Breast Cancer/Anti-Depressant Link: 5 Facts

Did you catch the news in April that anti-depressants are associated with an 11% increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer?* After pouring over 61 studies of anti-depressants, lead author Lisa Cosgrove of the Harvard Center for Ethics found several other titillating facts as well. Here’s my sum-up. 11% of the US takes an antidepressant,…

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The Holy Trinity – Or Charlie's Angels – of Vitality: Estrogen, Cortisol + Thyroid (and why they've got your back + your rack, baby)

Step into my time machine. We’re nine years old. It’s 1976. We’re fledgling feminists (already!) and we’re mad-passionately-crazy in awe of a trio of crime-fighting, bad-guy-busting women with brains, brawn and physical agility. And they are just like the hormonal system, when it’s working FOR YOU not against you. They’re amazing. They’re Angels. (They even…

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Digital Sabbatical + Your Hormones

I just resurfaced after a digital “shabbat” — that is, no online love from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. No email, no tweets, no Facebook Big Ideas. Result? Better relatedness with my husband and daughters, oxytocin-raising dialogue with girlfriends, and more mindful eating. But, wait, that’s not all! Cortisol comes as close as you can…

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Eat a Brownie and Overdose on Melatonin

Did you catch the NYT front page article yesterday on new snacks that deliver a walloping dose of the hormone melatonin? 8 mg per brownie. People, this is massive. This is madness. And it’s available at Walmart, 7-Eleven and the Harvard Coop. Where’s the voice of reason, here? Even the NYT seemed to think it…

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Reframe Food with Reverence and Restraint

It’s time to stop the madness with weight and food. Women aspire to thinness and this leads to distorted relationship to eating. We seek peace with food, yet we’re going about it all wrong. We starve ourselves on a new diet each Monday, and then binge by the weekend. Eighty percent of American women are on a…

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5 Tips to Reclaim Your Thyroid Mojo

Today I’m manhandling 5 mojo-zappers. Five things that I often find are depleting the energy of patients in my integrative medicine practice. Five things I want on your radar. Five things I want you to remove from your life. Now. 1. Dial in your free T3. Free T3 is the active form of your thyroid…

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Thyroid Questionnaire

I love this questionnaire from Dr. Hotze, another integrative physician. It gets to the heart of whether you should be tested for thyroid dysregulation, even if your conventional doc has dismissed your concerns. I also like to use these questions to build a tracker for how you improve with different therapies, as trial-and-error continues to…

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