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BlogFibroids Twitter Chats
June 8, 2018

Highlights from our Fibroids Twitter Chat with Olivia Haltman

Highlights from our Fibroids Twitter Chat with Olivia Haltman

On 30th May, we held a Fibroids Twitter Chat featuring Olivia Haltman, the founder of OH Services. We had a very interesting and insightful discussion about the emotional impact of fibroids.

If you missed this conversation you can read through the highlights below and if you have any questions, please do leave them in the comments section at the bottom of this page or send us an email

Are you interested in this topic? Then please do sign up to our fibroids mailing list here

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
May 9, 2018

Episode 13: Public Health Project Spotlight – Brothers Thrive

Wednesday 9th May, 2018

In this episode we put the spotlight on an interesting public health project, Brothers Thrive, a community-based mental health project aimed at black men in New York.

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
Fibroids NewsNewsOH Services
April 25, 2018

Our May #FibroidsChat is with Olivia Haltman

Our May #FibroidsChat is with Olivia Haltman

We’re delighted to announce that our May Fibroids Twitter Chat is with Olivia Haltman on 30th May 2018 at 7pm, GMT (that’s 11am PST, 2pm EST and 2pm AST).

Olivia Haltman is an accredited Integrative Humanistic Counsellor and an Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapist.  She is also a member of British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), EMDR UK & Ireland and BAATN (Black and Asian Therapist Network).

Olivia set up OH Services in 2010 to support people who want to develop their lives on a personal level and reach their best potential. She is passionate about self-development and helping others take positive steps on their life journey. ​

She has worked in the Mental Health Sector for over 10 years, supporting people from all backgrounds, genders and lifestyles.  She believes everyone is different, with unique needs and aspirations so she uses an integrative approach to apply and integrate the most suitable solutions for her clients.

​She also applies (where necessary) a holistic approach to help clients enjoy the essential benefits of wellbeing and healing processes.

We’ll be discussing the emotional impact of fibroids and how women with fibroids can improve their emotional wellbeing.

Join us for a very important and useful exploration of how fibroids impacts a women’s mental health. To take part in this conversation find us on Twitter on 30th May and use the hashtag #FibroidsChat

You can find out more about Olivia and the services she offers here: www.ohcounsellingservices.com

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
March 28, 2018

Episode 7: We talk to counsellor Olivia Haltman about the emotional impact of fibroids

Wednesday 28th March, 2018

In this week’s episode we had a really interesting and informative discussion with Olivia Haltman about the emotional impact of fibroids and how women with fibroids can improve their emotional wellbeing.

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
March 21, 2018

Fibroids Chat with Olivia Haltman

Fibroids Chat with Olivia Haltman

We’re delighted to announce that our May Fibroids Twitter Chat is with Olivia Haltman on 30th May 2018 at 7pm, GMT (that’s 11am PST, 2pm EST and 2pm AST).

Olivia Haltman is an accredited Integrative Humanistic Counsellor and an Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapist.  She is also a member of British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), EMDR UK & Ireland and BAATN (Black and Asian Therapist Network).

Olivia set up OH Services in 2010 to support people who want to develop their lives on a personal level and reach their best potential. She is passionate about self-development and helping others take positive steps on their life journey. ​

She has worked in the Mental Health Sector for over 10 years, supporting people from all backgrounds, genders and lifestyles.  She believes everyone is different, with unique needs and aspirations so she uses an integrative approach to apply and integrate the most suitable solutions for her clients.

​She also applies (where necessary) a holistic approach to help clients enjoy the essential benefits of wellbeing and healing processes.

We’ll be discussing the emotional impact of fibroids and how women with fibroids can improve their emotional wellbeing.

Join us for a very important and useful exploration of how fibroids impacts a women’s mental health. To take part in this conversation find us on Twitter on 30th May and use the hashtag #FibroidsChat

You can find out more about Olivia and the services she offers here: www.ohcounsellingservices.com

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
BlogGardening
February 14, 2018

Improving our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: Growing Tomatoes

Improving our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: Growing Tomatoes

Welcome back to our gardening and health blog series where we’ve been taking you on a personal journey as we explore the health and wellbeing benefits of gardening for ourselves.

Today, Abi Begho is back and this time she’s sharing her experience of growing tomatoes. She discusses the ups and downs, the need for patience and the joy of harvesting your first fruits.

We absolutely love tomatoes in my house. We eat them almost every day – in salads, we make Nigerian stew with them, we use them in omelettes, stir fries, sandwiches and much more. You name the dish and we’ll put a tomato in it!

When it came to deciding what to grow in our vegetable garden, tomatoes were first on our list and the first thing we tried.

