Invest in Your Health
Stay As Fit As You Can
Exercise at least 3-4 times a week, even if that exercise is just 20 minutes of walking a day. Multiple studies have shown that even light exercise regularly can make a huge difference for current and future health. If you can’t find time to walk or have problems with it, then do other types of light exercise, at least. Don’t have long periods of inactivity. Move and do something each hour you are awake. Many people find it helpful to track their daily exercise, but if you do and fall short of your goals, don’t give up! It’s better to exercise or move each day and miss your goals than just throw in the towel. On the other hand, if you can do more, then try it. Just add things in gradually and you’ll find yourself getting stronger and breathing more easily as time goes by. You may be surprised at how fit you could become. If you can’t quite get it in gear and need help getting into a healthful exercise regimen for your age, Progressive Medical Center can help. We can offer advice on levels of exercise appropriate for your age, and for people who want to get maximum impact from their exercise, we offer EWOT – Exercise with oxygen therapy- a technique beloved by athletes, but usable by everyone.
Eat Right
Easier said than done, right? Just like exercise, the key is to make as much effort as you can- and accept the fact that something is better than nothing and that you shouldn’t give up if you can’t be perfect. In fact, a common pitfall of dieting and eating right is the mindset that if you’ve failed to maintain the diet then you might as well abandon it. Nothing could be further from the truth. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step- and every step you take gets you closer to your goal. Eating right doesn’t have to mean a perfectly balanced diet, all the time. Instead, think of the 80-20 rule- 80% of the time eat right, and 20% allow yourself some leeway. That’s the goal to work toward. Avoid processed foods. Eat organic if you can, and if you can’t pick things like dairy, meats, and fats if you can to make organic since fats can carry harmful toxins. For vegetables and fruits, if you eat it unpeeled, try to make them unpeeled. Avoid nitrates, nitrites, antibiotics, and most preservatives. If possible, make seafood wild caught to avoid those same antibiotics and colorings. Avoid sugars, but if you don’t, then restrict them to special occasions or limit their consumption. Ongoing research is compelling that natural sugars are better than artificial substitutes in every case. Eat good fats- omega 3s, and polyunsaturated fats like olive oil. Avoid trans fats and artificial replacements. Butter is better than margarine, for instance. Intake enough fiber. Fiber is absolutely essential for gut health, both to make sure that bowels move things along and to maintain the health of the microbiome. Again, the goal is to do whatever you can to maintain good dietary habits- don’t let losing one battle lose you the war. Progressive Medical Center can help here as well. We have expert nutrition experts who can help you craft an effective eating plan and can advise you as you go about healthy eating. We not only can advise about whole nutrition but have a multifaceted approach to weight loss.
Avoid Allergens and Triggers
We all know that environmental allergens can make life miserable: pollen season, dust mites, pet dander, and mold, all can impact health. Many people live their whole lives not realizing that their environmental allergies are what have accelerated their asthma, and their skin conditions, and impacted their energy over many years. Getting tested for environmental allergies can make a huge difference in resolving issues of malaise and seemingly endless reactions to the environment. Progressive Medical Center offers a state-of-the-art environmental allergen test supplied by Precision Point Diagnostics. Environmental allergens can wreak havoc with your immune system, trigger upper respiratory diseases, and create a sense of malaise. Maybe even more insidious than environmental allergens are food allergens and foods that you are sensitive to. Food allergies can cause an immediate inflammatory response that can be hard on the body. While some foods can be easy to identify as triggers, others may be harder since they may be only one ingredient of many in a dish. Food sensitivity reactions are even more difficult to pinpoint, since it may take up to 72 hours to have symptoms, and those symptoms may not present the same as allergies do. Symptoms like brain fog, skin conditions, aching joints, and systemic inflammation can make you feel miserable and suck the joy out of life- and are hallmarks of food sensitivities. Because they are so difficult to identify, some people may have sensitivity reactions to foods for years without knowing what is causing the problem. Long-term food sensitivities can erode the lining of the gut, opening the tight junctions in the intestinal wall, which allows bacteria and food particles into the bloodstream. This can cause inflammation throughout the body, including in other organs. Progressive Medical Center offers a state-of-the-art food allergy and sensitivity test that can identify your food triggers so that they can be addressed.
