Traveling in Southeast Asia may sound like a dream for gluten-avoiders. All the rice! And rice noodles! But alas, there is one major stumbling block to GF dining: Soy sauce, made from wheat, in a travesty of inaccurate branding. Sadly, many Asian dishes are cooked with soy sauce, and requesting tamari as a substitute is…
Category: health
Women who drink themselves to death
Last year, my cousin died unexpectedly. She was a first cousin I barely knew, who had never lived in my town and only rarely appeared at family gatherings. I think I met her two or three times, and by the time we were teens, I could already see she was on a different trajectory. She…
Am I “healthy enough?”
Lifestyle choices can be fraught. When it comes to healthy or unhealthy living, our choices can fall anywhere on what seems to be a pretty massive scale. When you have elite athletes on one end and morbidly obese shut-ins on the other, it can be hard to assess what is “healthy enough.” I’m going to…
What if you have the Alzheimer’s gene?
Turns out, I’m APoE4 positive My Grandpa disappeared into the vortex of Alzheimer’s disease over the course of more than a decade before he finally left this world in a morphine nap at the age of 89. It was a terrible thing, to watch the journey from his first noticeable lapses—“My onboard computer is on…
New year, same old me
I can’t believe we’ve made it to 2023. It sounds so far in the FUTURE. I mean—as someone born in 1971—I grew up with the year 2000 as the shimmering threshold of a futuristic technotopia. We haven’t quite figured out the utopia aspect yet, but we truly do have a lot more tech, for better…
Off the rails: when healthy habits go out the window
We went to Europe in November, for the second time this year. Normally, I don’t take two major trips within twelve months, but we had been stuck in the house for two years, and my husband was anxious to take his six-week sabbatical. So he went off gallivanting around Europe for four weeks, and I…
Mid-year check-in
I launched this blog around the beginning of 2022, and while I am pleased with some of the content I’ve published, it is not really the blog that I want it to be. Why? I’m writing it as if I’m an expert trying to “monetize” or create professional clout in an area that I’m frankly…
Harm reduction on vacation
As I’ve changed my relationship with alcohol over the past several years, one of my challenges has been how to go on vacation without over-drinking. Ever since I started traveling internationally about 20 years ago, vacation has been a time to drink as much as I want…which is usually too much. How much is too…
10 reasons to take a break from alcohol
I used to drink alcohol enthusiastically and pretty much daily. Now, I drink only on rare occasions. It took me a lot of years and a lot of long breaks to get to almost-not-a-drinker. Given what I’ve learned about alcohol and how it impacts me, I can conclude that not drinking at all is the…
Why I quit Keto and went Pegan(ish)
When trying to decide how to eat, there are competing messages about what a healthy diet is. The division today seems to come down to plant-based versus meat-centric. My own journey has led me to ask: Why not both? Dietary choices are not religious convictions. It’s always a bit perplexing to me when a vegan…
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