With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by advertisements that make it seem imperative for us to express our love for friends and family with purchased goods. From staples like flowers and candy to bank-breaking jewelry and five-star restaurant reservations, decades of Valentine’s Day marketing have effectively equated love with flashy gifts and showy displays of affection.
Valentine’s Day as we know it in the United States primarily focuses on romantic love, often downplaying or outright excluding the relationships we have with family and friends. Alternatively, the Valentine’s Day equivalent celebrated in many Latin-American countries is “El Día de Amor y Amistad,” or “The Day of Love and Friendship.” In countries such as Colombia and Bolivia, the focus on both love and friendship encourages the celebration of our relationships with families and friends alongside relationships with significant others. Here are some ideas for how to celebrate this Valentine’s Day as your own personal day of love and friendship:
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It’s tough to overstate the benefits of being physically active. Regular exercise lowers the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and more. Research suggests that it also helps fight and prevent depression by releasing endorphins (our brains’ stress-fighters). However, working out often feels like a chore, and getting yours kids to participate can be an even bigger challenge. Inspire a positive attitude toward staying active in your family and show them exercise doesn’t have to be a drag!
Last week, we talked about a central part of our work here at Pinnacle Prevention: food systems in Arizona. Our team has a vision for healthy communities across our state, and our primary way of achieving these food system goals is through systems change.
In general, systems change represents a shift in the way communities make decisions about services and programs, as well as the ways these services are delivered to citizens. This shift is made possible through partnerships and collaboration across communities, including direct community input, stakeholders and agencies. Systems change creates lasting impact on multiple levels of influence. Here at Pinnacle Prevention, much of our work revolves around local food systems in Arizona. We are all part of the food system, though most of us don’t realize it. The food system is comprised of nearly every aspect of food, including the environment in which it is grown, production, demand, processing, transport, and where it is consumed and disposed. Each and every component is complex in its own right. Our mission is to encourage and build healthy, sustainable food systems in our state and communities.
Families in America throw away about 25 percent of the food they buy, often because of expiration dates on food packaging. For an average family of four, this waste is between $1,365 and $2,275 of lost grocery money every year.
Many of us rely on these labels to tell us when it’s time to toss our food, but these labels are actually leading to a huge amount of perfectly edible food being wasted every year. Let’s face it: family mealtimes can be a battle.
Everyone knows how important it is to eat our fair share of greens — everyone, that is, except your child who is scrunching her nose at that side of asparagus, hoping her determined distaste can make it disappear into thin air. It’s easy to get frustrated when you’re having a hard time convincing your children to dig in to their healthy and not-quite-favorable helpings. By making the following practices part of your dinnertime routines, you can make your mealtimes — and picky eaters — happier and healthier. Here at Pinnacle Prevention, we focus on positive approaches to healthy living rather than weight-loss goals or counting calories. When it comes to weight and body image, that means shifting the focus from scales and diets to mindful eating, nutrition and establishing healthy relationships with food.
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