Amazing Health Effortlessly

Keeping Excess Weight Off

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:39:07 -0700

Connie started a career in the weight loss business back in the '70s and was very successful opening weight loss salons in the US and Australia. The business was successful because the women lost the weight they wanted to lose. But even back then, she saw that for many of them, if they didn't have constant support to keep it off, it came back on.

Our experience in the thirty-some years we've worked together helping people lose weight with a Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) diet has had great results too, but we also saw that some of our clients didn't keep it off. It seems to be more than just knowing what to eat. There's a mental / emotional piece that we need to address as well if we want to keep it off.

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Dr. Goldhamer, the founder of True North Health Center, has some shocking statistics about the chances of someone who is overweight wanting to lose just 5% of their body weight and keep it off for a year. The chances are 5%. Ouch! That means 95% of those who lose 5% of their body weight gain it back again within 12 months.

This is the obvious reason behind the term "Yo-Yo Dieting." There are many ways to lose weight. The trick seems to be keeping it off.

What we saw was that, almost exclusively, what caused clients to "fall off the wagon" and return to their old diet and lifestyle, was some stress or anxiety in their life. When that occurred, they turned to food to shift the feelings they were having, to help them feel better.

Fortunately, since we've started coaching our clients about the nature of the mind and how life really works, they have been able to lose the weight and keep it off indefinitely. With this new understanding, they create a healthy relationship with food and all of life. They don't find themselves creating the stress and anxiety in their lives that used to drive them toward food for a fix.

What we do in our coaching is help them see that circumstances don't create the feelings...Read More

Love & Our Health

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:07:07 -0700

When Connie and I first got together, we see that we both had a "Hollywood" version of love and relationship. Meeting the right person and spending our lives together was the road to life-long happiness.

What we've seen since then is that finding the love we're looking for is not found in another person. In fact, it isn't found in anyone or anything outside of us. So, where do we look to find love? And what are the effects of finding love on our health?

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What we now see that has deepened our relationship beyond what we imagined, is that the love we're looking for is within us. Always has been and always will be.

But how do we find love within us? It's easy to say that the love you're looking for is within you. But that is abstract and can be confusing as to how to go about applying that idea.

What we have found helps our clients with this begins with understanding that our experience doesn't come from what's happening in our lives or who we're married to. Our experience comes from what we're thinking ABOUT what's happening and who we've married. Our experience comes from the inside-out, not outside-in. In other words, we're always experiencing our moment-to-moment thinking.

And that's really good news because that means the things and the people we're with don't need to change for us to find the love we're looking for. We simply need to stop looking for love in all the wrong places... which is everywhere, everything and everyone outside of me. The love I'm looking for is within me, so I will never find it if I'm looking for it in anything outside of me.

Next then is how do we apply this? What do we need to do?

If we're looking for love and not experiencing it, and we know that we are always experiencing our thinking, it seems logical to change our thinking. But that's not it.

Rather than changing our thinking, it's about letting go of the thinking we're having (that's creating our...Read More

The Nature of Change

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:31:30 -0700

Often, when we experience a health challenge, we need to make some changes if we want to address the issue at its root and not just manage the symptom. Sometimes those changes seems really hard. So, what is the nature of change and how can we make changes in the most effective way?

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In the past, when I wanted to create a change, I see what was involved was for me to have a strong commitment and great intention. When we want to make change, that usually means we're looking to change old habit patterns, and, like the saying goes, it can be hard to teach an old dog new tricks. 😂

And why is that so? It's because the old trick, the old habit, has become the path of least resistance. We've done the same thing over and over and that has become the natural thing for us to do. That's were commitment and intention come in.

We need to be committed and willing to experience the feelings that come up when we go against the old habits. Those feelings can be experienced as a strong craving or even an addiction. These can be strong, so commitment and intention are good to have on our side.

But let's step back and look at the nature of change itself. It's actually the nature of life to constantly change. In fact, if we look at it, does life ever stay the same? Every 15 days we have a new skin. Every 6 months a new liver. The seasons are always changing. Life is in a constant state of change and renewal.

So, why does it seem so hard at times for us to change? Our minds are designed to create patterns and habits of doing things in order to be efficient. And the mind doesn't care if it's a good habit or a bad habit. It just wants to be efficient. And in it's efficiency, it's running on automatic. Because of this automatic nature, our desired change goes against the well established behaviour, and our minds resist that. In this way, we're actually standing in our way. That is, our own mind is what is resisting the...Read More

Fibre & Ultra Processed Foods

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:11:25 -0700

We've talked about the value of fibre before and we've talked about Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) before. In this blog we want to share with you some interesting facts that Dr. Greger points out about how it is the fibre that's missing in UPFs that is the reason for much of the poor health associated with UPFs.

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UPFs, often referred to as junk food, are industrially manufactured and usually contain added sugar and fat, as well as additives like emulsifiers, sweeteners, flavourings, and preservatives. Think sugary sodas, potato chips and crackers, packaged cookies and baked goods (like Twinkies), breakfast cereals and processed meats... to name a few. 🤪

The heavy processing removes nutrients making them very low nutrient dense, in other words, very little nutritional value per calorie. And adding the emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners and flavourings, plus preservatives, it isn't hard to see why they don't support optimum health.

