A Healthy Tomorrow

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Dr. T's Blog

Change 1 Thing! January Challenge

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“Change 1 Thing” Challenge

Have You Accepted the Challenge?

Take One Year to Develop a Lifetime of Optimal Health!

“Change One Thing” is a 12 step process over one year to help you achieve your health goals.  You simply commit to make one change in your lifestyle every month, so that by the end of the year, you will have completely transformed to a healthy lifestyle. 

Why each month?  It takes about 21 days to establish a new habit.  So each month, you will firmly establish one change before starting another.  Are you willing to take the challenge?

Your January Challenge (should you choose to accept it):

“I will drink my optimal amount of water every day”

What is my optimal amount of water?

  • Adults need at least eight 8-ounce cups of water per day. But if you’re overweight, you should add about 8 ounces of water intake for every 25 pounds of excess weight.
  • Children should drink about half their weight in ounces of water.  For example, a 40 pound child should drink about 20 ounces of water daily (about 2 and ½ cups)

What You Can Expect from This One Change:

  • You will have a decrease in the symptoms of dehydration.  Dehydration leads to fatigue, headaches, back aches and joint aches.  As many as 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. 
  • If you have problems with constipation, like 40% of Americans have, this one change will improve your regularity. 
  • You will lose weight.  Why?  The average American drinks 10% of his or her daily caloric intake.  By replacing sweetened beverages with plain water, you will be on your way to losing unwanted pounds.

Creative Ways to Get Your Kids to Appreciate Vegetables

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If American kids had disposable incomes, they’d probably buy groceries like every day was Halloween – reams of Twizzlers, bushels of candy corn, and pounds of M&M’s, Reese’s, and Kit Kats. Unfortunately, the popular US diet (for adults as well as kids) has its consequences. Namely, 39.6 percent of adults are obese. (Obesity is defined as having a BMI over 30.)

Perhaps even more alarming, about one in three US adolescents or teens is overweight or obese. The health risks associated with excess weight include sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. That’s why it’s important to teach your kids to eat well: so that they grow up to be healthy, active adults. To do so, this might mean coming up with creative ways to inspire your children to appreciate and enjoy that most dreaded of meals: vegetables. Here are some helpful tips to get you started courtesy of guest blogger Jason Kenner.

Farmers Market

If your kids eat at the school cafeteria every day, their idea of “healthy food” might narrow down to neon-colored peas or pineapple chunks smushed into plastic ramekins. To teach them about the bounty and splendor of vegetables, take them to a farmers market. You may not know yourself that these markets offer interesting and unusual veggies. From Kohlrabi, Jerusalem artichokes, and green zebra tomatoes to Romanesco broccoli with its intricate coral-like patterns, the offerings can be as lush and varied as perennials in a plant nursery! Letting your kids pick vegetables out of the booths might prove to be enough of a hands-on experience to get them at least familiar with some of the healthiest foods in the world.

Raised Vegetable Beds

If there aren’t many farmers markets in your area, you might consider planting a raised vegetable bed. All you need is to hammer four planks (preferably cedar, since it’s rot-resistant) into a box. Dig out a square gulch, not too deep, in your backyard and fit the box over it and fill it with manure and fertilizer. Then, poke your finger through the surface to make rows where you plant your seedlings. Each vegetable has its own preference regarding sun, shade, moisture, and the month of the year to put it in the ground, but you’ll get all that down. And when you do, you’ll be feeding your kids heirloom tomatoes all summer long, right out of your garden.

Something else to bear in mind: if your backyard needs some additional modifications, as an added bonus, many kinds of home renovations can also increase the appraisal value of your home. Just make sure you keep those receipts!

Delicious Meals

Parents don’t have loads of free time, so serving your kids gorgeous vegetable medleys may seem preposterous. If so, then try looking up recipes meant to be simple weeknight fare. These might include quesadillas, spaghetti with lentils, tortilla or minestrone soup, or spaghetti squash burrito bowls. Making vegetables a staple of your kids’ diet from a young age may help them eat well for the rest of their lives, a routine that will prove invaluable to their health as they get older.

It’s also essential that your kids are drinking enough water every day. Not only will they avoid the extra sugar that comes with soda and juices, but drinking water removes toxins, prevents dehydration, and regulates body temperature.

Parenting Tricks

Meanwhile, if all these tips fail to lure your kids away from McDonald’s and Arby’s, try good old parenting trickery. Dress up your platter o’ asparagus or broccoli with a dab of butter (which is better for you than you might think) or a fun dip. Make them pick their vegetables out of your raised garden beds so that they can participate in the (suburban) farm-to-table process on their own. Finally, eat vegetables yourself, keep them out as appetizers during meals, and don’t pressure your kids to swallow every wedge of cauliflower on their plates. The less you stress about the importance of eating vegetables, the less they’ll latch onto it as a point of contention, until it’s simply part of your household’s regular diet.

Dr. Teresa Fuller is a pediatrician with an expertise in integrative holistic medicine. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Broccoli sprouts: a simple way to ameliorate a myriad of diseases?

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“We and many others around the world, have developed an enormous body of laboratory and pre-clinical data, and a burgeoning body of clinical evidence addressing the potential that sulforaphane has, not only in the prevention of environmental carcinogenesis, but in the prevention or amelioration of a very large, diverse, and seemingly unrelated series of conditions…[that] include autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, bacterial and viral infections, prostate, lung, breast, skin, and head and neck cancers, osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, sickle cell disease, fatty liver, and asthma.” Read more here…

Reference: Fahey Jed W., Kensler Thomas W. The Challenges of Designing and Implementing Clinical Trials With Broccoli Sprouts… and Turning Evidence Into Public Health Action. Frontiers in Nutrition, Vol 8 . Apr 29, 2021

The Best Offense is a Good Defense

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Loved the discussion with Dr. William Li on the Model Health Show podcast! Dr. Li lays out 5 key health defense systems that define optimal health. As always, Shawn Stevenson’s program is full of actionable items that we can take to improve our health right now. By the way, Dr. Li specifically mentions how shoring up our defense systems helps fight back against long COVID syndrome.

So here’s one tip to strengthen each health defense system as recommended by Dr. Li:

1)Angiogenesis: growth of new blood vessels to improve your circulation

  • Tip: Eat 2 fresh fruits and 3 vegetables daily. Optimize this practice by including fruit peel in your fruit intake. A great way to increase fruit peel is by consuming dried fruit if your system can handle the sugar.

2) Boost your Stem Cells

  • Tip: Dark chocolate (80% or higher) can double the number of stem cells in your blood stream

3) Healthy Microbiome

  • Tip: Kiwi’s high fiber content. Eating 1 kiwi per day will “quickly start to change the number of your healthy gut bacteria.”

4) DNA self-repair

  • Tip: Sunflower seeds slow down the degradation of DNA

5) Healthy immune system

  • Tip: consume broccoli sprouts which contain 100x the immune-supporting compound called sulforaphane found in mature broccoli

Always a wealth of great info on the Model Health Show. Dr. William Li’s book is called Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body can Heal Itself