Ask the Chiropractor- what are the first steps to better health? Here are the first 5 ways to improve your health. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor- what are the first steps to better health? Here are the first 5 ways to improve your health. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hi, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor" is a little podcast that I do here where people have a question about chiropractic, I always recommend they ask a chiropractor'cause nobody knows chiropractic better than a chiropractor. A lot of people might check with your family physician or healthcare provider first. Unless your primary healthcare provider's a chiropractor, they probably don't know the answer. Just like when I have a question about dentistry, I don't ask my family doctor, I asked my dentist. So if you have a question about chiropractic that you'd like to have me answer, go ahead and submit us a message below. Do a direct message to us and I'll tell you more at the end. But let's dive into this week's question. Well, it's January where we are currently recording this and during January, a lot of people want to start a new healthcare. They want to make resolutions or start a new leaf. And so with that being said, I get asked a lot of questions,"Hey, Dr. Hulsebus, what are five things that I can do to make myself healthier and better? Just gimme five things and let me know those five things I can do to make myself better and healthier." I know hundreds and thousands of things, right, but let's just go with the five easy, quick ways to get started. So let's talk about five ways that we can make ourselves healthier and better. The first one I'm gonna talk about, which is one that we know we know, but we don't ever do it. And that's sleep. We gotta get our sleep and we gotta get seven and a half hours, eight and a half hours of sleep as an adult every day. When you're sleeping, your body's healing. It's repairing itself. It's getting you ready for the next day. No matter how well you do everything else right, if you're not getting your sleep, your body's just not functioning. And when you sleep, you wanna sleep in a 100% complete pitch black. The darker the room is, the more melatonin you make and the more melatonin you make, the more serotonin you make and the overall healthy you get. And just your body works functions better, your attitude's better, everything's better. So if you wanna do one thing to make yourself better, the first step is get better sleep. Sleep in a dark room. Get some those blackout curtains. Make sure the room's just a hundred percent black, dark, and go to sleep. I even take a little tape and cover up all the little lights like on the TVs and stuff in the bedroom, cover all those up. Another good tip about the sleep is try to eliminate screens, TVs, phones, iPads, all that stuff an hour before you sleep. It just helps you fall asleep and get better quality of sleep. And if you're not sure about your quality of sleep, today, the phones have so many cool apps that watch you and monitor you. Take a look at some of those. I don't really have a favorite one. I've been kind of playing with them this week trying to find a good one, but go ahead and play with those different apps and watch your quality of sleep. Number two, we're gonna talk about your diet. Diet's very important. And the way I do the diet is I do the 12 to 14 hour fast every day. So I have lunch, then I have dinner, then I stop everything around eight o'clock. Don't touch nothing until lunch the next day. If you wanna start losing some weight and being better, what you wanna do is you wanna start that intermediate fasting. And what happens is after about 12 hours, your body goes into fat burning reserve mode. So I started this list recently, so I'm gonna see how it does for me. So far, it's not a big deal. Between that time you stop eating and the time you start eating, you can still have zero calorie stuff. You can drink your good quality teas. You can drink your black coffee and you can drink your water all you want. And that will definitely, definitely help. So now, as far as your diet's concerned, every meal you should have raw produce. At every meal you should have raw produce. So here in the clinic, I keep a bunch of celery sticks and carrots. So get my raw vegetables that way, so if I have to grab a quick bite to eat and maybe it's not the best, at least I can still have my celery and carrots, get some raw produce at every meal. I prefer a big salad at lunch, especially when I'm breaking that fast. Salads and fats, I like having good high-quality fats, avocados and stuff like that. And dinner, I try to do a lot of protein'cause at night, your body heals and repairs itself so the protein's very important. But you can't just make it just protein, you gotta have some produce in there too. See, the produce gets converted to vitamin C. We're very, very good at making vitamin C. We're not very good at storing vitamin C. So for those of you that get up at that big vitamin C capsule, you're only good for a couple of hours and after that you need to resupply your vitamin C. So some vitamins we store, some we don't. We do not store vitamin C. We all know how important vitamin C is for staying healthy so you wanna make sure you're eating raw produce. You do not wanna drink your vitamin C. Juice has got way too much sugar in it. Your body will always choose to deal with the sugar and ignore the vitamin C 'cause the sugar takes priority. So do not try to drink juice so you get a lot of vitamin C from that. You are not. You're just gonna get massive sugar rush. There's actually some studies out there that show eating a candy bar's better than drinking a glass of orange juice. So eat your