On a moment by moment basis, you are either moving towards Health or towards Sickness.

Every action that you take, and also the ones you don’t take, either moves you towards a state of greater health and happiness… or away from it. Either moves you towards a place of ease and peace… or it doesn’t.

Every time you go for a walk, you move towards Health.
Every time you stay in to watch more TV, you move towards Sickness.
Every time you eat lots of fruits and veggies, you move towards Health.
Every time you skip a meal, you move towards Sickness.
Every time you get a good night’s rest, you move towards Health.
Every time you get overwhelmed with stress, you move towards Sickness.

And everything, I mean everything counts.

That not only means that every Action moves you towards Health or towards Sickness, but also every thought you think and every feeling you feel as well.

Every time you explore a new way of healing yourself, you move towards Health.
Every time you convince yourself that “oh, I’ll just have to live with it”, you move towards Sickness.
Every time you forgive yourself for a mistake you’ve made in the past, you move towards Health.
Every moment you continue to hold a grudge against someone, you move towards Sickness.

And it works in all areas of your life too.

Saving money moves you towards Abundance – spending frivolously moves you towards Poverty.
Getting something off your chest moves you towards a more harmonious relationship – keeping it bottled up inside moves you towards a more dysfunctional relationship.
Collaborating with others moves you towards a fulfilling career – while competing against another moves you towards limitation and separation.

I could go on and on with example after example, but what’s important here is that you gain this perspective when looking at your health. Think of examples in your life right now of how you may be moving towards Health or moving towards Sickness. Be honest with yourself – if you had to say which direction your health is moving right now…which would it be?

Are you moving towards Health right now…or…are you making yourself sick?

Are your current lifestyle habits bringing you even more Health, more happiness, more balance, more harmony, more abundance, more fulfillment, more enjoyment, more ease? Or…not?

I am going to reveal to you the very best, incredibly easy yet most effective exercise program you could ever do.

This exercise secret will do everything you want it to do for you. It will melt away those stubborn, unwanted pounds. It will make look and feel sexy when you’re naked. It will make you strong as an ox (or any other animal you want to be as strong as). It will increase your energy levels astronomically. It will do for you everything I just described to you…and more!

So here it is: the very best, incredibly easy yet most effective exercise program you could ever do is…

the one that you will actually DO! The exercise program that YOU will do consistently and regularly.

The truth is all exercise programs produce results. ALL of them. The only factor, that determines whether an exercise program is successful or not, whether it produces results or not…is YOU! The factor is YOU. Whether you stick to it or not.

If the program consists of doing daily 30 minute walks and eliminating all refined sugar, if you do it, you will get healthier and you’ll loose weight. If the program consists of lifting only 10 pound weights for 4 hours a week and jumping on a trampoline for 10 minutes a day, if you do it, you will get stronger and you’ll get fitter. If the program consists of gut-wrenching interval workouts, 10 sets of 60 second, all-out sprints, each followed by only 60 seconds of recovery, if you do it, you will get more physically fit and you’ll shed pounds.

Do you get it? It doesn’t really matter what you do for exercise, it only matters that you actually do something.

Now if you feel tricked or disappointed here, the good news is that, like I told you, ALL exercise programs work, and ALL can produce the results want for yourself. ALL of them.

So your job is to find the sort of exercise that you enjoy doing, that you love doing and dare I say, that you have fun doing, and go do it!

These are the criteria you should use in choosing your exercise program. And only you can answer that for yourself.

What’s fun for you? What do you like doing for exercise? What excites you?

Do you like walking? Running? Biking? Swimming? Lifting weights? Plyometrics? Kayaking? Rollerblading? Yoga?
How about Aerobics classes, dancing, Tai Chi, CrossFit, triathlons, outrigger canoeing?

If it’s something you smile about and can’t wait to do again, then that’s the one for you!
——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

The environment of relationship is also critical to supporting your success as well. The people who you spend the most time with and interact with the most, influence you the most. If you have children you know this. You know that if they start hanging around with the wrong crowd, they are going to make poorer choices They are more likely to get into trouble with that crowd than if they have positive, considerate friends around them.

