Holiday Health Habits & Stress Busters

Holidays can be stressful. Organizing multiple family functions. Stress! Creating memorable experiences. Stress! Finding meaningful gifts at decent prices. Stress! It can all be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be.

When it comes to being healthy, I’ve spent the last six years laser focused on how to live a healthy lifestyle focused on being well. As a two-time cancer survivor, most recently with stage IV disease, I research and try different wellness practices. I always search for modalities that work for me and then can share with others. My goal is to generate healthy living ideas to help make others’ lives easier. So as I jump into the holiday spirit, I’m sharing tips and tricks on how to stay healthy and bust stress this time of year. I believe that it’s all about taking smalls steps toward what you want…

Healthy Lifestyle Hacks

We all want to make our lives a little easier, right? Finding simple solutions and lifestyle hacks can be the answer when you want to improve your health. We started PrettyWellness.com to share information together on how to take small steps toward better health. Whether you’re a working mom, a stay-at-home parent, an up-and-coming 20-something or anyone in-between, we’re all trying to find our way through a busy and complicated life. After my second cancer diagnosis, I learned that focusing on taking care of myself and tweaking my lifestyle, helped me feel amazing even under the stress of treatments. Now, it’s my mission to share this with everyone and create conversations together about our wellbeing. Taking small steps toward better wellness can put us all on the path to the life we want to live both personally and professionally. It starts with putting one foot in front of the other. This can be made easier, when you look for healthy life hacks to instill into your routine.

Easy Healthy Summer Snacks

Picnics, beach days, adventures in the park and vacations often = a bad eating day or two or three. While, I do believe in “sometimes foods,” “sometimes snacks” and “sometimes days,” I still think a little bit of planning is key. Rather than feeling bloated and fatigued from eating tons of processed and sugar-laden foods, eating well nourishes your body providing energy and a feeling of being toned. Recently, I spoke about eating clean and being active on vacation, and now with school out I’m focused on healthy living with staycations and adventures near home.

Inspire Kids to Eat Veggies with Gardening Fun

When I was a little girl I used to garden aka pick weeds out of our vegetable patch. The constant swarming of mosquitos around my head on humid days in the garden made me less than a fan. It took years for me to ever consider growing my own plants, let alone food. Almost three years ago, I started researching the role nutrition plays in healing and preventing disease and found that my clean eating role models all garden. I wanted to try it again. However, I knew I needed to figure out growing food on my terms. My goal was to make it fun and not time-consuming so that my son would be inspired to eat more vegetables. 

Creative Ways to Exercise with Kids on WTNH

Remember the days when you slept until noon, grabbed lunch mid-day, and leisurely headed to the gym or social activity?

Or how about the years when your schedule revolved around “must see tv.”

I’m laughing at myself, knowing that life was much easier for me back in college or earlier in my career, yet I still made excuses why I couldn’t exercise. Some of them included:

Green Beauty: Spring Clean Your Beauty Routine

Do you jump out of bed, brush your teeth, shower with shampoo, conditioner and then spray perfume throughout your hair? Let’s assume you use several products in the morning and throughout the day. What if these items contained a few toxic chemicals? Studies have found that cosmetics ingredients such as phthalate plastics, paraben preservatives and triclosan (a pesticide) are common pollutants in the human body. Many of these chemicals are potential hormone disrupters. Just like the food we put IN our body, the products we put ON them seep toxins into the blood stream. This is why after I was diagnosed with my second round of breast cancer, that I over-hauled my personal care regimen and cover green beauty on the blog. This morning, I spoke to Teresa Dufour on CT Style and shared a few tips.