produce. All right, number three. Number one, sleep. Number two, diet. Number three, of course, I go to my chiropractor. I get adjusted regularly. We all know that physical stress can wear us down because tire stomach gets frustrating. You've seen somebody who's dealing with chronic lower back issues and you know they're never a happy person. They're always tired and foul mood. They have everything else that goes wrong with them. So I get my spine checked regularly in order to stay healthy and stay strong and keep everything working the way it's supposed to. Try not to get the headaches by getting my neck adjusted ahead of time then I don't get headaches. So staying ahead of the game is key, not trying to catch up. So I'm a huge fan of going to the chiropractor obviously. Talk to your chiropractor about a good healthy maintenance plan for yourself in order to avoid getting sick and getting run down and how to be healthier. So speaking of exercise, speaking of the chiropractic, the reason I do is for exercise. I exercise quite a bit. I try to get up and do weights, heavy weightbearing exercises. I go to the gym about three times a week. Personally, I go to the gym twice a week and then over the weekend, I find some kind of physical project around the house that I'm gonna tackle in order to continue to work at my home too. So I will go to the gym maybe on Tuesday and Friday and then maybe on Sunday I'm gonna go outside and split some firewood or maybe I'm going to empty out the garage. I'm gonna get a sweat. I'm gonna do a lot of stuff around the house to get a sweat. So I do that at least three days a week. I also go for a long walks every day. You wanna walk a minimum of 30 minutes a day. If you go to my website, rockforddc.com, click on the wellness and the wellness notes, you'll see the benefits of walking. It's amazing what happens if you go for a walk 30 minutes a day. Amazing. Matter of fact, if you don't get anything else from this video, you wanna do one thing to improve your health: go for a 30 minute walk a day. It's crazy, some of the stats, like your cancers. Cancer going down by over 70%, even skin cancer. So going for a walk outside decreases your chance of cancer by 70%. And we gotta keep in mind that your spine itself, and the disc in your spine, there's no direct blood supply going to them. Very, very known blood supply at all. So when you walk and you move, the muscles contract and they push the nutrients in and pull the toxins out. And this is one of the things that we find that maybe a major contributor to avoiding arthritis in the spine with a lot of people, to give it the scary name. The scary name would be degenerative disc disease. All that means is you have a dehydrated disc. So by going for a walk, you can avoid degenerative disc disease. All right, so patients come all the time,"Dr. Hulsebus, I went to my doctor. I've got a disease in my spines. It's degenerative disc disease." That's just dehydration. Go for more walks. And then speaking of dehydration, make sure you're drinking plenty of water a day. This is my water bin. I drink this at least the one whole thing a day. If not, fill it back up. So I'm actually on my second one today already'cause today, the recording is the day I went to the gym. So I drank quite a bit of this when I was at the gym. Now I'm refilling it again. So lots and lots of water. Alright, so we talked about diet. We talked about your sleep. We talked about chiropractic. We talked about exercise. By the way, include the water in the diet part please. And then last but not least, vitamins and supplements. I am a big fan of vitamins and supplements, especially because it's January. So vitamin D3 is a sunshine vitamin. The rule of vitamin D3, I always say that R2D2, but D3, that's the sunshine vitamin. The rule is you need to supplement it 2 to 3,000 units a day every day that you do not get to spend the equivalence of a half an hour outside in your swimsuit. So this time of year it gets cold and nasty here so we don't go outside very much. We don't get a lot of sunshine. So you gotta make sure that you take a supplement of vitamin D3. Now vitamin D3 must be with a healthy fat. So some people get this prescription of vitamin D3 and do not understand this. Somebody can explain it to me. I don't get it. You have to be with a healthy fat and they come with a white pill. You see, in order to get vitamin D3, it has to be with a healthy fat. So the ones I take are gel caps with a healthy oil in there and I eat the gel cap and then I get the oil, the healthy fat, and then I get to absorb the vitamin D3 better. Now why do I keep saying D3? Well, D1 and D2 are the easy vitamins. These are the ones that are found in your dairy products. You might get some milk with vitamin D in it. Vitamin D1 and D2 are not the same thing as D3. Do not kid yourself. If you're eating a lot of dairy products, four to five with vitamin D, you are not getting the sunshine of vitamin. You're getting a different form of vitamin D, not the same thing. And vitamin D3 has been found to be hugely successful on preventing the flu. So if you're nervous about the flu, I would do my vitamin D3 faithfully and you did 2 to 3,000 units a day, but check with your chiropractor to make sure this is right. But most patients, I tell them,"If you're not feeling good, you double it. You take double that dose, about 5,000 units a day." Next what I do is a good whole vitamin, a good natural vitamin. And you know what? Vitamins and supplements, you get what you pay for. You really, really do. I know there's cheap ones out there you can get really cheap. I don't know how much of that you actually absorb. All they have to legally do is say this is in the vitamin. You take the vitamin under the assumption that'cause