Black History Month 2022: African-American Health & Wellness

In her evocative ethnographic study, Body Language, Kimberly Lau traces the multiple ways in which the success of an innovative fitness program illuminates what identity means to its Black female clientele and how their group interaction provides a new perspective on feminist theories of identity politics--especially regarding the significance of identity to political activism and social change. Sisters in Shape, Inc., Fitness Consultants (SIS), a Philadelphia company, promotes balance in physical, mental, and spiritual health. Its program goes beyond workouts, as it educates and motivates women to make health and fitness a priority. Discussing the obstacles at home and the importance of the group's solidarity to their ability to stay focused on their goals, the women speak to the ways in which their commitment to reshaping their bodies is a commitment to an alternative future. Body Language shows how the group's explorations of black women's identity open new possibilities for identity-based claims to recognition, justice, and social change.

From the unforgettable teacher Jessamyn Stanley comes Every Body Yoga, a book that breaks all the stereotypes. It's a book of inspiration for beginners of all shapes and sizes: If Jessamyn could transcend these emotional and physical barriers, so can we. It's a book for readers already doing yoga, looking to refresh their practice or find new ways to stay motivated. It's a how-to book: Here are easy-to-follow directions to 50 basic yoga poses and 10 sequences to practice at home, all photographed in full color. It's a book that challenges the larger issues of body acceptance and the meaning of beauty. Most of all, it's a book that changes the paradigm, showing us that yoga isn't about how one looks, but how one feels, with yoga sequences like "I Want to Energize My Spirit," "I Need to Release Fear," "I Want to Love Myself." Jessamyn Stanley, a yogi who breaks all the stereotypes, has built a life as an internationally recognized yoga teacher and award-winning Instagram star by combining a deep understanding for yoga with a willingness to share her personal struggles in a way that touches everyone who comes to know her. Now she brings her body-positive, emotionally uplifting approach to yoga in a book that will help every reader discover the power of yoga and how to weave it seamlessly into his or her life.

A complete guide to developing strategies for physical activity programs that meet the needs of every client--from healthy athletes to people with physical, pathological, social or psychological limitations. Exercise Management: Concepts and Professional Practice provides an interdisciplinary approach to developing, prescribing and delivering high-quality physical activity programs. Explore how to individualise programs to encourage more people to participate in regular physical activity and enjoy the many health benefits. This useful reference is designed for both students and practitioners involved in developing and managing physical activity, exercise and health-related fitness programs. Learn how to do the following: -Overcome the challenges of encouraging people to become and remain active. -Develop programs consistent with each person's goals and capabilities. -Promote and maintain successful physical activity programming in diverse settings and situations. -Develop the professional skills needed to manage exercise facilities and employees. This user-friendly text includes case studies that clearly illustrate key concepts and terms in practical application scenarios based on real-life experiences. Plus, glossaries at the end of each chapter and at the back of the book keep key terms within easy reach and make referencing during study or lecture quick and easy. The study questions and real-life activities included are great tools for independent study. They'll encourage you to seek further information, develop practical skills and observe professional practice with first-hand insight. You'll also find suggested readings divided between cited references and additional resources that will give you the edge when studying topics in more depth. With Exercise Management: Concepts and Professional Practice,you'll have the knowledge and tools to ensure that the young or old, healthy or infirm develop and maintain physically active lifestyles.

This lively, inspiring, and informative book zeroes in on the state of American fitness persistently sedentary, plagued by obesity and issues a clarion call to action that reaches across economic, racial, and educational lines. Toni Yancey finds that despite our best intentions and repeated resolutions to exercise, as well as a 40-year investment in fitness education and counseling, physical activity in all levels of society continues to plummet. In a warm, reader-friendly narrative that draws on solid scientific research, personal experience, and her own poetry, Yancey calls for a radically different approach: one that respects diversity and is grounded in the cultures of those most at risk. Instant Recess proposes regular ten-minute exercise breaks that utilize music and dance and are easily incorporated into school, work, and community life. Rather than encouraging unhealthful habits like cigarette breaks or high fat snacks, these instant recesses make the active choice the natural one. Here is a new paradigm for fitness and public health that promises vitality, well being, and a greater sense of community demonstrating, as Yancey argues, that what's good for the waistline is good for the bottom line.

The studio was decorated in the style of Don't Be Afraid, We're Not a Cult. All was white and blond and clean, as though the room had been designed for surgery, or Swedish people. The only spot of color came from the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway into the studio. In flagrant defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, I removed my shoes, paid my ten bucks, and walked in . . . Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love. Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good--even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife--and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy. Poseris unlike any other book about yoga you will read--because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent,Poseris for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.

Do you want to help your middle and high school students become more resilient and patient, acquire new skills, and sharpen their problem-solving abilities while feeling competent and good about themselves? If you do, then TeachingLifetime Outdoor Pursuits is the ideal tool for you. Editors Jeff Steffen and Jim Stiehl are nationally known physical educators with extensive experience in outdoor education teaching and teacher training. They brought together some of the nation's foremost experts in specific outdoor pursuits--such as bouldering, caving, rock climbing, and orienteering--to craft a book designed for physical educators who either have outdoor programs or who want to use outdoor activities in their traditional PE programs. The 12 topics included in Teaching Lifetime Outdoor Pursuits represent the outdoor pursuits that show the greatest growth in traditional PE programs. With each pursuit, students can challenge themselves and spend time outside of the customary classroom context while sharing an adventure with their teachers that can create a profoundly different student-teacher relationship. Teaching Lifetime Outdoor Pursuits is a comprehensive resource whose ideas and content can be incorporated into a traditional PE program regardless of geographic location. The activities for each pursuit align with NASPE content standards. For each pursuit, you are given detailed information on equipment needed, basic skills and techniques required, teaching strategies, safety considerations, and additional resources.

