Tag: mental health

Health Coach $100 Dollar Holler

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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 In the form of essays that no reputable M.D. has published and that are not peer-reviewed but written by lackeys parroting the president.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.

Risking Change

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About five weeks ago I attended a Zoom event that the Roadmap Coach Christina Bryan hosted. She talked about her method of creating your Personal Brand. In my view it’s the simplest most effective way to sell yourself.

Her pitch to obtain clients was that she helps women succeed despite their fear. Fear of change is a big issue for everyone of any identity. So too internalized shame stops us in our tracks. Feeling shame keeps us stuck and unable to change.

The writers given a platform in the media who attack readers I call the media darlings. A person who is made to feel guilty won’t be motivated to change their behavior. Attack someone and their natural response is to get defensive.

I’m struck with how fear and shame prevent us from reaching our potential. Our old habits might have served a purpose. In the light of today when we know it’s time for a change we can be afraid of making the change(s). Since the old way of life has become comfortable.

This has implications not only for our health and wellbeing. It prevents us from having the confidence to express who we are and what we stand for. This is where internalizing the shame others impose on us keeps us afraid to speak out and celebrate our worth.

I don’t know about you followers however I’m done with making myself small so that others will approve of me and feel better about themselves.

The media darlings–and any others who hate judge fear and shame us as a way of life–would be out of business if we stood up straight and stared them in the eye and said: “Look in the mirror not at me.”

The Personal Brand I want to sell is linked to the goal I have that peers can establish and sustain health, wealth, and happiness after facing illness, trauma, or injustice.

I’m not going to cut people down. My aim is to give everyone a shot in the arm of confidence to go after our goals with gusto.

The way to conquer the fear is through action. To act despite the fear. To keep taking action. Especially when the naysayers shoot down what you want to do. Tell you that it’s impossible. Or that you should stay where you are because you’re full of yourself and too big-headed.

Be proud of yourself. That’s what I say. It’s no sin to have pride.

Coming up my ideas on how to sustain change after you’ve gotten the courage to risk doing this.

My hope is that through my blogs I can create a Beautiful Community of followers. To entertain readers not just educate and empower you.

We’re going to live on earth too long in reality to harbor ill-will towards others. Too long to castigate ourselves for imagined faults too.

More Ways to Get Energy

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Today more than ever it’s imperative that we take care of ourselves.

Engaging in protest could drain us of energy. We don’t have time to wait to see progress. Today everyone’s tired of being told to wait. It takes a lot of physical stamina to march in the streets.

On the radio this week the disc jockey told listeners to take care of ourselves.

Each of us is possessed with a power bigger than our pain.

Yet sometimes the pain we feel–whether about injustice or our own illness or other things–can be overwhelming.

What do I think about how to take care of ourselves?

It comes down to conserving our energy for the tasks that are essential. Letting everything else slide.

I wrote in here recently about how to get energy. A Real Simple issue titled Find Your Balance has an article on The New Rules of Eating for Energy:

Eat protein for breakfast.

People who have a high-protein meal of about 30 grams first thing in the morning with low glycemic load food had the highest energy level.

Drink plenty of water.

I wrote about this in my last blog entry on getting energy.

Fatigue sets in when you get dehydrated.

Have a healthful snack during the day that has fiber protein and healthy fat.

This could be a handful of almonds or cashews or walnuts.

Eat more calories earlier in the day.

You have a food circadian rhythm. Having a moderate-sized meal for breakfast and lunch and a small meal for dinner could be the way to go.

Nix sugar as a source of energy.

After the initial blood-sugar spike you’ll be left drained.

Dine with friends.

As per the Real Simple energy article:

Social interaction has been shown to help people manage stress pain and sadness all of which are drains on energy.

There is a cookbook titled Protest Kitchen.

If I remember it caters to vegan recipes. You might be able to check it out of the library where you live. It’s available from the library system in Brooklyn NY.

Theme for This Blog Going Forward

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My goal in this blog has become to act as a motivational speaker in print.

I envision my blog as being a safe space on the internet to promote what I value:

Living in health harmony and happiness with yourself and others.

Most likely I have written in here before that I value fitness of body, mind, spirit, career, finances, and relationships.

As I remain mostly indoors while living in the epicenter [New York City] of the pandemic I’ve decided to continue to write motivational blog entries.

I choose to cater to a target market of people coming together to honor, accept, and embrace each other’s individuality.

