How to track your money

Intentional Spending

>> Avivah, could you share more details about how you track and budget? It’s one of those things we know we should be doing but never do. I’d love to get a better handle on tracking and budgeting, but even the idea overwhelms me. <<

I so much understand this! The more time that’s gone by without tracking, the more overwhelming it feels.

There’s a huge emotional relief that comes when you get clarity about what’s going on with your money. Even when you think it doesn’t make a difference to you not knowing how much you spend on what, there’s an energy drain from ignoring something that you know you should be paying attention to.

Get ready to do some homework – give yourself a week to get this done. Starting is the hardest part; once you’ve started, you’re on your way to bettering your financial situation so don’t put this off.

Step 1 – The first thing to do is to print out the last three months of your bank statements. Some people recommend twelve months and this is ideal since you can see your yearly spending pattern, but I think three months will give you a good idea and isn’t overwhelming.

You’re going to track two things: your income and your expenses. You can do this with pen and paper (that’s what I do) but a spreadsheet is a good option if you are inclined, and it’s nice to have the math done for you. Some people use budgeting apps; I’ve seen many recommendations for the YNAB (You Need a Budget) and Every Dollar trackers. They both have free versions. My husband once bought the paid version of YNAB and said it was very good, but obviously, it’s just a tool and if you don’t use it, it’s not going to help you. An advantage of the apps over a spreadsheet is the interface with banks in the US but I don’t know of apps that interface with Israeli banks. (If you know of any, please share that with us in the comments!)

Step 2 – Make a list of whatever income you have – salary, freelance, child benefits, disability payments, alimony, etc. Add that up and write your total income for the month, for each of the three months.

Step 3 – Now make a list of all of your expenses. You have two kinds of expenses, fixed and variable. Fixed expenses are fairly stable and predictable from month to month; variable expenses fluctuate from month to month.

Here’s a list of fixed expenses:

  • mortgage/rent
  • property tax
  • utilities – water, sewage, electricity, gas
  • insurance – car, life, house, health
  • communication – internet, phone, mobile services
  • building maintenance fee (vaad bayit)
  • tuition
  • day care/babysitter
  • extracurricular activities/tutoring
  • house cleaner
  • therapies
  • bank fees
  • debt repayment

Variable expenses:

  • food
  • take out/restaurants
  • baby supplies – diapers, etc
  • pet supplies
  • makeup/cosmetic procedures
  • haircuts
  • medical expenses
  • dental expenses
  • home maintenance
  • car expenses – repairs and maintenance
  • gas (for car)
  • transportation – buses, trains, tolls
  • clothing/shoes
  • computer maintenance
  • appliance/furniture purchases
  • holiday expenses
  • gifts
  • vacation

These aren’t going to include every possible expense, so add your own category if you find something that you spend on isn’t included above.

Now, total up the expenses in each category for each of the three months. Then total all of the monthly expenses for each month to get a total for your monthly spending.

You’ve done it – you’ve faced your worries about what you’re going to find, and you’ve tracked your expenses. Now give yourself a huge pat on the back for your accomplishment!

Once this is done, you’ll have solid information to work with to create your budget.

Is there anything that surprised or discouraged you? Don’t worry about it. This is just a starting place. There’s plenty of change possible to get you where you want to go.

Make a commitment to get this done in the next week. You may dread thinking about it but once it’s done it will be a relief and it will really help you.

Avivah

The little stuff really makes a difference

Intentional Spending, Self-Growth

Everyone wants to hear about a hack that will save them thousands a month. But there are very, very few suggestions like that out there.

If you want to cut your expenses, there are almost endless ways to do so. The problem is the small things seem so small and inconsequential that most people think it’s not worth their time and effort.

The truth is the little details add up and add up and add up. I can think of so many small things I do, and each one by itself doesn’t seem like it matters, but my ability to save as much as I do is a result of these small things combined.

I love frugality. I think it’s an incredible tool and for me it’s been expansive and empowering. It’s so unfortunate when people look at frugality as deprivation and doing without. That’s not what it’s meant to be and I understand the avoidance a person may feel if that’s what they think it’s going to be for them.

Frugality is about knowing what you want and spending your money on what matters most to you, so you can have the quality of life that you desire.

For example, for us it was really important that I stay home with our children, and I’ve been home full-time for the last 28 years even when we’ve had a very modest income. Many people will tell you that you need two incomes to make it, especially with a large family. Frugality made it possible for us to have the luxury of a big family, avoid debt and have a rich quality of life.

Your money is like a leaky faucet. Those little drips of water seem like a small amount, but they will run up your water bill quite a bit! And if you save those little bits of leaking money, over time it adds up to your benefit.

We were working with a small budget and a large family for a long time and as the years have gone by, our income has gradually gone up and our resources have grown. It’s been like a slow moving snowball that picks up more and more speed as it continues downhill. I wouldn’t be where I am now without all of those small, consistent steps, day after day, year after year.

Consistent small actions will lead to big results. I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago that we would have been able to pay off as much of our mortgage as we have – I mentioned how much we have left to one of my married sons last night and he was taken aback by how small the amount was – but we kept putting extra towards the principal and it’s been exciting and almost magical to see the loan amount and loan length melting away.

I’m going to write about different frugal suggestions and tips, and encourage you to think about what you can apply to your own lives. Everything won’t be for everyone but don’t make the mistake of dismissing the suggestions as not being big enough to make a difference. They absolutely will add up. As the saying goes, “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.”

