In Fitness and in Health

Posted on October 19, 2011 by

Don Parker

Get moving. Get strong. Eat right.

That was my mantra for health.

And then, I met Dr. Anita Haque.

She walked in to my gym one day and introduced herself, the new kid on the block—the new chiropractor in town. Her office was in the building complex next to my gym.

She told me about her services and a bit about chiropractic. There was no hard sell about it, just a real passion about how it promoted health and wellness.

I was impressed with her enthusiasm and genuineness. I was also struck by her warmth. Our meeting stayed with me.

Soon afterwards, I referred a client I thought might benefit from what Dr. Haque had to offer. My client’s enthusiastic report back confirmed what I suspected—Dr. Haque was the real thing.

She sent me a note thanking me for referring my client, and then invited me to lunch so we could talk about networking.

“I’m curious,” she asked me between bites of her salad. “Have you ever tried chiropractic?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her I had been a skeptic in the past.

“Then why did you refer your client?”

“Well,” I said, “you made a believer out of me.”

“Why don’t you give it a try so you can see first hand what chiropractic can do?” she suggested.

The next thing I knew I was in her capable hands. It was the most thorough exam I’ve ever had. I became a patient and after two weeks of adjustments, I started noticing changes —changes I didn’t even know I needed. I had become used to getting by on four or five hours of sleep a night. Then I started sleeping through the night.

After four weeks, I noticed that my allergies were gone.

My dedication to fitness has never been about how it changed my clients’ appearance—it has always been about how it changed the way they felt about themselves—how it felt to be taking care of themselves.

That’s how I felt about Dr. Haque and her chiropractic adjustments. I had discovered a new way to take care of myself.

What is unique about Dr. Haque is how she approaches her work. She really has an intuitive sense for what her patients need. She takes all the years of schooling she’s had (as strenuous as any received in medical school) then brings her heart and soul to it. She practices the art, as well as the science, of chiropractic.

We soon realized that our passion for health and treating our clients and patients as unique individuals was a perfect partnership. The strength training I offer helps her patients hold their adjustments; her attention to the health of my clients’ spines helps keep them fit and healthy.

As a side note, I did what any smart, sane man would do with a woman as beautiful, warm, genuine, and passionate about her life’s work as Dr. Haque is.

I asked her to marry me. She said yes. And so we married. I get to call her Anita.

It is a partnership of heart and soul as well as professions that are committed to helping people stay well and feel good about their lives.

Our lives are definitely on the wellness path.

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Adaptation and Healing — Your Body’s Innate Intelligence

Posted on October 5, 2011 by

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet, and the cause and prevention of disease.
Thomas Edison

Dr. Anita Haque, DC

The human body is a miraculous thing. We are made to adapt to our surroundings and changes in our bodies.

We can adapt to losing a limb or one of our senses, such as sight or hearing.

We also know how to adapt to pain.

Adapting to pain comes in handy when we are in a stressful situation. For example, if we sprained an ankle while on a hike in the middle of the forest and need to get back to our car before night falls, our ability to ignore the pain is a good thing. It’s a survival instinct that keeps us perservering.

Unfortunately, we have learned in our stress-filled daily lives to ignore pain, mask it with pain relievers such as aspirin, or develop adaptive behaviors that lead to permanent damage or keep us from a healthy lifestyle.

People who have neck pain, for example, often adapt to it by simply limiting their range of motion so they can go about their daily routine. Limiting range of motion is a way to avoid pain, but it doesn’t heal what causes the pain.

You may have decided you need to stop exercising because of knee pain. You adapt by deciding to stop doing something that keeps you otherwise healthy and well.

Adaptation is fine for the short run. But when the adaptation becomes the solution, you might be in for more problems.

We are assaulted by pharmaceutical ads that offer the promise of symptom relief. But relieving the symptom does just that — relieves the symptom. It does not solve the underlying problem The longer you ignore a symptom, adapt to pain, the greater the risk of permanent damage. Eventually, the body can no longer heal the damage, because it has become permanent.