When I started looking into tomatoes, I must be honest, I soon realised I really didn’t know a thing about them even though I eat them every day.

I was shocked at the variety of tomatoes out there, I was just aware of cherry, plum and what I call “normal” tomatoes, but this is just the tip of the ice berg. I was shocked to learn that there are over 700 varieties of tomatoes, they come in quite a few colours, not just red – yellow, orange, pink,  purple and black, and they have some very interesting names  – Beefsteak, Big Boy, Pink Brandywine, Pink Girl, Lemon Boy, Golden Jubliee and  Better Boy.

Deciding what variety to grow

When it came to deciding which tomato variety to grow, because there were so many to choose from, I decided the best thing to do would be to extract the seeds from a local variety that we buy in our super market all the time. This means that I have no idea what variety it is (as it’s not listed on the package), but I knew it tasted nice and as it’s grown locally then that suggested to me that it would grow well in our garden (I hoped!).

Although this is how I selected which tomato variety to grow, the advice from experts is to base your decision on more scientific factors – how disease resistant a variety is, how it grows (is it determinate or indeterminate) and the time it takes to mature.

From Seed to Fruit

Once I had decided on what tomatoes to grow, then it was planting time.

My seedlings about a week after planting the tomato seeds

In my last blog I explained that I simply sliced up a tomato making sure each of the slices had seeds in them, buried the slices in soil and watered them and in less than a week my seeds had germinated and I had about ten seedlings growing happily in my container. I was so excited and just couldn’t wait to see the seedlings develop.

I kept an eye on the seedlings and watered them regularly and one week later their true leaves (second set of leaves) had developed, a sign that the seedlings were developing well. At this point I pretty much left them alone, under a tree that got a lot of sunlight (but protected them from the intense afternoon sun here in St Kitts) and watered them regularly.

Tomato Flower

Tomato Flower

When they had outgrown the container, I put some of the young tomato plants in a large pot and the others I planted into my newly created vegetable bed. Then came the test of patience.  One thing gardening teaches you is patience.  Every morning I would go out into the garden and will them to grow, I was so excited every time I saw them develop just a little bit more, it was fascinating.

Two months after planting my tomato seeds I noticed flower buds developing (the very first sign that tomatoes are coming soon) and a few days after that a lovely yellow tomato flower had developed. I thought: ‘yes!  I’ll have tomatoes in a couple of weeks.’ What did I say about patience?  There was more waiting. It took another 6 weeks to get my first ripe tomato and as I type I have 51 green tomatoes growing nicely and waiting to ripen ( ah-mazing!)

Check out the video below to see me picking my second ripe tomato.

Another important thing to mention is that I had to create a support system for my tomato plants. Due to the weight of tomatoes most plants need some form of support to prevent the fruit from weighing them down. There are many options out there and I chose to create a tomato trellis (see picture on the right), I created this using stakes and string. As the plants grew I would tie the main stem loosely to the trellis and weave the leaves horizontally along the string. This, so far (it is still early days), has given the plants some support and training them to grow along the trellis, as well as pruning the plants, has kept them neat and contained.

Challenges

The four main challenges I have encountered thus far are:

Insects – Living in the Caribbean means there are a lot of bugs and insects to contend with and they all seem to love tomatoes as much as I do!  To date, they haven’t caused any major problems, but I did lose two tomatoes to caterpillars who ate them for lunch one day.  I was so sad, it felt like all my hard work had gone to waste, at least it was only two tomatoes . I’ve been keeping an eye out for tomato-eating insects and have flicked a few caterpillars off the plants before they made a meal of the tomatoes.

This is what blossom end rot looks like

Blossom End Rot – I woke up one morning shocked to see two of my tomatoes with dark patches on their bottoms, like they were rotting. I promptly discarded them hoping that they wouldn’t affect the tomatoes next to them.  Then, a few days later, the same thing happened to two more tomatoes on the same plant but in a different location. I was dejected, first insects now some horrible looking disease. After a Google search I learnt that is was blossom end rot and not as bad as it looked.

Blossom end rot occurs due to a calcium deficiency where the plant, for various reasons, is unable to absorb enough calcium for its development. The advice from Gardening Know How is not to worry, it usually clears up on its own, just pick off the affected tomatoes and discard them and make sure the plants get adequate water (not too much though). So, for the moment I am going to just wait it out and see what happens. I’ll keep you posted.

Blossom drop – Last week I noticed that my new tomato flowers weren’t looking healthy at all. They seem drier than the previous set which really thrived and developed into 51 healthy tomatoes. These new tomato flowers are shrivelling up and some have already fallen off the plant without developing into fruit (Nooooo!). I couldn’t believe it. I had so many new flowers which I had hoped would form tomatoes, but alas, it was not meant to be. I hope the next set do better.

