Occasionally, I will have an argument with my wife and realize “it’s the peas”. Let me explain. First, my wife and I are complete opposites. Although we enjoy a lot of similar activities and values, our personalities are very different. I used to get frustrated by our polarity at the beginning of our marriage and thought “this is never going to work out”. Now after 28 years of marriage, I realize that our differences and the way we approach life differently are a blessing. The saying goes, “if 2 people are exactly the same, one is unnecessary”. My wife having a different perspective than me, and one that I would never have thought of, is a gift if I can wrestle my ego to the ground. Not ALL the time, but many times, if you can be open (which is a genetic weakness in my family) and look at someone else's perspective, you can come up with solutions to your “issues” that are better than one person could have thought of one their own. Most of the time, 1 + 1 = 3 if you are open to it.

One thing that I’ve come to realize that results in a lot of our arguments, and usually results in an “I’m sorry” on my part, is “the peas”. My mom tells the story of her and her boyfriend having dinner one night, which she had taken the time to cook for him. When she asked him “how’s dinner?”, he replied, “the peas are a little mushy”. My mom immediately broke into tears, upon which her boyfriend was shocked. He apologized and asked why the dramatic response to mushy peas? She recognized that it wasn’t “the peas”, it was something else that she was upset with him about and was holding on to and didn’t share her feelings with him. It was building up inside and then “the peas” were the proverbial “straw that broke the camel's back” where the negative emotions came pouring out.

Thoughts create emotions and feelings. Many times, we have negative emotions and feelings because of thoughts we are holding onto. It’s like water building behind a dam that eventually breaks and when it does, it usually creates a mess, not just for us, but for those around us.

I have what I call “the doorknob test”. I ask myself how I’m feeling before I grab the doorknob to go into the house or my office? If I’m holding onto “baggage” in the form of negative feelings or emotions, I hit “control-alt-delete” in my mind and let them go before I walk through the door. I don’t want to take that negative baggage into my home or office and dump them out on someone who doesn’t deserve it. It still happens from time to time but I know that I am much more aware of my negative feelings and their potential impact on someone else.

So next time “the peas” happen and you go off on someone, not for what they did, but for all the rancid emotions that were building up inside you, realize that you have the power to change this. Mindfulness, which is the power to be aware of what you are thinking and change it, has become one of the most powerful forces for good in my life. Mindfulness is tough, which is why most people don't practice it. Mindfulness takes responsibility for your thoughts and the power to change them. Thoughts lead to emotions and emotions lead to actions. What actions are your thoughts and emotions triggering? Who is at the end of the barrel of your negative feelings?

David Bornstein said, “Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions”.

Best in health,
[[ownerNickname]]

This was written by Dr. Matt Hart, who lives in the Chicago area and is one of our 8 Weeks to Wellness doctors. He wants to do more for his patients. I thought this was worth sharing.

For everybody who has been at the office lately, I am sure you have noticed many changes and have wondered what is going on around here? It’s kind of a long story, but I will try to keep it short. The truth is that I have had to take a hard look at our practice’s long-term mission. We all know that there is a health crisis and that diabetes, obesity, heart disease, strokes, and cancer are on the rise, and it becomes even more personal when it affects you and the people you love.

The hard truth is that there is a huge difference between our biological and chronological age and that difference is becoming more apparent as time goes on and we take a hard look at ourselves as we age. Although the life expectancy in our country is around 79 years of age, most people over the age of 65 are taking 9 different medications and living with chronic pain and disease for the last 15 years of their life. People are merely surviving, instead of thriving in their golden years. In many ways, they are a burden to their families, instead of the blessing that they could and should be.

