Healthy Alternatives

Were you ever unsure about trying something, because you were scared or just didn’t believe and went for it anyway?

Many people are afraid to try acupuncture because of the needles. After the first needle is inserted, most people can’t believe how little they feel.  And even better, patients are so relaxed after the treatment they express regrets for not trying it sooner.
In my experience, most people really like receiving acupuncture treatment and look forward to relaxing in my Somerset, NJ office. Acupuncture is known to relase endorphins which is why we feel so relaxed from it. The relaxation alone is worth the trip.

Add the benefits for the health complaint being treated and you too will wonder why you didn’t try acupuncture sooner.

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Maybe it’s an accident, or a disease, or the effect of long term smoking, or eating greasy foods, or not enough sun protection.

Whatever the cause, there are some conditions from which we can recover and unfortunately, some from which we cannot.

The news from a doctor is heartbreaking, sorry your knee needs to be replaced and you will have to stop skiing forever.

Or,

Your lung capacity is now at 80%. It cannot be reversed, you will need to consider a portable oxygen tank longer term.

So we all have a choice, take the smaller hit today or totally give up beloved things in the future?

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Motion is a fundamental pleasure. The ability to freely come and go, up stairs, to throw a ball, to chase a kid around, to walk through the woods, to dance, to play.

All of these things rely on a healthy body. Losing even a small amount of them can lead to less excitement, enjoyment and pleasure. Imagine saying no to one or more of your beloved activities. Imagine the chane of never doing them again and what the impact would be on you.

You owe it to your “long term” self and to your loved ones to protect, strengthen, and enhance your abilty to move freely.

Please, for yourself… exercise, stretch, lose weight, destress, eat nutritous foods, laugh, repair and otherwise put energy into maintaining your health

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It’s the big secret to success in health, money, relationships, business, skills and most other endeavors.

Make big, long term plans and goals, but taks small, relatively simple actions on a consistent basis to achieve the longer term goals.

In health this means doing simple, daily things like stretching for 5 minutes, drinking a glass of water, saying no to that sweet snack, or going for a walk.

Do this every day for long periods of time and you will increase your health.

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Definition:
Doing things in your life to avoid health problems. Changing your lifestyle to build your health rather than to diminish it.

The benefit of approaching health proactively is you have less problems and overall the ones you have are less serious.

I once read a quote from a famous gardner who said “The best pesticide is a healthy plant”.
Bugs find it easier to burrow, nip and chew on weaker, softer plants. Like all creatures, they take the easy way out and sick plants are “easier”.

The analogy runs true for your health as well. Keeping fit, eating right, building your immune system, reducing stress and more are all deterrents to diesase.

Some specific areas where you can make a big difference:

Stress – Stress release chemicals into the body, these chemicals interact with your cells and a constant flood changes the biochemistry over time.

Stretching-A loose and limber body is more reslilent to soft tissue injuries like pulls strains, and rips. plus, you can often catch yourself in a potential fall if you are ablem to reach, step or stretch a but further.

Digestion- Most people realy don’t get the cause and effect of diet on digestion. What you eat going in changes significantly what comes out.

Exercise- A strong body works better, rests better moves faster and other things which all lead to a better healthier life.

So what is the downside?

It takes time to maintain your health and you have to move a bit away from maximizing your various pleasures and replace them with some things to boost your health.

Trade Candy for fruit, soda for seltzer, the couch for movement.

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Muscle relaxants have a lot of side effects such as drowsiness, dizzyness, confusion, light headedness and they are habit forming. I recently experienced a rehab patient with some mental side effects of muscle relaxants first hand and it was shocking.

In contrast, acupuncture creates an internal, natural response and relaxation. My patients often fall alseep and typically are very mellow and joke about acu-high after their treatment. They are experiencing the natural release of painkillers that usually accompanies acupunture treatments.

The way I see it is a simple choice, drugs manufactured in a factory running around your blood stream, or chemicals created by your body doing the same. We totally know the long term risks of the natural ones.

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The big thing is eating better.

Imaging a farm where the watter supply is slightly imperfect… say acid rain. Any one rain will not do much damage as the following rain will dilute the acid rain remaining in the soil and so on.

However, when you have a situation where there is only a mild, but continuous acid rain, the plants eventually suffer.

That is what happen when you eat too much sugar (soda, candy, cereal, snacks, desserts), white flower (bread, pasta, snack foods) and so on.

Any one ating of these will have little effect on your overall health. Eating them all the time will accumuliate in the form of excessive weight, circulation problems, etc.

One Hour per day Plan
4 things to do every day
Eat better 15 minutes
Exercise 30 Minutes
Stretch – 5 minutes
Destress 6 minutes

Ok that’s 56 minutes but there are transitions like putting your exercise clothing on.

