Gainsborough Family Chiropractic

Turning Resolutions into Results

Every year millions of people worldwide attempt to erase memories of shortcomings past by making resolutions at the beginning of January. Fast forward 365 days, and most are doing it all over again with very little having changed in the gap. What stops all of those well-meaning resolutions from becoming actual results that improve the quality and quantity of people's lives?

Inaction seems to be the obvious answer.  Not doing that which you say you will makes it pretty difficult to achieve much of anything. But I suggest inaction is just another symptom -- a symptom of the core problem that robs so many of the extraordinary lives they deserve. The real culprit is "The Limiting Belief," the deeply held conviction that something is true when it just simply is not.

One of the strongest beliefs limiting the masses (and there are many) is "not having enough time." Last I checked we all had the same number of hours in a day and the same number of days in a week.  In five years (260 weeks, 1825 days, or over 2 million minutes) Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.  And Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth" and five other immortal plays. Even Life By Design was created in less than one year! You may never have enough time for everything, but you’ll ALWAYS have time for the most important things. Time is not the issue.  Priorities are.

The solution is to start by asking two very simple questions: "What do I want?” And  “Why?"

Do you want fat loss, health, money, more vacation, travel? Wonderful! Dream big.  Don't be held back by what you simply THINK you can have. What do you REALLY want?  But the more important question is “Why?” Does losing some weight, adding health, gaining more money or time really excite you? Of course not. But what they each mean to you does! More energy, more freedom, more time with family, feeling better, gaining confidence, helping others.... When you begin to get clear on your "Why's?" the "How's?" naturally fall into place. Those nagging and limiting beliefs (“I’m not good enough, I don’t have enough money, and I don’t have enough time"),  become less defining factors and it is your purpose that drives you.

Spend more time and energy this January understanding and defining your “Why.” Having a well-designed plan such as Life By Design can transform your life, but only when you have the strength of purpose to make it worth following. 

 

What's the deal with Cholesterol?

There are sacred cows that exist in the wide world of health care, and one that is rightfully being questioned by both researchers and logical thinkers is the "fight against" cholesterol. This battle is an extension of the flawed "Lipid Hypothesis" of the 1960s which continues to have most of North America sold on low fat dieting as a means to losing fat and being healthy. The only problem? It hasn't worked. If low fat was the fix, why are 57 million prescriptions filled in the US each year for cholesterol-lowering medication to the tune of $26 billion in revenue?

The problem lies in the basic premise ... that cholesterol is bad for us.

Did you get your cholesterol today?

Cholesterol is a nutrient! It's a steroid hormone, like testosterone, estrogen and cortisol, and it is found in every cell membrane of all living organisms. It is the parent molecule to one of the most important hormones in the body, vitamin D. It's vital in immune system function and is required for tissue repair and healing. Does that sound like something we need to be afraid of? Why would our body require a nutrient that was so devastating to its own survival?

The answer, of course, is it wouldn't. In fact, there is no such thing as good and bad cholesterol. The HDL and LDL molecules that are marketed as good and bad are not even cholesterol. They are molecules that carry cholesterol through the bloodstream, with LDL carrying cholesterol to the tissues (including the arteries) that are in need of repair and HDL carrying them back to the liver to be recycled.

Here's the claim: High cholesterol is the cause of heart disease, and lowering cholesterol with statin drugs save lives. What does the data say? In a 2011 study of 52,000 people over 10 years, those women with the highest cholesterol levels lived the longest. Yes, the highest levels. In the Lipitor trials, 99 people needed to take the drug for 3 years for every one person to have a benefit. Add in the well-documented side effects of statins like muscle pain, depression, and sexual dysfunction, to name only a few, and we need to seriously reconsider conventional wisdom.

Bottom Line

Statin drugs reduce cholesterol, but they do not reduce your chance of dying. What do you think? 

Fulfill Your Destiny for Health!

We’ve been lied to.  We’ve been taught to believe that the absence of symptoms means health and the presence of symptoms means sickness.   While it is true symptoms can sometimes tell us how sick we are, the lack of them can never give us information about how healthy we are.  

Judging your health by your symptoms is not only unreliable; it is also dangerous.  The first sign of heart disease is often a fatal heart attack, the first sign of cancer sudden weight loss or a palpable lump. The result is the vast proportion of our population living symptom-free, yet very sick and unwell.

Are we to believe that disease is an entity that waits around for a healthy person to walk by and somehow invades their body, or that disease manifests as proper cellular function (health) disappears?  No different than darkness manifesting as light disappears.  Darkness is the absence of light.  Disease is the absence of health.

