Welcome to Health and Wellness for Life and Happy New Year!

This is it. It’s the New Year. We’ve all been here before. Many of us spent the Holidays eating pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down, promising ourselves that we would get on track after the New Year. Now it’s here.

Maybe your goal is to get into shape again, or you want to lose a few pounds. Maybe you’ve been given some bad news from your doctor about your cholesterol or blood sugars. Maybe you’re just tired of feeling lousy all the time.

No matter what our level of health, this is the time of year that people tend to think about their health more than any other time of year. Just watch how the advertising shifts from Christmas gifts to diet products and the latest greatest exercise gadgets. Unfortunately if you’re like most people, the resolve falls out of the resolution by sometime around the first week of February.

Why is that?
Why can’t we stick with it? It’s our own fault. We want everything NOW. It may have taken us years to get this out of shape, but we want a few sessions at the gym to be showing us some big changes. We gain one pound at a time, but we are disgusted when we only lose a pound at a time. We want to lose 10 and one just isn’t good enough. So we get discouraged and quit.

Process or Event?
We have to remember that it was a process that got us here. Whether you find yourself in the best shape of your life right now or seriously needing some work, it was a process that occurred over time that got you to where you are today.

We can’t undo a process with an event. There is no quick fix. It just doesn’t work that way. And the reason we get discouraged is that we are unfair to ourselves to expect changes to happen instantly, instead of a little at a time, day after day. Anything else sets us up for failure.

We have to undo the process with a process. That is what Health and Wellness for Life is all about. It’s not instant-anything. But it is about you and your greatest asset: your health. The only timeline that is set is how many years you want to live and more importantly, how you want to live them.

Please check out our weekly topics. Our weekly messages will give you practical and useful tools with all aspects of your health. We will be adding more information throughout the next several months. We look forward to your comments and suggestions.

“I Don’t Have Time for This.”
I hear it from my patients every day. I even hear it come out of my own mouth way too often…

“I don’t have time for this!” “I don’t have time to exercise, to make healthy meals, to get enough sleep…”

How often do you say or think those words on any given day? Are you thinking them right now as you read this? We have so many demands on our time: housework, yard work, kids, meetings, projects, deadlines…What things do we allow to occupy our time?

When you start to think that your week is too full to set aside time for your health, then your week is either too full, or you are letting the wrong things occupy your time. Either way, the result is disastrous.

Think of your time as a resource. There are only a finite amount of minutes in each day and it is up to us to squander them or utilize them to their fullest potential. We cannot control how many minutes in a day, but we can control how we use them.

What Comes First?
Ask yourself: What are the most important things in your life? What are your priorities? Is it important to have a new car, a big house, social status, health, faith, family, fitness? More often than not, we can tell a lot about our priorities by how we spend our time. When I ask people to list their priorities, no one ever mentions television, internet, or recreational shopping. But how many hours a week do we spend on things like these? Most everyone lists their health as a priority, but how many minutes a week do we dedicate to our health? What could be more important?

Your level health today is a result of the PRIORITY that you have placed on your health up to today. It is directly proportional to the time and energy you have spent on your health up to this moment. For the most part, we get to choose our level of health. How much of your time do you spend accumulating stuff that within five years will either be forgotten in your storage room or in a landfill? And how much of your time do you spend on YOU?

You Cannot Be Too Busy for This!
Your life depends on it. How are you going to spend your time? Think of how many things that you are responsible for in any given day. Of all those things, your greatest responsibility is to yourself. You ARE busy, and so you do not have time to be sick, or get a headache, or ache or be fatigued and run-down. You owe this to yourself and everyone who depends on you.

Let’s face it. You can have everything in the world, but if you’re missing this one ingredient, life falls flat. I’m talking about HEALTH. We all say we want it, but what are we willing to do to get it and keep it. That is what Health and Wellness for Life is all about. Giving you the information and the tools to get what you really want. It’s really not that tough. So, let’s start with the basics.

As Simple as Water
You can’t get more basic than water when it comes to health. It’s the easiest place to start. Water is one of the most essential elements for our body to remain healthy and function properly, yet three out of four people don’t drink nearly enough. The health benefits of hydration are countless, and water is free, yet most people are chronically dehydrated. Want to lose weight? Drinking water is the best place to start.

You’re Not Hungry, You’re Thirsty
In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is mistaken for hunger. Studies have shown that just one glass of water will diminish hunger pangs, if you give it time. The next time you feel hungry, or even fatigued, drink a glass of water and wait 20 minutes. You’ll notice the difference. Even if you don’t feel thirsty, if you know you haven’t had enough water for the day, drink a glass any way.

“I can’t be dehydrated, because I’m not thirsty.”
Don’t confuse thirst with hydration. Your body needs water whether it tells you or not. You can be chronically dehydrated, and feel thirsty, drink one glass of water and not be thirsty any more. But does one glass of water make you hydrated? No! You may not feel the sensation of thirst anymore, but you are not properly hydrated with just one glass of water, but it’s a start.

“How much water do I need?”
Your body needs at least 64 ounce of water per day. That is 2 quarts! Most of us don’t drink any more water than it takes to rinse out our mouths after brushing our teeth in the morning. Remember to drink water slowly through the day. You can’t drink it all at once and expect your body to ration it. If you drink too much at once, typically more than 12-16 ounces, it will just spill over instead of being used by your body to “clean house” and keep your organs and tissues healthy. Try cleaning your house, washing your car, doing your laundry without water. Try bathing without water. We use water to wash the outside of our bodies, right? When you don’t drink enough water, your body can’t clean itself on the inside.