Our bodies have an innate intelligence, a unique ability to heal themselves. Think about how quickly a paper cut, that annoyingly painful small injury, disappears. That is evidence of your body healing itself.

What if we learned to trust our body? What if we were able to listen to its innate intelligence? What if we decided that wellness, not simply the absence of pain or illness, was the standard? What if instead of ignoring pain, we listened to it, understood that our body is telling us we need to pay attention to it, that we need to take the time to return it to a state of wellness?

That’s what I would encourage you to do. Listen to your body. If you are in pain, don’t ignore it and don’t simply mask it with a pain reliever or other pharmaceutical. If you have a chronic illness, don’t just accept it as inevitable. Look for the underlying cause and how to treat it.

When I treat patients, I listen to the call of the body — how has it adapted and what does it need to heal itself.

Its ability to adapt and heal is evidence of our body’s innate intelligence. Trust that. Listen to how your body calls to you to take care of it, and take the time to do what you need to get back on the wellness path.

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Eat Now, Pay Later . . . or Eat Now, Reap the Benefit Now and Later

Posted on September 28, 2011 by

“Those who don’t have time to eat healthy now will have to make time to be sick”
Quote on the whiteboard at Lifestyle Fitness

I looked at a food label recently and had no idea how to pronounce ninety-five percent of the words. I picked up a dictionary. I couldn’t find eighty percent of them. Stuff that gives the food a long shelf life. Words that don’t exist in nature.

I thought, why would I want to put that in my body?

There’s the saying “Long shelf life, short life for you.” What you’re eating might be killing you, or at the very least not benefiting you.

I had a client who trained with me for over six years, but resisted looking at her diet. And by diet, I don’t mean something that you go on for a while to lose weight, but what you regularly feed your body.

Finally, she decided she would start using the menus I recommended. After using them for a while, she tried a dish she used to like, very cheesy and creamy. She felt nauseated.

Her body had gotten used to food that actually fueled it, nourished it, and so it reacted when she ate something that clogged it up more than it nourished her.

I hear all the time that people think they can’t afford to eat better, that the food with the long shelf life is so much cheaper.

To rephrase that quote at the top of my blog, “Those who can’t afford to eat healthy now will pay for it later – in medical costs.”

So you need to start countering the  two arguments — I don’t have time to eat healthy or I can’t afford to eat healthy — with common sense.

First, if cost is your issue, consider eating well as an investment in your future. I personally don’t think it does cost more to eat healthy. When you eat healthy, you don’t overeat. But if that point won’t sell you, think of the cost benefit of changing the oil in your car. Think of your body the same way.

As for not having the time to eat well, I’ll say it again, when you slow down you pay attention to what you eat, and you enjoy it more. You’re only talking about another fifteen to twenty minutes you add to your time. Isn’t that worth it?

You don’t have to sacrifice taste to eat well. You don’t have to go hungry to eat well. You just have to change the way you think about eating. Look at labels. Check out the number of calories, the grams of fat.

And, if you don’t recognize most of the words, don’t buy it. Don’t eat it. The words aren’t really necessary to your vocabulary, and the additives don’t contribute to your wellness. They might just do the opposite.

Eat now. Pay later. Or, Eat now. Reap the benefits now — and later. You decide.

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Life is not an Illness

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

Dr. Anita Haque, DC

Profound sadness and despair are a part of life. Neither is a sign of sickness. Yet, too often, they are treated as a sickness for which there is a pharmaceutical solution.

You have probably seen the commercials for anti-depressants on television — the ones that indicate a “side” effect is thoughts of suicide. Something that is supposed to treat your depression might make you suicidal?

The risk is apparently greater when the anti-depressant is prescribed to children, those under eighteen.

Loss is a part of life. It is normal to feel sad or depressed when we experience loss, whether it’s the loss of a job, a pet, a loved one, or even the feeling of loss elicited by deep disappointment.

Medicating emotions doesn’t make them go away. It merely mutes them, which means we never have the opportunity to confront them, work them through, learn from them. Working through sad times shapes who we are, brings wisdom and growth, teaches us compassion. We become stronger and more humane.

