Gut Health Essentials

If you missed our online workshop last week, it is still available on our Facebook page. I encourage you to pop over and check it out for all of the details but here is a brief overview of gut health and some action steps to restoring your health!

The gut is one of the most powerful and complex systems in our bodies! Not only does it take food and turn it into human cells, but it makes up 70% of our immune systems, and plays a huge role in brain function and mental health. So its pretty important to take care of our guts!

Problems arise when we put things in our bodies that aren’t supposed to be there. Things like excess sugar, grains, and man-made toxins irritate and damage the gut lining causing it to wear out and makes it impossible for the gut to do its job of digesting food and keeping the garbage out of your blood stream. That’s called leaky gut. Essentially, the gut wall cannot keep out harmful substances and they LEAK into your blood stream. When this happens your immune system goes on high alert attacking and removing those harmful substances. But if the problem persists, more and more harmful substances leak in causing your immune system to stay on guard constantly. Eventually your immune system breaks and starts destroying anything in its path. That, in a nutshell, is autoimmune disease. A broken immune system caused by a leaking gut. Solution: REMOVE the causes of your gut issues and RESTORE your gut back to health.

REMOVE: Get rid of the things that caused the problem in the first place! This seems so obvious. If you have a nail in your tire, you can pump all the air into it that you want but unless you remove the nail, the air will seep right back out!
Sugar/ Grains: There are many things that cause damage to your gut but none so prevalent as excess sugar and grains. These two enemies of health cause chronic inflammation and irritation and slowly tear up your gut lining. If you or your child has gut/ digestive issues, remove all sugar and all grains right away.

Lactose: Humans are the only creatures to use the milk from other animals! Its kind of weird when you think about it but beyond that, humans aren’t designed to break down lactose which is why so many people cannot handle dairy at all. So do process it better than others, but if you’re looking to heal your gut, cut out lactose at least for a month to see how you improve.

Toxins: When you take in harmful chemicals, it’s like swallowing a rock. When you swallow a rock, your body will do a great job of getting rid of it but it still must pass through your digestive system. As the rock is moving through, it scrapes, bangs, and tears up the gut! The same damage occurs when you take in toxins! Outside chemicals do not belong on the inside. It doesn’t matter what the chemical is, it should not be there and will cause damage to your health. Common chemicals come from the plastics you use (especially for food storage and cooking), the water you drink (heavy metals, fluoride, chlorine), and the drugs you take. Medications can be lifesaving but when used long term they have terrible effects on your health. Drugs are not intended for health they are intended to get you out of a bind when you are very sick and are in crisis mode. They disrupt your body’s ability to function properly and many have terrible effects on the gut. Even simple NSAIDs like aspirin cause intestinal damage. So, to heal your gut, cut the toxins.

RESTORE: Once you have removed the causes of the continued damage to your gut, your body will being to heal and restore but there are things that you can do to help your body restore faster!

Eat well! Start eating the Advanced Plan right away. See the NGFC team for support on this. The AP will give your body the essentials it needs and none of the garbage. I recommend at least 30 days of strict AP to begin.
Try fasting! You have been digesting food since you were born. Your gut needs a break so that it can use that energy to heal. Intermittent fasting is a great option. Basically, you simply don’t eat for 12-18 in a day. The easiest way is to cut out breakfast. So you will go from supper to lunch (approx. 16 hours). But the most effective way is to cut out supper. So you will eat breakfast and lunch but wont eat again until the next morning! Give it a shot, its easier than you’d think.

Supplements: You cannot get all of your nutrients from a healthy diet anymore. Modern fields and crops are largely depleted of vital nutrients. So you must “supplement” your diet. The problem is that the supplement industry is wildly under regulated. You can put just about anything on the label and charge what ever you please. Marketing agencies have jumped on this industry causing millions of people to over pay for supplements that don’t contain what they say!

I am very proud of the MaxLiving supplements that we sell at NGFC. They are of the highest quality possible, always contain exactly what is on the label, and always come in the most bioavailable forms. These are the supplements that we take daily and so should you!

Max GI + Probiotic 50B: The combo of Max GI and Probiotic 50B is a powerful punch for gut health. With digestive enzymes, essential oils, prebiotics, and 10 different strains of essential probiotics these two supplements is a great place to start to get things moving and healing.

