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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

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  • j on Eat For Your Genes: Why a good diet matters more than bad genes
  • 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!

Archives

You are here: Home / Archives for Wellness

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

Is Alzheimer’s disease Type 3 diabetes?

July 15, 2016 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Alsheimer's disease and diabetes

Insulin resistance in the brain contributes to Alzheimer’s disease Copyright: lightwise / 123RF Stock Photo

For decades, the progressive damage to brain cells and the connections between them that occurs in Alzheimer’s disease has been associated with abnormalities in two brain proteins: clumps of the protein fragment beta-amyloid into plaques and twisted strands of the protein tau into tangles. Over the past decade, scientists have been getting closer to a better understanding of why the brain develops these hallmark changes. Among the contributing causes, as reviewed in a recently released online article May 2016 in the journal Physiology & Behavior is accumulating evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is a metabolic disease—a disease of how the brain responds to insulin, utilizes glucose, and metabolizes energy. Alzheimer’s disease may be a form of diabetes of the brain. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: aging healthy, Blog, Wellness Tagged With: Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's and diabetes, Dementia, Insulin resistance, Memory loss, Type 3 diabetes

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

Do You Have Enough GRATITUDE? It Can Change Your Life and Your Health

June 26, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Two simple words—thank you—can open the door to unexpected benefits.

Copyright: sean824 / 123RF Stock Photo

Copyright: sean824 / 123RF Stock Photo

From the Latin gratia, meaning favor, and gratus, meaning pleasing, gratitude can be a feeling, an attitude, a virtue, or a choice. Feeling gratitude is the core of human connectedness–the give and take that supports and strengthens our relationships.

Whether you appreciate another’s act of kindness, the beauty of nature, or “count your blessings,” practicing gratitude can improve your emotional well-being, social relationships, and physical health. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: live better longer, Wellness Tagged With: Gratitude and happiness, Gratitude and health, Power of gratitude

Struggling to change your health habits? Try these 8 steps

May 20, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist Leave a Comment

Changing a health habit

photo credit 123RF

Whether you want lose weight, quit smoking, or start exercising, changing your habit—and sticking with it—is hard.

From my experience, most people know at least one habit or behavior they would like to change in order to improve their health and wellbeing but struggle to make it happen. The challenge is moving from knowing to doing. How can you get started, gain momentum, and avoid slipping backwards?

Changing any health habit requires having a clear, realistic, step-by-step plan. Continue Reading...

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

10 Surprising Ways Stress May Be Affecting Your Health

May 9, 2015 by Sharon Horesh Bergquist 2 Comments

stress at work

shutterstock

It may be the disease of our time. Stress and stress related illnesses are on the rise—with 44% of Americans reporting an increase in psychological stress in just the past five years. The American Psychological Association warns that we are a nation on the verge of a stress-induced public health crisis.

Stress in everyday life is only partly to blame. The crisis is compounded by how we respond: overwhelmed by stress, we often view lifestyle and behavioral changes needed to mitigate stress as insurmountable. We get trapped in a vicious cycle of heightened stress, poor health choices, and spiraling physical consequences. Continue Reading...

Filed Under: Health, Improving how you age, Wellness Tagged With: stress and appetite, stress and belly fat, stress and diabetes, stress and health, stress and heart disease, stress and longevity

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