Healthy people make healthy choices. But the opposite it true as well: sick people make sick choices. If you are constantly surrounded by sick people, it is going to be much more difficult for you to stick to your new healthy habits.

It is common knowledge that if your spouse goes on a diet, essentially you go on that diet too. Your eating habits become influenced by their eating habits. If you start eating healthier, most likely your entire family will start eating healthier as well. Realizing that your kids are watching the way you eat and that they are learning their eating habits from you right now can be incentive enough for you to change your diet.

If you are used to going out to eat fast food with the work crew everyday, it might be uncomfortable for you to say “no” to them so you can eat the meal you brought with you. If when you get together with friends to socialize, it is always centered around some overindulgent food fest, that environment will make it all the more difficult for you to stay on your new food choice plan. If your co-workers or your friends smoke, that social environment will make it more challenging for you to quit.

Examine your Relationship Environment right now. Determine whether the people around you are healthy influences on you. If not, you might be feeling a little discouraged and you are probably wondering how to deal with it. I definitely don’t recommend going through all of your friends, family and co-workers and weed all of them out of your garden. It will be better to amend that soil rather than just get rid of it.

Understand that environments work both ways – you influence those around you just as much as they influence you. The majority of the people around you – your family, friends, work associates, and the other people you spend most of your time with – they really do want the best for you. Maybe not every single person of course, but when you really examine this, you will find that the overwhelming majority really does want you to be happy.

So the first thing to do is Communicate with them. Take a moment to let them know what you are up to and ask for their help in working on it. Deep down, everyone wants to help in some way. They just might not know how to do it. So tell them how they can support you – whether it is brown bagging it along with you more at lunch, committing to finding other times and ways to hang out and connect other than smoke breaks or joining you for short walks after dinner instead of moving straight to the couch and turning on the TV.

However, if an environment proves to be just too powerful for you to overcome – a certain relationship just continually brings you down or back into your old unhealthy ways – then you may have to start minimizing the time you spend in those unhealthy situations or eliminate your contact with it altogether. This might not last forever, but at least until you establish your own healthy momentum so that when you do go back into those situations, it won’t be so difficult for you. Again, communicate what you are doing and why it is important to you, and those that love and support you will understand.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

There are only 2 types of stress:
1) Positive stress
2) Negative stress

“The father of stress research” was Dr. Hans Selye. He was the endocrinologist that studied the “Generalized Adaptability Potential.” This is your range of adaptability to stress or in our analogy, your container and how much stress it can hold.

Selye was also the first person to coin the term “stress” in medical circles in the 1930’s and 40’s. But the way he talked about stress then was different than the way the term is commonly used now. Today, when people hear the word “stress”, they usually think of something negative or unwanted. But Selye defined the term differently. He defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.” To him, stress wasn’t necessarily good or bad. It was just a response to changing stimuli around us.

But he did describe that there were 2 different types of stress: “Eustress” and “Distress”.

EU-stress is positive stress (using the prefix “e-u” meaning “pleasant or well”, like in “euphoria”).

DIS-tress is negative stress (using the prefix “dis” meaning “not” or “lack of” as in “dislike” or “dishonest”).

This is similar to the 2nd Health Principle in the Think Well section.

Taking a walk is a positive stress for your body. Sitting for long periods of time at your desk without taking breaks to stretch and move places a negative stress on your body.

Taking a daily supplement is a positive stress for your body. Eating a second bowl of ice cream places a negative stress on your body.

Everything you do for your health can be categorized in this way.

Start asking yourself:

Is this a positive stress for my body – causing it to change for the better? Or is this a negative stress I am placing on my body.

Is this moving me towards Health? Or towards Sickness? Towards what I want for myself? Or away from it.
——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

Your body can live only minutes without oxygen, but it can live weeks without food. Your body can only live days without water. The majority of the water our body uses on a daily basis comes from the foods we eat. The moisture in the fruits and vegetables and even the meat we eat is vital for our survival. But the reality is that most of us are walking around dehydrated and our body is suffering trying to deal with it.

