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 FITNESS & FITNESS & HEALTHY LIVINGHEALTHY LIVING

Mountain View News Saturday, August 8, 2026


Michele Silence, M.A. is a 37-year certified fitness 

professional who offers semi-private/virtual fitness 
classes. Contact Michele at michele@kid-fit.
com. Visit her Facebook page at: michelesfitness 
Visit her Facebook page at: michelesfitness.

UNLOCK YOUR LIFE


DEHYDRATION DANGER

Summer is here, and so is the heat. Most of us know 
we should drink plenty of water, especially if we're 
exercising or working outside. But what you may not 
realize is that dehydration can become much more 
serious than just feeling thirsty. In some cases, it can 
even land you in the emergency room.

I know because it happened to me.

During July, a friend and I spent nearly two weeks 
transforming my front yard into a drought-tolerant 
landscape. The water company offers a rebate for 
replacing grass with water-wise landscaping, but the 
work has to be completed by a deadline. It was a much 
bigger project than I expected.

Every day we worked for hours in the sun. We ripped 
out the lawn, filled and carried heavy construction 
bags, shoveled dirt, moved large cobblestones, spread mulch, and dug dozens of planting 
holes. It was hard, physical work.

I actually enjoy warm weather. What I didn't enjoy was sweating all day long and feeling 
like I could never drink enough water. I carried large thermos containers with me and 
kept refilling them, yet I still felt like I couldn't keep up with what my body was losing.

A few days after we finished the project, I woke up one night with an odd heartbeat. 
About five years ago, I had experienced a few episodes of atrial fibrillation, also called 
Afib, during a very stressful time in my life. Those episodes stopped, and I hadn't had 
another problem since.

This time was different. I became so weak that I could barely stand. I was extremely short 
of breath and nearly passed out several times just trying to walk to the car. An Apple 
Watch detected Afib and displayed a message telling me to have someone drive me to the 
emergency room immediately.

That's exactly what I did. The doctors confirmed that I was in atrial fibrillation, an irregular 
heartbeat that can increase the risk of stroke if it doesn't return to a normal rhythm. They 
asked me all the usual questions. Do you smoke? No. Do you drink alcohol? No. Lots of 
caffeine? No.

Then they asked one question that made everything fall into place. "Have you been 
dehydrated?"

The answer was absolutely yes.

Even though my yard project had ended several days earlier, my body was still trying to 
recover. I had replaced water, but not enough of the electrolytes I had lost through days 
of heavy sweating. Electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, and magnesium help your 
muscles and your heart work properly. When those levels get too low, your body may not 
function the way it should.

The medical staff was concerned because my heart rate was 123 beats per minute and my 
blood pressure had climbed to 174/154. They ran blood tests, performed an EKG, CT and 
started an IV.

Dehydration even makes drawing blood more difficult. When you're severely dehydrated, 
your blood becomes more concentrated, and your veins can be harder to access.

Not long after receiving IV fluids, my heart rhythm returned to normal on its own. By the 
time I left the hospital, my heart rate had dropped back to my normal resting rate of 53, 
my blood pressure was 119/70, and the cardiologist looked at my final EKG and simply 
said, "Perfect."

Needless to say, it was a frightening experience. The good news is that it also taught me 
a valuable lesson that I hope helps someone else avoid going through the same thing. If 
you're spending long hours outside this summer—whether you're exercising, gardening, 
hiking, or doing yard work—don't wait until you feel thirsty to drink. Thirst is actually a 
sign that your body is already becoming dehydrated.

And remember water isn’t enough. Your body loses those important electrolytes. 
Depending on your activity level and any medical conditions you may have, an electrolyte 
drink, electrolyte tablets added to water, or foods that naturally contain potassium and 
sodium may help replace what you've lost. If you have high blood pressure, kidney disease, 
or another medical condition, ask your healthcare provider what is best. 

Also pay attention to warning signs. Severe fatigue, dizziness, muscle cramps, confusion, 
a racing heartbeat, or feeling like you might faint are not normal. They are signs that you 
need to stop what you're doing, cool down, and seek medical care if the symptoms don't 
improve.

I never gave it a second thought because I kept drinking water. But my body needed more 
than that.

I won't make that mistake again. Hopefully you won’t either. Stay cool, stay hydrated, and 
take the summer heat seriously. Your heart function depends on it.

