Attainable health and wellness in the new year

This time of year, inboxes and social feeds are flooded with nutrition advice, influencers promoting diet products, and invites to join the latest get-well-quick program.

While there’s evidence that healthy eating habits and regular exercise can help people diagnosed with breast cancer with everything from maintaining a healthy weight to easing side effects to increasing energy, it can be difficult to cut through all the noise to find what’s right for you, right now.

We pulled together this list of some of LBBC’s health and wellness resources to help you easily find what feels good for you in 2022.

Getting active  

Kick-off your new year by getting active with Cathy Nobil-Dutton, LCSW, CPT. In these short videos — one to three minutes each — Nobil-Dutton takes you through some basic exercises that are safe and that account for the effects of treatments like surgery and radiation.

Moving with metastatic 

Diet and exercise were a part of Cathy Knowles’ life for three decades before she was diagnosed with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-positive, de novo metastatic breast cancer in January 2017. Read this LBBC leadership volunteer’s story of how her habits changed, how she keeps moving, and why she still makes room in her diet for chocolate.

Simple steps, healthy eating habits  

Stacy Kennedy, MPH, RD, CSO, LDN, CPT, suggests simple changes to make your meals and snacks more nutritious and enjoyable for the long-term. Read her recommendations.

For more tips and additional content from the summit, check out the Promoting health: Nutrition and exercise essentials resource booklet, or download our exercise planning worksheet.

Mind, body, soul, and more 

With the increasing spread of COVID and everything else going on in the world right now, we could all benefit from new ways to deal with it all — the stress, the anxiety, the uncertainty. 

Learn to rethink how you think about yourself and to feel more at ease  prioritizing yourself, and then get the resources to make your own self-care plan in Radical self-care: Body, mind, and soul, part of LBBC’s Knowledge is power: Understanding Black breast cancer program.

In this approximately 20-minute video, part of LBBC’s 2020 metastatic breast cancer conference, Anusha Wijeyakumar teaches Mindfulness mediation for resilience.

You can find even more tips and tools for taking care of your whole self here: Methods of self-care to deal with stress and anxiety.