Absolute Health and Wellness- Blog Feed

Understanding Metabolism and how it affects your lifestyle

January 17 2012 7:00 pm

This class will begin to uncover one of the most important concepts for those interested in learning how to control their body weight through lifestyle choices. Whether you are looking to loose weight, gain weight or control maximize athletic performance - this class will introduce the foundation of your understanding.
Please contact the New Seasons Market, Fisher's Landing for more information and signing up.

Metabolic Efficiency Training - Part 1

Alex — October 25 2011 10:06 am

Resting Metabolic Rate

The key to any weight management program is knowing your true and unique Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). The importance of knowing such a number is quite simple. Those individuals who are looking to lose weight for the vast amount of reasons, need a true starting place to begin - if they are going to be successful at “calorie tracking”. Like wise, those individuals who exercise need to know how many calories they are expending as to properly restore, and repair their bodies after intense training routines. These expended calories get counted get included when figuring daily intake numbers.

The most common method of calculating one’s RMR/BMR is done with an equation known as the Harris-Benedit equation. Some researchers suggest, that this equation can be off as many as 1000 calories for a given individual. And, if you think being off that much in your caloric intake won’t have a major impact on your success - despite your goals... think again!

With that said, let’s take a quick look at a few other important concepts that will assist us in determining your personalized resting metabolic rate. This consists of essentially three very important components. 1) Resting Metabolic Rate, 2) Daily Activity Factor, 3) Total Metabolic Rate. The first is exactly what it says - the individuals metabolic rate, while they are at rest. The second is a conversion factor that takes into account a given person’s daily energy expenditure. Let’s be honest, there can be a vast difference of calories burned through out the day - when we compare that of an office worker, to that of a brick layer. NOTE: your Activity Factor - Does NOT take into account your exercise for the day. That is a number that must be included on it’s own when calculating your total caloric intake for the day. Lastly, is one’s Total Metabolic Rate. This is how many calories a given person would need to consume once we know their RMR, daily activity factor and calories expended during exercise for the day. By adding the three together, we arrive at the total number of calories needed to be consumed.

From there it’s quite easy to calculate the rest. To lose weight you need to keep your total daily caloric intake below the daily Net caloric intake. To gain weight, you keep it above. And remember your Net caloric activity is comprised of the following:

Resting Metabolic Rate + Activity Factor + Calories burned during Exercise = Total Net Caloric Intake. If you keep your Total Net calories for the day above your RMR, but below your Net... You will be on the road to weight loss!

For more information on how you can start on the road to weight loss, please contact the clinic. Also, visit the calendar on the website for additional workshops that will discuss this topic in greater depth!

Be Well, Be Safe - and Keep it Moving!

Keep it Moving Series

Alex — August 1 2011 9:15 am

While there are many things that the various medical professionals of today disagree upon, there is that one thing that we all absolutely DO agree on. That is a physically active body, is generally a healthier body - when compared to that same individual maintaining a sedentary life.

There is something to be said for many of the old catch phrases like, “use it or lose it!” This is the core belief for every specialist that makes up the Absolute Health & Wellness team of medical providers. It is our goal to first teach your body how to move well again. Once we’ve assisted a patient on learning to move well, we move to the next step - which is helping them to move often.

There is a plethora of movement patterns that should have been “learned” many years ago, when we were infants. Developmentally, we should have followed a step-wise process in gross motor learning of our bodies. We go through a learning phase of letting our bodies learn through exploration that began from the most early days of life. As we progressed, our bodies should have learned how to create mobility in the places where movement is of the greatest importance, and creating stability in those places where the control of decreasing movement was needed. If we were allowed to progress only when our bodies were ready to advance on - this was learned "properly" by each of us.

For various reasons however many of us sometimes never reached the full completion of these learning phase of life, and hence we’ve developed abnormal movement patterns - that we’ve carried through our lives thus far. It is this exact reason that the staff of providers at Absolute Health & Wellness, will be offering a series of courses/workshops - free to the community, as part of the Keep it Moving series. These workshops will be 45-to-60 minutes in length, and free to the public. The goal of each of the various workshops will be to educate both the mind and the body on how to properly move once again. For some that movement might have never been learned. For others it will be be a wake up call to your brain and body to reconnect again.

Regardless of who and how, everyone will benefit from learning how to move pain free again! Spaces will be limited, and will be available through a signup sheet available at the clinic, or by calling the clinic at 360.883.2450.

Please keep up-to-date with this series of courses by reading the blog and/or calendar.

Our New Site

Staff — August 1 2011 9:00 am

The new Absolute Health & Wellness site is designed to promote health, community, & education. Below are a couple of things you might like to know.

Calendar
This is a great way to stay informed about what's going on at the clinic including workshops & classes (which are usually free to the community). It is also a place to promote community and activity events. If you click one of the events it will dump you into our "What's Happening" blog to give you all of the details.

What's Happening Blog
Articles & events will be posted on our blog so if you want to stay in the loop this is the place to go. You will also find regular postings with current specials (on products or services) as well as any upcoming social events (group bicycle rides, hikes, runs, etc...).

Each practitioner will have a category on the blog to help keep their patients up to date with current events and classes/workshops/social events. You will be able to follow these “blogs” and/or posts as an RSS feed, from Twitter, from Facebook, and upon its release Google+. The entire system was designed to complement one-another across all of the most current social platforms, so you need only to select your favorite to be kept up to date.

Current Patient Portal
For those who are current patients, you already know that we're a paperless, fully integrated digital clinic. Those of you who are not current patients, now you know too. Our patients have complete access and control of their medical care with our clinic. From entering your patient health history, to scheduling your treatments with any of our practitioners.

In best of Health,

~ the staff at Absolute Health & Wellness