Bone Broth Protein + Collagen + Max Greens: These 3 make up the majority of my daily smoothie. The bone broth protein plus collagen give your gut everything it needs to repair the gut wall. The greens add the nutrients of nearly 40 different organic veggies including fiber, which is essential for gut health. Plus it all tastes great as a morning smoothie!

Daily Essentials: Just as the name implies, the daily essentials are the bare minimum that your body needs to function properly every day. Nearly everyone is deficient in these nutrients but especially magnesium. If you want proper gut function, magnesium should be at the top of your supplement list, but Mg only takes its full effect when combined with Vitamin D and B, which is why they all come together in the Daily Essentials packet.

For many, following this outline is just the beginning. Your gut issues may have been around for decades. It will take more to correct all of that damage, either way this is your starting point. But for most, this is all you need. REMOVE the causes and help your body RESTORE! The key is to make one good choice at a time!

If you live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area and are ready to begin your health journey, give us a call today!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

(719) 419-7955

Control What You Can Control

Life happens! Good or bad, every day will bring a new adventure. Call it luck, call it fate, call it divine will, life will throw you curve balls and it our privilege to live through it all. But when we take a step back and realize there are certain things we have zero control over and there are also things we have complete control over our lives can become much simpler and our souls can be more at ease.

Bad things happen to everyone. A car rear ends you on your way to work, someone you love passes away suddenly, your boss was having a bad day so they took it out on you, negative situations will inevitably arise in our lives. But in those moments, it is essential to ask ourselves, what do I have control over here? I can’t stop someone from running into my car (assuming I’m driving safely) but I can control how I respond to the situation. Yeah, it stinks, you’re going to be late, your car is all smashed up but you have no control over that anymore not even in the slightest. You can choose to let it ruin the rest of your day, week, year, even life, OR you can see it for what it is, and move forward and make the most out of every situation. When we hold on to things of the past, whether minutes ago or years ago, we let them also affect our present. So not only did someone hit you in one moment, but you let that accident negatively impact many more of your precious moments. So, day in and day out you must ask yourself, what can I control here?

We will all die one day! I’m sorry if that’s news to you and comes as a shock but it’s something we must all face. There’s lots of ways we can die. That fender bender might have been a multi car pileup that ends your days. A tree branch could snap and fall on your head. You could slip on ice walking your dog. These can all happen but even if you’re as careful as possible you have no control over these things. But for the overwhelming majority of us that is not how we will go. 5 out of 6 people in our country die of chronic disease. And that is the most freeing thing I know of because you have control over chronic disease!

These days we love blaming things on our genes. My mom and dad were overweight so I’m overweight. My grand dad died of a heart attack so I probably will too. The women in my family all get breast cancer. Blaming our family history and genes takes all responsibility for our health off of ourselves and puts it elsewhere and that’s a much easier pill to swallow than saying I can control my health if only I make some changes. But the fact remains, your genes do not dictate your health. Only 2.7% of diseases are truly genetic meaning that if you have that gene, you will have that disease and you have no control over it. That being the case it means that 97.3% of diseases are based on your daily habits and choices and you have complete control over them! You choose to either build health or disease in your body every day. The food you eat, how much you move and breathe, the chemicals you allow in your body, the thoughts you tell yourself, the way you treat your spine and nervous system, these are all choices that will determine whether you build health or disease. Choose wisely!

There’s a saying that I love that goes like this, “The past is the past and it couldn’t have happened any other way because it didn’t.” There is no going back. Whether you had control or not nothing can be done. Ultimately you only have control over what you think, say, and do right NOW in this moment. If you want to be healthy, feel better, have more energy and joy, you are only one choice away. Choose wisely!

If you live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area and you are ready to take control of your health, give us a call today!

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Health Simplified

 

Everyone I have ever met wants to be healthy.  We all want to feel good, have unending energy, and be full of joy in life.  But the fact is that we aren’t healthy.  The vast majority of us are dealing with one if not multiple health issues whether its back pain, headaches, allergies, chronic disease, being overweight, the list goes on endlessly.  So the question begs to be asked, why?  If we all want to be healthy then why aren’t we?? Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer.  In fact the answer is different for everyone.  Some don’t know how important their health is.  Others will do anything to be healthy but they don’t know what to do.   Some trust in a system that keeps them sick instead of making them healthy.  And yet more have been lied to being told they are broken and cannot be healthy and whole.  Then there are the few who have searched for answers, found the truth, want to be healthy, and have done everything they know how to be healthy but quickly become overwhelmed!  If that is you, this article is for you!