Avivah


What I feed my family these days – carnivore/zero carb/low carb

Healthy Living, nutrition

>>After your last post I have so many questions.
1. How do you feed your little ones? Are they also on a zero carb diet? I have little ones who won’t touch eggs, so I’m trying to figure out if I can easily make a zero carb diet work for our whole family, particularly breakfast meals.2. Isn’t it more expensive to eat a zero carb diet, particularly with eating kosher meats?3. What would I give the kids for snacks while traveling? <<

My family is meat heavy, but some have no carbs, some minimal carbs and some moderate carbs.

I’ll preface with my perspective on eating. I don’t try to make carnivore foods that imitate high carb treat foods; I don’t experience any benefit in that for me. I’m changing my thinking about eating just as much as I’m changing the food I eat, and part of that shift is to see food as tasty fuel rather than entertainment or something to fill a space inside.

I eat like a queen but it’s simple and filling. Likely it will seem boring to read about; can it really be that simple? Yes, it really can. I’ve gotten clear on what I like and what feels good, and I stick with that.

I eat mostly ground meat, usually as hamburgers or meatballs, and hot out of the pan I top them with ground raw beef tallow. The heat of the meat partially melts it and it’s so delicious and incredibly filling. I usually eat a half kilo for a meal and eat twice a day. To keep costs down, I fill in with chicken wings and eggs but if cost were no issue I’d only have meat. My dairy intake is low. Occasionally I’ll have some cheese but I get a twinge in my hip a day or two later when I do. I sometimes have sour cream with sunnyside up eggs cooked in butter. That’s about it.

My husband started eating like this a couple of months after me, so it’s been 9.5 months. (He ate strictly zero carb for two and a half years several years ago.) He eats almost the same as me, except he prefers roast beef to ground meat and has more eggs than I do. Twice a week we prepare two or three roasts, slice it all up once it’s cooked and he heats up the amount he wants to eat at a meal. He used to have butter but after going zero carb realized it was the cause of breathing difficulties at night (who would have thought?!?). He made ghee (clarified butter) but that still wasn’t ideal for him so now he doesn’t have any dairy at all and he no longer uses an inhaler.

My fifteen year old son asked if he could join us in eating this way; I don’t remember exactly when he began but I think it’s been about three months. My only hesitation was cost – I’d love to have everyone in the family eat this way but I can’t yet stretch my budget that far. His daily breakfast is eight eggs in butter, an individual container of sour cream and now that they’re in season, an avocado. He prefers sour cream with 27% fat content, but since the 15% sour cream is much less expensive, he eats that as well. He usually has chicken wings, ground meat or roast later in the day. His comprehension of gemara and thinking skills have become notably sharper and his 30 year old chavrusa has commented on the change.

My twelve year old has been eating like this for 4.5 months. Earlier on I made more involved foods to pack for his lunch box like cold cut wraps and chicken bread, and every day tried to make different dishes. Like me, he’s settled into what he likes and it’s pretty similar from day to day: chicken wings, meatballs and hardboiled eggs. Very occasionally I send tuna or egg salad, cottage cheese and sour cream. We’ve seen some significant health improvements for him, he’s calmer and it’s easier for him to transition from one activity to another, and his teachers have commented about how fast he learns things now. His adherence has been good though he does sometimes eat higher carb foods out of the house, and sometimes has fruit at home.

He and my husband prepare a carnivore platter to take to shul on Shabbos mornings so he has something to eat instead of everything else served, which is almost exclusively white flour and sugar. This is some combination of hot dogs, cold cuts, meatballs, steak bites and devilled eggs (people around them have wanted to eat from their platter because it’s so appealing!). It’s very impressive how he sticks with this when surrounded by everyone else eating the standard kiddush fare.

Now for the three younger kids, they love, love, love meat and chicken. I send them standard lunch box fare – a sandwich or two, a fruit, a vegetable, sometimes a hardboiled egg or cheese. Before they leave in the morning all four of them have either chicken wings or hardboiled eggs, sometimes meatballs. For months I’ve started the day by cooking a pot of hardboiled eggs while cooking the meat or chicken main for ds12’s lunch box. When they saw there chicken wings that didn’t go into his lunch, they would ask to have them and it’s turned into a regular preferred breakfast for them.

On Shabbos mornings they have cottage cheese and sour cream with chopped fruit mixed in.

The three boys get school lunches that include a protein, starch, cooked vegetable – ds12 and ds8 bring them home and eat when they arrive. Ds12 just eats the protein. Ds7 gets lunch at school but dd7 doesn’t and as soon as she walks in the door, informs me she’s hungry and asks to make herself meatballs. Today I said I’d make her eggs instead, and she specified she wants meat eggs, not cooked in butter, so I cooked two eggs in tallow and crumbled in a meatball and she was happy.

The younger three have fruit as a snack, and dinner is usually low carb. It’s an ongoing challenge for me to make a meal that adapts well for ds12, and lately I’ve been making low carb meals that all of the kids eat.

Here’s our dinners from the last week- I make large quantities and the children eat as much as they want.

  • Sunday – tuna toasties (tuna, homemade mayo, diced pickles, mixed and then grilled on bread – no bread for ds12, just the tuna salad)
  • Monday – ground beef with sauteed cabbage
  • Tuesday – chicken giblets, sprouted lentil stir fry (carrots, onion, fennel, zucchini) – ds12 didn’t have the stir fry
  • Wednesday – thick chicken egg drop soup
  • Thursday – egg pizzas (large omelets with tomato sauce and olives on top)
  • Sunday – ground beef moussaka

For those who include dairy and/or don’t eat kosher, there are many more combinations possible.

As far as cost, some people would eat less expensive or more expensive hechsherim than we do and that would affect the price. Many people have said they don’t spend more eating carnivore than they did previously, since they no longer have to buy all the other items. I’m a very frugal shopper and I’m spending more on groceries than I did in the past.

