In our office this summer at the Newtown, PA 8WW center, we are reviewing the 9 longevity principles from The Blue Zones:  Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner.  We are on week 3, Have A Purpose.

 Principle #3:  HAVE A PURPOSE

This is probably my most favorite principle in the book.  Those that live long healthy lives all have a purpose.  It’s that little feeling you have inside of you that says “now this is what I am meant to do, what I’m good at, and what I love.”  It’s that knowing that this is what God created me for. 

Okinawans call it ikigai and Sardinians call it plan de vida… translation:  why do you wake up each morning?  Is your purpose to be the best parent you can possibly be?  Is your purpose defined by your charitable work?  Is your purpose to be the best ‘widget’ maker your company has ever seen?  My French grandmother always would say to me, “Denise you must maintain that certain “joie de vivre” (joy of living) throughout your life.”  And I know what she meant now. 

Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”  Wayne Dyer states “Don’t die with your music still in you.”  Those that lead lives of quiet desperation or die with their music still in them are people that don’t have a purpose for living. 

 Some of you know exactly what your purpose is, while others really aren’t so sure.  So here are some steps you can take to more clearly define your purpose:

• Write your own mission statement.  Put in on an index card and recite it each day.  Many of you have heard our center’s mission statement that we recite together before the start of each shift.  It gets our minds focused on the task at hand which is serving YOU, our customers, with the best possible care and love that we can give.  What are you passionate about?  What gets up pumped up?  What gets you excited to start your day?  By answering these questions, you’ll more clearly define your personal mission statement.

• Find someone to talk with about your life’s purpose.  This could be a spouse, sibling, friend, co-worker, but essentially it’s someone that really knows you.  They know your likes and dislikes.  That know what makes you happy.  They know what you are good at (and what you aren’t so good at!)

• Keep your mind working – read, do crosswords, engage in lively discussions.

I know that I know that I know what my purpose is.  In the simplest terms it is to be an encourager of people.  I get excited each day when I wake up knowing that whoever I come in contact with that day, I have the opportunity to make their day better, whether this is through an amazing adjustment, with encouraging words, something I might enlighten them about their health, or simply through a hug.

A principle from The Blue Zones:  Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner is to MOVE NATURALLY.  Dan is a National Geographic explorer who has traveled the globe to uncover the best strategies for longevity, specifically in pockets in the globe where centenarians are consistently found.

Not one centenarian in this study has a ‘gym’ membership yet every one of these 100 year old plus people would put us all to shame with the amount of daily exercise they get.  One 100+ year old woman from Loma Linda, CA, walks 1 mile each morning in her senior apartment center (up and down hallways), has breakfast, then bikes 8 miles and then lifts weight.  Male centenarians from Sardinia, Italy, work most of their lives as Shepherds, a profession that involves miles of hiking each day.  Okinawans garden for hours each day.  And the male centenarian studied in Costa Rica was chopping wood for several hours before his interview began.

Bottom line – you’ve got to move to live.  I often wonder if we could go back in time about 100 years and then show these people our current culture. I think they would be baffled that we actually have to walk/run on a treadmill to get exercise.  Of course when our grandparents tell us they walked 3 miles to school in the snow each day, they were telling the truth.  We balk at having to walk 1/8 mile in a mall parking lot if the parking spot was too far from the entrance.

 Over FIFTY % of ALL cancers could be completely prevented by exercising 30 minutes every day.  And yet we still don’t do it.  So you must get moving.  So here are some suggestions:

• Exercise with one of our personal trainers, take a yoga class with us, or challenge yourself to one of our circuit training classes.
• Actually GO to the gym you have a membership to.
• Use the exercise equipment you purchased that is currently acting as a clothes hanger.
• WALK, WALK, WALK – walking is perhaps the best cardiovascular activity you can do – it’s easy to do anywhere.  It’s free.  It’s easy on the joints. It’s great for your mind.  You get to enjoy nature.
• Make your life harder – Take the stairs. Park in the farthest parking spot. Throw away the TV remote or better yet, go on a TV fast and use that extra time to simply move more. Stretch in the shower or bathroom.  Hold your abdomen in at every red light.  Stand on one foot while blow drying your hair to tighten your core muscles.
• Simply make movement more fun:  turn on a great CD and dance for 15 minutes; jump on your trampoline with your kids; swim in your pool for exercise; follow your grandchild around wherever he/she goes for 20 minutes.
• Enlist a friend – working out with a friend is fun and they hold you accountable!

It is a great time to reflect on the many freedoms that thousands of men and woman have died to give us.  The freedom of where to live; the freedom of where or what to worship; the freedom to go to the school of our choice; the freedom to change jobs/careers; the freedom of speech.  And while I realize that economic times are tough right now, a visit to another country proves that America is still a great nation and enjoys much freedom where “choices” abound.

The doctors and staff of 8 Weeks to Wellness centers across the country know that health is a choice.  Health is not merely a roll of the lucky genetic die.  Rather health is our responsibility (ability to respond) to the many choices we have day in and day out.  Choices such as:

• Did you choose to skip breakfast or did you choose to eat a healthy balanced breakfast such as an egg-white, vegetable omelet and slice of high-fiber toast?
• Did you choose to watch two hours of TV last nite or did you choose to take a 45 minute walk?
• Did you choose to drink at least 64 ounces of water today or did you choose to drink 4 cups of coffee, 3 diet cokes and two beers?
• Did you choose to jump out of bed this morning and begin your stressful day (just like yesterday) or did you choose to wake up 15 minutes before anyone else in your household to take time to meditate, pray, say affirmations or visualize “making it a great day?”
• Did you choose to cut off the person in front of you that just cut you off while driving, or did you choose to say a silent pray for the other driver that they get to their destination safely because obviously they were in a hurry?
• Did you choose to be miserable today or did you, even though you woke up slightly grumpy, choose to be happy and smile just because you could?
• Did you choose go to the grocery store on the way home so that you could make several healthy meals for the week or did you choose to get take out… again?

