BUFFALO 60 STRONG
Karen Calandra BY ASHLEY ZIOMEK
Author and certified health coach Karen Calandra Photo by Elliot Cramer
T
hough we’re reminded often that diet impacts physical, mental, and emotional health, it’s usually not until the impact hits us that we heed the warnings. For more than twenty-five years, registered nurse Karen Calandra suffered from an auto-immune condition, psoriasis, and psoriatic arthritis; age fifty-five brough a new diagnosis: thyroid cancer. The East Amherst resident shares, “[I] started to think, ‘Maybe I’m doing something wrong.’”
After undergoing radiation treatments and surgery for the removal of her thyroid, Calandra began researching holistic healthcare, which focuses on how the entire body works as one unit. She discovered undeniable links between her diet and health and concluded that certain foods were impacting her conditions. Her findings left her yearning to know more, so she returned to school to study nutrition. As Calandra learned about “Food as Medicine,” a movement among physicians and medical institutions to make food a formal part of a patient treatment plan, she identified added sugars, gluten, and dairy as aggravators of her health issues. She quickly decided to cut them from her diet and was delighted to see lesions from her psoriasis clear and feel arthritic pain begin to dwindle. Her new understanding of food, combined with other positive choices, also
resulted in a thirty-pound weight loss. Calandra was eager to share the benefits of her knowledge with others. “Sometimes, I think you have to go through things to come out on the other side better,” she says. “Now that I’ve learned, I’m so much better for it.” Calandra became an author and certified health coach, which allowed her to offer speaking engagements and nutrition classes. For seventeen years, Calandra participated in hospital visits through her church and in the cancer institute’s pastoral ministry, where she helped spiritually minister patients undergoing chemotherapy. She was also an organizer for the American Heart Association’s Heart Ball, a nationwide fundraising gala for heart and stroke-related illnesses. Today, Calandra spends her days with her husband and family, and as caregiver to her mother and father-in-law. Her advice to the sixty-plus community? “Sixty years old is the new forty. You don’t have to get old and decrepit as you age. It’s just a number!” FY Buffalo 60 Strong is sponsored by Buffalo Medical Group, in conjunction with the launch of Senior Care Advantage ONE. Ashley Ziomek is a freelance writer living in Western New York.
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www.foreveryoungwny.com | September 2021
