Health= Function

I love asking people if they think they are healthy.  Nearly everyone says yes!  Which is funny because the statistics show the exact opposite.  But I always follow up with another question, how do you know?  Whether their answer is healthy or sick, “how do you know”?  You see most of us are basing our health off of misguided markers.  Some base their health on what the doctor says.  We do annual screenings with the MD and they send you off with a clean bill of health.  The problem is that medical tests are not preventative, they are reactive meaning they can only detect when disease has already arrived.  Is it possible to be building heart disease, cancer, or diabetes and it not show up on a test yet??  Of course!  In fact heart disease builds in the body for 10-20 years before it’s even detectable.  On average cancer is discovered at stage 3, years into the making!  Testing alone cannot tell us if we are healthy.  

There’s another group of people who base their health on how they feel.  Now don’t get me wrong, if you feel bad you can assume you’re not doing well.  But again at what point do you FEEL heart disease?  It’s called the silent killer for a reason!  Over 70% of people find out that they have heart disease because they have a heart attack.  Now, how do you feel the day before you have a heart attack?  You feel fine!  Looking back, would you say that you were healthy the day, the week, the month, even the year before your heart attack?  No way!  Everyone can be building heart disease, cancer, diabetes, thinking they are healthy, if they are waiting until they feel bad.

To truly know if you’re healthy you must know the definition of health.  Webster’s dictionary tells us that “Health equals 100% function in the body”.  I think that’s so cool because it’s inferring that we are DESIGNED TO BE HEALTHY and that our bodies heal, regenerate, and repair themselves in order to maintain that normal state of health.  So when your body is functioning at 100% there is no pain, no sickness, no disease but there is life, and energy, and health!  

The question then becomes, what can I do to improve my body’s ability to function properly??  Welcome to the 5 Essentials of Health.  We call them Essentials for a reason.  Your body requires them to function properly and heal!  Without them you are slowly slipping into dysfunction, disease, and ultimately early death.  So what are they?

Nutrition:  How well do you think your body functions off of fast food and soda?  Do you think pizza enables your body to heal?  Do you think your late night ice cream builds health or disease?  The foods you put into your body matter more than you can imagine.  Your diet is either the CAUSE or the CURE for disease.  For me food is black and white.  Is this food life-GIVING or life TAKING?  Always choose life-giving foods!

Exercise:  It comes as no surprise to anyone that exercise is important.  But do you see it as ESSENTIAL?  Motion is life.  The more you move the more alive you are and the better your body functions and heals.  Exercise should not just be about losing weight, it’s about restoring balance, energizing and oxygenating cells,  increasing metabolism, and improving function and healing!

Minimize Toxins:  Man-made chemicals destroy proper function in the body.  Every chemical that comes in is toxic to the body so your body has to work overtime to get the chemicals out and repair the damage they cause.  If your body is constantly working to remove and repair, you cannot be building health.  Toxins also disrupt the perfect hormone balance in your body.  What do hormones do?  Everything!  From weight loss, to appetite and energy levels your hormones are responsible.  Remove the chemicals, let your hormones rebalance, and let your body heal!

Mindset:  When talking about mindset and proper function in the body we need to start with stress.  The way your body works you are in 1 of 2 states.  You are either in “rest, digest, and heal” or “fight or flight”.  In Rest, Digest & Heal your body is at ease.  This is where we are designed to be for 99% of our lives.  In this state your body repairs from any and all damage.  You can properly break down foods.  Your immune system is kicking butt.  But when stress comes in our state shifts to Fight or Flight.  Your body turns off all “non-essential” processes in order to escape danger.  Your digestive, immune, and reproductive systems shut down.  Your heart rate and blood pressure increase.  Breathing rate goes up.  Blood flows away from the brain and organs and gets pumped into the muscles.  All of this is a very good thing if the stressor you are dealing with is a bear chasing you!  But that’s not the case these days.  Your stress is your bills, your relationships, your emails.  So instead of living in Fight or Flight 1% of the time, we are there 99% of the time.  Managing stress is ESSENTIAL to proper function and healing in the body.

