Health Care Reform Bill

Six Wellness Provisions Are

Addressed in the Final Bill

Worksite health promotion programs are expected to increase according to the recent Health Care Reform bill approved by Congress. Don Powell, founder of the American Institute for Preventive Medicine outlined six provisions favorable to wellness promotion in his brief article. If you are a wellness promoter, now is the time to bring your work forward! AIPM offers excellent professional Journal Articles on their website addressing wellness.

Worksite Health Hub

Health Promotion with a G.L.A.D. Approach

Worksite Health Hub integrates, centralizes, and personalizes wellness activities offered by organizations. Worksites can achieve G.L.A.D. results using an interactive method that ‘Grabs’ attention daily, inspires ‘Learning’ in small segments of two minutes or less, helps individuals and families ‘Apply’ healthy practices, and for deeper reinforcement, encourages people to become ‘Dedicated’ to a healthy lifestyle. Participation throughout the program is celebrated, heightening the joy of wellness!

With over 26 years experience in the wellness field, I have been able to design the Worksite Health Hub combining the capabilities of the Internet and wireless devices with the experience Wellness Quest has gained developing motivational wellness programs. The integrated wellness portal Worksite Health Hub is a breakthrough in health promotion effectiveness. Check out Quest for Your Best! postings on this blog to see content that will soon come alive on our Worksite Health Hub! Jeff Haebig

Let's Walk the Talk on Obesity

Let’s replace lip service

with ‘hip service’!

Dr. Delos Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, reported in the February 18, 2010 issue of FORTUNE magazine that, “Obesity accounts for 10% of the cost of health care in the U.S. — we will never be able to control the cost of health care until we begin to control the epidemic of obesity. Two-thirds of the U.S. is overweight, and one-third is obese. We are the fattest nation in the world. Our rate of obesity is going up so much that probably half the U.S. will be obese in the next 20 years. We have to do something, and there are plenty of things we can do.”

How about insisting on Daily Physical Education with a fitness focus in our preschools and beyond? Let’s replace lip service with ‘hip service’!

Obesity Outweighs Tobacco Risk

Obesity is now just as much

a drag on health as smoking

Katherine Harmon writing for Scientific American reports the results of a CDC study revealing that being overweight has replaced tobacco as the leading contributor to poor health in the U. S. Smoking still causes more cumulative years to be lost due to premature death.

Health-related Websites

Ten health-related websites to add to your favorites list

I just heard from Hollee Enright, OD, Certified Nutritionist whose website has interesting articles and a short blog that is worth your attention. The Ten Health-Related Websites article caught my eye.

Get High without Chemicals

Wellness Quest for Your Best! Sing, exercise, laugh and enjoy other natural ways to perk yourself up. Body-brain ‘feel good’ chemicals you create can last longer, without nasty hangovers.

Health Benefits: Natural endorphin chemicals produced in the body and brain can produce feelings of peaceful calm and euphoria, while easing physical pain.

Quote: "Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." Mark Twain

Humor: “Why did you get drunk in the first place?” “I didn’t get drunk in the first place… it was the last place.” Author Unknown

Post Script: Feelings of blissful euphoria can result from soothing massage, brisk aerobic exercise, helping people, meditation and other natural acts.

Quest Link: 20 Natural Ways to Get High: Part 1 by LiveLighter.org

Take Steps: How to Get a Natural High on eHow.com

Video: Emotional Sobriety by Tian Dayton on YouTube.com

Note: The cartoon is taken from Health Care-toons Calendar by Jeff Haebig and cartoonist Ed Fischer.

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Hypo-Slow Vestibular System (video)

‘Fidget is Legit’ in classrooms to aid

our learning challenged students

Video: We are creating learning handicaps in our classrooms for students with vestibular weakness when we don’t provide enough physical movement that stimulates the vestibular and connected visual, auditory, tactile, and proprioception (muscular) sensory systems. Attention deficit may result as the RAS, Reticular Activation System is under-stimulated by a hypo-slow vestibular system.

NCLB, Leave No Child Behind by insisting our learning challenged students have frequent opportunities to strengthen their body brain systems called upon to succeed in school. Daily Physical Education strengthens the vestibular system with repeated movements (e.g., rolling, spinning, bouncing, stop and go, balancing, etc.). Let’s move on this!

Emotional Sobriety (video)

Natural highs – healthy ways to feel good

Tian Dayton’s video briefly shows the importance of ‘turning on’ the body’s opiate system… endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, prolactin, and other calming and euphoric mood stabilizers released through wholesome activities. Emotional sobriety is learning how to live in the mid-range, achieving a balanced state to release the medicine chest within us, rather than resort to drugs and addictive behaviors.

