I have been a board member director for a local clinic for almost a year. Lucky enough, I have met many intelligent people who care about others. David Adamson is one of them. He used to be the director for Mountain Family Health Clinic in Glenwood Springs until he retired last year. He and I support each other to inform people about wellness. He receives my newsletters and shares his knowledge with me, as well. I want to introduce you to some of his work which is very informative. Please enjoy! WELL RULES: 10 SECRETS THAT WILL GIVE YOU A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE Even If You Just Do One of Them By David Adamson From the book THE WELLNESS CLUB: A JOURNEY TO HEALTH BEYOND HEALTHCARE Copyright 2013 David G. Adamson Smashwords Edition ***~~~*** Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. WellRules 10 Secrets That Will Give You a Long and Happy Life Even If You Just Do One of Them During our year long exploration of healthy living, the Wellness Club discovered wellness is within everyone’s reach. We were excited about this because we were employees in a community health center where every day we dealt with people who were sick, often due to their lifestyles rather than an infectious disease or genetics. Some members of the Wellness Club suffered the same serious health issues as our patients. Others just wanted to have more energy or lose some body fat. Whatever our motivations, we all felt a strong desire to find wellness and maintain it. Our health insurance was more expensive every year. We knew healthcare reform will take decades, and healthcare costs will continue to increase, not fall – we have too many sick people and a healthcare system that profits from them. Luckily, we discovered healthier living just takes a few lifestyle changes. However, making even small changes can be challenging because there are dark forces blocking our progress that lurk in government, corporations, the healthcare system, and in ourselves. We realized that in the short term we would not be able to do much about the first three, but we could do something about the last - ourselves. As described in The Wellness Club: A Journey To Health Beyond Healthcare, we met weekly for a year. We listened to in-person presentations by healthcare professionals and personal trainers. We watched videos of some of the leading healthcare thought leaders in the country. We circulated books by doctors and nutrition experts. We explored mainstream health dogmas and opposing views based on cutting edge research. The Wellness Club quickly realized that many factors contribute to health, like genes, ethnicity, gender, age, health history, activity level and geography. We are all unique. But we uncovered 10 Wellrules that apply all of us and greatly improve our odds for a long and healthy life, save lots of our money, keep us out of hospitals, and even help us look better in the mirror. The Wellrules are simple things we can all do, backed by plenty of scientific evidence. They aren’t commandments where you go to health hell if you don’t follow all of them. We learned to think in terms of do more of this – less of that rather than either do this 100% or die. If you adopt even one Wellrule, you will enjoy immediate health benefits. By incorporating the Wellrules into your life each day, you get healthier with no drama, trauma and minimal cost. You don’t need to get on The World’s Biggest Loser or run a triathlon with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. You don’t need to borrow money to go to the health spa in Costa Rica or Sedona. You don’t need to shave your head and become a monk. We had families, jobs, obligations, responsibilities. We had to be practical and figure it out quickly. Our lives depended on it. Wellrule #1: Know what you are putting in your mouth. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But most of us have no idea what’s in that can, wrapper, container or box that we scoop out and gobble down. We just we like to eat it because it tastes good. Hey, the front label says it is vitamin fortified, so it must be healthy. We found out that’s not necessarily so. The USDA food label on every packaged food has major shortcomings. One is you need to do math to calculate how much you should eat. How many people have a clue how many calories they need every day or can do metric conversions? The most useful information is listed in the ingredients, but only if you are familiar with all the chemical names mean and whether or not they’re good for you. Once you become curious about what you’re eating, you naturally become more informed and picky about food. You learn more about carbs, fats and protein, which ones and how much are better for you. You start to make better choices and avoid food death zones. Wellrule #2: Substitute whole foods for processed foods. The most nutritious foods do not require food labels. The problem with packaged processed and fast foods (which are warmed up processed foods) is that they are not nutrient dense. You get lots of flavorful hydrogenated fats (artery cloggers), sugars and salt for your dollar, but few nutrients. The manufacturers have to add vitamins to replenish what is destroyed in the manufacturing process. No need to worry, right? After all, doesn’t the federal government make sure everything in the store or fast food joint is good for us? Actually the government knows very little about the long term effects of all those artificial ingredients, like food colorings, binders, stabilizers and flavor enhancers. In contrast, whole foods, which don’t require food labels, are very nutrient dense. They contain healthful, natural complex compounds that cannot be replicated in laboratories that our bodies needs to combat free radicals and prevent inflammation, both the cause of many unnecessary chronic diseases. Until the last hundred years, humans ate mainly whole foods because what you saw was what you got, and it was mostly good for you – safe and natural. Generations of ancestors passed down in song, lore and cookbooks what was a palatable food or a poison. As the consumption of processed food has increased in our hyper-speed lives, so have heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Here comes the more of this – less of that wellness strategy. All of us eat processed foods. To be healthy you don’t need to avoid them all, but you benefit in direct proportion that you eat less of them and eat more foods that don’t require a label. Just substitute one unhealthy choice, like that mid-afternoon candy bar or venti mocha, for a few nuts or fruit. Substitute a small salad for those fries. The more substitutes you make, the better you feel. You will become slimmer, have clearer skin, and think better. Wellrule #3: Know where