A message to our dear patients and community members

We understand that this is a difficult and uncertain time. Given the magnitude of the current situation, Danforth East Wellness is restricting care to only those patients with acute or emergency needs. Dr. Nicole De Yonge, our Naturopath, will be providing virtual consultations at this time. You are able to book an appointment with her via our website (book here).

As your health care providers, your health and well-being is our top priority. As we continue to navigate these circumstances, we wanted to provide you with a few tips on how you can focus your efforts over the next while to optimize your health and well-being.

Daily Physical Activity – Think of simple ways to achieve 30 minutes of exercise like 10,000 steps outside. Stretching, or quality time with the foam roller is also a wonderful way to help your body move and can provide well-needed stress relief.

Good sleeps – We can’t “catch up” on lost sleep, but this may be the best opportunity we’ve had in a long time to kick start better sleep hygiene! Sometimes turning the temperature down a few degrees to reinforce the body’s natural instinct to sleep helps, as does applying a few drops of lavender essential oil on the pillow before bed to help calm your mind. For more sleep hygiene information please read Dr. DeYonge’s earlier excellent blog post Rise & Shine.

Healthy food choices – Try to limit the amount of refined sugars consumed and make the conscious decision to eat foods that we know will help support our bodies and our immune systems, like vegetables and fruits. Also strive to drink water to help hydrate.

Mindfulness – Think of doing a daily meditation or mindfulness practice. This can include using easy-to-follow meditation apps such as Headspace or Calm, starting or ending your day journaling (a great outlet to let go of things and make peace with your emotions), or, maybe even a daily yoga practice. These are great ways to help balance our nervous system and take us out of the sympathetic fight or flight state. For yoga you can look at yogaghar.ca, YogaTree’s Instagram, Boho Beautiful and Cosmic Yoga (for kids!) on YouTube.

Let’s support each other through this and keep ourselves as healthy as we can.

Be well until we see you next,

The Danforth East Wellness Team

(Dr. Katarina Bulat, Dr. Elisa Petricca, Dr. Nicole DeYonge, Susan Tomkins RMT)

How To Survive Sitting For A Living

Sitting is important to our lives and bodies, but we aren’t meant to do anything in excess. Sitting for long periods of time can create stress on our physical bodies, and anything that affects the physical body can spiral and create stress in other ways.

What are some of the things that sitting for long periods of time can affect adversely, you may ask? It puts pressure on our spines, and contributes to postural strain. The hip flexors and hamstrings can become short and tight and spinal support muscles can become weak or stiff. This all contributes to a potential for low back pain episodes. Also, if you are at a computer there are all sorts of issues with eyestrain, repetitive strain of hands/wrists/arms, and anterior head carriage which can all lead to things like headaches, neck and shoulder pain and carpal tunnel syndrome. Ugh.

Unfortunately that’s not all… and now for the super scary stuff. It is associated with increased mortality rates overall, and increased mortality rates due to the development of cardiovascular disease. There is also an increased chance of developing diabetes, and you may be prone to depression.

Oh my goodness! But don’t freak out, there’s a very easy, unbelievably super simple solution. Set an alarm of some sort so you stand up every half an hour. That’s it. Seriously. Just stand up. You don’t need to walk around or do anything else. Easy right?

Now do it. Your body, mind, posture and emotional well-being will thank you. As will I, less work for me to do when you come in! Everybody wins.