_________________

Michele Silence, M.A. is a certified fitness professional who offers semi-private/virtual 
fitness classes. Contact Michele at michele@kid-fit.com. Visit her Facebook page at: 
michelesfitness

WHO CARES FOR THE CAREGIVER?

My friend just retired. For the first time in decades, she has a chance 
to catch her breath, and the second she stopped moving, her body 
sent her a bill.

Chronic pain. In her joints, in her back, in places that she'd pushed 
for thirty years of high performance. She's gorgeous, she's fit, she 
doesn't have any wrinkles or a single grey hair; from the outside, she 
looked like she had this all figured out. But underneath, something 
had been festering for years, silently deteriorating in a place no one could see, and now she can 
barely function. "I wish I'd paid attention earlier," she told me. She hadn't been ignoring her 
body. She'd trained herself so well to override her body's signals that they stopped bothering 
to speak up. Her body's message, in effect: Go ahead, ignore me. I'll wait.

When she finally stopped, everything she'd suppressed for decades showed up with a vengeance.

I know this story because I've lived versions of it, and because most of my clients have too. 
We are the helpers: the lawyers, executives, clergy, nonprofit founders, educators, advocates. 
The truth nobody tells you when you're building a career: to be good at the work, you have 
to swim in the mess, their traumas. You learn your clients' worst stories. You see the harm 
done to them and, sometimes, the harm they've done to others. You watch institutions and 
governments cause damage up close, not in the abstract. You carry all of it, every day, while 
staying calm, available, and effective for the next person walking through the door.

Maybe none of those job titles describe you. But if you're the one everyone calls when it falls 
apart, the one who always says yes, the one whose family or team or friends have quietly made 
you the container for everything hard, then you already know this math from the inside. This 
column isn't about a profession. It's about a pattern, and it catches far more people than the 
ones with "helper" in their job title. Getting stuck in helper mode, while putting your own life 
on hold to take care of everyone else's. That happens to lots of folks: parents, the friend who's 
always the strong one, the sibling who holds the family together. You don't need a license or a 
caseload to recognize this in yourself.

Here's a question, sparked by a recent conversation with my friends Lisa and Frank: who 
cares for the person who committed to being someone's person? Not just one person's person, 
sometimes a whole team's, a whole community's. The social worker carrying forty families. 
The teacher who's the only stable adult some of her students have, the nonprofit founder who's 
become the entire staff's emergency contact. Somebody decided, at some point, to be that 
person for everyone else. Unfortunately, too often, nobody’s decided who takes care of them.

You may know this feeling: the disappointment of happiness delayed. You've told yourself 
the joy, the rest, the adventure that would come later after the caseload eased after the kids 
launched. After the mission was secure or the pension vested. And now some of you have 
arrived at "later," the way my newly retired friend did, and instead of ease, you found the bill 
waiting. No energy. No strength. Just the realization that you spent your body and your life 
force on years you can't get back.

That feels like theft.

There's opportunity in that moment. We can’t erase what happened, but we can grab what's 
left. We cannot go back and un-delay the happiness. The only moment we actually influence 
over is the one we're standing in right now. Regret is a story about the past; agency is a decision 
about today. Both can be true; you can grieve what was postponed and refuse to postpone 
what's still ahead of you.

The research backs this up, and it's more specific than "practice self-care." Care that actually 
protects you isn't a manicure, massage, or a bubble bath; it's capacity maintenance, not 
emergency repair after collapse. The body rarely starts with a sledgehammer. It starts like a 
feather, a tickle, a small irritation easy enough to brush off. Ignore it, and it pokes. It nudges. 
Keep overriding it, and a whisper ignored long enough stops whispering; the poke becomes 
a shove, the shove becomes a sledgehammer. Or sometimes it never gets louder at all; it just 
recedes below the surface and festers there, out of sight, looking fine from the outside until 
you finally slow down enough to look and find the mess underneath. Self-care is noticing the 
feather while it's a tickle. Noticing before it needs to become the sledgehammer. It's naming, 
aloud, that none of us were built to carry other people's trauma for years, and that's not a 
personal failing. Our nervous systems are not designed to be the sole emotional lifeline for an 
entire community, even you.

Your body kept score the whole time. It's still keeping it. The good news is the score isn't final.

I help the helpers build a life they actually love, not a performance of having it together, not a 
life that requires you to keep proving your worth through your exhaustion, but an honest one, 
with room for joy and rest and adventure built back in. It starts with radical truth-telling about 
one question: what do you want? Not trained to want. Not what's impressive or earns you the 
martyr's crown. What do you actually want?