Take Care Of Your Gut
Food allergens and sensitivities can damage your gut lining, but they can also radically alter your microbiome. What’s your microbiome? The human microbiome is a collection of microbial communities that have evolved alongside humans. The microbiome is found in all parts of the body, and the gut is home to the majority of the bacteria- between 10-100 trillion of them. These bacteria are mostly beneficial and help us digest our food, extract nutrients, and regulate the functioning of the gut. The microbiome in the gut also influences other systems in the body and is connected to other microbiomes including those on our skin, in the mouth, etc. These connections and others can have a profound effect on the entire body, including the brain. In fact the gut-brain axis is now widely accepted in the medical and scientific communities. The state of your gut influences the state of your brain, including clarity of thought, mental energy, emotions, and stress, and has been linked to depression and mental illnesses. A healthy gut can mean a healthy body and brain, a disturbed microbiome can mean brain fog, depression, inflammation- even diabetes, heart conditions, autoimmune diseases, and more. When the microbiome is disrupted, this allows harmful bacteria, yeasts, fungi, and other microbes to thrive, which is the mechanism for harm throughout the body. This disruption can come from food triggers, but also from eating the wrong foods, like too many fats and not enough fiber, from courses of antibiotics, from obesity and lack of exercise, from toxins including smoking and too much alcohol, and from accumulated damage from many sources combined. Once damage in the gut reaches the state of an autoimmune disease, the gut can start launching powerful immune attacks, including against cells in the body itself, that can leave you inflamed and sick. Knowing the state of your gut can help you adjust your microbiome. Progressive Medical Center uses comprehensive tools to assess the state of your gut- The Advanced Intestinal Barrier Assessment looks at a number of markers of gut health to determine the sort of damage that has so far been done to the gut lining and how inflamed it might be. The GI Microbiota test is an assessment through the stool of the health of your microbiome. Both tests can survey the state of your gut, and then the team at Progressive Medical Center can get you back on track.
Take Care Of Cellular Health
Your cells make up your body, and they are differentiated into very particular roles that they play in your human system. The interactions between cells are very complicated, and there are various pathways that drive how they behave both in interactions with each other and in how they fulfill these various roles. When your overall cellular health is good, then your body is healthy, the mitochondria in those cells produce energy as they should, and appropriate growth, maintenance, and replacement occurs. When your overall cellular health is compromised, the cells are stressed, energy in the cells is lacking, and regular growth and maintenance are compromised. Cancer is an example of cells being pushed to irregular growth. How is cellular health compromised? There are many ways that this can occur, but the three most predominant ways are through toxicity, oxidative stress, and senescence (aging). Everyone knows that many cancers are caused by toxins, but the body can be affected in many ways by toxicity without it coming to full-blown cancer. Toxic accumulation in the cells can damage DNA leading to many conditions, and impeding the functioning of organs. Toxic accumulation can lead to inflammation, bloating, weight gain, and damage to neurotransmitters in the brain as well as reproductive health. Avoiding toxins can go a long way toward cellular health. Progressive Medical Center can help here as well. We can start by assessing your toxic load through a Heavy Metal Test. This test will evaluate your toxic load, and help make a determination if intervention is necessary. With less of a toxic load, toxins can be flushed from the system through diet and supplementation designed to support the liver and restore your body’s balance. With greater toxicity, Progressive Medical Center can help flush toxins and support your cells through IV therapy, including chelation if necessary. Chelation therapy uses a substrate that binds to the heavy metals and other toxins in the body to make it easier for the body to flush them out. Toxins accumulate over time, so addressing toxicity should be a semi-regular occurrence. Cellular health is also affected by oxidative stress. Oxidative stress in a cell is when free radicals accept electrons from a cell and become Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). The ROS system damages cells and causes inflammation and energy disruption, which can be systemic. This process can underlie many of the chronic conditions that can develop in the body, which are often essentially inflammatory diseases. Diabetes, cardiac conditions, pulmonary function, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, and many more are, at root, triggered by inflammation. Assessing the body’s oxidative stress is essential in order to get at the root cause of chronic conditions and treat them appropriately. Progressive Medical Center uses an Advanced Oxidative Stress Test that measures major markers of oxidative stress, free radicals, and inflammation. Progressive can treat oxidative stress through antioxidants and coaching you on how to modify your lifestyle to make a difference. Senescence in cells is normal and as you age more of your cells age and die. The real question is at what rate do cells become senescent? Combatting senescence in cells not only addresses longevity but also how well you live and feel. Progressive Medical Center is a long-time expert in anti-aging strategies and therapies.