The common symptoms of even just mild dehydration are listed as: fatigue or general low energy levels, hunger, muscle cramping or “tiredness”, constipation, indigestion or “upset stomach”, blood pressure problems, persistent or recurring infections, and even the emotional feelings of irritability, anxiety and depression.

Many of these symptoms of dehydration are health complaints that people go to a physician for help with. What do you think these people go home with: a glass of water or a prescription for a pill?

But if this person did get a pill and they did get relief from that symptom, knowing what you know now, how can you be sure that the relief actually came from the pill and not from the glass of water they took it with?

Your body is made up of 60-70% water so it is important to keep that level maintained for optimal health. A good rule of thumb to begin with is to drink 64 ounces of clean, purified water that tastes good to you each and every day. If you are exercising, you will want to drink more – usually an extra 12-20 ounces for every hour of exertion you do. This replaces the water you loose through sweat.

If you are drinking caffeinated beverages, you will need to drink more water to compensate as well. Caffeine is a diuretic, which means it causes your body to urinate more. So for every serving of caffeine you drink per day, you need to balance it out with an 8-ounce glass of water. One glass for every cup of coffee you have. One glass for every cup of caffeinated tea. One glass for every caffeinated soda (if you are still drinking soda – and later, we’ll go into the plethora of reasons why you shouldn’t be drinking soda at all – regular or diet).

Water helps your body flush out the toxins that accumulate in your body on a daily basis. When your body is able to get rid of these toxins so they don’t stagnate in you, you feel better. You feel lighter, you feel healthier, and you feel more energetic.

Drinking lots of water helps you to loose weight as well because instead of snacking or eating more calories at a meal, you can fill up on water. Also, many of your cravings for unhealthy foods (like salty foods, sugary foods, or fatty foods) go away when you are getting enough water each day.

But the past, if you have tried increasing your water intake by drinking a lot more than you have before, then you probably felt like you had to go to the bathroom all of time. It might have become such a hassle for you that you stopping trying to get hydrated. But rest reassured that you that you will not feel like this forever. Your bladder is a muscular organ, which means that it can stretch as well as contract. Over time, your bladder will expand and get used to the increased amounts of water you are taking in if you continue do it on a regular daily basis.

So don’t think that to be hydrated means you have to be in the bathroom all the time. The fact that your body has to go so often when you first start shows you how dehydrated your body has become. Your body has shrunken down the size of your bladder because it is not getting the volume it is designed to handle. Remember, “use it or loose it.” Once your body gets used to it, you won’t be running to the bathroom all the time.

You can set alerts on your computer, on your smart phone or on your desktop to remind you to drink another glass of water repeatedly thought the day. I recommend buying an easy to carry, refillable water bottle that will serve as your visual reminder to stay hydrated. This will prevent you from contributing to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” which is a large mass of trash full of thrown out, disposable plastic bottles. Buy a stainless steel reusable bottle or a hard plastic bottle that is BPA free that you can keep using over and over. A reusable water bottle will not only help you build that healthy hydration habit, but it will also help the planet as well.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

The physical environment that affects your health (see previous post on creating healthy environments) also includes your geography, i.e. where you live in the country or the world.

Is the city you live in a healthy place?

Does the climate match what you most enjoy?

Does it allow you do the activities you most enjoy doing?

Take me for example, I choose to live in San Diego. It is a perfect place for me to live because I love the beach, I love surfing, I love volleyball, I love cycling, and I love warm, sunny weather to do it in. I am NOT a cold weather guy at all. I am think I am solar powered because warm, sunny days give me tons of energy and make me really, really happy.

I learned this when I lived in San Francisco while going school. I loved the people, the food and the energy of the Bay Area. But it was just too cold for me. I didn’t enjoy the long cold, wet damp winters there. Now, I have friends who live in Minnesota and the East Coast that when they hear me say San Francisco was too cold for me, they laugh at me and say that I don’t know cold if I am saying the Bay Area was too cold for me. And I say fine. I don’t want to know their type of cold if it is worse than what I experienced there.

