Inside and Out

Anne Baker encourages her clients to put whole foods, especially vegetables, at the top of their grocery lists.

Healthy approaches to diet and exercise for your 2023 resolutions

By Al Parker

Every January, millions of us promise to get behind the two most popular New Year’s resolutions: eat better and get fit. While we can’t be your spotter at the gym, Northern Expressdid talk with two northern Michigan experts to get their advice on how to achieve these elusive goals, once and for all.

Make Smarter Food Choices

Fad diets are out, folks. (And often rather dangerous.) Eating right is no longer about drastically restricting food intake or treating carbs like the enemy, but instead about consuming what’s right for your body right now. That’s the approach Certified Holistic Nutritionist Anne Baker of Lake Ann takes to help people with chronic health issues reclaim their good health.

“Food is information the body uses,” says Baker. “Every time we ingest food, it either helps nourish our body or acts to drive up inflammation, which ultimately leads to disease. Most chronic health issues are preventable. While we can’t yet alter our genes, everyone can reduce their risk of developing a chronic disease by being M22's Arcadia legging smarter about their food choices.” She tells us there are three “pillars” that have a direct impact on health and longevity: diet and nutrition, environmental factors and toxic exposures, and lifestyle choices, including exercise, stress and your sleep/ wake cycle.

You can optimize your health and reduce risk by eating an anti-inflammatory diet, according to Baker, so identifying and removing inflammatory foods will help improve your ability to digest and absorb nutrients.

What causes inflammation can be different for different people. As a first step, Baker recommends keeping a “diet log” for a couple of weeks, noting how you feel physically and emotionally. It can help identify problem foods that should be eliminated, including anything deep-fried, soft drinks, high sodium snacks and packaged foods, hydrogenated oils, sugar, candy, and commercially prepared baked goods.

Other items to avoid include highlyprocessed foods like packaged deli meats and products with long lists of additives, such as artificial coloring and flavors.

Go Green

What should you be eating instead? In a word: veggies.

“Most Americans get enough protein but don’t consume enough leafy green and non-starchy vegetables,” says Baker. “Even most vegans don’t consume enough vegetables because they rely on a carbheavy diet. Vegetables are naturally high in vitamins and minerals…I advise my clients to aim for seven to 10 servings [a serving is ½ cup] of vegetables every day.”

Baker says it helps to think outside the cereal box when it comes to typical breakfast foods. That goes for lunch and dinner, too.

“Soups and stews, wraps, egg dishes, for example, can be eaten for any meal,” she says. “For those who dislike or cannot tolerate eggs, it’s perfectly fine to eat a leftover dinner meal for breakfast. Leftover vegetables are great on a salad and can be added to omelets or wraps, and starchy vegetables can be made into quick blender soup by adding in some broth.”

She recommends batch cooking and freezing entrees and sides to help maximize your food budget and cut down on meal prep time. “Pick two or three entrees or sides to batch cook on weekends or a day off work and freeze some of what you cook,” she advises. “Do this twice a month and replenish your freezer. That way you always have something home cooked in your freezer to build meals around.” Reclaim Your Health

Baker began eating a diet based around organic whole foods and medicinal herbs in her early teens. She read everything she could find about holistic nutrition and kept up with it for years.

“Once I hit my mid-40s, I felt like my body was falling apart,” she recalls. “I was experiencing excruciating migraine headaches several times a week. They were so bad that they forced me to take time off work. I had constant nagging low back pain, chronic constipation, rosacea, and such serious fatigue, I would literally fall asleep sitting up in a chair. Eventually I found out I had chronic fatigue syndrome and was diagnosed with precancerous cells during a routine checkup.”

Baker reclaimed her health by applying everything she had learned in her study of nutrition.

“My health improved by focusing on making simple lifestyle changes and by finding the right mix of foods, herbs, and targeted supplements that fit my specific health needs,” she recalls. “This is now called BioIndividual Nutrition. In making these changes, I repaired my leaky gut, rebuilt my immune system, and decreased my risk.”

So what’s her favorite comfort food or treat?

“Soup is my go-to cold weather comfort food,” she says. “One of my favorite soups to make is chicken tortilla soup made with homemade bone broth. My warm weather favorite is all the seasonal fruit grown locally.”

