Welcome to Flowers on the Table, a blog about eating, cooking, gardening, health and wellness. I’m Beth Flowers (yes, that’s really, truly my name) and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado with my amazing, musician husband, Scott Bussen. Together, and apart, we’ve experienced unexpected, yet ultimately explicable health conditions that made us radically change our daily lives, diets, and attitudes. This blog is all about how I help us stay wellthy and happy every day.
We commemorated quitting my job with a trip to the woo-woo, vortex capital, Sedona, Arizona and a family birthday celebration in the Elvis impersonator capital, Vegas. All via Route 66. Trippy.
In 2007, I learned that I had developed life-threatening health problems – high blood pressure, very high pulse rate, unstable plaque in my arteries despite normal cholesterol levels and off the chart CRP inflammation readings. In just under two years, I went from petrified, highly medicated, stressed community radio station manager to drug free, clean bill of health, calm life. What I did to educate, protect and heal myself may not work for anyone else, but I hope you’ll be able to take a few ideas from it.
In order to understand what was happening and develop a plan for regaining my health, I read everything I could find about high blood pressure, heart disease, stress reduction and women’s health. I read medical books written by the latest designer doctors, websites, cookbooks, diets, everything at the library and on the internet related to blood pressure and women. I learned a lot about the number one killer of women in the United States – heart disease.
I thought that most women died of breast cancer. Bet you did too. The awareness campaigns and money raised for breast cancer research is awe-inspiring considering 35,000 women die from breast cancer every year. But heart disease kills 350,000 women every year. And, unlike breast cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure, if caught early, can be controlled by your life style, diet and medications. The most important thing I learned in those first scary months, was that my condition could be managed and even reversed by my own decisions about what I ate, how much I exercised, and how I managed stress – even though my condition was hereditary. Being an over-achiever, I was determined to change my life, create a miracle cure and live happily ever after.
Flowers on the Table 
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