Becky Longacre: Seven health behaviors for people in mid-life

By Becky Longacre

I was once chronically sick, overweight and highly anxious. I had chronic back pain all day every day and was flaring on and off with ulcerative colitis for many years.

Becky Longacre

Since my 20s, I started on the long journey of health and wellness. I was not interested in being a full time or (even a part time) patient. I was interested in healing pain, losing weight and calming my ulcerative colitis and anxiety.

There was a lot of trial and error, and as a nurse, I noticed over almost two decades of practice there were certain common denominators in patients that tended to get better after illnesses.

Now, keep in mind, there are times when you do everything right and you still get cancer or another terrible disease. But for many illnesses we treat in the hospital, I noticed a correlation between certain health behaviors and illness recovery.

Here they are in a nutshell:

1.) Hydration. From assisting in temperature regulation to flushing out lactic acid from our muscles (so they are not sore) drinking enough water is critical to our health and wellness. It even reduces brain fog! Unless you are fluid-restricted by your doctor, drink at least 1.5 liters of water daily if you are a woman and at least 2 liters of water daily if you are a man. Most people are walking around pretty dehydrated.

2.) Healthy food. Due to limited space, I will not get into the specifics of a healthy diet plan, but according to the Mayo Clinic, diets that tend to include lean protein, fruits and vegetables and whole grains are associated with less disease than high fat, processed-carb diets. What is imperative for you to learn is: What diet or eating habits work for you? It is not a one size fits all. Aim to eat food with shorter ingredient lists and pay attention to serving sizes.

3.) Healthy Exercise. Harvard Medical School states that a comprehensive exercise program including cardiovascular activity, resistance training, balance and stretching will increase your endurance, strength, range of motion, and agility. Aim for 30 minutes of various types of exercise most days of the week.

4.) Sunlight and fresh air. When we get outside, the exposure to sunlight helps to stimulate us and wake us up during the day. This also helps us to sleep at night. Aim for at least 20 minutes of sunlight per day.

5.) Sleep and Meditation. Most of the people I talk to are sleep deprived. I can’t emphasize the importance that sleep has on our mental health, our hormones and our metabolism. Aim for eight hours per night.

6.) Community Connections. People who have strong community connections experience less perceived stress. This means that out of 2 people experiencing the same level of stress, the person who has a stronger support network will experience less stress than the person who is feeling like they are alone. So, nurture your family, friends and community relationships! Go out and have fun once per week.

7.) Spirituality/Joy. Take the word that resonates the most with you. Find a connection, an activity, an experience that is bigger than you, that gives you happiness, that connects you with others, that gives or receives love. This can be prayer for some and affirmations for others. Even praying or meditating 5 minutes per day has been shown to slow the brain down and increase relaxation.

Have more questions about health wellness, weight loss and personal development? Ask away! I will address them in future articles. Until I hear directly from you, may you be happy and healthy.

Becky Longacre is a Nurse Coach for Health Transformers LLC. Send her questions at becky@healthtransformersmaine.com or call her at 207-400-7897. Visit her website at www.healthtransformersmaine.com" <

Andy Young: The graveyard shift

By Andy Young

One afternoon long ago my brother, several of my cousins and I were stuffed into a Ford Falcon station wagon. My uncle was at the wheel. None of us were wearing seatbelts, which was understandable, since at the time such items didn’t exist, or if they did, they weren’t standard equipment on Ford Falcon station wagons.

Part of the beauty of being a child passenger inside an automobile during the pre-seatbelt era was having the freedom of motion necessary to covertly poke, pinch, punch, and/or kick whichever sibling(s) and/or cousin(s) they felt like pestering at the time. Similarly, the target(s) of such provocations, who were also unrestrained physically, were free to maneuver themselves around the inside of the car in order to evade the bullying of older, more aggressive passengers or, if the opportunity presented itself, to launch a counterattack.

If you’re worried this childhood recollection is going to end in some sort of horrific tragedy that could have been avoided had we only been wearing seatbelts, well, don’t be. My uncle lived to a ripe old age, and most of the youthful passengers who were in the car that day are still alive, hoping to do likewise. But my most vivid recollection regarding that particular outing was my uncle, who was desperately attempting to calm his rambunctious passengers, asking (or probably shouting, just so he could be heard) as we passed a graveyard, “How many people are dead in that cemetery?”

There was a pause. Then someone hesitantly chirped, “a hundred?” An older, slightly deeper voice scornfully retorted, “There must be at least a thousand in there.” The rest of us began chiming in with various estimates, but my uncle, having successfully gotten our minds on something other than torturing one another, urged us to keep trying. We spent the rest of the ride venturing further guesses about exactly how many deceased individuals there actually were in that graveyard. When we arrived at our destination my uncle finally revealed the precise number of people who were dead in that cemetery. The answer, of course, was “all of them.”