Obviously, there are times when intervention is important with depression. Severe depression can lead to suicide or delusional behavior. Bipolar disorder is a biochemical problem.

But, if you can identify a reason for feeling sad and depressed, there are other ways than drugs to help manage it while you are working it through.

Exercise releases endorphins, which improve your sense of well being. Eating good nutritional meals also helps you maintain a sense of balance. Staying away from alcohol, which is a depressant, is important.

If you’ve lost a loved one, most local hospices offer grief counseling. You might even find a group that offers support from people who speak the same language — the language of loss — as you do.

Losing a job can bring about despair. There are often support groups for that as well.

The Wellness Path, to me, really is about living our lives as fully as we can. If we are living fully, we cannot escape life events that bring with them sadness and despair. But we don’t have to treat our reaction to difficult times as a sickness.

If we honor the feeling, recognize the loss, do our best to maintain our overall health while we work our way to the other side of grief, our lives will become richer.

I think it is a much better path to take than muting our feelings with drugs that rob us of he opportunity to weave the experience into our life’s tapestry — and might have dangerous “side” effects.

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Bring on the Healthy Food Memories!

Posted on September 8, 2011 by

Don Parker

“Bring on the donuts!”

That was Sunday morning in my house growing up. My dad would bring home two dozen donuts before church. We loved it.

Our culinary heritage was southern with a bit of Italian thrown in. We ate black-eyed peas, red beans and rice, jambalaya, fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Bacon was a big deal. I called it smothered food — smothered in gravy and tasty fat.

I loved the food I grew up with, but didn’t like what it did to my body. My family was overweight and got picked on because they were.

We all grew up with food that is familiar to us. We get used to it as a way of life. It’s not just about fuel, it’s what gives us comfort, what satisfies us, what makes us feel we are in familiar environment.

But most of us grew up eating food that wasn’t healthy for us. When you pile on the “convenience” of fast food (isn’t that a weird concept, fast food?) we have ended up with a culture where people are shoveling food into their mouths, getting little nutrition from it, and thinking it is normal — familiar.

Changing the way you eat might seem daunting, especially if you cook for a family. How are they going to react to change?

Here’s the most important thing to know about changing how you eat: You don’t have to adopt a different culture to eat well. You don’t have to give up flavor to eat well. You don’t necessarily have to give up your favorite foods.

You just need to start thinking about your food.

When I decided eat in a more healthy way, I started by choosing my favorite foods, and then researched healthier ways to cook them. Don’s Fat Free Smothered Chicken is an example of a satisfying alternative to one of my favorites, fried chicken.

Comfort eating is problem for a lot of people. When their sad, depressed, anxious, or otherwise distracted they turn to eating to comfort themselves, and then they start eating unconsciously. They end up overeating, and eating the wrong foods.

You might ask yourself, do I really feel comfortable when I overeat? Do you really feel better? Comfort really isn’t about over-doing it. It’s about feeling satisfied by what you eat.

Keep in mind that exercise releases endorphins, and endorphins help mitigate depression and anxiety. So think about how exercise, rather than that piece of cake, might help your sense of well-being without adding calories.

Our relationship to food is very complicated. The trick to changing it is to start being conscious about it. Start thinking of food as something that fuels your body and feeds your spirit.

Sunday morning and donuts is a good memory for me. Start creating memories of your own, memories that are just as happy, but include a healthy approach to food and how you eat it.

Check out this Mayo Clinic site  for guidelines on boosting flavor and cutting calories.

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On the Wellness Path in Sickness and in Health

Posted on August 31, 2011 by

Dr. Anita Haque, DC

I grew up in Canada, where they had walk-in clinics. Every time I got a cold, which was once a month, my parents took me to the local clinic where I saw a doctor who had little, if any, knowledge about me, and my general state of wellness.

Each time, I came away with a prescription for antibiotics (colds are caused by viruses — antibiotics are useless against viruses); they even started giving me a “precautionary” prescription.

When I became a teenager, I started rebelling. I refused to take the antibiotics. It was a smart thing to do.

