mind body planet

Something’s Fishy

Hey all. I am still here up in Ithaca New York and I’m still loving every minute of this trip. This morning we got up and we did some harvesting of squash and zucchini. Then after breakfast we cleared some brush and did a little bit of weeding in the garden. After lunch we went for another hike, this time on a different trail. We came eventually to another waterfall and lagoon type of thing and we swam for a good long time. After a while I started to get hungry and my friend Jamie got out some fresh veggies that she had cut up before we left. We munched on those for a while until we had finished them all. I knew I was still hungry so I suggested that we walk back to the house and make some kind of a meal. On the hike back I was hurting. My head hurt and my legs were cramping and my back started to ache. I tried drinking lots of water and that type of thing but it didn’t help and so I just suffered on until we got home. When we got back to the house I sat down and tried to think of what I may have done that might have just drained me of all of my energy and left me in this sorry state of affairs. Then I remembered my diet. I have been a vegetarian before, for about two years, but now I don’t eat that way. Since I started staying at the house I have been eating their diet which is almost totally vegetarian. I had stopped my lifestyle as a vegetarian for this exact reason and I think that this is why I had this little episode today.

When I take a step back I can really see that my diet now is not just an omnivorous diet, but a diet centered around the vitamins and minerals in those foods. One of the foods that saved my life I think after I stopped being a vegetarian was fish. The first food I ate to break my habit was salmon and then I began taking fish oil supplements. Now I see that there is a huge value in these supplements that I was always missing out on when I was a vegetarian. Fish oils contain lots of omega-3 fatty acids which are great for the brain. The fish oil is also good for cholesterol, heart health, and blood pressure. I know that I after I began to take them I was feeling one hundred percent better and a lot of my aches and pains went away fairly quickly.  The fish oil companies did go through a little hype which may have given them a bad wrap, competing with promotional mugs on the counters at health food stores, claiming to be cure-alls. But the fact is that it is a valid and healthy supplement that was marketed badly for a short time.

Tonight I went to the store and bought myself a little salmon steak and cooked that up. I am already felling a lot better. I hope that anyone who needs this in their lives will hear the call.

Chiropractics

In the fall of my first year here at school I was introduced to a class that opened my eyes in a lot of ways to many healing practices that I had never heard about. Though my parents were fairly liberal and interested in those things that may be considered fringe, they were never wealthy enough for us to be a part of those things. Living out in the middle of nowhere didn’t help either. Anyway, this class was probably one of the best classes I will ever take in terms of exploration of a topic that I’d love to learn about and not necessarily study in depth. The class was a very general survey of alternative, complementary, and preemptive healing methods. At the time I was pretty blown away by most of the information that I was being flooded with because it was all very new to me and some of it, like shamanism, I didn’t know still existed other than in Carlos Castaneda novels. After the class ended I knew that I would like to try some of these new methods and still I was bound by my limited budget as a student. This summer though I finally gave in and realized that it would do me a lot of good in my life to go ahead and try something. My big question was which one I should choose. I finally decided that I would try Chiropractics because it seemed to me to be the most effective of all of these modalities at really solving a much bigger problem.

My experience with Chiropractics, though still very limited, has been nothing but positive as of yet. The whole series of appointments began with an initial examination that is very similar to a general examination that you might get in a doctor’s office. The guy who I picked out was amazing and he really made me feel like he cared. The entire examination lasted about two hours during which we did a full physical, x-rays, and a questionnaire sort of interview. He then gave me a brief overview of what he wanted to do the next time and told me he’d call me in a day or so. When I went back for the next appointment he had my x-rays up on the projector and showed me the problem areas of my spine. He told me that a car accident I had had a few years ago my be the cause for the problems I have been having with my arches in my feet lately. He said that all of our health problems essentially boil down to an imbalance and areas of trauma in the spine. He did an adjustment on my spine that first day and gave me some evaluations of the strength of different areas of my spine. That was last week and now I am really excited for my appointment tomorrow.

I have been looking in to chiropractics more and more now that I am a subject and I feel better about it every time I read on. The work that Chiropractors do on the spine has been used by various cultures for a very long time and many of their theories are being proven by science long after they known that they are truth. It’s really a very beautiful set of theories of health and human development based around the proper functioning and shape of the spine in order to balance the whole of the body system. Based on my current level of care and improvement I would not suggest that this level of satisfaction will change any time soon. I will have to recommend this to every one of you if you have the money to shell out since many insurance policies do not cover this amazing form of medicine.