I’ve been thinking more about cemeteries recently, since there are several of them along the route I’ve been taking to work lately. South Portland is home to at least five graveyards, which seems like an awful lot for a place the size of Maine’s fourth-largest city. But the truth is there are more people buried in just one of South Portland’s boneyards, the 97-acre Forest City Cemetery (over 30,000, according to Portland’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities, which oversees the place), than there are living, breathing citizens in the entire city (26,498, according to the 2020 census).

However, South Portland is hardly the only place in America with more dead residents than live ones. Take, for example, Colma, California, which lies on the San Francisco Peninsula. Founded as a necropolis (burial ground) in 1924, the 1.89 square mile unincorporated town is currently home to, per the 2020 census, just 1,507 extant human beings. However, it also houses more than 1.5 million dead folks, meaning that Colma’s ratio of deceased inhabitants to living ones is somewhere around a thousand to one.

By utter coincidence, my current abode is located a mere mile from a burial ground that’s been there, if one believes what’s been etched into some of the older stones, for more than two centuries. Despite its age, though, I know for a fact the cemetery in my town is a truly high-quality one because, as my uncle would no doubt have gleefully pointed out, people are still dying to get into it. <

Insight: Imprudence on parade

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but sometime this summer my wife Nancy hooked me on watching YouTube videos of arrests from around the country captured on police bodycams.

It’s a non-stop parade of lame excuses, driving while impaired, know-it-all college students and angry people who believe that they know more about law enforcement than the men and women working in the profession do.

There are drivers who try to evade arrest by pulling away from traffic stops and then taking officers on high-speed chases. There are some women frequently described in these videos as “Karens” who shout and scream and resist and obstruct being arrested.

I’ve seen arrest videos on YouTube from as recently as two weeks ago and some even have a former police officer who narrates or explains why an officer takes specific actions when investigating criminal offenses and situations.

Many of these videos share one thing in common – drivers suspected of drunk driving. Once pulled over, the investigating officer will ask a driver for his or her driver’s license, vehicle registration and proof of insurance. Inevitably, the suspected driver will not have any of that and tells the officer that with slurred speech, glassy eyes or the inability to stand, let alone drive a motor vehicle.

Here is a sampling of some of my all-time bodycam arrest favorite videos that I have watched so far:

The owner of a self-serve car wash in Florida called police at 1 a.m. to report that a woman had been sitting in her SUV in the car wash parking lot since 7 p.m. and he found that behavior to be suspicious. Even though the car wash was open 24 hours, he thought she was using drugs there and asked police if they could investigate and get her to leave his property. He said he had video security footage of her being there that long.

Arriving at the scene, officers approached the woman’s car, and she was speaking with someone on her cell phone and ignored them. They banged on her car window until she rolled it down and instructed them to stop and go away. When one of the officers asked what she was doing there and told her that the car wash owner wanted her to leave, she refused, saying she hadn’t done anything wrong. She rolled up her window and ignored police asking for her identification and to get out of her car to talk to her.

Eventually, the police smashed her window and dragged her out of her car but before that happened she said she didn’t believe the officers in uniform were real police. She demanded to speak to a supervisor and a sergeant and as she was being handcuffed, she repeatedly asked why she was being arrested. The officer told her she was arrested for trespassing because she did not leave when instructed to by police.

Another weird incident was caught on bodycam video in Florida and involved a van, a topless woman, a medical student from Jamaica and barking sounds coming from the van during the arrest. Apparently, a homeless woman who lived in her van had stopped to pick up the medical student who was hitchhiking. All the seats in the van had been removed except for the driver’s seat. On the floor on the back of the van was a large mattress in which the woman had tied up the college student at gunpoint and made him lie there.

Officers had observed the woman speeding and swerving all over the roadway and chased her for miles. Her tires became flat when she ran over police stop sticks, but she kept right on going until one of her rims crumbled. She refused to get out of the van and started throwing mountains of trash out the van’s passenger door. She allowed the college student to exit the van and then started making loud noises sounding like a barking dog and then a clucking chicken.

She eventually threw her gun out the window and tried to run away to escape but was wrestled to the ground by officers. She wasn’t wearing a shirt and had to have a towel wrapped around her before being transported to jail for kidnapping, drunk driving, assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.

I’m always amazed at how much some of these suspects do not listen to basic commands. Even though they are told time and time again what they are being charged with, many say they’ve done nothing wrong and are not under arrest.

