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At the beginning of every year many people decide that this is the year they get healthy – eat better, sleep more, exercise and meditate and all the other good things that lead to better health.
The problem is, when we try to do everything, it’s hard to get it all right, and if we set the bar unreasonably high, then it feels like we’re failing even If we’re doing pretty well.
Instead, in this New Year, pick one thing and commit to working at it.
Do you want to be fitter? Plan a simple exercise program, starting slowly and getting more vigorous as you make progress. Three thirty minute sessions should be plenty to get started, and then add more sessions and more intensity from there.
Do you want to be thinner? Reduce your portion size – you can still eat a variety of foods, but eat less, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to knock off some of those unwanted pounds.
Do you want to be calmer and less stressed? Pick a short time each day just for quiet time, to be alone with your thoughts, or even better, see if you can get outside and commune with nature, or learn to practice yoga.
Do you want your body to be tuned up to peak efficiency? Visit your chiropractor – doctors of chiropractic are experts on the inner workings of your body, keeping you in alignment and balance for optimal performance.
Maybe you can do all of these things over time, but at least you can do one right now – pick a health habit and commit to it, and you’ll feel better, look better, and your body will work that much better. Happy New Year!
The way your body works is truly amazing. You take in air, food and water, and from those raw materials, you manufacture everything you need to run millions of chemical reactions, to maintain trillions of cells, to keep your heart beating 100,000 times a day, to think intelligent thoughts and take meaningful actions.
It’s a remarkable, miraculous process, and Nature does most of the heavy lifting – these body functions are mostly automatic, not requiring our conscious direction, but that doesn’t mean we can’t choose lifestyle habits that make it easier for the body to work well. When you understand the way the body runs, it becomes clear what you can do to be healthier.
All body parts and functions are under the supervision and control of the brain, so taking care of your brain is necessary for optimal health. There are three kinds of stress that affect your brain – emotional stress, chemical stress, and mechanical stress.
Emotional stresses, like upsets, work or financial pressure, or family issues, can be relieved with stretching, yoga, massage, connection with trusted friends and advisors or counseling. Chemical stresses, such as toxic environments, intake of excessive chemicals in processed foods, or poor nutritional decisions, can be helped with cleanses, better food choices, and proper nutritional supplementation. Mechanical stresses, like wear and tear on your body and injuries to the spine and limbs, can be dealt with through exercise, better rest and sleep cycles and chiropractic care. Each of these habits improves brain health and decreases brain stress.
Take good care of your brain, and it will continue to take good care of you.
Can Gratitude Improve Your Health?
The holiday season is more than a ploy for greeting card and toy manufacturers to fatten up. At the foundation of the holidays is a spirit of gratitude and a sense of good will toward our fellow human. This is a lovely sentiment, but besides being nice it turns out that it may well have a positive influence on your health. Here are some of the findings and remarks of some contemporary experts:
From Psychiatry MMC, November 2010:
“Gratitude is the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself; it is a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation. The majority of empirical studies indicate that there is an association between gratitude and a sense of overall well being.”
(Randy A Sansone MD and Lori A Sansone MD)
From the Huffington Post Blog, “The Neuroscience of Why Gratitude Makes Us Healthier,” November 2011:
“Gratitude, it turns out, makes you happier and healthier. If you invest in a way of seeing the world that is mean and frustrated, you’re going to get a world that is, well, more mean and frustrating. But if you can find any authentic reason to give thanks, anything that is going right with the world or your life, and put your attention there, then statistics say you’re going to be better off.
(Ocean Robbins)
From Psychwiki.com, “Does Gratitude Cause Happiness”:
Within psychology, there are also numerous practical ideas about the importance of feeling thankful. In Maslow’s Self Actualization model, Self Actualized people are said to be “incorporating an ongoing freshness of appreciation of life” (Huitt 2004). Part of Dr. Martin Seligman’s website on “Authentic Happiness” includes exercises designed to help one feel and express more gratitude, including the Gratitude Visit … In more empirically based psychology work, gratitude has been statistically linked to happiness, pride, and hope in a study of college freshmen
(Overwalle, Mervielde, & De Schuyter, 1995).
Can Gratitude Improve Your Health?
The lack of gratitude has been found to be characteristic of clinically diagnosed narcissistic personalities (McWilliams and Lependorf 1990).
