October 10, 2017

The most important question you can ask for your health is a very simple one…

“Energy,” especially when it comes to the body, is one of those topics that get pretty hippy-dippy pretty quickly, depending on who’s explaining it to you.

But take a step back for a moment and think. What causes you to move throughout the day? How does your brain communicate things to the rest of your body? How do your muscles move?

The answer? Energy. Electrical energy, in fact.

Are you ready to lose weight… FOR GOOD? Register for our FREE Wellness Dinner Seminar and learn how here.

If you remember back to seventh-grade science, energy exists in two states. Potential energy is the energy that’s stored up. It’s not doing much of anything except sitting there. Kinetic energy, however, is the energy that is in motion. It’s the life force that powers everything from the miraculous microbes in your gut to the distant stars growing in strength and brightness by the moment.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Philosophers have been at work for centuries attempting to figure out the meaning of life. And while that’s still an open question, I’m convinced that energy factors into it. Namely, we’re supposed to tap into our kinetic energy and, well, move.

If you take a look at the diabetes and obesity epidemics in our country, you see a lot of potential energy. A lot of stagnation, and very little growth and change (apart from our waistlines, which, c’mon, that doesn’t count.)

Growth is one of the six basic human needs (along with, according to Tony Robbins, Certainty, Variety, Significance, Love and Connection, and Contribution.)

And growth is just another example of kinetic energy.

We are designed to change. To grow. To become wiser, healthier, better.

We’re not designed just to sit back and let the world happen to us. That’s a recipe, quite literally, for disease. For death.

So, you have a choice. We all have a choice. We can continue to commit slow suicide by eating the junk we’ve always eaten, spend our time avoiding the problems that come standard with each human life, to exist in toxic relationships with those around us, and keep remaining in a state of potential energy.

It’s Newton’s first law of motion. Whatever state of motion (or lack thereof) you’re in will continue until something pushes it in a different direction.

And honestly, I see the consequences of remaining in this state of stagnation every single day. It doesn’t end well.

But, again, Newton gives us the key. Allow that other force to move you towards growth and change, and you’ll find health and happiness.

What’s Your “Why”?

And what’s that other force? What’s your “why” for getting healthy and staying that way?

For some, it’s knowing that your loved ones need you. For others it’s waking up one morning and deciding that enough is enough and it’s time to live. For some that “why” reveals itself when they catch a clear, terrifying vision of the future if they continue to stay the same.

Any of these reasons are perfectly valid for deciding to change your life and seize happiness.

Watch a video on choosing life each moment of every day below!

Or listen here…

The post Kinetic Energy and the Meaning of Life appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

August 4, 2016

One of the things that sort of drives me nuts when I see a Facebook ad about getting healthy is how narrow the perspective is.

For example:

Does losing six pounds per week necessarily make you healthy?

Probably not.

Or, at least, not in isolation.

WHAT HEALTH REALLY MEANS
We’ve gotten so far away from what health means in this country that ads like this can just pass us by in our daily feed scrolling that no real red flags come up.

Which is why, at the Wellness Training Institute, our approach to health is holistic. Health is an all encompassing thing.

Is it changing our diets so that we can lose weight and belly fat? Sure.

But it’s also learning how to breathe, how to move, how to get our thoughts in order, and how to just—well—be.

It’s about getting our bad habits shoved to the side and replaced with good ones.

Which is the main reason that when we begin working with someone—no matter where they are on their health journey, no matter how old they are, no matter what their end goals might be—we to start with a gratitude journal.

THE GRATITUDE JOURNAL
You’re probably thinking exactly what most of our members think at first.

A gratitude journal? Seriously?

Isn’t that for second graders? What possible good could writing down what’s going well in my life do when all I want is to get my weight under control, my heart disease reversed, or my diabetes managed?

So, I get it. But stay with me for a second.

Nothing exists in isolation. No matter how independent you might consider yourself, you still came from somewhere, you had two parents, you live somewhere now, you have to eat food and drink water and breathe air to live. You are not an island.

In the same way, neither is your health. You can’t break it down into parts and attempt to reverse, say, your autoimmune disease by only treating the physical parts of it. You can’t just replace the starter in your car if the whole wiring system has been chewed bare by that nest of mice living in your carburetor.