Health is a state in which all the cells of the body, all 50 trillion, are working in harmony.  The cells are interacting with each other, carrying out the processes for life, communicating under the control of the brain and nerve system.  Even outside the body we discuss the principles of health in the same way.  “Our relationship is healthy, we communicate and work for the betterment of ourselves and each other.” Or “The office environment is healthy, everyone strives to excel and appreciates each other’s role”.

Your cells have a drive towards health and life.  The only time they move away is if we force them to adapt to a pathological environment, one that is not By Design.

Do not fall prey to the false notion that no symptoms means healthy.  Symptoms, for the most part, are the final stages of malfunction, not the first.   Using the lack of symptoms as criteria for judging your family’s health is like using the lack of debt as evidence for wealth or the lack of poor grades for the presence of brilliance. 

The true meaning of health is that it’s already yours. Simply fulfill the design, remove the interference and live the life you deserve.

 

Living Well in a Stressful World

The boss is on your case, kids are busy with school, there are bills to pay, mom is sick and you’ve got stress!

Never before have we lived in a world where we are inundated with non-stop stress from all corners of our lives.  It’s nearly impossible to escape; it’s the number one contributor to illness, days off work and could be considered the plague of the twentieth century.  We’re told we need to “manage” it, reduce it and even avoid it.  But is stress really the problem? Or is it our relationship to stress that is the real culprit?

Despite conventional wisdom that says stress is bad for us, at its most basic level, stress is neutral. A stress is simply any stimulus that requires your body to respond or adapt: exercise, eating, heat, noise, poison, and sleep, essentially anything can be considered a stress.

The classification as good or bad is dependent on how well your body handles it.   Exercise can be a wonderful thing if the body can recover and rebuild, but it can also lead to debilitation or, even worse, death.  Food can turn on health or it can severely compromise function.   The same experience can be a “eustress” or a “distress”; it depends on you.

Today we are succumbing to stress at an accelerated rate, not just because we have more of it, but also because we can handle so much less.  We have weakened our bodies by living in ways that oppose our innate design: poor food, minimal movement, chronic sitting, less sleep, and all the effects of these in combination accumulating over time.

This understanding is empowering and makes living well in a stressful world much more achievable.  Instead of hiding from life, we need to enhance the body’s ability to adapt to life.   For centuries it was our only option…adapt or die. 

Stop focusing on what’s wrong and start focusing on what’s strong.  The solution, as always, is Living By Design.

 

Jacquie's Story

 

This month Jacquie Richards from Life By Design and the Life By Design Strength and Condidtioning Centre shares her story of how the principles of Life By Design and Chiropractic have helped change her and her family's life.

It is always powerful to remember where we have come from with regards to our health and lives. Most people think that founders of Life By Design have "always been that way" but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the reasons we are so passionate about what we do is that OUR lives have been transformed by the same things we are trying to teach you. Please go back and look at Dr. Rachelle and Dr. Kreso's story if you need an further convincing. 

Stay Away From Chronic Cardio

 

Each Life By Design step bucks the trend of conventional wisdom, but none moreso than our disapproval of "chronic cardio".  “That's blasphemy!” you say.  Everyone knows that in order to lose body fat and get lean you need to do spend a lot of time walking the infinite steps to nowhere on the climber.  Still not buying in?  Go to the gym, take a look at everyone running, walking, cycling and rowing.  Head back a year later and voila, no change. 

How can that be? How can someone spend hours sweating it out in the cardio section and not lose body fat? 

As discussed before, our body's genetics have adapted to our lifestyle over the past 40,000 years.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't spend an hour a day significantly elevating their heart rates, but they did spend many hours walking at a slow pace using fat as the primary energy source.  As such, our current physiology is set up to handle those demands.  When you begin elevating your heart rate for extended time periods you start to depend on stored glycogen as an energy source and eating excessive amounts of carbohydrates to refuel that lost energy - completely backfiring your goal of decreasing body fat.  Total up the lack of results, the inflammatory effects, the boredom and it equals a no-brainer - run if you love to, but don't fool yourself that it'll be your best fat loss vehicle.

Since the anti-cardio stance will be a difficult one for people to accept, here's the proverbial nail in the coffin:  some good research suggests that not only is extended cardio not the best bet for fat loss but it may also be damaging to the heart, cause inflammation and heart disease!  Now that should have you thinking twice before joining that running group.

