Author: Lauren

Stefaan Engels, a Belgian man (with asthma no less) has just run 365 marathons in a year (see the story here). Holyyyy crap! To break the world record, he would have only had to run something like 40 consecutive marathons…. but no this guy decided to be a champ and run a marathon a day for a year. Talk about an over-achiever! When I heard this story I was AMAZED. I don’t even know how much it would take for me to run ONE marathon let alone 365. But Stefaan has something to offer us all. Don’t ever do just the bear minimum. Be CRAZY, be ridiculous, amaze people, have a story worth telling. Too many people trudge through life blending in with the crowd, doing whatever it is they have to do to get by and nothing more. Not everyone is a record breaker, not everyone goes out of their way to be three times greater than great. It takes a lot of effort… effort that we just don’t have time for in our day to day lives. But why can’t we be great in the things we do every day? Why not put 100% effort into the boring monotonous things we do? I decided, for example, after hearing this story, that I was going to be extremely productive in my work this week, with a goal to...

Sophomore year of college, arguably one of the most stressful. You are no longer a freshman, you can no longer use that excuse. Professors expect more of you, you have to figure out a major, and the work is piling on. It seems as if the rest of your life depends upon this year. If you don’t start a routine of organizing your time, getting your work done, and (most importantly according to everyone you seem to talk to) getting good grades, your life is doomed. You start to depend your grades on whether or not you’ll get a job rather than whether your parents will punish (i almost typed punch… oopsies!) you. Sophomore year is the perfect analogy of how much we dwell on our choices now because we think they will ruin the rest of our lives, how much we base our lives on failure. Yeah, some choices are bad ones. Sometimes it is difficult to turn them around, not impossible… but difficult. But I think we forget that the free will we possess to make mistakes, also exists to turn them around. When I was younger, skipping treatments would mean I would be in the hospital frequently. My pattern of hospitalizations was so common, that I expected that my poor health would never turn around. I saw those hospitalizations increasing. But look at me now, the...

In healthcare, we talk about a “sickness (or medical) model” vs. a “wellness model.” In the American Healthcare system, we are based mainly on a sickness model… you get sick, break something, develop a heart condition, whatever, you go to the doctor (who is licensed and trained to know about it) and are given some medication to treat your symptoms. Some argue that healthcare should be more about the wellness model, where wellness is stressed, where disease and progression of disease is prevented as much as possible by treating the whole person, socially, mentally, and physically (hence holistic). The body has ways of healing itself when the whole person is taken into account. In the same way, we have ways of healing our lives in order to live well. As a CFer, I practice the wellness model every day, and thats probably why I haven’t been in the hospital for so long. I do everything I can NOW to prevent getting sick later. My wellness model prevents the chance of future untimely and undesired events from occurring. For about 2 years I have been incredibly active and have been able to run 3+ miles at once. Recently, I have begun to practice hot yoga, which has proven to have immense benefits on my health and well being, especially in the way that it decreases stress that often exacerbates my...