These days there is a “health expert” on every page of social media.  Every building has a health and wellness clinic.  There’s naturopaths that will test and measure every detail of you, Chinese medicine that will use ancient traditions to align you, modern medicine that will research and attack your ailment with chemicals and lasers.  With so much information that is often conflicting it’s hard to start and stay on your health journey!  Even I recognize that once you start diving into the 5 Essentials of Health, the details can be overwhelming!  Eat everything organic and grass-fed.  Eat lots of fats but not the unhealthy kind just the good stuff.  Go hunt down every toxin in your house and buy all new things!  Get adjusted 3 times per week and wobble every day.  It can all be daunting!  So here and now, lets simplify things a bit.  Because even if something is true, it’s complexity can be halting.  It is in simplicity that there is power. 

Health Simplified:  If you want to be healthy, have more energy, and enjoy life more do these things:

Wake up early and thank God for the life you have.

Get your body moving and your lungs breathing deep.

Eat a smoothie for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and make good choices for supper. 

Take care of your spine every single day.

Go to bed early and thank God for another day.

But Dr. Marc, what do I put in my smoothie?  What goes in my salad?  How long should I exercise?  Should I take supplements and which ones??  I understand, you might have loads of questions and that’s great but the key to health is to just start and don’t stop.  Do the steps above in the best way you know how.  Over time you will learn more and you will add things to your steps, you will take some away.  Health is a journey.  You cannot start at the end you must start at the beginning.  So, get started!

If you live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area and are ready to begin your health journey, let us help!  Give us a call today to set up your initial consultation.

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Laws of Nature

When I stop and look at our world it makes me think God must have an incredible sense of humor!  All of the twists and turns that He used when created the world just make me smile.  If you watch any nature show these days, its mind blowing to see all of the details He built in and all of the things that baffle science.  Take the bumblebee for example.  With their tiny wings and their large bodies, “science” says that they should not be able to fly yet they travel hundreds of miles by wing everyday.  Or the ant that can lift thousands of times its own bodyweight, the cuttlefish that can change colors and shape shift to hide from predators.  So much of our world completely breaks what science says can’t be done.   But while there are plenty of things we cant comprehend through the lens of science, God created our world with some very real principles.  Those principles are the Laws of Nature and once we understand those laws and live according to them our lives will go exceedingly well! 

One of the most well known of the Laws of Nature is gravity.  Now the fact that something is a law means that it cannot be broken.  It is set in stone and cannot be altered and if it is broken even once then it cannot by definition be a law.  When the apple leaves the tree branch, it will ALWAYS fall down, never float up!  That’s the law of gravity.  If you ignore the law of gravity your life will be worse off!   But if you live in accordance with it, your life will go exceedingly well.  It makes sense.  When you live your life according to how God created the world, things tend to go much better for you! 

Gravity is pretty simple but there are other laws that are less well known.  One of my favorites is the Law of Health, which essentially says that all health and all healing come from within.  There is no drug, no surgery, no diet, no supplement, no adjustment that will heal you.  It is ALWAYS the body that does the healing.  It takes the things that you give it, good or bad, and it utilizes those things but ultimately it is always the body that heals.  Put simply, “health comes from within”.  Once you recognize this fact and live in accordance to it, your life will go exceedingly well!

In my experience, we all want our lives to go well.  We all want to wake up with energy, be pain free, and have a great day with as little stress as possible!  We all want good things in our lives.  Good relationships, good finances, good health, good everything!  Luckily God made a law for good things.  That law is that all good things in life require time, effort, and consistency and once again if we can understand that fact and live our lives according to it, things will go exceedingly well!

