Day 7
Day #7 5/17
Today was another successful day of senior project. I got an early start so I could get some breakfast and prepare for my meeting with Kara Kidder. I told her about some of the ideas I had for my project and other topics I still wanted to learn about such as yoga. She give me a list of people and topics to look into while researching and most of it involved yoga and functional medicine. I headed over to the library to get some work done after my meeting and I chose to focus my time on a guy named Mark Hyman who is a doctor with a very interesting story. He was trained as a traditional western doctor but after spending time working in China, he developed a holistic approach with an eastern influence. He had issues mentally and found out it was coming from mercury poison as well as a few other issues. After years of seeing specialists and trying to figure out what was wrong, he decided to focus on what he calls the 5 pillars that make a healthy human. The pillars are nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management, and relationships and connection. Through this, he helped fix many of the issues he was facing by focusing on the root cause rather than taking more drugs to solve the issue short term. He also sees many patients with dementia, Alzheimer's, and autism and has helped many of their symptoms by finding the root of the cause, which usually is an issue in your gut or physical function. He had some really good ideas about how we can reapproach the diet we think we need and give ourselves food that benefits brain health, and a major way to do that is to cut out or reduce sugar because it’s a neurotoxin that only contributes to issues. I think that he is a very smart guy with interesting ideas and I think the approach he takes will only continue to become more popular, a quote he had that stuck with me was, “Your Brain only has so many ways to say ouch, but it can be hurt in many ways”. I also read about the ayurvedic lifestyle and the doshas that Kara told me about and it was an interesting lifestyle that basically tries to live in unity with the earth. After grabbing some lunch, I began to look into yoga and more specifically ashtanga yoga and the benefits it has to people. I then needed to get outside for a bit and I decided to go for another run. It wasn’t too hot and I went on the rail trail and came back by the ski area and after the recent storm, everything was flooded. I almost had to go a full mile back down the rail trail to get from the ski hill across the river but I decided to just walk through some shallow parts instead, making it almost a six-mile run. I then had some more time before baseball practice and so I did my first yoga session. It went really well and I enjoyed it but was surprised at how difficult it was for my body, I realized ashtanga is a really good workout too. My afternoon and evening were spent at my last baseball practice and also another dress rehearsal for the play.
Hours: 5.5
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