Can an apple a day keep the doctor away? The A-Z Guide to Food As Medicine addresses food folklore by exploring the scientific findings about physiological effects of over 250 foods, food groups, nutrients, and phytochemicals. Today, health care providers are fielding more questions from patients on how to help improve their nutritional health, which in turn can help to prevent disease. The guide is a dictionary-style reference intended for use by health care professionals to quickly and easily access information about the bioactive components in the foods and how diet can be manipulated for health benefits.

One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its advent signals a new form of "colorblind scientific racism"--a repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research. Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of bodies--without incorporating social and economic inequalities into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.

A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry--both black and white--through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep--the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together.

In Laila's kitchen, nutrition is King, but flavor is Queen. In her debut cookbook, Laila shows readers how to make knockout meals in ways that work with their busy and demanding lives, so they can lose weight without feeling hungry or missing flavor. Food for Life shares more than 100 of Laila's favorite recipes. Whether you're new to cooking, busy feeding a family, or ready to take control of nutrition, Food for Life will be your guidebook! In Food for Life, you'll find real-life recipes to bring simple, healthy, hearty, and satisfying food to the table, such as: - Coconut Chicken Curry - Oven-"Fried" Chicken - The Greatest-of-All-Time Burger (her father's favorite) - Heavenly Lemon Yogurt Cake - Not-Your-Mama's Sweet Potato Pie

Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere. After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country's best neurology departments--all in the hopes of understanding his mother's condition. Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood.

A mother-daughter duo reclaims and redefines soul food by mining the traditions of four generations of black women and creating 80 healthy recipes to help everyone live longer and stronger.

James Beard Award-winning chef Bryant Terry's first cookbook, a vegan homage to Southern, African American, and Afro-Caribbean food One of the foremost voices in food activism and justice, Bryant Terry brings soul food back to its roots with plant-based, farm-to-table, real food recipes that leave out heavy salt and refined sugar, "bad" fats, and unhealthy cooking techniques, and leave in the down-home flavor. Vegan Soul Kitchen recipes use fresh, whole, healthy ingredients and cooking methods with a focus on local, seasonal, sustainably raised food. Bryant developed these vegan recipes through the prism of the African Diaspora-cutting, pasting, reworking, and remixing African, Caribbean, African-American, Native American, and European staples, cooking techniques, and distinctive dishes to create something familiar, comforting, and deliciously unique. Reinterpreting popular dishes from African and Caribbean countries as well as his favorite childhood dishes, Named one of the best vegetarian/vegan cookbooks of the last 25 years by Cooking Light Magazine, Vegan Soul Kitchen reinvents African-American and Southern cuisine -- capitalizing on the complex flavors of the tradition, without the animal products. With recipes for: Double Mustard Greens & Roasted Yam Soup; Cajun-Creole-Spiced Tempeh Pieces with Creamy Grits; Caramelized Grapefruit, Avocado, and Watercress Salad with Grapefruit Vinaigrette; and Sweet Cornmeal-Coconut Butter Drop Biscuits and many more.

"Measured, funny, and fascinating... If you need vitamins to survive (you do), you should read this book." Scientific American ("Food Matters") Most of us know nothing about vitamins. What's more, what we think we know is harming both our personal nutrition and our national health. By focusing on vitamins at the expense of everything else, we've become blind to the bigger picture: despite our belief that vitamins are an absolute good--and the more of them, the better--vitamins are actually small and surprisingly mysterious pieces of a much larger nutritional puzzle. In Vitamania, award-winning journalist Catherine Price offers a lucid and lively journey through our cherished yet misguided beliefs about vitamins, and reveals a straightforward, blessedly anxiety-free path to enjoyable eating and good health. When vitamins were discovered a mere century ago, they changed the destiny of the human species by preventing and curing many terrifying diseases. Yet it wasn't long before vitamins spread from labs of scientists into the realm of food marketers and began to take on a life of their own. By the end of the Second World War, vitamins were available in forms never before seen in nature--vitamin gum, vitamin doughnuts, even vitamin beer--and their success showed food manufacturers that adding synthetic vitamins to otherwise nutritionally empty products could convince consumers that they were healthy. The era of "vitamania," as one 1940s journalist called it, had begun. Though we've gained much from our embrace of vitamins, what we've lost is a crucial sense of perspective. Vitamins may be essential to our lives, but they are not the only important substances in food.

Millions of people visit Whole30.com every month and share their dramatic life-changing testimonials. Get started on your Whole30 transformation with the #1 New York Times best-selling The Whole30. Since 2009, Melissa Hartwig Urban's critically-acclaimed Whole30 program has quietly led hundreds of thousands of people to effortless weight loss and better health--along with stunning improvements in sleep quality, energy levels, mood, and self-esteem. The program accomplishes all of this by specifically targeting people's habits and emotional relationships with food. The Whole30 is designed to help break unhealthy patterns of behavior, stop stress-related comfort eating, and reduce cravings, particularly for sugar and carbohydrates. Many Whole30 participants have described achieving "food freedom"--in just thirty days. Now, The Whole30 offers a stand-alone, step-by-step plan to break unhealthy habits, reduce cravings, improve digestion, and strengthen your immune system. The Whole30 prepares participants for the program in five easy steps, previews a typical thirty days, teaches the basic meal preparation and cooking skills needed to succeed, and provides a month's worth of recipes designed to build confidence in the kitchen and inspire the taste buds. Motivating and inspiring with just the right amount of signature tough love, The Whole30 features real-life success stories, an extensive quick-reference FAQ, detailed elimination and reintroduction guidelines, and more than 100 recipes using familiar ingredients, from simple one-pot meals to complete dinner party menus.