We’ve discussed on the last few Wellness Wednesdays the impact of our lifestyle on our blood sugar. And one way that impact may manifest is type 2 diabetes. People have even coined type 2 diabetes a lifestyle disease more often referring to food intake than some of the lifestyle characteristics I have been describing. Traditionally diabetes education always centered around food, even though there were six other topics within the curriculum, every patient visit focused on food.

It kind of bugs me when people refer to yoga as exercise. It’s so much more than that. In fact asana, the actual postures people refer to as “exercise”, is only one of the 8 limbs of yoga. That means there are 7 other ways to practice yoga. If you study the root of the word yoga, it means to yoke or to unite.

Adrenaline or epinephrine is your short-term, acute stress hormone.  It’s designed to help you get out of danger quickly.  It is the hormone that promotes the fight or flight response, that results in your blood supply being diverted to your periphery, (i.e.) arms, legs.  In order for your body to have the energy to fully execute on the fight or flight system, you need fuel or energy, and the most readily available source of energy in the body is glucose.

Habits are a powerful thing. But if you know like I do, creating habits can be incredibly hard and sometimes they even feel impossible. Habits, however, are the reason why you aren’t losing weight, why you constantly feel like your schedule is out of control, why you can’t seem to get ahead financially, and why you aren’t doing the work that you love.

Hello December! Since December is my wedding anniversary month, I thought I would start the month by talking about love. This year my husband and I will have been married 7 years and together for many years long before that. While marriage, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful expressions of love, the other being motherhood, it is not without difficulty. I think we get so caught up in the fairytale of love sometimes, we forget that it takes work to make love work.

One of my friends recently celebrated her birthday. She’s in her first year of her medicine residency, her intern year which is unbelievably busy, so she had to celebrate her birthday on call. When she told me she was on call for her birthday, I responded with “that’s a bummer…” She quickly responded with, “No, I’m good. I worked really hard to get to this point, so I don’t think it’s a bad way to celebrate my birthday at all!”

This may sound kind of weird, but sometimes I wish I had a job that had a set schedule. Before you clutch your pearls, let me explain a bit. When you work a set schedule you have to be somewhere at a certain time and you leave at a certain time. You might even have to eat lunch at a certain time (now that might get on my nerves, it seems weird to be told when to eat…). Now full disclosure, I haven’t had a job with a set schedule since my residency and even then I always worked past my set hours, but having a set schedule can create discipline and increase productivity. Because I don’t often work set hours due to my travel schedule, work can bleed into more hours than what’s necessary.

I feel like people say all the time to avoid stress because it can affect your health. It’s interesting though if you ask them how, you don’t always get a clear response. And the truth is, your health is affected by stress in multiple ways. I want to share with you a specific system of your body that is affected by stress that I find to be most common among working moms. Now remember, this is not the only way stress affects your health, but it is a concrete way that you might be able to identify with and then use this information to improve your health. First of all, what is stress?

Moms are always talking about how busy they are, “not enough hours in the day”. No time to cook dinner, so let me pick something up on the way home. No time for exercise because I go to work early and get home late. No time for myself because I have to work, go to the grocery store, do homework with the kids, and cook dinner. There are just not enough hours in the day.