Chiropractic Resolutions: Kickstart Your Health in the New Year

Dr. Brant Hulsebus hosts an episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' focusing on New Year's resolutions for better health. Dr. Hulsebus explains how chiropractic care can enhance overall wellness by managing the nervous system through the spine, discussing the importance of addressing subluxations and the role of chiropractic adjustments. He shares supplement recommendations, emphasizes the significance of daily exercise, and encourages incorporating reading and mental activities into daily routines. Additionally, he highlights his credentials, the benefits of chiropractic consultations, and suggests helpful books for guiding healthy lifestyle changes. #healthy815

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hello. So if you're listening to this when it comes out, we're just about to celebrate New Year's Eve. And every year at New Year's Eve, a lot of us make a resolution that we're going to make ourselves healthier next year. And this is a big thing that chiropractors do. Not make the resolution always, but help people get healthier. See, chiropractors don't necessarily specialize in treating disease and sickness. We specialize in adding more health. There's no such thing as darkness, right? But there is such thing as light. Darkness is merely the absence of light. Sickness is merely the absence of health. So when you have sickness, you're losing health. And as chiropractors, we study the nervous system through the spine. How to access your nervous system, make your nervous system behave better, function better, and perform better. Therefore, you can get better. If there's a thing that we call subluxation, when one or two bones are misaligned in the spine, creating stress on the joint itself, that would create a stress response down that nerve, which we've been able to prove with all kinds of science through the years. And that nerve, wherever it goes, will tell the body that we're in a state of stress. And the organs, the tissues, the muscles, the blood vessels, and everything that nerve touches, will go into stress mode. Chiropractic adjustments to this, OGUYA studies, O G U R A, OGUYA studies, have been able to prove that there is a change in your tone when you get a chiropractic adjustment. This is stuff that Dr. Palmer talked about back in 1895. Can you believe that? That's how long we've been around. If you want to make New Year's resolutions, a great place to start is your chiropractor. Not only will a chiropractor look and examine your spine, but a chiropractor can also help you with other lifestyle choices and health tips. Now here in Illinois, as a chiropractor, I'm a licensed primary health care provider. What does that mean? That means I can actually order blood work for you. I can order blood tests if I want to have them done. Doesn't mean your insurance will pay for them, but I can definitely order them. So if you want to see what your baseline is before the beginning of the year, compared to how you can improve yourself, a chiropractor can help facilitate that. Now, your primary doctor can too, and your insurance will probably cover that. But here in Illinois, where I live, it might be three to four months before you can get in and see one. Your chiropractor probably has appointments the next day or that day. So your chiropractor can help you with ordering different tests and different labs and things like that. Your chiropractor can also help obtain your records from other health care clinics. If you got some blood work somewhere else or some medication somewhere else and you want to round it all up, your chiropractor can help facilitate that. Now today with these e charts and stuff like that or my charts, it's not so hard to get that information like it used to be, but your chiropractor can definitely help you round that stuff up. Not only that, but your chiropractor can make a good translator. You might see a lot of this stuff, a lot of these reports, MRI scans and things like that, and you don't really know what it's saying. As chiropractors, we learn all those big words too, so we'd be more than happy to translate for you. Now, in my practice, I also have my wellness degree. When I have my wellness degree, we studied what healthy people do and healthy people should have, not how to treat sickness again. So today's world, our food has been tainted. That's what make America healthy again is all about. Wants to go in and change the preservatives and the garbage in our food and make it more real food. So knowing that we've come up together with a couple of supplements that we think everyone should have. One of them, primarily, if you're only going to do one, I tell everyone to make sure you're doing fish oil. We used to get Omega 3s from eating things that ate grass and algae. But today, everything is farm produced, where it eats corn, including your fish. When you eat corn, the animals you eat are deficient of Omega 3s. You eat them, you're going to be deficient also. I'm a huge fan of taking Omega 3s. Now, do I take Omega 3s to lower my cholesterol, to improve my heart strength? No. I take Omega 3s to lower my neurological inflammation systemically throughout my entire body. Now a side effect of that might be my cholesterol might go down. A side effect of that might be my heart's a little healthier. So a lot of people get stuck in the allopathic thinking that I take fish oil to treat this or to treat that. I take fish oil because our diet lacks that and I think that we need to put that into our food because it's no longer available to us and we can't synthesize it ourselves. Another one I like to do in Northern Illinois at this time of year is vitamin D3. I always say not R2D2, but D3. Vitamin D3 is a sunshine vitamin. If you're not spending at least a half an hour a day outside in the equivalent of your swimsuit, you are vitamin D3 deficient. Vitamin D3 should come in an oil based form, because you need a healthy fat to absorb it. We're not meant to eat it, we're meant to be outside. Don't ask me what food has it in it, because very little food does, because you're meant to get it from the sunshine. The darker your complexion, the more serious this is, the more you need the supplements. very much. The other one is a good daily vitamin. Now, my good daily vitamin, I like to think is my big salad I have every day for lunch that covers everything. But I will occasionally take an extra vitamin along with it from whole food sources. And I try not to have any copper in my vitamin. So those are my supplements that I do. Just those three things. Sometimes I'll take some probiotics, depends how bad I've been eating. We're coming off the Christmas holiday here, so