Archive for February, 2007

True or false: Exercise not necessary for weight loss.

February 25th, 2007 / Main Page / Comments Off

A new study, the results of which are described here at tvnz.co.nz is being hailed as a result that “debunks the widely held belief that diet plus exercise is the most effective way to lose weight.”

The study results as quoted in the article state:  "For weight loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity," Dr Leanne Redman of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, explained in a press release and that researchers report that dieting alone is just as effective as dieting plus exercise.  ‘What we found was that it did not matter whether a reduction in calories was achieved through diet or burned everyday through exercise.’"

Well of course this is not really new information.  A calorie not eaten is the same as a calorie burned.  Exercise can help you lose by burning more calories, but of course, you can also lose without exercise by eating less.  At getfitsource, we always emphasize that the key to losing weight is eating less, not exercise.  Eating less always trumps exercise for losing weight per se, because it is extremely difficult to burn the number of calories needed to lose lots of weight, whereas it is relatively straightforward not to consume them in the first place.  Of course, exercise confers other extremely important benefits as well, which fortunately, the article does point out:  “regular exercise can improve aerobic fitness and lower the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.”  Not exactly a minor piece of information and one that is totally ignored by the headline news: “exercise not necessary to lose weight.”

Although it says it somewhat differently, the article also repeats the well known fact that one can’t “spot reduce.”  In other words, one can’t target one part of the body for greater fat reduction than another.  This is also a well known principle in weight loss.

Don’t let studies like these shake your faith in the benefits of exercise.   But don’t expect exercise to be a panacea for weight loss.  You have to eat less to lose weight.

 

Marketing Your Practice With Integrity

February 20th, 2007 / practice growth, strategy and philosophy, marketing / Comments Off

It’s no secret that CAM practitioners, on average, aren’t keen on marketing. It isn’t something most students desire (or get) training in during school, and as practitioners, there’s a sense that marketing is just a little bit dirty – that it’s the sleazy side of business that simply must be done to get ahead.

It ain’t true. Welcome to marketing with integrity, where everyone feels good about marketing and more people get healthier.

What Is Marketing With Integrity?
Marketing with integrity is the practice of promoting and selling products and services in a manner that raises the level of professionalism of your practice, fosters increased mutual respect between you and your clients, and allows you to match your marketing efforts with your personal and business beliefs.

In short, it’s marketing that everyone feels good about.


It’s also marketing that works better. Before we dive into how it works, here are a few reasons to consider it.

Reasons to Market With Integrity

It raises the level of professionalism for you and the industry
CAM is an extraordinarily diverse profession. As such, there are no industry standards, no single governing body, and no consistent regulations. This creates a seemingly never-ending struggle for acceptance by the larger population who has yet to embrace holistic practices. By marketing with integrity, you help raise the level of professionalism for the whole industry as well as your practice. That’s something that everyone can benefit from.

Reach more people
Marketing with integrity will help you reach new segments of the market that may have previously ignored your efforts. It helps to create a bigger pie, as opposed to slicing up the existing pie into smaller and smaller pieces to share with increasing competition. That brings new faces into your practice, and lets you help people you may never have helped before. Needless to say, more clients tend to create more revenue, too.

You'll enjoy it
Marketing with integrity is about aligning with the vision for your business, and with your personal values. By doing that, you’ll create an environment in which marketing becomes something you can enjoy and look forward too. This creates a great positive cycle of better marketing, better results, even better marketing, even better results, and so on.

Make price changes more easily
If you’d like to change your prices, marketing with integrity will help. It changes the perceived level of quality of your practice, allowing price changes to be more readily accepted. If you’re competing on lower prices, it’ll help that too.


Principles of Marketing With Integrity

Clarify your vision and align your marketing
Perhaps the biggest marketing challenge for alternative health practitioners is that they’re not aligned with their marketing. You may perceive yourself as a smart, professional chiropractor, but you perceive marketing as lowbrow, sleazy and dumb. You may think of your acupuncture office as relaxing and soothing, but you have loud, busy advertising materials. With this kind of misalignment, you’ll never be terribly inspired by, or successful in, your marketing efforts.

Clarify the vision for your practice. What’s your unique offering? Are you a high-end boutique practice, or a volume business with lower prices? Are you at the fringes of holistic medicine, or integrating allopathic and alternative medicine in one place? What makes you different from other practitioners? Is it the atmosphere? The service? The price? A unique modality or health model?

Once you’ve determined the vision and unique offering of your practice, you’ll find it’s much easier to market what you’ve actually got as a means of getting to what you actually want. If you’re the professional practitioner with the soothing, tranquil office, you might find it actually enjoyable now to create an advertisement that expresses those values, instead of “BUY 2 GET 1 FREE!!!”

Don’t Mistake Advertising for Marketing
Advertising is one facet of marketing. But just one. Practitioners tend to be easily turned off by advertising and networking, but those are just a tiny part of marketing. For example, the best marketing you can ever do is to help heal a patient with a challenging, chronic and common problem. Do that, and their referrals will beat a path to your door. It’s exceptional marketing, but to apply it all you have to do is be exceptional as a CAM practitioner, not as a used car salesman.