So every day does not have to be exactly these proportions. One day you may exercise 45 minutes because you cooked 2 days of food yesterday. Cooking may take less time than you take now if you normally drive to a restaurant 10 minutes away.

Anyway, the 1 hour is a guideline, but the real point is to make a daily significant effort to “do time” on each of these items.

Perhaps the worst thing you could do is to go out, buy shoes, clothes, new cookware, books and everything right at the beginning. This too is a short term orientation and a symptom that you may fall back. You need to take a ‘rest of your life” attitude to this change as that is the only method that will permanently work.

Start today

Note that I am not providing any specifics. Most important is your attitude change and I want you to focus on that. Your main goal is to focus on changing your lifestyle to one of action and better eating.
Go for a walk in your current shoes, cook what you have in your fridge. Eat something natural in place of the the chips or soda. Make sure you keep in mind that your activties are your new lifestyle, The old one is gone. Watching TV for that hour, or chatting on the telephone, or reading fluff magazines are the victims of your new lifestyle. The benefits will come without doing anything else.

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In less than one hour per day, you can change your health profile around. The benefits are many:

Look Better
Feel Better
Have fewer health problems
Spend less money on health
Have more energy
Do more in life
Have fewer limitations
Have less pain.

One hour a day to do a few things differently and a few months to establish them, and get lifetime benefits.

Losing health is like a lost loved one, there is a deep anguish and longing for what you had before and no way to get it back.
You owe it to yourself to keep your health in the top condition and avoid that loss for as long as possible. Have you ever really thought about what it would be like to lose your sight, or painfree movement in one of your limbs? Unfortunately, in my acupuncture practice, I do see people every day with physical problems and it is heartwrenching. Often it is avoidable.

I’m a big proponent of lifestyle change to accomplish improved health.
The short term orientation of diet, weightloss pills, ab machines sold in infomercials, special supplements, energy drinks, and anything else that promises immediate results is often only a short term solution. Almost everyone who has tried any short term approach to health falls back into their old lifestyle and loses all of the benefits and sometimes incurs an additional loss (such as increased net weight a few months after a diet).
The only permanent solution is to change your lifestyle. Worry less about short term fixes and results, just change what you do every day and the benefits will accumulate.

It could take 6 months to feel real effects, but once you change the underlying cause, you change your equation.

Ok, so almost everyone knows that this is the simple truth, but like many other things, saying it is easy, its the doing that is hard.

In an upcoming posting, I will give some techniques that I have seen work that help people make permanent lifestyle change and make it stick.

I will olso outline a one hour per day schedule that will change everything around.

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Recently I had a family member experience a very serious health issue. I’m leaving out personal details of my family member for their medical privacy.

Their serious medical incident was followed by a few weeks of rehab. During rehab, my relative was experiencing serious calf cramping. The attending doctor prescribed a muscle relaxant. I know that muscle relaxants are generally not being used much any more due to the side effects. I was dying to do acupuncture on their calf, but the hospital/rehab staff would not allow me to do it. Tight and knotty muscles are one of my specialties. I could have released the tension in the calf with 3 or 4 needles in 10 miniutes.

I was shocked at how quickly the side effects of this muscle relaxant became apparent. My family member became disoriented, lost their short term memory and became quite child-like. 5 Minutes after my delivering some Sushi and detecting the strange mental state, I asked them who brought the Sushi and they said someone else who had been there earlier in the day. This 12 hour period was quite disturbing to all who saw it and quite frustrating to me. Frankly, we did not need another cause for alarm after many weeks of serious experiences with this persons situation.

This experience clearly was in contrast to my “do as little as possible to solve a health problem”. Start with free or low cost treatments that have the lowest risk, then increase the seriousness and risk when there is no success.

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It seems to me that many people have developed or accepted an approach to health that can best be described as reactive. They wait until something develops and then address it.

In general, a reactive approach to solving problems seems more time efficient as no time needs to be spent on the problem until “if and when it appears”.

This approach to solving problems appears in many parts of life, such as careers, relationships, cars, devices, politics and more.

Unfortunately the downside of this approach is that the cost can be many times larger to solve the problem, and sometimes no solution is possible due to the damage done in waiting to detect the problem.

Certainly in health, trying to recover what was lost is at least much more difficult and agonizing both physically and emotionally. Typically, aggressive and expensive reactions to serious problem like surgery, strong drugs and other therapies used. At worst, the damage done to the body is irreversable.

In my experience, a proactive, maintenance approach to health is more long-term effective, less expensive and avoids the huge blow of “it’s too late”. Watch for an upcoming posting on living a proactive health approach life.

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