When eating meat, there’s a satiety factor that can is significant and surprising. There’s much less need or desire for other foods, and as a result, the kids stay full longer and request fewer snacks after a zero carb meal. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that if I add a vegetable to my meals, then I feel more hungry and eat more meat with my vegetables than I would have if I only had the meat alone. It’s counterintuitive but that’s my experience, and it seems similar to what I see with the kids.

It’s been interesting for me to see their taste buds shift, particularly since when the twins came to us a year and a half ago, they were used to cookies for breakfast and jello snacks after school. I think part of their eating preferences is due to seeing two parents and two older brothers eating like this, so they have a very positive association with it and want to eat what we eat.

If you don’t serve eggs, you have dairy, fish, meat and chicken left. I’ve let go of serving stereotypical ‘breakfast’ food – what makes hamburger okay for dinner but unappetizing for breakfast?

Sometimes I want to make more variety for them and look up all kinds of ideas, but our children so strongly prefer plain meat and chicken that the response to my efforts hasn’t been very gratifying. They’re happier with a chicken wing than with all the different muffins and quiches and pancakes, so I stay with what they like.

When we travel, we make the same kind of things we have at home – meatballs and hardboiled eggs are easy. We took a bunch of these when we travelled for my son’s wedding in Jerusalem. There are foods you can easily purchase like cheese sticks, meat sticks, hot dogs and cold cuts (they have some sweetener added so not ideal but still a better option than other things). I’ve also made muffins that are a combination of eggs and ground beef and other ideas, but keeping it simple really is working best for us.

Avivah

A hike and aging in reverse

Healthy Living,

Today I went on a lovely and very rigorous hike.

I haven’t gone hiking for ages. I used to join a group of women regularly for hikes when living in Beit Shemesh but it’s been five years since I’ve had that opportunity.

As much as I enjoyed hiking, as time has gone on my desire to participate has gone down quite a bit. Until a year ago, I was experiencing pain in my right hip, left knee and plantar fasciitis on the sole of my left foot that was getting worse as time went on. I didn’t know what made it hurt but I knew that walking any distance made the pain more likely and staying off my feet kept it at bay. So I managed my pain by avoiding triggers.

Additionally, sometimes without any warning my right leg would go out from under me. It’s as if it didn’t catch when I would stand up or take a step. Just for a moment, not enough to cause me to fall, but enough to cause discomfort. It was very unnerving.

In January last year I began eating a zero carb/carnivore diet, and these pains completely disappeared. The hip pain has sometimes briefly returned when I don’t adhere to zero carb guidelines, and a couple of times in the last year my leg hasn’t ‘caught’. I’ve never had the knee pain or plantar fasciitis return even a smidge.

When I heard about the trip, I didn’t think about not going because pain isn’t part of my considerations any more. Until I was on the middle of the hike I didn’t think of how I used to feel not so long ago.

The hike was surprisingly rigorous, with a lot of steep and narrow paths. In one place we needed to use hands and feet to climb up, going almost on all fours with hardly room to place a foot. And at the end was a very steep extended section of a mountain that we climbed.

I did it all easily, staying at the front of the group the entire time, and not feeling any need to pause or rest at any point. It wasn’t until someone mentioned her walking stick helps her compensate for her knee pain that I was reminded that this is a hike I wouldn’t have been able to participate in.

After the first serious ascent, I looked down the way we had come and reflected that I never would have made it this far if I hadn’t changed my diet. If I had joined the hike, I would have gotten stuck at the ascension point and had to return on my own without completing the hike. I don’t think I physically could have ascended the paths that I did today, even if I was willing to suffer a lot of pain. I could just picture my dread seeing the climb ahead of and realizing that I wouldn’t be able to do it. (I took my dog with me, and even he had a hard time with the ascent.)

Today I was climbing without strain, without pain and with agility; there was no point I felt even a twinge of discomfort. I didn’t even feel sore or strained from the exertion afterward.

I feel very grateful to be enjoying a level of health and wellness that I thought was behind me, and to have turned back the hands of time. It feels like aging in reverse.

Avivah

Track your money, budget your money

Intentional Spending

I haven’t been actively budgeting in recent months so I’ve spent some time in the last couple of days remedying that.

Though I haven’t been budgeting, what I have been doing is tracking our expenses. Tracking is knowing what goes in and out of your account, and is something you must do to be a good steward of your money.

Here are a few things I noticed when tracking our expenses:

Last month I noticed that our mortgage payment went up 630 shekels – and our mortgage is fixed so it shouldn’t have gone up at all. I looked into it and for some reason the bank started charging us for home insurance – despite having a different insurance provider since 2023. When our insurance agent checked this for us, it showed that our paperwork was all in order and the necessary notifications had been made to the bank long ago, so we’ll get our money back. But if I didn’t track our expenses, the bank would have continued to automatically deduct this amount every month for years.

This week I noticed that a transfer I made to a different bank didn’t show up. It turns out that there were two account numbers and I sent it to the wrong one – I corrected that and the money is now in the right place.

Two weeks ago I saw that money that was supposed to be reimbursed to us by the health clinic hadn’t come in by the latest date they told me to expect. I went back into their office, and within two days the outstanding 850 shekels was in our account.

Several months ago, the horseback riding stable we had one meeting with charged us for three lessons for two children (ie six total lessons), and one lesson for another – hundreds of shekels for lessons that never took place. I got that refunded as well, and moved the kids to a different ranch for lessons.

A couple of months into the academic year, I noticed one of the tuitions wasn’t being deducted. My husband called the yeshiva and let them know they hadn’t activated the automatic withdrawal plan we had set up. If we hadn’t realized that, at some point they would have realized we weren’t paying and we would have accrued a high outstanding balance.

