Wellness in Fountain Valley

What is Wellness?

Wellness is a popular word in our culture and signifies an effort at staying healthy or well. But it is not clear what one needs to do to practice a wellness lifestyle. Wellness is actually taking care of oneself when you are WELL as well as when you are SICK. We have patients that frequently come in and say, “I came in for maintenance right when I felt the pain again”. We’re always happy to see our patients, but this is not prevention or wellness. These patients are practicing crisis care versus wellness care in Fountain Valley. On the surface, health seems like the state of having no symptoms. But we all know people who felt fine the day before a heart attack or the day before they found out they had cancer. How many times have you been to the dentist and found out you had a cavity… but you had no symptoms! Health is a lot more than just a lack of symptoms. The truth is health is on a scale or continuum with wellness on one end and illness or disease at the opposite end. We are all headed in one of those directions or the other. The key is to practice a wellness lifestyle.

How can I practice a Wellness Lifestyle?
Wellness begins with knowing the basic aspects of health which are reminded with the handy acronym DREAM. The main aspects of health are:

• DIET - eating the right foods from the right sources.
• REST - we all need a sufficient amount of rest for our bodies to repair.
• EXERCISE - do at least 30 minutes three times a week.
• ADJUSTED - getting the spine adjusted to keep healthy nerve connections between brain and body.
• MENTAL ATTITUDE - negative thoughts and low self-esteem have been shown scientifically to make us less healthy. It is important to stay positive and enrich your mind with good mental nutrition.

In order for one to be truly healthy one must keep these five aspects of health in balance. Doing a ton of exercise without regard for diet is like having a high performance car and putting low quality gasoline in it. Eating organically grown, free range foods without having a nervous system that ensures proper body function is like putting the highest quality gas in that same car without ever changing the oil or getting it tuned up.

Wellness is about looking to the future and treating your body like you are going to have to live in it until you are 100 years old. With this mindset you would eat the right way, get an adequate amount of rest, exercise regularly, make sure there was no interference between the control center (the brain) and your lifeline to the rest of the body (the spinal cord). And finally you would feed your mind with positive, uplifting messages that encouraged you to reach your potential or to choose to have great days!

We encourage our patients in our Fountain Valley office to practice wellness in all aspects of their lives and we help guide them through the choices they have in being either healthy or sick.