Tamara Zablocki

What food and diet changes can do for you-

Nutrition is an area where you can create an impressive effect on your daily health outcomes. Food is considered the building blocks from which our body grows and fortifies itself, so this is an important area for people that are trying to rebuild or strengthen their body’s immune system. Nutrition can make a positive impact on everyone’s health, but especially people with chronic health conditions.

Each of the chronic health conditions that are featured at the Symptom Journal website has as a resource a nutrition section that covers some of the most important basic foods that can help your condition, along with a variety of diets that other people have found have made a positive impact on their health outcomes. Many health conditions are treated with drugs and we forget what a profound effect the food we eat each day can have on rebuilding, balancing, and strengthening our bodies.

For individuals with the various health conditions covered at the Symptom Journal website we cover specific foods and also a variety of diets including: The GFCF Diet, Feingold Diet®, The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, The Body Ecology Diet™, Rotation Diet, The Macrobiotic Diet, The Fail Safe Diet, GAPS Diet, and The Elimination Diet. These are diets that have helped others reduce their symptoms, as well as determine what foods worsen or improve their condition through different diet protocols while seeing the cause and effect between their food choices and whether their symptoms spike or abate. Your Report area acts as an in-depth overview, not only of your reaction to the foods that you eat, but how your other daily choices play into your general well being.

Whether you are a parent of a child with ADHD trying to reduce their hyperactivity, or an individual that suffers from Migraines trying to reduce migraine attacks, finding diet interventions that have worked for other people and can work for you or your child, provides a positive resource for affecting health outcomes. You start to realize that foods often mimic drugs and can affect our bodies in major ways, positively and negatively as much as medications.

What can food and diet changes do for our bodies? Below are some of the positive and negative impacts that food and diet changes can have.

• Create an ADHD child or adult to be more hyperactive or calm them down

• Help soothe some of the symptoms of anxiety or heighten them

• Children or adults on the ASD spectrum with food allergies or gastrointestinal disorders can benefit from understanding what foods create reactions in their bodies

• Individuals with Bipolar Disorder or Depression can finds foods that help even out their moods

• People with Fibromyalgia, Migraines, Rheumatoid Arthritis can understand what foods trigger their symptoms flaring and target eliminating those foods through one of diets that are featured in their health condition’s Nutrition area

• Individuals with thyroid disorders, whether hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, Graves’ disease or Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, can find foods that assist in lessening or increasing their bodies thyroid production

All of these amazing changes can be achieved by changes in our diet, consciously choosing what foods we eat. The Report area of the Symptom Journal let’s you be your own health detective seeing what foods or diets create the most positive change in your or your child’s health condition.

Diet is an area where we can exercise our power of choice and see the benefits through our child’s health outcomes or our own. It is important for us to provide the latest information to our members about health and nutrition news that benefit their health outcomes. At our site you will find the latest information about possible endocrine disruptors that the EPA is currently studying that can alter the various endocrine glands, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid, pineal, thymus, pancreas, ovaries, and testes.

Why are endocrine disruptors an important area of concern? Our endocrine system is a system of glands and hormones that regulate some of the most basic and important functions of our bodies, including areas of growth, development, and maturation of the human body.  We cover this subject and will continue to provide breaking news within the Symptom Journal website, but a good overview is given at the National Resource Defense Fund’s website and we encourage you to read their information, http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/qendoc.asp

Watch for our next blog showing you how to stretch your food dollars, and at the same time, buy foods that are healthy for you and your family’s health. We will describe what foods are important to buy organic and what foods are safe to be a little more lax with when it comes to the “organic” label in stretching your food budget.

Tamara Zablocki

It amazes me in how many ways creating SymptomJournal.Com parallels giving birth to a child. We are at approximately 42 weeks; we are about two weeks overdue. I am as inspired, engaged and excited about our launch, as I was with my kid’s births, incredible, but true. I have put so much of who I am, and what I believe into the creation of the Symptom Journal that it feels very much like my child.

We began with the anticipation of what it would be like, nothing like it has really been. Just like hopes and dreams for our kids, Symptom Journal has left me incredulous with what it has become. This was an organic process, messy like art at times, all of us stretching and giving it our best. I was able to bring together some wonderfully talented women who believe, like myself, in enabling people with chronic health condiitons through symptom journaling to have a better quality of life.

We have all stretched using our abilities and talents to create the best experience for our members. Just as a pregnancy can seem like it has engulfed our lives for what seems like an eternity, our time creating the Symptom Journal seems like it has been fast and also a very long process at times. What unified us and kept us strong was our commitment to our members and our hope that we could help them have healthier lives.

What at times seemed like hurdles in the beginning, brought us together in the end, the excitement growing as birth drew near, our talents woven together, bringing us to our moment of birth. We went through many transitions, more than just the one you have with birthing a child, and each one made our team stronger, unifying us in our mission. It was a miracle that brought us together, grew our team, allowing us to push through to this moment of birth.

You are our inspiration. Our passion is what drives our commitment to give the very best of ourselves to you and the Symptom Journal. We will strive to keep it real, vulnerable, from our hearts, timely, professional, fun, and growing to meet your needs and filling an important place in your lives.