What Does Arthritis Mean For Younger People?

Think arthritis only affects the elderly? Think again. By 2030, an estimated 580 million people worldwide, ages 18 and older, will have been diagnosed with the disease. Pretty eye-opening, right?

Conventional medicine tends to treat arthritis with strong, immune-suppressing medications that temporarily relieve the symptoms of the disease. Unfortunately, I've seen how these medications can also damage your gut and how they fail to truly address the root cause of the issue. This World Arthritis Day, it’s time to make a change. I’m here to tell you that there’s another way—a way that’s designed to address the underlying causes—in order to reduce inflammation without medication. Here’s how:

1. You can treat all kinds of arthritis with one approach.

There are more than a dozen different kinds of arthritis, and while there are certainly differences in conventional understanding and treatment for each one, they all have common root causes and triggers for inflammation and pain. For example, the two most common diagnoses are rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA). While RA is considered an inflammatory (autoimmune) disease and OA is typically thought of as the result of "wear and tear" and injury to the joint, both of these conditions are influenced by lifestyle choices such as diet and exercise. No matter what kind of arthritis you have, it’s important to know that it can be made worse by inflammation that starts elsewhere in the body, including the gut. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Heal the gut, and you heal the joints.

You may have heard some talk about gut health—and the gut-brain connection or the gut-pain connection—and you’ve probably heard the word "microbiome," or the friendly bacteria in your body. Fascinating studies have confirmed that the root cause of your arthritis is most likely lurking in your digestive system, so to heal your joints, you must first heal your gut. But where do you start? The best first step is to take a probiotic daily to help remove the harmful microbes that might be causing your symptoms, but some require a more intensive plan.

3. Treat your terrain with inflammation-fighting foods.

A fresh start for your microbiome means a new chance to influence your "terrain," or what I think of as the body’s deepest soil, where cells either thrive or wither. There’s a strong connection between your diet, your gut microbiome, and your pain level, so I recommend choosing foods that fight inflammation like organic plants and foods high in fiber and healthy fats, while avoiding refined sugars, dairy products, and red meats. Here are some of my guiding principles:

• Increase fiber, micronutrients, and phytonutrients, or, in less-scary terms, eat more vegetables and fruits, and choose organic whenever possible.
• Reduce refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and refined grains.
• Improve the quality of fat by removing refined oils and hydrogenated fats.
• Improve the quality of the animal protein you eat by choosing 100 percent grass-fed and finished beef, free-range chicken, and sustainably farmed, low-mercury fish.
• Limit salt, food dyes, and preservatives (which happens naturally when you limit processed foods).

4. Carve out time for daily stress-reduction activities.

Traumatic events and ongoing stress are very real triggers for inflammatory diseases. In our go-go-go world, we’re always rushing; we can’t miss this deadline or that meeting, and we very rarely take the time to sit back, relax, and let our minds reset. Diet and stress are two root causes of a damaged gut, inflammation, and chronic disease, so it’s no surprise that in order to heal your arthritis naturally, you must take time to practice your favorite stress reduction activities daily. I recommend meditation, yoga, long walks through nature, and journaling to ease the mind.

This article originally appeared on mindbodygreen.com and was written by Susan Blum, M.D., MPH

5 Steps to Bounce Back From a Bad Day

A bad day starts when you spill coffee everywhere on your way to work. Then you space out about the important tasks you had to get done. The icing on the cake? Your boss cancels a presentation you spent all yesterday preparing for. Bottom line: Today sucked.

Even if you love your job, an occasional bad day is par for the course. It can be hard to shake grouchiness when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are annoyed by at work, or distracted by world events or relationship drama.

The secret to recovering from a bad day is learning how to move forward despite it. How you respond can mean the difference between a quick recovery and a full-blown funk.

Here are 5 steps to help get you back on track so you can come back stronger tomorrow:

The only constant is change.

