Our culture is really uptight about bathroom stuff, but I joke with my clients that having worked in hospitals, I’m pretty much impossible to shock—especially in that realm. If you’ve ever stayed in a hospital, it might have seemed like every person who came into the room wanted to know if you were passing gas or moving your bowels or making urine. They weren’t just being nosy—those are bodily functions that tell us a lot about the state of a person’s health....

Essential oils are created by glandular structures in the plant, either on the surface or internally. If you touch a lavender leaf, for example, you can smell the essential oil on your fingertips from the external oil glands. With a plant like eucalyptus, you have to break open the leaf to access the aromatic compounds. In either case, when it comes to incorporating essential oils into wellness, it’s often more practical—and accessible—to work with a concentrated essential oil than the raw plant itself....

When working with patients in my practice and online community, I hear a lot of similar comments. In particular: As a board-certified gynecologist, I am uniquely qualified to understand the private suffering that women experience with weight gain and body shame. But even more important, I used to be fat. So I applied my medical knowledge to my own body to free myself of weight gain. And now I want to share my knowledge with you....

A derivative of western Africa, Madagascar, and South Asia, these twisty desert plants love heat and humidity and are incredibly resilient in indoor environments. If your snake plant isn’t getting enough sunlight, it will tell you with droopy and sad-looking leaves. While you should be careful to not suddenly move your snake plant from a dark corner to a high-light environment, you can train it to grow really well next to a window that receives some brighter light....

Oral fixation is the desire to experience pleasure and sensation through your mouth, tongue, and lips—these are some of the most erogenous zones of the body. This can apply to eating, drinking, smoking, kissing, anything really. These can all be ways to experience the same serotonin surges associated with sex and orgasm (e.g., food-gasm). Smoking is also a way to calm nerves, and you get a buzz from the nicotine. If this is a true oral fixation in Freudian terms, it might be responsible for your smoking habit....

As psychiatrist Anna Yusim, M.D., explains to mbg, the idea of manifestation was popularized by Rhonda Byrne’s book and movie, The Secret, describing the universal principle that our thoughts create our reality. “We are what we think, consciously and unconsciously. In other words, what we attract into our lives reflects the contents of our mind,” she explains. Or as spiritual author Shannon Kaiser puts it, “We are all like magnets, both reflecting and attracting what we hold in our thoughts....

And if you’re a heavy sitter, or have stayed even remotely up to date with health news in the last decade, you know that sitting is straight-up bad for us. Taking walk breaks, even short ones, can activate our glutes and lengthen the front of the hips, essentially counteracting the physiological harm of sitting. That isn’t to say that getting up to fill your water a few times a day is going to reverse all the side effects, but we should always be looking for ways to break up our sitting with movement....