Principle #7 from The Blue Zones:  Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner:   

Principle #7:  Have Faith 

Centenarians have faith.  Okinawan’s have a blended worship that focuses on ancestral worship.  Costa Rica Nicoyans and Sardinia Italians are Catholic and Loma Linda centenarians are 7^th Day Adventists.  Faith is a funny thing.  I was raised Episcopalian.  By the time I went to college, going to church wasn’t a priority.  The first few years being married and have small babies, although we went to church, I wouldn’t profess to having a strong faith.  But a funny thing happened to me about 8 years ago.  I literally felt drawn to have a closer relationship with God and to develop my faith. 

I won’t go into the details of where I went from there because I believe each of us will be drawn to God when the time is right and you will develop your own sense of how to become ‘faithful.’  I believe it is personal and I am thankful to live in a country where I get to choose!  What I can say is that my life has become profoundly better since I have ‘uncovered’ my faith.  I have a morning routine each day where I wake up naturally at 5 am and spend the next hour with me and God.  That routine usually involves reading a few pages of some inspirational book (I’m always reading one), reading a few scriptures, praying, affirming my goals and meditating.  I know for certain that the days that I get this time in (I average 5 out of 7), are the days I most enjoy. 

In There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem by Wayne Dyer, he has a chapter on faith.   The chapter begins with a quote by a famous Indian Poet, “Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.”  He then goes on to describe faith this way.  Imagine a junk yard filled with million of pieces of junk (bits of metal, toilet seats, glass, old appliances, rags, etc).  Suddenly a gigantic wind blows through.  You see a tornado of junk flying in the air.  The wind calms and as the dust settles you look out.  There in front of you is a jumbo Boeing 747.   By luck or a weird coincidence, all the parts of the junkyard were thrown together to make a perfect jet.  This analogy is similar to how the universe works.  Better yet, just think about one human cell.  A cell’s metabolism, structure, chemical makeup and so on are truly miraculous.  One must assume that there’s an intelligence that created it.  Or we can just say it’s all a coincidence.

To sum it all up, I would rather have faith all my life and be wrong and then to have no faith at all.  Martin Luther King said it this way, “faith is taking the first step even though you don’t see the whole staircase.”

Principle #5 from The Blue Zones:  Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner:  SLOW DOWN

Ok here’s the scenario… you are driving to work for several miles when all of sudden you realize that your mind was totally somewhere else and you have no idea how you safely made it to this red light.  We have all been there.  Unfortunately, it’s a regular occurrence that our minds are frequently on to the next event.

Deepak Chopra reminds us that we are human beings, not human thinkings, and yet we don’t seem to grasp this concept.  If we aren’t doing 22 things per day, we don’t feel productive.  Americans work more hours per week and take fewer hours of vacation than most countries.  Our children must be involved in baseball, cheerleading, church choir, and ice hockey or they’ll miss out on something for certain.  If we don’t check our email, blackberry, cell phone and landline phone messages, we might certainly miss something important.  Night time involves getting two or three children to two or three different events three nights or more per week.  We work 12 hour days, sleep 5 hours per night.  Sit down, family meals happen less and less.

We are so busy that we’ve forgotten how to be happy.  Why is this?  Well the centenarians in the book would tell us that we are too busy and we don’t know how to “down shift.”  They point to an example of a 100 year old Okinawan woman pausing to watch a brilliant thunderstorm as she washed her breakfast dishes and a Sardinian shepherd stopping to take a long look over the emerald green plateaus that he had seen daily for 80 years.

I believe with all the “junk” going on with our economy which is quite devastating for many families, there will be one positive thing that will come out of it.  We will learn what’s important and what’s not.  We will learn why family time is so much more important than work time.  We will value that family meal, which is less expensive and more valuable in so many ways, compared to the quick take out meal. We will learn the importance of a strong social network of friends that we can play cards with rather than having only expensive dinners with.  We will learn how to “think less” and be in the present more.  The author reminds us,” Life is short. Don’t run so fast that you miss it.”