I lived this firsthand for the last 10 years of my dad’s life and watched him go from a jovial, passionate man, excited about his new life after retirement, looking forward to traveling the country in an RV with my mom visiting family, and national parks and playing with their 8 grandchildren. He had all these dreams of what he would do once he retired, and the reality was that shortly after retiring he had a mild stroke and developed Type 2 diabetes, and then developed kidney disease. He also had COPD from years of smoking, had a major stroke, and spent the next 10 years in and out of the hospital and long-term care facilities, in a wheelchair or with a walker and with my mom as his primary caregiver. Sound familiar? All my dad’s health problems that he developed were due to poor lifestyle and health choices throughout his life and they were all completely preventable. Years of smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, and high stress robbed my dad of his golden years. Instead of my kids being excited to visit their grandpa because he would play with them, we would have to tell the kids to come with us to visit grandpa because we don’t know how much longer he has. I wish my kids could have known him like I did, a great man that I admired. They knew him as a grumpy, tired old man that they had to see out of family obligation. What made this so hard for me was everything that my dad had going on with his health problems was preventable years earlier with better lifestyle choices.

Don’t get me wrong for the past 20 years I have loved every day at Hart Chiropractic Center and have loved helping people live better lives naturally by helping to take care of their aches and pains with chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, and spinal decompression. However, over the past 10 years struggling to help my dad with his failing health I have realized that there is so much more we can do to help serve our patients and the trip-city community. For that reason, we are starting the 8 Weeks to Wellness program, a proactive, lifestyle approach to help individuals optimize how they eat and supplement how they handle stress, exercise, and care for their body through a specific comprehensive 8-week program.

Our primary mission is your health. One by one, family by family, our goal is to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own well-being and positively impact their God-given true health potential. I am excited to share more with you as we grow and serve our community. You can also go to our website Hart Chiropractic.com and learn more about the 8 Weeks to Wellness program.

Yours In Health,

Dr. Matt Hart

Hi [[leadFirstName]],

One of the things that I think my patients really appreciate is teaching them how to develop healthy habits. We educate them on what healthy habits consist of, and what they look like when practiced regularly. There is NO greater gift that you can give yourself than the gift of a healthy body and mind. The return on investment of putting time and energy into your health is 1,000-fold. It will determine if you ultimately become a blessing or burden as you age.

In our office, we have created a simple yet powerful graphic and metaphor to know what "habits" reap the biggest rewards.

Great health: “INSIST ON IT”.

Each letter stands for a different yet important category of good health.
Inflammation: You must minimize the inflammatory load on the body. Are you inflamed? Learn how to decrease inflammation in the body. Belly-fat is one of the biggest causes of inflammation in the body because it produces cytokines (inflammatory messengers).

Nutritional Deficiency: The body requires nutrients to function optimally such as Vitamin D3, Omega-3 fatty acids, Magnesium, B-vitamins, and Probiotics to name just a few. Are you getting enough of them? I recommend supplementing these nutrients with a good quality company.

Subluxation: Misalignment in the spine compromises our posture and movement patterns. This impacts our nervous system's ability to adapt to environmental stresses. Posture follows movement like a shadow and alignment determines posture and ultimately movement.

Insulin Resistance: We are eating too many refined carbohydrates and way too much sugar. 40% of Americans over 40 are now obese and have Metabolic Syndrome which leads to SO many chronic diseases. Eat mostly carbohydrates with fiber, which comes down to eating mainly vegetables, and limited amounts of fruit.

Sleep Deficiency: We downregulate our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and our bodies heal when we sleep. As a society, we are not getting the required amount of restful sleep to recover and heal. Health begins with HEALing and recovering.

Toxicity: We are exposed to WAY too many environmental toxins, especially in our food. Be mindful of toxins that you may be exposed to.

Overstimulated Sympathetic Nervous System: We are way too stressed out and don’t know how to turn off our sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system through things like meditation, walks in nature, exercise, and deep-breathing exercises, just to name a few.

No Muscle Mass: As a society, we are significantly under-muscled, and loss of muscle mass is the #1 biological marker of aging. Get strong! A strong body has command over its world.

Increased Visceral Fat: Our bellies are killing us, and we are carrying too much fat in our trunks, strangling our organs, and producing way too many cytokines, which are molecules of inflammation.