Chiropractic:  If our goal is to improve function in the body, it would be silly not to ask, “what controls all function in the body?”  I’ll give you a hint, it sits between your ears.  It’s your brain!  Everyone knows that your brain and nervous system control everything in your body.  For you to digest food, to move your arms, lungs to breathe, heart to pump blood, detox and repair, even to regulate your Fight or Flight response, your brain MUST tell that part of your body what to do!  But what happens if it can’t?  What if your brain can’t tell your heart to beat?  Well you die.  That’s a little extreme but what happens if your brain can’t tell your heart how to beat PROPERLY?  If your brain can’t tell any part of your body what to do at 100% it cannot function at 100%.  If health = function and your heart is not functioning properly it’s not healthy!  It’s not healing, regenerating, repairing like it’s supposed to!  The best example of this comes from heart transplants.  Here we have this 60-year-old man with a bad heart.  He gets a brand new 18-year-old heart transplanted in.  You’d assume that with an 18-year-old heart he’d have another 60 years ahead of him!  But on average heart transplants only last 5-7 years.  Within 5 years a healthy heart is destroyed!  Why?  Because the cause was never corrected!  The reason the man’s heart went bad in the first place was because his brain couldn’t tell it how to repair and heal!  So the new heart will have the exact same issue!  The brain MUST be able to tell the body how to function at 100% otherwise health cannot exist.

God knew that the brain and nervous system were so important that He designed protection.  He designed your skull to protect the brain but then He designed the spine to surround and protect the spinal cord. He even put openings in the spine so that every nerve in your body can exit through the spine to go out to every corner of the body.  That’s why we say that “life flows through your spine” because for your brain to tell your heart, lungs, gut, and immune system to function, the signals must flow through your spine!  But your spine can shift out of place causing interference to the flow of life!  Those misalignments are called SUBLUXATIONS.  When subluxations occur nothing else matters.  You can eat the best life giving foods, exercise and move all day, remove all chemicals and even take away all stress but if you have subluxations your brain cannot tell your body how to function.  Dysfunction leads to disease and disease leads to early death.  This is why chiropractic care is ESSENTIAL.  Chiropractic seeks to find and correct any and all subluxations in your spine RESTORING function, HEALING disease and PROLONGING life!  

Improving function is what the MaxLiving lifestyle is all about.  It’s not just fighting disease or losing weight, it’s much more than that.  It’s about maximizing your life!  It’s about having abundance in all areas.  Having an abundance of energy, an abundance of joy, an abundance of vitality.  It’s about adding years to your life and life to your years!  Live an abundant life – Live the MaxLiving life! 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Cheat Code: HEALTH

When I was growing up I didn’t play a lot of video games.  I was sent outside to use my imagination to find my entertainment.  Sticks turned into swords and a couple of trees became endless forests.  But when I would go stay with friends they had all the games!  I was so jealous.  I thought the secret to happiness was found in Sega, PlayStation, and Nintendo.  We would play for hours at a time.  Now and again, my friends would put in a “cheat code”.  These secret codes would change the game.  Cheat codes would do things like give you unlimited lives or make your character invincible.  It was a secret that once unlocked completely changed the game making it significantly easier to win!

I recently came across a very interesting question.  “What is the best cheat code you have found in life?”  What a fun question!  In all of your experience, all of your time here on earth, what have you found to be the one thing that can change the game and make all of life easier to win??  My mind starts racing at the question.  Maybe it’s understanding compounding interest or saving/investing at a young age.  Maybe its goal setting and vision casting. The list could go on forever.  But the more I really think about it, the one thing I have found that can radically improve EVERY aspect of life is HEALTH.

Your level of health dictates every aspect of your life.  Your energy, your mood, your self confidence.  In gaining health we can improve every facet of our lives!  