And that’s why we start with the gratitude journal. There’s something very powerful, and very effective, about getting your thoughts and emotions pointed in the right direction before starting in on any of the other repair work.

A big part of this—and I’ll ask that you please forgive my extended car metaphor here—is that true health happens when you get the maintenance schedule in order.

You don’t keep a car running for 500,000 miles by taking it into the shop whenever something breaks.

No, you keep it running for decades by being proactive and giving it regular tune-ups.

You fix the problems by not allowing the problems to happen in the first place.

I’m talking about habits.

And because the mind—your thoughts and emotions— control so much of what the rest of your body does (often automatically, without any thought at all), starting to get that system in order is really the first step in getting the rest of the system fixed.

There are three reasons for this:

1. BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING
Firstly, change is hard. So, it’s nice to start with something simple to get the ball rolling.

How we do the gratitude journal is this: Every morning you wake up, and the first thing you do is grab a pen and the pad of paper you keep on your bed stand. You then write down five things that you’re thankful for.

Five: That’s it.

They could be the big, obvious things: friends, family, pets, etc.

Or they could be small, but vital: The air you breathe, the warm patch of bed you’re currently sitting in thanks to the sunlight streaming in through the window, the fact that you’ve been blessed to have awoken to meet another day.

It’s easy (it really is, I promise). There’s no pressure. You can even repeat yourself. It doesn’t matter. Just get it down.

You do this every day.

And soon enough, it become a habit.

Which is the whole point. Health— and sickness, for that matter— are a matter of habits. Health is one set of habits. Sickness is another.

2. AMPHIBIAN CULINARY TIPS
Which leads to the second reason for starting with the gratitude journal: Big, hard changes happen when you make a lot of little, easy ones.

It’s in the way we’re built as humans: We don’t go through complete overhauls overnight. Change—for good, or for bad—happens incrementally.

It’s the whole “frog in the cooking pot” adage. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’s going to jump out as quickly as it can. If you put it in cold water, however, and gently let the heat rise, the frog becomes so accustomed to the gradual change in temperature that by the time it realizes it’s in trouble, it’s already being served up with whatever condiments make frog meat even slightly palatable.

(If such a thing even exists. Gross.)

So. We change slowly. That’s how we’re designed, even from the start. They don’t call them “baby steps” for nothing.

3. SETTING THE TONE FOR SUCCESS
So the gratitude journal is the first healthy habit we work to instill. It’s the first because it sets the tone for the rest.

Dave Ramsey is a pretty famous financial counselor. His systems are designed to help people pay down their debt, and his success rate is pretty impressive. Through his method, people have paid down hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It’s impressive.

One of the first steps in his system is to pay down the smallest credit card balance you have. It seems kind of counterintuitive at first. Why wouldn’t you tackle the big stuff first, kill those dragons, and then move on the smaller stuff after that?

The reason is a question of positive momentum.

There’s something innate within us that needs smaller successes to build out upon. We’re way more likely to get past the third step if we take the first two one at time, rather than taking all three at once.

So, by doing the easy stuff first, getting focused on the journey ahead, and then gaining that first little bit of momentum early and often, we’re far more likely to push on towards realizing our bigger, harder health goals.

That’s why the gratitude journal is such an effective way to start any change you want to make in your life—especially when it comes to your health.

Which brings us to a pretty basic question: Why do you want to be healthy? Health for its own sake isn’t a terribly valuable thing. For example, say you’re healthy and active at the age of 110, but… all your friends and family have passed on and you live alone in a cave by sea. Your physical health, at that point, isn’t worth much.

So, it makes sense that a big part of overall health also has a ton to do with your outlook on life. You could call this your mental health.

That’s what the gratitude journal does, first and foremost. It gives you a positive perspective on your life. And, after just a few days, you’ll find that because you know you have to write down something positive the next morning, you’ll begin looking for happy things. Our perspective changes so much of how we live. A positive outlook—as cheesy as it sounds—serves as the first few bricks in the foundation of your health.

And that positive foundation is where healthy habits begin to accumulate. As they accumulate, you’ll be shocked to find how great your life can be!