My husband once ordered an Adobe product. Months later, we were still being charged a monthly fee of 45 shekels for something he had forgotten about and never used – he cancelled it and we’re no longer being charged that fee.

We have another ongoing monthly expense, a charitable donation for a cause that we committed to for a year – I don’t know how long we’ve been donating for but it’s been a lot longer than that. I was glad to contribute initially but now I’d like to shift our giving to a different cause.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of things that I found, but some examples of the kind of things that come up when you track your money. What you learn when you track your expenses can save you a lot of money.

Ideally tracking includes tallying the total spent each month in each area of spending (eg, food, utilities, clothing, health, leisure, etc) so you know what you are spending your money on.

In October we reached the financial goal I shared with you last year, which was to pay off the smaller but higher interest loan of our two mortgages. (When we refinanced the track that was adjustable to a fixed rate, the two tracks of the mortgage were separated into two loans rather than one). It was an ambitious goal and tracking was critical to our success, because I controlled for the expenses that would have otherwise drizzled out with nothing to show for them, and all of that extra money in addition to the savings went to the principal of our mortgage loan.

Now I’m thinking about what I want to set as the next financial goal. It might be paying off the second mortgage loan, it might be putting it towards something more investment oriented. I’m still reflecting on that; there are pluses and minuses and I have to confront my own conservative tendencies and ask myself if that’s serving me as well as possible. Whatever I end up doing, it will benefit our finances for me to tighten up my money management even more and actively budget our money.

Let me share with you what the difference is between the two. Tracking is noting all of your expenses after the money is spent, and knowing how much you spend in each area.

Tracking is a critical preliminary step to getting your finances in order. If you’re not tracking, it’s likely you don’t have an accurate ideal of where your money is going and your money is leaking out.

Once you’ve tracked your spending, budgeting is the next step. Budgeting is looking forward, and determining how much you’ll spend in each area for the coming month. When our finances didn’t have much wiggle room, I had to carefully budget and there was no such thing as not having a budget established in advance. There’s no way we would have avoided going into debt and had an expansive life without being very on top of the details.

Budgeting is when you ask yourself, “Although I’ve spent a certain amount in a category in the past, is this really the amount I need to spend? Can I trim my expenses in that area and funnel the difference into savings? If so, what amount do I choose to allot for each area that will allow me to meet my financial goals?”

Tracking shows that I spend a certain amount of money each month on food. Budgeting is when I decide to spend the amount I want to spend, and to do whatever I need to do to keep my spending limited to that amount.

Budgeting feels very different than tracking; it’s proactive, intentional and powerful. It’s when you commit to yourself, “I’m going to set my goal and I’m going to reach it!” A good budget is a wonderful financial tool. I’m setting some parameters in my budget that will challenge me and am looking forward to seeing if I can jump over what feels like a high bar that I set.

Avivah

Prices are going up but we’re still living in good times

Intentional Spending, Self-Growth

I’ve been thinking a lot about money and frugality lately, particularly with the price increases that went into effect.

The following costs increased in Israel as of January 1, 2025:

  • property tax: 5.29% increase
  • electricity rates: 3.8%
  • water bills: 3.4%
  • Value Added Tax (VAT): 1% increase (this is added to every purchase in Israel, other than produce)
  • National Insurance contributions: rates will increase from 0.4% of income to 1.2%, a 0.8% increase

Tax credits will be frozen, we’ve been told public transportation costs will go up, food will continue to go up – everything is expected to get more expensive. That’s not such a pleasant thought, particularly as we’ve experienced inflation and rising prices in the last few years.

I’ve read a number of articles about the price increases and the message of every single one is that they are going to negatively impact our society. It doesn’t resonate with me to tell people how much worse off they’re going to be, because I don’t like narratives that turn you into victims. It never benefits you.

You have choices in every situation that can improve your situation in some way. Sometimes life is hard, even very hard, but there are still better or worse ways to think about and deal with your situation.

My approach to these increases is to ask myself, and a question I encourage others to ask if they’re concerned about prices going up, how can I make the coming year as good or better than the one that just ended? Is it possible? I think so and that’s my goal for the year to come. For that to happen I’ll need to be more intentional about goal setting, budgeting and spending.

When people complain that things just keep getting worse and never get better, I wonder if they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, as we live in a time of unprecedented abundance.

You have clean running water and indoor plumbing; chamber pots and outhouses aren’t the norm. You can take a hot shower inside your own home. You dress in clothes washed in a washing machine, you don’t boil huge pots of water to do the laundry or scrub it down at the river’s edge. You turn on your stove and oven with a flick of a dial – my great grandmother had a wood stove and cried with happiness when she got a gas stove. The physical effort you need to expend on a daily basis to provide for your needs is miniscule compared to the past.

You have stores filled with a variety of food products unimaginable to past generations and can find just about everything, regardless of seasonality. You have large quantities of inexpensive foods in every store in your country. You don’t have to stand on food lines waiting for hours for your one allotted loaf of bread, only to find out that there’s none left and then you need to stand on the next line for your allotment of potatoes for the week. You can buy whatever quantity that you want.

Clothing and household goods have never been less expensive and more easily acquired. You often don’t even have to leave your home – click on the computer to order and it arrives at your door a day or a week later. I have a clothing order that’s supposed to come today that I ordered from overseas less than three weeks ago; in the past my orders came within a week and I feel as if something’s not right for it to have taken so long to get here! When we get used to luxuries, we take them for granted.

Thrift and second hand stores are filled with items that are in excellent condition, often unused. My daughter volunteered at a clothing gemach and told me the quality and quantity of donations is so high that they don’t keep anything missing a button, needing any kind of repair or not in perfect condition or out of date. That reflects a level of material abundance that didn’t exist thirty years ago.