So, why do it? Well, there's profit in it. The foods are designed to get us to eat more, which they do, meaning we buy more, meaning companies make more profit.

All that being the case, it was interesting when we heard Dr. Greger explain how the absence of fibre played a big part in the lack of benefit from UPFs. This gives us good reason to have fibre in our diet. But really good to know that just adding a fibre supplement is not the same as getting fibre from the whole foods we eat.

Research has shown that fibre in the whole food encapsulates nutrients inside the cell wall for special delivery to our gut microbiome. That's what nature intended to happen. And may be why apples are more satiating than apple juice, even when the juice is enriched with an identical amount of added fiber.

So, food structure makes a difference. That is, the same food in different forms affect...Read More

Health & Wholeness

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:10:09 -0700

We've helped people restore their health with a Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) diet for many years. And we saw that a client's return to health didn't always stick. What we learned was that there was more to restoring physical health than just diet and lifestyle. There's a mental / emotional aspect that impacts our health too.

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We find it interesting that the words health, wholeness, and holiness all derive from the same root.

When you think about health, that's the natural state of the body when all the systems, the whole body, are functioning as they are designed to function. Each system is functioning in a whole and efficient way and in coordination with all the other systems. When we're healthy, there's a natural, wholeness of functioning throughout the body.

And, we're more than a physical being. We have a mental and emotional component that strongly influences our health. Many experts have said that stress is a significant contributing factor in probably 80% of illnesses. So, to experience good health we need to address the issue of stress in our lives, too.

We've been sharing the understanding that our experience of stress is not caused by what's occurring in our lives, but rather, on how we're interpreting what's occurring. This is why one person can become very stressed in a situation, while another, in the exact same situation, finds it an impetus to excel. They're both under pressure, but their interpretation of the situation is what turns it into stress or an opportunity to excel.

Seeing this has made a big impact for our clients and their health. When they no longer feel like they are a victim to their circumstances, they realize that they have the ability to shift how they relate to it. And, in that, the stress in their lives is transformed.

As stress is reduced in our lives, not only is it a sign of a healthier (more whole) mental state, but we find it easier and more natural to make...Read More

Turmeric, Curcumin & Alzheimer's

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:15:52 -0700

There's research showing a number of cases of Alzheimer's patients have experienced improvement in their symptoms when taking turmeric regularly. And there's research showing that curcumin supplements, the "active ingredient" in turmeric, do not show much improvement. So, why would that be?

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It looks like the most plausible reason there's a difference is that when we take turmeric, we're getting a dose of curcumin as well as hundreds of other compounds with it. And isn't it interesting that the investigators concluded that this was the first demonstration of turmeric as an effective and safe drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's. Of course, it isn't a drug at all. It's just a spice you can get at the grocery store. That's so cool.

This is one of the reasons we like eating Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB). When our meals are made of whole foods and not processed, we're getting all the nutrient value in the food. But when people include processed food in their meals, they only get some of the nutrient value, creating gaps in their nutritional needs.

This can often lead to supplementation to fill in the gaps, but that can be complicated to figure out, as well as expensive. For example, the 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric the patients in the study were taking would cost about 5¢. But a curcumin supplement costs many times that and doesn't provide the same benefit. So, why concoct an artificial mixture when Mother Nature already packaged it all in turmeric?

It looks like the benefit of turmeric, the whole food, may be greater than the sum of its parts. Once again, getting the nutrients we need to stay healthy by eating our food in its whole form may be the easiest as well as the least expensive path to good health.

When Hippocrates said, "Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food," he was referring to food in its whole form. And that seems to be what's at play with the Alzheimer's patients in the...Read More

The Three Essentials

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:54:49 -0700

If you want to improve your health and aren't eating a Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) Diet, we encourage people to make a 100% shift to WFPB to see what it can do. And we understand that not everyone is going to go 100%. So, for those who want to "sample" what WFPB eating can do for them, Dr. Greger suggests three essential food groups to eat every day.

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We always encourage people to go 100% WFPB if they want to see the best results from a change on diet because it was so clear over the thirty-some years of sharing this with clients that those who made a 100% change saw great results, where those who made say an 80% change saw only about 20 to 30% of the results.

That being said, every little bit helps too. So it's good to know where to get the most bang for your buck if you're making the shift gradually. And that's what Dr. Greger points out so well.

To get the most benefit from changing what you eat, the three essential food groups to eat each day are berries, greens and legumes. Berries are the healthiest, most nutrient dense fruits we can eat. Greens are the healthiest, most nutrient dense vegetables we can eat. And legumes: beans, split peas and lentils provide the most longevity gain of any foods and are the centre piece of protein for every population in history. Additionally, all the blue zones (areas where people live the longest) around the world eat beans and lentils as their primary protein source.

