Welcome to the wonderful world of wellness care. Did you know it is less expensive to keep yourself well vs. fixing a problem? In fact, there is a saying about that. It says “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Think of it this way, which is more cost effective, a regular oil change for your car or a new engine? ...So keeping things well is better than the fixing in the long run. Let’s talk about wellness care and the different ways wellness can be applied to becoming healthier.

There are many ways to stay well with wellness care. In no particular order, we need to get regular exercise, take specific supplements, cleanse our body, get plenty of rest, de-stress, laugh and have fun, and get regular chiropractic care.

Let’s talk about all of these:

Exercise:

You need to be exercising daily. Your life needs to be set along with an exercise program, not if there is extra time. You make time for things that are important. Exercise is vital for your future health and well being. You need to understand there are three facets to exercise. Strength training, cardio-vascular and stretching. You need to be doing all three at specific times of the day. In my program, True Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss (click here), we discuss everything you need to know about weight loss and the best way to maximize your results. I will stress this again – exercise is not something you do if you have time, you make the time for exercise. Remember this -- nothing tastes as good as thin and fit feels!

Supplements:

I am a firm believer that we all NEED supplements. In today’s world, our food quality is low, the soil is depleted of nutrients and is toxic, our water quality is lower, and we eat too much processed foods. How can your body fight off disease, repair tissue, provide nourishment, and create what it needs if you don’t feed it correctly? Tired of high gas prices? Try ½ water and ½ gas and see how your car runs. We all need SPECIFIC supplementation for our health. Many supplements can help with specific conditions, and if you have a specific need, e-mail me. We all need our basic-foundational supplements daily. The supplements that I recommend we all take are what I call the basics, and are the following:

A quality multivitamin (click here for my recommendation)
A high powered antioxidant (click here for my recommendation)
Omega 3's fatty acid (click here for adult and kids products)
A highly absorbable form of calcium (click here)

By adding these to your life while avoiding the processed foods and the soda, diet soda, and fruit juices, you will be transformed into a healthier person. Health starts from the inside and is expressed outward. Start today and you are on the way to becoming healthier!

Precise Nutritional Cleansing (PNC):

This is becoming very popular and is something I completely agree with. In my lifetime I have done a liver cleanse, a gall bladder cleanse, and a colon cleanse. I have done these multiple times. I continue to do them. Why? I am not always perfect with my nutrition, I live in the midwest and I eat processed foods -- I live on planet Earth. I recommend the following product (click here). It is the best I have used.

I would recommend that this is something you do twice a year. If you are cleansing for the first time, maybe even 3 times for the first year. If you are new to the term cleansing, it is a way to remove toxins that have accumulated in your body and tissues. It is a process to remove them from your body. If you research colon cleansing, or the function of your colon (gut), you will find that 80% of your immunity starts in your colon. Many believe that most disease processes start in the colon -- I agree. Certainly over the years all the food we put in our body that gets digested when we eat, if we eat too much, or too fast, there is a tendency for some food remains to stay in the colon and accumulate in the tissues over time. This can add unwanted weight, bloating, gas, blocks vital blood supply (even when you eat healthy), and can cause other future health problems.

Rest:

You need to get your rest, like mom always said. You should be getting close to 8 hours of rest each night. We all give our kids a specific time to go to bed, but we seem to not do that for ourselves. Rest is vital for repair and rejuvenation. In fact, when we weight train, it is in the rest period that we build our muscles. If you are having trouble sleeping, that needs to be corrected to improve your overall health. One problem is that a lot of us have a television in our bedrooms. We all try to watch a little TV before bed. The illumination from the TV can interfere and actually stimulate you to stay awake. Also, many of us are lacking in exercise. Exercising the correct way at the specific times, will help you fall asleep.

Stress:

The catch all term for health problems is S-T-R-E-S-S. Well stress alone is not necessarily all bad and some types of stress can actually be good. The main issue is how we deal with stress. Many of us, for stress relief, will drink alcohol, smoke, or get some comfort food. None of these are good for us in the long run. I want to mention the three different causes or categories of stress. They are as follows: chemical, structural, and emotional.

Chemical stress is when things are getting into your body that do not belong there. These can be things we eat or drink, and many times the medications that we are taking. It may also be the chemicals we use to clean our home, what we put on our skin, or the air we breathe – there are so many. Once in or on our bodies, the chemical irritants affect our overall health. This is one of the main reasons we all need to detox or cleanse our body.

Structural stress are things that have occurred to your body, like fender-bender car accidents, work injuries, falls, etc. Do you know any kids that ever fell learning to walk or ride a bike? Even the birth process itself can affect structural problems. All kids should be checked by a chiropractor. Repetitive stress (called micro-traumas) can affect structure. An example is hair stylists, they stand all day on hard floors, and look down all day while cutting hair. Over time, they develop problems with their neck (cervical spine) and this can cause a lot of symptoms. It is important to remember that you cannot stretch, exercise or massage your structural stress away. You need to get it corrected with chiropractic care.

Emotional stress is actually number one. We all have to pay our bills, we all have to go to work, we have to deal with life. When our emotional stress gets too high, the body produces different chemicals, and this can cause (among other things) the muscles to get tight and pull the vertebrae out of alignment and cause structural stress. So emotional stress can cause structural stress. Based on the increase of stress hormones produced and released, emotional stress can also increase the chemical stress. All three stressors can affect each other.

It is important to work on each one. Chiropractic adjustments, proper rest and better nutrition will help you to become healthier.

Chiropractic:

Being a Doctor of Chiropractic, while also increasing my education with more study and research with nutrition, chiropractic seems to be last if at all in a person’s view toward wellness. Chiropractic is vital to the full functioning of the nervous system. People that do not get chiropractic care on a regular basis are missing out on a wonderful experience while increasing their health potential. Chiropractic aligns the spine and allows for full unrestricted motion in the spinal column (vertebrae). When this happens, there is no nerve pressure and allows the nerve flow to be full and unrestricted. When we do not get adjusted regularly, our spine becomes misaligned, gets lack of full motion, and gets stuck. This will put pressure on the spinal nerves and will disrupt the nerve flow to your muscles, tissues, organs and cells. I cannot prevent the stressors in your life, I cannot prevent accidents that could occur, but what I can do is keep your body functioning at as close to 100% as possible with regular adjustments. How would you like living at only say 60% of your body function? I recommend never going longer than one month. The most effective is two times each month. Some, based on their lifestyle or job, come in weekly, some every six weeks. As long as you are staying up on it, you are better off. Remember, it is not what we do all the time, but what we do most of the time.