So being grateful will make you a happier person. Being more content and positive about life is worthy of the effort on its own. But when it comes to money, it’s not putting more money in your pocket, is it?

Maybe it can. When you feel grateful for what you have, you feel less entitled and more willing to consider different options. When you focus on all that you have, you need less. When you recognized you need less, you buy less. When you buy less, you have more money to put into savings. And that happens without feeling deprived and unhappy.

Avivah

Our family Chanuka party

Parenting

It’s customary for families to have a family party on Chanuka and since we have several married children who will be having family parties on the side of their spouse (and those families have more married children who will be having parties for their families…), it’s a logistics issue to find an evening that everyone can come to. I didn’t want to wait until the last minute and not have an evening everyone was available, so six weeks ago I connected with my daughter in Jerusalem who usually does the hosting to plan a date.

Happily, all of the other family parties coordinated with our date – one son had one on Saturday night, one son and one daughter had a party on Sunday night, we had our party Monday night, and one son has a party on Wednesday night.

When children get married, the relationship with them changes and that continues to shift with time. Every family will have their own dynamic – ours includes living far from all of our married children, and having a wide range of ages that include children who still need a lot of supervision. Our married children visit periodically for Shabbos, but as time goes on and their families grow, naturally they come less frequently.

My husband and I discussed what we want our relationship with our married children to look like, and agreed that we don’t want to rely on them coming to visit as the only time we see them. For us to visit each family individually is right now not realistic, due to distance and work/school scheduling for everyone. Sometimes our married children get together and my husband and I agreed when they do this we’d like to make the effort to attend.

Last year attending the family Chanuka party was impossible, as the twins were so much in emotional transition that being in a group of people would have been overwhelming and been stressful for all of us. This year we’re in a different place and really wanted to be there, to spend time with our grandchildren and married children.

One daughter is in the US with her family, one son stayed at yeshiva and one daughter-in-law wasn’t feeling well, but otherwise everyone was there. And it was so, so nice to be together with them all.

It was low key and pleasant. We had a shared meal and everyone contributed something (except us, unfortunately the main dish I prepared was forgotten at home).

My husband planned an activity to do with the younger children, and exclaimed to me afterwards about how engaging all of our grandchildren are, and and how much he enjoyed spending this time with them.

We were pleasantly surprised that our younger four children were calm and engaged appropriately the entire time with hardly any need for input from us. That’s a Chanuka miracle of its own – that could never have happened even six months ago.

My youngest married daughter is a career coach and coordinated in advance with my husband a Chanuka-themed guided expressive drawing activity for the adults that she did at the end of the evening. When asked about it in advance I said I didn’t think this was the best venue for an activity like this because parents would need to be busy with their children, but I was completely wrong about that. The kids were busily and constructively occupied with the craft materials we brought while we did this activity. It was interesting to see as each person shared their drawing afterwards how reflective of their inner selves and aspirations each was.

It’s a lot of driving for us to get there – three and a half hours in driving rain on the way there, over two hours on the way back; we spent four hours in Jerusalem and got home at 2:30 in the morning. Today will be a day that I anticipate a lot of tiredness in the younger children that are likely to result in behaviours they’ll need guidance managing.

But it was worth being together with all of these amazing human beings who are our family. I’m so proud of each and every one of them, and my husband and I never stop feeling amazed and humbled by them all.

Avivah

My thoughts on cancer screening

Healthy Living

I’ve had kids home the last couple of weeks almost every day for one reason or another so it’s taken me time to get this post out to you.

Before I get into the topic, since it’s the first day of Chanuka and every year people ask me for my recipe for doughnuts, I’m linking it here for you so you don’t need to search. It’s heartwarming to know that some of you have been making this recipe since I first posted my recipe here thirteen years ago!

****************

I’m going to continue to respond to questions asked about doing screenings for cancer. I’d like to start by addressing an underlying attitude towards screenings that you may not have considered.

The thought behind the need to do screenings, is that there are all of these scary things that can happen to us, to any of us, any time, randomly, and we need to take every precaution to catch them before they bring us down. Inherently, that leads you to think of yourself as a potential problem waiting to happen.

For me, thinking in this way would lead me to living in a perpetual state of low grade anxiety and fear, worrying that something could be wrong with me and running to get tested to reassure myself that I’m okay. Instead, I choose the baseline position that I’m a healthy person. This is not from a place of denial, but I actively choose to view myself as strong, healthy and capable; it’s empowering and psychologically healthy .

>> sometimes it is important to do preventive testing. My 40-year-old sister-in-law decided to go for a mammogram only because her close friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and it scared her. My SIL had no symptoms whatsoever and was healthy and energetic. Sadly, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Boruch Hashem after chemo and double mastectomy and oophorectomy, she is in remission, but had she not done that mammogram, things could have been very different. <<

I am so glad to hear that your sister-in-law is doing well, and I’m not questioning in any way if this was the right decision for her to make.

I’m going to share some thoughts for you to consider – I’m asking you to not reflexively respond but to let the points sit with you for a moment.

I’ll begin with briefly referencing a summary by the American Cancer Society of concerns with the effectiveness and accuracy of mammograms that include false negatives, false positives, overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

You can read the link, but I’ll sum it up more briefly here: One in eight breast cancers aren’t picked up by the mammogram, leading to a false negative. That means there are women who have done the testing who think they’re fine who actually have cancer.

Over a ten year period, half of women having mammograms will get a false positive – they will be told they have abnormal results when they don’t have any cancer whatsoever. That leads to further testing and treatment, as well as stress and anxiety.

