Welcome to our 13th installment of Living Well with MS Coffee Break, and the first Coffee Break episode for 2021, where we welcome Luke Johnson as our guest!

Our Coffee Break series is your chance to get to know members of our diverse OMS community. In each episode, you’ll join Geoff Allix for an intimate chat with a different member of our global community. Our guests will share their personal stories and talk about their challenges and victories, large and small. We hope you find common cause and a source of inspiration from the stories of these very special people.

As always, your comments and suggestions are always welcome by emailing [email protected]. We hope you enjoy this episode’s conversation with Luke Johnson, beaming to you straight from Western Massachusetts.

Bio:

Luke is an artist and college fitness director based in the United States in Western Massachusetts, where he also grew up. He attended university in New York City and worked for many years in wilderness therapy and immersion programs in places as diverse as Costa Rica and Nepal. Eight years ago, after returning from the West Coast of the US and completing his graduate studies, Luke developed his first signs of MS. Since then, Luke’s life has been a journey in rebuilding his health, discovering the new, and unpacking the old.

Questions:

• Luke, our audience wants to know a little bit about you and your life. Can you share some background on where you’re from, what you do, any snippets of your family or personal life or anything about you that would give our listeners a sense of who Luke is?
• How about your experience with MS? Can you provide some context on that? When were you diagnosed and how did you initially cope with it?
• At which point did you come across the OMS program? How was that experience for you? Why did you decide to start following it?
• What are some of the challenges you’ve faced at first in adopting the OMS program? How did you overcome them?
• When did you first start to see any kind of positive indicators in following OMS guidelines? What were these?
• How have you had to adapt your daily healthy habits to the new realities imposed by Covid-19? And has following the OMS program helped you deal with the new realities of Covid-19 times?
• On a personal note, do you have any unusual interests or wacky hobbies you can tell us about? What kind of stuff will we find you doing on a weekend?
• If there is one piece of advice you can share with people new to the OMS program, what would that be?

Links

• Check out Luke’s amazing photography
• Follow Luke on Instagram
• Luke’s favorite comprehensive resource on plant-based lifestyle
• A great online course on well-being from Yale University
• Rhona Patrick is a scientist and she explores a lot of useful lifestyle tweaks that are beneficial to anyone pursuing better health or managing chronic conditions
• Another great site for healthy lifestyle change
• A podcast on plant-based eating, exercise and wellness Luke really likes

Coming up on our next episode:

On the next episode of Living Well with MS, launching March 10, 2021, help Geoff welcome Mark Webb – writer, wheelchair rugby athlete and head of communications for Shift.ms, an amazing community of people with MS. Mark will share the View from Shift.ms and talk about his role as a champion of all things MS, especially as it relates to diversity and inclusion.

Don’t miss out:

Subscribe to this podcast and never miss an episode. You can catch any episode of Living Well with MS here or on your favorite podcast listening app. Don’t be shy – if you like the program, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you tune into the show. And feel free to share your comments and suggestions by emailing [email protected].