MORE ENERGY.  Imagine having more energy.  What would you do?  Where would you go?  What goals would you take on?  Would you take up that new hobby you’ve always wanted to do?  Finish that project you started years ago?  We all want more energy.  If in doubt just look at the line at Starbucks everyday.  We simply enjoy life more with extra energy!  We are better versions of ourselves with more energy!  We get more done with a smile on our faces!  The crazy thing is that you have UNLIMITED energy inside of you.  But it is buried underneath your bad choices.  Your sugar and grains, the toxic junk you put in, your poor sleep habits, all of it sucks your energy.  By making healthier choices we can tap into that unlimited energy.

CLEARER MIND.  What if you could make better, wiser choices?  What if the words came out more quickly and the ideas came more clear and sharp.  Your mind, like your energy, is UNLIMITED.  All you need to do is tap into it.  But again, through chronic bad choices our minds have been steeped in a fog.  For many it has been a lifelong fog.  You don’t even know how fresh your mind can be!  Once you remove the interferences it unleashes your mind to let it run without limits!

BETTER MOOD.  We all want to be in a better mood.  That’s one reason we want more energy – it puts us in a better mood!  When you have a smile on your face people are drawn to you.  The world seems to turn in your favor and even when things go array, the blow doesn’t seem as sharp.  Being healthy makes for a better mood!  Less pain and headaches, better sleep, less digestive issues or breathing problems, less drugs with all of their terrible side effects.  When we have less sickness, pain, and disease, more energy, a clearer mind – it inevitably puts us in a better mood.

SELF CONFIDENCE.  Self-confidence is defined as having confidence in yourself, trusting yourself, being able to rely on yourself.  When you CHOOSE a healthy lifestyle you build up your self-image.  You made a good choice.  You stood up for yourself.  You said no to the fast food and chose a healthier salad or smoothie.  You chose to wake up early and go for a walk.  You chose to do your homecare exercises even when you were tired and didn’t feel like it.  As you make good choices you are telling yourself that you are worth it.  Yes, its hard to say no to your cravings but your health, your life is more important.  YOU are more important.  Make choices that honor you! 

How to enter the Cheat Code:  HEALTH 

Get adjusted!  When you get adjusted, it removes any interference from your nervous system.  Your nervous system controls everything!  Your energy, your mind, your mood, your confidence is all controlled by the nerve system.  Even a slight misalignment in your spine can limit your experience in life!  Stay subluxation free.

Eat well.  Sugar, grains, and toxins cost your body energy.  Your body has to heal itself from the damage you inflict with your garbage diet.  The neuro-toxins you eat directly destroy your brain and nerves.  Damaged fats that come from fast-food and food from boxes clog your cells, and starve your body of the healthy fats you require.  Switch to clean, God-made food that is life GIVING as opposed to dirty man-made foods that are life TAKING.

Move.  Motion is life.  You gotta move to live!  Exercise is essential but even walking more can be a huge shift in the right direction.  The more you move the more alive you are!  More movement whether it’s working out, walking or running, or even stretching will give you more LIFE, more energy, more joy!

Minimize toxins.  Chemicals, not some but all are toxic to your body.  They cause gut damage, cancer, hormone imbalances, and subluxation.  And they are everywhere in your life!  Cut out the plastics.  Eat organic food that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides.  Purify your shower water and drinking water.  Remove as many toxins as you can from your life because they will forever hold you back from optimal health.

Maximize your mind.  Don’t just wish for a better life, make it happen!  Decide that enough is enough.  Set your goals to take care of your spine and nervous system, eat well, move more, and minimize the toxins.  There is more waiting for you in this life.  It comes one good choice at a time.  Put in the cheat code of HEALTH and watch as life becomes easier, better, more joyful, and fulfilling than you ever thought imaginable.  

