Healthy Products Might Only Be "Skin Deep"

Posted by: The Balancing Center

The snow might be wet outside but the air is dry as a bone inside. I don’t know about you but my skin is about ready to revolt and head for warmer, more humid climates. If it weren't for buckets of lotion and conditioner, I’m sure I would have left a long time ago.

Of course, how do you find that perfect lotion in a literal ocean of choices? You have hundreds of different brands, formulas, and scents to consider and that’s even before you look at the label on the back of the bottles.

Why the back of the bottle? Because the increasingly important question that savvy consumers ask is: What’s in my product?

And for too many cosmetic products, including lotions, shampoos, cleansers, makeup, and more, the back label is a block of gibberish. You have multiple kinds of parabens, sulfates, dimethicones. There’s the vague word “fragrance,” which is a blanket term that covers a host of other troubling ingredients. Some of these long words refer to perfectly safe chemicals and others...not so much.

How are we supposed to know what’s in the products that are going on our faces, hands, eyes, and lips? Luckily for us, in this information age, finding safe products is a matter of a quick internet search. Even luckier, there is a fantastic directory called the EWG Skin Deep Cosmetics Database.

The EWG database is a fully searchable catalog of over 70,000 cosmetic products. They rate the products from Low to Moderate to High hazard and list how much scientific data are available about the individual ingredients in those products. Brands have their own ratings as well and you can search by brand, product, or even by ingredient!

This database is invaluable to the conscious consumer. Not every "organic" product is actually healthy and not every healthy product is easily identifiable. A product’s impact on the environment is also taken into consideration, (which can help you help the planet by, for instance, showing you how to prevent the negative effects of bioaccumulation).

Through this database, I was able to find a wonderful line of hair and skin care products that are vegan, cruelty free, paraben free, sustainable, and made from organic ingredients. (Carina Organics out of Canada, if you are interested!)

So hopefully you can beat winter fatigue by reinvigorating your hair and skin care collection with products that you can use in health!

Integrative Care Heals the Whole

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Have you ever caught a cold because you were experiencing incredible amounts of stress? Have you ever found that you get sick at the worst possible time, when you are already depressed or swamped with work or dealing with relationship or family troubles?

While some might call your situation a coincidence or bad luck, those with an integrative perspective on wellness would see nothing coincidental about it. This is because health issues are rarely just physical issues; they often arise in direct conjunction with or even because of the mental and emotional stressors in your life. And even if these problems are just physical, one problem might be related to several others and you might not even know it!

One faulty gear can interfere with the rest!

At The Balancing Center we believe that health problems are multidimensional, involving physical, emotional, and mental states. We therefore offer multidimensional solutions to get you out of pain and into wellness, energy, and vitality. We help you discover and apply the right, integrative combination of doctor care and self-care to maximize your recovery and your overall state of health.

What might go into your customized care plan? Well, there's no one answer! Since every person is unique, every care plan is unique. The Balancing Center offers an array of health and wellness services, integrating chiropractic care with bodywork, energy synchronization, supplements, and more.

The Balancing Center features the N.U.C.C.A. technique as its signature chiropractic care, a specific kind of care that focuses on adjusting the upper cervical vertebrae. Dr. Daniel Fedeli, Dr. Ken Bennett, and Dr. James Tickel also practice B.E.S.T. and NET, synchronizing your mental, emotional, and physical states and releasing traumatic patterns. The doctors teach you their signature Foundational Movement Practices to retrain you to sit, stand, and move better, allowing you to integrate your chiropractic care into everyday life.

The Balancing Center’s bodyworkers, Barry Krost and Mary Holmquist practice various kinds of therapeutic techniques, including Ortho-Bionomy, cranial-sacral therapy, myofascial release therapy, and more. These therapies help to clear stress, relieve tension, and increase your energy.

We are also always excited to offer Orenda products and partnerships. Orenda offers a variety of supplements that support your body’s natural functions and health systems, including your immune system, your endocrine system, and your pituitary gland. We also sell a variety of supplements from other trusted partners-in-health. You can get your daily dose of Vitamin D, iodine, digestive enzymes, and fish oil at the office.

Besides these specific services and products, we strive to provide general resources for health and wellness, from diet to exercise to healthy thinking. We advocate integrating a dynamic combination of techniques to first get you healthy and then keep you healthy. A variety of tactics creates a strong health strategy that you can use as your master plan for increased and continued wellness, now and far into the future!

Sit Better and Be Healthier through Chiropractic and FMP!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

The Washington Post recently published an informative and helpful chart on the medical science behind the dangers of sitting for too long and how to offset and counter those effects.

Dr. Ken demonstrates correct seated posture.