Get the picture.  Health is indeed a choice.  Choose wisely!

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.

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.

New York, NY (PRWEB) May 26, 2010 — Wellness is often represented as a passing fad or niche market, but a major study conducted by SRI International (SRI), released at the 2010 Global Spa Summit (GSS) in Istanbul, Turkey, reveals that the yearly worldwide wellness industry is poised to cross the $2 trillion mark.

The report, titled “Spas and the Global Wellness Market,” represents one of the first analyses of the wellness industry and the consumer forces driving its growth. The study also for the first time presents wellness as an integrated industry cluster with nine core segments, adding definition to what has been an amorphous market.

Global Mega-Trends Drive Growth

Three mega-trends will ensure continued growth in wellness: (1) an aging world population; (2) failing conventional medical systems, with consumers, healthcare providers, and governments seeking more cost-effective, prevention-focused alternatives to a Western medical/”sickness” model focused on solving health problems rather than preventing them; (3) increased globalization, with consumers more aware of alternative health approaches via the Internet and the powerful reach of celebrity wellness advocates such as Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, and Jamie Oliver.

While the study finds that there are 289 million active wellness consumers in the world’s top 30 industrialized nations alone, wellness has proved exceptionally resistant to definition. SRI does not offer a single definition, but the report describes wellness as: (1) multidimensional and holistic, integrating physical, mental, spiritual, and social approaches; (2) complementary and proactive, not only treating illness, but more importantly, focused on preventing sickness and improving overall quality of life; (3) consumer driven, relying on consumer choice rather than patient necessity. (sounds like an office we know.)

“Whether you find the term meaningful or not, wellness is a vast, mainstream, and very real industry, with an extraordinary global ancient and modern history. It’s interesting that this $2 trillion dollar market has received so little research and that there is not more consensus on key definitions and benchmarks,” said Katherine Johnston, senior economist with SRI. “Governments, health professionals, and investors need to take consumer demand for wellness products and services very seriously, because, with the shortcomings in the global healthcare system, a shift toward wellness and prevention not only will, but must, accelerate.” Johnston further noted that 81 percent of consumers surveyed have a strong interest in improving their personal wellness.

8WWWellBalancedOfficeFlyer

Well I did it.  I finally got the courage to watch Food, Inc, the movie.  Boy was it eye-opening.  This is a MUST WATCH for all food eating Americans. 

Watch it with your family.  The website for the movie is www.foodincmovie.com with a plethora of information/organizations/campaigns that we can support to make sure that our food supply is going to sustain us.

On the website, www.foodincmovie.com, you are able to search by your zip code all the local farmer’s markets.  The more we demand locally grown, organic produce and meats, the more we will be supplied with these foods.  It’s how demand and supply work in this country.  So demand more and the supply will increase (as well as the price will decrease).

Below is a description of the movie that I obtained from the website.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Date__________________

• Did I wake up with “attitude of gratitude and ask what am I grateful for”
• Did I do some light stretching after my shower?
• Did I eat a healthy breakfast?   (high fiber, low sugar, fresh fruit, good protein)
• Did I take my supplements to complement what I don’t get in my diet?  (Good Multi, Fish Oil, Vitamin C, Anti-Oxidants, Co-Q-10)
• Did I Exercise or plan to today? Look at myself naked in the mirror to know why? (20 minutes interval cardio training, 45 minutes yoga or strength training,  be  mindful of intensity level, push yourself )
• Did I eat healthy snacks (Ultrameal, fresh fruit, raw nuts)
• Did I feed and challenge my brain? Use it or lose it!!    (read, crossword puzzle, learn a new skill, teach a new skill, turn off the TV at night, spend time with friends, family, social groups such as reading club, bridge club, community learning center, etc.)
• Did  I drink 50-70 oz of water   (keep a water bottle with you in the car or at  your desk)
•  Did I practice (4-7-8) breathing, Inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7 and exhale for a count of 8, repeat 5 times. Complete twice a day.
•  Did I avoid High Sugar Carbohydrates after 2pm? (anything with flour, refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup)
• Did I read at least one food label today and learn from it?
• Did I love someone or serve someone or something today?
• Did I get 5-7 servings of vegetables in my diet?
• Did I eat a healthy dinner with my family if possible?   (lean protein with veggies, interact and listen to family)
• Did I drink something or do something to sooth my body before sleep (chamomile or green tea, read something light, practice meditation)
• Did I go to bed at a time that will allow me to get 7-9 hours of sleep?

 Read this everyday until it become a habit after about 4-6 weeks

Join the Newtown and Yardley 8WW offices at the Bucks County health & fitness fair this weekend, April 17th & 18th.  It’s being health at the Bucks County Expo Center at the Sportplex in Feasterville. Presented by Aria Health there will be over 75 exhibitors, cooking demos, spa treatments, fitness classes, fun activities for children and lots more.  Look for our 8WW booth.  Goto www.bucksfitfair.com for more info.