When I was going through school, I read every personal growth book I could find.  I was searching for that one thing that would unlock the door to success and happiness in life.  What I realized after 100 books or so (I’m a slow learner!) was that there are no shortcuts.  There isn’t a perfect 9 step process for a better life.  There isn’t any get rich quick scheme.  There is no pill or diet that will shed the weight for you or make you healthy.  Now, we all want to get our desired outcomes faster which is why companies and marketing agencies have discovered that if they promise you a better life with zero effort on your part, their product will sell like hotcakes!  Things like diet pills or surgeries that make you lose weight.  Sure you might shed pounds overnight but it is at the expense of your health.  Winning the lottery to get rich!  The vast majority of lottery winners are broke and miserable just a few years later.  Drugs and vaccines to make you healthy, ignoring how God created your body!  They all come with terrible, often deadly side effects.  There is no quick, easy way to the good life God has intended for you.  Everything that is good and wholesome requires time, effort, and consistency.

Time:  We are like children in the way we want what we want and we want it NOW!  In our world of free 2 day shipping and high speed everything; we demand that we get everything we want immediately.  But good things take time.  The saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day means that it took time!  You cannot get healthy or pain free overnight.  You cannot create an incredible marriage in a weekend.  You cant pay off debt with your next paycheck.  Life is a journey and hopefully a long one!  All along that journey you are planting seeds.  That seed first grows roots, and then it sprouts and continues climbing and growing.  Even a tall tree isn’t done; it is only after years of spreading limbs and digging deep into the soil that the fruit finally comes!  Such is life.  All good things take time and thank God that they do because over time, you mature and learn.  The things that I thought I wanted when I was 20 years old are completely different than today.  Thank goodness I had time to learn along the way!

Effort:  Effort means work!  This one is one of the harder ones because our brains are wired to drive us towards as little effort as possible.  That made a lot of sense when more effort meant more energy spent and energy meant we’d have to hunt more or gather more food.  But in our world of abundance we have the freedom to put effort into the things that matter to us.  An easy way to think of it, if you care about something, you have to work on it.  You care about your children, right?  That means you have to put in effort to make sure they are well behaved and healthy.  You can’t just ignore them and hope it all just falls into place!  If you care about your finances you have to put in the effort of creating a budget and a plan to save.  If you care about your marriage you have to work on the hard stuff!  If you care about your health you have to work on it; eating well, exercising, getting adjusted.  Now effort doesn’t just apply to good things, it applies to the bad as well.  If you don’t put in the work ahead of time to ensure things go well, you will have to put in the work after everything falls apart and at that point the work is much harder.  The work of repairing is much harder than the work of preventing.  It’s easier to work on a good relationship than fix a broken one.  It’s easier to maintain your health than working to reverse disease and pain.  Good things take effort.

Consistency:  Rome wasn’t built in a day which means it took time, but it also took consistency!  They didn’t work really hard one week, then take the rest of the month off.  Everyday they worked towards their grand vision of what civilization could be.  Good things take consistent effort everyday!  So often I hear about people who did crash diets.  Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!  And those people really did lose a lot of weight, but what happens after the 30 days?  They go back to what they did before and the weight comes right back.  One of my favorites is those who come get adjusted regularly until their pain goes away then I don’t see them for a month or two, and they come limping back in with even more pain!  All good things take consistency.  That often means making lifestyle and identity changes.  If you want long lasting good results you have to change the fundamental things you do in life.  Become the person who does ________.  I am the person who saves 10% of every paycheck.  I am the person who works out every morning.  I don’t eat sugar or grains.  I go to church every Sunday.  Your goals should not be end results, they should be daily efforts.  Instead of setting a goal to lose 30 pounds, set a goal to have a smoothie and a salad every day.  I guarantee that with that consistency you will lose way more than 30 pounds.  So, whatever good thing you are working towards, work towards it every day! 

There are so many good things that God has planned for our lives and while our world is full of awesome surprises and wonders, He created life with laws that we can depend on.  The best parts of life come when live in alignment with how He created us.  So, while its not always fun to wait on time, put in work and effort, and be consistent with the things we do, we can rest assured that when we do, there will always be good things to come. 

If you are ready to start your health journey and live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, or Palmer Lake area give us a shout! 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Are You Free

This time of year it is important to look at your life and be thankful for the freedoms you have been given.  Most of us did nothing to earn that freedom yet we are more free in this day and age than ever!  The men who founded our country knew how important those hard earned freedoms were and tried to establish laws to protect them but they also warned that if we were not vigilant and defend those freedoms we would swiftly lose them.  So I ask you, what would you do to protect your freedom?

