Consuming Consciously

Your diet extends far beyond what you eat at meal time. The nutrition (or lack thereof) you obtain from the food you eat is a combination of quantity, quality, and value. If you don’t eat enough, or if you have too much, you won’t feel great. If you have the “right” portions, but they’re made of junk, that won’t be great either. A third consideration, which I think is as important as quantity and quality, is value. How are you consuming? Are you taking notice of what you’re eating? Are you eating alone or with friends and family? Are you watching TV, trolling the internet, stressing about work? Are you paying attention to not only the food itself, but the experience you create when you eat it?

Consuming food is the most accessible example for the talking about consuming consciously. Your brain and your body consume everything that you expose them to. Activities that you do on the regular become a “diet” for your senses. If you sit a desk all day, make an effort to move. You wouldn’t eat white rice for 75% of your meals, so don’t subject your body and your posture to the cast of a chair for 75% of your time awake. The information you expose your mind to becomes the nutrition (or lack thereof) for what you think, how you think, and how you feel. Listening to Mozart on the ride to work will have a different impact on your mind than listening to talk radio. Reading Rumi or Rilke will provide different nutriment than the news. Having an exciting conversation with someone (in real life) about bike mechanics, coffee, or whatever you find interesting will be more novel, more energy rich, and provide more value than casual observations about the weather.

What we eat, what we listen to, what we read, who we engage with, and what activities we perform - consistently - will serve to mold who we are and what kind of experiences we have. We live in a time when we are overtly and covertly pushed to consume. If we can bring this process to a more conscious level, we give ourselves the opportunity to make a choice to ask: how much, what kind, and is this important to me?

The Role of the Chiropractor

"Thus the role of the chiropractor is to mobilize the biological resources of the organism, - to allow it to do for itself as much as it is able to do. He does not whip a tired organ into activity by stimulants, nor squelch over-excited nerves with sedatives or narcotics. What he accomplishes is not accomplished at the expense of masking symptoms, side-effects, and the general physical deterioration that so often follows dependence on drugs."

-- C.W. Weiant, DC, PhD

I often use the analogy of a smoke alarm when discussing symptoms and medications with my people. Symptoms, especially pain, are the body's innate way of cueing your brain into the fact that something needs to be addressed. The role of medication is to alter your body's chemistry. A major consequence of this altered chemistry is that the cause of the problem remains, but the signal alerting your brain that something needs to be reevaluated gets turned down or turned off. This is analogous to taking the batteries out of the smoke detector. The smoke detector is trying to tell you that there is a fire in the kitchen. Just because the alarm stops blaring does not mean you have addressed the cause of the smoke.

For me, chiropractic is about helping people to develop strategies to access greater levels of resourcefulness. As Weiant says, to "mobilize" those biological resources. Mobilization is a direct result of establishing and improving clear lines of communication. When the system is clear, the message is clear, and the body can organize - and mobilize - accordingly.

As BJ Palmer, the developer of chiropractic, says in Volume XXXII,

"Have you more faith in a knife or a spoonful of medicine than in the Innate power that animates the internal living world?"

From the Ground Up

When was the last time you looked at your feet? I mean really looked. Like many parts of the body, most people don’t think about their feet until there is a problem. Unfortunately, by the time we sense a problem (pain!), it is often because we’ve forced our feet into bad shoes for too long.  

There are many opinions about footwear. Mine is not particularly driven by fashion, trend, or advertised function. I’ve found that when you apply a rational, anatomically-based perspective to how the body works, things just start to make sense.

Our connection to the ground comes through our feet. If we squish our toes, elevate the heel (to any height), or have lift in the toe, it is impossible to properly bear the weight of the body. Period. Over time, this enforces poor biomechanics through the entire lower kinetic chain. If you have a foot problem, you have a knee and a hip and a pelvis problem. Everything is connected. The brilliance of the body is such that it can and it will adapt, compensate, and put up with the trauma to which you subject it - to a point. From the ground up, this means looking at the relationship of your feet to the floor.  

I recently had the opportunity to meet with and shadow Dr. Ray McClanahan, D.P.M. As a classically trained podiatrist, he employed the needle and knife approach of allopathic medicine to “fix” the “pathology” of the foot issues he saw. A combination of personal experience, exposure to the uncommon perspective of Dr. William Rossi, and a compassionate drive to find a better way heal and improve the quality of life in his patients led him to innovate a product called Correct Toes.    

Dr. Ray McClanahan is an educator. He practices what he preaches and he preaches a Good Word. He believes in employing a preventative and conservative approach to not just alleviate your pain or complaint, but help to position your feet (and by extension your body) in way that honors natural movement and allows for healing to occur.

So check out his website, but more importantly check out your feet. If you draw a line from your first metatarsal to the tip of your big toe, is the line straight? Take the liner out of your shoe and step on it. Is the line still straight? What do you think happens when you cram a foot into a box that is too small for years? For decades? You wouldn’t do that to your hands. You only have one pair of feet. Wear them well.