After I graduated, I received an offer to help run a clinic in Costa Rica so I left San Francisco and moved there for a year. Sure, it was an incredible opportunity, but I also wanted to go there to thaw out! Now I live in San Diego and I am very happy here.

But that is me and my likes. That is what is a good healthy environment for me. You might not care for hot weather and that is fine. A cooler, crisper climate will be healthier for you then. Thankfully there are millions of places to live that can suit your own individual needs and likes. It is important to at least ask yourself whether or not the place where you are currently living is the healthiest place for you.

If the arts and attending cultural events is important to you, is the area you live in metropolitan enough to feed this side of you? Chances are Cirque du Soleil isn’t going to make it to your town on their next tour if you live in the middle of BFE.

If getting out into nature regularly is important to you to help balance out the concrete jungle living and the cubicle existence you are in, do you have places to do that? Do you have a beach to walk on if you like the sand and waves? Do you have trails to hike on if you like the forest?

Do you have a peaceful spot to take in a sunset? Do you have a place where you can sit and take in a beautiful view below you?

Each of these are healthy places that can help shift your attention from the mundane, day-to-day to a bigger, more cosmic perspective and they all come from your external physical environment.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

The environment of your internal self is largely what you have been spending most of this program working on. You are changing your internal environment in the way you think, the way you move your body, the way you feed and nourish your body, and the way manage your stress. All of these factors are required for you to make real change in your lifestyle so you can reap the benefits of healthy lifestyle.

Healthier people make healthier choices for themselves. As you start taking baby steps toward health, a healthy momentum build and more and more health will come to you. Health creates health. It brings more of it to you and more health attracted to you. So by making changes in your internal physical environment, giving your health the thoughts it needs, the movement it needs, the foods it needs and the energy it needs, you will be creating health from within.

But your physical environment is not just your internal environment. Your external environment plays a huge role in your health as well. Think of the home you live in: is it a clean, organized, beautiful living space that you love living in? Or is it dusty and dirty, which may be detracting from your health? Is it cluttered and disorganized so it causes you stress just moving around in it or trying to find something you might have misplaced?

Think about your workplace: is your desk setup or your office space ergonomically correct so it doesn’t place a continual strain on your body? I remember a patient I worked with years ago that came in to see me for help with the daily headaches she had been suffering with for months. After getting adjusted for a few weeks, the headaches were about 80% gone. But there didn’t seem to be any clinical reason why the last 20% of the headache pain should have hung around It was only after asking further questions about some other areas of her life did we discover the answer. She told me that at work, the only place her monitor would fit on her desk was off to the side of the keyboard which forced her to keep her head rotated 45 degrees all day long while she worked on her computer! Obviously this was putting strain on her neck, so she changed the position of her monitor and a week later all of her headache pain was gone.

So consider if your work area is up for your body to do your job properly, so that it doesn’t strain your body or drain your energy. Does your chair support your spine well especially if you are sitting for most of the day? If you stand for most of the day, do you wear good shoes that support your legs and do you take frequent breaks to move around and take the load off your feet? Is there adequate lighting while you are working so your eyes don’t have to strain?

Consider other areas of your physical environment as well:

Are the clothes you wear stylish and up to date? Do they fit you properly and are they comfortable? If you have ever been under-dressed at a party or had an itchy tag in your shirt, then you know how stressful clothing can be.

Is your car in good condition so you don’t have to worry about it breaking down on the way to an important meeting at work or if you have all the kids in the car with you?

All of these things and more make up your external physical environment and each one of these is either contributing to your health and well-being or taking away from it. Remember how Health Principle #2 works in your life – everything counts.

Ask yourself: What is one thing you could do today to improve your external physical environment, to make it healthier for you?
——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

The amount of calories you need to eat to be healthy depends on many different factors including your age, body size and health goals. Males typically need more calories per day than females, all other things being equal. If you are trying to loose weight, your daily caloric intake is going to be less than if you are trying to put on weight or just even just maintaining your current weight.

You can find out just how many calories your body uses on a daily basis by calculating your basal metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate is the amount of calories in a day your body needs at a minimum to maintain its basic functions.

