drchrista, Author at Hudson Valley Chiropractic & Wellness

My January Whole30 Experience

February 7, 2023 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Have you been struggling to stick to a healthy eating & exercising regime in the wake of the pandemic? I know I have. It’s been hard to admit because yes, I know these things, and I’m a health expert. In the middle of such uncertainty though, it happened to many of us that we lost the supports and structure for our normal health routines.

Enter the Whole30.

I’ve known about the Whole30 for years; recommended to it many of my patients. I even tried one in June of 2018 that didn’t quite work out (I was doing it for weight loss, not health). Fast forward to this year and an email that inspired me to give it a go to kick off the new year.

It’s not a D-I-E-T.

One of my favorite things about the Whole30 protocol is that it’s not a diet. There’s no counting of calories allowed. There’s no tracking what you ate and didn’t eat and you’re not even allowed to weigh or measure yourself for the 30 days. This combined with the focus on only eating real, whole foods helps shift the focus to mindful eating- am I really hungry? Hungry enough to eat a can of tuna from the pantry with some avocado mayo? Or am I snacky- craving sugar or salty treats? Many processed foods are designed to be hyperpalatable- that means its so much easier to override your body’s satiety signaling that’s saying ‘thanks I’ve had enough’ and plow headlong into a dopamine-induced stupor of ‘holy cow is that the bottom of this pint of Ben & Jerry’s already????’ Developing this mindfulness is hard, but it’s key to any long term changes in dietary habits. If you can’t stay in touch with whether you are actually hungry or thirsty or just craving something sweet to deal with stress, it can be very easy to over consume calories trying to ‘figure it out.’ This is why the results for willpower-based crash diets can be so poor. You’re starving, and all you can think about is what you can’t eat. Cravings can be hard enough to deal with, but when you add real hunger from caloric restriction on top of it- that’s why its so hard to have enough willpower to stay on the diet. Your brain is starving for calories so it will grasp at any justification to give up, give in and just eat the thing you aren’t supposed to eat and have been fixated on. Again, since the Whole30 is not about starving yourself or calorie counting or focusing on a scale, you shouldn’t ever get to the point of having to try and white-knuckle it through hardcore hunger. You might be feeling snacky for sugary or crunchy/salty items, but without the calorie restriction on top of it, I found these cravings much easier to resist and they took far less willpower than so-called diets of the past. Without the calorie restriction or focus on metrics like calorie-restriction or weight loss, I never felt overly hungry. Part of this did involve preparation & planning. There were very few places I could eat out or just pick up a snack if I was hungry. I had to plan ahead my lunches and make sure that I had healthy snacks in my purse if I was going to be out for awhile. EPIC bars, plain almond butter packets, the occasional Larabar and chicken salad bowls with guac from Chipotle were my best friends for the month. As a healthcare practitioner, I think this a huge win in helping folks form long-lasting healthy eating habits for the long-haul. Focus on filling your plate with healthy, nutritious food. Indulge in a favorite treat every once in awhile- once you’ve checked in with yourself about why you want it and what you are expecting to do with it. From that mindful place, it’s easier to make a better choice about whether or not said treat is ‘worth it.’ With that mindful pause before eating you can much more easily asses if its worth it both in the moment and to your future self, who is trying to stay healthy for the long-term.

Elimination Diets: The gold standard for food allergy testing

Another thing I appreciate about the Whole30 program is the clear elimination diet it sets up. Removing grains, dairy, legumes, alcohol, sugar and processed food additives like MSG will work as an introductory elimination diet for the vast majority of people. Following the Reintroduction phase after the 30 days follows the same protocol as a medical elimination diet- reintroducing one food group at time, observing the reaction and then trying another. Once you follow the Whole30 and do the Reintroduction, you should have a solid understanding of what foods help you feel great and which ones- well, not so much. Understanding the possible consequences of a certain food for you gives you more objective data to compute for the question of ‘is it worth it?’ when confronted with the choice to eat that food again. It’s a lot easier to say no to a food that you know will make you feel bloated, foggy, crumby or otherwise less than your best. I came down with a sinus infection just as I was finishing my Whole30 and moving into Reintroduction. This made it difficult to determine which foods made me feel ‘less than my best’, so I will definitely be doing another Whole30 again in the future to reset and try the Reintroduction phase again with hopefully a clearer result. In the meantime, I am practicing flexing my new-found mindful eating muscle with lots water drinking during the day and grateful “no thank yous, I’m actually full and satisfied and don’t need to eat more.”

Have you tried a Whole30 before? If so, what did you experience or think of it? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

The ‘Lazy’ Person’s Guide to Becoming a Better Fat Burner

September 6, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

I’ll get into the secrets of becoming a better fat burner in a moment, but first, some perspective. Humans evolved to be lazy. We don’t like to admit that in this modern era, where our culture values doing and being ‘more,’ but the truth is, you wouldn’t be here today without lazy ancestors.