That’s why we created the Making a Change course and guide. Whether you’re starting a new job, moving across the country, or changing a habit, Making a Change will prepare you to get Unstuck. 
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Step 1: Embrace your bad day

You’re human, and like the rest of us, you’re bound to make mistakes or have moments where you’re not performing at 100 percent. As much as your inner perfectionist may be freaking out, forgive yourself. Give yourself permission to feel bad (for a little while at least).

Release any anger, guilt, or self-blame so that you can move on. Take a breather and walk around the block. Scribble out your frustrations in a journal. Call your mom or best friend. There’s no shame in crying in the bathroom, either!  

Step 2: Change your mindset

Once you’ve moved through the sorrow, shift your mood by asking yourself, “How do I want to feel right now instead?” Calm? Joyful? Strong? Consciously generate positive emotion so that you can get back to work with a fresh perspective.

Watch for ways you may also be blowing things out of proportion (“I’m not good enough. I always screw up” or “Nothing ever goes according to plan”). Unhelpful thinking is common, but you can unhook from it by reframing your perspective. To do so, first identify those automatic negative thoughts, then tweak your self-talk to be more balanced and realistic.

Step 3: Recalibrate mentally and physically

As you may know, bad days affect both the body and mind. Stress shuts down many normal functions, which is why you may feel anxious or rushed and experience symptoms like tunnel vision or shallow breathing when things are going badly.

Try bringing blood, oxygen, and calm back into your system with a grounding practice, stretching, or a few jumping jacks.

Step 4: Treat yourself — the healthy way

Don’t confuse self-care with self-sabotage. Skip drinking the day away at happy hour. Steer clear of numbing out through food, TV, or another substance or bad tendency. Focus on what restores you and makes you genuinely feel good, even in the tiniest way. That may be giving a calling a friend, going to bed an hour earlier, or saying “no” to a networking event so you don’t overextend yourself.

Step 5: Leave it behind

Emotions are contagious (including negative ones) and when work sucks, unhappiness can follow us home. Draw a boundary with an evening routine to signal the shift and bring closure to a bad workday.

At home, speak up and let your family, roommates, or maybe your pets know you’re having a rough day. Request space to decompress if you do need it, but resist the urge to isolate. Connection with others, even virtually, is an important component of happiness. It helps us realize that bad days are universal and also serves as a much-needed source of support and advice.

No one is perfect. Life rarely works out exactly as planned. Instead of beating yourself up when a crummy day happens, expect them. And remember, you get to decide how you respond when bad days happen. Will you let it derail you? Or will you choose to see it as a tiny bump in the road on the way to achieving your goals?

Ironically, a bad day can be a hidden gift — it’s an opportunity to show to yourself exactly how resilient you are. You have the capacity to do hard things, so go show today who’s boss.

This article originally appeared on unstuck.com and was written By Melody Wilding.

11 Ways to Stay Energized All Day

Stuck Moment: It’s 3 pm and you’re down for the count. You’re tired, hungry, and cranky — longing for a venti-size, two-sugar latte. Sigh. Once again, the rest of this workday is going to be an unproductive drag.

But it doesn’t have to be. All that’s required are some small diet and exercise fine-tuning to sharpen that remarkable instrument you call your body. Because what you feed it and how you care for it affects the physical and mental factors that contribute to productivity: Mood. Confidence. Concentration. Energy. Memory. Your immune system.

Even better, these tweaks to your daily habits are so easy to implement that they can quickly become second nature — building a positive and lasting impact on what you can get done. Let’s get started.

Go easy on your digestive system. Digestion is work for your body. After you eat, increased blood flows to your stomach and intestines for the energy-hungry task of breaking food down — energy which then isn’t available for other kinds of work. Like brain work. On average, if you eat a mixed diet of carbs, proteins, and fats, 5% to 15% of the calories (a.k.a. energy) you take in are used for digestion. To compare, the brain uses about 20%.