We’ll spend more time on this subject in the upcoming weeks, because the negative effects of dehydration (fatigue, disease, joint pain, memory loss) are so huge, and the positive effects are so numerous. Here are few simple tips to get started:

1. Carry water with you every where you go. Sip it all day long.
2. If you drink coffee or tea, fill your cup with water and drink it before you fill it with coffee.
3. Make it a habit.

It All Adds Up
For some of you, this is a topic that won’t apply. We’re going to talk about the dreaded issue of Weight Management. For you select few that are naturally thin and can eat whatever you want without gaining an ounce, we all hate you. (just kidding)… For the rest of us that are not so fortunate, we know that this is a battle that we wage on a daily basis. (No, we’re not kidding, we really hate you). Weight management is all about the math, which we will discuss in future sessions, but for now, we need to lick our wounds and talk about past failures, so we can leave them behind once and for all.

We Know What Doesn’t Work
Any of us that are all too familiar with trying to lose weight could probably teach a class on what NOT to do. We can list the things that have not worked. Many times, what ever weight we lost, somehow finds us again. And sometimes it comes back with a little extra that we didn’t have in the first place.

If we think about all that has gone wrong in the past, we can narrow it down to one problem: We are not patient people and we want the weight gone, now. It just doesn’t work that way. There are ways to try to cut corners, but we know they don’t work. The promises of fast and easy weight loss don’t work. The gimmicks and fad diets, no matter how much money we spend on them, don’t work.

What Is the Secret?
It’s no secret. It’s just not fun. Nor is it easy. To really take control of your weight, you need to change two things: your mindset and your behavior.

Process vs. Event
This is the shift in mindset. We talked about it on week one. We may think that we gained those extra 10 pounds all at once, but we didn’t. We gained them one pound at a time. A process. So why do we treat weight loss like an event? It took months and years to accumulate the extra weight, why do we keep telling ourselves that we can reverse the process in a matter of days or weeks? We’ve lost our common sense about weight loss, and in doing so, we’ve spent billions of dollars on the latest, greatest diet revolution. And the only thing that’s thinner is our wallets.

There’s nothing confusing about weight gain. We know exactly how it happened. We can make excuses and kid ourselves about our genetics, our stress, our ‘whatevers’. But pretty much the only way to gain weight is to eat more energy than your body needs. The rest is stored for future use. How we gain weight is a simple, predicatable process. So, why do make weight loss so confusing, complex and frustrating? We didn’t buy a kit or a program to make ourselves gain weight, why then do we think we need those things to lose weight? We’ll talk more about this next session, but in the meantime, I want you to take a few minutes and write a list of what behaviors that made you heavier than you’d like to be. Be honest with yourself. Next to each behavior, give yourself a VERB to correct it. A “go do it” statement to yourself to correct it or make better, Here’s an example of how to start a list. Everyone’s list will look a little different:

Behavior	“Go Do It”
I eat fast food every day at lunch	I will pack a nutritious lunch from home
I never drink water	I will sip water throughout the day.

Go ahead, make your own list and get started!

Calories: Your Body’s “Department of Energy”
We’ve all heard of a calorie, and nearly always in association with last week’s dreaded subject of weight management. Calories are not evil, really, they’re not. A calorie is merely unit of energy for our body, just like a gallon of gas is a unit of energy for our car. We all need a certain number of calories each day. Even if we stayed in bed all day, we would still be burning calories to just to stay alive, just not as many as if we were walking around the block or mowing the lawn. We all need a certain number of calories a day just to survive. It’s important that you have an idea of how many calories your body needs per day to maintain your current weight.

Use this link to find out:
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_6_1x_Calorie_Calculator.asp

Food=Fuel
When we consume food, those calories, the units of energy, are available fuel for our bodies. The key is to take in the number of calories we need, but no more than that. When we take in more calories than we need, our body stores those units of energy for future use. They are stored as…you guessed it…FAT. On our tummies and on our tushies, it rides along until we need to use it. If we don’t use it, we just carry it around with us, putting strain on our organs and our joints. We have to remember that we are designed by nature to be hunters and gatherers. We are designed to walk, not drive a car….to pick berries and kill bison, not push a shopping cart through Safeway. Our bodies are designed to spend energy seeking out our food sources. But how many calories does it take to roll down your car window and reach out for the white paper bag at the drive-thru with a burger, fries and a coke? We are designed to store units of energy for the times when there are no berries on the bushes and no bison to be found. So, during times of plenty, our bodies store extra units of energy for times of drought and famine. The only problem is that modern life provides us with a readily available food supply, no matter what time of year. To our bodies, there is no winter, no famine. We are always storing, but never using our stored energy. We just keep on storing. We are still genetically programmed to store units of energy for survival, but the ironic thing is that this mechanism designed for us to survive, is killing us instead. Killing us in the form of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

It’s Simple Math:

Calories IN (what we eat) - Calories OUT (what we burn) = What we KEEP (on our tummies, on our thighs…)

If we take in more than our allotted calories per day, we gain weight. One pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories that we consumed but did not burn. Does it matter if that calorie was a Twinkie or a rutabaga? Nope. A calorie is still a calorie. This is only true from the perspective of ENERGY. Does it matter with NUTRITION? You bet it does. That is why we want our calories to not just FUEL our bodies, we want those calories to NOURISH our bodies as well.

Not all Calories are Created Equal
We use the term “empty calorie” for a unit of energy with no nutritional value. For example, a 20 ounce bottle of soda will supply you with roughly 10 percent of your day’s supply of calories, with no zero nutritional value. No vitamins, no minerals, no fiber. Same with alcoholic beverages and your morning Mocha. Remember, many of our biggest sources of empty calories are not chewed. Drinks typically do not satisfy our hunger, nor do they nourish our bodies. How many of your calories each day are ¬empty? Write down what you ate this week and take stock in what fuels your body each day. Be creative with healthy changes and add them to your "Go Do It" list from last week.