Always offer value
Offering value means that your patients get something of equal or greater worth in return for their money. Ask yourself if you’d come to the office twice a week and pay what you’re asking your patients to pay. There’s nothing wrong with making a great buck, but don’t rip people off. Is the professional line supplement you’re selling in your dispensary really worth the sticker price? It may well be, but make sure you know.

Why? Because it bleeds through in all your marketing efforts. If you’re not offering genuine value, it shows, and eventually word gets out. Remember that part of marketing is getting referrals from your existing patients, and value is an important part of that. Even very sick people are value sensitive – they amount they’re willing to pay for relief may be much higher, but everyone is value sensitive at some point.

Believe what you’re selling
If you don’t believe the effectiveness what you’re marketing, it’ll come through in your efforts, too. Ads, brochures, letters, speaking opportunities, websites and all other facets of marketing tend to reflect the belief of the sellers. If you’re really not quite sure if your new bio-super-pulse-magneto-astral-ping machine is actually measuring what the company told you, you’re going to find it tough to sell it to your patients. Ask yourself if you’d recommend it to your grandmother if you knew she had to use her entire pension check to buy it.

Raise the level of your material
Regardless of your niche, be professional in your approach to marketing materials. Take the extra time, spend the extra money. Get someone to proofread. Graphic/media designers are a dime-a-dozen these days. Take a little time to shop around, and you can usually find someone quite good at reasonable rates. If you’re short on cash, stay away from larger shops and ask around until you find a reasonably priced freelancer with some real skills. You’ll discover some real joy in producing material that you’re proud to showcase. You’ll also find some real business in it, too.

Don’t Talk Dollars, Unless…
Forget about price in your marketing efforts. Discounts, buy one get two, bring a friend for free, 20% off for Valentine’s day, blah, blah. This approach reduces the professionalism of your practice, hurts the industry, and reduces the value patients place on your care, which hinders their healing and their referrals.

The exception to the rule is when price is your unique offering. If you’re one of 30 massage therapists in your neighborhood, and you’ve decided to compete by offering cheaper massages, then that’s what you’re selling: cheaper massages. If that’s not what you’re selling, stay away from numbers.

Coming next: using marketing with integrity to increase referrals

The Kansas City infoZine: Beverages the culprit in obesity surge

February 19th, 2007 / Main Page / Comments Off

This article from The Kansas City infoZine suggests that calories from beverages may be a large causal factor on the nation’s growing obesity problem.

 

Here are some facts and opinions from the article:

 

During the last 30 years calorie consumption has increased by 150-300 calories per day with half of that increase coming from beverages.

 

Average soft drink portions have increased from 13 ounces to 20 ounces.

 

Studies indicate that when people consume more calories from beverages they do not compensate by consuming fewer calories from their meals, hence the increase in calories from the beverages is a net increase in calorie consumption leading to permanent weight gain.

 

Even after consuming more calories from sweetened beverages with their meals, study participants did not report any increase in satiety.

 

Beverages don’t provide an increase satiety commensurate with their calorie component:  they pass through our mouths quickly giving less time for the brain to realize we are eating and some people somehow rationalize that they don’t count; they do.

 

This article provides an excellent summary of the perils of high calorie beverages; read it in full here.

 

Our take at getfitsource.com is simple:

If you are still drinking colas or other “sugar water” you really aren’t serious about losing weight.  Sweetened soft drinks should be the very first thing that you jettison from your diet if you want to lose.  Drink only water and other unsweetened beverages if you are serious about losing weight.  If you must drink orange juice or grapefruit juice, be sure to dilute it copiously with water before you consume.  Sports drinks fall into the “sugar water” category.  Although they contain fewer calories per ounce than sweetened colas, they should be avoided if you want to lose.  A large sports drink can easily negate the (caloric consumption) benefits of a fairly strenuous workout.

 

Ditch sugar water from you diet today. All refined carbs are really a no-no if you want to lose weight.

 

Acne Facts Treatments And Tips For You

February 18th, 2007 / Herb Remedies, acne, acne treatment, acne skin care, skin care, acne scars, acne cause, acne facts, acne products, natural / Comments Off

By Helen Hecker

Living with acne can be very difficult, and even more difficult to find the right acne treatment for you. There are times when one has to think about alternative, natural, effective treatment methods to get the best cure or solution to their acne, zits, pimples and blackhead problems.

By their mid-teens, nearly 35% of teenagers have acne severe enough to require some treatment from a medical professional. Nearly 17 million people in the United States have acne. Acne is the most common skin disease. People of all races and ages get acne. Baby acne is a rash seen on the cheeks, chin, and forehead of infants. There are several different types of acne.

As time goes by, more research may help determine just how male and female hormones influence acne and the role diet plays. Understanding that hormones may have some influence on the cause of acne needs to be considered.