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Happy Hormones

Are you happy or sad today?  Did you sleep well last night?  Do you feel hungry right when you wake up or does it take an hour or two?  Do you feel motivated and energetic or slow and sluggish today?  When you eat well and exercise do you lose weight or does weight loss seem like an impossible feat?  Whatever you are experiencing today, good, bad, or ugly, you have your hormones to thank!  

If you haven’t noticed, at NGFC we talk an awful lot about the nervous system.  Rightfully so, since the nervous system is the foundation of all life and healing, but it is the CHEMICALS in your body that dictate your experience in life. Now, God designed your body perfectly with everything it needs including every chemical.  The best pharmacist in the world is the human body!  Your body is designed to create every chemical you will ever need to experience life, love, and happiness.  Those chemicals are called “hormones”.  Your hormones dictate EVERYTHING in life.  Your happiness, sadness, and depression, your hunger, thirst, and cravings, your energy and tiredness, your athletic performance, and weight loss resistance, even your libido and reproductive health are all at the hands of your hormones.  So the question must be asked, are your hormones happy? 

My sister is a pharmacist.  This makes family gatherings interesting as my wife and I preach a drug free lifestyle, but it’s always interesting to hear her talk about the people that come to see her.  It’s even more interesting to hear her talk about all the mistakes the doctors make in prescribing medications to people who would have had serious reactions to the drugs their doctors told them to take if my sister hadn’t caught their errors.  But, you’d assume that all of her clients coming to pick up their medications would be happy, healthy, and full of life!  Quite the opposite.  In fact they all sound miserable.  The reason behind their misery would be an endless topic, but in terms of hormones, of course they are miserable!  You see, ANY outside chemical coming into your body makes it IMPOSSIBLE to have balanced hormones.  It doesn’t matter if it’s from a drug, cleaning product, or food byproduct, outside chemicals interfere with your body’s perfect balance and thus your ability to experience life, love, and happiness.

Your body is a “closed system.”  If you recall from chemistry 101, if you have a beaker, you can fill it with certain chemicals and as long as they are the right chemicals, everything will be in balance, everyone is happy.  But add just a tiny drop of the wrong chemical and BOOM!  The chemistry lab is on fire and you lost your eyebrows!  The same is true of your body.  Your body produces the right chemicals to make sure you fall asleep and stay asleep at night, lose weight when you eat well, and feel happy and motivated all day long.  Your body produces the right chemicals at the right moment all day long.  That’s crazy to think about!  You have 1000’s of different hormones in your body, all of them needing to be in the perfect amount at every moment of your life.  Your body is so smart that it runs this perfect orchestra from start to finish of life UNLESS you add outside chemicals.  Just like our lab exploding, when outside chemicals come in your body reacts!  An easy example of this that we all know is poison.  If poisonous chemicals come in, it could kill you!  That’s quite the reaction.  But most chemicals don’t kill, but they all hurt. That’s why all outside, man-made chemicals are called toxins. 

Every day we are exposed to an average of 2,100,000 toxins.  They come from the air that you breathe, the drugs you take, the food you eat, water you drink, even the products you rub on your skin.  All 2 million of them throw our body out of balance, reducing our experience in life. Thankfully, God designed our bodies with a “detox system.”  Your body is so intelligent that it does everything in its power to remove the life disrupting toxins.  But, it can only do so much.  2,100,000 toxins are too much for your body to handle.  When more are coming in than your body can remove, you get to see first hand the reactions.  Things like acne and eczema are clear signs that your body is full of toxins and they are literally bursting out of your skin.   Mental and mood disorders are often the result of neurotoxins.  Reproductive issues nearly always have a toxicity component.  Toxins destroy gut health.  All these life-disrupting effects brought to you by man made chemicals destroying the perfect God made balance.