After doing some research, I found that blossom drop is common and looking at all the possible causes I have narrowed it down to two which I think could be the culprit:

  • Lack of water – we’ve had some short sharp showers and so I haven’t been watering the plants as regularly as I used to. Reflecting on this I don’t think the showers were providing enough water for my plants as the soil has been pretty dry so I am going to start watering every other day as before
  • Too many blossoms and fruit  – up until now my plants have been developing really well and I do currently have 51 tomatoes spread across 9 plants and a lot of flowers developing (and dying!). According to The Spruce having all these fruit and flowers developing at the same time requires a lot of energy and they will all be competing for a limited amount of energy and food, and only the strong will survive. They state that once the majority of tomatoes have been harvested the problem will resolve, so again, I just have to wait it out.

Playing the waiting game – In this blog, I have mentioned patience and waiting several times and that has been one of my biggest challenges: waiting for something significant to happen. In the whole scheme of things it hasn’t been that long (3 months) to get my first ripe tomato, but at times it has felt like a life-time. Each step does take a while – it took two months from seed to the first sign of a blossom, then from flower to pea-sized tomato took a week, that got me excited, but then it took over a month for that pea-sized tomato to develop into a fully ripened red tomato, but it was so worth the wait – it was delicious!

Why grow tomatoes?

Tomatoes are a great fruit to grow because they are packed with nutrients. They are known for their fairly high lycopene content which has been linked to a reduction in our risk of developing heart disease and cancer. Tomatoes are also rich in vitamin C, folate, vitamin K and fibre, and they contain iron, potassium, vitamin A and vitamin E.

All these nutrients and minerals are excellent for your overall health and by growing tomatoes in your garden you’ll get an ample supply so you’ll get a good dose of nutrients.

Happy gardening!

Well….that was a fairly long blog post (sorry!), but I hope that it gave you an idea of what it’s like to grow tomatoes and some of the challenges you may encounter along the way. Despite the challenges, it has been a lot of fun and very rewarding. I am looking forwarding to harvesting more tomatoes, so far I have only harvested two so there are many more to come. I’ll keep you all updated.

In my next blog I will move on to my okras – the stars of the show!

See you next time and happy gardening!

Some references and more information

  1. Identifying Tomatoes with Blossom End Rot
  2. How to prevent blossom end rot
  3. What kind of tomatoes should I grow
  4. Controlling Blossom Drop 

If you missed our previous blogs you can read them using the links below

  1. Improving Our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: An Introduction
  2. Improving Our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: How I Got Started

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
BlogGardeningGeneral Health
December 12, 2017

Improving our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: An Introduction

Improving our Health and Wellbeing Through Gardening: An Introduction

Welcome to this blog series on gardening and our health and well-being. Over the next couple of months we’ll be taking you on a personal journey as we explore the health and well-being benefits of gardening for ourselves. We’ll tell you how we started, show you our garden, what we’re growing and share some of what we’ve learnt along the way. Today we start off with a quick introduction. Enjoy!

When many of us think of gardening, we think of it as hard manual labour and a chore. We wonder why anyone would spend a weekend in the garden when they could be doing something else. Well, research (and personal experience) has shown that gardening is not only fun but can play an important role in improving our physical and mental health. The benefits are so effective that a whole industry of therapeutic horticulture exists and has been in existence, in some form or another, since the early 19th century.

Thrive, a charity that was founded 35 years ago, uses gardening to bring about positive changes in the lives of people with a disability, who are experiencing ill-health, are isolated, disadvantaged or vulnerable. They describe the health benefits of gardening as:

  • Better physical health through exercise and muscle strengthening
  • Improved mental health through a sense of purpose,  achieving a sense of peace and tranquillity, restoring attention and stress alleviation
  • The development of life skills

Gardening and Physical Health

Gardening is no joke! It can be really hard work. Mowing the lawn, digging, weeding and raking can leave you feeling physically exhausted. This is a really good thing as it means you’re getting some serious exercise.

 A research study published in 2014 showed that digging and raking equated to high-intensity exercise whilst other activities such as weeding, sowing seeds, harvesting, watering and planting transplants were found to be equivalent to moderate-intensity exercise. This means that spending time working on your garden every day could enable you to achieve the government’s recommended amount of physical activity (150 minutes a week), and because of the variety of tasks performed in the garden you’ll be getting both a cardiovascular and muscle strengthening workout.

Regular gardening has an impact on our physical health as the exercise we achieve from it can improve the health of our heart, help with weight loss and reduce our risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, fibroids and a number of other health conditions.