Tian Dayton’s article, Body Comes to Therapy, excerpted from her book, The Magic of Forgiveness provides a thorough understanding of how emotions affects the body, including “How Emotion Travels Though the Body… The Positive Function of Fear and Anxiety… The Power of Thought… The Role of the Limbic System… It’s Never Too Late to Limbically Revise… and Limbic Resonance, Regulation and Revision.” Many forms of physical and emotional distress may be caused by pain internalize as a child. We need to confront these deeper origins of pain. Visit TianDayton.com for more insightful articles – this is a terrific site!

Use It... Or Lose It!

Wellness Quest for Your Best! Walk, bike, skate, swim, dance, or move another zestful way for 30 minutes today staying well within your fitness comfort zone. If you haven’t been exercising for a while, choose a shorter time period and activity you enjoy doing.

Health Benefits: Aerobic exercise helps build heart strength and efficiency, increases endurance, improves sleep, raises good cholesterol, and lowers blood pressure. Over time, aerobic exercise helps burn excess body fat and reduces risks of diabetes and other diseases including heart disease and certain cancers.

Quote: He who has health has hope; and he who has hope, has everything. Arabian Proverb

Humor: Just think, if you exercise for 1200 months you are guaranteed to live to a hundred! Author Unknown

Post Script: Be safe, check with your fitness specialist or health service before starting any new exercise program, especially if you are out of shape, over 40, or have a medical condition.

Quick Quest Link: The Benefits of Aerobic Exercise and many other excellent health related articles can be found on WeightLossforAll.com

Take Steps: How to Start an Aerobic Routine by eHow.com

Video: Walking -- Part 1: Start Quick and Easy

Note: The health cartoon is taken from the Health Care-toons Calendar by Jeff Haebig and cartoonist Ed Fischer.

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Explore Movement through Feldenkrais (video)

Awareness through Movement for

Vitality, Creativity, and Comfort

Are you experiencing tension, anxiety, pain, tiredness, lack of focus, or diminished creativity? Explore your own movements through Feldenkrais, a method that combines anatomy, physiology with physics, mechanics and martial arts to understand and optimize movements for increased vitality and youthfulness.

Watch the video or read Marissa Harshman's article 'Exploring Movement with the Feldenkrais Method'. You will learn how to move more seamlessly and effortlessly. Experience the effect of your body on your brain as movement soothes and refreshes your mindbody.

Richard Goldsand's article makes 'Awareness Though Movement', a key Feldenkrais approach, easy to understand.

Brain Research Helps Educators

Brains change based on experience…
Even students embedded in poverty!

Eric Jenson, author of 26 brain-based books connects teaching and learning to brain research. Eric has inspired people around the globe to use music, arts, physical activities, positive emotions, environment, engaging states, and other essential ways to help students of all ages and learning styles achieve their learning potential. He is a master teacher offering highly engaging books, articles, workshops and conferences involving people in the highly effective brain-based learning process. Sign up for a free monthly newsletter at JensenLearning.com.

Enjoy the movie, The Blind Side for a compelling story of a young man moving from poverty and illiteracy to living and learning success, emphasizing the adaptability of the brain when given a chance. This is a movie the whole family will enjoy.

Special thanks to Eric Jensen for inspiring me to put key learning ideas to movement as the Body-Brain Boogieman.

Your Everyday Guide

Free Physical Activity e-book from

TheNational Institute on Aging

Reading my Total Wellness monthly newsletter from Rutherford Publishing, I was directed to the National Institute on Aging offering Your Everyday Guide… a free e-book instructing older adults how to ‘Get Ready…Get Set… Go!’ forward and exercise. Here’s a terrific collection of exercises for endurance, strength, balance and flexibility. You can even track your progress using their daily, weekly and monthly progress charts – this is a superb resource.

Thanks to the insightful and delightful Total Wellness newsletter for leading me to this amazing guide!

Wellness Wheel (graphic)

The goal of wellness is balancing all seven areas

Don Alsbro, originator of Dump Your Plump motivational wellness program, perfectly represents the meaning of wellness using a graphic taken from his book, Take the Wellness Road. Spend time reflecting on this Wellness Wheel. Estimate what you have done in the last 24 hours to foster each of the seven wellness areas – Physical, Intellectual, Social, Environmental, Spiritual, Emotional, Nutritional, and Vocational. Determine your strengths and areas needing attention; joyously seek total well-being today.

