Do you enjoy exercising?  Have you found something you love and stuck with it?  Are you an exercise swinger, doing everything from yoga to CrossFit, still searching?  Exercise is a sore spot for some of my clients.  They hate the gym and therefore don't try anything else.  Yet, doing something, even if it's just going for a walk, is better than doing nothing, according to new studies published recently on the relationship between exercise and longevity rates. 

Can too much exercise be bad for your health?  It turns out the answer is yes, but only in a very small population of long-term high-endurance athletes.  Most of us don't qualify here.

What about the relationship of exercise to food?  I used to be a runner.  I also use to eat many, many brownies before running, justifying their consumption with exercise.  It turns out this is disordered eating...an eating disorder.  It's a combination of Binge Eating (one of the top three eating disorders) plus Exercise Dependence.  And an obsession with exercise can have far-ranging consequences. 

As an aside, here is a helpful article about what not to say to someone who has an eating disorder. 

Exercise can be approached like eating.  Finding the right amount is about coming to understand your bio-individuality.  Once you know what exercise you like, find a way to incorporate it into your life and make it not just a habit, but part of your lifestyle.  I'm still working on this.  How about you?  Do you have exercise you like and regularly enjoy?

P.S.  Laughter is great exercise!

Many summer days and nights of my youth were passed in a cabin on a small lake in southwestern Colorado.  It is such a beautiful place that my husband and I chose to be married there.

So many cherished childhood memories are wrapped up in and on and around that lake.  It's where I learned fish at age five, cliff jump at age eight (something I would never do now!), drive a snowmobile at age nine, and mountain bike at who knows what age.  It's also where I learned to cook the trout I caught in the lake.  The benefit of doing anything as a young child is that you don't know enough to be intimidated or scared or to let the voices in your head talk you out of trying something new.  It seemed completely natural to me that even though I could barely see above the stove I should pull out a cookbook and find a recipe for cooking the trout I caught in the lake with my dad. 

As an adult, when I mention I enjoy cooking whole trout, people look at me like I am crazy.  I get it...cooking a whole fish can seem overwhelming, especially if you didn't grow up fishing on a mountain lake.  However, this recipe is one of the simplest in my repertoire, makes a crazy good impression on dining companions, and is delicious and healthy to boot.  It's based on a recipe I employed as a kid which I can no longer find and from a source I no longer remember.   I simply tapped into a strong childhood memory to recreate this easy recipe.

The good news is that U.S. farmed rainbow trout is a sustainable choice and listed as a "Best Choice" on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List.  Now, you may be wondering, where exactly can you buy trout.  I have found it at well-stocked fish counters in grocery stores everywhere from New York's Hudson Valley to Ventura County, California.  You'll want to look for trout with clear eyes and no fish smell (they should smell like a fresh lake).  To ensure even cooking aim to buy trout of roughly equal size. 

As with any recipe, read this the whole way through, have all the ingredients prepped and ready to go, and in no time at all you'll be serving delicious whole trout for dinner. 


Trout with Green Onions and Almonds
Serves approximately 4 persons

2 whole rainbow trout, cleaned and dressed
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 green onions, cleaned, white and light green parts thinly sliced
2 tablespoons sliced almonds, toasted
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Brush trout inside and out with olive oil.  Next, sprinkle inside and out with salt and pepper.  Mix green onions and almonds together and then sprinkle evenly inside each trout.  Lay trout flat on its side until ready to grill.

Preheat gas grill to medium.   Brush oil on both sides of a grill basket* and place trout inside, and then lock the grill basket shut.   Grill for five minutes with the cover shut.  Then, turn the basket over, and grill for another five minutes covered.

The trout is delicious served with brown basmati rice or roasted green beans.

*If you don't have a grill basket, tie the trout shut with twine, and oil the grill thoroughly before proceeding.

After a hiatus due to travel and illness, Web Wellness Wednesday is back!

So much good stuff about health and nutrition to discuss this week.  Chief among the top news stories, is this gem that the FDA is banning artificial trans fats in the food supply by 2017 because they post a serious health risk to the general public.  It's about time!

You may have noticed that you are hearing more and more lately about the importance of the gut to everything from your mental health (most of your serotonin is produced in the gut) to your immune system (70-80% of your immune system resides within the gut and the good bacteria found there).    Scientific American recently published this excerpt about understanding the gut-brain connection.  Want to lose weight?  Your answer might lie in that connection. 

And if you don't have time to sit down and read that, here are some quick reads on the relationship between the gut and common health problems, skin issues, and joint pain. 

During my freshman year of college, I was voted the messiest person in my dorm.  At the time, it was treated as something shameful.  Now I see, and science supports, that I am a creative person and need to nurture that.  In fact, when I work with clients on everything from weight loss to autoimmune challenges, we always address the role creativity plays in both the healing process and the maintenance of feeling good.  So tell me, how do you indulge your creative side?

I recently turned 40.  To celebrate, my husband, Brian, and I went on an Alaska cruise.  It was great.  Many people on the ship were celebrating something wonderful from a 50th wedding anniversary here to an 80th birthday there, and we we were all so happy for one another.

What was not so wonderful was the incessant changing of my age as soon as I mentioned I was turning 40.  "Oh Happy 29th birthday AGAIN!"  "Happy 16th Birthday doll!"  "Oh you young thing, Happy 30th birthday!"  Why is this so common, so accepted, and so specifically directed at women?  I cannot recall one person doing this to Brian when he turned 40 last year.

I am over the moon to be turning 40, but before, after and during the cruise my husband and I seemed to be the only people actually accepting and embracing my new number.  I have been happy for months just at the thought of turning 40.  So much has changed for me and improved for me the older I've become.  I am in much better health at 40 than I was at 22.  I am much more aware of my magical powers and my place in the world now than at any other point in my life.  And as the actress Tilda Swinton said recently at the age of 54, "I live with the reality that my life just gets better."

When we fail to wish the woman who is turning 40 a happy 40th birthday, what we are really saying is that the best is behind her, that she peaked in her youth, and that she should just keep looking backwards.  What a truly terrible thing to do to her.  Dig a little deeper and you find the subtle cultural oppression that tells women that beauty is only available to the young, which frankly is a narrow-minded definition of beauty (and, quite frankly, of youth).  To me, a woman is beautiful when she has found the freedom to be herself, just as she is, and love herself, just as she is.  Kudos to the young woman who is there already.  But for me, it took these past 40 years, many lovely mistakes, a couple of terrible health scares, and more than a few wrong turns to even start contemplating living peacefully in my own skin.   Forty for me equals a freedom I've never experienced before that includes letting go of the need to please people or fit into their vision of/for me, releasing myself from the score-keeping of life, and exploring why I like what I like.  Freedom, it's the word that keeps coming up for me over and over again now. 

40 = FREEDOM

So happy 40th birthday to me!  And here's hoping that women embrace their beauty and magic no matter what age they are.