Look around you…not just right now but what you have been around throughout your day or week.  What is your stress level, are you anxious?  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best…where are you at with your nutrition?  Are you getting any exercise?

These are important questions to ask yourself.  It has been shown that our environment and lifestyle choices greatly affect our risk of getting breast cancer and recurrence.  Therefore it is essential to look at your environment and decide what you can change or what you must change.  By adding in exercise, achieving a healthy weight and consuming a less processed diet you can significantly lower your risk of this disease coming into your life. 

I look forward to helping you achieve a better sense of wellness to improve your life!

Since we are on the topic of processed foods, I wanted to see what someone else says about them.  So I spent some time recently reading Michael Pollan’s book, “In Defense of Food” where he discusses fortified processed foods.  Basically these food items are robbed of their original nutrients through processing and then fortified to contain whatever the trend is at the moment  - no trans fat or saturated fats, more omega 3 fats, vitamins, minerals, etc.  This results in a fortified processed food which is at times plugged as being a healthier choice than it’s original whole food?   Confusing! 

We see this many times throughout our TV commercials or shopping in our grocery stores.  When you go shopping, how do you decide which one is best?  We need to put less focus on specific nutrients, instead looking at the big picture of whether these food items are whole foods or processed foods.

So keep these little tidbits from Michael in your nutrition kit to help you choose wisely: 

 *Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

*Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.

Here’s to the rest of your weekend filled with foods your grandmother would recognize!

Processed foods.  The unfortunate side to most of our days that can mess up our attempts at good health and nutrition.  As we try to ”keep up” with our day to day routines, it seems that choosing processed foods becomes our regular choice.  This will continue to threaten our health until we really get a grip on it.  Remember, the choice is yours.  Adding weight, increased cancer risk, more inflammation, increased heart disease risk, more fatigue and the list of problems goes on and on.  Processed foods rob us of essential vitamins and minerals, that protect us from illness.  I challenge you to take a look in your pantry, fridge, desk drawer, kid’s lunchbox, snack drawer and make some decisions about how you can un-process your diet.

I had the opportunity to walk through our local fair last evening – in the horrid heat and humidity!  And it truly amazes me how the color pink is so pegged with breast cancer and how it just brings the crowds out.  I had the opportunity to meet 4 young men who were working within a booth devoted to making more people aware of breast cancer and working to provide opportunities to cancer patients and their families.  How great to see men so involved with this disease – really made me smile.  If you would like to learn more about this group, check out Mrs. Dudes funds – it’s a tribute to his mother-in-law.

So as this new journey continues, I find myself succeeding.  Finally!  This dream of getting more information out to people who find themselves concerned over their future either as breast cancer patients or as people who want to prevent cancer, manage weight and work through nutrition concerns.  And this new blog journey will hopefully find its way to the people who need support and encouragement.  But also a way to look completely at their treatment so they are able to use the power of nutrition with traditional medicine to help in this battle. 

When starting this journey, I knew that breast cancer was my focus however I did not want to miss others who are looking for a nutrition resource.  Remembering that all the steps we take to move towards better nutrition improves our health whether we are looking at weight loss, cancer protection or other health protection. 

So use this to your advantage.  I am hopeful that you will learn more and identify ways in your life to improve your health and sense of wellness.  Also while realizing that I am a real person with real nutrition struggles just like everyone else. 

I look forward to great things with this new adventure of helping you customize your style of nutrition.