While some foods, like fats and alcohol, take extra work to digest, others, such as a pastry or white toast with jam, break down easily to glucose (the sugar that fuels brain and muscles). You get a quick burst of energy (yay!). But as soon as 15 minutes later, you’ll crash (oh no!) and need another sugar-fix. Why? Because your brain needs glucose delivered in a steady supply to keep it running at its best.

The upshot: Eat the right foods, in the right amounts so that the energy produced isn’t “eaten” right back up by your stomach. And eat to control the release of glucose into your system to avoid the blood sugar roller coaster.

Here are five easy ways to do that:

1. Your morning meal helps set your blood sugar pattern for the day. What you want: fiber, slow-burning carbs, some fat, and some protein. Try a shake (soy, almond, or low-fat milk) with fresh or frozen fruit. Or an omelet with veggies and multi-grain toast.
2. Choose foods low on the glycemic index, which means that they burn slowly, giving your brain that nice even flow of energy. Choose toast with whole grains over a white bagel. A handful of nuts and dried fruit over a cookie. Here is a helpful chart listing high, medium, and low-glycemic foods.
3. Avoid heavy meals. That three-martini bistro lunch you see on Mad Men? Terrible for productivity. Instead, order salads, veggies, a high protein-to-carb ratio such as a baked potato with tuna or a light turkey sandwich. Go big on volume (to help you stay full) but judicious on calories (to help you stay perky).
4. If you do opt for fast-burning carbs, counteract them with fiber-rich foods — even a snack-size portion of carrot sticks can slow the release of sugar into your blood stream. Fiber also helps you stay full longer, so you don’t get distracted by cravings. Use this chart to check the fiber content of common grains, proteins, fruits and vegetables. (Berries and lentils are big winners in the fiber department.)
5. Avoid foods that you know make you feel sluggish or bloated. Gluten, dairy, and soy are common culprits.

Get into the focus and memory zone. We all know the feeling when our mind wanders and nothing sticks. You scan the same paragraph over and over. And just when you finally feel like you’ve got it and flip the page, whoosh! It’s gone.

The ability to concentrate and retain information, like your energy level, depends on how you tune your instrument. Studies show that diet and exercise choices not only affect mental alertness, but also memory formation. Fortunately, it doesn’t require a diet overhaul. There’s lots of easy stuff that you can do right now to make today (and tomorrow) work better.

1. Get in a half hour of low to moderate intensity aerobic workout. No need to cross-fit or marathon-train to get brain-boosting benefits. Instead of carpooling, take a brisk walk to work. Or jump on a bike. Or get on the elliptical, where you can review an important brief while your blood gets pumping. Exercise and learning are the perfect multi-tasking companions; working out during or just before a demanding learning task has been shown to improve memory or brain performance. 
2. Stay hydrated. A parched system can tire you and cause headaches, making it hard to concentrate. You know the drill: eight eight-ounce glasses of water throughout the day. And avoid the double-whammy of sodas and alcohol when you need to get stuff done: They dehydrate you and funk up your blood sugar and digestion.
3. In addition to plenty of water, eight foods that help you focus are blueberries, green tea, avocados, leafy green vegetables, fatty fish, dark chocolate, flax seeds, and nuts.

Tend to your immune system. On average, we get two to five colds a year. But studies show that it’s possible to halve your chances of getting sick with some simple choices.

1. Just 20 minutes of light to moderate exercise (enough to break a sweat) five days a week will boost your immune system. If you do catch a bug, researchers found that regular exercise can reduce the length and severity.
2. Eat lots of fruit, especially citrus, during cold season. The vitamin and mineral benefits boost your immune systems, and Vitamin C can actually help reduce the duration of a cold by a day.
3. Avoid suppressing your immune system with sugar and alcohol. These indulgences make you more vulnerable to bugs and can slow recovery.
4. Sleep well because when your sleep is out of sync with your schedule, your immune system suffers. When ready for bed, shut off screens — TV, smart phones, tablets, computers — and dim lights to cue your body for rest.