So, that's where you get the most bang for your buck: berries, greens and legumes. And Dr. Greger also points out what to avoid, what not to eat, to improve our health with diet change: trans-fats, processed meats and "liquid candy": sodas and sugar sweetened liquids.

Trans-fats, although no longer legal in North America, still kill around half a million people a year around the world. Trans-fats are created when an oil is processed to become more solid at room temperature, like...Read More

Living In A Beautiful Feeling

Mon, 25 May 2026 15:35:41 -0700

One of our mentors, Sidney Banks, would often suggest for people to live in a beautiful feeling. To hear that, it could sound like a form of positive thinking. But as we've come to understand more about his teachings, we see he wasn't pointing to a feeling that we would call an emotion. He was pointing to something deeper.

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We've talked before about our true nature. How, who we are isn't our body or our thoughts or the roles we play. These things are always changing, and there's something about us that has not changed through all the years and different roles and responsibilities, achievements and difficulties we've experienced. We've always been there at the centre of it all, the steady awareness of what was occurring.

Look for yourself and see. Relax your focus of attention. Don't focus on any one thing, so hat youa re not attending to anything in particular, like thoughts, sensations, or anything in your visual environment. Just for a moment, relax the focus of attention and allow attention to be open and free. What is there?

Can you see that underneath all the activity of your thinking and your life is a calm ease aware of what is occurring? Something that is always there and doesn't change as everything it's aware of is constantly changing.

This may seem abstract, but think about this. Consider any war-torn area, or any area of conflict, and remove all the people. What remains? When all the people are gone, there is only what is there as its nature, which is peace. Do you see that?

Isn't that interesting, that underneath all the fighting and conflict in a region is the peace that is inherent to that region, even though we aren't aware of it because our attention is on the conflict.

Like this, underneath all of our joys and sorrows, all of our thinking and doing, is the peace and the love that is inherent to our true nature... even when we're not aware of it because...Read More

Getting What You Want

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:43:31 -0700

We talked last year about the idea that the Universe has your back. But it doesn't always look that way when we aren't getting what we want, does it? When Connie and I look back on our lives though, we see that when things weren't going our way, the difficulties were opportunities to open and grow more into our full potential.

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Many people we talk to often hear the phrase "The Universe has your back" as meaning "Things will go my way," or "I'll get what I want," or "Painful things won't happen." To us, the Universe has your back doesn't mean life always gives us what we want. It means life is always working with us, even when it’s challenging.

When you think about support, who would you say is giving a child more support, a parent that gives their child everything they ask for, or a parent who helps the child grow?

When things don't go our way, and we are aren't getting what we want, can you see that there is an opportunity for insight, growth, or humility? This is how we develop resilience in life. When we begin to understand that sometimes the support of life looks like comfort and other times it looks like a wake-up call, we don't resist the things that at first don't please us. We begin to trust that our initial perception of the situation may not be the full story.

I think we’ve all experienced that real support isn’t always immediate gratification. Looking back, Connie and I see that difficult times have resulted in some of the best, life-changing and growth events we’ve had. Like Connie having a mini-stroke and me ending up on a ranch in Canada instead of pursuing a life in medicine.

In the end it may be that life is more on our side than we sometimes realize. Everything may not feel good, but everything can deepen us.

When we say the universe has your back, the gift is not always in the event itself, but in the consciousness, understanding, or capacity that emerges through it. It's in the...Read More

Homemade Nut Butters

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:32:50 -0700

We don't eat a lot of nut butters but we always have some around for a quick snack with a banana or corn thin. And we use them in dressings, sauces and different recipes.

One thing that has always struck me about the nut butters is their cost. They aren't cheap. I experience mild sticker shock when I see this little 365g bottle costing $14. So when I discovered that I could make my own with the nuts I buy at wholesale, I thought I'd give it a try.

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We find we save 25%-30% on the cost of nut butters when we make our own. All the nuts but peanuts, that is. Peanuts are about breakeven, so the commercial producers must be getting their peanuts really cheap.

Beyond the cost savings though, I enjoy making it for a number of reasons. The first is that I love creating with food. So it's fun just to make it. I can combine different nuts and seeds to get "custom" blends. And I can make it crunchy or smooth, thick or runny, roasted or raw, depending on my interest at the time. It gives us so much variety and there's a noticeable freshness to it that we love and don't find in any of the commercial butters we've bought.

From a nutritional standpoint, when made fresh, the delicate unsaturated fats that begin to oxidize when processed haven't oxidized, so it's more like eating the whole food in its natural state.

Plus, we keep it in the fridge and make just enough to last a month or so, which means it's always eaten fresh. This also means that the oil never separates and needs to be stirred back in.

Nuts are also a good source of protein. So if you're looking to add some protein to a meal this can help. 2 tablespoons of almond butter contains 7 grams of protein.

And, although there are lots of brands that use only nuts as the sole ingredient, when you make yours at home, you're sure there's no added sugar, salt, oil, emulsifiers or preservatives that can be found in some commercial...Read More