Dr. Alexis Shields

| A personalized approach to optimizing your health

The 5 lab tests your doctor should be ordering every year (but isn’t)

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5_lab_tests

You are putting yourself at risk if you are not asking your doctor for these tests every year.

Monitoring the progression of your health with blood work each year is extremely easy and vitally important. However, the typical yearly physical is NOT a comprehensive look at your health, and it rarely prevents chronic illness.

Therefore, it is very important that you take preventive health measures into your own hands.

These five lab tests should be a crucial piece of your annual physical, and here’s what you need to know about them:

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The 3 things you can do every morning to reduce stress

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Last week my article titled “A 15-Minute Morning Routine That Will Dramatically Reduce Stress” was published on MindBodyGreen!

Here is what you missed…

“Our bodies aren’t designed to manage the amount of stress we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.

Chronic sleep deprivation. Blaring alarm clocks. Long work hours. Lack of vacation time. Kids’ busy after-school schedules. We’re overweight, undernourished, and badly needing regular exercise in our lives. But with our crazy schedules, who has time?

Your primary goal in establishing a healthy habit is to reduce the harmful effects of stress. Without stress, amazing things happen. Chronic diseases disappear. You look and feel younger. You spend less time sick. No magic pill or fancy technology will ever replace good old-fashioned taking care of yourself.

Luckily, there’s something you can do at the start of your day to reduce the negative effects of stress:

Establish a 15-minute healthy morning routine.”

Click here to read the full article

If you find yourself waking with your mind racing through all the things you need to do for your day, this post is for you. 

Here are some additional helpful resources for creating your 15-minute stress reducing morning routine.

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Grain-free, dairy-free, kitchen-free cookies

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grain-free-cookies

Last week my recipe for the No Kitchen Cookie was published on the MindBodyGreen website!

Here is what you missed…

 “When I moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, seven months ago, I did not anticipate that the typical Thai apartment would have no kitchen!

At first, this seemed like a problem. However, after you discover all the fresh, healthy food readily available outside your doorstep for $1-3 per meal, you start to gain perspective. It is often more expensive in Thailand to cook at home than it is to eat the local street food. 

However, I still miss cooking, especially fun treats from time to time.

Here is a creative way to make cookies with a very limited kitchen. When the sweet tooth strikes, you can quickly whip up this healthier option to processed sugary sweets.”

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1 baby + 2 adults + 2 backpacks + 100 days in SE Asia = my travel heroes

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 infant travel in thailand

Several months ago I met my travel heroes at a breakfast gathering here in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Ty and Sloane left Utah and embarked on an epic journey with Fay, their 8 month old baby, to travel around Thailand, Bali, Cambodia and Vietnam for 100 days, bringing with them only 1 small Jansport and 1 travel backpack. I suddenly felt very sheepish about packing my own brand of deodorant to Thailand.

So, I decided to interview them at the end of their journey, to get all their tips and tricks about traveling with an infant.

This is what I learned from them…

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Learning Muay Thai in Thailand

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kickboxing

Muay Thai is the national sport of Thailand. If you sit down to eat dinner at a authentic Thai restaurant chances are there will be one of two things playing on the television: a truly horrible sitcom about a overly dramatic teenage love triangle OR Muay Thai. Thai professional kickboxers can have upwards of 300 fights during their careers. To put that in perspective, if a professional boxer has 50 fights that is considered a very seasoned career. Nobody fights as much as the Thai. So, people come from all over the world to train in Thailand.

One of my goals this year is to get in the best shape of my life. In one of Shannon’s other lifetimes he trained for 8 years in Vegas and had 2 amateur Muay Thai fights. So he was already planning on training in Muay Thai and I decided to see what it was all about. Three weeks ago I went to my first Muay Thai class at Team Quest Thailand and started the best brain and body workout I have ever had. I knew it would be great exercise because I have done some kickboxing aerobics classes before. But I learned quickly that my Tae Bo skills would be of no use here. 🙂

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