Their recommendations are simple, sensible, and easy to incorporate into your workday or relaxation time. They are, however, are missing two other, important recommendations:

1. Visit your chiropractor for regular adjustments.

Regular adjustments not only get you and keep you out of pain--they also help keep your spine aligned and your body balanced. This means that while you’re sitting, you won’t be putting uneven pressure on isolated parts of your body. Regular adjustments also prime your body for health and activates its self-correcting nature. Remember, you are designed to be well!

2. Learn and implement the Foundational Movement Practices.

The Foundational Movement Practices, falling somewhere between exercise and yoga, are series of simple movements that retrain your body to sit, stand, and move better. The FMP also help you hold your spinal adjustments longer, which creates a stronger foundation for even more physical, mental, and emotional improvement. They are great to implement while you are at a desk job because they teach you how to locate and then engage the correct bones and muscles used in seated postures. The FMP can further alleviate chronic back and joint pains as you retrain your body’s muscle memory to engage in healthy, dynamic postures.

You can learn more about the FMP on our website or YouTube page, where we have PDF instructions as well as instructional videos.

Call the office today for an adjustment! You can even add 10 minutes to the end of your visit to get a hands-on FMP session!

They say sitting is the new smoking. And we say that it doesn’t have to be!

Go Upstream to Find the Problem!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Imagine you live by a river, brown from chemical pollution, gritty from agricultural runoff, choked with debris. You work hard to clean it up and manage to get it decently restored. But a few weeks later the river is right back to where it was: brown, gritty, choked...out of balance.

And then you travel a few miles north and discover the factory that is actually responsible for all the problems appearing miles downstream. Without working to have the factory improve its waste management, any downstream clean-up efforts become mere stopgaps.

Often when people deal with health problems and pain, their situation is like the story of this river. When you are ill, it is easy to become distracted by the most apparent evidence of a problem, usually pain or discomfort. And while pain is a powerful sign of illness, it is often the last sign that something is wrong. Cleaning a river that is still being polluted only provides a temporary solution. Addressing pain, symptoms, and side effects without discovering the source of your health problems will only provide temporary relief.

That’s where we can help! When you visit The Balancing Center to experience our care, the first step we take is to travel “upstream” in your spine to discover exactly what root causes are contributing to your pains, sufferings, and imbalances. Rather than “cracking” separate areas of your back, we focus on your upper cervical vertebrae to realign your neck and head. This is because your upper cervical vertebrae has a controlling influence on the rest of your spine and body. This is how we uniquely specialize in getting to the root of the problems that are robbing you of your vitality and interfering with your life. By uncovering these underlying conditions, we can provide customized care to get you out of pain and back into balance!

Once we address your upstream problems, your body is clean and clear to receive the full benefits of the other wonderful care you provide for it: regular exercise, calming meditation, a nutritious diet, all three or more! We help provide you with the balance and connection your body craves in order to enhance your body’s wondrous ability to heal itself. You are designed to be well. We help you on the path to achieving that healthy design.   

Better than Boot Camp? Try Chiropractic Care!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

A recent piece from NPR details an alternative technique some people try to alleviate their back pain. “Back pain boot camp” rehabilitates sufferers by having them exercise through their back pain; this helps strengthen their back muscles and conditions the sufferer to not be as sensitive to her back pain. This boot camp is often a last resort after failed attempts at surgeries, painkillers, and spinal injections.

It might seem counterintuitive to work through pain when, “Normally pain is an alarm bell that says, ‘Stop what you're doing right now or you may hurt yourself!’” The piece highlights, quite correctly, “that pain is a false signal. It's not about looming danger; it's actually caused by hypersensitive nerves.” Pain can indeed be a poor indication of illness. We often forget that pain is often the last symptom to arise from an illness and that many pain-free people can have unseen health problems. So, sometimes we do have to work through the pain to get out of it. And sometimes we might not be in pain but need a health change anyway.

The piece highlights how sufferers from back pain received no relief from surgery, spinal fusions, and painkillers. But I wonder: did they try chiropractic care? After all, even though chiropractic care offers a wealth of benefits, alleviating back pain is what it’s known and famous for!

A misalignment of the vertebrae can be a direct irritant of those “hypersensitive nerves,” bulging discs, and herniations. Nerve disturbances caused by spinal misalignments can cause mild to severe back pain that persists through painkillers and surgeries. If you’re out of balance, all the surgeries and spinal injections in the world won’t help since your body cannot accept and adapt to those cures. Underneath surface level changes, your imbalanced spine and body can and will most likely revert back to its unhealthy foundation.

The piece highlights how this is a “different way of thinking about pain” and The Balancing Center happens to specialize in that difference. We get you back into balance. Once you are aligned and balanced, you can avoid surgery and any rehabilitation, physical therapy, and strengthening exercises will be even more effective since your body can fully accept their benefits.

At “back pain boot camp,” the philosophy seems to be movement can override pain. Chiropractic care is also great at facilitating pain relief through the movement of muscles by directly addressing joint dysfunction and reestablishing proper joint mechanics.

