create our own healthcare reform with self-directed whole person care – that means taking care of ourselves with consideration to all 5 aspects of health. In advocating this type of care through patient education, we all move toward living well and living long.

For more whole health discussions, listen to Dr. Georgianna Donadio’s radio show Living Above The Drama.