Dr. Craig Reese, DC, PC
DR. CRAIG REESE, D.C., P.C.
Bio Cranial Center of Boulder
February 2006 Newsletter
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The New Year
Now that January is already over, how are those New Year’s Resolutions holding up? I laugh every year about the massive influx of new people to the gym in January. For the first few weeks of January there are bodies everywhere. The machines are full, there are lines to use the different weight benches and the locker room is packed like after the end of a high school gym class. What makes me laugh is that by the end of January, very few of those well intentioned people are still in the gym. The same 10-15 people you see everyday during the rest of the year are now the only ones left each morning. The enthusiasm of the "new year" has died and most go back to doing what they normally did before.
Perceptions
There can be several reasons for this waning enthusiasm. Starting too fast with your exercise program and being too sore to workout again for weeks or worse, getting injured. Setting unrealistic goals like losing 50 pounds in a month and then quitting when you found you only lost 5. Or worse yet, that you gained 5 instead. One of the keys to successfully achieving your goals is that you must change your perception of who you are in your head. People who want to quit smoking have to look at themselves as non-smokers before they can truly quit the habit and the cravings. Heck, they quit smoking every night when they go to bed but they start smoking every morning when they get up. A non-smoker has no thought of ever having a cigarette in the morning because they ARE a non-smoker. To make the transition from couch potato to exerciser is a change in your perception about "who" you are not what you have to do. "I’m a person who exercises 4-6 times a week" will get you closer to your goal then "I’m a couch potato but I know I need to exercise when I can."
Decision
Once you decide you want to be in shape (other than round) or be healthy or be a non-smoker, you can start living that lifestyle and you will eventually be what you want to be. Living a healthy lifestyle is doing more things right for your body than wrong. It takes honestly looking at what you do on a daily basis and what you put into your mouth. Deciding is the first step. If you want to be physically, emotionally, financially or spiritually fit, you have to make that decision first. Then you can get down to the mechanical steps of how to go about doing it. Being in great physical shape comes from living (being) like an athlete. I’ve read stories about Lance Armstrong and how hard he trains because he has decided to be the winner of the Tour de France every year he enters it. He lives and breathes his bike and it drives his European competitors crazy that whenever they call him he is out training to win it again. Sports are filled with stories like these from greats like Ali, Schwarzenegger, Woods, etc.
Gradients
Very few people on the planet could survive a week of training like Lance Armstrong or Arnold in his prime. They had to work up to it and so would you. Going from zero exercise to running an hour a day will injure you pretty fast. Instead, try walking 10 minutes a day for a few days or weeks then 20 minutes, until you can work up to an hour of just moving your body. It applies to living healthy, too. Someone who is drinking a gallon of soda a day could try and cut back to only drinking one or two 12 ounce cans a day. They are certainly living healthier than they were. Health is a journey that is lived everyday not just on holidays and weekends.
Fads
The quick and cool way to lose weight in the last year or two is gastric bypass surgery. This is surgically induced starvation that is achieved by making your stomach smaller and bypassing the first part of your small intestine. This is the part that absorbs all the nutrition and calories from food. So most of what you eat passes out of you virtually undigested and unabsorbed. Do low-calorie diets make you lose weight? Absolutely! So does being stranded on a desert island or locked up in a concentration camp. But along with every pound of fat you lose, you lose 1-2 pounds of muscle. Most low calorie diets make you lighter but fatter. That is, your percentage of body fat went up even though you are lighter on the scale because your muscle mass went down. Oh and don’t forget that 1.5% of gastric bypass patients die directly from the surgery. Now 30 patients dead out of 2000 surgeries may not seem like much statistic-wise unless you are one of the 30. Then it is 100% of the time you had the surgery you died.
Fasts and Flushes
Fasting is a good way to make the body healthier and eventually thinner but it is not a good way to lose weight. If you do a water fast for 7 days, you will lose tons of weight but as soon as you start eating again, most of it will return. Fasting is for cleansing the bowels and flushing the liver or for spiritual enlightenment. It is not a good weight loss program because again, you are losing muscle everyday you don’t eat. There are things in life that are medicinal in nature and things that are nutritional in nature. When you have failed to give the body the proper nutrition it needs, disease and sickness start and medicinal measures are needed. If you have a seriously toxic bowel, liver or kidney, then a 7 day water fast with herbal bulk to scrape out your bowels maybe just what you need to get healthy. Try living on that program for a year and you will certainly die. The Standard Process 3 week cleansing program that we carry works great and helps you detox your body but you can’t live on it forever. Medicinal procedures are only to be used for a short time and good nutritional practices are what make us healthy and repair the body.
Calories Don’t Count
Every January the "weight-loss experts" tout the old adage of "eat whatever you want just eat less calories than you burn up and you will lose weight." That theory was disproved decades ago but they still promote it and people starve themselves into being lighter but fatter. Calories are the amount of possible heat units a food can produce. But eating for energy is not the way to health. If it were, you could drink 10 glasses of Kool-Aid or soda a day and you would have tons of calories to burn. Your body really needs living food full of vitamins and minerals to replenish the building materials needed to repair itself. Proteins and saturated fats make up the structures of the body and carry essential nutrients for proper hormone function. Most obese patients eat fewer calories per day than normal weight people but they are eating the wrong foods for their body
Food Sensitivities
Since biblical times it has been known that "one man’s meat is another man’s poison". If you don’t know what foods you are sensitive to you we can help you to find out. If you have a weight problem you have a food sensitivity problem period. You may have several other reasons for your weight problem and we can help you sort it out but how you react to the foods you are eating is a primary one.
