Simply Health and Wellness
Simply Health and Wellness is a podcast designed to encourage, uplift, inspire, and educate young families and the millennial generation concerning a holistic and vitalistic lifestyle approach to health and wellness.
Simply Health and Wellness
The Five Pillars of Wellness: A Chiropractor's Guide to Optimal Living
Do you equate feeling good with being healthy? That assumption might be completely backward. Dr. Knight Bryant challenges conventional wisdom by revealing that health has almost nothing to do with how you feel and everything to do with how your body functions.
Through compelling examples, Dr. Bryant illustrates how bodies that are functioning perfectly (like expelling food poisoning) can feel terrible, while serious conditions like cancer can develop without noticeable symptoms. This paradigm shift transforms how we should approach wellness—focusing on optimizing bodily functions rather than simply chasing comfort.
The podcast introduces five essential pillars for true health: nutrition (emphasizing fresh, local foods and proper hydration), exercise (recommending 30 minutes three times weekly, with both strength training and flexibility work), social health (stressing the importance of meaningful connections and personal hobbies), quality sleep (providing practical tips for better rest), and regular chiropractic care (supported by research showing benefits for blood pressure, stress reduction, and pain management).
Whether you're struggling with chronic issues or simply want to optimize your wellness, this episode provides a roadmap for understanding health beyond symptom management. The husband-wife chiropractic team at Mustard Seed Chiropractic offers these insights for patients of all ages—from infants to seniors—highlighting that proper function is the true foundation of health. Ready to transform your understanding of wellness and start functioning at your absolute best?
What's up you guys, dr Knight Bryant here, mustard Seed Chiropractic with Simply Health and Wellness. It is a beautiful day in Smyrna, georgia, and I cannot wait to give you this amazing episode. What is Health? And that's what I'm gonna ask you right here, right now. What is health?
Speaker 1:Many would define it as feeling their best, right when I feel my best and I am extremely healthy, but that could be the furthest thing from the truth. I'm going to let you know today. Health has almost nothing to do with how you feel. It has everything to do with how you actually function. The World Health Organization, they define it as this, and I love this definition the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. One of the many examples that I give my patients is we know, right here in the city of Atlanta, georgia, we tend to see that one out of 10 women could be walking around with breast cancer, and that is not great news. However, we know that the body is not functioning the way it is designed to when it is creating abnormal cell tissue at high rates, aka cancer. Okay, so I always say health has more to do with how you actually function. Another example would be this you could go to. There's a lot of great restaurants here in the Atlanta area. You can go to a really great restaurant, particularly, let's say, seafood. This time, Eat the food. It's amazing, tastes great. Go home, you end up over the toilet and you're like man, what just happened? You probably got some food poisoning and in that moment, if I was to ask you how you feel, you would tell me I feel terrible. However, your body is doing what it's supposed to do. In that moment, it is getting rid of toxins that are not supposed to be there and actually throwing them up, getting them out, expelling them from the body in any way that it can. So, long story short, that is a healthy, well-functioning body, and so many times what we feel and how we are functioning, it can be a little bit confusing, and so I'm here to give us a great definition. Again health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. So I have these five pillars that I like to talk to my patients about, and when I think about them this is what I think about concerning their health and their wellness is these five pillars?
Speaker 1:Number one nutrition, nutrition and food is your medicine, right. So you got to understand that you want to look for fresh, locally grown foods, good, high quality ingredients. You want to start cooking more at home, the best you can, right, or having it prepped for you right, or even meal plan. That could be a great option as well. The ingredients that are closer to their source. They're usually the healthiest, and that's mainly since they haven't been frozen or shipped right. You freeze it, you ship it. It has a lot of shelf life. Then we know that there's ingredients in there that is allowing it to stay for longer periods of time in there. That is allowing it to stay for longer periods of time. Also, I want to encourage you to increase your variety of foods in your diet right. More fruits, more veggies and meats, if you will, right.
Speaker 1:And then, maintaining proper hydration is so critical, especially as it's starting to get a little bit warmer here in Smyrna. Springtime is here. Summer is right around the corner. Making sure you hydrate with water is so important, especially for my athletes. Making sure you take on some type of salts as well into the body to make sure you retain it. It makes your muscles communicate appropriately. Next piece is this so that's our nutrition pillar. Second one is this Exercise, I know, and you don't need hours on hours on hours on hours, but you do need hours on hours, on hours, on hours spread over time.