I take the vitamins in there, I'm gonna absorb it. But again, like I talked about the vitamin D3, the absorption is a whole kind of factor. So if you're taking a good daily vitamin, the reason why it's so good is because you can absorb it. So really, really watch your vitamins that you take is a good daily vitamin. If you came in here and asked me where to find some, I would tell you the stores are my area that I recommend to get a good quality vitamin. And then of course, you know we have some here because people just want to take what I take so I offer it. We do not ship. So if you're watching this somewhere else and you go online and buy it, I'm gonna leave it here till you come pick it up. So I know, for some reason, a lot of people in Germany watch me. So if you're watching me in Germany, you buy my supplements, as soon as you come to America, come to Rockford, Illinois. They'll be here waiting for you. I do not ship, all right? Another one, the last one I think is very, very important is fish oil. Fish oil is huge. Fish oil helps internal inflammation. So when your body's all inflamed, you go into a state of stress. You're in fight and flight. In fight and flight, you can't heal. You cannot be in a state of stress and healing at the same time. You cannot be in fight and flight and repair at the same time. If you're deficient on your omega-3s because of the world we live in and the quality of food that we're offered today, then you're high in your omega-6s. You get those from the grains and the corns and stuff like that and the animals that eat those things. So if you're really high in omega-6s and really low on omega-3s, you're hyper-inflammatory. Little things become big things and then your body gets all flamed and swollen. You have all kinds of health problems. So I'm a huge fan of fish oil. Now, the fish oil I take is a three-for-one. It's got vitamin A in it. It's got vitamin D3, right, the healthy fat. The fish oil. You can't find a healthier fat than fish oil. So it's fish oil, vitamin D3, and vitamin A. I love my fish oil. It's one of the best ones. It's got everything in it. I have my liquid, actually. I don't even swallow capsules. I just take a tablespoon of it and down it goes. You know, a lot of you might like, "Ooh, that's gross!" If that's gross that means you're buying gross fish oil. I had a student intern, Dr. Stephanie. She told me one time, if you cut the fish oil open, you smell it, it smells rancid, it is rancid, don't eat it. Other thing to do is is to cut it open, dump it on styrofoam, if the styrofoam dissolves, it's not pure. So really look at it again. You can buy a big tub of fish oils some places that's really dirt cheap, and that's probably some pretty nasty stuff. So really look at your quality of what you're buying. Make sure you're getting the right stuff, okay? So there you have it. My five things. Go to bed at night, get some sleep, turn the TV off a little early, make that bedroom as dark as you can. Number two, we talked about after sleep. I forget the order now. We talked about sleep, we talked about your diet. Make sure you're eating good. We talked about going to chiropractor. We talked about exercise, at least 30 minute walk a day. And the last, but not least, we talked about good supplements and vitamins. The bare minimum. Now there's a lot more vitamins and supplements I recommend for a lot of different people, but you need to come talk to your chiropractor to find that out, to figure out which ones you should and shouldn't take. If you talk to a different healthcare provider and you ask about fish oil, and they say, "Don't do it, this and that." Ask them and then say,"Don't do it because I shouldn't do it, or don't do it because maybe you don't understand the benefits of it?" When it comes to fish oil, I don't take it to lower my cholesterol. I take it to balance my omega-3-omega-6 ratio. So if a doctor told me not to take fish oil, I would ask to do a test to test my omega-3 versus omega-6 levels to make sure I'm sufficient. If you are sufficient, then don't take it. If a doctor told me not to take vitamin D3, I don't need to take vitamin D three. I would ask for a blood test to verify my D3 levels are were there supposed to be. I mean, this is all easy stuff and it's hard to argue science, right? I know today's world science after COVID and everything that word's kind of thrown around a little too much. But you can go with blood test for all this stuff to see where you are. So if you have a doctor tells you not to do these things, ask for the blood work to verify that they're right. You don't want to make these mistakes. You can't take it back. All right, there you have it. My five tips how to stay healthy and strong and with the five things I do to make yourself healthier and better for next year. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, or maybe you wanna learn, you know, I talked about five things really quick. Previous episodes, I've dove into each one of those much more deep. So you can go back and search the previous episodes, find more. But if you have a question or you wanna learn more, rockforddc.com. R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. That's my website. You can find everything there. All the every video, blog, podcast, whatever. It's all on my website, but it's also a button that says, contact us. If you had a question, contact us. Let me know, I'll be happy to get back to you. And if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic health or what chiropractors do, go ahead and leave a message there and maybe next time you're watching this video or listen to this podcast, you'll be the question of the week. All right. Stay healthy, stay strong. As Dr. Palmer always said, keep smiling. Thank you.