The Gratitude Board

This month in practice we put up a gratitude board as part of our pay-it-forward project. 

Check it out below:

At so many levels this had been exciting and has created a great feeling in the practice.  It has been such a joy to see so many people participate and it's honestly surprising to see who is pausing, thinking and writing something to put up. 

This is the part of our "pay it forward" theme which was actually a surprise for me.  I thought the benefit of this exercise was simply being grateful for what "I" have.  I did really enjoyed thinking about what I wanted to put up and it did make me stop and pause and be grateful.  BUT  the most heart warming experience has been reading what OTHER people are grateful for and how happy that made me :-D  And watching other people in the practice stop and read it as well.  EVERYONE  has this happy smile on their face as they look over the board. And reading other people's gratitude messages expanded my concept of what I am grateful for. 

So my next project is to bring this into my home and with my family create a gratitude board on our fridge!!!  Why not try it with your family, your kids, your grand-kids…I think  we may be surprised by what our family is grateful for and it will most certainly bring more love, joy, thoughtfulness and appreciation into our lives. 


And who doesnt want more of that??!!

Next time you pop in for your adjustment, make sure YOU too check out our gratitude board!!

Gratefully yours :-D
Dr April xo

Physical Activity, What Is It and How Do I Do It?

We always talk about getting physical or taking part in physical activity but what does this statement really mean. According to the World Health Organisation Physical activity is any bodily movement produced by our muscles that requires energy expenditure. 

Be careful not to confuse the term 'physical activity' and 'exercise'. Exercise is actually a subcategory of physical activity. Exercise is a planned, structured repetitive and is purposeful in improving or maintaining our physical fitness.

Research has shown that around half of us are not getting enough activity to meet the minimum targets that are needed to achieve good health. The minimum amount of activity that is recommended for good health is 30 minutes of 'moderate' activity 5-7 days a week. "But what is a moderate level for me" you might ask. Well this is defined as a level that causes a 'slight but noticeable increase in our heart rate' Some of the things that this might include are a brisk walk, a good guide for a moderate intensity is about 15 minutes for a Kilometre, or even simpler you can talk but you cannot sing. But we don’t always have time for this, or we are tired when we get home from work or we have chores to do around the home. Well good news. These things can be used as part of our physical activity. We can mow the lawn, vacuum, dig in the garden- as long as your breathing and heart rate are raised you are on the right track.

You don’t have to do all your physical activity in one day either. You could do three 10 minute burst spread throughout the day. But anything shorter is probably not going to have the impact that is desired.

If you are able to achieve a good and constant level of activity you will achieve great health benefits. You will reduce your odds of coronary artery disease by a massive 40% this is where a fatty build up exists in the blood vessels; this is the key risk factor in heart attacks. You might even take a huge step in preventing the occurrence of diabetes, stroke and possibly mental health issues such as depression.

Here are some simple guidelines to help you all get started in being physically active and kick start our healthy lives.

1. Think of movement as an opportunity, not an inconvenience.
2. Be active every day in as many ways as you can.
3. Put together at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most, preferably all, days.
4. If you can, also enjoy some regular vigorous exercise for extra health and fitness.

Often I hear that “A gym membership is just so expensive”, and “I need motivation. I need someone pushing me to get active” but my answer is why do you need someone to help you get active. Isn’t getting out doors and seeing the world enough. There are great bush walking sites around Wollongong and even up to Stanwell tops. Go and see the area we live in. It might cost you a pair of shoes but gee it’s much cheaper than a gym. Why not do your chores to music that you like, that you can sing and dance to. I have to admit when I do my chores around the home I am always listening to music and can’t help but “get my bogie on”.

Something that I have found helpful in recent times is the use of what is called a workout tracker. These are applications that you can get on your phone in order to help you track and store your exercise routes and assess how you are going. Many of these applications also have sports stars built into the phone to help keep you motivated and also give you regular updates on how you are going. You can get these applications for free through either the Android store or the Apple ITunes store.

Life can be an amazing journey full of fun joy and happiness and love if we choose it to be. A good way to increase your physical activity is to write a list of “play ideas”. These are ideas of how you can not just get your heart rate moving, but spend time outdoors or with family and friends. These can be not just a structured (planned) event but even a non structured activity, these can include things like fishing, drawing a landscape or even flying a kite with your kids or grandkids. Make this list and place it on your fridge and cross them off as you do them. Make a plan to do at least one of these activates once a week.