Back then food was harder to come by and you had to do more work to get it. It wasn’t as convenient as the drive-thru or even rolling your cart through aisles and aisles of caloric-offerings. Most hunter-gathers walked an average of 8-10 miles a day just to gather water, food, and medicines, so whenever they could, they took advantage of surpluses by lazing around. Visiting with community members, making art or crafts, even getting drunk or stoned. By reducing their activity, they reduced caloric expenditure and saved it for time when they might need it instead to save their lives. So if you have a hard time coming up with the willpower to go to the gym regularly- it’s not that you are lazy, its that you have your ancestor’s lazy genes.

Of course, this presents a problem in a modern age where we have ready access to whatever calories we want- without having to do any work to get them. Our bodies do what evolution shaped them to do- save those excess calories for leaner times to ensure our survival- but those leaner times never come, not really. So they keep saving and keep saving. We call this saving phenomenon ‘obesity’ and blame the individual for being ‘lazy’ instead of blaming our environment/society for capitalizing off of this adaptation.

So instead of trying to fight an uphill battle against your biology, how can you work with it to become a better fat burner and achieve a lean, fit physique healthfully and sustainably? Glad you asked!!! Here’s my simple, effective ‘Lazy’ Person’s Guide to Better Fat Burning.

Sleep more. Research shows that if you are sleep deprived one night, you are more likely to crave and indulge in higher calorie, carbohydrate-dense foods the next day. Don’t know how to curb late night food cravings? Simple- GO TO BED earlier! You need the sleep to repair and restore your body anyway. Turn off the TV, put the phone down, and just go to sleep. Simple.
Fast. Do you find it difficult to cook healthy food for your meals, especially on certain busy days of the week? Tempted to get take out or grab-and-go junk food on days like this? Here’s a simple solution: don’t eat on those days. I know it sounds crazy at first, but stay with me. If you go 12-16 hours without any calories, it stimulates a process called autophagy, where your cells will put their energy into cleaning up debris and repairing or replacing worn out proteins instead of digesting and assimilating nutrients from food. Periodic fasting of this nature has been associated with lower rates of cancer and dementia, most likely because of this very mechanism. Drink plenty of water on the day you fast, but consume no calories and no fake sugar beverages like diet drinks. Just water or herbal tea. The hunger is more mental than it is physical. This strategy works best if you eat a higher fat, lower carb diet on non-fasting days, so you may want to start there if you’re don’t eat that way already. Doing so helps your body become more adapted at utilizing fat stores for energy. That way when you fast, you dip into those excess fat stores for energy. Over time, fasting 1-2 days a week, you wittle down your fat stores and your pants size at the same time, all while letting your body to do the decluttering it needs. (Note: if you have reactive hypoglycemia or take certain medications like insulin, you need to be careful with this approach. Please work with a qualified health care professional who understand how to do this and can help you monitor your meds/blood sugar.)
Slow down your exercise. Some where along the line, we adopted this misguided “no pain, no gain” philosophy of exercise, where if you aren’t leaving sweat angels on the floor beneath you it doesn’t ‘count’ somehow. The irony here is that your body is very bad at utilizing fat to fuel muscle work during intense exercise like this. You actually increase your percentage of fat utilization at lower, aerobic intensities- 55%-65% of your max heart rate. For most people, this is achievable by simply walking. The problem is, it takes time to walk as much as you need to in a day to starting seeing the benefit on a scale. (Remember the 8-10 miles a day your ancestor’s walked?) Because higher intensity exercise is anaerobic and relies on glycogen for fuel, it’s not the same thing to do a harder effort in less time. Certainly not if you’re goal is fat burning. Slow down your effort to a pace where you can comfortably and quietly breath through your nose to increase fat utilization.
Move more throughout the day. So how does a modern human move the equivalent of 8-10 miles a day at a slow, aerobic, fat-burning pace? Well, you’re going to have find more ways throughout the day. Instead of coffee dates or meetings, have walking meetings. Use headphones to walk while on a conference call or other phone call. Park a few blocks from the playground or soccer fields and walk the rest of the way. Rely less on machines or tech for food processing and do more by hand. Functional movements like these don’t seem like they would fit a ‘lazy’ person’s guide to becoming a better fat burner, but given a choice, would you rather walk more throughout that day or face a beat-down, sweat session each day that in the end isn’t getting you closer to goal anyway?
Natural movement training. Practicing a system of natural movement like MovNat is fun way to get more strength, more mobility and improve your physique without feeling worn out, beat down or injured all the time. The low intensity, constant movement favors fat oxidation for fueling. Building lean muscle mass through bodyweight exercises increases your metabolism at rest without getting too big/bulky/imbalanced. Best of all, these movements are directly transferrable to every day life.

