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WELLNESS
What is Wellness?
Wellness is a popular word in our culture and signifies an effort at
staying healthy or well. But it is not clear what one needs to do to
practice a wellness lifestyle. Wellness is actually taking care of
oneself when you are WELL as well as when you are SICK. We have patients
that frequently come in and say, “I came in for maintenance right when I
felt the pain again”. We’re always happy to see our patients, but this
is not prevention or wellness. These patients are practicing crisis care
versus wellness care. On the surface, health seems like the state of
having no symptoms. But we all know people who felt fine the day before
a heart attack or the day before they found out they had cancer. How
many times have you been to the dentist and found out you had a cavity…
but you had no symptoms! Health is a lot more than just a lack of
symptoms. The truth is health is on a scale or continuum with wellness
on one end and illness or disease at the opposite end. We are all headed
in one of those directions or the other. The key is to practice a
wellness lifestyle.
How can I practice a Wellness Lifestyle?
Wellness begins with knowing the basic aspects of health which are
reminded with the handy pneumonic DREAM. The main aspects of health are:
DIET- eating the right foods from the right sources.
REST- we all need a sufficient amount of rest for our bodies to repair.
EXERCISE- do at least 30 minutes three times a week.
ADJUSTED- getting the spine adjusted to keep healthy nerve connections
between brain and body.
MENTAL ATTITUDE- negative thoughts and low self-esteem have been shown
scientifically to make us less healthy. It is important to stay positive
and enrich your mind with good mental nutrition.
In order for one to be truly healthy one must keep these five aspects of
health in balance. Doing a ton of exercise without regard for diet is
like having a high performance car and putting low quality gasoline in
it. Eating organically grown, free range foods without having a nervous
system that ensures proper body function is like putting the highest
quality gas in that same car without ever changing the oil or getting it
tuned up.
Wellness is about looking to the future and treating your body like you
are going to have to live in it until you are 100 years old. With this
mindset you would eat the right way, get an adequate amount of rest,
exercise regularly, make sure there was no interference between the
control center (the brain) and your lifeline to the rest of the body
(the spinal cord). And finally you would feed your mind with positive,
uplifting messages that encouraged you to reach your potential or to
choose to have great days!
We encourage our patients to practice wellness in all aspects of their
lives and we help guide them through the choices they have in being
either healthy or sick.
Contact :McMullin & Stark
located in Los Alamitos, CA to start your wellness lifestyle today. |