Eating Well After Exercise

What You Eat After Exercise Matters

Newswise reports research from the University of Michigan, showing that “Many of the improvements in metabolic health associated with exercise stem largely from the most recent session of exercise, rather than from an increase in ‘fitness’ per se,” according to the study’s senior author Dr. Jeffrey Horowitz. “Specifically, the study found that exercise enhanced insulin sensitivity, particularly when meals eaten after the exercise session contained relatively low carbohydrate content. Enhanced insulin sensitivity means that it is easier for the body to take up sugar from the blood stream into tissues like muscles, where it can be stored or used as fuel. Impaired insulin sensitivity (i.e., “insulin resistance”) is a hallmark of Type II diabetes, as well as being a major risk factor for other chronic diseases, such as heart disease.”

Hyper-vestibular system (video)

Know why so many are challenged in school and life

People with an oversensitive or ‘hyper’ vestibular system often feel overwhelmed. Visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive (muscle and joint) and the attentional systems are directly connected to the vestibular apparatus located within the inner ear. Sitting in the back seat of a car, walking over a bridge, being on the playground, gym, or a class where there is excessive talking, writing or movement can be very challenging.

Rocking, walking, and other linear movements can soothe the oversensitive vestibular system, helping people relax and focus. As the video shows, at times we need to “rock it, to calm it.”

Physical exercises designed to strengthen the vestibular system can greatly help academics. Daily Physical Education taught by movement specialists enhances the body-brain helping students with a hyper-vestibular system achieve their living and learning potential.

Obesity and Early CV Disease

Childhood Obesity Alone May Increase Risk of Later Cardiovascular Disease

Newswise reports research conducted at Nemours Children’s Clinic, showing that obesity alone can predispose individuals to developing cardiovascular disease early in adulthood. Abnormalities in C-reactive protein, high fibrinogen, and other markers for predicting the development of cardiovascular diseases occurred in obese children as young as age 7, long before the onset of puberty.

Nelly Mauras, MD, senior author concludes, “It would be prudent for health care providers to advise more aggressive interventions to limit calories and increase activity in “healthy” overweight children, even before the onset of puberty.

Once again Daily Physical Education with an emphasis on fitness is advocated by researchers, within the medical community.

Note: The health cartoon is taken from Health Care-toons Calendar by Jeff Haebig and cartoonist Ed Fischer.

Exercise Can Ease Fibromyalgia Pain

Easy does it… well planned movement can reduce pain and build strength

Seems contradictory… but moving sore muscles and aching joints can benefit the body according to Gina Shaw writing for WebMD. Swimming, mild stretching and light aerobics can benefit many people. The National Fibromyalgia Association offers a bountiful resource of articles including this one by Lara Ozenne entitled, Staying Fit with Fibromyalgia.

We Are the World

We lost part of our global family in Haiti.

Please reflect on heartbreaking images you have been watching during the past week, showing the devastation in Haiti. If you haven’t already, listen to your heart and donate whatever you can.

We are the world…We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day…

So let’s start giving”

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Exercise and Children

Children need at least sixty minutes of physical activity every day

Medline Plus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health offers a collection of evidence-based, documented articles on popular health topics.

This article on Exercise and Children points to the need for Daily Physical Education in our schools. 4,299 additional articles relating to exercise are posted on this comprehensive Medline Plus website

Exercise May Aid Cognitive Function

Moderate exercise proves key to reducing cognitive impairment during aging

Charles Bankhead writing for MedPage Today, reports “Almost any amount of moderate physical activity in mid- or late life reduced the odds of mild cognitive impairment by 30% to 40% in an ongoing cohort study by Yonas E. Geda, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. For more information regarding this study, and for more studies on Exercise and Fitness focused on body brain function, visit MedPage Today.

Amygdala De-Dah! (video)

Shift from fear to cheer, harnessing the brain’s amygdala with vibrant movement

The Amygdala part of the brain’s limbic system registers intense feelings, preparing the body to fight, flee or freeze instantly should there be a threat. Some people overreact to stressors rather than stepping back, analyzing the situation and taking a more rational approach.

Why not harness the amygdala, using cheers, handshakes, and other energetic actions like dancing and sports to arouse intense feelings of joy? At the Illinois conference for Health Physical Education, Dance and Recreation professionals showed ‘A-Mig-Dah-La’ gestures then created De Dah! with a simple cheer!

Daily Physical Education with vibrant movement is an excellent way to help students regulate intense feelings in wholesome ways – important during these stressful times.

5 Levels of Healing

The miracle of the inner movement called “healing”

According to Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, Ph.D., “Healing is the greatest of all joys.” True healing requires simultaneous work on all five levels – Level one, the physical body; Level two, electromagnetic body; Level three, the mental body; Level four, the dream body; and Level five, the spirit body.

Dr. Klinghardt’s vertical healing system gives us an understanding of holistic medicine. .. “a road map that makes it easier to navigate the sometimes chaotic landscape of healing techniques.”

