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Sharon Horesh Bergquist, M.D.

Live Healthy, Age Healthy™

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Recent Posts

  • How to Use the Power of Habit to Improve Your Health and Productivity
  • Why Finding Your Flow May Be More Important Than Work-Life Balance
  • Holiday feasting leaves months-long setback on weight
  • The Health Benefits of Everything Pumpkin!
  • Prepare Your Family for Back to School Success with Home Cooking

Recent Comments

  • Sharon Horesh Bergquist on How to Use the Power of Habit to Improve Your Health and Productivity
  • Sharon Horesh Bergquist on Eat For Your Genes: Why a good diet matters more than bad genes
  • Sharon Horesh Bergquist on Managing Pain from Arthritis — Naturally
  • Sharon Horesh Bergquist on The Health Benefits of Everything Pumpkin!
  • Scott Baker on The Health Benefits of Everything Pumpkin!

Archives

You are here: Home / Archives for Health

How to Use the Power of Habit to Improve Your Health and Productivity

January 18, 2017 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 1 Comment

Power of Habit

Courtesy of Unsplashed

We think of building healthy behaviors or increasing productivity as a matter of willpower. We seek knowledge and goal setting skills to make the desired change. With determination and discipline, we may succeed, at least for days or even months—but more than often, we fall off course. The common assumption is that our day-to-day decisions are conscious choices. But our ability to make informed decisions that control our behavior is fundamentally limited. Psychology and neuroscience suggest that most of our actions are borne out of habit—they are reflexive, instinctive, and occur outside the awareness of our conscious mind. And if we pit one against the other, our thinking minds are no match for our automatic habits. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, Prevention, Wellness Tagged With: changing a habit, habit, health, productivity, setting goals

Why Finding Your Flow May Be More Important Than Work-Life Balance

December 4, 2016 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Named by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept of “flow” has existed for thousands of years in different forms. When you are in the flow, you are fully immersed and energized by what you are doing. In sports, performing at that point where natural skills and peak performance align is called “being in the zone.” And in ancient Chinese philosophy, when your body is in harmony between opposing Yin and Yang forces, you have an optimal flow of the vital energy called “Qi.” Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, live better longer, Prevention, Wellness Tagged With: Flow, happiness, health, wellbeing, work-life balance

Holiday feasting leaves months-long setback on weight

November 13, 2016 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Holiday meal

Holiday binges can take months to take off –Copyright: evgenyb / 123RF Stock Photo

The weight that you gain this holiday season is likely to remain until the summer months, or beyond, according to a recent letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Across three different countries, researchers found that while up to half of holiday weight gain is lost shortly after the holidays, half remains for months later. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Aging well, Health, Wellness Tagged With: Avoiding holiday weight gain, Holiday meal, Holiday weight

The Health Benefits of Everything Pumpkin!

October 16, 2016 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 2 Comments

Health benefits of pumpkin

Copyright: olegdudko / 123RF Stock Photo

Fall is here. That means it’s pumpkin season! Time for pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, and pumpkin everything. This season’s most popular food also happens to be packed with nutrients. Yes, the versatile pumpkin has so many health benefits that it can be considered a superfood.

Here are 5 main health benefits of adding pumpkin to your recipes this holiday season. Continue Reading...

  1. Good for weight loss

Filed Under: Aging well, Health, Wellness Tagged With: Health benefits of pumpkin, Health benefits of pumpkin seeds, Pumpkin, Pumpkin seeds

Prepare Your Family for Back to School Success with Home Cooking

September 13, 2016 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 2 Comments

Home cooking

Home cooking for the whole family
Copyright: pressmaster / 123RF Stock Photo

The time-honored tradition of family meals has been a family cornerstone for generations. Eating meals at home may also be one of the most effective yet decreasingly utilized ways to help your kids get better grades in school and be less likely to drink alcohol or smoke.

Time and money. Both are common reasons people eat out. But contrary to common perception, convenient fast food meals can be more expensive than home cooked meals. And small improvements such as picking more nutritious options among breads, cereals, and packaged foods at the grocery store do not on average cost more. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Blog, Health, Prevention, Wellness Tagged With: cooking, eating healthy, healthy diet, home cooking

A 3 Step Plan for Preventing Menopausal Belly Fat

November 29, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 2 Comments

menopausal belly fat

Copyright: thepoo / 123RF Stock Photo

As a women approaching menopause, you may endure many changes in your body, such as drenching night sweats, mood irritability, and difficulty sleeping.Perhaps the most challenging, however, is the hormonally driven change in your body shape and lean body composition.

With the start of menstrual irregularity, your ovaries progressively make less estrogen and progesterone. In contrast, the amount of androgens, including testosterone, they make is less affected.

The drop in estrogen and the higher relative proportion of testosterone gradually morph your body from being curvy at the hips to being fuller at the waist—until you eventually lose your waistline. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Aging well, Health Tagged With: belly fat, menopause

[Video] How Can Stress Make You Sick? A TED-Ed Lesson

October 25, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Although short term stress can be advantageous, chronic stress can have the opposite effect. Our bodies are hard wired with a flight-or-flight response to give us a survival advantage. In pre-historic days, that helped us fight or escape from predators. Unlike the acute stress of facing a predator, modern stress is chronic, such as from conflicts at work or at home– and can overload our stress response. In this video, done with the amazing TED-Ed team, you can see how chronic stress can affect your heart, your waistline, and your longevity–and what you can do about it!

 

Filed Under: Aging well, Health, live better longer, Prevention Tagged With: stress and appetite, stress and belly fat, stress and health, stress and heart disease, stress and longevity

What “Dose” of Exercise Do You Need To Live Longer?

October 17, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Exercise

Shutterstock

Exercise is deservedly considered the best medicine. It can reduce your risk of heart disease and stroke, lessen your risk of colon and breast cancer, and lower your blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. It can also improve your mood, cognitive function, and your fitness in everyday life. But what dose of this medicine do you need to improve your health and live longer?

Conventional wisdom is that more is better. However, scientists do not yet know if there is there is an upper limit to the benefits of exercise, or whether there is a point where it can conversely increase your risk of mortality. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, Improving how you age, live better longer Tagged With: Benefits of exercise, Exercise, Exercise prescription, How much exercise do you need, Longevity

Do These Genes Make Me Look Fat?

September 7, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Belly Fat

Copyright: buriy / 123RF Stock Photo

According to a recent report in The Washington Post , the average American woman now weighs as much as the average 1960’s man. The average man isn’t doing any better—having gained nearly 30 pounds since the 1960’s to an average of 195.5 pounds today.

The obesity epidemic has many pointing fingers at the Western lifestyle. A concoction of calorie packed, high fat, high sugar processed foods combined with increasingly sedentary habits, the Western lifestyle seems a sure recipe for obesity. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, Prevention, Wellness Tagged With: epigenetics, Genetics and diet, nutrigenomics, obesity

Eat For Your Genes: Why a good diet matters more than bad genes

July 18, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 5 Comments

Diet and your genes

Copyright: rolffimages / 123RF Stock Photo

Whether you are a vegetable lover or a vegetable hater, there is another—and perhaps the most powerful—reason to eat your veggies: chemicals naturally found in plant-based foods, called phytochemicals, can change your DNA.

This so called epigenetic effect of plant foods, in addition to their established antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefit, helps explain why your mother was right when she said eating your fruits and vegetables, rather than processed foods that modify or lack these natural phytochemicals, is good for you. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, Improving how you age Tagged With: epigenetics, Genetics and diet, nutrigenomics, personalizing nutrition, plant based diet

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