Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson

Action's Antidotes

2022 just flew by so fast, it’s as if we’re playing life at twice the speed. At the beginning of the year, we set goals for ourselves. Things that we want to tick off and put a checkmark on, things that we want to accomplish.I would be shocked if "health and wellness" didn’t make it to your resolution list. Because it would be a waste not to prioritize your health, especially in times like this. And our guest for today would probably agree with me on that matter. Meet the registered dietitian, mother, podcaster, and cancer survivor, Regina Topelson. She enjoys exploring health and wellness from a variety of perspectives and is eager to share her experiences and knowledge with you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about our health, because our health is very integral to everything we want to pursue in life. We keep ourselves in good health, well, you know, we’re more likely to be more energetic and we’re actually also more likely to be in good mental health. There’s kind of a connection between the two. And, of course, we must take care of our bodies in order to have the energy to pursue whatever it is that’s inspiring us. My guest today has a perspective on the whole field of health from multiple angles. Her name is Regina Topelson and she is a registered nutritionist, a news contributor as well as the host of her own podcast that features people who have dealt with some tough health challenges, mostly cancer. --- Regina, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. It’s so great to be here. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure. Thank you, Regina, and first question I want to ask is let’s start from beginning. What inspired you to make this health and wellness, you know, your life’s pursuit? Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, both of my children were born with food allergies. Twenty years ago, that was still kind of an unheard of type thing. It was heard of but it was very rare. What made my kids extra special is that they had multiple food allergies. Prior to that, it was one kid with one food allergy, like peanuts or tree nuts or eggs or something like that or dairy, but mine had multiple all rolled into one child. And so we kind of went down this path in our family where we really had to try to figure out how to keep these little guys alive, you know? Yeah. So, when my oldest was eight and my youngest was, I think at that time, five and a half, I decided that I wanted to pursue becoming a nutritionist, what I ended up doing was becoming a registered dietitian, but what I thought of in a broad spectrum was I wanted to follow this traditional kind of path with education and evidence-based practices for health and wellness because what I had was a lot of moms coming to me and saying every time I feed my son bagels, he breaks out in a rash around his mouth and my husband thinks I’m crazy but I see it every time he eats bagels, you know what I mean? And so I thought, you know what, if I’m going to be counseling and helping people in my community, then I really should be well versed at this. I should be a professional, not just a lay mom. I don’t know why that wasn’t enough for me. It should have been enough for me, it could have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I wanted to have the professional background for it. How much emphasis should be placed in any pursuit on developing some form of traditional education, whether it be going back to school for a degree or whether it be some sort of a certification program? I guess the question is how much do we need to know what the world knows versus kind of the other school of thought being learning by experience, which is just, “Okay, I’ve observed this, I’ve observed that, I started doing this, I interview people,