The Lack of Purpose: Without a purpose, life has no meaning and without meaning, why would you want to perform at your optimal level? If your life doesn't matter, neither does your health. Why did God put you on this earth? What are your talents and passions that could help this world? When you have a talent that serves something bigger than yourself, you will know HAPPINESS and PURPOSE.

Yours in great health,
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Hi [[leadFirstName]],

For over 20 years, I’ve been coaching patients and Chiropractors to make behavior changes that will create better habits, habits that will lead to happiness and success instead of shame and failure.

I've come to learn one very powerful thing through the coaching process. Willpower doesn’t work at all!

Let me give you an example, anyone who knows me knows I LOVE ice cream. If it has chocolate and peanut butter in it, all the better. I can tell you, the key to me not eating ice cream is NOT about willpower. It’s about not being exposed to it. If ice cream happens to land in my freezer because in a moment of weakness a pint of Häagen-Dazs happens to jump into my grocery cart, it won’t last for more than a few days. I KNOW how many calories, cholesterol, sugar, dairy, (should I keep going?) are in that pint of ice cream, but I eat it anyway.

Before my son left last year for Life University in Atlanta this past year, he worked at Owowcow, a group of ice cream stores in our area. He delivered their freshly made ice cream from the factory to their 5 local stores. An employee benefit was he got free ice cream that he frequently brought home and put in our freezer. Did he take this job to torment and torture his father? Maybe so. What I can tell you is that since he left for college a year ago, I have eaten about 5% of the amount of ice cream that I ate the year before when he worked for the ice cream company. Why? Exposure, not willpower. I know I shouldn’t eat it, but if it’s available and easy to get, my ice-cream-addicted brain takes over and I’m toast.

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During the Vietnam war, some interesting research came out on the power of addiction. In 1971, as many as 20% of the soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. Lee Robins oversaw a special task force created by Richard Nixon to help promote the prevention and rehabilitation of soldiers returning from Vietnam. What he learned from this research was that only 5% of soldiers became re-addicted within a year of returning home from the war. This compared to the traditional rehab experience for non-soldiers at the time, in which 90% of heroin users became addicted once they returned home from rehab. The research concluded that people who are addicted aren’t all that different.

What determined the difference between those that can stop addictive behaviors like heroin and those that can’t? Their environment. The soldiers returning home from Vietnam radically changed their environment. Once they returned home, they weren’t exposed to the daily triggers, easy access, and reminders of heroin use that was present in Vietnam.

What’s the lesson here? It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it all the time. Once a habit (good or bad) is formed, it’s much harder to change when the environment in which this habit was formed suddenly appears. The habit is an effect and the environment is its cause. Ice cream in the freezer? We eat it. Stressed at work? We reach for a cigarette, alcohol, or junk food. Getting a little bored or we’re feeling low? We jump on your social media to take our minds off our problems.

You can’t break a bad habit if you don’t change the environment in which that habit was created. Change the environment and you’re more likely to change the habit.

Want to work out? Schedule to meet a friend or personal trainer at the gym. Want to eat healthier? Change the food you put in your grocery cart or stop eating out so much. Want to improve your mind and emotions? Pick up a book instead of your phone.

Self-control is NOT a long-term strategy to stop bad habits. Optimizing your environment for better behavior is. A behavior repeated often over time becomes our unconscious habit, and our habits determine the outcome of our lives.

Best in Health,
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Hi [[leadFirstName]],

As you get older, you become less sensitive, less emotional, and less egocentric and it becomes easier to talk about things that really matter.

So, I’d like to talk about something important… Your bowels and gastrointestinal system. I’m sometimes amazed at what I see when I take a patient’s side-standing lumbar x-ray. Not only can you see the lumbar vertebrae, alignment of the spine, and lumbar disc spaces, but you can see the bowels. It’s amazing what I see on patients' x-ray, large, distended bowels, which bloats the stomach out.

