Lucky 13!

Our Top 13 Tips for
a Better and Healthier You!

Eat Breakfast

There’s no better way to start the morning than with a healthy breakfast. Include lean proteins, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.

Make Half Your Plate Fruits and Veggies

Fruits and veggies add color, flavor, and texture. Plus, they add vitamins, minerals, and fiber to your plate.

Watch Your Portion Sizes

Try using smaller plates, bowls, and glasses to help you keep your portions under control.

Be Active

Regular physical activity lowers blood pressure and helps your body control stress and weight.

Fix Healthy Snacks

Healthy snacks can sustain your energy levels between meals

Get to Know Food Labels

It’s important to understand what the numbers in the “Nutrition Facts” panel really mean to ensure a healthy lifestyle.

Get Cooking

Cooking at home can be healthy, rewarding, and cost-effective.

Stay Smart while Dining Out

The key is to plan ahead, ask questions, and choose foods carefully.

Enact Family Meal Time

Research shows that family meals promote healthier eating.

Banish Mealtime Boredom

Try new and creative ways to add more fruits and veggies to your meals.

Establish & Plan Your Health Goals

Your health goals are easier to reach when your path is paved with sound advice and easy-to-follow steps that fit into your daily routine.

Drink More Water

Our bodies depend on water for just about everything: regulating body temp; transporting nutrients and oxygen to cells; carrying away waste products; and more.

Get Regular Chiropractic Care

Regular chiro care can help you feel better, move with more freedom, and stay healthier through your lifetime. Ultimately, the goal of chiro care is to restore the body to its natural state of optimal health.



Safe Driving Tips

10 Tips to Boosting Your Immune System

 

Give You Immune System a Boost
10 Helpful tips to give your immune system a boost
this cold and flu season.

                Cold and flu season is here, but with the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, you may not be giving your immune system its best chance at fighting off infections. Thankfully, there are some simple everyday tips to avoid getting sick and to give your immune system a boost.  With the holidays just around the corner, you will definitely want to do everything to boost your immunity.

1.       Decrease/Eliminate Stress: Stress hurts your body in many ways, but it has the most significant effect on your immune system. When we’re stressed, the immune system’s ability to fight off antigens is reduced. That is why we are more susceptible to infections.

Stress can also have an indirect effect on illness as it is associated with all manner of bad habits (coping strategies), for example smoking, drinking alcohol to excess, poor diet due to lack of time, lack of exercise for the same reason, lack of sleep etc.

2.       Laugh: The saying goes that laughter is the best medicine, and there's truth to that. Laughter releases dopamine and other feel-good chemicals in the brain, all of which can help decrease stress.

3.       Adopt a Healthy Diet: Try to eliminate processed foods from your daily routine. Not only are processed foods hard on your body, they don’t provide you with the energy or nutrients your body needs to fight infections. Instead, opt for plenty of colorful fruits and veggies paired with lean proteins!

4.       Drink Water: One of the most popular and beneficial subscriptions for healing is to drink plenty of liquids. And by liquids, we mean water. Water is absolutely essential and critical for all cell functions in your body. When someone is dehydrated they produce Histamines, which are the mucus promoters in your body. So dehydration causes mucus, inflammation, and swelling. We want to be fully hydrated. All of the time, not simply sometimes!

5.       Rest: Been running around like crazy to finish your holiday shopping and now, all of a sudden, you're sick? Well, that's your immune system getting its revenge. The immune system requires a lot of energy to work. When you notice that you’re tired, your appetite is suppressed, and you’re low on energy, your body is diverting energy to your immune system. Instead of taking drugs so you can rush off to work, listen to your body and get some rest. Stay home, stay warm, allow your body to use the energy to feed your immune system, and get healthy. When you sleep, your body is rebuilding new, healthy tissues. Staying up late only slows down this process.

6.       Move: Regular exercise appears to have the advantage of being able to jump-start the immune system, and that can help reduce the number of colds you get. With exercise, the number and aggressiveness of certain immune cells, such as the ones called natural killer cells, increase by as much as 50% to 300%. If you exercise regularly, this temporary increase can help make the immune system more efficient at destroying intruders that cause illness such as colds.