Speaker 1:So exercise does not have to be this long, strenuous activity. I would start with 30 minutes a day and then progress into strength training and I would try to do that at least three times per week. How many guys, three times per week for 30 minutes? I know you have it in you, even if you have to go for a family walk three times a week altogether, now you can do it.
Speaker 1:Another important factor when it comes to exercise is flexibility and mobility. That's one that people just forget about. You got to stretch your body, you got to move your body. The example that I use is this Cats and dogs first thing they do in the morning, they stretch. Humans first thing we do in the morning grab a coffee, look at the iPhone, hopefully pray, and then I don't know, maybe use the bathroom. But long story short, we need to be able to stretch and move our bodies. Cats and dogs have it figured out. Why don't we? And basically, this can be done a few minutes before you sleep. It can be done whenever you wake up, some people take on the practice of yoga. Just find a way to move your body slowly and stretch it out.
Speaker 1:The next one is social health. This is huge. This is huge. Physical and social health are equally important. So you got to be able to really start meeting with friends, meeting with family once a week. If you can Use that iPhone, if you will FaceTime people, have crucial conversations, have friend groups, create friend groups, get in with your local church, sit with people, have coffee. Socializing can help people a lot with dealing with the daily stressors that we face, and it's really important also to take some time to enjoy your own hobbies that you like. I don't care if it's once a month, once a week. Shoot. For some of us, we got to hit it daily because we have such high stress on our lives that we need an outlet. We need something that we can socialize with and that we can enjoy, and so you have to do something that you truly enjoy, and that's a hobby. Right, reading is one of my favorites, just being honest. Next one is this. Number four sleep.
Speaker 1:Sleep is crucial for the body and I know I'm parent two and I have a four-year-old and a 11-month-old right now and it can get rough. However, sleep is crucial to the body. You have to rest your body to prepare for the day ahead. We don't want the sleep debt. Many of us, many of us, are in a sleep debt. You owe your body hours and hours of sleep.
Speaker 1:So if you're having trouble sleeping one of the main benefits of a chiropractic adjustment people tend to notice right after an adjustment body goes into parasympathetic man, our rest has improved dramatically. For example, you might need to change your eating habits, maybe at home. For example, you might need to change your eating habits, maybe at home. Sometimes the times that we eat can change the way that we actually sleep and not allow us to really get the rest that we need. Sometimes we need to go ahead and start learning how to sleep. Train the family. We get up when the sun comes up. We go down when the sun goes down. That's not always helpful in every single case, but that's something that can be helpful is literally just using the light to let you know when it's time to actually go to bed and then also making sure you turn off the television at least 30 to 40 minutes before you go to bed is huge. This will help your body kind of downregulate and start to relax and go into that healing phase, if you will, so you can get some good sleep.
Speaker 1:And there are times where you just got to upgrade the bedding. Sometimes the bed, the pillows, the, this, the that has not been upgraded in a while and it's time to really upgrade those areas so that you can maximize the amount of sleep you get. Right, your body cannot heal its best, right, whenever you're not sleeping. If you have a cut on your hand, you tend to see that it might stop bleeding within the day, but the scab appears the next day, and that's because cells reproduce the most overnight. If it happens in your skin, it can happen internally as well, and it does. So that's something that you want to focus on.
Speaker 1:And then, last but not least, you got to have your chiropractic care. And don't forget chiropractic care is for infants, chiropractic care is for kids, chiropractic care is for teenagers, chiropractic care is for youth, middle-aged, students, adults, seniors. Chiropractic care is for each and every person. One thing that we have found with chiropractic adjustments research is there. Super easy to go through the research here Lowering blood pressure.
Speaker 1:Something that people don't know is that when we adjust specifically C1, c2, it actually opens up the blood vessels so it can actually lower the pressure on the actual heart, aka lower your blood pressure. So important. Another one improve sleep. We want to help you with your sleep, lower your stress. Fewer headaches, less chronic pain, improving the pregnancy experience and then also lower the case of depression. There is just research after research concerning chiropractic. We can always talk about those on another episode, but today I wanted to make sure you at least got the five pillars locked down. Hopefully this was helpful for you. If you have any questions, thoughts concerns, reach out to Mustard Seed Chiropractic myself, dr Jagarin I Bryant or Dr Jessica Knight Bryant, the husband and wife combo and duo here to help you feel great and function at your best. Have a great day, take care Until next time.
