Susan Orenstein, PhD, started a new podcast last year with an intriguing title: “After the First Marriage.” Which is to say, the first marriage is over, and you're starting over. In her clinical practice as a couples therapist, Dr Orenstein sees people who are struggling to learn the lessons from a marriage that ended. Typically, there's pain and loss, which often gets filtered through guilt and blame and rage and disappointment. All of which gets in the way of learning. And that's the whole point of her work, and podcast: that no matter what happened, what went wrong, or how it ended, it's worth it to perform a “post-mortem” on the first marriage so you don't repeat the same mistakes going forward. I wanted to talk about divorce and moving on as it relates to our health goals and health behaviors. Many of my health coaching clients' issues around food and lifestyle are entangled in a messy relationship. Eating salad instead of steak isn't just a food choice, but an act laden with layers of unspoken meaning between spouses. You're eating healthy now? Does that mean you think you're better than me? I've gained 30 pounds since the kids were born. And we haven't had sex for six months. You must be grossed out by my body. Look at me suffering with this salad. You don't expect me to give up my favorite foods and eat rabbit chow with you, do you? And so on… The core of Dr Orenstein's work revolves around Attachment Theory, which posits that it's our primary relationships in childhood that form the template for all our subsequent relationships. If we were tended to with care and presence when we were babies, we can form secure adult bonds. But if we were ignored, or abused, or betrayed, or felt insecure in the attachment with primary caregivers, we'll carry those wounds into our present relationships. And the first marriage – or any serious relationship, past or ongoing – can give us clues to those wounds, and help us heal them by practicing new attachment styles. Oh, and by the way, you could still be married to the person from your “first marriage,” if you decide to grow together and create a mission statement for an upgraded “Marriage 2.0.” In our conversation, I asked Dr Orenstein about typical relationship scenarios that impact the work I do around health behaviors, and we brainstormed therapeutic approaches to some of the thornier problems. Links Dr Orenstein's first Plant Yourself visit: Creating a Safe “Couple Bubble” OrensteinSolutions.com AfterTheFirstMarriage.com Diane Poole Heller's work on Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Attached, by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller Wired for Love, by Stan Tatkin
Dr Casey Means is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Levels Health, a med tech company that provides closed-loop continuous glucose monitoring to help people optimize their diets and so much more. As Dr Means points out, eating the right food isn't sufficient. Whether a particular whole, plant food – say, a banana, a sweet potato, or bunch of grapes – will spike your glucose to a dangerously high level depends also on the time of day, what you're paring it with, your level of stress at that moment, how active you are physically, any environmental toxins that might be disrupting your metabolism, and the state of your microbiome. Levels Health's monitor is the size of a stack of two quarters, attaches to the back of your upper arm, and tells your smartphone about your glucose level and heart rate every 15 minutes. With this information, you can literally see how different foods and activities affect your blood sugar levels. And blood sugar levels are highly predictive of lo...
Yuvika Iyer discovered the benefits of indoor plants when her young daughter began suffering from rhinitis and other allergies. After removing as many environmental toxins as she could, Iyer began looking for ways to improve the air quality, and not just not make it worse. And that's when she found the treasure trove of data about the health benefits of house plants. Some of the best information comes from NASA, as part of their mission to create environments that could support human life and health outside of the earth's atmosphere. And there's also a lot of plant guidance and wisdom to be found in the Ayurvedic practices and philosophies that Iyer grew up with. Iyer decided to turn her passion and her discoveries into a website, FreshOAir.com, which shares all manner of information on how to live healthier and greener within the walls of your home. We spoke about the easiest plants to grow, and how to learn how to take care of plants if you lack a green thumb. We also talked about...
? Josh LaJaunie returns to talk about his strategies for staying sane, strong, and fit during the pandemic. What 2020 has been like for him – the good, the bad, and the unexpected. And how he's navigated. Where he's fallen down, and where he developed new resilience and antifragility. He shared his strategies to resist junk food and dismiss “junk information.” And how to talk to ourselves for the long haul, especially when we're overwhelmed and feeling sorry for ourselves. And why misinformation and conspiracy theories find fertile soil in rural communities. Links JoshLaJaunie.com Korin Sutton's nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle program
? Author, academic, and artist Tyson Yunkaporta offers an Indigenous perspective on some of the core beliefs that have guided my life. Some, like veganism, survive. Others, like the Hero's Journey, lie in tatters. In our far-ranging yarn (I believe the conversation met that bar), we examined the myths of Western Civilization to see how they serve us. The Hero's Journey, which requires us to see ourselves as cosmic orphans and posits a degraded world in need of saving, leads to isolation and self-destruction. The whole idea of technological progress without regard for unforeseen consequences creates a dynamic in which each solution turns into a more intractable problem: “curing” sickle cell with CRISPR leads to installing terminator genes in African mosquitoes, which leads to environmental destabilization and the extinction of birds and big mammals. Tyson is highly suspicious of veganism, seeing it as another form of rigid control requiring tight human manipulation in order to get ...