On Tuesday April 19th here at NGFC we will be diving deep into the chemistry of life with our Spring Cleaning Workshop. We will be talking about how your body is made, the perfect hormone balance you require, and the source of all these 2,100,000 toxins.  But most importantly, we’ll learn what to do about it to return to a balanced healthy life.  I hope to see you there!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

 

Chiropractic:  Helping Babies Poop Since 1895

I get pooped on a lot.  I’ve come to peace with it but it was not something that was on the Chiropractic School brochure!  The first time it happened I was a little shocked but I was filled with joy and gratitude.  Joy because it had been a week since that little girl had pooped and even if it was while I was adjusting her I was nothing but happy to see her suffering end.  Gratitude because I got to see first hand the power of healing that lives inside all of us.

These days chiropractic has been relegated to pain treatment.  Over the years we have come to be the neck pain, back pain, headache doctors.  There are lots of reasons why this is the case, one of them being that studies have proven that chiropractic is the most effective treatment for pain another being the pressure from our medical licensing boards lording over chiropractic schools (a story for another day).  But chiropractic has never and will never have anything to do with pain!

Way back in 1895 Dr. DD Palmer was curious.  He was a learned guy and had a lot of questions.  In his drive to help sick people get well and live long happy lives he started questioning the medical system.  It became clear to him that medicine is the study of disease and what causes man to die.  Dr. Palmer didn’t want to just prevent death or disease in his patients.  He wanted to restore life!  He wanted sick people to get well but he also wanted people to live full, vibrant lives far beyond sickness well into health and vitality.  So he asked a different question.  He began to study HEALTH instead of disease.  He looked for what caused a man to LIVE not what caused him to die.  What he found started a new profession and has been making babies poop on chiropractors ever since.

Palmer discovered and defined the Principle of Health.  This was not a new idea.  In fact humans have honored this principle from the beginning of time.  Every civilization over every age has spoken of a greater power that gives life to man.  It has gone by varying names; life, nature, the universe, great spirit, prana, chi, the list goes on.  But the fact is that we have always recognized and honored the reality that there is something far greater than us that gives us life, keeps us alive, and heals us.  Palmer knew this but he saw around him a world that was forgetting it. 

Modern Medicine was beginning to take root at the turn of the century.  J.D. Rockefeller with his billions was pushing his newly found petrochemicals onto the medical system.  He donated millions of dollars to the schools that would teach his new drugs made from oil.  He literally wrote the book on modern chemical medicine.  He is the reason that when you go to your doctor today you are not offered a solution.  You are offered a drug.   But what ended up happening is far more tragic than the side effects of taking man-made chemicals.  People stopped honoring the fact that life and health comes from something far greater than human minds can fathom and that the greatest doctor is the one that lives within not the chemist in a white coat.

DD saw this.  He was determined to get humanity back on track.  He began chiropractic as a profession that would first and foremost honor the life, the healing, the intelligence that God placed inside of man.  He preached that the human body was not made broken and flawed lacking man-made drugs requiring chemicals to stay alive and fight disease.  He taught the truth that the natural state of the human body is HEALTH and the only reason that a person suffers from pain, sickness, or disease is that there is an interference in the body’s ability to function properly and heal the way that God designed it.  He started chiropractic as a means to remove the interference and allow the body to go back to work healing, repairing, and regenerating the body.  He never once adjusted someone because they had back pain.  He adjusted them because he knew that interference to the nervous system because of a misalignment in the spine would result in lack of function, create dis-ease, and would lead to less life and early death. 

Babies are supposed to poop.  The life and intelligence that God put inside of each baby tells it that when food comes in, the extra has to go out.  If that isn’t happening correctly there is always a reason why and that reason is never a lack of chemicals.  It is always an interference to their little body’s ability to function properly and poop!

Whether it constipation, high blood pressure, asthma, hormone imbalance, auto immune disease, cancer, or simple low back pain, there is always a cause and the solution is always to give the body what it needs, restore life and let the healing and pooping begin.

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Experience Him

Every day I get asked the question, “How are you today?”  More often than not it’s just a polite way of saying “hi” but my answer is always the same;  “I’m doing great!”  Now, I do not say that lightly or just because is an easy response.  In that moment I am genuinely doing great but I think it’s important to tell you why.  It’s not that my life is so amazing and incredible that I walk around in a great mood all the time!  Nope.  Just like you I deal with life every day.  Sometimes life is good, sometimes the struggles are harder than I’d like.  But the fact remains that in that moment, at the adjusting table, I am truly doing great! 