Something wonderful happens the moment you actually start paying attention to yourself 
again. And there's more available past that: when you let yourself go further and actually 
conceive of what you want, not just survive but want, you cross from repair and into something 
generative. That kind of vision isn't just about getting back what caregiving cost you. It creates 
life. In my experience, it doesn't stop with you, either; a person who's living from a real vision 
tends to bring everyone around her more fully alive too.

If you don't know what you want yet, it's where the real work starts. If you read this and 
recognized yourself, I'd love to talk with you. I'm offering you a Clarity Call: one hour, an 
honest look at what you actually want and what it would take to have it.

Book your Clarity Call: loriaharris.com/schedule-your-clarity-call

Your life is calling you. All Rise. All Shine. Lori

CHRISTOPHER Nyerges 

[Nyerges is the author of “Guide to Wild Foods” “Foraging 
California,”and other books. He can be reached at Box 41834, 
Eagle Rock, CA 90041, or www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

 INTEGRAL HEALTH


“Patient, heal thyself.”

-- HIPPOCRATES

Around 1999, the Mother Earth News magazine visited 
by wife Dolores and I at our Highland Park home to take 
photos for a cover story we wrote for them. Our topic was 
“Integral Health,” which was our way of addressing the topic 
of “health” not as a single topic of removing illnesses, but 
rather as an integrated whole where the person relates to 
their entire environment.

We were concerned about the direction of the “health 
industry,” a term which typically refers to hospitals and 
clinics and drugs and all the medicines that go along with 
it. It is understandable that someone screaming in pain only 
wants relief. You go to the doctor for that relief.

But what does that tell us? We are not doing our absolute best 
to live our life with the utmost concern for good health. Well, 
maybe we think we are, but we get lazy, or we really like those 
burgers and shakes.

Our basic premise is that all illness is a symptom. The best 
“remedy” is to do everything possible to determine the root 
cause of the illness. Not always so easy. 

When we considered the idea of Integral Health, we 
developed the Integral Health Pyramid as a way to look at 
priorities. (In part, we were influenced by Coach Wood’s 
Pyramid of Success that he taught to his basketball players.) 
The path of Integral Health 
consists of the building blocks of 
the Pyramid. With our Pyramid, 
the most important aspects are 
the foundational blocks, and the 
least important is the very apex. 
Study the pyramid. It consists of 
those elements that Hippocrates 
taught a few thousand years ago, 
and of those ideas taught by Dr. 
James Adams, co-author of “Healing with Medicinal Plants 
of the West” and “The Balanced Diet.”

These building blocks contribute to, and help to create, a 
fulfilling and meaningful life. You still won’t live forever, but 
you will live better. 

We know that the length of one’s life is determined by 
many factors, such as genetics, one’s dharma, and many 
environmental, social, and dietary factors. We’re quite aware 
of the many “health enthusiasts” who died relatively young 
(e.g., Adelle Davis, Euell Gibbons, Paavo Airola, et al), which 
might suggest that their lifestyle didn’t contribute to their 
longevity – but we feel that is much more complex than 
simple explanations.

The purpose of this Pyramid is not to “get to the top,” but 
rather as a tool to ascribe levels of importance to our daily 
activities.

For the record, we wrote a full book on this topic about 25 
years ago, with many details about why the foundational 
blocks are the most important. 

For example, the two foundations are Love/Empathy and 
What We Think. That seemed obvious to us. Next up the 
Pyramid (remember, higher up the Pyramid means less 
important)was Exercise, Breathing, and Cleanliness. Next 
level up is What we Do and What we Don’t Do. Our book 
delved into the many details of these. Next up is Food and 
Nutrition, obviously important. Next is Environment. Of 
course, some things in your environment you can control, 
and many you cannot. Then, next up is Food Supplements 
(not “food” per so). Then are Medicinal Herbs, and then 
“Alternative” Health practices. We placed at the very top, 
meaning the least important, the entire Medical Business. 

We have had some expected criticism for this Pyramid, but 
remember, our point is not to show you how to relieve pain 
or eliminate sickness, but how to live fully and dynamically. 
As much as I love the doctors I visit, when departing, I often 
tell them that I hope I do not see them soon. Dolores died 
in 2008, and we never finalized or published the book. I do 
hope to publish it one day.

Let me know what you think of the Pyramid, and if you have 
questions.


Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com