There are many resources out there than can do this for you. The famous Mayo Clinic has a calorie calculator at mayoclinic.com. FitBit.com and Daily Burn.com have one as part of their calorie counting programs.

My favorite is on Livestrong.com from Lance Armstrong’s foundation. I use their food tracker and exercise journal app almost everyday. It has a section that will calculate your daily caloric needs as well. You just enter in your age, your height, your weight and your general activity level. Obviously a marathoner is going to need more calories to sustain her workouts than a couch potato needs.

The tools on Livestrong.com can also help you to learn just what a normal portion size is for the foods you eat – what one serving of chicken is, how many calories are in one serving of pasta, for example. Most of us were never really taught what moderate portion sizes are and what healthy meals are. We just ate the food that was put in front of us. And we still do. Educating yourself on the calories that are in certain foods and what moderate portion sizes look like will help you for a lifetime of healthy eating habits.

When it comes to loosing weight, in the most basic, simplest terms, it comes down to this: calories IN vs. calories OUT or the number of calories eaten vs. the number of calories burned. At very advanced levels, there is a difference in the types of calories you eat and the way you burn calories. All calories are not created equal when it comes to your body’s biochemistry. But for now, just concentrate on when you burn more calories in a day than you take in, you will loose weight.

A pound of fat is equates approximately to 3500 calories. So if every day you burn 500 calories more than you take in, then over a week you will loose one pound in a healthy way. You can either eat 500 calories less per day than you usually do so over a week to loose that pound. Or you can burn 500 calories more by exercising than you usually do to loose that pound. Of course, you can also do a combination of the two.

If you are trying to loose weight, don’t forget about that metabolic fire of yours. Don’t stop eating and burn yourself out with exercise. Take a slow and steady approach. It might take longer, but your clothes will start to feel better on you, your energy levels will pick up and that scale will start moving in the right direction.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

Even if you ate impeccably – you ate all organic meats, fruits and vegetables in the right amounts, right proportions and at the right times – you would still need to take a supplement for your body to get all of the nutrients it needs to be healthy.

The fact is that the state of the world today requires you to take a supplement. The over farming of our land has severely depleted our soil. So there are less nutrients available in the soil, which means there are less nutrients going into the fruits and vegetables we buy in the market. The artificial fortification of our food supply doesn’t help either.

The nutrient value of our food supply now is quite simply not what it used to be. Did you know that to get the same nutrient value of one apple from the 1920’s, you would have to eat 27 apples today? That is why it is so important for you to supplement your diet to make sure you get all the vitamins and minerals your body needs to be as healthy as you want it to be.

So what do you look for in a good, quality multivitamin? The most important thing to consider in selecting a multivitamin is the “bio-availability” of the nutrients it contains. Bio-available nutrients come in forms that your body is able to absorb easily. This means that what is in the supplement, your body can use.

I remember in one of the radiology courses I took, the doctor put up an abdominal film and asked us what we saw. We all saw that something shouldn’t have been in that person’s abdomen. So we started down our differential diagnosis list as we were trained. A tumor? Too regular a border. A cyst of some kind? Too opaque, too dense. Maybe it was a belt buckle or top button on a pair of jeans they forgot to take off before the x-ray was taken? No, didn’t have the same shape.

The shape actually looked like it could be bullet! Was it a bullet? No, the doctor assured us it wasn’t a bullet but we were on the right track, he said. It turned out that it was a multivitamin that was on its way through this person’s lower intestines to be expelled – a multivitamin!

Would it surprise you to hear that most of the $10 bottles of one-a-day vitamin supplements are made of materials that are so cheap that the body cannot even assimilate them? Take calcium for example. This is a mineral that has been marketed very intensely in the supplement industry. But the majority of the calcium that is found in the cheaper supplements comes in the form of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is the same substance that makes up your common chalk that teachers use in the classroom. Imagine swallowing a piece of chalk and trying to get your daily recommended allowance of calcium from it. The truth is you can’t.