I choose to serve a target market of individuals who want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise in the ways that count.

I choose to use my life experiences and accumulated wisdom to educate, empower, and entertain a target market of people who seek to heal what’s not right in society:

Namely, the corrosive hate and judgment that reinforces stigma and makes it impossible to heal from any kind of ill-ness.

My focus will be on ideas I have for achieving mental and physical health.

In the next blog entry I will talk some more about the six categories of fitness talked about above.

You’re Not an MD So Stop Giving Medical Advice

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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.

Recovery is an Open Door

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Tonight I’ve changed the wording in a couple of sentences in the book description for Left of the Dial on Amazon.com.

You live–you change your mind. I deleted the reference to achieving a “pre-illness dream.” I replaced it with wording that you can have your own version of a full and robust life.

Going on over two years since the memoir was published I’ve learned something profound, more realistic, and hopeful in terms of what is possible:

That when we get older we can discover that we have a new talent that we didn’t have before we got sick.

This is the real hope. The truth is that the illness can attenuate for a lot of us in our older years. So the point isn’t that to be considered successful we must–or can–achieve our pre-illness dreams.

The point is that I didn’t achieve my pre-illness dream of getting a Masters’ in Journalism.

This is the far more remarkable thing: that a person can have better life after they’ve had a breakdown than before. And this life isn’t always the one we wanted or expected to have.

Nothing succeeds like persistence. Recovery isn’t quick and it isn’t easy–it’s challenging and hard at times. Yet it can be a beautiful expression of the potential within each of us to do some kind of personally meaningful “work”–paid or not.

There’s an ending to the expression: “When one door closes, another door opens.” It’s this: “Yet we often look so longingly at the door that closed that we don’t see the one opening before us.”

It’s a mistake to regret what cannot be. It’s a gift to embrace what life has in store for us when we dare to walk through the open door.

No one else has stated in these exact words what I’ll be the first person to tell you now:

Recovery is an open door.

Smiling Depression

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Before I go into things from my other books I want to take a detour into talking about a feature article in Women’s Health magazine. Every year the May issue focuses on Mental Health.

There’s a thing: smiling depression. In the May issue you can read about how this silent suffering affects women.

I could relate to having a persona that masks what’s really going on. In here before I wrote about squelching your personality to fit in–and how that can damage your soul.

The Peer Support guideline is: “We judge no one’s pain as any less than our own.”

Yet the women in the May issue were told in essence to buck up–that they had done great things so shouldn’t be depressed.

One woman’s friend told her: “You’ll feel better if you pray.” Yet prayer doesn’t cure a person’s mental health issue. The woman’s Pastor had the good sense to tell her to see a therapist.

That’s the toll it takes on a lot of us to live in hiding. Our therapists are complicit in telling us not to disclose at our jobs. Good advice. Yet that’s precisely why we need to find our own tribe of kindred spirits to talk to about what’s going on.

Smiling depression is a thing. It deserves our attention. Those of us who have smiling depression deserve our compassion.

Go subscribe to Women’s Health if you want to–it’s a great magazine and I read it every month. I like Self too–yet I think Women’s Health is even better.

Nutrition Action

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I want to talk about food and nutrition again. We’re coming up on Greenmarket season in New York City. Here you can use food stamps at a Greenmarket and there’s even an incentive for doing so. I think you should if you get food stamps buy fresh produce at a Greenmarket this time of year. Or year-round if a market is available in the winter.

The pasta is fresh angel hair pasta. The mussels are Newfoundland rope organic mussels. I order from an internet grocery that delivers. I had splurged for Mario Batali tomato sauce yet won’t do that again–it cost a ton of money for one jar.

I sloshed the mussels in red wine. You can fill a large saucepan with just enough water and place the mussels in the water. The water shouldn’t be so high that it goes into the shells. Steam the mussels for 25 minutes or so. Pour the wine over the mussels halfway through.

One time I was eating mussels in a restaurant. As you might know I’m Italian. So I’m eating the mussels and the woman at the table next to me tells the young girl with her: “Italians love their mussels.”

I was astonished. There I was Italian and I’m eating mussels.

The table decor is the spring tablecloth and vase and candlesticks. I firmly believe in changing your table decor at the start of every season. It can give a lift to your spirits.

I eat mussels. I have muscle. I doubt the two are connected. Yet enjoying good food  can improve your mental health too.