A different path to health

By Jaclyn Desforges

Meghan Telpner is the picture of health.

As a professional nutritionist, she spends her days teaching cooking workshops, helping clients develop healthier eating habits and riding a bicycle around her Parkdale neighbourhood. At age 31, she's often mistaken for a teenager. But her life hasn't always been this way.

"There were a lot of days when I was too sick to go to work, or had to leave work to go to various doctor’s appointments, because I was dealing with this beast inside of me," she said.

That beast was Crohn's disease— an inflammatory disease of the intestines that causes abdominal pain, digestive problems, weight loss and has been linked to colon cancer. While Telpner had suffered symptoms since high school, the disease came to a head at age 26 while she was working in advertising.

"I was going to the gym before work, so I was getting up around five every morning and working out really hard on cardio machines, then coming home, getting dressed, eating really quick breakfasts and going to work for the day until about eight o’clock at night,” she said. “I would come home at night and sort of crash.”

Empowering all sizes to do yoga

By Michael Gibbons

When Cora Clearwater first started taking yoga classes, she stayed at the back of the room.

“I stayed in the back because I know what people think. I know when I walk into a room… there’s a prejudice,” she said. “It automatically comes to the surface without anybody talking about anything.”

Clearwater, 63, has been heavy for most of her life. But that didn’t stop her from living an active lifestyle. As a youth, she enjoyed doing physical activities like playing basketball and pole-vaulting.

“There were a lot of things I could do that I wasn’t supposed to be able to do as a large person. So yoga was kind of the next step,” she said.

“I started looking and started talking to people who are large about exercise and why they weren’t exercising. They weren’t exercising because they were embarrassed.”

Exercise and Happiness

By Michael Gibbons

Dan Taylor can remember the exact moment when he knew he had to make a change in his life.

“I was actually working in a school at the time and there was a gym class coming in,” he said. “I saw this little itty-bitty kid do 50 chin-ups and I thought, ‘Man, I’m a big guy and I should be able to do that, but I can’t.’ So that’s when I started going to the gym.”

Taylor, 24, works as an electrician with the Toronto District School Board.

At his heaviest, he weighed 310 pounds. Once he started exercising regularly, he lost almost 70 pounds.

Now Taylor feels healthier and happier, which he attributes to his new look, but also his newfound sense of determination, which has bled over into other areas in his life.