Staying Healthy

Transcription

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton at The Chiropractic Place. Today's video is about staying healthy, and I wanted to focus on the six things that make a substantial impact on our health daily. There's a lot of things out there about health. The more we can simplify it, the easier it is for patients to follow that list and guidance that we're offering. So here are my six simple things to help you stay healthy, really up to the chances of your body to stay healthy, your immune system functioning at its very best.

First and foremost, we need seven to eight hours of sleep every night. If you're a full-grown adult, if you're a child, if it's your children, nine to 10 hours is going to be much more appropriate. But for adults, typically seven to eight hours. There's been a lot of recent research on the importance of sleep. These people are getting sleep deprivation. We know long-term, there is a significant increase in their chances of developing dementia and other mental health issues down the road because the brain needs that time at night to process and heal itself from everything that it's done through the day, so really focusing on our sleep habits is a great way to start being healthier.

Water, this is a big one as well. The majority of Americans are actually dehydrated and have no idea, so let's talk about the importance of that real quick. Our body is roughly 70% water. The blood is about 90% water. Without proper hydration, every cell in the body is going to function at a lower rate. If you're not properly hydrated, your blood is going to be thicker than it should be, making it harder for your heart to deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell in your body. So water is essential. Start small if you're not used to drinking a lot of water, the goal. We want to try to get to the 64 ounces a day, eight glasses a day. I would say drink even more than that, but we have to start somewhere, and if you're not even coming close to the 64 ounces, let's make that your first goal, and then from there, maybe we can start to increase that to 80 ounces a day, and perhaps even eventually hitting 100 ounces a day. That way, we know that your body is properly hydrated, correctly able to do all of the chemistry that it needs to do. Your body is doing billions and billions and billions of chemical reactions every single day to keep you alive. The best way for your body to perform is to make sure that it's properly hydrated. The third aspect of our health, many of us are already familiar with this, what we put into our bodies matters what we eat, so my good rule of thumb is looking for very healthy proteins.

I like to get organically sourced as local as possible, whether that's chicken, my fish. The only fish I eat is wild. I will not eat farmed fish because how it's raised and fed is not natural. I always encourage patients that if you're having seafood, you have salmon. We want it to be wild if we're eating beef, pork, or chicken. We want to be looking for organic sources of food. In the Redding area, it's very easy to find lots of organically raised grass-fed beef. Lots of this stuff is available to us, so these are things that we want to be consuming rather than just commercially produced processed foods—also, healthy green vegetables. Carbohydrates are a big one that people talk about. I still incorporate carbohydrates into my diet. Some people do better with less, but I always encourage my patients, if you're going to consume some form of carbohydrates like rice or something like that, we're looking for whole food sources of that rather than processed foods.

We want to try to avoid processed foods as much as we can when discussing food. The other thing we need every day is a level of exercise. Now you don't have to be an Olympic athlete, but getting daily exercise helps your body circulate and helps your immune system circulate throughout the body and is essential for helping us burn off stress. When people have stress, they produce stress hormones, those hormones affect our physiology, and exercise is a great way to help us mediate the effects of those hormones. Help us burn off those hormones, so to speak, to help our body stay healthy and to stay fit and to give us that boost of endorphins that we need to keep us happy as well, so very impactful, not just on health but on our mood, which is an important part of our health.

Number five - avoiding toxins, avoiding things, avoiding exposures to things that can be detrimental to our body, there are thousands of artificial chemicals in the world today, so anything we can do to prevent toxic exposures to things like pesticides, herbicides, something that we know can harm our health, we wanna try to avoid those as much as possible.

And the sixth one is chiropractic care not just for the treatment of neck pain, back pain, things like that, headaches, but because regular chiropractic care has been shown to impact our overall function and well-being, it's been shown to raise T cell counts in our body. So that helps us fight off infections. It's a real known thing to help us boost our immune system. So, believe it or not, chiropractic care has a major impact on the function of our immune system and how our body takes care of itself. So these are my six lists of things that you can focus on to start staying healthy and being healthy today.

Call our office today to schedule an appointment to kickstart your healthy life: 530-221-8443