And there you have it, folks. The Lazy Person’s Guide to Becoming a Better Fat Burner. Sleep more, fast occasionally, and move slower with more emphasis on function than just calorie burn. Now go be lazy, be lean and be well.

MovNat: Why I got certified

June 21, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

The other weekend, I had the privilege to attend the first women’s only MovNat certification course. I came home with my Level 1 certification and a new passion.

It might be curious to some as to why someone with a doctoral degree would spend the time and money to get a little training certificate. The fact is, as a chiropractor, I’ve been passionate about natural human movements for quite some time. I think it’s bound to happen when you realize you are seeing the same common themes in people over and over again: tight hamstrings, lazy glutes and cranky psoas muscles from a lifetime of chronic sitting leading to poor mobility and increased compensation by the lumbar spine. I have glibly proclaimed in my office many times before that if it weren’t for people sitting all day, I probably wouldn’t have a job.

It doesn’t seem like it would be a smart idea to work one’s self out of a job, but given our gross de-conditioning as a culture, as well as our predilection for a sedentary lifestyle because of the structure of our economy, I don’t feel insecure. Rather, I feel it my duty as a HEALTHcare practitioner to do the best that I can to educate people on how to take care of themselves. This sense of fiduciary responsibility is what eventually lead me to MovNat.

How do you begin to teach people to move again? How do you do so in a balanced, thoughtful, personal and most importantly, effective, way? How do you take weakened, de-conditioned bodies and make them whole again, at any age?

The cultivation of the body, when done in a continuous and progressive manner, constitutes physical education. It can be done entirely with natural movement patterns, without order or methodology, the same as in people living outside of civilized areas.

So said George Hébert, who wrote his book, The Natural Method, in the early 20th century. Hébert was adamant that incredible fitness was the birthright of all human beings, not just the genetically gifted. In fact, he even went so far as to suggest it was a moral imperative for all humans to be fit. He was known for saying “be strong to be useful” to describe what was really at stake. Be fit not because you want to look good at the beach, but be fit because you never know when you might need to rescue your child from a mountain lion/alligator/gorilla (all recent news headlines).

The other thing that Hébert was adamant about was that this training regime needed to be systemized. In this way, a coach or trainer could ensure that a person developed evenly a whole host of natural movement skills that led to adaptability in novel situations. For instance, it’s not useful to have gigantic muscles and 450# deadlift if you can’t swim and potentially rescue someone from drowning. Swimming was one of the core skills The Natural Method taught.

Unfortunately, the system that Hébert created and successful implemented with the French Navy, as well as French school children, was pretty much decimated by the outbreak of WWI. (Those he had trained were so useful, they were often sent to the front lines of combat & other suicide missions.) His brilliant system of teaching everyday people how to regain their innate fitness as human animals was relegated to dusty bookshelves until Erwan Le Corre happened upon his book decades later. Inspired by Hébert ideas & system, Le Corre began training this way himself and created ‘The Natural Method 2.0’, known as MovNat.

When I first heard of MovNat, it must have been from one of Robb Wolf’s podcasts. Instantly, it made sense to me and I was intrigued enough to look it up immediately. At the time, Erwan was teaching most workshops himself and there were only a few each year. I had my eye on going to Summersville, WV to take one ‘someday.’ Luckily for me, Erwan & his team have been very busy int he intervening years educating other instructors and attracting some seriously talented trainers.

As I watched the growth of MovNat from afar and looked at what movement skills my patients were deficient in, I began to see the puzzle pieces fitting together. Here was the balanced, individualized, effective system I was looking for to begin to teach people how to move again. The only question left was- did I have what it takes to demonstrate enough physical competency in the basic skills to earn my certification?

Just. I came home from that certification grateful for the education I received on how to coach others as well as personal weaknesses and deficiencies that I need address. The certification weekend was just the beginning of my journey and I look forward to practicing, exploring and learning more.

Moreover, many of the skills I learned were immediately relevant. Monday morning in the office, I was using a regression of what I had learned to teach an elderly patient how to breathe fully and start building the strength to be able to get off the floor with minimal assistance.

In short, I got certified to be a better doctor for my patients. I want to have the tools to teach them how to maximize their health and maintain their fitness and vitality long into their golden years. To that end, I am currently working on offering movement-based group classes as ‘rehab’ for my patients. Stay tuned for details!!!

Gym-free workouts: Bust your Gym Rut!

May 11, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

Looking for a gym-free workout? Are you stuck in the same out routine at the gym? 30 minutes on the cardio machine, a circuit or two of the weight machine and then you’re done? Has your progress plateaued leaving you frustrated and unmotivated? Tired of the ‘scene’ at your local gym? Or maybe you’re just not thrilled at the idea of being inside a smelly gym when the sun is shining and there is a nice breeze outdoors. If so, then here’s some fun gym-free workouts to bust your gym rut!