I've been eating not so good. I'll probably take some extra probiotics to make up the difference. But if I'm eating good canned stuff from my garden, if I'm eating real food from real kitchens, then I probably don't really need to take a lot of probiotics, because I'm not lacking a lot of the normal gut bacteria. But again, these are all tips that most chiropractors know. I have what they call a CCWP, Certified Chiropractic Wellness Practitioner, where I've done some advanced studies and certification in this topic. So I maybe know a little bit more than the average chiropractor because I just took this course. If you go to chiropractic. org, you can find a wellness certificate program and you can find chiropractors near you that also might have this certificate. Or you can always leave me a question below and I'll be happy to answer it. As we start the new year, new resolutions too. I recommend working out. I recommend getting a sweat every day. Try your hardest. Try to figure out a time to get a good workout in. Best way to do it, question is asked is with somebody who knows what they're doing because if you exercise done right, it's amazing. Exercise done wrong is going to have you come and see me more. Myself, I go to movement fitness and work out with the trainers there. Even Michael Jordan had a coach, right? So they're my coaches there. They help me exercise. They watch my posture for me and make sure I'm using correct form and technique. And it's just nice to have other people to work out with too, right? Like I feel if I don't go, I'm going to miss some of the gym gossip, right? I always make sure I go and participate. So you're gonna, we're gonna try to eat better with our diet and our supplements. We're gonna try to exercise a little bit every day. Now the bare minimum exercise you should do every day would be a 30 minute walk. And I don't mean being on your feet for 30 minutes. I don't mean like me. I'm a chiropractor. I'm going room to room seeing patients, but that's not going for a walk because I'm stopping in those times. Start, leave your house, walk 15 minutes in one direction. After 15 minutes, turn around and walk back. 30 minute walk, bare minimum you should do every day. Love to see you do more. Love to see you do some stretches every morning. That's another good thing your chiropractor can give you because your chiropractor will have a copy of your x rays. Your chiropractor should x ray you. You should have a copy of your x rays and know what's going on with your spine and your posture and your core. And your chiropractor should be able to design certain exercises and stretches for you to do beginning of each day, the end of each day and before and after that exercise. And lastly, we want to talk about our mind. We want to find a little bit of time every day to find a new book, a little less screen time, a little more book time, and I'm going to recommend a couple books here for you. The first book I'm going to recommend comes from my good friend, My coach, Justin Kegley, Be Great Today. It's a great book if you want to learn some new healthy exercise and habits. It's a 28 day plan to change your life as far as your habits. If you feel like you're in a funk and you want to get out of it and start making these New Year's resolutions. Easy book to read, and what I like about it is that it actually has things that you fill out inside the book along the way. So you see this book and it looks like, that's like a big book. It's really not a big book because it has all these little tips in there, suggestions for you, and it has ideas for you, ways to get things done. And it just keeps you on point, is what it does. So you can get this on Amazon. If you go to my website, there's a link direct to this book on the very bottom of my website. If you're watching this or listening to this, you can obviously find my website. So go to my website rockforddc. com and you'll see it right there. Another good book I like is this one right here. It's Bodied by a Guy by Dr. Ben Lerner. I've met Dr. Lerner several times. He's a chiropractor like myself. And it's an interesting read. It's how do I say it? He learned that Man's made in God's image. And so he said I'm only going to eat food made by God. And he talks about his prayer he does every day to keep his mind straight and clear. And he talks about his everyday exercise and activities that he does to keep his body healthy and strong. Great book. I wish he would've mentioned he was a chiropractor in the book. He didn't do that. But he is a chiropractor. He does speak to chiropractic conferences all the time. And I told him that personally one time, I said, I wish you would have called yourself a chiropractor in your book. But I don't know, maybe his editors didn't want him to do that for some reason, who knows. Great book, it was, like I said, it was a New York Times bestseller, you can see right across top here, you can find this anywhere, Amazon, this and that. It's it's gotta be about 20 years old now, but, the things in here, they hold up. They hold up all the time I highly recommend this book. So there's are two easy books to read. Little less iPad, little less, things like that. I know I make it a habit, try to exercise three days a week. And I also make it a project to do something around my house every day, every week with the family, whether it's fix this, fix that, repair this, dig this out, clean the gutters, whatever it is. I try to make myself do one project around the house to make myself consciously be home with everybody at the same time. So there you have it, New Year's resolutions from your chiropractor. If you're not going to a chiropractor already, I recommend that you go in and get screened, get checked get some images of your back, see what the chiropractor can and can't do to help your health. But, you shouldn't ask your doctor first, because your doctor doesn't know what chiropractors do. You should only ask the chiropractor. That's the name of this podcast. Ask the chiropractor. Only chiropractors are educated in chiropractic education. Medical doctors don't study it. No more than I study dentistry. I'd be a horrible person to ask about what kind of filling you should do based on this kind of cavity. I have no idea. I'd tell you to ask your dentist. I want to just make up an answer and tell you, I don't really know what dentists do, so you probably better not go. I would just tell you to ask a dentist. Okay? So if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, make sure you leave a comment or a post below. Wherever you're watching this, listening to this, and maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Hey, Happy New Year's everybody. Talk to you real soon. Bye bye.