Archive for June, 2010

Why Fast?

Monday, June 28th, 2010

This summer at our Newtown, PA 8WW office, we are encouraging patients to do a one day per week liquid fast. (this is not part of the 8 Weeks to Wellness program, but a seperate program will are running). 

We recommend that you pick the same day each week for your fast.  Preferably this will be a day when you aren’t working out.  You can use the Ultrameal shakes we carry out in the lobby, chicken or vegetable broth, a juicer, teas and water.  Be careful not to get too much sugar in your juices to throw your glucose levels off which will make you really feel hungry.  Coffee is ok. 

So why a fast?  There are many reasons to fast one day per week.  Of course many fasts go on much longer than this but since we are also trying to build muscle on your body, we’ll stick to one day fasts.  Below are just a few reasons behind a fast:

  • Fasting is standard in almost all religions.  Stated simply, fasting as a religious practice is refraining from food for a spiritual purpose.  Ideally the time you would spend cooking, preparing and eating your meal is dedicated to more spiritual time and self-reflection.

 

  • Fasting gives your gastrointestinal track a MUCH needed break.  We eat so very, very much in this country.  A restaurant meal can easily be over 2000 calories.  The amount of artificial flavors, preservatives, trans fats, sugar etc that we consume each year is overwhelming to our systems.  Giving your body a break from food, can be a great thing.

 

  • Fasting will make you feel hunger.  The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed and one-third is starving. Since reading this at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.  Fasting will give us an extremely small sense of what 2/3 of our world feels each night as they lay down their head to sleep.

 

  • Fasting will shrink your stomach size.  The smaller your stomach, the less you will eat (that is, of course, if you eat slowly enough for the brain to register that it’s full).

 

  • Fasting reminds us to not allow our stomach to rule our lives.  Eating is a form of entertainment in our country and that type of entertainment has gotten us obese, sick, and dying prematurely.  When you feel a hungry pang during your fasting day, so “hello stomach, I hear you, but I’m not giving in” just as you would to a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum.

 

  • Fasting will allow ‘mind over matter’ to prevail and will really make you feel like a winner.
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Healthy Highlights from Phoenix

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Well myself and some of our team just returned from Phoenix for one of our industry seminars. I thought I’d share some of the highlights & quotes from the seminar speakers:

  • We are all better to wear out than to rust out.
  • Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
  • Comfort comes as a guest, lingers as a host, and stays to enslave us.
  • Mastery is nothing more than the desire to do better & better at something that matters to YOU.
  • We are limitless.  We can muster up more of anything.
  • God’s waiting room is the drug store!!
  • Sometimes if God’s out of town, you’ve got to fill in for him, so live a powerful, purposeful life.
  • A subluxation of the spine is interference to your nerve system and therefore interference to your potential. 
  • The Universe will not bring you things if you aren’t ready.
  • Continue to ask yourself, what is my potential?
  • Gratitude increases your vibrational state.  Remember to give thanks each day.
  • You have 60,000 thoughts each day. 95% of these are the same as yesterday. 80% are negative and non-supportive thoughts.
  • If you are in fear, you cannot be in faith.  Just like as if you are in the dark, you aren’t in the light.
  • A negative emotion is simply re-living the past because you had to bring that emotion back from somewhere.

 And lastly Dr. Richard Barwell gave us a terrific neuroscience update of chiropractic, subluxation and the adjustment.  This is what he emphasized.

One of the biggest challenges to chiropractic is to overcome the concept that you get adjusted because you have a ‘bone out of place.’  In fact it’s extremely rare that a bone, ie vertebra, is putting direct pressure on a nerve.  This fallacy is further substantiated when you hear things like, “I’m getting my back cracked” because obviously we associate the cracking sound with the bones. 

A better definition of a subluxation is compromised neural integrity that is created by emotional, chemical, structural or other stressors.  This compromised neural integrity causes us to adapt to our environment inappropriately.  True health equals proper adaption from the environment.  And if there is improper input in the form of a chemical, environmental, physical, or psychosocial stress, then this can lead to a subluxation causing improper nerve system output to the environment.  In other words, we aren’t adapting well.

When we perform your examinations, you’ll notice that we measuring nerve system function through the surface EMG scans, the thermography scans and the heart rate variability test.  All these measure nerve system function.

I realize for some of you this just sounds like we are making a mountain out a mole hill.  But all the doctors and staff here want you to not only enjoy the benefits of your chiropractic adjustment, but also to understand why you get those benefits.  When your communication system, ie your nerve system, receives and responds to stimuli from the environment in a healthy way through your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord) then you will be healthier.  The chiropractic adjustment as defined by Dr. Barwell is ‘a procedure whereby the consequence of an action serves to continually modify further action within the nervous system with the intent of creating harmony within the body’s systems.”

Finally, Dr. Barwell, concluded with giving us a definition of wellness from Mosby’s Medical, Nursing & Allied Health Dictionary which we think bears repeating:

Wellness is a dynamic state of health in which an individual progresses toward higher level of functioning, achieving an optimum balance between internal and external environments.

MAKE IT A GREAT WEEK AS ONLY YOU CAN.

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