I love to read about history and how the people of old lived.  When compared to modern life, the people of even 100 years ago had it rough.  Living in times where sewage riddled the streets, clean water was a luxury of the rich, nutritious food was impossible to find, and a bad growing season meant millions starved.  In those environments disease ran rampant due to a severe lack of health and harsh medical treatments like purifying the blood with poisonous mercury, surgeries without anesthesia, and bloodletting practices surprisingly performed up until WWII.  Thank goodness around the turn of the 20^th century cities became cleaner, clean water became available, and for the first time people realized that the foods you put in your body either make you healthier or sicker.  This lead to a drastic drop in viral and bacterial disease all because people were healthier and their bodies could fight an infection.  This in turn provided even more freedoms!

I am baffled at how free we are these days.  Not just the freedoms given by our constitution but the freedoms that modern life provides.  We have more free time than any other time in history.  It often doesn’t feel like it because of how we choose to live, but you don’t have to wake up at 3 AM to feed the livestock, milk the goats, collect the eggs, churn the butter, THEN go to work for 12 hours.  Our appliances do all the hard work.  Groceries can show up at your door any time of day.  You don’t have to leave your couch to buy clothes or toilet paper if you don’t want.  But what do we do with our free time?  We fill it with mindless junk!  We turn on the TV, jump on our phones, and turn off our brains.  I always wonder where we’d be as a race if Aristotle had an iPhone or Edison had Netflix.  Instead of using our powerful, creative minds to enjoy and improve our lives and world, we waste our time and brainpower watching the opinions of the talking heads on whatever box you have in front of you.  

Beyond free time, one of the best freedoms we have is the power of choice.  You are free to choose anything!  You can choose where your kids go to school, where you work, what you drive, where to live, what to do with your time, who to marry, you can even choose what gender to be these days!  Even if it doesn’t feel like it, everything you have in life as an adult is your choice.  Even your health!

When I was going through school one of my most mind opening moments was when I realized how powerful the human body is.  It is unfathomable how complicated the human body is.  Humans have studied the body for thousands of years and we have barely scratched the surface.  But knowing how ignorant we are God gave us a gift.  He designed the body to run itself!   You don’t need to tell your heart to beat, or your lungs to breathe, or your gut to digest, or even your immune system to fight germs.  God put an intelligence inside of us that governs it all for you!  But the problem comes when we live a life outside of how we were designed.  We put manmade garbage in instead of God made food.  We live sedentary lives, barely moving or breathing.  We put toxic chemicals in, and stress out our minds and nervous systems! So instead of giving your body what it needs, we give it exactly what it doesn’t need.  Again, thank God, He gave us that intelligence because every time you make a bad choice, you put the garbage in, your body gets to work.  Your body fights for you trying to keep you alive and healthy!  But it is a losing fight.  If you deprive any living thing of what it needs it will slow die.  Think about a flower.  If a flower is in rich soil, has good sunlight, and the right amount of water that lil guy will bloom and be beautiful!  But, if you hide it from the sun, deplete its soil, and give it only half the water it needs, it will wither and die.  The same is true for you and your family.  Deprive your body of what it needs, and it will still live, but it will never bloom beautifully, it will slowly wither away.  That withering in humans is called disease.  Diseases and all their many medical signs and symptoms are nothing more than the body slowly losing the fight for health, all because it never got what it needed.  Here in lies freedom.

My favorite aspect of living a healthy life is the freedom it provides!  Once you understand that your body is designed for health, that it is fighting FOR you ALWAYS, and that it has certain requirements to fight properly, then you no longer need to live life in fear of sickness, pain, or disease!  You can CHOOSE to give your body the things it needs, support your body as it fights for you and maybe for the first time experience energy, health, and wholeness the way we were all designed!  To me health freedom means that I get to choose what to put into my body, and my choices directly impact my health for the good or bad, but when you choose the good you can begin to live life on your terms. 

So, whatever decisions you face this week, choose that which is life GIVING and avoid that which is life taking.  And understand this, if you choose poorly for long enough, one day you will no longer be able to choose.  So choose well!

If your ready to take reclaim your health freedom and live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area give us a call today!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921