Take your workout to the woods! If you’ve been following me on Instagram, then you know I love MovNat! What’s that you ask? Besides being the original gym-free workout, it’s a system for teaching and training normal and natural movement patterns- ones that many of us have lost or are deficient in because so much of our modern lives are oriented around being ‘chair shaped’ humans. Though doing workouts outside is not required, it makes it so much more fun to be outside as you balance on a log, jump from rock to rock, or climb a tree. (See this video and tell me that doesn’t look like way more fun than 30 minutes on the dreadmill?!) It feels more like playing than working out! Practice these movements and I dare say you’ll be more able to keep up with your kids as they play outside! (They are playing outside, right???)
Try an aerial silks or yoga class! More like vertical dancing, aerial silks can be a great way to indulge and augment a creative, flowing type movement practice. It takes both flexibility AND strength to climb the fabric and do some of the moves. Aerial silks are fun way to take your yoga practice to new heights (pun intended!) or work towards your first pull-up. If you are a Hudson Valley local, check out Hudson Valley Circus Arts for classes. I’ve taken classes from Mai Frank and she’s a fantastic instructor!
Parkour!!! (Have you seen that episode of The Office?) Parkour is an AWESOME gym-free workout! Again, you’ll be having so much fun, an hour long class will FLY by. Don’t be intimidated by the versions of Parkour that you see in the movies or on YouTube. Those folks are long term practitioners of this movement discipline. The basics of Parkour are accessible to everybody with a body! For Hudson Valley locals, check out Innate Movement Parkour in Kingston, NY. The instructors are fantastic! Both encouraging and safety conscious, they emphasize safe movement progressions tailored for the individual. They offer classes for both adults and kids, of all ability levels. If you’re a parent with a hyperactive child and you are dreading the approach of summer & the kids being home from school- definitely check out their summer camps!

These are all gym-free workouts I have tried and LOVED! Give them a try and your might find yourself in the best shape of your life!

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Rewilding your Feet: Tips to go barefoot safely

May 3, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Rewilding your feet can have many health benefits, which I discussed in my previous blog post. The key is to remember that if you’ve been wearing shoes, especially really built up shoes, for most of your life, you have to transition slowly to barefoot.

If you’ve ever had a cast (or known someone who has) for a broken bone, then you’ve probably seen how small and shriveled their muscles were after getting the cast off. This muscle wasting is called disuse atrophy. The body very much works on the “use it or lose it” principle. While it’s not being used, the muscles cells are broken down and their constituents parts are either recycled of excreted.

Shoes are similar to that cast. They’ve held most of your foot muscles and joints immobile in one position for a long time. The muscles themselves are small and weak in comparison to what they would or could have been without the shoes. As any natural bodybuilder could tell you, it takes time, patience and diligence to build muscle.

Another thing to consider in rewilding your feet is the ‘toughness’ of your feet. Shoes are a protective covering and as such, your feet have not had the stimulus to build thicker, more protective skin on the soles of the feet. If we lived without shoes for most of our lives, our feet would have a nice little fat pad underneath the heel bone to help cushion them on hard surfaces. This heel pad is often very thinned and ineffectual in persons frequently wearing shoes.

So again, I reiterate- you must transition to rewilding your feet and going barefoot slowly, so as to not risk an injury because of weak muscles, nearly non-existent fat pads and overly tender skin.

How to do this…

Begin by simply going barefoot more around your own home. (Slippers don’t count!) Socks can be used for purposes of warmth, but may not help your soles toughen up enough. Notice which surfaces in your home are more uncomfortable than others. (Concrete is an ‘unnatural’ surface and it can take time to stand comfortably on such a surface). Remember that its totally normal to be uncomfortable to stand for long periods of time like this. Start slow and work your way up. It will get better with time and patience.
Once that feels comfortable, try small bouts of going barefoot in your yard or lawn (hopefully you don’t spray any toxic chemicals on your lawn). Sticking your barefeet in grass when its still covered in the morning dew is a divine delight!!!
From there, you can begin to have barefoot adventures! I like to look for soft, mostly dirt trails to do short barefoot walks on.
Use barefoot and minimalist shoes where appropriate. Something like the Vibram Five Fingers or Vivobarefoot shoes have very thin, flexible soles- just enough to give your feet a little protection while still allowing them to move through their full ranges of motion. By increasing the amount of time I wear such shoes, I have been able to strengthen my feet very safely over the last year.
Do your corrective stretches!!! Remember that it’s not really just your feet that have adapted to wearing shoes- other muscles in your lower leg have as well. Stretch your calf muscles several times a day to provide them the stimulus to ‘lengthen’ after years of signals to ‘shorten’ because of positive-heeled shoes. Use a lacrosse ball and roll on the bottom side of you foot to break up any ‘sticky’ areas- bits of adhesive or scar tissue- that are limiting the range of motion of the various joints within your foot.