7.       Eliminate Sugar: Even if you’re drinking fruit juice, it’s more than likely that is chalk full of sugar. To put it simply, sugar can cripple your immune system. Sugar compromises the immune system because it lowers the efficiency of white blood cells for a minimum of five hours.

8.       Stay Positive: Researchers aren’t exactly sure why, but studies have shown those with more optimistic attitudes feel sick less often and/or recover from sickness more quickly than those who think more negatively. They believe that a person with a positive mind-set has an easier time clearing their head and reducing stress in their life.

9.       Let Your Body Fight: Your immune system will get stronger and smarter if you let your body fight. If you interfere and suppress it with prescription drugs because it’s more important for you to be comfortable rather than healthy, your body will get weaker and not be able to defend itself properly in future attacks.

10.   Receive Regular Chiropractic Care: The nervous system controls and coordinates the entire body including all of the immune organs. Subluxations or misalignments of the spine can interfere with messages sent to immune organs, making you more prone to illness. When you receive specific adjustments by a chiropractor, you are giving your body the chance to operate at optimal levels. Additionally, chiropractic care can help reduce the effects of stress on your body, indirectly giving your immune system a boost.

 

If you think you’re coming down with the cold or flu, or know someone who is seemingly always sick, be sure to give our office a call and find out more on how we can help!
605-332-9235



Second Annual Costume Contest Winners!

 

 

1st Place (Adult): $50 gift card to Runners Block

 

1st Place (Kids): 8 free games to Eastway Bowl

 

Honorable Mention: Mary Kay gift baskets

2nd Annual Halloween Costume Contest

 

 

 

 

 

CPR: Learning to Save A Life

CPR: Learning to Save A Life

                Imagine, you’re in a store, doing your weekly shopping, and a few short feet away from you, an elderly couple is doing the same. Suddenly, surprising, the husband collapses; he’s unconscious and doesn’t appear to be breathing. What would you do? Would you know what to do?

                In the scenario above, it is likely the patient suffered from sudden cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is a medical emergency and is more common than you may think. Unexpected cardiac arrest can lead to death within minutes, however, it is potentially reversible if treated early. One of the best tools for increasing the survival rate of cardiac arrest patients is the administration of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR.) CPR is performed on patients who are not breathing and do not have a pulse. There is no greater emergency. CPR has the effect of getting much-needed oxygen to the brain, where it can keep the nerves of the brain alive long enough for someone to get the patient's heart beating again.

                As of 2011, there were nearly 383,000 instances of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests; that’s almost 1,050 a day. Of these instances, 88 percent of cardiac arrests occur at home. Many of the victims appear healthy with no known heart disease or other risk factors. It is not the same as a heart attack and does not discriminate for age or gender. Anyone can be affected by cardiac arrest.

                With these statistics in mind, it is important to point out that 70 percent of Americans may feel helpless to act during a cardiac emergency because they either do not know how to administer CPR or their training has significantly lapsed. This should be alarming as, statistically speaking, if called on to administer CPR in an emergency, the life you save is likely to be someone at home: a child, a spouse, a parent or a friend. To put it simply: The life you save with CPR is mostly likely to be someone you love.

                We cannot stress enough how beneficial it would be for more people to be trained in providing life-saving CPR. Effective bystander CPR provided immediately after sudden cardiac arrest can double or triple a victim’s chance of survival, but only 32 percent of cardiac arrest victims get CPR from a bystander. Sadly, with so few administrating bystander CPR, there is only an 8 percent survival rate for cardiac arrests that occur outside the hospital. Whether it is someone you love or a complete stranger, by taking a CPR training course and engaging bystander CPR, you are giving someone a much better chance to survive.

