Category

Nutrition Coaching

Health CoachingNutrition Coaching

Sweets: The Good, The Bad and the Toxic

There are moments in life that can really pull you off track from improving your health; birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, you name it.  Why do we get derailed during these occasions?  Because most of the sweet treats Americans “celebrate” with are like gateway drugs that open the door to poor dietary habits and chronic disease.  The taste of sweet is a natural and healthy part of our taste sensation.  You may not realize this, but food chemists have found some pretty…
Ashley
March 26, 2014
AllergiesHealth CoachingNutrition Coaching

Has Your Immune System Gone on Strike?

How’s your immune system holding up this year?  Is the stuffy head cold you got last month STILL hanging on even though you’ve drunk your weight in cold medicine and taken a couple rounds of antibiotics?  What are you doing wrong?  First of all, food (real food), really is the best medicine – eating natural whole foods provides the raw materials for every cell in your body to function properly.  If you’re eating processed foods throughout the day, you should expect…
Ashley
December 30, 2013
Health CoachingNutrition CoachingTherapeutic Lifestyle Change

Are you willing to make the ultimate sacrifice… for junk food?

I once had a patient tell me that eating a bag of potato chips was worth having diabetes and injecting insulin every day.  My thought was, "Seriously?  Are potato chips really worth dying for"? How can this mentality even exist? It exists because processed foods in the standard American diet aren't just unhealthy, they're addictive.  They are designed by chemists to be addictive in the same way nicotine makes cigarettes addictive.  One reason that compounds like isolated sugar, salt, fat, gluten, MSG and…
Ashley
September 26, 2013
Health CoachingNutrition Coaching

Create a New Sense of “Normal” with 5 Simple Habit Changes

Spring is upon us folks, and if the thought of swimsuits and physical activity makes you groan in misery, you probably aren’t feeling well. You feel fine, you say? Most of us have underlying pain and fatigue that we acclimate to everyday until it becomes a new state of “normal” - in other words, you don’t think you feel bad because you always feel bad. So how do you re-set your “normal” and get that spring vitality back? Feeling good…
Ashley
March 21, 2013
Nutrition Coaching

Healthy Holidays?

The holidays are upon us and as much as I love them, trying to maintain healthy habits can be difficult to say the least. Surrounded by a plethora of high glycemic fatty foods and grandma smiling sweetly as she hands you a piece of pie… it’s hard to say no. So how do you stay on track with all of the temptation and chaos? Here are my top five tips: Relax – Don’t let the holiday chaos turn into a…
Ashley
December 3, 2012
Gut HealthHealth CoachingNutrition Coaching

Acidophilus – A Team Player in the Health of Your GI Tract

You’d have to be waking up from a decade-long coma to not have heard the words acidophilus, probiotic or flora in the media - especially with Jamie Lee Curtis’ yogurt commercials making light of what happens “in the bathroom” and the hilarious Saturday Night Live parodies that followed. Acidophilus (specifically lactobacillus acidophilus) is one of at least 300 different strains of bacteria living in your intestines. Actually, there is an entire ecosystem of microorganisms living in your intestinal tract, called…
Ashley
October 8, 2012
Gut HealthNutrition Coaching

Cleaning “House” with Fiber

Fiber is one of the most important nutrients in our daily diet – it’s our internal housekeeper! Unfortunately, those of us eating the SAD way (ie. the Standard American Diet) are getting far too little of these substances to maintain optimal health. According to the Institute of Medicine, we need at least 25-38 grams per day, a far cry from the measly 10-15 grams we’re actually getting on average. There are two different kinds of fiber – soluble and insoluble.…
Ashley
August 6, 2012
Nutrition Coaching

What do you Consider “Good Nutrition”?

Surprisingly, I like Wikipedia’s definition of nutrition: “the provision, to cells and organisms, of the materials necessary (in the form of food) to support life”. These provisions are really macro-nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) and micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, amino acids, fatty acids, etc) that come from our diet. Ultimately the foods in our diet are broken down into a simple unit of measured energy called a calorie. You’ve probably heard calories referred to as “empty” in certain circumstances –…
Ashley
July 24, 2012