Has ditching your shoes improved your health? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Barefoot: 5 reasons to ditch your shoes for better health

April 18, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

People going barefoot is not something you see often in modern Western society outside of a swimming pool or similar body of water. And what a shame! There are many health benefits to be gained from going barefoot.

April is National Foot Health Awareness Month, so before I get into some of the specific benefits let’s talk a little first about your feet, what they are capable of, and a little bit of their anatomy, because form = function.

Fun fact: 25% of your muscles & bones live below your ankle. (Another fun fact: your foot is a hydrostat. That means it can change its shape without changing it volume- like an elephant’s trunk.) There are 33 joints that make up your foot and your foot has a very similar anatomy to your hand. Now, imagine for a moment what your life would be like if an evil person came along and put your hands in casts from the moment you started crawling around on them and you wore these casts 75% of your day. It wouldn’t be pretty right? Your hands would be more like paddles or fins than hands. You certainly wouldn’t have all the dexterity that you do now. Wearing stiff shoes from the first moments of walking is really no different.

‘Sure Doc, but we don’t walk on our hands like we walk on our feet. Shoes protect our feet from glass, and sharp rocks and things like that.‘

True enough. But again, that is because most of us walk around on altered foot. If we have a shoe to protect our feet, we don’t build up callouses or tougher skin on the soles of our foot. With shoes, the muscles and other tissues of the feet become weaker and lose their ability to respond quickly and reflexively to sensory stimuli from the bottom of the feet. Remember those 33 joints in your foot? In a fully articulating foot, you have the ability to move them independently of each other, allowing you to ‘lift’ one part of the foot off of a sharp object without unweighting or lifting the entire foot.

Imagine that I took your hand and quickly & forcefully pushed the palm of your flattened hand down on a table. Your hand would stay flat. Now imagine we repeated this experiment, but this time I placed a tack, sharp side up, on the table and lined up your hand to land right over top of this. Hopefully, you wouldn’t let me do this to you, but if somehow I did manage to slam your hand down on the tack, you could articulate your hand in such a way that it tented up over the sharp end of the tack so as to lessen and potential injury from the tack. Your feet innately have this exact same capability when it comes to sharp objects on the ground. Hopefully, you use your eyeballs to scan for any potential danger and avoid stepping on them, but in case you miss it, or miscalculate how sharp the object is, reflexes in the foot should engage to protect you from most injuries.

The reflexes become extremely dulled by shoe wearing for most our lives, so at first going barefoot may be a painful experience to you. With time and patience though, your feet will ‘toughen up’ as your reflexes, range of motion, and muscle strength come back.

If it’s going to take some work, time patience and little pain to get your feet ready to go barefoot, why even bother??? I’m glad you asked. Here’s 5 reasons that going barefoot can help improve your health.

Improved balance. In senior citizens, the greatest health risk is falling, which is directly related to a lack of balance that seems to come with aging. You don’t have to lose your balance just because you are getting older though. We lose our balance because we don’t use it enough. If your feet are articulate enough to go barefoot regularly without pain, then you’ve trained those reflexes in your foot to a very high level, which means you will have much better balance. Better balance = less falls = less likely to break a bone. In fact, I would say that if your are worried about keeping healthy, strong bones as you age, but aren’t regularly working on your balance, you’re missing a huge opportunity to prevent broken bones.
Better posture. You might not wear ‘high heels’ but even most athletic sneakers have a positive heel. That means your heel is higher than your toes relative to flat, level ground. Structurally, even a few millimeters of height difference pitches your skeleton forward. You don’t fall forward though because your muscles along the back of your body- the calves, hamstrings, gluts and low back muscles- overly tense in order to keep you upright. If you walk around like this all the time, those muscles will eventually physically shorten by decreasing the number of sacromeres- the repeating contractile units that make up the muscles. Once they are shortened, they stay that way, unless you give them enough stimulus to lengthen again. Going barefoot puts you in a ‘zero drop’ or neutral foot position and allows your skeleton to achieve a balanced, “stacked” position over the feet without having to shorten your muscles.
Less foot/knee/hip/low back pain. As above, if your muscles have started to physically accommodate their length to keep you from falling over, they are probably very tight too. This means they are putting an increased amount of force on the bones to which they are attached and the joints which they cross. For example, the calf muscles attaches to the lower part of the femor (thigh bones) in the back and the hamstrings cross the back of the knee to attach to the lower leg bone, the tibia. If both of these muscles are short and tight, they are going to pull and compress the knee joint. How many people do you know who have “bone on bone” in their knees, or are losing the space (and therefore cartilage) in their knee joint? Do your knees grind, click or pop? Taking supplements to increase the synthesis of cartilage in the knee can be helpful, but if there is no space for that cartilage to grow because the joint is compressed, how effective will that be? Perhaps that real reason clinical trails fail to find a conclusive benefit from taking glucosamine, chondroitin and/or MSM. By walking around on a neutral foot, going barefoot can help correct these imbalances that lead to poor posture and increased compression forces on certain joints. Also, if you have bunions, let me correct a misconception right now. Bunions themselves are not hereditary. The tendency to wear shoes with a narrow toe box that squish the toes together, can be taught or even encouraged by family members, which is why it might seem to ‘run in the family.’ Also, the shape of your foot- how wide or narrow it is, may be under some genetic control. So if everyone in your family has wider-than-average feet, but all insist on cramming them into average width shoes, most people in the family will end up with foot malformations at some point in live.
Less foot odor/nail fungus. Fungi love dark, moist environments. So do most of the bacteria that lead to foot odor. If you want to clear up these conditions, you don’t need a lot of expensive creams, sprays or powders. You do need to let your feet air out and dry out though. Going barefoot around your house or yard more often can be a great way to do this. (Note: if you have an advanced case of nail fungus where most or all of your nails are thick brittle and yellow, please see a doctor for a medication. Once the fungus is cleared, going barefoot more often can help prevent it from coming back. Especially since some of that fungus is probably now living in your shoes….)
Earthing. When we walk with our barefeet directly on the earth, there is a measurable exchange of ions. Specifically, we discharge excess positive ions. Holistic health experts believe that a build up of these positive ions in our bodies can support inflammation and have negative health consequences. One clinician did a small experiment and found that just 15 minutes a day of walking barefoot on the ground helped her patients reduce inflammation. If their inflammatory load was already low, it helped them lose weight.

