The Spine & Wellness Centre Maintain Healthy Spines and Nerve Systems which are Essential Components of Wellness
Regular spine & wellness care, eating a healthy diet, keeping your weight under control and stress management are all part of maintaining a overall wellness lifestyle. By following these practices, you can attain a healthier, happier and pain-free life. To help you achieve these goals, this section offers some helpful tips on how you can maintain a healthier body and mind.
At Nova Spine & Wellness, we offer a unique approach to healing and wellness. By practicing advanced spine & wellness techniques combined with sports massage and using sophisticated modern healthcare equipment, we can treat a myriad of injures and prevent the risk of recurring symptoms in the future. Some of the various injuries we treat include:
- back pain,
- neck pain,
- headaches,
- whiplash,
- sports injuries,
- musculoskeletal problems,
- reducing high blood pressure,
- decreasing the frequency of childhood ear infections (otitis media),
- improving the symptoms of asthma,
- alleviating the mental and physiological symptoms caused by chronic stress.
Our team are wholly committed to restoring our clients to their natural state of optimal body health. To achieve this aim, our expert chiropractors and certified massuers – utilise state of the art equipment, manual adjustments, massage, trigger point therapy, as well as offering nutritional and exercise rehabilitation advice, in order to precisely diagnose the cause of your injuries and subsequently administer appropriate treatment.
We endeavour to remove the pressures, tensions and contractions which interfere with your body’s healing ability, thereby facilitating your body to heal naturally and maintain its own health. As such, our clients can benefit from natural procedures which will alleviate their chronic pains without having to resort to expensive surgical procedures or unnatural prescribed painkillers.
As part of our goal to facilitate your body’s natural healing process, we recommend a series of lifestyle changes which can exponentially benefit your overall health and mental wellbeing. We recommend that you implement the following lifestyle changes into your everyday routine in order to optimize your body’s health, movement and nerve function:
- Sports massage therapies- as well as being beneficial for the recovery of sports-related injuries, massage therapy treatments are also serve as extremely successful supportive measures which bolster your body’s natural healing process,
- Following a regular exercise program,
- Eating a balanced and nutritious diet- eat more fruit and vegetables and avoid sugary, processed foods,
- Maintain good posture,
- Get enough sleep- at least 8 hours a day,
- Aim to reduce your stress (For more advice, see our health condition section on Stress),
- Maintain a healthy body weight,
- Sleep upon a supportive mattress,
- Drink more water- approximately 2 litres per day,
- Take nutritional supplements,
- Stop smoking,
- Avoid consuming excessive amounts of alcohol and caffeine,
- Wear orthotics (if needed)- these are custom fitted inserts which you place into your shoes to keep your feet functioning correctly and maintain overall body balance, good posture and stability.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DIETARY WELLNESS
DRINK MORE WATER
By drinking enough water, you will be helping your body to remain healthy. Ideally, the average person should consume around ten cups of water per day, or just over a half gallon.
Water is the single-most abundant nutrient in the body, accounting for around 60% – 65% of your total weight. It is also the least forgiving of all the nutrients you consume. You can survive for weeks without food, but for only a couple of days without water. Water is responsible for the transport of nutrients, oxygen and waste products, as well as for regulating your body temperature and serving as the medium in which all of your body’s chemical reactions take place. Most people do not drink enough pure clean water.
Drinking an adequate amount of clean water every day is one of the most overlooked, but simplest ways of keeping your body healthy. Water is used to help the body cleanse itself of toxins and metabolic waste. Although drinking water has become more popular over the past several years, many people still do not consume enough water. Instead, they drink coffee, tea, juices and soft drinks and believe that they get enough fluids. It is true that when you drink these things you are consuming water. However, along with the water, you are also consuming a lot of other stuff that the body will need to ultimately eliminate, so the potential beneficial effect of the water is somewhat or totally negated. To make matters worse, drinks that contain caffeine, such as coffee, tea and soft drinks, actually cause more water loss than the amount of water they contain, resulting in a net loss of water.
Ideally, the average person should consume around ten cups of water per day, or around 3 litres. Some of this water is found in the food and beverages you consume, so you don’t have to drink an entire 3 litres of water every day. An easy way to accomplish this is to buy a 2 litre bottle of water from the local supermarket and to drink that amount of water every day. If you exercise heavily, you may have to drink more of water each day. By drinking enough water, you will be helping your body to remain healthy. It is by far the cheapest health insurance you can buy.
EAT MORE RAW FRUITS AND VEGETABLES
People know that they should eat more fruit and vegetables in their diet, but most people don’t do it. It seems lately that the major foods consumed in the British diet have gone from unprocessed fruits, vegetables, and meat to highly processed foods containing sugar, fat, grains, dairy, salt and caffeine. Because of the easy availability of fast foods and snack foods, we have lost our taste for fruits and vegetables; especially vegetables. It is not uncommon for many people to go for weeks without consuming a single serving of fresh raw vegetables. This is not good.
The human body evolved with a diet high in raw fruits and vegetables, and is dependent on many of the compounds unique to plant foods in order to operate correctly. If you don’t consume enough of these plant compounds, your energy level will suffer along with your overall health. Most people are shocked at how much better they feel when they cut down on the fast foods and snack foods and increase their raw fruit and vegetable intake.
If you find it difficult to work in several servings of fruits and vegetables into your routine every day, you may find it helpful to supplement your diet with what is called a “greens” supplement, which is a highly concentrated powder of fruits, vegetables and antioxidants.
Increasing your consumption of fruits and vegetables is an important way to improve your overall health. The key is to make it part of your lifestyle – to make it a new habit.