Your bowels (small and large intestine) are about 9-15 ft. long and they are wound and packed into your abdomen. Imagine what happens when those bowels swell and distend due to multiple factors which we'll talk about in a minute.

I’m amazed at how much garbage and gas the bowels can hold. Research shows that the average person’s bowels can hold up to 7-10 pounds of fecal material. That’s a lot of garbage that nobody is taking out to the trash. People are eating their way to bigger and bigger bellies and their bowels are making the increased fat in their abdomen stick out even more. No wonder nobody tucks in their shirt anymore.

Let me explain why all that garbage is stuck in your intestines and what to do about it.

When you think about it, your GI system is just the continuation of your skin. It’s the interface between your external skin (the skin you see) and your internal skin (the skin you don’t see). Food passes from our mouth to our esophagus, onto our stomach, then to the small and then large intestine, and from there, I think you know what happens.

Well, research shows that the average American eats up to 60% processed foods. These proceeded foods are void of one of the most important things for your GI system, FIBER. The average American adult (kids are even worse) gets about 5-10 grams of fiber per day and research shows that we need about 35-50 grams of fiber per day. Fiber is SO important, it increases peristalsis, which is the natural movement within the bowels, hence the term “move your bowels”. No fiber - No movement.

Fiber also feeds our microbiome, our naturally occurring pro-biotic gut bacteria that do so many things for our health from help digest our food, to help make vitamins for our body, to help aid in immune function, to help boost serotonin to aid in depression, and lastly they help reduce inflammation.

Think of fiber as “weed and feed” for our gut. Many people take probiotics, but without healthy soluble and insoluble fiber, you are throwing seeds (probiotics) on bad soil (gut lining). Your gut lining, which is called your intestinal mucosa, is easily damaged and this can lead to “leaky gut syndrome” or “intestinal permeability" where proteins and molecules that should pass through the gut pass back into our bloodstream. This can trigger an auto-immune response in the body. Therefore, auto-immune diseases (over 100 of them) have risen dramatically in the past few decades. So, the moral of the story is to take better care of your bowels. If we cared as much about how the inside of our body looked as much as we did the outside, we would be much healthier people.

This is an important topic, so I’m going to talk in my next blog about how to care for your bowels and what to do if you have a bowel disorder such as IBS, constipation, Crohn’s disease, or leaky gut (auto-immune problems).

Remember, your bowels are the interface between your external world and your internal world. They stand guard at the gates of your health.

Best in Health,
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Hi [[leadFirstName]],

The other day, an interesting thing happened that happens often in my practice. A dad came in for a follow-up visit that I had with his 16-year-old son. The 16-year-old came in initially with his mother for his new patient evaluation for a low back problem that he was experiencing. The follow-up visit is usually the second appointment in our office where we review the patient’s exam findings, posture pictures, and x-rays. We also explain if we can help them, how Chiropractic works, and give them their first adjustment.

The young man, David, was the last patient of the evening and I went out to the reception area to introduce myself to David and his dad Craig. I hadn’t met David (the new patient) yet because my associate Christine has done his new patient exam and taken his x-rays. Right away, from the time I shook Craig’s hand (David’s father), to the walk back to my office, I could tell from his body language that the father was curious and somewhat skeptical about what his son was doing in a “Chiropractors” office. I mean come on now, were not “real-doctors” are we? You can tell a lot from someone’s body language, tone of voice, and the dad’s body language and questions he asked me was asking me “I don’t know if my son should be doing this”. After all, the mom was the one who initially insisted that David come see us, but the dad was the one who was going to make sure that this “Chiropractic thing” was on “the-up-and-up”.

Something incredible happened though over the next 30 minutes. As I explained what was going on with David's spine, Craig went from being skeptical of Chiropractic to understanding Chiropractic. I could see the change as I asked his son questions and went over his posture pictures and x-rays with them both. As I explained WHY he was having back pain and what we need to do to fix it, the dad paid more attention and even agreed with me a few times when I talked to David about his posture and “screen time”, and how I thought this was causing issues in his neck that was compounding his low back pain. Chiropractic WORKS and it makes sense. It’s a simple concept, anything out of its normal alignment is not going to work as well as something in good alignment. Posture is an EFFECT and alignment is the CAUSE.

