Wellfie Wednesday Tip #127: #IMovedToday December Challenge

/

Happy Wellfie Wednesday! Welcome back! This week’s post comes to you by a guest promoter of health, Mark Milligan (@markmilligandpt). Mark is a practicing physical therapist in Austin, TX, specializing in orthopaedics and pain science. Mark is also the founder of Anywhere Healthcare (@Anywhere_Health) - “A telehealth platform solving the problem of healthcare access by allowing any provider of any discipline remote access to their patients.”

December is upon us! With December and the holiday season, the Season of Excess begins!! This is a challenging time in almost every way. The temperatures are cold, the days are short, the end-of-year work piles up, and we all have the desire and need to spend more time with our families and colleagues, eating of course!! All this happens just before we all make the annual effort to change our lives for the better... 

Reflecting on my holiday behaviors over many years and realizing my own struggle with the "I'm on top of the world and I am going to get in the best shape of my life" moments mixed with the "Meh, what's one more cookie, I can start my diet tomorrow" moments, I realized that I always had these discussions in my own head and never with other people... So, I decided to reach out for help with accountability and motivation. Social Media seemed like the obvious place to go so I just put it out there and created the #IMovedToday hashtag to not only help me post about my daily movements but also have people support me and be able to support others!! People were responding and a small group were supporting and tweeting!

Timing is everything and the universe works perfectly, I had received a message from Cheryl Capone Keller (@KellerCaponePhD) who was having a similar thought about helping each other support and celebrate movement during the season, when movement is often forgotten about! 

The #IMovedToday December Challenge was born!!!

So we would like to invite and welcome all of you to the Challenge to help you and others choose movement!

The rules for the #IMovedToday December Challenge are incredibly easy!

Join us and look for #IMovedToday to continue into 2019!!!

Thanks for all of the support, be sure to post your successes and pictures this week and tag with #WellfieWednesday & #IMovedToday, along with the WW crew members (@TheFuelPhysio, @Eric_in_AmERICa, @FreestylePhysio, @DianaKlatt) and keep the wave of healthy change going!

- WW Crew

Wellfie Wednesday Tip #124: Updated Physical Activity Guidelines

/

Happy Wellfie Wednesday! Welcome back! This week is brought to you by Patrick (@TheFuelPhysio) and it includes NEW updates to The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. This is the first update in 10 years! And a bit of a spoiler, not much as changed. But greater emphasis in key areas has been added.

The foundation of the recommendations still suggest a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and muscle-strengthening activities two or more days a week. However, they now also speak to specific populations, such as preschool-aged kids, older adults, and adults with disabilities.

Here are a few of those specific key guidelines:

“Preschool-aged children (3 through 5 years) should be physically active throughout the day to enhance growth and development. Adult caregivers of preschool-aged children should encourage active play that includes a variety of activity types.”

“Children and adolescents aged 6 through 17 years should do 60 minutes (1 hour) or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily.”

For adults, “additional health benefits are gained by doing physical activity beyond the equivalent of 300 minutes (5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical activity a week.”

“As part of their weekly physical activity, older adults should do multicomponent physical activity that includes balance training as well as aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities.”

“When adults with chronic conditions or disabilities are not able to meet the above key guidelines, they should engage in regular physical activity according to their abilities and should avoid inactivity.”

In addition, the guidelines highlight the many known health benefits of being physically active. And with an influx of new research, those newly discovered benefits are also mentioned. Such as “improved bone health and weight status for children aged 3 through 5 years,” “brain health benefits, including improved cognitive function, reduced anxiety and depression risk, and improved sleep and quality of life,” and “for people with various chronic medical conditions, reduced risk of all-cause and disease-specific mortality, improved function, and improved quality of life.”

Be sure to check out The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans in its entirety, is it contains a lot of great information and a greater call to action for healthcare providers and community leaders.

The real take home message is that we need to Move More, Move Often, and that ALL Movement Counts! And as the WW crew believes, it is the small victories that matter!

Thanks for all of the support, be sure to post your pictures this week and tag the WW crew members in your post (@TheFuelPhysio, @Eric_in_AmERICa, @FreestylePhysio, @DianaKlatt) and keep the wave of healthy change going!

-WW Crew

Wellfie Wednesday Tip #77: Lifestyle Changes to Reduce Heart Disease Risk in 2018

/

Happy Wellfie Wednesday! This week is brought to you by Alyssa (@kuhnalyssa_spt).