In yet another video, a fugitive from Vermont was living with seven other people in a Florida home. She had an outstanding warrant for theft and officers pulled her over for matching a woman who had stolen from a smoke shop a block away. When placed in handcuffs, she bolted and tried to run away but was captured. She told police she was seven months pregnant and started to cry and asked why she was being arrested. The woman denied having a warrant for her arrest and that she didn’t want to have a baby in jail.

These videos are like watching a trainwreck but you can’t look away.<

Insight: Not in Kansas anymore Toto

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

As I took my seat in the 28th row in the American National Government class at New Mexico Highlands University in September 1971, it began to dawn on me that I was now a full-fledged college student.

Just 17 years old and on my own away from home for the first time in my life, my high school days were behind me, and I was about to start a new chapter that would require focus and plenty of attention to detail.

My class schedule for that fall included American National Government taught by Dr. Ralph Carlisle Smith; Journalism 101 taught by Dr. Harry Lancaster; History of China with Professor Emmett Cockrum; along with Earth Science, and English Composition.

Looking at the reading list passed out by Dr. Ralph Carlisle Smith that first day, I surmised that a great deal of my time would be spent reading about government. His list was 18 pages long and I thought I’d never complete reading all the books he required in just one semester.

I vowed to do my best and had a strong desire to learn as much as I could about the workings of our government and how the federal system operated. I had thought I knew some aspects of government bureaucracy before that class, but Dr. Smith was an excellent teacher and experienced in all things federal.

He had co-authored a book “Project Y: The Los Alamos Story” and had served from 1947 to 1957 as Assistant Director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory which helped to develop the atomic bomb.

During our first Journalism class, students discovered our powers of observation. As Dr. Lancaster started to give his opening lecture to our class, he was interrupted by a man in a suit carrying a yardstick in his left hand and a red dictionary in his right hand. He walked to the front of the classroom and whispered something to our professor before leaving.

Dr. Lancaster then continued with his opening presentation to us, telling us that the first paragraph in a news story should always contain the “5 Ws” for readers, or Who, What, When, Where, Why and sometimes How.

But then he stopped and told us that a journalist’s job is to provide as much detail as possible about a subject when writing an article. He asked us to pull out our class notebooks and to jot down as many details as possible about the person who had interrupted his lecture just 15 minutes earlier.

He wanted to know what color the person’s suit was (blue), what color his shoes were (brown), his hair color (black), and what he was carrying (yardstick and a red dictionary). He even wanted to know what color the person’s necktie was (yellow).

Going around the room, he asked us one by one to reveal our answers and it just happened that I was the only one of 15 students in the class to get all the details correct. Dr. Lancaster praised my powers of observation and told our class that we needed to be aware of how difficult a job that a police investigator may have because we all see things differently and sometimes an eyewitness to a crime fails to get the details right. He said that if we wanted to become effective journalists someday then we needed to always be aware of our surroundings and those around us.

My first class for History of China was something I vividly recall 54 years later. Professor Cockrum had served in the U.S. Marines after World War I. He told us that in 1927, the 4th Regiment of the U.S. Marine Corps had been ordered to China with a mission of protecting the lives, property and commerce of American citizens in Shanghai.

Cockrum described his life as a U.S. Marine in China and how he found that nation’s history fascinating and why we would too. He told us that when the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria in 1931, war broke out between Japanese troops guarding their settlement in Shanghai and Chinese troops at Chaipei, a district to the north of Shanghai. The 4th Marines and Cockrum were called into action, maintaining a defensive perimeter and protecting the Shanghai international settlements.

As part of Cockrum’s Marine Corps duties, he said he was assigned to oversee his unit’s caissons, or small horse-drawn wagons carrying ammunition. He pointed out that caissons were still in use by the U.S. Army’s Old Guard unit to bring caskets of military personnel to Arlington National Cemetery for burial.

In his first class, I could sense Cockrum’s passion for Chinese history and it ultimately led me to complete a concentration in Asian studies for my college minor in history for my Bachelor of Arts degree.

My other two classes as a freshman, Earth Science, and English Composition, were not as memorable. I can’t remember the professors for those classes. I must have liked them because my college transcript shows I received an “A” grade in both Earth Science and English Composition that first semester.

Reflecting on my first days of college so long ago, it amazes me that I was able to not only survive but thrive at that challenge. <

Andy Young: Time to change a (very) dated item

By Andy Young

I’m not advocating that America switch to the Hebrew, Islamic, Coptic, or Bengali calendar but the fact is there’s little about the one currently in use that makes any sense at all.