So we have discussed non structured ideas but what are some structured ideas. Well this can be the plan to go for our walk or run. Another great activity that is cheap and cost effective and can be done at home is to get an exercise ball and to do various exercises on these (exercises are often included when you buy the ball). These exercise balls can cost. $20-$40 and are a great way to help increase our heart rate. But more than that we can use them to help stretch our bodies.  But if you cant get an exercise ball we can do the common exercises that we can all benefit from. These are listed below with a brief explanation:

1)      Crunches for Abdomen:

·         A crunch begins with lying face up on the floor with knees bent. The movement begins by curling the shoulders towards the pelvis. The hands can be behind or beside the neck or crossed over the chest.

2)      Push-ups:

·         Lie chest-down with your hands at shoulder level, palms flat on the floor and slightly more than shoulder-width apart, and your feet together and parallel to each other.

·         Look forward rather than down at the floor. The first contact you make with the floor with any part of the face should be your chin, not your nose.

·         Keep your legs straight and your toes tucked under your feet.

·         Straighten your arms as you push your body up off the floor. Keep your palms fixed at the same position and keep your body straight. Try not to bend or arch your upper or lower back as you push up.

·         Exhale as your arms straighten out.

·         Pause for a moment.

·         Lower your body slowly towards the floor. Bend your arms and keep your palms in fixed position. Keep body straight and feet together.

·         Lower body until chest touches the floor. Try not to bend your back. Keep your knees off the floor, and inhale as you bend your arms.

·         Pause for a moment. Begin straightening your arms for a second push-up. Exhale as you raise your body.

3)      Squats:  

·         Start by standing with your feet shoulder width apart with your weight evenly distributed on both feet. Your hips, knees and toes should all point straight ahead, and abdominal muscles should be held tight.

·         Inhale as you bend your knees and extend your buttocks backward as if you are going to sit in a chair. Extend your arms in front of you and focus your eyes straight ahead or at a point slightly higher to help you maintain balance.

·         Watch that your knees do not extend past your toes, which puts great strain on the knee joints. Focus on keeping your weight over your heels, your back straight and your chest lifted throughout the exercise.

·         Reverse the move when your thighs are parallel to the floor and return to a standing position, exhaling as you stand. Be sure not to lock your knees.

·         Focus on contracting and working the muscles of the thighs and buttocks. If you feel pain at any time, stop.

I hope that now that you have some ideas on how you can get out and get physically active that you can apply these things into your life for just 30 minutes a day and that you start to see great improvements in your life. If you do find improvements please don’t hesitate to write a comment here on this blog so that others may see the growth and change it has on other people lives.

So go on get out there.  Brendan.

The Amazing Dr You

Everyone is worried about how good they look, how many calories we are eating, losing weight, what new miracle fad diet I can find to look good in a bikini? 

What about if I told you, you could have it all?  Not worrying about calories, lose weight, eat heaps and look and feel good in a bikini.  If I could show you a different way to help create a new you but a healthy one, not a fad one, one that is about making changes that are lifelong.  The great thing about health is we don’t have to figure it all out; your body does that for you.  What you do need to give your body what is needs… most of the time (we don’t have to be perfect).  And that is what I can share with you the secrets to what your body needs to be healthy, thriving and vibrant…which really aren’t secrets at all.  The research about what we need to be well is there, it is just not being shared with you.  And I want to change that. 

So in terms of what we need to be nutritionally fit all we need to look at is what our body’s genetic requirements are.  If you look at what are body is designed to be we can find the answers to what our body is designed to eat.  From an evolutionary perspective we are hunters and gatherers which gives us many clues to our current lifestyle is making us so unwell.  We are currently the sickest species on the planet. 

If we are hunters and gatherers by design, what do you think our meals would have consisted of? If you think about it we would have mostly fruits, veggies, seeds and nuts when we were foraging so one the go, all fresh and we would have eaten meats when we caught it.

What we didn’t eat was grains and dairy which is what most of our diet consist of today.  We didn’t have fields of grain to make bread and pasta, or cow farms to produce vast quantities of milk.  We are the only species on the planet that drinks the milk after weaning and we drink milk that is not even from our species.  Guess who decided that we needed 4-6 serves of dairy/day….The Dairy Industry! So the fact is our body is not designed to eat grains and dairy and it responsible for so much poor health in the world. 

