Empower Your Inner Architect: Building a Life of Epic Wellness

There is no doubt—May is upon us. There are increasingly more sunny days than cloudy ones, and there is suddenly a plethora of tissue boxes popping up in diverse places all over my house.  Yukon Cornelius, my cat with the paltry immune system, just sneezed seven times in my closet. And though I am comforted by my personal arsenal of allergy meds, I am left wondering if my stockpile of medications is now varnished with a sheet of feline boogers. But I digress… May excites me.   May encourages us to celebrate mothers everywhere. May 15 th is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day and, in my opinion, by default, National Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Day. Why not celebrate your moms with cookie dough? Pure brilliance if you ask me. What would even be MORE brilliant is if my boys read this blog… National Hamburger Day (May 28 th ) could be celebrated just a little late when paired up with Memorial Day (May 31 st ) as you round out the month. I am grateful to those that sacrificed...

I’m fairly certain I have mentioned diverse variations of the word “poo” in my last three blogs. (Oops. There’s the fourth!) I am thinking I will spare you the excrement in this post, while I move on to a random personal health experience that I bet many of you can relate to. And let me tell you, my eyes have been opened. A couple of months ago, I started with a mild headache at work. “Headache” and “work” are SO often found in the same sentence; this was nothing new. I popped some Ibuprofen and commenced with my nursing duties. Within a 90-minute period, my headache had severely intensified, forcing me to my locker for the rest of the allowed eight-hour dose of Ibuprofen. In another hour, I was pan-handling for Tylenol among my coworkers but came up with zilch. A kind soul with whom I work offered to run to the convenience store across the street for Tylenol (Crap. Now that I think of it, I never paid her back! She’s probably talking about me. Right...now…) 1000mg of that was sure t...

My cat, Yukon Cornelius, is cool. He’s pretty darn special too—worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Yukon is helping me by contributing to April’s digestion discussion. Yukon has a mass in his small intestine. Before you all get angry at me, I usually deal with tense situations by using slightly incongruent humor. And before you all get upset, this finding is not a surprise. We knew, after a pretty expensive surgery with inconclusive results in November of 2019, that Yukon would most likely need future X-rays, that would lead to future ultrasounds, that would identify future digestive issues, that would require expensive prescription food and steroid treatments. What we didn’t count on was this—Yukon will probably never have another solid bowel movement, ever again. We really wish we would have known that before he decided his favorite potty spot was the $500 Litter Robot. Loose stools going through a Litter Robot is quite similar to any foreign liquid substance meeting the Room...

After inviting squeamish “eeews” and “uugghhs” with last week’s IBS discussion, I realized that even though everybody poops, people might not know the “end” from the beginning when it comes to digestion. I guess I started a little backwards, but it’s not the “end” of the world. After all, according to your Friday Financial Blogger, we shouldn’t leave any loose “ends” and always begin with the “end” in mind. I hope my never “end”-ing idioms haven’t left you at the “end” of your tether! Before we walk through digestion, it is important to know WHY we feel the urge to eat. Think back to the last show you saw at a movie theater. Who remembers the dancing hot dog? Or the rollercoaster that speeds between soda cans and candy bars as popcorn rains down on the track? We can’t forget the amplified sound of a soda can cracking open, followed by the sizzle of carbonation. Theater owners are no dummies; in fact, their brilliant advertising, as well as the smell of buttered popcorn, stimulate app...

Ahhh, April. Not only does its showers bring May flowers, but it brings the excitement of Easter and Tax Day. To add to the diversity of April’s gifts, it is also IBS Awareness Month. So, let’s become aware… IBS=Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Ya know, this is NOT a fun subject to address, and medicine really missed the mark in naming this extremely frustrating condition. One can assume by its name that your bowel, or your large intestine, becomes irritated a little more often than that of the guy next door. Irritated… A two-year-old pulling on your leg, saying “MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA”—that’s irritating.  A pebble in your shoe while you are on your morning run? Irritating. How about that popcorn film that gets stuck between your teeth? That’s irritating too. And “irritating” is the perfect word for when, in true Carey fashion, I hit every red light on the way to work. IBS puts “irritable” to shame. I don’t have personal experience with IBS, but I have a son that does. I asked him,...

Those that know me are keenly aware that for me, bread is life. As a kid, when my friends snacked on the biggest candy bars they could find, I would grab 2 pieces of nice, soft, white bread, peel off and consume the crust first, and then I would roll the rest up in a ball and eat it (ok, I still do that today.  Please still be my friend!) And fair warning—do not bring home Texas Roadhouse rolls tonight and still expect them to be here in the morning.  Just sayin.  I tell everyone that I love bread more than sweets. But guess what? Both bread and sweets (carbohydrates) are broken down into the same byproduct by the body, and that is glucose. And to put in generally, glucose is…well…just sugar! Sugar can’t be all bad, right? After all, glucose is the body’s preferred energy source. In fact, our red blood cells can ONLY use glucose for energy, and our brain and other nervous tissue primarily rely on glucose as well. Have you ever felt irritable, shaky, and tired when you h...

I got your attention! Ask any 4-year-old--not only is the word “poop” fun to say, it’s entertaining to talk about. Stool, waste, feces, excrement, bowel movement—these are all very professional synonyms, but I would choose poop over any of them, any time. Not only do we feel better when we do it, we cheer when our toddlers are successful at it. And they get a gold star on their sticker charts.  SO not fair.   There really is a lot that can be learned from someone’s poop. Color, frequency, shape, consistency, and smell all tell a different story about what, and sometimes why, it is coming out of you. And, there are fewer daily discomforts that feel worse than when the poop…just…WON’T leave. Now that you have all lost your appetites, let’s discuss National Nutrition Month and…WHATEVER it is that can possibly connect proper food consumption with poop. When we eat, enzymes are released into the small intestine to help break down the food into nutrients that can be absorbe...