The long-since-outmoded Gregorian model needs a radical facelift. It’s been impractical and obsolete for some time now and my guess is the only reason it wasn’t overhauled long ago is that no one knows who exactly is in charge of making such changes.

The most obvious imperfection: what dimwit decided to designate January 1 as New Year’s Day? That’s pretty arbitrary, if you ask me. Why change over to a brand-new year in the midst of winter, or, for the folks in the southern hemisphere, in the heat of the summer?

September 1 would be far more appropriate, as it, for many people, marks the tangible turning over of a new leaf: the beginning of a fresh school year. That portends far more significant changes than going from December 31 to January 1 does. The start of an academic year impacts anyone attending school, working at a school, or parenting and/or grandparenting someone in the midst of getting their formal education. Bus drivers, crossing guards, and people involved in coaching school sports start their new year in the fall as well. So it’s settled: from here on in, New Year’s Day should be September 1.

Better yet, let’s swap January 1 with Labor Day. There are already enough good-weather three-day weekends; why not give America’s workers a Monday off when the meteorological conditions are more likely to be unfavorable? I for one wouldn’t mind not having to commute to work on a day when the likelihood of the roads being coated with snow and/or ice is significantly higher than it is on the first Monday of September.

A healthy society evolves over time, and the Gregorian Calendar has been in use since October 1582. No one I know is suggesting that people should go back to living in mud huts or log cabins. Reading by electric light bulb rather than by candlelight isn’t just better for the eyes, it causes fewer fires as well. I for one prefer traveling distances of greater than a mile via bicycle, motor vehicle, train, or airplane rather than on foot, on horseback, or in a birch-bark canoe. And I don’t hear anyone recommending going back to getting their nourishment solely from unrefrigerated foods that they’ve grown and/or killed themselves, either.

Also, why just a dozen months? Thirteen, with 28 days each, sounds far more equitable to me. True, having 13 four-week months each year would leave one extra day to account for, but solving that problem is easy. I propose the extra day be given to the new month of Thirteenuary, given that it’s been deprived of having any days up until now and thus deserves to be retroactively compensated.

I admire reformers like the people who want to re-christen the fifth month as “No-mow May.” Designating five-ish weeks where people don’t pollute the air with gas-powered lawn mowers or tractors is a great idea, although this year I’d have preferred “No-mow August,” since I didn’t have to mow the lawn even once last month anyway.

Besides, if the main idea behind the “No-mow May” movement is to help support bees and butterflies by allowing flowering plants to bloom naturally, why not just go the whole hog and say “No Lawns?” That’s already being tried, albeit involuntarily, in places like Phoenix, south Texas, and southern California, where many residents are customarily even thirstier than the increasingly rare blades of grass are. <

Insight: Scent O'Mental

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

It’s kind of funny when I think of things I can remember vividly from my childhood more than six decades after they happened.

In a way, our memory is comparable to a computer in which our brains capture sensory information, store it away, and then can bring it back to the forefront when needed. In my case, I have been blessed with a great memory and even in my advanced age, I can recall trivial and insignificant events from years past.

I happened to think of this the other day when I was shopping at the supermarket and was in the dairy aisle. Passing by the refrigerated cheese section, I recalled a certain type of cheese was the brunt of many jokes when I was a child. The pungent odor of limburger cheese smells terrible and was the source of an ongoing Three Stooges comedy routine on television. I can recall smelling it myself at school and remember how bad it was even though that was close to 65 years ago.

Despite the passing of time, I haven’t smelled limburger cheese since, yet I can remember that experience and consider that to be truly amazing. As an adult I have never purchased limburger cheese and haven’t seen it at any of the stores I have shopped in. It might be on the shelf there somewhere, but it isn’t a commodity I would go searching for.

The arrival of every spring in Rochester, New York where I grew up is marked by the blooming of lilacs in Highland Park and the annual Lilac Festival. Our family used to go every Memorial Day Weekend to see more than 1,800 lilacs in majestic shades of purple and white at the event. Along with the visuals, one of the things I remember the most about the Lilac Festival was the sweet smell of the lilac flowers. It wasn’t an overpowering aroma, but a pleasant one that captivated my senses, and one I still enjoy.

My sense of smell is directly connected to my memory and it’s more than recalling the odor of limburger cheese and lilacs.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother was a stay-at-home mom who did all the cooking for our family. When I was in first grade, she instituted something she called “Vegetable of the Day,” introducing us to as many different types of vegetables as she could find, one at a time with each supper.

My younger brother and I were not allowed to opt out of this program. We were made to try each one of them we were served, and it has led to a dislike of the taste of many vegetables for me that persists to this day.