Don’t freak out!!  What am I going to eat?  I won’t suggest that you give up anything that you are not ready to give.  What I will suggest is you start adding some stuff that is genetically good for your body and what happens then as you start to feel better, most people find they don’t want to eat the other stuff as much because they feel so much better by eating whole, healthy, naturally foods that our body knows what to do with and creates awesome health.  The healthier you get the more you wont want to every give that up and you will start to love that good feeling more then you love a piece of bread :)

Starting Tips to creating a healthy, happy new you in three months!!

#1 ADD, DON’T TAKE AWAY…not yet, not until you feel ready.  I don’t want you to give up anything yet.  Not until you feel the difference and you are excited by fresh, whole food and cringe at a plate full of pasta because you know how you will feel after eating it.  There easy…no pain, only gain (Health, not weight that is!!!!)

  Whew…we can move on now.  See you can trust me.  I really meant you won’t have to do anything you don’t want to. 

#2 EAT FRESH FOOD FIRST…this is how it works.  The first part of each meal should be fresh and preferably raw and before you eat anything else.   Remember the part where I said you won’t have to give up your breads, pasta, rice or sweets.  This is it.  Eat what you would normally eat but start every meal with one or two serves of fresh, raw fruit or veggies.  Starting with a salad is great.  You can have other veggies that are cooked as well.  But eat them second.  Eating the right and good stuff first will feel better, fill you up and give you body the vitamins and minerals from where they really come from….Fruit and Veg.  What I know will happen as you follow this, eventually you will want more fresh and less processed and when that happens listen to your body. 

#3 EAT MORE!!!  Crazy but true.  Now I don’t mean more McDonalds.  I mean more often and more of the foods our body is designed to eat.  Your body needs food at least 6 times a day.  This will stimulate your metabolism which helps to lose weight and we eat smaller meals because we are snacking all day.  For work make sure you pack heaps so you can eat as much as you want and don’t get tempted by unnatural foods for our body

#4 EAT MORE FAT!!  Pick your jaw up off the floor.  And again it doesn’t give you free rein to eat ice cream for all six meals.  The high carb low fat diet has been of the saddest myths of the last thirty years and obesity has skyrocket since people have started have consuming low fat products and lots of carbohydrates like grains, rice and corn. Historically our Paleolithic nutritional intake was 30 – 45 %.  Today it is 30 – 40 % but it is saturated fats.  So I promised you, you didn’t have to give up anything you didn’t want to.  So for now, until you are ready eat the carbs but avoid low fat products.  Eat the fat it is better for you then not eating it.  So the fact is our body needs fats to transport certain essential vitamins and minerals around our body.  The good fats…olive oil, avocado, fats from animals that are free range or grass fed.  Avoid high Omega 6 linoleic fatty acid foods or adding extra Omega 6 in our food, our food and therefore us are currently toxic is Omega 6 and deficient in Omega 3.  This is happening because most of meat is now farmed, even fish and farmed meat is fed grain which makes it high in Omega 6 instead of what is should be which is Omega 3.  So we are essentially getting a double hit of Omega 6 and no Omega 3

#5  EAT OMEGA 3 SUPPLEMENTS…you saw that one coming didn’t you   JIf you eat the kind of diet that we are talking about here you will need very few supplements but one that you need everyday and cant get adequately for optimal health with our modern lifestyle and current farming practices is Omega 3.  Now don’t rush out and buy just any Omega 3 that you can find.  There are some very important things to consider when you look at your choice of Omega 3 supplements.  So what are the tips you need to make about.  It needs to be the right ratio of EPA to DHA and that ratio is the same one as our ancestors which is 3:2, it needs to be made from smaller fish like krill so that there is no heavy medal accumulation and it needs to before manufactured and purified properly so that is doesn’t oxidize which makes it toxic.  If you have a fish oil supplement you use, you want to make sure it meets these basic criteria or it could be doing you more harm then good.  We stock very few supplements in the center for the simple reason that if you are eating well you shouldn’t need them but this is one supplement I do stock so that I can make sure that you can have access to the right supplement and can be sure of its quality. 

 

Once you get started on these if you want to learn more, speak to Mish or Jess about saving a seat at our Eat Well workshop.  I would love to share more with you.  Health really is and should be fun and exciting, not hard and boring.

And remember the goal is a life of health and wellness…a natural side effect of doing this is more energy, less weight, less illness, and less medication. 

“Let your food be your medicine and you medicine your food” Hippocrates

 

Power On!
Dr April x