At the end of David’s appointment, the dad asked me if I could help him with a chronic neck and shoulder issue that he was having. I said, “I don’t know until I see what’s going on if I can help you?” I am pretty sure that Dad will become a patient in my office. The dad went from a skeptic to grasping Chiropractic and understanding what it had to offer people. I can work with skeptics, but I can't work with close-minded people. Some of the biggest fans in my office started off being some of my biggest skeptics. When you get great results for people, you win them over.

The definition of ignorant is “lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated”. Get curious about things you don’t understand. That includes other people as well! You may be surprised by what you learn and how something or someone can benefit YOU in your own life.

Yours in Health,
[[ownerNickname]]

Hi [[leadFirstName]],

I have a good friend and mentor who is a genius when it comes to understanding nutrition, particularly why and how your GI system is critical to your overall health. His name is Dr. Robert Silverman and he always says "It takes guts to be healthy". I absolutely agree, gut health is probably close to nervous system health when it comes to a long and vibrant life.

In my last email, I talked about WHY gut health is so important. In this email, I'm going to talk about HOW to have better gut health.

Remember, the 4 main causes of poor gut health are:

1. Poor Diet - The most common components of food that can damage your intestinal lining are the proteins found in unsprouted grains (traditional grains), excess sugar, GMO’s and conventional dairy.

2. Chronic Stress - Stress shuts down your digestion because digestion takes a tremendous amount of energy which can’t be spared when you are in “fight or flight”. This causes food to rot or spoil in your gut causing intestinal damage.

3. Toxic Overload - We are exposed to over 80,000 chemicals and toxins every single year, but the worst offenders for causing leaky gut include antibiotics, pesticides, tap water, aspirin, and NSAIDs. I recommend buying a high-quality water filter to eliminate chlorine and fluoride and look to natural plant-based herbs to reduce inflammation in your body.

4. Dysbiosis - Probiotic Bacterial Imbalance. So many things can cause damage to the normal “flora” which helps us in so many ways. Things like antibiotic overuse, chlorinated water, a diet high in sugar and animal protein, sulfates as well as abuse or overuse of non-steroidal meds are the main ones.

The good news is there’s a solution to having better gut health. There is a four-step process called "The 4 R's" that includes:

1. REMOVE - Foods and factors that damage the gut. These include sugar, gluten, artificial sweeteners, antibiotics, steroid medications, dairy, soy, GMO foods, alcohol, and additives/preservatives.

2. REPLACE - with healing foods like bone broth, fermented veggies, coconut products, sprouted seeds, grass-fed meats, wild fatty fish like salmon or cod, steamed veggies, and of course, high fiber foods like lots of veggies.

3. REPAIR - with specific supplements like probiotics, pre-biotics such as fiber (soluble and insoluble), digestive enzymes, L-glutamine, oil of oregano, quercetin, and collagen powder. 2 of my favorite products to help repair the gut are Colonix intestinal cleaner and GI Integrity by Nutri-Dyn.

4. REBALANCE - with probiotics. Look for brand quality meaning choose reputable companies, high CFU (colony-forming units), and survivability (probiotics should never be heated and should be shipped cold). Bifidobacterium bifidum, Bifidobacterium longum, Bifidobacterium breve, Bifidobacterium infantis, Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus acidophilus. Lactobacillus bulgaris are just a few strains that should be included in a good probiotic. The probiotic that I take is called Ultra-Biotic Daily by Nutri-Dyn.

If you suffer from inflammatory issues, auto-immune issues, depression, energy issues, sleep issues, and of course, GI issues, look to your gut, as it is most likely the core of your problem.

Remember, it takes "GUTS" to be healthy. Do you have what it takes?

Yours in Great Health,
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