Our bodies’ immune system is designed to fight off illness. It helps us keep from getting sick, and when we get sick, it works to restore us to wellness. A low-grade fever (under 102 degrees Fahrenheit), for example, is a healthy sign — it means your body is working to overcome whatever “bug” is in your system.

Stress, lack of sleep, and poor nutrition compromise our immune systems. So does abuse and overuse of antibiotics. Your body never gets the opportunity to build up the natural immunities that it creates by fighting off the illness naturally.

Even more important, the abuse and overuse of antibiotics has created an opportunity for bacteria to mutate into “super bugs” – bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and for which we have no natural immunities.

So what’s the best way to maintain a high functioning immune system — one that keeps you from getting sick and fights it off when you do get sick?

Staying on The Wellness Path is the best way to support your immune system: Eat well, keep your body moving, manage stress.

Chiropractic adjustment also helps bolster your immune system. The first bone in your neck connects to your body’s immune system. So much of our lifestyle — stress, working at a computer, long commutes — pulls that out of alignment.

Keeping that flow of communication between your brain and your immune system free and clear will help your body fight off and recover from illness without drugs.

We live in a quick-fix society. We have come to think that there is a magic pill that will take an illness away. But the pill — the drug — often introduces other problems. Antibiotics, for example, change the culture of our guts, which can lead to diarrhea. Women are more susceptible to yeast infections when they take antibiotics. These aren’t side effects, they are effects.

Keeping your immune system functioning at its optimum level, by practicing healthy habits is the best way to stay on The Wellness Path. If you do get sick, letting your body heal itself, by resting, relaxing, and eating well, reinforces optimal functioning.

Obviously, there are times when allopathic medicine has a place. But even then, the goal is to let your body return to a state where it can heal itself, where it functions at its optimal level for its circumstances.

Trust yourself. Trust your body. Get on and stay on The Wellness Path.

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Eat Well to Live Well

Posted on August 24, 2011 by

Don Parker

“Where’s a good place to eat?”

That’s one of the first things people ask when they get to their vacation destination place. We like to eat. We like to eat what we’re used to eating. We like to share meals with friends and family. We feel miserable if we go too long without eating.

Anita and I had lunch with a friend recently. The food was delicious — good, healthy Mediterranean style. As we ate, we talked about recipes we’d discovered, new ways to cook the foods we love.

There’s no getting away from it. We like to eat. And that’s a good thing. Food is fuel, and it’s a social thing.

But, because of bad habits we’ve learned over the years, when we get on the wellness path, most of us need to change how we eat. That can seem like an insurmountable obstacle because it’s change that takes us out of our comfort zone.

The change is worth it, and simpler to make than you might think.

Start by picking all the foods you love, and then thinking about how you can make them healthy. You might be so used to covering up the taste of food with sauces and cheeses and fat, you don’t realize how good things taste in and of themselves.

If you’re used to vegetables smothered with cheese, try steaming them or sautéing them lightly in olive oil and garlic. You just might find you like the taste of the vegetable and don’t need the cheese. But start with fresh vegetables.

Portion control is important to losing weight, but we were taught to clean our plates when we were kids. You’ll be surprised at how much less you eat when your plate is full, but it’s a smaller plate. So, try using smaller plates.

Slow down and take the time to actually taste your food. Americans tend to rush through meals. Europeans are more likely to have a complete meal experience. Turn off the TV. Sit down at the table. Share the meal with someone you like and allow yourself an hour to dine.

When I work with clients, I develop nutrition plans tailored to their individual needs. For some, giving them a menu works. Others look at the menu and think “diet!” — something that’s hard to follow. So, I also provide lists of foods they should have each day (two boiled eggs, for example) so their muscles get the enzymes they need to work optimally.

Our relationship to food is complex. Eating to live well does not mean depriving ourselves or giving up the enjoyment of food. It means creating a new comfort zone where we get our relationship to food in the right perspective.

We want to get to the point where we know what it feels like to need to eat, make the food choices that give us the fuel and nutrition we need for optimal wellness, and enjoy the pleasure of sharing food with people we love.

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