With the early spring weather fluctuations, many people are experiencing seasonal allergies already. One of the ways to help your body fight back is to eat more bitter green vegetables. They are in season in the spring and help clean out the toxins that have become stagnant in your body over the winter. Bitter greens include artichoke, arugula, asparagus, baby greens, bok choy, celery, chard, collard greens, dandelion leaf, endive, kale, mustard greens, spinach, and watercress. You can also boost your immune system to resist these allergies with acupuncture and herbs.

Is your energy still struggling to keep up, even though there is more sunshine? If so, don’t be too worried. Your body is just starting to come out of its hibernation stage from winter, and there weren’t as many quiet snowy evenings for your body to catch up from all of last year’s activities. Take things slower than usual and try not to overdo things. It looks like summer outside, but your body is still adjusting. If you want to kickstart your system, give us a call and come in for some acupuncture.

As we move into spring, we tend to eat more summer foods like salads and sandwiches. Be conscious of making sure you’re eating enough cooked foods as well, though, so your digestion doesn’t have to work too hard just when its strength is coming back. Incorporating broth-based soups, rice (we love basmati!), and fish into your meals now will help your digestive system ease into summer so you can enjoy magnificent garden salads in the months coming up. We’ve been eating fish from Coastal Seafoods and it is delicious!

Ready to shed that winter weight? Now is the perfect time to get some more motivation to look and feel your best. We’ve spent the last few months trying out some new lifestyle support websites and found that we love them when paired with acupuncture to reduce emotional eating, increase metabolism, and get the body back on track. We also came across our new favorite quote:

“A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.”

The Pioneer Press article featuring our business came out this past Sunday and we’ve been so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post a link. So if you didn’t get to see our article in the newspaper, check it out online now! The response has been amazing and we’re really enjoying getting to know the steady stream of new patients coming into our clinic.

http://www.twincities.com/business/ci_18485917

Are you curious about what the new patients come in for? The main things we’ve been treating are insomnia, depression, anxiety, headaches, tobacco cessation, stress and PTSD related to grief and loss, back pain, neck pain, and weight loss. It has already been a really full week and there are many more fun weeks to come! So if you’ve been thinking about acupuncture for awhile and wondering if it might help you, give us a call!

In January, we attended 15 hours of training for Acupuncturists Without Borders, where we learned more about using ear acupuncture and the NADA Protocol. This technique was developed to treat addiction (including smoking, alcoholism, and street drugs), but can be applied to a wide range of conditions. It uses 5 needles in the ear and is the system used by Acupuncturists Without Borders to treat trauma victims, including the wildfires out west, flood victims, hurricane Katrina, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and a variety of other emergency situations. We are a member of Acupuncturists Without Borders and hope to travel to Haiti or Nepal later this year.

In the meantime, since the NADA Protocol helps reduce stress, improve sleep, and improve wellbeing, we are using it in our clinic along with regular acupuncture to treat mental health, insomnia, weight loss, and quitting smoking. The overwhelming response has been that our patients love the technique because they feel so much more relaxed and balanced after treatment. If you’re interested in trying it out, come in for acupuncture and ask us to add these points in your ears as part of your regular treatment. We hope you’ll love it too!

With chapters 1 and 2 finished on our food therapy book, we’re stepping up to make the writing go faster.  Our timeline is to have the first draft completed by next summer, so we can get final revisions done by the end of next year!  The first chapter discusses the basic principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine food therapy and our weight loss and digestion patients love it.  We also finished the second chapter on Dampness and Phlegm.  Next week we’re looking forward to starting the chapter on foods that calm the mind (to help with stress, irritability, and anxiety) and foods to uplift the mind (to help with depression and melancholy).  This is one of our most exciting chapters because mental health is what we’re super passionate about here at Beautiful Ama.  We do sell the chapters of our book to our patients as pamphlets, so make an appointment if you’re interested in learning more!

I’m so excited about the Holistic Weight Loss Program that I’ve developed as a collaborative effort with Senia at Healing InSight that I can’t sleep.  We start with acupuncture, herbs, and food therapy (of course) and include other perks like weigh-ins, measurements, lifestyle coaching, books, and things you can do at home to increase your metabolism and lose that weight.  Recently we’ve expanded the program to include a 7 day weight loss detox, meal ideas, and new chapters of the food therapy books we’re writing.  My patients love the program so much that after the initial 10 weeks, they’ve been requesting phase 2 so they can continue losing weight with the same support that has been so successful in phase 1.  So we finally finished putting that together and we’re too excited to sleep!