Gratitude was found to be rated among the top 5 personal “strengths” in a survey of 24 strengths given in 40 countries (Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005).
From happierhuman.com, “The 31 Benefits of Gratitude You Didn’t Know About: How Gratitude Can Change Your Life,” July 2012:
A five-minute a day gratitude journal can increase your long-term well-being by more than 10 percent. That’s 2.5x the impact of winning more than $1,000,000 in the lottery! How does a free five minute activity do what $1,000,000+ can’t? Gratitude improves our health, relationships, emotions, personality, and career. There is even reason to believe gratitude can extend your lifespan by a few months or even years.
(Amit Amin)
These are only a few of many research projects that demonstrate a connection between being grateful and being healthy and happy. It may seem unrelated at first, but if you think about it, just being thankful for your blessings, however few or many, should make you feel good and reduce your stress — and it will set the stage for those you influence to do more of the same, paying it forward.
In this season of good will and thankfulness, let’s go out of our way to show our appreciation to those we touch and serve – it’s good for them, and good for you, too.
Six Tips For Healthy Eating
Kristen Aldridge of Shape Magazine provides us with some simple and useful ideas for managing our eating and staying fit during the holiday season, based on six tips from chef and holistic nutritionist Tricia Williams of FoodMattersNYC.com.
Pregame with chia seeds. Before you party (and eat) the night away, add a tablespoon of chia seeds to a glass of water. Rich in antioxidants and minerals, these little seeds expand in your stomach, curbing cravings while reducing inflammation.
Plan your calories. If you know you’re going to indulge for dinner, plan your day of eating ahead of time so you can monitor your caloric intake. “Have a green juice for breakfast and a lighter lunch so you can prepare to splurge for the night out,” Williams says. “Low glycemic foods like oatmeal or quinoa with fresh berries are also great options. Since they metabolize slowly, you’ll feel fuller longer.”
Be a food snob. Scope out the spread before you chow down. What makes your mouth water? Zero in on that and steer clear of the rest. If you can muster, stay away from bread, cheese, and crackers.
Stay away from grains. “What’s interesting is that I find people consume less alcohol if they’re consuming less grains,” Williams says. “You could easily go up to 2,000 or 3,000 calories at a party with a few glasses of wine, so it’s definitely something to try!”
BYOD. If appropriate, bring your own dish! You’ll have a delicious, healthy option that you actually like. “If you’re bringing a dessert, it’s easy to swap out refined white flour for oat flour,” Williams says. “You can also substitute coconut sugar for white sugar. It has fewer calories and you won’t experience the crash.”
Have a plant-based plate. Make sure 80 percent of your plate is plant-based. The rest should be mostly protein and a little bit of fat. “Allow room for a tiny dessert, but try to fill up on as many veggies as you can,” Williams says. “And your protein portion should always be the size of the palm of your hand.”
Most good eating habits are common sense – think before you eat for the holidays, and stay fit and healthy!
You may have heard the expression “phantom limb” — what on earth could that mean?
You see, when people suffer the loss of an arm or leg, they may still feel pain or other sensations in the missing body part, because we don’t actually feel things on our body, we feel them in our brain.
Your brain is in charge of running the body, using the spinal cord and nerves as a wiring network to connect everything together. Because all messages come from and go through the brain, it’s essential to keep your brain and nerve system in good working order.
As long as this control center is functioning normally, your body tends to work well. But if anything stresses the system, it will affect the efficiency of your body to heal, regulate itself, and work properly.
There are three causes of stress on the brain and nerve system. There can be emotional or psychological stress, like anxiety, depression or just pressure. There can be chemical or nutritional stress, from eating poorly or taking drugs or other toxic substances. And, there can be physical or mechanical stress, from wear and tear, or large and small injuries to your spine, which is charged with the responsibility of protecting the nerve system.
But no matter the source of the stress, all stress is brain stress. Like with a phantom limb, all sensations are routed through the brain, and it’s essential to have a healthy brain and nerve system if you want a healthy body.
Your doctor of chiropractic is your neighborhood expert on decreasing stress on your brain and nerve system. You and your family will enjoy a better health and wellness when you develop better lifestyle habits — your chiropractor can help you make better choices and decisions, leading to a better quality of life.