                Anyone can learn CPR, and everyone should! By taking the course, you are empowering yourself to save a life. The course, led by a certified medical instructor, covers CPR and removing airway obstructions (choking) for adults, infants and children. This class also covers AED, ventilation devices, barriers for performing rescue breathing and two-person CPR techniques. You will also be provided with various information from how to take control of an emergency situation to facts and statistics that may surprise you. At the end of the course, the instructor will turn you on to Pulse Point. This is a free app that you can download onto your smartphone and it will alert you if there cardiac emergency in a public place. The location-aware application will alert trained citizens in the vicinity of the need for bystander CPR with the dispatch of advanced medical care.

                If you are interested in learning CPR, courses are offered through Sioux Falls Fire and Rescue. The course generally takes about two hours and allows up to 20 students. We strongly encourage you get your family, friends, and colleagues involved. There can never be too many people who know how to properly administer CPR in emergencies. Take the course and save a life!   

National Healthy Aging Month

Healthy Aging Month

September is the annual Healthy Aging Month when Americans nationwide are reminded to focus on the positive aspects of growing older and take personal responsibility for one’s health – physically, socially, mentally, or financially. We, at Excel Chiropractic, have chosen to honor this month by focusing our efforts on those who wish for helpful information on successful aging. We believe it is never too late to take control of your health.

                One of the biggest issues Americans face as the age is the onset of arthritis pain. Specifically, osteoarthritis is the most common joint disorder and one of the most common reasons for disability for adults today. This condition, often called wear-and-tear arthritis, occurs when the protective cartilage on the ends of your bones wears down over time. While osteoarthritis can damage any joint in your body, the disorder most commonly affects joints in your hands, neck, lower back, knees and hips. Sadly, no cure for this disease exists yet. However, there are natural treatments and lifestyle changes that can slow the progression of the disease, relieve joint pain, and improve mobility.

                As you age, the cartilage that cushions the ends of bones in your joints begins to deteriorate. This process is slow and worsens over time. As the cartilage deteriorates, you may begin to feel pain, tenderness, and/or stiffness in your joints, especially after long periods of inactivity. You may also experience a loss in flexibility; unable to move your joint through its full range of motion. In severe cases, you may feel a grating sensation when you use your joint or find that you are susceptible to bone spurs. If you are experiences any of these symptoms, it is important to make an appointment with your doctor so that he may diagnose your condition.

                If you are diagnosed with osteoarthritis, it does not mean that you cannot be healthy and successful in your golden years. By focusing on making healthy lifestyle changes, you can help reduce your osteoarthritis symptoms. Ensure you are getting enough rest to help reduce inflammation of your joints. Adopt an exercise routine that keeps you active, but is gentle on your joints, like walking or swimming. A healthy diet along with exercise will help you lose weight, which will relieve pressure on your joints and reduce pain. Using hot/cold packs will help with muscle stiffness or spasms and allow you some control over your pain.

Chiropractic care can also have a positive impact in controlling your osteoarthritis. Chiropractic care involves chiropractic manipulative therapy, also called a chiropractic adjustment, along with therapies such as ultrasound and electric muscle stimulation. For us, one of the most important steps is to restore normal joint alignment.  By aligning the joint and enabling it to move properly, chiropractic care can reduce further wear and tear and slow down the degenerative process.  In addition, we can help reduce pain and inflammation in the joints, which goes a long way to reducing the overall pain in osteoarthritis patients.  Chiropractic manipulative therapy also increases the mobility of the joint which can help improve joint stiffness and lack of motion. 

In addition to treatments, we may also recommend stretches and exercises specific to your affected joints. These recommendations may include range of motion movements, stretches, and light exercises that may help maintain fluidity in the joints and flexibility of the muscles.

Healthy Aging Month should be a motivation for everyone to resolve that it’s not too late to shore up their health. As we grow older, it is our responsibility to ensure we are making the right choices to be successful in both health and happiness. By taking charge of your health and learning about conditions, such as osteoarthritis, that you may face as you age, you are taking the first step in improving your overall well-being.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding Healthy Aging Month, osteoarthritis, or this article, please feel free to contact our office at 605-332-9235.