If you haven’t noticed, I love adjusting people!  I think it’s the most fun I can have.  I view it as a challenge to correct subluxations.  I view it as an art that I am always improving on to make each adjustment better.  And to be perfectly honest, I just love moving bones!  I think its so satisfying to do the right adjustment, at just the right place, at just the right time, and feel the release of LIFE into someone’s body.  It’s awesome.  But that’s not why I’m great when you ask.  I’m great because I am living out my purpose.

Like all people I struggled for years to find out who I am and why I am here.  I had all these pieces of my life floating around that got me near the answer but never fully there until after one crazy weekend with my family God told me exactly what my purpose is.  To summarize, my purpose is to “Help you experience Him.”  Now I could do that in a ton of different ways but I have been given certain knowledge and understandings that have led me to use chiropractic and health as the means to help you experience Him.  You see, I fully believe that you cannot experience all of the goodness God has in store for you and your family in this life if you don’t have your health.  When you are riddled with pain, sickness, or disease, you cannot live life to the fullest extend.  You cannot maximize everything that God has entrusted to you.  Can you have great faith and a close intimate relationship with God even in the middle of disease and pain?  Of course!  But the infinite goodness of creation will lie there untouched and unrealized because you couldn’t see past your current situation.  My great joy is to help people come out of pain, out of sickness, and to envision more.  More life, more joy, more abundance, more God.

The other day we had a little boy come in.  He is barely a year old but has been nearly deaf since birth.  He has also been struggling to stand on his own because he was unable to balance.  His parents were at a loss.  They had bounced between doctors and specialists since he was born.  No one had any answers.  They suggested injections into his ear and if that didn’t work, surgery.  Now, just imagine what kind of life his parents were experiencing.  Here they have this child they love so much and would do anything for so much so that their entire life had become helping him.  All their time, their energy, their prayers, their money went to helping him.  And even in all their efforts his hearing and balance were getting worse through the medical treatments.  What kind of life was the boy experiencing?  Although he’s a happy little guy and doesn’t know any different his entire life has been masked doctors poking and prodding him, not able to walk and run, not able to hear his mothers voice, his brain not developing properly.  The question begs to be asked, “God, is this really the life you have intended for this little boy?”  The answer is no.  God has bigger plans for all of us.

I see this same story play out every day.  It might not be a child with hearing loss, but it’s the same broken record.  Someone is in pain, is sick, has some chronic disease that is impacting their life.  Your knee pain keeps you from exercising.  Your child’s asthma keeps them from playing soccer.  Your headaches made you cancel your plans with friends for the 10,000^th time.  You can’t go hiking because your heart isn’t strong enough.  You feel alone and hopeless because you have dealt with this for so long.  That is not the life God intends or wants for you!  He wants you to enjoy your life! He longs for you to be healthy and full of energy, to live your life to the fullest, to explore and discover the incredible mysteries of His creation.  He wants you to experience Him.  When you come to know who you are, Whose you are, and how He created you, you can begin to live in alignment with Him and experience the health and abundance He has in store for you!

Just a few adjustments in and, the little boy is now standing firmly on his own.  He was even able to take a few wobbly running steps for the first time.  Now, only God knows what will become of his hearing but for the first time since he was born, his parents experienced something new.  They experienced hope.  Hope for his future.  Hope for the healing miracle that God has placed inside of each of us.  They have a new vision of what their life could be.  They get to experience a life that is so much more full and abundant.  So next time you ask and I reply “I’m doing great”, understand that it is because I get to help people go for a hike.  I get to help kids play soccer.  I get to help people have fun with friends and go to church.  I get to help babies poop.  I get to watch as hope is renewed.  I get to help you experience Him.

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc