Westchester Women’s Summit explores health as wealth 

“We don’t come here to make history. We come here to make a difference,” Andrea Stewart-Cousins, New York State Senate President Pro Tem, Majority Leader, told some 400 women who gathered at the Sonesta White Plains Downtown hotel Friday, March 15, for the fourth annual Westchester Women’s Summit.   

Stewart-Cousins, who represents Greenburgh, Mount Pleasant and Yonkers, has certainly made her share of history as the first woman and the first African American to become President Pro Tem, Majority Leader, and thus one of “the three,” including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, making decisions that shape New York.  

History aside, an audience consisting mainly of women but also a few good men – Westchester County Executive George Latimer jokingly apologized for being a man at the podium – was certainly focused on making a difference in their overall well-being, knowing that their health is bound to their potential wealth. While women have made advancements, even exceeding men in college and graduate-school enrollment, they still have not achieved economic parity. According to a report by the Westchester Women’s Agenda, women in New York state make 84.5% of what men do. Women of color lag behind white women generally in education, employment, housing, life span, infant mortality and maternal mortality. Before the pandemic, 39% of women surveyed cited mental health as a major concern. 

Making beneficial changes in health, panelists and workshop leaders said throughout the day, can be incremental.  

Elizabeth Bukac, MS, RD, CDN, CDES, a clinical dietician with NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester who took part in the health-care network’s panel on “Overcoming Struggles With Body Image,” said she focuses on quality nutrition – fruits and vegetables, fiber, protein, portion control.  

“It may affect your weight or not,” she said. “The best thing to do is follow a healthy diet pattern.” 

The White Plains Hospital panel that followed – “From Self-Care to Health Care: Your Guide to Women’s Wellness” – built on the NewYork-Presbyterian panel. Elizabeth DeRobertis, MS, RD, CDN, CDE, a registered dietician and diabetes educator with the Scarsdale Medical Group, suggested that in addition to dark green vegetables,  sweet potatoes, and clementines for nutrient absorption, healthy eaters should also incorporate into their diets beans and other legumes like peas and lentils and calcium- and protein-rich Greek yogurt (better than taking calcium pills) – all of which are ingredients of the Mediterranean Diet. She also gave a shout out to Dave’s Killer snack bars as sources of fiber and protein and said the water-soluble B vitamin biotin was fine to take for hair growth once you exhausted various nutritional options.  

Just as dietary changes can be made with step-by-step adjustments, DeRobertis’ fellow panelist Nicole Solomos, M.D., a sports and lifestyle medicine specialist with White Plains Hospital Physician Associates, said that you can exercise in “small batches” if that’s all the time you have – taking a 10- minute walk, parking in the farthest part of the lot when running errands and doing some resistance training to build muscle.  

The panel touched on such hot-button issues as Ozempic and other diabetes drugs used for weight loss – not recommended, DeRobertis said, unless you have a BMI, or Body Mass Index, of more than 27, plus two health problems. On the subject of fertility, Michelle Giannone, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist with White Plains Hospital Physician Associates, suggested that young women freeze their eggs now as many women are waiting until they’re older to have children.  

The tone of the health-care panels may have been best summed up by Rachele Khadjehturian, FNP-BC, a family nurse practitioner with White Plains Hospital Physician Associates, who said: “Remember to be kind to those who can’t do what you can do.” 

Indeed, the summit – organized by The Event Department in partnership with Westchester County; Westfair Communications Inc., parent company of the Westfair Business Journal; News 12; and Today Media — was a reminder that physical health is inextricably tied to mental well-being, as the dramatic keynote speaker attested. Andrea Navedo – an actress, producer, author and diversity advocate who is perhaps best-known for her role on the TV series “Jane the Virgin,” spoke of her “otherness,” growing up poor and brown in the dilapidated South Bronx of the 1980s. Her story was one of delinquency abetted by a bad boyfriend until she had an epiphany one day when she was trapped in his apartment by one of his Pit Bulls. (Here Navedo’s acting skills made you feel the terror of that moment.)  

Her courage in picking up the snarling dog and throwing it into a bedroom so she could escape would lead her to finish high school; earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in theater arts from Old Westbury College and then, once she got her foot in the door on the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live,” overcome typecasting as a Latina from the ’hood while balancing her roles as a career woman, a wife and a mother. 

“I believe if we embrace our otherness, we can find a power we didn’t know we had,” said Navedo, author of “Our Otherness is Our Strength: Wisdom From the Boogie Down Bronx” (Broadleaf Books).  

Poverty, being raised by a single mother, hanging with the wrong crowd:  These also played into the early life of business coach and life force strategist Jennifer Maher, who led a session on “Becoming Anti-Fragile,” one of the day’s 10 workshops. Her troubled upbringing was compounded by a family history of alcohol addiction and ultimately her own drug use. Even when she got her high school equivalency diploma and found success as a real estate agent in Putnam County, naïve business decisions would help evaporate a $450,000-a-year salary. Work with a life coach at the Buddhist Association of the United States in Carmel would prove a turning point.  

Today, Maher is the coach she always wanted to be, offering a blend of Buddhism, Christianity and ancient Roman Stoicism – she quotes the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who said, “the obstacle is the way” – that leads to what she called becoming “anti-fragile,” neither vulnerable (fragile) or superhuman (strong) but rather possessed of a resilience that makes the most of challenges. 

Both Maher and Navedo stressed that women must have 100% agency in whatever happens in their lives so they can decide what they want and pursuit it. 

“The world will conspire with you to be a victim,” Maher said. “Faith is knowing that you can stand up for yourself.” 

To view the Westchester Women’s Summit 2024 photo gallery, click here. Use the hashtag #wws2024 on your social media when you post your Westchester Women’s Summit pictures!