Manage Your Stress
Stress isn’t just a killer, it’s a debilitator as well. Too much stress, or stress at the wrong times of the day can shorten your life, make every waking moment difficult, and prevent you from getting the restful sleep your brain and body need to recharge. Not getting enough sleep and being stressed all of the time is a recipe for disease, mental illness, and early death. Even moderate stress too often can shorten your life and wear you down. Stress developed as a survival mechanism in order to push us to get things done and to react quickly. The “flight or fight response” is an example of positive stress in action in an emergency. We need those stress responses, but in the modern world with its endless stimulation and possibly perceived dangers, the stress response can go into overdrive. It can beat us down, make our immune systems less effective, strain our organs, and exhaust us. Learning to manage stress should be the goal, but first a person should be assessed to make sure the stress response isn’t out of sync from biochemical causes. Our stress is programmed to rise and fall throughout the day through our cortisol cycle. In those with a healthy stress cycle, cortisol rises just as we are ready to wake up after a good rest, and then increases throughout the day to allow us to get things done. It plateaus in the late afternoon and then begins declining until it is at its low point just as we are going to bed. When the cortisol system is mistimed, it can cause cortisol to be low in the morning and high in the evening or any permutation of that aberration. This means we feel exhausted in the morning and not able to accomplish much, and tired but wired in the evenings when we need to go to bed. This altered cycle can leave us perpetually tired and our brains fried. It can also end up damaging our thyroid glands and other systems in the body which makes the entire cycle even worse. Progressive Medical can assess the state of your cortisol cycle, as well as several other markers of stress, through a simple saliva test that charts your cortisol levels over 4 key points in the day. This is the only way to get an effective assessment of stress response. If your cortisol system is off, we can help fix it. If it isn’t, we can help train you to modify how you approach stress.
Have Regular Conversations With Your Medical Practitioners
How? Many people find it difficult to get an appointment, and when they do the entire time spent with the doctor may last just 10 minutes. Many conventional doctors are overburdened and overscheduled, either because they are an outpost of a large hospital group, or have adopted a model of seeing 50 patients a day. This style of medicine is hardly conducive to having a conversation with your practitioners. Many patients have been searching for answers to baffling symptoms for years, going from one practitioner to another, and never having the time during their rushed appointments to ask the questions they want to ask, let alone getting the answers they need. Functional and integrative medicine is built on a different model. Patients are built around a team approach to get to the root cause of the problem. Patients have ample time to converse with their practitioners and tell the story of their health journey. Functional and integrative practitioners use science-backed medicine, utilizing conventional therapies but with an open mind that allows the use of adjunct and natural therapies that let the body heal itself wherever possible. Functional and integrative practitioners like those at Progressive Medical Center also treat the whole person, and not just the condition. The body is complex, and many interrelated systems in the body can be involved. We also minimize drug and intrusive interventions whenever possible. Our range of functional testing also allows focus on subclinical results that still affect your health, and we have utilized many markers of health on our functional tests that conventional practitioners may ignore. If you are ready for a health conversation that includes you being able to tell your side of the story in Atlanta, then welcome to Progressive Medical Center. Investing in your health is the best investment you’ll ever make.