Baker helps others on their wellness journey by finding and addressing the cause of their problems while avoiding prescription medications that just treat symptoms. Her therapeutic nutrition plans are built around “safe” foods, targeted nutrients, and lifestyle changes to bring the body back to health. She works with people across North America through virtual phone appointments and is currently accepting new clients. Find more at nourishholisticnutrition.com.

Get Moving

Exercise is another area where we’ve been programmed to believe we have to meet a certain standard or conform to a specific mold. If you’re not doing high intensity interval training first thing in the morning or running at least two or three marathons a year, you’re a couch potato, right?

Wrong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that each week, “adults need 150 minutes of moderateintensity physical activity and 2 days of muscle strengthening activity.” That breaks down to about 20-30 minutes a day, which is certainly a commitment, but not quite the challenge of training for a marathon.

Their definition of moderate-intensity physical activity includes walking, water aerobics, and even mowing the lawn. (Perhaps they’d give us Michiganders points for snowblowing the driveway, too.) In fact, the CDC’s biggest recommendation is “move more and sit less,” and that’s a resolution we can all get behind.

Weightlifting classes for all ages and skill levels are available at the Y.

Take the Healthy Habits Challenge

A good place to start? The folks at the Grand Traverse Bay YMCA are eager to help you make 2023 your best year yet with their Healthy Habits Challenge Series ($80 for members, $120 for community participants).

It’s a series of six-week holistic health challenges designed to improve your body, nutrition, and movement. You’ll learn (or relearn) the important components of a healthy lifestyle, and the series begins and ends with essential fitness testing, so participants can track their transformation as it unfolds. By using habit-tracking, you’ll be encouraged to engage in healthy behaviors that will turn into lifetime habits.

“The Y is a place where all are welcome to create community,” says Liz Bloom, senior director of membership and wellness. “We’re less about resolutions and more about healthy habits.”

This is good news, as New Year’s resolutions aren’t known for lasting for a year…or even much more than a month. A University of Scranton study found 23 percent of people gave up on their resolutions after a single week, while a OnePoll survey found the average person sticks with their resolutions for just 32 days, making February 1 something of a notorious date.

At the Y, at least, it seems easy to make exercise goals stick with dozens of group classes available weekly, ranging from swimming to pickleball to yoga to weight lifting. Members also have opportunities to work with staff to enhance their wellness journey or pursue one-on-one instruction.

Bloom says some of the most popular classes include Strength Train Together, a high energy barbell class; Enhance Fitness for active older adults; and Aqua Fit in the pool for an all-around low impact workout.

Other upcoming options include: Exploring Yoga and Meditation; Mastering Suspension Training; Introduction to Strength Training for Teens; and free programs like the popular community breakfast offered the first Friday of each month. Visit gtbayymca.org for details.

All in the Family

How to commit to your family’s mental health and wellbeing

By Craig Manning

“This year, I’m going to take better care of myself.”

When it comes to setting New Year’s resolutions, many people return to some version of the above statement every December or January. But how about this version?

“This year, we’re all going to take better care of our mental health.”

That focus is one that Sander and Wendy Weckstein are urging everyone to adopt in 2023—especially families with kids and teens. The Wecksteins are two of the most respected mental health professionals in northern Michigan, particularly when it comes to addressing the growing epidemic of mental health challenges in young people.

Sander owns Northern Michigan Psychiatric Services and is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with more than 30 years of practice under his belt in northern Michigan. Wendy is a physical therapist and a certified instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, as well as the director of wellness for Northern Michigan Psychiatric Services. Together, the two are doing their part to foster sound mental health for young people in the Grand Traverse area.

But that work, the two say, has absolutely gotten more difficult in recent years.

A Perfect Storm

“The mental health needs of children and adolescents—and adults—after the pandemic have skyrocketed,” Sander tells Northern Express. “If you talk to any therapist or psychiatrist in the community, they will tell you that it is the busiest it’s ever been for them. I have hospitalized, psychiatrically, more teens in the last few years than I ever had in the past.”

Even before COVID, youth mental health challenges were on the rise in the United States. The Wecksteins point to a whole slew of factors to explain the trend, including social media, excessive screen time, lack of sufficient physical activity, not enough time outdoors, poor nutrition, and a constant cycle of “bad news” headlines, ranging from political division to school shootings to climate catastrophe.