The answer, again, is quite simple.  By understanding the body's design, we can live congruently with it and reap the benefits of naturally and simply expressing our full potential.  Remember: "You're human, not hamster".

Love your life!

 

We are back from an amazing vacation. Greece was magic, and I recommend that everyone who has a chance to visit, please use that opportunity. One of the most important self-discoveries I made while in Greece was how much I love what I do.

It started with the lead-up and our final week before we left for our trip. We were both excited to visit Greece and go on vacation.  However, we didn’t have any trouble withholding the urge to slip into vacation mode too early; it feels excellent to be able to say that the first adjustment I delivered on Monday was of the same quality as the last adjustment I delivered on Thursday before we left. I’m sure the recipient of that adjustment was equally thankful.  It’s so good to work in the place where my passion lies.

In Greece, we had many awesome brainstorming sessions. We talked about

Life By Design and how to make it better, more efficient, how to add more value to our practice members, and I can truly say that we are both super excited to start implementing some of these ideas.

The reason I share this with you is twofold. First, I would like to thank our practice members and the entire Life By Design community. It is the best feeling in the world that we have found each other and that together we are building better and healthier communities and families. I’m so thankful you love what we do!

 Secondly, I’m beginning to understand how important it is to have a purpose in life. No matter where I go, my mind always eventually comes back to the same thing.  Life By Design and its growing community offers me the wonderful  chance to practice MY passion and that helps both me and my practice members.  Thank you!

 

August Newsletter - Standing on Principle

 

“As a human being you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation – or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”

 

Ayn Rand

 

I would wager that most people would find that quote very powerful and true. I would also wager that in the same breath they would think to themselves: "What (if anything) does philosophy have to do with health and life?"

 

Make no mistake: the world health crisis is a philosophical one, particularly derived from the main branch of philosophy -- Metaphysics.

 

Most people link the idea of philosophy to a Sunday afternoon activity usually involving coffee or tea with a friend. We get together and “philosophize” and then return to “the real world” on Monday with no significant impact on our lives.   Even this idea itself is based on a philosophy (the philosophy of Immanuel Kant).

 

Here are some others:

"What a terrible thing for that person to do, but he couldn't help it.  He is only human." (Augustine)

"It might be true in theory, but not in practice." (Hegel)

"Don't be so sure; you can't be sure of anything." (Kant)

 

The point is: philosophy is vital in the world and you have accepted bits and pieces of various philosophies.

 

Health and wellness are no different! When most people think of losing weight they think that they have to do more “cardio”. People think that eating whole grains is different and better than eating refined grains, that health can be found in a pill bottle, and that getting older is synonymous with aches, pains, and arthritis. All these ideas are based on incorrect philosophies on health.

 

Life By Design is a also a philosophy. It is based on the exact opposite principles and ideas than the current “sick” care model.  It is in this gap where success lies.  By following correct principles, results (more health, vitality, energy, less medication, less illness and less disease) are a natural extension.  If the “sick” care philosophies were correct, wouldn’t we see similar results?  Instead we are sicker and more diseased than ever before.

 

The problem is not a shortage of doctors, not enough hospitals, or too many bacteria.  The problem is simply philosophical.  The next series of newsletters will discuss where the errors in current medical philosophy are, and how they are contributing to symptoms, sickness, and disease.  I will also share with you how the Life By Design philosophy perceives the same circumstance and how it has led to success after success worldwide.

 

THE BURNING QUESTION, IS SUNSCREEN A SCAM?

Having spent a great Sunday afternoon in Springbank Park playing Bocce ball with a great group of friends I became very aware of just how powerful and penetrating the media can be in regards to sunscreen usage.  As I looked around every child was slathered from head to toe in sunscreen, wives were following their husbands around with the Coppertone bottle in their hands, and many of my friends I’m sure did not leave home without applying it first.  

via www.gfchiropractic.ca

The Power Of The Adjustment

 

Every so often we are reminded of the power of the human body. The potential stored in every single human being on this planet is limitless. We have the power to create, love, inspire, and be healthy. Unfortunately most people never realize their full potential because they have interference in their lives. Subluxation is an interference in our lives. The practice of Chiropractic has, and always will be to remove the interference caused by Subluxation; restoring neural integrity to the body. This is Joel's story of how removing the interference in his son Cohen's spine after birth gave Cohen's body enough power to return to life. Please have enough courage to share this video with others. Think of the life saving effect it can have on the people you love. It is still humbling to know, and admit that something so simple as a specific scientifically applied adjustment can have so great an impact. T