     According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 610,000 people die of heart disease each year- that’s 1 in 4 people! Heart Disease remains the leading cause of death in both men and women and coronary artery disease (CAD) takes the cake as the most common form of heart disease. So what causes it?

     Many people used to believe that arteries became “clogged” due to high consumption of saturated fats- commonly found in animal and dairy sources, along with highly processed foods. When arteries get “clogged”, the clots can burst and travel to the heart causing ischemia of the blood- aka a heart attack. The British Journal of Sports Medicine (2017) recently discovered that saturated fats may not play a large part after all.

     A recent meta-analysis found that there was no association between saturated fat consumption and (1) all-cause mortality, (2) coronary heart disease (CHD), (3) CHD mortality, (4) ischemic stroke or (5) type 2 diabetes in healthy adults. Interestingly enough, another study found that in postmenopausal women with coronary heart disease, greater intake of saturated fat was associated with less progression of atherosclerosis (“clogging”), whereas carbohydrate and polyunsaturated fat intake were associated with greater progression. It has also been found that instead of looking to levels of LDL, typically deemed as “bad” cholesterol to determine risk of CAD, the ratio of total cholesterol (TC) to HDL cholesterol (“good”), has been shown to be the best predictor of cardiovascular risk.

But what does this tell us?

     Fat may not the enemy in our diets. It turns out that a high fat, Mediterranean diet (vegetables, nuts, extra virgin olive oil, oily fish) improved outcomes for recurrent myocardial infarctions and all-cause mortality discovered in the Lyon Heart study. We also need to find ways to decrease the TC to HDL ratio in order to diminish risk of CHD.

So, what do we do?

     It’s been shown that replacing refined carbohydrates (highly processed foods) with healthy high fat foods (notably plant fats and vegetables can decrease the TC to HDL ratio significantly. Physical activity can also play a part as those who walk briskly at or above 150 minutes/week (22 minutes per day) have been shown to increase their life expectancy by up to 3-5 years compared to physically inactive adults!

Overall, the two simple ways to reduce your risk of CAD and help to keep your heart healthy:

1.     Eat REAL food. Decrease the amount of refined carbohydrates and processed sugars. Stay in the outer perimeter of the grocery store!

2.     Get moving! Walk 22 minutes a day (which is only 2% of your day!) to keep your heart strong!

     Give it a try this upcoming new year! Thanks again for all of the #WellfieWednesday support, be sure to post your pictures this week and tag the WW crew members in your post (@TheFuelPhysio, @Eric_in_AmERICa, @AaronPerezPT, @DianaKlatt, @kuhnalyssa_spt) and keep the wave of healthy change going!

- WW Crew

 

References:

Malhotra A, Redberg RF, Meier P. Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions. Br J Sports Med. 2017;51(15):1111-1112. 

Wellness Wednesday Tip #26: MOVE 2 Work! (or school, or the store, or anywhere!)

/

     Welcome back folks! Happy #WellfieWednesday! This week we have a guest promoter of health, Dr. Chris Hinze, PT, DPT, with a special message!

     We all know the recommendation, right? As adults, we need to be accumulating at least 150 minutes/week of moderate intensity physical activity (420 minutes/week if we’re kids). But we’re busy people. 150 minutes a week to exercise? A’int nobody got time for that! But what if those opportunities to exercise, those opportunities to MOVE, are just hiding there in plain sight?

Photo courtesy of Gary howe

Photo courtesy of Gary howe

     We all have places to go, whether it is going to work, school, the grocery store, the coffee shop, you name it. As Americans, we typically deploy our sedentary supporting machines (AKA the personal motor vehicle) to help us make these trips. But, what if instead we engaged in a disease fighting, mood boosting, environment enhancing mode of transportation - one that involves actually MOVING the human body? What if we incorporated this daily dose of physical activity into the trips we already make everyday?

     On this #WellfieWednesday, I encourage you to leave the keys on the counter. Instead, let’s lace up our sneakers, pump up our bike tires or dig out our transit passes and MOVE.

-       Dr. Chris Hinze, PT, DPT

     As always, thanks again for all of the #WellfieWednesday support, be sure to post your pictures again this week and tag Chris (‪@ChrisHinzePT‪ ), Eric (@Eric_in_AmERICa) or Patrick (@PBernerSPT) and keep the wave of healthy change going! And you have any interest in sharing your opinion of healthy living and would like to be a guest promoter of health, please let us know!