Tag: medication

Health Coach $100 Dollar Holler

Christina BruniLeave a comment

On Sunday morning I reported on the YouTube video I watched because I think it’s worth exploring a food-based option when all other treatment fails. For those of us who have a better life because we take pills I say not so fast to discontinue this treatment.

However I know that the food we eat plays a big role in how healthy we are. Mangia Bene Vivere Bene Eat Well To Live Well is a truism.

I won’t tell others: “This is my 2 cents.” I think the information I give is worth way more than 2 cents. That’s how I created the term $100 Dollar Holler.

Today’s advice comes from a reputable Health Coach I’ve talked with after viewing the YouTube video. In fact I think in the interview Dr. Ede said not everyone is helped with the ketogenic diet. I will have to watch the video again to verify this.

What I agree with Dr. Ede about is that so-called experts are giving advice that is not credible. I think what she is saying about the erroneous information is right.

Like the idea of having smoothies. I don’t drink smoothies at all. In the era of anti-science government leaders I think we need to educate ourselves more than ever.

The profit-driven Big Food marketers will claim anything to get us to buy their processed food. Maybe it’s because I have come to question the authority of elected leaders that I’m wary of believing the claims about health and nutrition that the current regime is passing off. In the form of essays that no reputable M.D. has published and that are not peer-reviewed but written by lackeys parroting the president.

Who can we trust to give us the right information?

Per the Health Coach:

“Doing a keto diet is not great for everyone, but incorporating healthy fats is an important part of diet for mental health, hormone health, and so much more. A high fat diet is pretty hard to execute.”

This is why I’m no fan of outright discontinuing psych meds if those pills enable a person to have a full and robust life they wouldn’t be able to live otherwise.

The idea that anyone can hang out a shingle as a nutrition expert is what alarms me. In the early 2000s I contacted a woman. She charged $1,000 per month for her advice. Where did she get her training?

The keto foods I eat that are “animal” fat are eggs and chicken every week. The other fat I get is from a handful of cashews every day and a tablespoon or 2 of organic peanut butter. Plus the healthy omega-3 fatty acids in seafood.

The Health Coach thinks a whole foods, low carb, healthy fat diet (like the Mediterranean diet yes!) is a great balanced diet for most.

Her eating plan is exactly the one I’ve used for over 10 years. Minus the smoothies. Minus grains. Minus meat.

In fact the Director of the USDA is often a person chosen who used to be a Big Food industry person. As early as 1993 I bought and read the original Mediterranean Diet paperback guide.

Decades ago on the government food website the recommendation was to have 6 servings of grains per day. This was obviously because the government subsidized farmers who grew wheat.

There’s a book I think it’s called Grain Brain that talks about eating grains. For 20 years I haven’t eaten grains. Only every so often.

I’ll end here with this: it’s worth exploring other options for achieving optimal mental health when everything else has failed.

My take on this is that I think some people have what I call “beautiful brains” and this is why the medication works. What a person eats can be a factor in why treatment works too.

More than the food we eat our lifestyle choices can buoy our mood and mindset.

Coming up after this blog carnival I will talk about the simple effective changes I’ve made in the last 2 months that have transformed my health.

How to Eat Healthier – Part Three

Christina BruniLeave a comment

One of the scariest true facts is that chemicals thought to cause cancer are often found in food and drink products in the U.S.

Not all chemicals in food and drink products are regulated. Most aren’t.

Awhile back I had no energy to get out of bed on most days. Without resorting to taking an anti-depressant (I wasn’t depressed just fatigued) I was willing to try any non-chemical method of regaining my vigor.

My primary care doctor had told me that emotional distress can cause physical fatigue.

One idea she told me was to buy Ubiquinol from the pharmacy. The pill was supposedly a better version of CoEnzyme Q10.

CoQ10 is thought to give a person energy. I thought nothing of popping this pill until I read the ingredients. The Ubiquinol was listed as having Red and Blue Food Dye.

No kidding. After that, I stopped buying and taking this supposedly healthful product.

The pills were coated in an orange color–which should’ve been a tip-off.

Shortly after I stopped taking this OTC product my energy started to get elevated again. So I was lucky the fatigue slowly slowly got better.

You might not know this: a lot of drugs that are prescribed like atypical anti-psychotics cause weight gain precisely because the pills cause a person to have a ravenous appetite.

I take a pill that I’m grateful didn’t cause weight gain.

To end this blog entry I want to give you a dose of common sense.

Alas, common sense isn’t at all common.

I’m 53 years old, so technically I’m living in mid life.

Yet I haven’t packed on any extra pounds in mid life and have maintained the same weight as when I was 40.

Part of this equation is that I don’t eat a lot of food. I eat healthfully 80 percent of the time. I wrote about the 80 Percent Rule in a long-ago blog entry.

When I’m not hungry anymore I stop eating. Often I leave food on my plate–not a lot yet there’s food left over.

Thinking that you have to “clean your plate” so as not to waste food is a mistake. Why are you cooking too much food to begin with?

It’s also not your fault that chain restaurants sell huge portions of food. The food they’re giving you is unhealthy most of the time: the food was bought cheaply and prepared cheaply.