If you’re excited about and ready to start adding some barefoot time to your life- excellent! Stay tuned for next week’s post where I will give you some guidelines for incorporating this in your life safely and without injury! Can’t wait? Check out my favorite book on this topic by Katy Bowman.

Also, feel free to follow me on Instagram (@primaldoc) for some inspiration from my own barefoot adventures!

Or sign up for my email list with the link below to get my free report and to receive emails with important information for living your best, healthiest life!

Blue light, your brain and your health

March 22, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Blue light is much more common in our environment than it ever has been. It’s affecting your eyes right now as you read this on your computer screen or device. I’m not going to tell you it’s all bad. In fact, sunshine has been providing our eyeballs and brain with a source of blue light since the very beginning of time.

The problem is that our brains are still very much attuned to natural rhythms of dark and light. When bright sunlight hits the backs of our retinas first thing in the morning, it actually helps us wake up. Melatonin production is turned off and cortisol production begins. Cortisol should be at its highest levels first thing in the morning.

Throughout the day, cortisol levels will gradually decline, with the lowest levels occurring just after dark. Since cortisol is antagonistic to melatonin, it is extremely important that this occurs. People who have trouble falling asleep at night, especially if they feel their minds are too ‘busy’ to fall asleep, often have cortisol levels that are too high in the evenings.

This often happens due to stress, but it also occurs because of all the stimulatory blue light we expose our eyes and brains to at night!

In the evenings and after dark, the bright, blue wavelength light fades away in favor of the orange wavelengths. Without the blue wavelengths stimulating the pineal gland and the rest of the mesencephalon (the top part of your brainstem), cortisol production decreases and melatonin production proceeds.

What’s interesting to note is that melatonin may do more than just help us sleep. There is research that suggests it has cancer-fighting properties; that one of the important things that happens while we sleep is immunosurveillance for precancerous and cancerous cells. In this study, women who worked at night had an elevated risk of breast cancer. Here, it was associated with an increase incidence of colorectal cancers (see citation 12-17 in this last article for physiological mechanisms of melatonin’s anti-cancer properties).

So we need to limit our exposure to blue light after sundown, but how? One of the biggest ways is to eliminate the use of electronic devices at night. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have all become regular interlopers in our evening routines. For purposes of stress reduction as well as melatonin, it would be optimal to not use these device at all after sunset.

That may not be reality for most of us though. I use a free program on my laptop called f.lux that determines what time of day it is in my next of the woods and then automatically filters out the blue light from the screen. You have to jailbreak your phone or tablet to use it on those devices and I’m not just not up for doing that, so if I have to use one of those devices, I wear a pair of orange googles that filter the blue light. Rumor has it that the new iOS update (9.3) includes a native blue-light filter function , though my phone is not new enough for me to have tried this personally.

One thing I would like to note here- though there are ways to mitigate the harmful effects of blue light exposure at night, that doesn’t mean you can continue using your device at night with impunity. The postures we tend to use when staring at a small screen, as well as the effects to the muscles of our eyes from focusing on a close up object for long periods of time, all take their toll on our bodies and our health as well. For some of us, the stress caused from social media interactions can be detrimental. For these reasons, it would be best not just to mitigate the harmful effects of blue light, but also to be more conscious and aware of our electronic usage in general. You’ll probably find more high quality, fulfilling interactions with the people next to you then the ones on the other side of the electrons.