Under the “Vegetable of the Day” regimen, I recall eating asparagus, spinach, artichoke, broccoli, beets, carrots and cabbage. We also ate cauliflower, eggplant, corn, green beans, wax beans, kale, lettuce, collard greens and peas. Our mother prepared squash (both orange and yellow), rutabaga, radishes, green peppers, rhubarb, sweet potatoes, turnips, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, and zucchini.

But one afternoon when I was in second grade, I got off the school bus and raced home to hit up the cookie jar on the kitchen counter. As I entered our house through the back door to the garage, I caught a whiff of a smell that instantly turned my stomach.

Dear old mom was frying some parsnips in a pan on the stove for “Vegetable of the Day.” The rank smell became indelibly imprinted upon my brain that afternoon and continues to strike fear in me even years later. The foul odor of fried parsnips also evokes having to sit at the dinner table and having to eat it.

My mother would watch us and our dinner plates to ensure that my brother and I consumed every last bite of her vegetables each evening, and I struggled mightily this time with her heaping serving of fried parsnips. I think the reason I remember eating those after six decades have passed is that when dinner was over and I was excused from the table, I stepped out into our backyard, and I remember being ill to the point of projectile vomiting chewed pieces of fried parsnips into the grass.

Once when I was serving in the U.S Air Force in Germany, I went to a local restaurant and was waiting for my meal to arrive when I began to smell something that I hadn’t experienced in many years. Apparently, the couple dining at the next table had ordered and were eating fried parsnips, and that smell had wafted over to my table. Just like years previously, the smell started to make me feel sick to my stomach, so I got up from the table, left money for what I had ordered on the table and then departed quickly. Being outside and away from the smell, mu stomach slowly seemed to recover.

Scientific research has shown that memories associated with smell carry more emotion than visual memories and that’s something that I can certainly assert as fact.

Some of my childhood memories are directly linked to certain smells and I suppose one could say that fried parsnips are my personal kryptonite. <

Rookie Mama: Motherhood Bureau of Investigation

By Michelle Cote

The Rookie Mama

‘Tis that season of reading and ‘riting and ripping through kiddos’ wardrobes as we inventory school clothes and checklist what fits.

I don’t know about you, but investigating what lies beneath, on top, below, and squished between all the garments in all the drawers of the bureaus makes for quite the bureau of investigation, indeed. And not a federal one.

Sorting through clothing in my household is nothing short of an Olympic sport. The tears, the emotions, the absolute refusals to part with faded pants that have knees holier than a church, too-small shirts that ride up for all the world to see one’s belly button – when the shirts were definitely not designed that way – and socks whose significant others have long since been rendered to an island of misfit socks and are worn beyond darning.

Darn it, indeed.

More tears, more emotions, more attachments to clothes that just don’t fit.

Last weekend, I forced a fashion show from my teen who insisted his pants still fit loosely.

One would think that, as an oldest, he’d handle the inevitable sizing up best.

But alas, no.

He posed, he strutted, he insisted that shirt after shirt, shorts after shorts, pants, the whole ensemble fit fine.

I had no choice but to teach him a lesson.

Steve Martin.

You may recall the classic scene that plays out in ‘Father of the Bride’ in which his titular character insists on saving money by wearing an old, ill-fitting tuxedo from two decades earlier that fits him, well, as his daughter remarks – ‘like a glove!’

He poses, he struts – like my son had done – before a dusty attic mirror in his tux with too-short pants, crooning, ‘What’s new, pussycat?’

I pulled up this scene on my iPhone and showed my son, who rightfully remarked that any scene with Steve Martin is solid gold.

But the maternal point I made was that it was time to let go of some of his favorite clothes.

After all, he has three younger brothers.

As it turns out, breaking up with favorite threads is hard to do.

Letting go is emotional for me, too.

As I gently fold and place outgrown clothing from my youngest child’s wardrobe into storage totes, I regard them tearily as memories flood back.

When said shirts were once worn and loved by my oldest.

My secondborn.

My thirdborn.

My last.

How did time pass so rapidly in too-fast-forward motion?

When did the switch flip off babyhood directly to strutting like Steve Martin before a mirror?

Time flies when we’re having fun, and apparently clothing flies too – Because ready or not, clothing sizes stay put while the kiddos keep on growing, and will eventually be handed to the next in Cote boy line.

So clothes keep on flying right to storage; I’m tossing them more rapidly than my athletic eldest can cause pass interference and cling to what’s outgrown.

And so we’ll continue to focus on packing away the old; hand down to the next, so we can make room for what’s new. Pussycat.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time! <