The book offers us 3 ways to help us slow down:

Reduce the noise:  shut off the TV, radio, and internet to reduce the amount of aural clutter. Limit TVs to one area in your home.

Be early:  plan to arrive 15 minutes early to every appointment.  This one practice minimizes the stress that arises from traffic, getting lost or underestimating travel time.

Meditate:  PLEASE don’t underestimate this one.  Start with 5 minutes per day in a quiet place in your home and simply sit still and breathe deeply. Try increasing to 15 minutes per day.  And remember there’s no wrong way to meditate.  Just sit and breath.

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.

Every issue of Oprah’s Magazine ends with a page called, “what I know for sure.”  It got me thinking.  If helping you achieve your optimal health potential is our goal, what do I know for sure will help you achieve this.  And I continually return to two concepts that I know for sure, without a doubt, with 100% assuredness, and with unwavering certainty.  How’s that for being sure!

First I know that I know that I know that your thought life determines the quality of your life.  So many people ‘poo-poo’ all this positive thinking mumbo jumbo.  But the same people that don’t place value on their thought life happen to be the same people that wake up each and every day to a rather dreary existence.  Two things are amazing about your thoughts.  First, they are free.  Second, they are a choice.  Your thoughts don’t choose you.  You choose them.  Each day when you put your feet on the floor you get to choose how to react and how to think about what life brings to you that day.  You get to plant goods seeds at the start of your day.  You get to ‘think about and thank about’ what your day may bring.  I believe knowing and more importantly, applying, this simple principle can greatly change your life. 

The second thing I know for sure is that our purpose during our relatively short time on earth is to serve.  What we serve can vary from serving dinner to serving your family to serving your boss to serving on a missionary team to serving a compliment to serving a meal to the homeless to serving a tennis racket.  It’s all in the ‘serve.’ And this includes serving yourself too.  When we focus outside of what we think, need and feel and place our focus on service to others, our life is immensely better.  I’ll give you an example.  Joanie C., a patient in our practice over 40 years, once asked an elderly woman if she would like her cart (that she was putting away) while in the parking lot of a grocery store.  The elderly woman said thank you and also let Joanie know it was her birthday.  Joanie immediately went into her car and got the bouquet of flowers she had just purchased for herself and handed them to this elderly woman and said Happy Birthday.  So I ask you, who got more out of this, Joanie or the elderly woman. 

Think better thoughts.  Serve more.  These are two things I know for sure.  It’s a simple as that.

Make it a great week.

Just got back from an amazing trip to Chicago where The Masters Circle held a fantastic seminar for chiropractors, staff and family.  I was able to present on a topic called, “Why Wellness Works.”  Of course much of my presentation revolved around the Eight Weeks to Wellness Program.  8WW is changing lives one person, one community, one city, one city, and eventually one country at a time.  A program that consists of chiropractic care, on-site hard exercise, a healthy eating program, massage therapy and meditation instruction, how can you go wrong?  If fact you can only GO RIGHT.  So share 8WW with your family and friends.  It IS how we will change the face of healthcare in America by taking the focus off of sickness care and disease prevention, and placing it on wellness care and restoring God-given health potential.  Make it a great week!!!  Spring is right around the corner.  Yipeeee.

Hello, and welcome to the 8 Weeks to Wellness (8WW) blog!

My name is Dr. Denise Chranowski. Together with my twin brother and fellow chiropractor, Dr. Dane Donohue, I developed the 8WW program to help empower people of all ages to take responsibility for their own well-being and positively impact their God-given true health potential.

8WW will help you optimize what you think about, how you eat and supplement, and how you exercise and care for your body. As reinforcement for our comprehensive wellness program, we’ve updated our website, launched interactive profiles on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and created this blog to support you as you learn how to live a happier, healthier life.

Check back often as we’ll be sharing practical exercise tips, recipes and advice for healthy eating, success stories from 8WW patients, before-and-after photos, videos and much more.

Feedback is appreciated and encouraged. Have a question? Want to share your personal story? Please post a comment – we’d love to hear from you!