The cause of acne is really unknown. Doctors think certain factors might cause or contribute to acne including hormone increases in teenage years, hormone changes in pregnancy, starting or stopping birth control pills, heredity, medicines and greasy make-up.

One helpful remedy seems to be to use ice to reduce the swelling caused by inflamed pimples: rub it over the blemishes for 2-3 minutes. Coconut is one of the best treatments I’ve found for acne. Some natural home remedies include dabbing on non-gel toothpaste to dry out zits or lemon juice.

It just takes motivation, a willingness to try it, and diligent application of coconut oil several times a day and at bedtime to see its benefits. It’s easy to treat acne cheaply, simply, naturally, yet effective, at home.

Use baking soda carefully to exfoliate. It’s always best to seek non-invasive treatment for any skin condition.

There are several types of acne scars: ice-pick scars, depressed fibrotic scars, superficial and deep soft scars, and atrophic macules. As a registered nurse, I have learned a lot over the years about acne scars, acne scar treatments, and acne scar removal. The good news is that there are several types of treatments to choose from for acne scar removal.

Drink lots and lots of pure, filtered water. Whether you eat a natural diet with living fruits and vegetables or eat dead junk food, what you eat may have a direct or indirect affect on the male hormones which may play a part in acne.

The liver sluffs off toxins from bad foods, drinks, drugs and chemicals and sends them through your skin resulting in skin eruptions, acne, pimples and other skin disorders. Besides external acne treatment it’s best to work from the inside out too.

Eat high-fiber snacks like raw nuts, raw seeds, and dried fruit, such as dates, and figs. You want to help the skin from the inside out too. For an easy fiber boost, mix in 2 tablespoons of ground up flaxseeds in raw applesauce, from 2-3 apples, made in your food processor.

The skin must be regularly cleaned or it’ll become cracked or inflamed. Functions of the skin are disturbed when it is dirty; it becomes more easily damaged, the release of antibacterial compounds decreases and dirty skin is more prone to develop infections.

Be assured, scientists are constantly looking at new non-invasive ways to treat acne. With cheap, safe, simple, natural, effective, alternative home treatments for acne and pimples, your skin should be well on its way to recovery. In any case, try not to panic about your acne and take it day by day.

About The Author

For more information on natural treatments for acne and acne light therapy, go to http://www.Best-Skin-Solutions.com Helen Hecker R.N.’s website specializing in acne, pimples and skin disorders with tips, advice and resources for adults, teens, and babies, including information on acne scar treatments

Acne Facts Treatments And Tips For You

February 18th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

By Helen Hecker

Living with acne can be very difficult, and even more difficult to find the right acne treatment for you. There are times when one has to think about alternative, natural, effective treatment methods to get the best cure or solution to their acne, zits, pimples and blackhead problems.

By their mid-teens, nearly 35% of teenagers have acne severe enough to require some treatment from a medical professional. Nearly 17 million people in the United States have acne. Acne is the most common skin disease. People of all races and ages get acne. Baby acne is a rash seen on the cheeks, chin, and forehead of infants. There are several different types of acne.

As time goes by, more research may help determine just how male and female hormones influence acne and the role diet plays. Understanding that hormones may have some influence on the cause of acne needs to be considered.

The cause of acne is really unknown. Doctors think certain factors might cause or contribute to acne including hormone increases in teenage years, hormone changes in pregnancy, starting or stopping birth control pills, heredity, medicines and greasy make-up.

One helpful remedy seems to be to use ice to reduce the swelling caused by inflamed pimples: rub it over the blemishes for 2-3 minutes. Coconut is one of the best treatments I’ve found for acne. Some natural home remedies include dabbing on non-gel toothpaste to dry out zits or lemon juice.

It just takes motivation, a willingness to try it, and diligent application of coconut oil several times a day and at bedtime to see its benefits. It’s easy to treat acne cheaply, simply, naturally, yet effective, at home.

Use baking soda carefully to exfoliate. It’s always best to seek non-invasive treatment for any skin condition.

There are several types of acne scars: ice-pick scars, depressed fibrotic scars, superficial and deep soft scars, and atrophic macules. As a registered nurse, I have learned a lot over the years about acne scars, acne scar treatments, and acne scar removal. The good news is that there are several types of treatments to choose from for acne scar removal.

Drink lots and lots of pure, filtered water. Whether you eat a natural diet with living fruits and vegetables or eat dead junk food, what you eat may have a direct or indirect affect on the male hormones which may play a part in acne.

The liver sluffs off toxins from bad foods, drinks, drugs and chemicals and sends them through your skin resulting in skin eruptions, acne, pimples and other skin disorders. Besides external acne treatment it’s best to work from the inside out too.

Eat high-fiber snacks like raw nuts, raw seeds, and dried fruit, such as dates, and figs. You want to help the skin from the inside out too. For an easy fiber boost, mix in 2 tablespoons of ground up flaxseeds in raw applesauce, from 2-3 apples, made in your food processor.

The skin must be regularly cleaned or it’ll become cracked or inflamed. