“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.” – Joseph Conrad
“Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower . . . beautiful in essence.” – Tony Samara
“God knows far more about living a life of joy and blessings than we do.” – Randy Loubier
One of the wonderful things I have been able to do to prepare for guests at Lost Creek Bluebird Retreat/Spa is to study nutrition. I enjoy learning positive things to take care of my body and hopefully for others through foods that taste good and are healing for the body.
It is amazing to me there is just so much to learn! I get complacent at my age thinking about how many experiences I have had thinking I do not have a need to learn. It takes effort to push out of the comfort zone and task my brain to absorb information. The effort is always rewarded. I want to share the information I have learned about functional medicine through Dr. Jeffrey S. Bland. He is known as the “father of functional medicine”. Dr. Bland gives a brief history of medicine discussing our current system came to be with Pasteur’s discovery of medicine for infections. When he talks about “functional medicine”, he talks about disease beyond the care of immunizations and antibiotics. The chronic diseases are the plague of our humanity. These are some of the chronic diseases:
Gastric Heart and blood-vessel diseases like type 2 diabetes, gout, high blood pressure, and dementia, arthritis, gastric reflux, duodenal ulcer, osteoporosis, obstructive pulmonary disease
Well, you get the general idea. He contends that a chronic disease does not have a single cause but multiple factors and have multiple symptoms. We live in an exciting time of science exploring different ways to help with these chronic diseases. A website he lists for detailed information is www.plminstitute.org . This is the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute that he founded in 2012.
For me, learning the foods that help our bodies is really FUN!!! He includes a Baseline Seven-Day Eating Plan with such cool recipes as “Mandarin Almond Salad”, “ Chicken and Broccoli Skillet”, “Santa Fe Corn Salad” and “Spicy Carrot Muffins”.
Our bodies are only as good as we treat them. Feed them well and they allow us to find joy more frequently!