Tada Hozumi is a somatics practitioner, and one of the leaders of a movement known as cultural somatics. Basically, cultural somatics explores how our culture influences our bodies – how we move, how we interpret reality through our senses, how we think about the relationship between mind and body. Hozumi came to my attention due to a viral post on his blog, SelfishActivist.com. It was titled, “Why White People Can't Dance: They're Traumatized.” In the piece, he argues that the colonizing, imperialistic impulse that created the category of whiteness caused physical trauma to those who were forced to give up their native culture in order to be “white.” And that trauma restricts movement, restricts expression, restricts joy. In our conversation, which is one of the most challenging I've had as a podcast host, I asked Hozumi to guide me to an understanding of the connection between trauma and political oppression. But not just in the obvious direction, the one in which those who a...
Glen Merzer offers an unusual disclaimer in his new book,Own Your Health: before you adopt any of the recommendations in this book, consult your plumber. Making the point, via parody (or is it irony or sarcasm, I'm never sure) that most medical doctors know little more than plumbers do about nutrition. Or it is, they know as little about nutrition as they do about plumbing? Probably the first one… Glen's come out swinging, arguing that the case for whole food plant-based eating as the optimal diet for human health has been closed for a while, and it's marketing and greed, not science, that's keeping the debate open. And while the meat, dairy, and junk food industries haven't yet booked the parking lot of Four Seasons Landscaping to hold a press conference insisting that animal-based foods and processed foods are the try winners of the diet wars, their actual tactics aren't much more convincing. Glen wraps the science in funny and endearing anecdotes. The one I'll tease you with tel...
? Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams returns to the podcast to talk about his new book, Healthy at Last. Part family memoir, part political mission statement, part science review, part self-help book, and part cookbook, this is a celebration of the possibilities of health for the American people in general, and the Black community in particular. We talk about the title – from Etta James, and not Martin Luther King, Jr's “I have a dream” speech, as I first assumed – and the fact that, in Adams' words, “slavery never ended,” and remains entrenched in the slave foods that are still harming Black people to this day. And we explore some of the policy initiatives BP Adams has launched to bring the practice of plant-based health to Brooklyn, New York City, and the world. We talked about the link between the incredible creativity of Black cooks who turned the unpalatable slop served to slaves into delicious soul food – and how that creativity, in the hands and minds of the new gen...
? “I have a body.” When you think about it, doesn't that mean that I'm NOT my body? By definition, anything that I can HAVE isn't me. I have socks. I have thoughts. I have an itch. The Western worldview insists on a split between the body and whatever the “I” is that isn't the body. You might think this is all philosophical bullshit, and totally irrelevant to your actual life, and you might be right. But one of the consequences of thinking that our bodies and minds are distinct from each other is the way we treat our bodies as second-class citizens. Physical labor is seen as inferior to intellectual labor. We exercise so we don't get weak or ill. The purpose of our bodies, for many of us moderns, is to carry our minds around. We take care of our physical health the same way we'd take care of a car. Today's guest, Barbara Tversky, has spent her professional life questioning the primacy of the mind over the body. Her incredible book, Mind in Motion, argues that our abilities to th...
“If living were a thing that money could buy, You know the rich would live, and the poor would die.” – All My Trials, Joan Baez Today's guest, Jovita Lee, is co-founder and vice president of Democracy Green, a North Carolina-based non-profit dedicated to environmental justice. The environmental movement has a long and shameful history of privileging certain parts of the environment over others. Specifically, it's focused on preserving spaces enjoyed by the rich, and where the rich live. The result is a nation in which environmental racism condemns poor people and people of color – regardless of income and economic status – to lives cut short by chronic conditions caused and worsened by pollutants and climate instability. How many factory farms are located near middle- and upper-class communities? How many toxic chemical plants and waste disposal facilities are sited near upscale suburbs? We are shocked when we see police officers killing Black people by depriving them of air. W...