Finding a cancer that wouldn’t cause problems is referred to as ‘overdiagnosis’. There are cancers that wouldn’t be found and wouldn’t grow or spread if there hadn’t been a screening for them; they will not become life-threatening. It is possible to be completely unaware of the presence of the cancer, and live a long and healthy life, untreated.

Treating cancers that wouldn’t cause any problems is called ‘overtreatment’. When a cancer is found, a doctor can’t know which will cause problems and which won’t, so he will advise treatment for all of them. That means that a lot of women will unnecessarily undergo cancer treatment.

And finally, just because they find a cancer when it’s small doesn’t mean it can be treated successfully.

Mammograms also expose women to radiation. While the phrasing that is consistently used for all sorts of medical procedure is ‘the benefits far outweigh any risks’, there are a number of reasons for a woman may question if this is a screening that is actually to her benefit to participate in.

If you’re interested, here’s an article from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine: Mammography is dangerous and should be abandoned.

————————-

Let’s say that you do testing that shows you have cancer, and now you have to do something about it. Now what?

The standard of care is chemotherapy and radiation, and this is what doctors are obligated to recommend. It’s considered malpractice for them not to suggest that.

Chemotherapy is poison. The goal is for the chemotherapy to be more toxic to the cancer cells than the human receiving it, and kill the cancer cells before it kills the human. That’s how it works. It’s brutal, and the person who is ‘cured’ is one who can survive chemo. One day we’ll look back with horror on this barbaric treatment but currently this is our standard of care.

Another aspect of standard care is radiation therapy. According to the American Cancer Society, radiation therapy used to treat cancer is linked to the further development of cancer. So it’s a treatment that contributes in the long term to what it’s supposed to be eliminating in the short term.

Here’s an emotionally charged point to consider: When a person is diagnosed, treated for cancer and then dies, we make the presumption that it’s the cancer that killed them. We don’t question if the treatment contributed to their death, and if they would have lived longer and with less suffering without the chemo and radiation.

According to the genetic disease model, there’s not much to do in the way of prevention other than screening and preemptively removing body parts. People do what they feel they need to do to save their lives, and if this is the best option presented to them, then of course they’re going to do that.

Are the only ways to treat cancer with chemotherapy, radiation and the removal of affected body parts? Is there anything more effective and less toxic that can be done? Are there any preventative steps that can be taken?

Cancer researcher Dr. Thomas Seyfried has written extensively about cancer being a metabolic disease. This is counter to the prevailing view of cancer as a genetic disease. Metabolic therapies that lower blood glucose and elevate ketones will quickly reduce tumor growth, extend lifespan and in some cases cause complete remission.

Several years ago I was on a group hike with a bunch of women, and got to chatting with someone I hadn’t met before, who mentioned she doesn’t give her children sugar. Naturally, I asked her why. She told me as a lab researcher she’s seen what happens to cancer cells in a petri dish when they are given sugar- the cancer explodes. And she just can’t give that to her children to eat.

What fuels cancer cells? Glucose and glutamine. That’s sugar. Glucose immediately goes into blood stream and into the tumor cell. A tumor cell is one that has out of control division. The only way to shut down growth of these cells is to get rid of their fuel and transition the body to a fuel that the cancer cells can’t use to grow. Starve the cell and the cancer can’t continue to grow.

Unfortunately, cancer patients are generally told they can eat anything they want, and cancer wards tend to be filled with sugary foods. It’s interesting to consider the ethics of giving a patient chemo to kill the cancer cells, giving them no dietary guidance to reduce or eliminate sugar, and then following up their treatment with a hospital tray of sugary foods.

The highest risk factor for cancer are processed carbohydrates in your diet; the constant barrage of these foods is the highest risk factor for all of the most common diseases. Elevated blood sugar leads to systemic inflammation. Yet not only is that the standard diet, the dietary pyramid recommends high carbohydrate consumption as the foundation of a healthy diet.

***Edited to add – I am not suggesting that if someone is diagnosed with cancer, all that is necessary to treat it is a dietary approach. Not at all. There are other alternative therapies that I would personally look at in that case. What I am stating is that prevention is better than the cure and it would be wise to take a preventative and preemptive approach to minimize the development of systemic inflammation in our bodies that leads to all kinds of diseases. As such, diet is an important preventative factor to be aware of.***

Massive amounts of money have been spent on the ‘war on cancer’ but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s doing much good. Cancer rates are steadily rising – right now it’s predicted that one of every two people will develop cancer by the time he is 85. That’s downright scary, and if you believe it’s screening that will save your life, those statistics will probably send you running to do some testing to be assured you’re not one of those two people.

Though previous generations of my family had a high cancer rate and that would seemingly dictate that genetically I’m at high risk, I take a different approach. We live in a world of toxins and eating well won’t eliminate the poisons in our foods, air, and all the products that are part of our every day lives (for example, microplastics in just about everything). However, if I can change my diet and eliminate the highest risk factor, it makes sense to me to do that.

I’m not a passive victim waiting for cancer to strike me. There are things I can do to make myself less of a likely target, and I’d rather do them than participate in screenings and the follow-up treatments with all of the risks they entail.

Avivah



More about preventative health screenings

Healthy Living

In this post I’m going to give a broader view of my perspective, my reasoning and thinking behind my decision to decline routine health exams at this stage of my life.

The first reaction to me choosing not to do routine health screenings may be to think that’s somewhat reckless and irresponsible.

What I think is irresponsible is handing over your health and the quality of your life to someone else. I want to use resources thoughtfully and judiciously, not just because someone from the doctor’s office calls and tells me because of my age it’s time to do something.

I’m not giving medical advice to anyone else. I’m certainly not denying the value of accessing those with more experience and knowledge as partners in your health. I advocate and practice a preventative lifestyle in which education and knowledge are central, and don’t believe in being oblivious to or ignoring issues.