Want to learn more about lifestyle factors may be eroding your health? Interested in working with doc that “gets it” and sees the bigger picture of health? Give my office a call today at 845-687-6387 and see how I can help you.

Or sign up for my email list with the link below to get my free report and to receive emails with important information for living your best, healthiest life!

Understanding musculoskeletal pain: “You are how you move”

March 15, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

Musculoskeletal pain is one of the main things that brings people into my office. Most of us have resigned ourselves to pain simply being a part of life. We’re even told by the medical establishment that it is simply part of getting older.

Pain from trauma or acute injury not withstanding, I generally don’t accept this ‘simply getting older’ argument. I think a much more likely culprit is the way we do or do not move our bodies on a regular basis.

For instance, I have joked with people that I have a job because people sit at computers all day long. They spend hours a day using only the tiny muscles of their hands and eyes, while hardly using the large “prime mover” muscles of the hips, legs & torso. As the number of hours a person spends in a chair accumulates over a lifetime, their body begins to adapt to this position. Hamstring and calf muscles become short & tight, as does the psoas (which helps stabilize the lumbar spine). Glut maximus muscles lengthen and become weaker. This alone correlates with most of the cases of low back pain I see in my office. When the glutes are no longer effective at extending the hip- a motion which allows us to standing up right from sitting, I find that more of the effective load shifts to the smaller, paraspinals muscles of the low back. This often leads to a person’s back going ‘out’ and musculoskeletal pain in the low back as these small muscles aren’t designed to take that much of the load. (Read more about why sitting is bad for you in my post Sitting is the New Smoking.)

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, if the problem is caused by the way a person is moving and using their body on a regular basis, then the solution should be aimed at this root cause. That’s because “you are how you move.”

Here’s a couple of examples:

Baseball pitchers show a “twisting” of their humerous (upper arm bone) in their pitching arm on CT scans. Why would the bone twist? Because it is responding to constant twisting forces that come from the wind-up portion of the pitch. (Read more in Katy Bowman’s Whole Body Barefoot.)
Ever known someone who has a bunion on one foot and not the other? If this was just genetic condition (as some people believe it is), it should happen on both feet because your feet are not genetically different from each other (unless you are the world’s first walking foot transplant recipient). The bunion develops on the foot where there has been downward movement of the arch, toward the ground. This results in forces that push the big toe to the side as the foot rolls over it or “toes off.” The bunion is a callous of bone that develops in response to this force.

I could go on, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t. The point is this: despite what it may seem, your bone structure is not fixed. Neither are your muscles. They simply react to the loads and forces placed upon them on a regular basis.

This means that even something like osteoarthritis- and it’s subsequent musculoskeletal pain- is subject to change! After all, what osteoarthritis really is, is a mal-adapation to forces and loads placed on a joint or joints from the way we use them (or don’t) over our lifetimes. This is essentially what mechanotransduction is- the physical loads and forces on a cell effect the way it’s DNA is expressed. (The word of the day kids is ‘mechanotransduction.’ Bonus points if you can use it in a sentence today!)

So how do you ‘fix’ this and end your musculoskeletal pain? The solution is simple, but its not easy. It requires a daily commitment. A commitment to move more- through a variety of ranges, positions and conditions. It requires a transition away from positive-heeled, overly built footwear, to zero-drop or minimal footwear. It requires a transition away from sitting at your desk in front of a screen all of the time, to standing, squatting or even sitting on the floor more and taking frequent screen breaks to ‘rest’ your eyes. It requires doing the daily work of performing corrective exercises that stretch and lengthen tight tissues while also committing to doing work to strengthen weak areas. In short, it requires commitment to a daily movement practice.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to take long. You can do many of these things while doing your normal daily activities. Watch for a future post about how to incorporate more beneficial movement into your daily routine. (You may want to sign up for my email list below to be notified when it’s posted. You’ll even get a free gift from me for signing up. Use the box below.)

In the meantime, if you are struggling with musculoskeletal pain and are looking for a doc who will help you work to fix the root cause, give my office a call at 845-687-6387.

Primal Beauty: My non-toxic skincare regime

March 9, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

Did you know your skin is your largest organ? It’s a huge part of our detoxification pathways. Yes, skin is a barrier system, but it also absorbs things through it’s membrane and allows other things out.

I’m always flabberghasted when in one breath, we are told not to worry about chemicals in our beauty products being absorbed through our skin (the FDA has different safety standards for things that go ON your skin as opposed to IN your body), and then that same organization approves the use of a hormonal birth control patch. Errr…. um what?