Then it’s loaded up on the plate. You could be tempted to eat it all or take home the leftovers.

Taking home leftovers is better than eating the huge portion all at once. You’ll have a second meal the next day.

Eating healthful food in moderation–five a day of fruits and vegetables–is one sensible guideline I think is non-negotiable if you want to stick to the one best nutrition guideline.

In How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life Frank Lipman, MD goes so far as to recommend eating two servings of fruit a day.

Eating two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables isn’t that hard to do every day. I have an organic navel orange for breakfast and a serving of an in-season fruit for an afternoon snack. I have a salad three days a week for one serving of a vegetable that day. Mix in a vegetable for dinner on most nights:

Voila–you can see it really isn’t hard to eat healthfully 80 percent of the time.

How have I been doing in executing my sub-goals for Step Three Perspire with the  Changeology 90-day action plan?

Remember: I wanted to buy and bring salads to my job to eat for lunch 3x/per week. And I wanted to exercise at the gym 2x/ per week.

In the next blog entry you’ll find out whether I succeeded or not.

26 Years in Remission

Christina BruniLeave a comment

I’ve decided I want to act as a storyteller to tell stories from my own life. I’d also like to have other people tell their stories in this blog.

As always, I don’t have a license to practice medicine–I’m not an M.D.

So I can’t give medical advice. I can’t tell people to take medication. Nor can I give instructions on how to discontinue medication.

My goal in telling my story is to uplift and inspire others that there’s hope for healing and having your own version of a full and robust life.

Ann Bartlett at HealthCentral years ago told it like it is:

“Healing is as potent a medicine as a cure can be.”

The reality is critics have attacked me for writing about how taking medication helped me heal.

There’s a whole contingent of anti-psychiatry folk who champion that people have the right to be psychotic. Underneath their contempt of what I write there’s most likely a grain of envy.

They don’t like that I’ve done great things in my life precisely because I take medication. This disproves their claim that medication causes disability.

If I went away, if I watered down my vision to please these people, if I sold my vision to the highest bidder (Pfizer et al), nothing would change in society.

Peers who need to hear my message of hope and healing would be left in the dark. Families would think there’s no hope for there loved ones.

This is my story:

I’ve been in remission from schizophrenia–with zero symptoms–for 26 years as of this month.

This has been possible because I take a dose of maintenance medication.

The details about my recovery are out in the open in my memoir Left of the Dial.

What’s different about my story is that when I was only 22 and first diagnosed I dared think a better life was possible than the one presented to me: living in public housing and collecting a government disability check forever.

I’ve written in here before a blog entry that if I remember right was titled the Myth of Competitive Employment.

One anti-psychiatry critic denounced my success as impossible for most people to achieve.

If that were so, why would I dangle in front of peers a goal that can’t be reached?

Those of us who are doing well–most of us who are doing well–don’t have the courage like I do to talk about this publicly. So it can seem like no one’s able to recover.

The point–as expressed in The Myth of Competitive Employment–is that each person’s definition of recovery is going to be different.

Each of us can find our own version of well inside the illness. My version of well is simply my story. Your version of well is your story.

I really wish more people would come forward to tell their stories.

I wanted to publish Left of the Dial to show how getting the right treatment right away can create a better outcome.

I’ve been in remission 26 years as as of this month.

In the coming blog entry I’ll talk about the book in more detail.

You’re Not an MD So Stop Giving Medical Advice

Christina BruniLeave a comment

Chris Bruni is not an MD. I refuse to give medical advice.

Telling someone to discontinue their medication and offering a method to do so is practicing medicine without a license.

I’m not here to tell people what they should do. The story I tell–the only one I have to give–is my story. I can and will talk about how taking the SZ medication every day enabled me to be in remission for over 25 years so far.

A friend of mine who doesn’t have SZ I consider to be my soul mate. He discontinued his psych medication under supervision and is perfectly fine years later.

What gladdens me is that although he’s been successful he doesn’t give people medical advice. He thinks most people with SZ need to take medication.

My friend hasn’t attacked me–like so many anti-psychiatry folk have done–for choosing to take pills.

I want to be very clear to readers now: telling people they should discontinue their medication is practicing medicine without a license.

At this point I won’t even tell people they must take medication because as said I’m not an MD.

We can only share our stories with each other. It’s up to each of us to decide what we want to do.

If someone asked me I would tell them that I think discontinuing SZ medication is too risky to chance it. That’s my belief and my friend’s belief.

You can decide for yourself if this makes sense to you. You have the choice.

Yet I also think that choosing psychosis over health is a big mistake.

No one I know who discontinued their SZ pills got better. They started hearing voices again. (I’m lucky I didn’t ever hear voices.)

Yet even stating this I cannot tell you or anyone else what to do or how to do it.

I urge you if you’re a paid peer specialist as your job not to dispense medical advice without a license. You’re not an MD. You’re not licensed to diagnose and treat illnesses.

In the coming blog entries I’m going to talk about practical career information again.

My goal is to publish You Are Not Your Diagnosis in October 2018 which is Disability Employment Awareness Month.