Romp in the Mud

Ease up on Antibacterial soap and get down and dirty

Peaceful Playgrounds reports research from Northwestern University suggesting that children be allowed to get dirty playing outdoors, exposing them to common, everyday bacteria and microbes needed to build their defensive inflammatory systems. Handling everyday germs is part of our evolutionary protection system.

Hooray for sandboxes and playgrounds!

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America on Drugs

Is our health care system costing us our health?

Craig Stellpflug’s article, Misguided Trust – America on Drugs, presents a bleak picture of health care in America. Emphasis on drugs, rather than on healthy lifestyle is costly. America’s health care costs will soar to $4.1 trillion annually. We spend more for health care than any other country, yet we are only 34th in the world for infant mortality and 42nd for life expectancy.

Craig presents other startling statistics, then ends his article, encouraging us to eat quality food, exercise daily and find positive ways to focus on positive things and creative hobbies. Check out Craig on his Healing Pathways website.

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Healthy Fat Mass in Girls

May have a positive long-term impact on bone health

Newswise.com reports latest research from The Endocrine Society that,
“Fat mass in girls during puberty may have a long-term impact on bone health as they grow into adulthood... Excessive reduction in fat mass could have adverse effects on the developing skeleton particularly in girls, leading to an increased risk of osteoporosis in later life.”

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Stronger, Faster, Smarter (Video)

Physical exercise boosts brainpower for students and the elderly

Mary Carmichael’s article in Newsweek cites research showing how aerobic exercise increases Nerve Growth Factors, such as BDNF, Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor, called Miracle Gro for the brain by Dr. John Ratey in his book, SPARK, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

Understand why we need Daily Physical Education in our schools, and why all people throughout life, especially the elderly need daily exercise to maintain their mental sharpness.

Kudos to scientists William Greenough, Charles Hillman, Arthur Kramer, and physical educators performing a short Genetic Expression -- BDNF movement routine, all from Illinois, involved with moving this science forward!

Start the Year with Weil

Dr. Andrew Weil gets you behind the wellness wheel

There is no better way to start the New Year than visiting Dr. Weil’s website focused on integrated medicine and natural health; check out the food pyramid and read the many self-empowering body and brain enhancing ‘Weil Lifestyle’ articles. Listen to his interview on the Diane Rehm radio show. Search your favorite articles on his Daily Blog – Your Health Today. These are 'Weilly' good wellness resources!

Happy New Year!

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Review the Year and Celebrate!

Wellness QUEST for YOUR BEST! Find a quiet moment to reflect on family, friends and other special people who have helped, loved, and inspired you throughout the past year. Celebrate all of them with an expression of gratitude before the year ends.

Health BENEFITS: Gratitude has a unique relationship with well-being. Wikipedia reports research suggesting how grateful people are happier, more satisfied with their lives and social relationships, and more in control of personal growth. They are less depressed, less stressed, and sleep better.

QUOTE: He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. ~Epictetus

HUMOR: An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~Bill Vaughan

POST SCRIPT: In addition to being thankful for other people’s positive effect on your life, give yourself credit. Your positive efforts deserve to be celebrated as well.

Note: The Health Cartoon shown above is taken from the perpetual Health Care-toons Calendar by Jeff Haebig and cartoonist Ed Fischer.

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QUEST CRYPTOGRAM answer from December 28th

"Triangle of Fitness... strength, flexibility, aerobics"

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Take New Fitness Steps

Wellness QUEST for YOUR BEST! With the New Year fast approaching, consider how you can improve your physical fitness. If you are not sure, consult a fitness specialist or knowledgeable friend who is physically active. You might want to improve your strength, flexibility, or stamina with aerobic training such as walking. Read the web links highlighted above and consult with your health care provider if you are just getting started. Make sure you start well within your fitness level for safety and ease into any new exercise for maximum enjoyment.

Health BENEFITS: Aerobic training strengthens the heart, lungs and circulatory system for disease prevention, helps boost body and brain energy throughout the day, regulates insulin, burns excess calories for weight management, and improves restfulness and sleep. Flexibility training, such as yoga and pilates, keeps muscles and joints supple for greater range of motion, injury prevention and relaxation. Strength training builds muscle tone, making your daily work easier to manage.

QUOTE: To follow without halt, one aim; there’s the secret of success. Anna Pavlova

HUMOR: He’s developing a more active lifestyle. Now he sits and watches aerobic shows on television.

QUEST CRYPTOGRAM: EAMPRDVZ FJ JMERZWW: WEAZRDEO, JVZKMHMVMEC, PZAFHMBW

Clues: D=g and M=i The solution is given on the next blog posting.

Note: The Health Cartoon shown above is taken from the perpetual Health Care-toons Calendar by Jeff Haebig and cartoonist Ed Fischer.

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