Personally, I made the transition to non-toxic skincare and beauty products long ago because that didn’t make much sense to me. It also seemed that if I was going to do a lot of work caring about what I put in my body, I should also think about what I put on it as well.

The biggest problem with non-toxic skincare products is of course, finding ones that work half as well as their chemical-laden counterparts. The demand for non-toxic skincare has greatly increased the choices available however, and has even brought these products out of the back aisles of out-of-the-way health food stores to major chain retailers throughout the world. This unfortunately has lead to many products being marketed as ‘natural’ when really they are anything but. So how do you find effective and truly good for you skincare products?

For starters, look in your kitchen. There’s the axiom, ‘if its safe enough to go in your body, it’s safe enough to go on your body.’ This is why they call their products ‘skinfood’ over at Primal Life Organics. (Also because it’s deeply nourishing for the skin!) The great thing about using kitchen products is that you can make your own beauty products yourself. You can save money and know exactly what is them!

Being pretty busy though and having a pretty tiny kitchen, I don’t have a lot of time or space to make my own ‘skinfood,’ so I was thrilled when I found Primal Life Organics. I’ve been using their products almost exclusively for over two years. Here’s a few of the products I personally use and love!

Peppermint toothpowder. You don’t need a lot or even any foam to get your teeth clean and freshen your breath. Especially if you are eating a low sugar, lower carb diet, you may notice like I have, that you don’t get that funky build up on your teeth. (Carbohydrates are the only macronutrients that start to be digested in the mouth. They are broken down to small sugars and as these sugars build up in the mouth, they feed the bacteria there. These bacteria ferment those sugars for food, and in the process, create acids that can erode the enamel of your teeth, leading to cavities & gum erosion.) This toothpowder is a fine clay that creates a gentle polishing paste, without any added sugars or weird foaming agents. I’ve had no complaints from my dentist since using it. I also find that it makes an excellent toothpaste for camping because I can practice Leave No Trace ethics and simply swallow it with a bit of water- without wanting to throw up (like I would with regular toothpaste).
Dirty ‘poo. My hair has been a constant source of frustration for me. It’s super fine, there’s not a lot of it, and it’s pretty limp. I use to wash it everyday, otherwise, it would look greasy and the extra oils would weigh it down. A few years ago, I tried the ‘No ‘Poo’ method of using just baking soda and it was much too harsh for my fine hair. It broke a lot of my hair off at or near the root and I’m still trying to grow out some of those funky layers! Enter Dirty Poo, which has some baking soda in it, but is mostly clay based. The clay absorbs the dirt and excess oil which gets washed out when I rinse the clay out of my hair. The result is perfectly clean hair! I’ve also switched to washing my hair 2-3 times a week instead of everyday and this has cut down on the amount of oil that builds up. (The oil actually builds up in response to being constantly stripped away by typical shampoos.) Dirty Poo has kept my hair much more healthy and even allows it have some of its natural body!
Stick Up deodorant stick. It was a hard transition to just deodorant. I’m definitely a sweat-er and I’m pretty active. It’s taken some time to get use to sweating after years of anti-perspirant use. At first, it seemed like the floodgates were opening and my armpits were making up for all the sweat they were forced to block for years. It’s finally settled out where I don’t sweat much unless I’m being really active and what I do sweat doesn’t have quite the odor to it. This detox and transition to just deodorant took me the better of a year but I’m glad I didn’t give up on it. Coconut oil, baking soda and some essential oils are all that is in my deodorant. No weird propolyene glycol chemical like even some of the ‘natural’ deodorants have. (Sweating is important for detoxing some chemicals!)
Sugar-based hair spray. Given that I have some pretty fine, limp hair, I like to give it a little spritz with this and then scrunch it to give it some body and texture. It washes out easily and isn’t overly drying to my hair.
Fallen face serum. My skincare regime in pretty simple. After a shower, I use some organic witch hazel on a cotton ball to cleanse & tone the skin, then I moisturize with this serum. It’s jojoba oil based, which closely resembles the chemical structure of the skin’s own natural oil. Hence your skin doesn’t have to replace as much oil because it’s not constantly being stripped away. The Fallen serum has essential oils from pumpkin that smell DEVINE and I love using it all the time- not just in the fall.
Fallen body butter. I buy this two jars at time in the fall, when it’s made, so that I have enough to last all year. With a bit of cinnamon essential oil in it, it smells wonderful and the combination of oils is deeply hydrating- no more scaly, dry winter skin!

That’s it! Those are the only 6 non-toxic skincare products I need to use on a regular basis. All are completely organic with ingredients that come directly from nature. Most I could find in my kitchen. My skin and hair skin look great and are healthy too, and most importantly I don’t worry about the future health consequences of my beauty regime.

MovNat: The workout the world forgot

March 2, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Our bodies are designed and capable of doing amazing things!!!!