SOUTHRIDGE CHIROPRACTIC                     CENTER
909-428-0700
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Your First Visit
  • The Office
  • My Articles
  • Contact Us
  • COVID19

#85 Practical Weight Loss

4/14/2014

0 Comments

 
            Before I offer my opinions on the subject of weight loss, for those of you who don’t know, the ideas in this article are based upon my own experiences having lost a total of over 80# in my life, combined with the experiences of my wife who lost 50#, as well as speaking to hundreds of patients over the course of 25 years, finally combined with my training and general clinical experience.  This is obviously not an exhaustive guide to weight loss nor is it meant to be.  Its purpose is to help you, if you are in need, to know how to start and steer the life-style change that is needed to lose weight and keep it off. 

As with all changes it starts with motivation and support.  And although I will spend very little time talking about motivation and support, if you don’t have these two components, you will likely fail.  So do not set yourself up to fail.  Learned failure is all too common.  If you have the motivation to lose weight then set yourself up to succeed.  To succeed you must take on only what you can handle and you must have the support structure to turn to when you are weak.  Assume that you will have weak times.     

            Some will argue that weight loss is about increasing caloric output and decreasing caloric input.  While that may be essentially true, however if you do not already exercise I encourage you to first focus only on the input side.  You can add the exercise in later after you are successful on the food side.  There are a few reasons for this approach including the truth that exercise increases body mass as you convert fat to muscle.  But the biggest reason is the prospect of success.  Taking on one life-style change is hard enough, at least it was for me.  Taking on two at one time is a recipe for failure.  As I said set yourself up for success.  This gets to my core philosophy I call “Just One More Thing” in which we take on just one change until it is part of our daily life and then add just one more thing, and so on until we have stacked good habit on top of good habit.  This is the method I used to learn to drink water, to lose weight, to take supplements, to exercise, to get rid of my disabling pain, in short to go from the emergency room visit in 2000 that changed the direction of my life to climbing several of the highest peaks in California by 2006.  Just One More Thing.

            This is a powerful tool that if used and applied properly and diligently will slowly steer the user’s life and life-style in a different direction so that at the end of 1 or 5 or 10 years it will result in a very different health profile, a longer and better quality of life.  But back to practical weight loss.  There are a myriad of different approaches out there to losing weight and most of them work as advertised.  What I encourage you to do is to learn to choose food properly, to be able to analyze food for its content and to know what you are really putting in your mouth.  The most practical thing here is not to lose weight, but to change the way you eat.  This requires education, not a diet.  This requires time on your part to invest in learning the value of each bit of food you consume.  It is only through the process of motivation, support, education, and application will you succeed in the long term. 

            So although there are many such programs out there, Weight Watchers is a great program that supplies the support and education side while you bring the motivation and application to the table.  It works as long as you heed this last bit of advice.  Buy into whatever you do.  Whatever program you chose, give yourself over to it completely and do everything they say.  Don’t pick and choose what you like, unless you like to fail.  Accept it and do it and don’t look back.  

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Dr. Rick

    After writing an article per week for a year, I just kept going.  These are most of my collection.  They are written with my existing patients in mind, so some stuff may seem odd or unusual, but would make perfect sense to those who know chiropractic and who know me.  Enjoy and share!  For my personal blog visit: 

    Personal Blog

    Archives

    March 2020
    November 2018
    May 2018
    February 2018
    June 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    May 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    July 2015
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014

    Categories

    All

Company

Home
About Us
Your First Visit
The Office
Blog
Contact Us
COVID19
909-428-0700

What Our Patients Have To Say

Yolanda wrote:
     
     I used to suffer severe headaches and migraines on a daily basis, usually all day.  I managed to work in an office because I had to.  When I went home at the end of the day I would often close the shades and go to bed.  I could not plan weekend events because I simply never knew how I was going to feel tomorrow.  If there were a special event such as a birthday or wedding, I would begin to medicate myself two weeks in advance to give myself the best chance of making the event.
     Friends and fellow church-goers had been trying to get me to see Dr. Rick for some time before I finally gave in.  Looking back, I don’t know why I waited.  Within a month, I was headache free.  I couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel pain.  I could do whatever I wanted and not live in fear of the headache.  This was a miracle for me, but the story does not end here.
     An opportunity came up for us to adopt a newborn baby girl not long after I began chiropractic care.  This baby was particularly important to me and my husband because her mother is a relative.  Tragically, her mother was also a drug user and did drugs during her pregnancy.  If we could not adopt the baby she would have been put into the foster system since the biological mother was incapable of raising her.
     To keep a long story short, we did adopt her and she is doing fantastically.  There is no sign of any effect of the drugs on her as of yet, and with God’s help, there never will be.  We think that is because of the vast amounts of love and attention she gets from us, her real mommy and daddy.
     What does this have to do with chiropractic?  The reality is that without chiropractic, I would still be nearly an invalid with headaches.  I COULD NOT HAVE TAKEN CARE OF AN INFANT OR RAISED A YOUNG CHILD.  THEREFORE, SHE WOULD NOT HAVE ANY OF THE OPPORTUNITIES IN LIFE THAT MY HUSBAND AND I WILL BE ABLE TO PROVIDE FOR HER.  MY DAUGHTER’S LIFE IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE SOMEBODY MADE ME GO TO A CHIROPRACTOR. 
     You need to tell everyone you know what you know about chiropractic.  Who knows who’s life you will change too.
Andrew's mother, Barbara, wrote:

     Hello, My name is Andrew and I am a happy, healthy one year old.  But I wasn’t so happy or healthy when I first met Dr. Rick a few months ago.  I had been having problems with my ears for four months, I couldn’t sleep at night and I was miserable.  We’d been to the doctor lots of times but nothing was helping.  In fact, all the medicines the doctor had tried seemed to make me worse instead of better!  Both the regular doctor and the Ear-Nose and Throat doctor said that if the antibiotics didn’t work, then they’d just have to put tubes in.  Now my Mom and dad weren’t about to let them do surgery on me, especially since they had been reading and learned that tubes can cause more problems than they solve.  My mom and dad did a lot of praying.  Then my mom heard that sometimes babies who have a traumatic birth like mine have ear trouble.  You see when I was born they used a vacuum extractor and forceps to pull me out.  I guess all that yanking on my head, hurt my neck.  She also heard that chiropractic care can be the answer.  Now she was skeptical because she couldn’t imagine a chiropractor helping ear infections!?!  But at that point she was willing to try anything!!  Happily, a few weeks of adjustments and my ears were all cleared up.  In addition, I no longer had a stiff neck or shoulders and my whole personality was happier.  I have to tell all babies who have ear troubles, don’t let them give you tubes until you at least try chiropractic care first.  After all, it can’t hurt and if you’re like me, you could be perfectly well with no drugs and no surgery.  In my family, we thank God for Dr. Rick, because I feel better, my mom and dad are happier and sometimes, I even sleep through the night.