I hope that you’ll take these ideas to heart. You’ll be surprised at how much this one activity, done diligently over the course of the next month or so, will begin to transform the rest of your life. And if you have any questions, or want to learn more, I encourage you to join us for a free dinner!

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Thank Your Regular Stars: Why You Need to Start a Gratitude Journal Today appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 17, 2016

Let’s say you’re sick. Or overweight. Or have one of 90-plus autoimmune diseases running rampant these days. Or just feel sluggish.

(Given the current state of health in this country, there’s a big chance I’m not asking you to actually pretend. But, I digress…)

So, your health isn’t exactly optimal at the moment. Now, let’s say you want to get better.

Great! So what do you do?

Take some vitamin C. Or whip up a pot of chicken soup. Or go see your medical practitioner for a prescription or ten.

There’s a hundred places to start, right? And depending on what’s ailing you, any of the above is probably going to be equally effective. You might get “better,” or not. You might get “better” for a while and then fall back into that sickness ditch again sometime down the road.

But that’s the best we can hope for, right? Sickness is essentially just a hamster wheel we have to run on more and more as we age, right?

Wrong.

With whatever happens to need fixing with you right now—before you can even think about not just “getting better,” but instead finding optimum health in your life—you need to understand something very basic about how our bodies work.

The Body Electric

What I’m going to say next might sound a little hippie-dippy, but I promise you it’s not. What I’m going to say is based on a solid scientific principle.

There’s an energy that is always flowing in our bodies. This energy directly affects our health. Every moment of every day, our health is either getting better or getting worse. There’s no such thing as just “coasting along.”

(Which makes sense, of course. When was the last time you saw electricity just sitting around doing nothing? Part of what makes it what it is is that state of constant movement.)

And the most vital energy flow we have is grounding energy. Just like the name implies, this type of energy happens when we direct our energy down towards the ground. We do this by thinking grounding thoughts, eating grounding food, taking grounding breaths, making grounding actions, etc.

The Foundation

So any wellness program worth anything has to start with with strategies that direct your body’s energy to ground. This is where your wellness foundation is built. Everything else depends on it.

At the Wellness Training Institute, we guide our patients through a number of these strategies. Our diet plan includes the introduction of grounding foods. Our revolutionary form of yoga, Sit Stand Stroll, is designed to continually ground your energy throughout the day as you go about your life. We even incorporate a Gratitude Journal into the program to develop in our patients daily habits that ground their thoughts.

It only makes sense: You can’t build anything lasting or good if you don’t have the right foundation in place. All the healthy stuff in the world won’t do much good if they’re being introduce to a structure that’s about to topple over.

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Reinventing Wellness from the Ground Up appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 11, 2016

In a previous post, I talked about how important it is for your health, no matter what state your well-being is in these days, to start from the ground up. 

What I mean by that is health and wellness begins when we direct our bodily energy down through our feet and into the earth.

So, here are the top 10 techniques for doing that. In my experience, these have been effective for a lot of people. They’re also very practical, very easy, and don’t take up a ton of space in your day.

When you’re feeling scattered, out of sorts, or just blah, pick one or more from this list and try it out!

1. Breathe deeply using your body for breath rather than your facial muscles (this is difficult at first which is why Sit Stand Stroll is so critical). With every breath, imagine that each worry or anxiety dissolving into the air around you.
2. Eat or drink something healthy. Concentrate on the sensation. Is it hot or cold? Sweet or bitter? What’s the texture like?
3. Sit and just be in the moment. Keep your eyes closed and just feel what your body is doing.
4. Do some simple yoga positions.
5. Imagine yourself in a safe, comfortable place, and concentrate on the details around you.
6. Take a piece of paper. Write down ten things you are thankful for.
7. Read the first paragraph of a book out loud to yourself. Concentrate on your own voice. Feel the sensations in creates in your body as it travels up through you and out into the world around you.
8. Have lunch with a friend. Eliminate distractions. Concentrate on just being together.
9. Take a bath or shower and focus on the sensations of the water.
10. Pick up and hold something soft and comfortable. Focus on how it feels and how your body responds to it.

Have another idea? Let us know!

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Top 10 Grounding Techniques appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.