If you have a concern, go get it checked out. Then if a health concern is revealed that you need to address, research and make a decision based on all of that knowledge as to what is best in your situation.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to take responsibility for your own health. That is part and parcel of my mindset and how I live. I appreciate any and all help from others, but try not to expect others to save me from myself.

>>As for having health checks such as blood tests, mammogram over age 40, blood pressure and more, unfortunately they are vital and save millions of lives daily. It would have been so easy and ideal if health was all about how we feel, though many illnesses begin silently and erupt suddenly, without the person ever having previous noticeable health issues or discomforts. If those tests are available and don’t provide side effects, we should be grateful for them…<<

Please don’t think I’m picking on the person whose question I am responding but since people often make statements like this – are you certain that millions of lives are saved daily as a result of these checks? Statistically it’s hard for me to believe that claim is true.

Here are some questions I would suggest you consider:

  • Is it possible that sometimes these tests are inaccurate or flawed?
  • Is it possible that these tests/or treatments have side effects?
  • Is is possible that the treatment for whatever has been diagnosed may cause a worse outcome than taking a different approach?
  • Do you assume that if the doctors are doing it, it must be right, it must be documentably the best course of action, and it must lead to the best results?

Perhaps some of your presumptions as to the benefit of widespread allopathic testing and treatment may be flawed.

The third leading cause of death in the United States is medical error. It is preceded by cancer and heart disease, both strongly impacted by diet. Based on those brief facts, doesn’t it make sense to: 1) invest a lot more time learning about and implementing proper nutrition so you can take a preventative approach and minimize the chances of dying of cancer and heart disease, and 2) stop using the medical system as the first stop for every question or concern so as to minimize the danger of medical error and prescription drug misdiagnosis or contraindication?

When it comes to routine tests, I want to know what the purpose of the screening is, how it works, what the accuracy rate is, and then consider what steps will be taken if a health condition is uncovered.

The screenings are generally for signs of cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Here are more questions: What leads to cancer? What leads to heart disease? What leads to diabetes? None of them suddenly or randomly pop up, even if a sudden diagnosis may lead us to believe that.

Are any of those things you can control? Are there any things you can change about what you’re doing to lower your likelihood of getting them? What are those changes? Can you proactively make those changes before getting a hard diagnosis?

There is so, so much that you can do to improve each area of your health. You can participate in testing, or preempt the testing and take proactive actions before there’s a reason for concern, which is what I do.

I believe you can pay attention to how you feel and you don’t need to rely on someone else to tell you how you’re feeling, any more than a woman in labor needs someone else looking at the monitor to tell her she’s having a contraction.

>> I am not sure that not going to health care clinic just because we feel good and healthy. I did not know I had high blood pressure until I had to go to doctor. So how safe, by not going, will be?? I prefer to be checked as I’m getting closer to 60’s. <<

If you feel comfortable doing these screenings, then by all means, do them! Again, I’m not telling anyone not to do something they think is important.

I’ll address the point about not knowing you had high blood pressure, but first, some things to consider.

Here are questions I would ask about high blood pressure/hypertension: What causes high blood pressure? What are symptoms of high blood pressure? How can you treat high blood pressure? What happens if you don’t treat high blood pressure?

I’ll help you out and save you some research time 🙂 -primary hypertension is caused by hyperinsulinemia, the excess of insulin in your blood stream.

Here’s a link to a typical cardiologist’s recommendations for lifestyle changes if you have high blood pressure. What does it say?

“Avoid smoking.
Eat a heart-healthy diet, especially one that is low in salt.
Exercise under the directions of your doctor.
If you’re overweight, talk to your doctor about weight loss options.
Limiting alcohol consumption to 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men.
Manage stress.”

These are standard guidelines that are telling you, if you don’t smoke, drink alcohol in larger quantities, if you move your body, manage your stress and eat a nutritious diet (important to note that the diet recommended in the link on that site will not improve high blood pressure so obviously all ‘healthy’ diets aren’t created equal and in my opinion avoiding salt isn’t a good idea), then it’s highly unlikely you’re going to have high blood pressure.

As someone who follows those healthy lifestyle recommendations, is it irresponsible for me to not regularly get my blood pressure tested? (In case you’re wondering, my blood pressure has always been on the low side of normal.)

Back to not knowing you had high blood pressure – eventually, a person with high blood pressure will show symptoms. That goes back to my comment in my last post about being in touch with yourself and noticing if something changes in the state of your health.

Now that you know you have high blood pressure, what are you going to do with that information to empower yourself and become a healthier version of you?

>>I have the same question. Aren’t there health conditions that are easier to treat if caught early, and that don’t present symptoms at early stages? I’m curious to understand your perspective<<

Absolutely it’s easier to treat something if you learn about it sooner than rather than when it’s more advanced. I am one hundred percent a proponent of being proactive and not waiting for issues to show up, or treating something when it’s small rather than waiting for it to get bigger.

The question might better be asked, is screening the only way to be proactive and careful about your health? Is screening really the best way to be careful about your health?

Let’s think about diabetes (which is reversable), for which we do screening. What are some subtle signs of blood sugar that’s getting too high? Weight gain, moodiness/anxiety, rising blood pressure, cavities/dental infections, frequent infections. There are signs that something isn’t right before you get diabetes. It doesn’t suddenly happen.

If I stop eating foods that raise blood sugar, is it irresponsible of me to not screen for pre-diabetes? If I rarely get sick, have stable moods, no dental issues or infections of any kind – am I being neglectful not to do this screening? Or am I doing something that others can also be doing to take meaningful preventative action?