The substance calcium carbonate is not very “bioavailable” for our body, which means although there is calcium in the product, our body cannot absorb it easily so most of it passes right through us. This is why that multivitamin appeared intact that x-ray. By contrast, your body much more easily absorbs calcium citrate, so you body gets most of what is in your supplement if it is in this form.

But supplements that have bio-available nutrients are naturally going to be more expensive. So instead of buying that cheap, one-a-day vitamin at Costco, save your money for one that you will actually get some health benefit from. You may spend $40-50 to even $100/month for a good multivitamin and it is one of the best health insurance purchases you can make. It will give your body the nutrients it doesn’t get from your diet to repair and replace each of your cells in the best way possible.

Your DNA can be thought of like the blueprint of a house and your cells are like the workers that are continually rebuilding and repairing that house (of course, in this analogy, this house is your body). If your cells don’t have the proper building materials, the quality of your body’s renovation will suffer. Then your health will suffer.

At the bare minimum, your basic supplementation should include:

1) A high quality multivitamin – The supplement should contain the bioavailable forms of a wide range of the vitamins and minerals you need – especially calcium, potassium and magnesium.

2) Omega 3 Essential Fatty Acids – Fish oils have been shown to have beneficial effects on many things such as insulin metabolism, lowering triglyceride counts, blood clotting and easing tension in clogged arteries.

3) Vitamin D3 – It plays role in cardiovascular, bone and immune system health, as well as in the healing of chronic injuries and general mood and emotional health.

Work with your health care provider to get the proper blood testing to set up a supplementation plan and get product recommendations that are optimal for you.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.

There are 3 types of exercise and each one is essential for your body to be fully healthy: Cardiovascular, The third type of exercise is stretching or flexibility training. This is the type of exercise that all too often gets forgotten about. This is because in the exercise realm, so much of the focus is on burning calories with cardio or building muscles with weights.

But stretching is so important for you. Because of all of the contraction that you’re doing with your running, your biking, your walking, your weight training, or whatever exercise regimen you’re doing, it leaves your muscles tight and shortened. If you don’t counteract that with stretching, those muscles are just going to become tighter and tighter.

Picture the quintessential body-builder type of physique whose muscles are so huge and so tight that they look like they’re going to fall forward all the time. Because they are so overdeveloped and haven’t stretched adequately, their shoulders are rounded forward, their elbows can’t even straighten out and they just can’t move fluidly.

Your muscles too can become tight and inflexible when you lift weights without stretching. This inflexibility can also make you more prone to injury, and to more pain too.

That’s because your chronically tight muscles compress your joint surfaces together and this causes more and more inflammation to build up.

Try this: put both of your hands in front of you for a minute and go ahead and make two fists. Now place your knuckles together so that the mountains of your knuckles on one hand, fit in the valleys of the other hand. (With you looking down onto the backs of your hands it should look like a zipper.)

Now contract your chest muscles so that you push your two fists together putting pressure on your knuckles. Do you feel that pressure? Now if you imagine your fists together like this is your knee joint…then the pressure you feel on your knuckles, is from your chronically tight leg muscles that you don’t stretch, those tight quads and hamstrings, press your knee joint surfaces together and irritates them.

And because these tight muscles also restrict its normal range of motion, that inflammation can’t be pumped out of the area. The more inflammation that is allowed to stagnate in there, the more damage that will occur and the more pain you will feel.

Ironically, this sequence of events is often what prevents a person from doing the moving and stretching they need to do to help the problem they’ve created by not stretching: because their joints and muscles are just too painful.

Experience has shown though, by stretching the large muscle groups slowly and consistently, overtime, the muscle tension can be released, the circulation improves and the pain will subside.

So if you feel like you have tight and sore muscles, stretching out is going to make a huge difference for you. So you can feel less pain and more relaxed.

And if you’re already working out regularly, be sure to keep flexible so you don’t injure yourself and so you can keep working out the way you have been and so you can keep enjoying all the benefits of your exercise.

——–

*Adapted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.

Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, call 619-239-0053, email Info@BeingWellLifestyles.com or visit www.BeingWellLifestyles.com.