CUT DOWN ON SUGAR
In a recent study done by the USDA, it was reported that the average American consumes 134 pounds of refined sugar every year, or approximately 20 teaspoons of sugar per day. We probably consume less in the UK, but at the same time we are probably not that far off and getting closer. As hard as this may be to believe, consider the following facts:
• A 12 oz. can of Pepsi™ contains 10 teaspoons of sugar
• A 2 oz. package of sweets contains 11 teaspoons of sugar
• A 16 oz. cup of lemonade contains 13 teaspoons of sugar
• A cup of Frosted Flakes™ contains 4 teaspoons of sugar
This high level of sugar intake is very unhealthy and contributes to obesity, Type II diabetes, heart disease due to elevated triglycerides, kidney stones, dental caries, chronic tiredness and reactive hypoglycemia. Decreasing your sugar intake is as simple as avoiding foods which are high in refined sugars, such as soft drinks, sweets, cake and donuts, as well as most condiments. When you purchase sweetened food, look for products that are sweetened with apple juice or stevia, rather than sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.
ADD LIVE FOOD SUPPLEMENTS TO YOUR DIET
Many people don’t think that they need to take any nutritional supplements because, after all, the human body did not evolve to need supplements – as long as you eat a balanced diet, you can get everything that your body needs, right? While it is certainly true that people living a ten thousand years ago did not have multivitamins, they also did not have thousands of tons of toxic chemicals being pumped into their environment every year; they were not exposed to a constant man-made electromagnetic field from power lines and cell phones; they did not eat highly processed foods that contained artificial colors, flavors and preservatives; they were not sedentary; and they were not under constant stress at work and at home and they ate almost exclusively raw live foods straight from non farmed land. Our bodies were simply not designed for a fast-paced, high-stress, highly processed lifestyle.
The reality is that we need to give our body some help in order to stay healthy in the world today. That’s where supplemental whole foods come in. Supplemental whole foods (not traditional low grade vitamins and mineral supplements) help to ensure that your body gets all of the extra vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and probiotics necessary to function the way it should. You can find more information about the importance of whole food live nutrients on this site.
GET INTO THE LIGHT
One of the most important nutrients for your mind and body speeds toward you at 186,000 miles per second from more than 93 million miles away. This nutrient is called sunlight. Most people don’t think of sunlight as a nutrient, but it is. Sunlight is necessary for regulating proper hormone function, calcium absorption, bone health as well as a normal daily sleep-wake cycle (circadian rhythm). In fact, if you don’t get enough sunlight in your daily ‘light diet,’ you can suffer deficiency symptoms, such as:
• seasonal depression (also known as Seasonal Affective Disorder)
• poor quality of sleep
• a loss in work performance (especially in night-shift workers)
• disrupted melatonin regulation
• depressed cortical brain activity
• depressed immune function
Unfortunately, the light to which most of us are exposed each day comes from manmade sources, such as fluorescent, sodium and incandescent lights that do not produce full-spectrum sunlight. Numerous studies have shown that these limited-spectrum artificial light sources can make students irritable in school, reduce production among factory workers and make office workers sluggish. In one study, researchers even found that calcium absorption dropped off in the elderly who spent their days indoors during the winter, while those who spent time under full-spectrum lighting had an increase in calcium absorption.
Getting enough full-spectrum light can give your mood a tremendous boost. Light can help reduce stress, help you feel happier and improve your ability to concentrate. To make sure that you are getting enough light in your diet, doctors recommend the following tips:
•Try to spend at least 15 minutes outside every day; even when it’s very cloudy. The full-spectrum daylight is still beneficial to your health.
•Begin using a light box during autumn and winter seasons, especially if you tend to get the winter blues.
• Stop wearing sunglasses as they create very unnatural light for your eyes. Sunglasses should only be worn when you need to protect your eyes from physical harm or very bright light.
KEEP YOUR HEART HEALTHY
Heart disease is a massive killer of adults in westernised society worldwide. This is unfortunate because most heart disease is caused by poor lifestyle choices. The four big lifestyle changes you can make to ensure to maximise the health of your heart are eating live raw vegetables and fruits, exercise, taking a high quality live whole food supplement and stopping smoking.
Just as exercise is important to the health of your neuromusculoskeletal system, it is also critical to the health of your heart. When you regularly exercise, your body becomes much more efficient at using oxygen and burning calories and your blood pressure is normalised. This decreases the stress on your heart.
Vitamins E and C and folic acid are the three important nutritional components found in live raw food supplements to take for your heart. Vitamin E is a powerful fat-soluble antioxidant which helps to prevent the cholesterol in your blood from becoming oxidised. High cholesterol levels in the blood, per se, are not that big of a deal. Cholesterol only becomes dangerous when it interacts with an oxidizing radical. Vitamin E helps to prevent this.
Vitamin C is important to help strengthen the walls of the arteries and prevent the development of cholesterol plaques inside the coronary arteries. Did you know that the arteries that are the most likely to develop cholesterol deposits are the ones that are close to the heart? The reason is that when the heart contracts, it pushes blood out with a great degree of force. If the walls of the arteries which are closest to the heart are not as strong as they should be, they will tend to momentarily stretch out like a balloon and cause small tears to the inside arterial wall as the rush of blood from the heart passes by. These small tears serve as a place where platelets and cholesterol form deposits. High levels of vitamin C reduce the number of tears in the arteries by strengthening the collagen tissues around the arteries, keeping them from expanding too much as blood pulses through.
The third vitamin which is important is one of the B-vitamins called folic acid. Folic acid, also called folacin, is important for reducing the level of homocysteine in the blood. Homocysteine is a metabolic by-product which can contribute significantly to the development of heart disease. Raw foods rich in folic acid include broccoli, cabbage, beetroot, bananas, oranges and spinach. Look for these on your raw, live, whole food supplements.
To book an appointment please call 01438 532 075 or view availability and book on-line here.