Is there something that concerns you about your health, something that is a low-grade worry but not something serious enough to check out? Pay attention to that. Don’t ignore that inner voice. Ignoring things doesn’t make it go away. What are you worried about?

You’ve seen me share the kind of questions I ask to get clarity about what steps to take. You can ask yourself those same questions, and then do something proactive to improve your health. I want you to feel empowered to take action to help yourselves, not to put the power onto a health provider or a test and certainly not to pretend everything is fine and ignore symptoms you may be experiencing.

————————-

Now the final question that I listed in the beginning is, what if a health issue is revealed? What will you do?

Hopefully all your scans and testing will come out just fine. But there’s a possibility that they won’t at some point in your life. Then what?

Then you’ll really need to take the time to ask some questions and learn, because the traditional allopathic choices will be medication that invariably comes with side effects or a medical procedure that you might want to avoid. These are valid options if you’re comfortable with them, but since my goal is health and wellness and not the management of disease, those aren’t the first line strategies that I would adopt.

That doesn’t mean declining treatment and wasting away. Fortunately there is always more than one way to treat a health issue, and some will be more effective and less toxic than others.

However, to be able to say, ‘thank you for the information and I’ve chosen a different way to address my health concern’ isn’t easy to do. Not at all. You’ll really need to be confident in the information and resources you’ve gathered to stand your ground, and at the core, you need to believe in yourself as a competent and capable person. You need to be able to trust yourself as able to make good choices for yourself.

As you can see, I don’t reflexively say ‘no’ and refuse to participate in standard medical screenings. Seeing myself, rather than my doctor, as responsible for my health puts the onus of responsibility on me. A lot of people feel that that’s too heavy a responsibility for them to take on, but whether you actively accept the responsibility or not, it’s your life and it’s therefore your responsibility.

Avivah

PS – I’ll address some other questions asked relating to cancer in my next post.

You as the expert in you

Self-Growth

I had a fascinating conversation yesterday.

A woman I spoke to shared that she been struggling in a certain area and was looking for resources to help her. As she looked in depth at different programs available, she began to feel concerned about the meta message inherent in the various products she was looking at. That message was, you can’t improve or grow or figure out an issue you’re having without a professional telling you how to do it.

In the end, through a lot of introspection and conversation with a trusted family member, she was able to work through it on her own. She found it very empowering to come to a positive resolution on her own, and after getting clarity on what the real issue was, is confident that the program she was considering enrolling in wouldn’t have helped her deal with it. She would have missed out on all that personal development if she had gone the route of enrolling in a course.

Obviously, there are lots of great courses out there that can enrich someone’s life. And since effective marketing is often about telling people how badly off they are without your product and why you’ll be better with it, there’s going to be a message of ‘buy this for your life to be better’.

She wasn’t questioning if these courses can be valuable at times, and obviously there are times that you can benefit by turning to professionals for targeted assistance. She was expressing concern that the overall message is disempowering and leads people to stop tuning in to and trusting themselves.

Someone else recently shared with me that she’s taking yet another personal development course and she ‘hopes this one will be everything I want it to be’. ‘Of course it won’t,’ I told her with a smile.

How do I know that? Because she has a lot of things to deal with in her life and there’s no course that will give her the results she’s hoping for. The answers she’s looking for are inside of her, and she’s not going to find them by taking one more course and one more and one more and one more.

There are two different components in this message of disempowerment:

  1. You need professionals to help you improve your life and can’t trust your own instincts and thoughts, because you aren’t a professional.
  3. You start looking for the answers outside of yourself and stop seeing yourself as the locus of control. If something isn’t working, then you need to find a different resource, a different advisor – it’s about them, not about you.

This is an incredibly disempowering attitude to adopt, but it’s one that is becoming more prevalent and we don’t even realize the subliminal messages coming from all directions that lead us to think like this.

As a special needs and foster mom I regularly speak with therapists, psychologists and social workers who express surprise at my understanding of human psychology and child development, and ask me how I know what I know.

Here’s something mind bending to consider: Did you know that you can learn a lot about a topic, even acquiring a high level of knowledge in an area, without getting a degree in it?

While we may intellectually believe this, we somehow still tend to believe that the average person needs an ‘expert’ to tell him how to best live his life.

I got a call a month ago from my health clinic letting me know that the tests I haven’t done that they recommend for someone my age are building up and strongly encouraging me to come in to have them done. I told the nurse calling that I’m concerned about my health, take appropriate steps to care for my health, and if I feel in need of testing in any area of concern, I’ll come in.

Then she asked me, “But how can you know you’re healthy if you don’t do the testing?”

Her response is a perfect example of the ‘expert is outside of you’ paradigm. It’s irrelevant how I feel or what I know after a half a century as to what living in my body feels like – if I haven’t taken a test to tell me I’m okay, I can’t be okay.

In my view, how do I know I’m healthy? I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself, I live in my body – if I’m free of pain, if everything works well, if I think clearly, if I have energy – I’m healthy. There are symptoms that indicate that imbalances are beginning to present in one’s health; disease doesn’t occur overnight. If you’re paying attention you’ll generally notice when something isn’t feeling right, when something is changing.

It’s unfortunate when we accept what others tell us about ourselves as more valuable than what we think or know. Even when you turn to the experts, a doctor can’t make you healthy, a therapist can’t heal your childhood traumas, a coach or course can’t give you self-esteem- they can only support you in taking care of yourself. They would be the first to tell you that you have to do the heavy lifting yourself; you have to make the effort and invest in yourself.

Often you can make those same or better efforts for yourself with your own insight and your own research, as the woman I referenced at the start did. Your success is in your hands; don’t discount who you are and what you know.

When you selectively turn to someone for assistance in furthering your development in any given area, remember that the magic is in what you do with the knowledge they share.

Avivah