Boost your body to boost your mood. Confidence, stress, and happiness levels are hugely influenced by chemical and hormonal fluctuations in the body — i.e., diet and exercise. And they, of course, affect your productivity. These three actions will pump up your mood to power through your to-do list:

1. If you’re a non-morning person who needs to function in the A.M., eating breakfast regularly helps you avoid becoming tired and cranky. Eat something light — not too much fat, not too many fast-burning carbs — such as a shake with almond or soy milk and fresh or frozen fruit. And don’t eat until you’re fully alert, which is when your body is ready to start digesting.
2. Regulate your coffee intake. While caffeine can jolt you awake, too much at the wrong time, like early morning on a empty stomach, can kick you into an adrenalin overload, stressing your system, and leaving you with the jitters or mood swings. However, an afternoon coffee (go easy on the sugar) is a good offset to the slowness caused by a heavy lunch.
3. Finally, there are so many benefits to exercise that there’s really no reason not to. For instance, just 20 minutes of walking or other mild workout will boost endorphins and other chemicals that give you a feeling of euphoria, help your body and mind reset, and leave you feeling clearer and fresher.

This article originally appeared on unstuck.com and was written by Unstuck

How to Cope When The Holidays Are a Time of Grief

The holidays might be anything but happy when you’re going through grief, heartbreak, or disappointment. Just as festive decorations and music that are meant to spark joy can turn into reminders of your loss or frustration, the end of the year can also generally be a lonely, challenging time.

Although there’s no magic switch to instantly recover from pain, grief is a valuable, healthy process. It puts your resilience to the test. You discover strengths you didn’t know you had and you learn that you can feel sadness without getting stuck in it. Most of all, you unearth opportunities to improve your relationships and well-being as well as prioritize what matters most.  

While there’s no right or wrong way to grieve, the strategies below can help you deal with the loneliness of loss during holidays in some of its different forms.  

You feel grief for a lost loved one

The holidays will be different now, so decide which holiday traditions you want to keep to honor someone and which ones you might want to change. You might also create new rituals to honor a memory, like making a donation in their name or playing holiday music they enjoyed.

Be open to offers of help from siblings, relatives, and friends. Scale back on gifts and decorating if it feels too painful. It’s okay to take things one day at a time and say no if you feel too overwhelmed.

You’re recovering from a job loss

Layoffs are common around the holidays and losing your job suddenly can be traumatic, particularly as you prepare to gather with friends and family. Even though you may find yourself vacillating between strong emotions like shock, sadness, and anger, try not to get bogged in defeatist thinking.

Rewrite the negative stories playing in your mind that it’s your fault or that you’ll be broke forever. Focus on what you can control, like starting small and sending one email a day to someone in your network. A job loss can actually be a clean slate that allows you to pursue a new direction (maybe changing careers or starting a business?), so hone your skill at spotting opportunities. Take advantage of the holidays to reflect on your values and plan for the year ahead.

You’re getting over a breakup

December is the most popular time for couples to split. The holiday spirit of togetherness only magnifies the loneliness of singledom. Instead of focusing on a lost relationship, appreciate the love that does surround you. Keep plans to see friends and family, but have a kind-but-firm responseprepared to set a boundary when people ask about your relationship status. Writing a goodbye letter to your ex (that you don’t send) is also a great way to find closure after breaking up.  

Remember to be a good partner to yourself, too. Follow through on personal goals like getting to the gym or cooking nutritious meals on weekdays. It’s a great way to build confidence during emotionally rocky times.

A happy holiday may seem out of reach if you’re hurting right now. There’s no shame in feeling awful for a little while. Cry, journal, create — take whatever action you need to find peace including seeking professional help. But don’t pretend like your grief isn’t real. Shock, sadness, and anger are valid emotions. Allowing yourself to move through the natural healing process — while hard — is the key to moving forward and enjoying yourself this holiday season.

This article originally appeared on unstuck.com and was written by Melody Wilding