Life
New year resolve already wilting? Take a kinder approach using our experts’ tips
March 13, 2025 18:11
By this stage in the new (secular) year, many of us will have started a new diet then stumbled into a cream bun, stopped going to the gym after a few sessions and swapped the juicer for the cocktail shaker. We’re only human, after all.
But what are the long-term changes that will boost our wellbeing without putting a strain on our willpower? As 2025 gets going, I’ve been searching for experts whose common sense and humanity will help us to find a better way of living with ourselves and the world. What I’ve discovered might well be a gentler, kinder way to help us make positive changes inside and out.
Dr Jenny Goodman is an ecological physician, meaning she looks at the environment and nutrition for the root causes of illnesses. Since retiring from clinical practice, she’s turned her attention to prevention rather than cure. “Nowadays, one in two people get cancer”, she says. “A hundred years ago, it was very rare indeed.” Dr Goodman identifies one key culprit: toxins in the world around us. “There must be environmental factors factor at play, because our genes don't suddenly change like that.”
Her latest book, Getting Healthy in Toxic Times, explains how each of us can lower our risks. First, she says, take a deep breath – don’t panic. “If you know where the pollution is coming from, you can avoid 90 per cent of it.” And the most effective place to start is your own home. She suggests swapping air fresheners, laundry tablets, washing-up liquid and surface cleaners for natural and herbal versions that don’t use harsh chemicals.
She also recommends avoiding plastic, filtering your water and eating organic wherever possible. “I was astonished to discover was that there are thousands of published papers in proper pukka peer reviewed journals documenting the links between pesticides and heavy metals – such as mercury, lead, aluminium, cadmium – and cancer as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis. They get into us because we breathe the air, we drink the water, we eat food that's grown in soil that may be contaminated. So, eating organic is a way of protecting yourself against all of that. And I just can't emphasise enough how important it is.”
She describes organic food as the most valuable form of health insurance. “If you're eating organic, you're eating pure, healthy food, which is what your great-grandparents ate. If you're eating non-organic, your food has been sprayed with insecticides that are directly derived from nerve gasses used in the Second World War and the First World War.”
Getting Healthy in Toxic Times – an ecological doctor’s prescription for healing your body and the planet by Dr Jenny Goodman (Chelsea Green Publishing UK £16.99 also Kindle and audiobook)
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Trying to avoid toxins in food and environment sounds straightforward enough, but cleansing your thoughts is a tougher challenge. Therapist Steff Roeg, who sees the body and mind as deeply interconnected, recommends some simple steps for clearing the mental “fug” that can clog us up in the fag-end of the winter.
“The best thing you can do is just put your coat on and walk, even if it's just around the block, because it takes you out of your mind,” she says. “Your mind can be like a washing machine, these thoughts go round and round and round, and you start to find yourself stuck in your head. It’s an important thing to be able to drop down into your body, because your body is full of wisdom.”
Roeg, a psychosynthesis therapist and breathwork facilitator, says that though walking in nature is excellent for mind and body, there are alternatives. “I suggest something called ‘separating senses meditation’, which takes about eight minutes.
“Simply go outside and just look at everything quite intensely. Start with your sense of sight by looking around you for a couple of minutes to orientate yourself, then start listening. After a moment you can make out individual sounds. Then you might touch a leaf, or the brick of a wall, and really concentrate on that sense of touch. If you are in the park, you'll touch the grass. Concentrate on each sense for two minutes. And it's amazing how it can clear your head, lift your mood and make you feel revitalised.”
The health service doesn’t really understand what it means to be Jewish and fails to make the connection between our identity and health. When it comes to Jews, the NHS doesn’t collect data about ethnicity, so has no information on which to base policy.
Amongst staff, misunderstandings about the range of observance are common. Some Jewish patients might prefer a single sex ward, might mind being touched by an opposite sex doctor or nurse, and not want appointments on a Friday or Saturday, for example. Jewish patients are also more likely to be BRCA positive and to suffer from Crohn’s and 46 other illnesses linked to recessive genes .There is little understanding of how faith or ethnicity might affect care needs, and communication is poor.
That is the damning conclusion of a report published at the end of last year, yet it seems have passed into the public domain almost unnoticed. The hard-hitting enquiry spells out the problem, “There is a systemic lack of understanding, recognition, and therefore consistent accommodations for the Jewish community with the NHS.” And though the report provides some impressive examples of good practice, it concedes that gaps in provision are plugged by a huge range of voluntary organisations.
For those inside the NHS none of this was new. “From a Jewish health professional point of view, there were no surprises,” says Dr Fiona Sim of the Jewish Medical Association (JMA), “but I think it was refreshing that people have been so forthcoming with their evidence.” Dr Sim, who was an advisor to the study, said she was very impressed with the way researchers got to grip with unfamiliar subject matter and that the comments of non-Jewish NHS staff were especially revealing, “They're saying ‘We don't know anything about Jews. We don't know the questions to ask, this is not what we're trained for or taught.’”
Dr Sim says that the critical thing is what happens next. “The recommendations are sound, but you don't want a report like that to either become a doorstop if it's printed, or just sitting on somebody's hard drive with nothing happening to it. There are a lot of things that could be implemented without that much difficulty like statutory services working in partnership with Jewish service providers and their users. And ensuring that health service staff receive appropriate training so they can respond better to the needs of Jewish patients. They need to understand the diversity of needs of their Jewish patients.
So, will all the hard work just be kicked into the long grass? The JMA have asked for a follow-up meeting with NHS executives. Watch this space.