The Mental Health Benefits

Gardening makes you feel good.  The excitement of seeing your seeds sprout , the peace and tranquillity of having some quiet time in your garden, the accomplishment you feel when you harvest your first-fruits and gaining a new-found  appreciation for nature all contribute to improving your emotions and state of mind. This is backed up by research too.

In 2013, researchers published a review of ten high-quality studies on garden-based mental health interventions. These studies all explored the benefits of gardening on people with mental health difficulties. All of them showed an improvement in the symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as a range of benefits including emotional, social, vocational, physical and spiritual.

Gardening and a Healthy Diet

Many people who delve into the world of gardening explore growing their own fruits and vegetables.  Growing your own produce is a fun and rewarding way of introducing more fruits and vegetables into your diet;  it can be a way to introduce a lot of these into your diet as one, say, tomato plant can provide an abundance of tomatoes, meaning your diet can be more plant-based. This type of diet has a number of health benefits including reducing the risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

In addition to this, as you’ll be growing these yourselves you can avoid some of the harmful pesticides that are commonly used in commercially grown fruits and vegetables, avoid genetically modified products and you’ll get very fresh fruit and veg which many have said are tastier than store-bought products.

The Development of Life Skills

To grow anything requires you to develop and utilise a number of skills. These include problem solving (coming up with solutions when your plants don’t look right), patience, discipline, time-management, research (understanding the plant you’re growing), perseverance and a basic understanding of plant biology. Gaining these skills improves confidence and there is the added benefit that some of these skills are transferable to other areas of your life. Being empowered with these skills improves a person’s overall well-being, improving their outlook on life and leading to significant personal development.

Conclusion

Whilst at first glance gardening may not seem that inspiring, when you explore it further you can see the huge benefits it can have on your well-being. So… if you’re looking for a  fun, yet practical way to get fit, active and healthy why not try a bit of gardening. We’re trying it and we love it!

See you next time and happy gardening!

Let us know your thoughts on gardening for health benefits in the comments section below.

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
Mental HealthOH Services
November 10, 2017

OH Services – Improving the mental wellbeing of our community

OH Services – Improving the mental wellbeing of our community

With 1 in 4 people in the UK suffering from a mental health issue, there is a need to find experienced counsellors who provide an effective and high quality service, OH Services does just that.

Founded in 2010 by counsellor Olivia Haltman, OH Services aims to support people through the difficult periods of their life. They are committed to providing a safe, confidential and non-judgemental environment where people can open up and get the support they need.

They provide one-to-one counselling, EMDR therapy, group therapy, workshops and seminars for adults and young people from all walks of life. They understand that people have different needs and deal with traumatic experiences in different ways, and therefore provide a tailored programme of support that ensures the right approach for each individual.

Founder, Olivia Haltman, is an accredited Integrative Humanistic Counsellor and an Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapist.  She is also a member of British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), EMDR UK & Ireland and BAATN (Black and Asian Therapist Network). Ms Haltman has over 10 years experience working in the mental health sector having worked for organisations like Mind and established her organisation to support people who want to develop their lives on a personal level and reach their best potential. Of her approach to tackling mental health issues she says:

“I believe everyone is different, with unique needs and aspirations so I use an integrative approach to apply and integrate the most suitable solutions for my clients. Within my practice, I also apply (where necessary) a holistic approach to help clients enjoy the essential benefits of wellbeing and healing processes.”

OH Services works with a range of clients and issues, and if you’re experiencing some form of anxiety or trauma, or just need someone to talk you through an issue then please contact OH services. You can find their contact details here and for more information visit their website.

 

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
BlogDiseasesNon-communicable diseases
November 1, 2017

The Montevideo Roadmap on NCDs as a Sustainable Development Priority

The Montevideo Roadmap on NCDs as a Sustainable Development Priority

A couple of weeks ago government representatives from across  the world met in Montevideo, Uruguay for the World Health Organisation’s Global Conference on NCDs (Non-communicable diseases, e.g: cancer, diabetes,  cardiovascular disease etc).  The objectives of the conference were: to guide countries on how to reach sustainable development goal target 3.4 by 2030; to launch a new set of global initiatives to help countries accelerate progress in tackling NCDs; to share and exchange experiences; and to discuss how the health sector can be a key example of the benefit of enhancing policy coherence to achieve the sustainable development goals.