Some graduates of back pain boot camp report that their back pain still returns. And if they are out of balance, even with stronger back muscles and decreased nerve sensitivity to pain, this makes sense. The root cause of their pain still affects them. If their spines remain misaligned, surgery, physical therapy, spinal fusions, and painkillers are mere stopgaps.

Before you resort to surgery or spinal fusions or even boot camp, give chiropractic care a try. If we can heal the underlying cause of your pain, your illness can unravel and you can get back into balance, achieving health and robust wellness.  

New Year, Clean Start

Posted by: The Balancing Center

And welcome to 2014. It’s been a brutal start to the year. We hope you weathered the freeze with relative aplomb. We can all look forward to a veritable heat wave this weekend! 38 degrees? It’s practically beach weather!

When it’s this cold outside, healthy eating can be at least a little challenging. Cool, crisp salad doesn’t warm you up like pot roast or chili or burgers. The coldest and darkest months of the year require comfort foods and hibernation! 

But if you’re feeling the toll of that comfort, feeling a little slow and sluggish after the indulgences of the holiday, this might actually be a great time to reintroduce healthy eating into your days and nights. It might not seem like it at first, but healthy eating can be an even greater comfort to your body and mind in both the short and long run.

You can make a great start by clearing out the old before ushering in the new. Kickstart your year with a great cleanse! Cleanses can jumpstart your body and set a great foundation for a year of healthy eating and habits.

The two cleanses for 2014 we’re recommending are the McCombs Plan and Orenda’s Clean, Burn, and Shape. Both cleanses have something a little different to offer, depending on your health goals.

If you’re looking to recalibrate the environment in your gut--gut health being absolutely essential to wholeness and wellness--the McCombs Plan is specially formulated to help you achieve a healthy balance of yeast in your digestive tract. It’s a rigorous and thorough process, with a food regimen and you can find out more at the McCombs website and also in this blog post by Dr. Ken.

Clean, Burn, and Shape is the new cleanse and weight-loss program from Orenda, our partner-in-health. It is a 10 day vegan cleanse followed by a 30 day diet and exercise cycle. This program features tasty shakes and works in tandem with Orenda’s established line of supplements. You can read more about CBS (as we call it) here.

Let us know if you’ll be embracing a cleanse this year and which one! We’d love to feature and celebrate your results. 

Here’s to a clean start and a wonderful winter!

Any Day is the Best Day to Make a Change

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Everyone is talking about resolutions: which to make, why we make them, why we break them, how to keep them. Of course, the new year sparks these discussions. The promise of a new beginning is both inspiring and irresistible.

But you know what’s amazing? Any day is technically the start of a “new year.” The entire calendar might not roll over, but if you are here today, you were (most likely) here exactly one year ago and you will (hopefully) be here exactly one year from now. January 1st might be a poetic date to start anew, but January 2nd is just as good. And if January 2nd or 3rd or 4th happens to be today, than it is automatically better than January 1st. Because today is the only day you can do anything, change anything, be anything.

Any day can herald the ending of an old habit and the beginning of a new one. Any day can be Day 1 of your Awesome Plan to Get Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy.

“Any day” also takes the pressure off of January 1st. The first day of the New Year doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all date of your life changes. Why not create a new anniversary, a new personal holiday? Celebrate a year of success, growth, and change on February 12th or April 24th, or maybe every day of the year. Celebrating success is a profound way to make sure you keep on striving for it!

Also, as long as we’re discussing resolutions, what happens If you lapse? First, according to countless studies that I will not link here, that’s almost to be expected. Second--and it can never be stated enough--lapsing is perfectly awesome. You’re human and it happens. Get back on the horse. Pick yourself up and brush yourself off. It’s not about perfection: it’s about perseverance. After all, the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.

And finally, in the meantime, the best place to begin is with self-acceptance. Accept yourself, unconditionally, right now. Warts and all. Flaws and everything. Self-acceptance is like a rallying cry for your dreams, intentions, and actions. Let’s gather together and accept every last part of Me today and push ahead into the future as one whole, powerful unit.

You might know where you want to go, but it is so much harder to get there if you don’t know and accept where you are. Imagine trying to get directions with only an end location. “Well, I want to arrive at X but since I don’t know where I’m coming from, I have literally twenty options to try to get there.” Which is all still fine. But without knowing where you are, you might end up on the scenic route when you want the express lane, or end up caught in traffic because you didn’t know about a strategic overpass that avoids the messes.

You might not necessarily like where you are or who you are right now. But did you know that that’s awesome? It’s awesome because dissatisfaction can give you the inspiration and drive to be somewhere else and change into somebody new. But who you are today is an integral part of the person you will be tomorrow. You can’t have the “after” picture without the “before.”

So, let’s recap:
Accept yourself for who you are today.

Start your changes any day. Any day can be a New Year.

If you lapse, start again. And again. And again.

When you get there, celebrate your success.

Repeat.

And have a most wonderful 2014.