Blogs and Articles

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11 Tips for Sustainable Wellness and Weight Loss

Why is it so easy to regain weight after dieting? Messages about how to lose weight in media and popular culture often promote the latest fad diet or product. For some reason, we flock to these diets like lemmings. Sadly, traditional dieting and “diet food” have rarely made good on their promises, or at least not for very long. On the other hand, evidence-based research tells us another compelling story.

 
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Carolina Day Magazine

April’s print articles in this magazine include The New Beat P. 15-21 (with sidebar) and Fostering Reflection for Student Success P. 26-29 (with sidebar). Additionally, she ghost-wrote the head-of-school letter beginning on P. 3.

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Move Over Lotus: There’s a New Flower on the Yoga Scene 

What is CBD yoga?

Modern Americans have found plenty of reasons to roll out their mats and practice the ancient discipline of yoga. There’s just one problem for some of us: distraction. It’s tricky to suddenly shift gears from our busy day-to-day routines in order to enter the zen-like state that we seek in yoga.

 
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How Yoga and Meditation Can Help Boost Your Creativity

Creativity is a wonderful yet elusive part of the human experience, seeming to abandon us when we need it most. As a result, creatives are constantly in pursuit of “the zone”—the headspace in which they produce their best ideas. Recent research shows that practicing yoga can help them tap into it.

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Can Science Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

On the Manistee River banks a Potawatomi tribal leader—Simon Pokagon —heard something strange as he prepared his fishing traps. It was a bright spring morning in 1850 Michigan and except for a distant, mysterious rumble, all was clear and tranquil around the water. But the sound grew louder by the moment until finally the 20-year-old fisherman put down his traps and stopped dead in his waders, frozen in fear.

 
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Killer Bees Honey Expands Apiary to Skyterra

As Skyterra prepares to host their new guests of the Hymenoptera order as well as their homo sapien counterparts, a cross-pollination of worlds unfolds. In exchange for a taste of the bees' harvest, Skyterra will continue to protect their home. Ultimately, the wellness of the hives will mirror the wellness journey of Skyterra's retreat guests. 

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Love at First Dip: The Rapture of CBD Bath Bombs

There are bath people and there are shower people. We bath people generally feel that the other set of bathers simply lack the imagination to appreciate the joys of a good bath. We assume that if they could only experience the right kind— maybe with candles or bubbles, Bulgarian choral music, or a caddy with a glass of merlot— they might finally get it.

 
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4 Ways to Boost Dopamine Levels Naturally

If the current millennium had a chemical mascot, it would likely be dopamine: the double-dealing neurotransmitter that keeps us wanting more. More coffee, more clothes, more food, more beer, more love, more money. Who would think all this want begins with a chemical exchange between synapses in your brain?

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Can Yoga Mitigate Dementia?

Just before Pete turned 57, he wrote in his journal that his memories were unraveling. “When I try to remember my parents and my life with them, it is all hazy and vague,” he wrote and later shared with the Alzheimer’s Association. “The images are fuzzy, the happenings obscure, the flow of things lost. Just bits and pieces and fragments left of the day-to-day that was our existence, our life.” Pete is not alone in this unsettling reckoning of early dementia.

 
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5 of the World's Longevity Hotspots

Though we have no control over what bodies we're born in, we do have control over what we do with them. That's why the longevity mystery is so complex. It's clear that genes and environment play an important role in determining how long we live. However, living a long healthy life also has a lot to do with lifestyle. To figure out which aspects of lifestyle affect longevity the most, National Geographic’s Dan Buettner set out to study the world’s longest living clusters of people.

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Spectrum of Benefits: CBD Alters Neural Activity in People with Autism

My friend David swallowed a cocktail of medications each day in a constant effort to alleviate symptoms of his autism. These included hitting himself, extreme anxiety, unbridled rage, and debilitating paranoia. The pills helped to a degree, yet the side effects were no fun.

 
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Your Friday Picnic by the Waterfall Awaits

We’ve found the antidote to the February blues in one word: waterfalls. Thundering through the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, they beckon like friends who are always there for you when you need them. These majestic giants that you forgot how much you loved are waiting in what the locals call the land of a thousand waterfalls. So, dust off those hiking boots and bag up a couple of turkey sandwiches. The waterfalls are calling you back to reawaken with the spring.

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The Case for Smoking Hemp vs. Tobacco

The jury’s reached a verdict in the case of tobacco versus hemp— and it’s unanimous. Strike the gavel: hemp is a better plant to smoke than tobacco. And the best part is that it’s relatively healthy. So, if you like the taste but not the psychoactive effects of marijuana, a hemp roll-up might be just what the doctor ordered. Unlike smoking tobacco, the benefits of smoking hemp are many.

 
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In a Culture of Screen Fixation, a Nature Study Breaks Ground

It's no longer just a hippie trope to “chill out” in nature. Indeed, recent evidence from a new nature study shows that the stress hormone cortisol significantly decreases when you go the way of Thoreau. More to the point, your body and mind remember how to relax when you breathe fresh air and get your senses out-of-doors. Enter, the "nature pill."