sugar hides, then eat and drink less of it. The jig is up on sugar. In the amounts Americans consume it, sugar is a poison and addictive, especially high fructose corn syrup. If you don’t like hearing this, you’re probably addicted too. Sugars added to almost every processed and fast food because manufacturers know we crave it. The problem is that sugar causes a hormone disruption that causes heart disease, some cancers, diabetes and obesity. Being skinny doesn’t mean you escape the deadly effects of sugar. The sugars are in plain sight on the food label, but most people don’t recognize them because they have so many names. Once you know what to look for in the ingredients, you’re shocked to find out most of those carbohydrates are from sugar. For many of us, this is the most difficult Wellrule to follow. Wellrule #4: To lose fat, build muscle. The permanent goal is changing your body composition, not just weight loss. You want to improve body composition by reducing the amount of fat and increasing lean muscle mass. The very act of exercising to develop muscle mass reduces body fat. Not only that, lean muscle more lean muscle mass increases your resting metabolic rate, which means your body burns more calories per hour, even when at rest. You don’t need to get on the scale every day. Just take a tape measure every few weeks and measure your waist right at your belly button. Do this every few weeks. As you’re losing fat there, you’re losing it everywhere. There’s no such thing as spot reducing. You’ll notice your clothes are getting loser. Wellrule #5: Exercise hard enough to sweat a little every day. Exercise has gotten a bad reputation from the crazy, extreme weight loss shows on TV, as if exercising requires screaming trainers and running to the point of collapse. Wellness has nothing to do with this. Any form of exercise will do – if it’s done vigorously. It can be fast walking, jogging, weight lifting, Zumba, whatever a person’s preference. It can also be household chores like mopping, scrubbing or vacuuming, if done with gusto. The key is to exercise hard enough to elevate your pulse. You know you’re in the magic zone where exercise confers health benefits when you are working out at an intensity level where you can still talk, but you are breathing hard, and you sometimes need to pause between words. You’ll start to sweat. Any amount of exercise you do is better than nothing. Experts think 30 minutes a day is a good starting place, and this can be split up in smaller time segments. The health benefits of even this short time on every organ system in your body are mind-boggling. Sweat is the cheapest and most powerful medicine. Wellrule #6: Eat fresh vegetables every chance you get, whether you like them or not. Veggies are a potent food brimming with powerful phytonutrients which cannot be replicated in corporate labs and artificial additives. They also have lots of fiber that slows the transit of food through your body so it can be properly digested, and cleans the colon at the same time to help ward off colon cancer. Too bad if you don’t find them as tasty as a donut. Grow up! There are a million ways to prepare veggies to make them appetizing. Once you start on the path to wellness, you no longer treat your body like a garbage disposal. Wellrule #7 Join a tribe on the wellness warpath. Your odds of achieving any wellness goal skyrockets when you join other people working on a similar one, like joining other walkers to walk or a local food organization composed of people who care about and support access to quality, fresh food in your community. Others give you ideas and encourage you in inevitable moments of doubt that you can change a habit or lose that fat. We tend to behave like the people around us. Warpath is an intentionally strong word because change takes passion, commitment and willpower. Wellrule #8: Pause and take 5 deep, deep breaths. Stress is a constant companion that can undermine our best efforts. It makes us seek out unhealthy comfort foods and eat too much of them. It also causes the release of a hormone called cortisol that signals the body to store fat rather than burn it for energy. Our lives are stressful because of things we cannot always control, like money, a supervisor, teenagers, an illness, your mother-in-law. However, you can change your reaction to them through a variety of proven techniques like meditation, prayer, yoga, and deep breathing. All of these are cheaper and more effective than tranquilizers. But for them to work when you need them to, you need practice them when you don’t need them. Long, slow, deep breathing is great because you can do it anywhere, anytime, and it always works – even in the most stressful situations such as combat. Nobody can claim they don’t have time for this because it only takes a minute or less, a fraction of the time they spend checking emails and Facebook or chatting with a co-worker. Practice it a few times a day. You’ll feel better, more in control, calmer and less stressed. Stop reading this and try it right now. Wellrule #9: Think like a human, not react like a rat. Lots of very smart people with advanced college degrees work inside corporations to devise schemes to attract our attention and entice us to consume their products. Their highest priority is their income and stock valuations, not your well-being. They use the cleverest tricks behavioral science has to offer, many of them based on experiments with rats that are further refined on us. They know the tastes, colors, smells, sounds, locations that cue us to eat zombie foods, stare at TV screens for hours, and drool when we see golden arches, without even thinking about it. Rats are conditioned to see a certain color, then automatically push the button and get a reward. We are just like the rats until we learn to identify those cues in the store, in media, on the street corner, and in our homes. Once we understand how the cues work and start paying attention, they lose their power over us. For the first time in your life, you are truly free. Wellrule #10 Don’t stop. Once you follow any of the other Wellrules, you’re on your way to better health. The more Wellrules you embrace, the better. Don’t pause or look back. These lifestyle changes are not like medicine you take temporarily for ten days for a sore throat. Your old cues are dimmed but still there. You’ve just over-powered and replaced them with new, healthier ones. If you stop, you go back to the way you were and will have to start all over again. To find out more about what the science behind the Wellrules and personal stories of The Wellness Club, order your copy at Smashwords. You can change the arc of your life. Be well!
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:59:55 +0000