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A Wellness Lifestyle
"The doctor of the future will give no medication,
but will interest his patients in the care of the
human frame, diet and in the cause and
prevention of disease."
Thomas Edison
Living a Wellness Lifestyle...
Living a Wellness Lifestyle is the #1 approach to both promoting and maintaining health and preventing disease by allowing your body to function as it is meant to, ie to its full genetic capability.
Simply put, humans, like all other animal species have evolved over millions of years based on the environment they have lived in. Therefore it is our daily surroundings that determine and control how our bodies function.
Provide your body with what it needs and avoid the elements that the body doesn't need!
Wellness is a relatively new word to most people in today's society and it has a number of different meanings to different people depending on who you talk to. This section of our website will explain our own interpretation of wellness and how we are passionate about incorporating it in to the philosophy of our centre, our own lives and hopefully we can pass on some knowledge to our patients too.
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing
and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
World Health Organisation
We believe that the majority of health is determined by the consistent approach you have towards the 4 cornerstones of health, which are:
- Eating Naturally
- Moving Often
- Being Happy
- Living Clean
For us, living a wellness lifestyle means living in a way that mimics as closely as realistically possible, to the type of lifestyles that were lead and the daily environmental conditions that were present for the past few hundred generations. This provides a setting that is required for our bodies to be able to function normally and therefore healthily.
According to anthropology and genetic studies, humans are virtually genetically identical now as they were 10,000 years ago and yet we now live in a way that is so unrecognisable to our ancestors. So much of today's lifestyle factors and environmental conditions, particularly certain aspects that have arisen in the last 50-100 years are not what our bodies are designed to cope with.
It is this general mis-match concept; the rapid lifestyle and environmental change compared with the significantly slower genetic ability to evolve and adapt that has been identified as a leading cause in today's abundance of illness and disease.
Eat Naturally...
"Let thy food be the medicine
and thy medicine be thy food."
- Hippocrates -
What you eat is a vital aspect of keeping your body functioning properly and therefore healthy. This is a FACT, there is no way around the matter.
To keep it simple, there are foods that contain ingredients that the body has genetically required for tens of thousands of years to function properly. Without them we become deficient and our bodies will begin to suffer, ultimately leading to symptoms and disease.
Then there are foods that we genetically don't require because they were not present for the vast majority of time we developed as humans and by consuming them and becoming toxic with them our bodies will begin to suffer, ultimately leading to symptoms and disease.
A body that is deficient in ingredients it needs and toxic with ingredients it doesn't need will always be struggling to function well. In some cases you will not be aware of this at the time, you will feel as though you 'can get away with eating this and that' where as someone else will notice it e.g. always tired, poor skin, overweight, poor concentration, IBS, and irritability and these are just some of the more common symptoms. However diet is a major factor in determining your risk of these initial inconveniences (such as bloating or heart burn) or your long term risk of the more serious chronic illnesses and diseases such as high blood pressure, stroke, cancers and type 2 diabetes.
Healthy eating is not about doing the latest fad diet for 6 weeks that will make you shed the most weight in the shortest period of time. It's about starting off by understanding the basic concepts of what foods our bodies are able to work with and those that it can't. This is done by looking back over time to how and what our ancestors ate and what different cultures eat around the world today and looking at their health too. From there it is about learning how to make a whole variety of different meals from scratch, experimenting with different herbs and spices, trying new ingredients and slowly reducing the amount of processed, pre-boxed, pre-made jars of sauces, processed cereals, high sugar foods and reducing quantities of grains and dairy consumed.
The supplement industry is worth a significant amount of money. There are good supplements and poor supplements, expensive ones and cheap ones spread throughout the hundreds of different brands available.
While some supplements have their place for the specific few with specific conditions, we believe there are 3 main supplements that can be beneficial to everyone in this part of the world. These are based on the fact that even with a truly healthy diet we generally still don't get these in the quality or quantity our ancestors did based on today's standards of foods and environment.
They are:
- A good quality EFA (Omega 3) supplement with the correct EPA:DHA ratio
- A good quality Vitamin D supplement
- A good quality Probiotic
Move Often...
"Move. Move because you can.
If you won't, probably you won't be able to.
Use it, or you're going to lose it.
And it's going to be a bad day when you lose it.
Move. Move."
- Ido Portal -
As far as movement goes, our bodies are designed to be moving regularly. This movement is required for so many different reasons from playing a role maintaining a healthy blood pressure to keeping your spinal cord stimulated and working.
The lack of exercise today in school children and the hours spent sitting in cars and at desks for adults at work is a significant problem to health and chronic illness.
Movement and exercise can take many different forms, each benefiting the body and mind in different ways. It is important to cover all the different categories by finding specific types of exercise in each category that you will enjoy and do, regularly. The main movement and exercise categories (including some of the hundreds of examples) that should be covered include:
- General cardiovascular exercise e.g. Walking, Cycling, Swimming, Dancing, Aqua Aerobics, Skipping, Gardening
- Strength (resistance) exercise e.g. Weight Lifting, Gymnastics, Pilates
- Balance & Co-ordination exercises e.g. Yoga, Tai Chi, Martial Arts, Gymnastics, Ballet, Hand-Eye Coordinated Sports
- Agility e.g. Squash, Gymnastics, Circuit Training, Dancing
- Flexibility e.g. Yoga, Dancing, Stretching
- Explosive Power e.g. Weight Lifting, Sprinting, Jumping, Boxing
The health benefits of exercise and general movement are no secret. Exercise and daily movement has been part of our ancestors' daily lives for 1000's of years and has resulted in being essential for how our bodies have developed to work and function.
Be Happy...
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass,
it's about learning to dance in the rain."
- Unknown -
The state of mind you have also plays a vital role in mental and physical health. Our 'Be Happy' category encompasses everything from your happiness in social circles, work satisfaction, self esteem, relationships, financial security, religious or spiritual beliefs, personal goals, beliefs and values. All of the above and more will all play a major role in your happiness and stress levels and therefore health.
The difficulty with this category is that all emotions and behaviours are driven by your underlying beliefs and values, a lot of which are subconscious. This means it can be very hard to therefore identify what might be preventing happiness or personal growth.
Live Clean...
"Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
we will realise we cannot eat money."
- Cree Indian Proverb -
When we talk about living clean, we are talking about trying to minimise the number of pollutants or chemicals that get into our body. Nature provides all that we need, however modern day human populations haven't done everything they can to help keep nature as it once was, and this has been shown to have detrimental effects on our health and well being.
Living clean can be very easy in some cases such as buying a water filter to remove excess chlorine and heavy metals in tap water or buying toxic free cleaning products to virtually impossible in other cases such as avoiding toxins in modern furniture or air pollution.
Some of the areas to start to look into regarding the negative health effects of today's environment include:
- Purity of water for drinking and washing
- Chemicals used in modern cleaning products
- Chemicals used in beauty and hygiene products
- Air pollution
- Recycling
- Pesticides
- Man-Made Materials
- Smoking and other drugs