You hear about it every day – so many of the common maladies suffered by our families, friends and neighbors seem to come from stress of some kind – but what is stress, what causes it, and what can we do about it?
Stress is your body’s response to the conditions around you – if your environment is friendly, you will have less stress, and if it is less friendly, your stress will increase. The stronger and healthier your body, the better you handle stress.
There are three types of stress – physical stress, chemical stress, and emotional stress.
Physical stress is mechanical stress, either injury or wear and tear, often affecting your bones, muscles, joints, and nerve system. Chemical stress is toxic stress, either from taking in poisons or not nourishing your body with the proper foods and nutrients, affecting your organs, nerve system, immune system and skin. Emotional stress is psychological stress, from poor coping strategies, financial or family pressures, or the absence of stress reduction and relaxation practices, influencing your digestion, sleep, circulation, and nerve system.
Authorities agree that about 70% of serious disease is preventable, by adopting lifestyle choices that reduce these three types of stress. Improve your diet and reduce your intake of stress-producing foods like sugars, fried foods and heavy fats. Ease your mind by including meditation, yoga or some other stress reduction technique. And get yourself in shape by exercising, while minimizing your physical stress with good posture and regular chiropractic care.
Learn about these wellness principles and apply them to keep your stresses under control – you can save yourself a lot of unnecessary suffering and expense, and improve the quality of your life while you’re doing it.
It’s easy to chalk it up to genetics, that some have better raw materials to work with, and this is not entirely inaccurate. But much as some athletes have natural gifts and others have to work harder to achieve their objectives, so it goes with health and wellness – regardless of your inborn tendencies, there are things you can do to improve your chances at glowing, vibrant good health and vitality.
Good health and wellness boil down to lifestyle habits and decisions – some more obvious than others. For example, if you eat fresh, wholesome foods, balancing and combining them effectively, then your body gets the fuel it needs and works better. If you drink enough water, get enough rest, and exercise appropriately, you’ll feel better, look better, and your body will work better. If you meditate, get regular massage or perform some other stress relaxation technique, then you have less stress and less wear and tear on your body. Most people are aware of the importance of developing patterns of behavior like this.
But your body also requires some maintenance to work at its best – and one of the most important things you can do is to keep your spine and nerve system healthy with chiropractic. Your nerve system is the control system of your body, and when it is working well, your body thrives. When it is not working as well, your body doesn’t work as well.
Well-informed people include safe, all-natural chiropractic care among their lifestyle choices – it’s the difference that makes the difference in health and wellness.
People want to know – what does it take to be healthy? What habits and behaviors are likely to lead to more vitality? How do we avoid getting sick, and spend more of our time being well?
There are three basic steps each of us can take to walk the path of good health.
First, we need to learn to eat right. Providing quality fuel for this human machine is critical in maintaining and developing the best health possible. While there are many styles of good eating, there are a few simple guidelines we must all respect:
eat enough but not too much
stick with fresh whole foods over processed foods
avoid toxic substances like preservatives, food additives and colorings
strike a proper balance between proteins, fats and carbohydrates
drink water
supplement with vitamins and minerals from natural sources
Second, we need to think right, creating a healthy mindset that helps us deal with the stresses of our lives effectively. Developing supportive self-talk, practicing meditation or just quiet introspection, and sleeping sufficiently can lead to a better attitude and more happiness.
Third, we need to move right, through appropriate exercise, proper breathing, good posture and maintaining your structure and nerve system with chiropractic care. Including yoga, stretching or martial arts helps to create balance and coordination.
Addressing these three basic needs, eating right, thinking right, and moving right, will lead to a better quality of life with less illness and more productive time throughout your life. Take the responsibility to notice where you could improve, and make good decisions to enhance your lifestyle – it will pay off for you, as it has for millions of people who are adopting the wellness way of life.
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The way your body works is truly amazing. You take in air, food and water, and from those raw materials, you manufacture everything you need to run millions of chemical reactions, to maintain trillions of cells, to keep your heart beating 100,000 times a day, to think intelligent thoughts and take meaningful actions.
You hear about it every day – so many of the common maladies suffered by our families, friends and neighbors seem to come from stress of some kind – but what is stress, what causes it, and what can we do about it?
Why are some people healthy while others are not?