The pandemic put all those stressors into a bottle and shook it up. “You take all the factors that already existed, and then you add the reality of kids not being in school,” Sander says. “They suddenly lost all their structure, and because of that, they were even more sedentary, even more on the internet, and with less and less supervision. It was a perfect storm of multiple events that really negatively impacted their functioning in so many ways. And virtually every evaluation that I see now, I will hear parents and kids going back to something relating to the pandemic being an additional stressor for why they’re here.”

If there’s good news, it’s that the dark cloud of the pandemic receded in a big way over the course of 2021 and 2022, allowing kids and teens to return to something resembling a pre-COVID normal. The structure of school, extracurricular activities, and face-to-face time with friends is back in place.

And yet, even with the worst tidal waves of COVID (hopefully) in the rearview, the Wecksteins say there are still things to worry about when it comes to youth mental health. First, there’s the blast radius of the pandemic and all its far-reaching impacts on youth development and wellbeing. Second, all the stressors that existed before COVID-19 still exist as we look toward 2023.

Brighter Days Ahead?

So, how can kids, teens, and their families find their way toward brighter days in 2023? We asked Sander and Wendy for their best tips to make the New Year a healthier one for mental health.

Some strategies can be implemented at home right now by shifting the ways that families interact with one another—and with technology.

“Spending time together without the internet, without video games, that’s really important,” Sander says.

Wendy concurs: “A huge tip is just getting outside as a family and enjoying outdoor activity together as much as possible.”

“I’d also say that parents shouldn’t be afraid of setting limits,” Wendy adds. “Don’t be afraid to specify when it’s time to turn off the phone. Having technology timeouts one to two hours before bed is especially important, because the blue light has an impact on stimulation and can affect their sleep. How about bringing in meditation or journaling or reading prior to bed instead? Those things make a huge difference in terms of getting better sleep—which in turn means less irritability, less anxiety, less depression. One of the big problems right now is that a lot of teens are on their devices 14-16 hours a day.”

Another option for families looking to be proactive about mental health in the New Year is to seek professional help—whether in a one-on-one capacity (like what Sander does) or in a group class-based environment (something Wendy offers).

Sander Weckstein Wendy Weckstein

Building The Toolbox

Wendy’s courses focus on the aforementioned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week program that she says can provide “healthier coping strategies through mindfulness.” Participants can then take those strategies and put them in action to help deal with stressors in their day-to-day lives.

Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s, MBSR is an evidence-based approach that employs mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga, and other tactics to reshape the way the brain responds to certain negative stimuli. The program has been researched by institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA and has shown considerable benefits in helping people navigate stress, anxiety, severe depression, and even chronic pain.

“Every time I’m teaching these classes, I’m in tears, because the kids come in just feeling crushed—without a center and without anything to really hold on to,” Wendy says. “And then we learn that we have these inner resources that we can cultivate to deal with stress. A lot of times, teens come in really not wanting to [go through the program]. It’s often been recommended by a doctor, or their parents are forcing their teens to take the class because they’re struggling in some way. So, they come in with their heels a bit dug in.”

But eventually, things start to turn around. “By the second or third class, they are like sponges; they are just so open to the process,” Wendy continues. “And that’s because they start to see the benefits of breathing, and mindfulness, and meditation, and yoga, and all of these self-regulating practices. It’s just incredible to see the transformation by the end of the class. And then when they leave, they have this toolbox that they can reach for whenever they’re in the midst of a stressful moment.”

Sander says he often gets to see firsthand the extent of that before-andafter comparison. “I’ve had patients where we were doing therapy and utilizing both medications and supplements, just really working comprehensively to try to get the best outcomes, and they were still just stuck. Then they end up in one of these classes, and like Wendy said, they go in really gun-shy. But then by the fourth class, they’ll be saying to me, ‘This is the best night of the week for me.’ And then, on the other side when they’ve finished the class, I see that they’re still utilizing the strategies.”

Through Northern Michigan Psychiatric Services, Wendy offers MBSR programs for both teenagers and adults. While those classes are separate, Wendy does note that families can and do work through the process together. “I like when a parent takes the adult course concurrently with their teen taking the teen course,” she says. “They go at the same pace on different days, so families can work together on these strategies as a unit and bring them back home into their family dynamics.”

Interested in learning more about MBSR courses? Winter sessions start the week of January 23 and details are available online at nmpspc.com/classes.