Making A Commitment to Tackle NCDs

At this conference governments endorsed the Montevideo Roadmap 2018-2030 on NCDs as a Sustainable Development Priority. By endorsing this roadmap they have made a commitment to take significant steps towards reducing the premature deaths due to NCDs by a third. They recognised that NCDs are one of the major challenges of the 21st century and that progress to tackle them has been uneven and insufficient. The roadmap states that 15 million 30 to 69 year olds per year die from a NCD and 80% of these premature deaths occur in developing countries.  There are a number of challenges associated with tackling NCDs and with this is mind they committed to the following actions:

  • Reinvigorate political action
  • Enable health systems to respond more effectively to NCDs
  • Increase significantly the financing of national NCD responses and international cooperation
  • Increase efforts to engage sectors beyond health
  • Reinforce the role of non-State actors
  • Seeks measures to address the negative impact of products and environmental factors harmful for health and strengthen the contribution and accountability of the private sector and other non-State actors
  • Continue relying on WHO’s leadership and key role in the global response to NCDs
  • Act in unity

Our Thoughts

We were delighted to see world leaders come together and make this commitment and look forward to seeing these actions being taken forward.

We’re particularly happy to see that efforts will be made to engage with a variety of stakeholders. As a small organisation that is passionate about improving the health and well-being of our community we do get frustrated at the lack of engagement with grassroots organisations. We have many times reached out to local and national governments with our enthusiasm and ideas, ready to play a role but have received lukewarm responses or no responses at all. We hope that governments will see the value of working with small organisations and we have been grateful for the funding provided by Croydon Council, Sports England, Macmillan and Eli Lilly for some of the work we’ve conducted on NCDs. We look forward to continuing to work in this area and making our own small contribution.

You can read the complete Montevideo Roadmap below.

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
BlogMoneyVolunteer Bloggers
October 10, 2017

How healthy are your financial habits?

How healthy are your financial habits?

In this week’s blog, our guest blogger, Stacey Mensah explores the health of our finances and gives us all a few  points to consider if we’re aiming to improve our financial health

Welcome back to The Lake Foundation! On this platform you can expect a plethora of articles relating to your physical health and mental health. This week we’re going to do things a bit differently and look at financial health but more specifically, habits concerning your finances. Now for those of you that are still not sold as to why your financial habits are important let me tell you this: according to the Mental Health Foundation being in debt can trigger anxiety or depression, which can open the door to a whole host of other mental and physical illnesses.

In my own experience crafting healthy habits when it comes to finances is about more than having the right systems in place – you need to have will power! And that was not something I had much of. I remember a time when I had saved enough money to clear a credit card. After speaking to my mother, who had managed to clear all her debts off early on in life, I knew that I had to cancel this card. So I called my bank ready to cancel this card, ready to break free, but of course after a 45-minute phone call instead of cancelling the card as my mother instructed, I ended up upgrading the credit account and in a few days I received a shiny new piece of plastic. Suffice to say that some people find it easier to break free from debt but I’m certainly not one of them.

For those of you that are certain that you’re above such behaviour here are a few habits from Sarah Coles, a personal finance analyst, that might have become so ingrained in the way that you handle your finances that you can’t even see past them.

Casually dipping into debt

The odd few times of dipping into your overdraft doesn’t seem bad at first but it does make it easier for you to keep on going back. Sarah notes that the key to this habit is drawing up a household budget and identifying the regular costs that you can cut. This may mean being far more selective when it comes to shopping for groceries, expensive media packages and gym memberships. And for all of the students out there just know that when you’re done with your degree that ‘student’ over draft will be even harder to get rid of because employers unfortunately, won’t be lining up to pay you a six figure salary!

Only paying the minimum amount back on your borrowing

Surviving by just paying the minimum amount each month is how so many of us are lulled into a false sense of security. By paying off the debt at such a slow pace we are indeed just racking up more interest. If you have a significant balance it may be worth switching in in order to cut interest rated for the time being. However, if you choose to do this it’s important that you realise that the switch was simply a mechanism for debt repayment.

 Forgetting about your savings

Forgetting about your savings is an expensive habit to form as rates on such accounts are likely to become less competitive. The best way to avoid such a mistake is to regularly check what you are earning on your savings and if the rate is no longer competitive then it’s times for you to make a switch.

 Putting plans off

 When dealing with your finances it’s so easy to think that your debts are a problem for the future and not for the present. The ugly truth is that soon enough the future you had once envisioned will one day soon become your present, and as you never put a physical plan in place for paying off your debts, they will continue to follow you around like an unsightly rash.

Do you have healthy financial habits? Or, do you think you need help in that area?

Comment down below, we would love to hear from you!

Stacey Mensah is not a financial advisor nor does she claim to be. Before changing the way, you handle your finances it’s important to seek the help of a professional.

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By Lake Health and Wellbeing
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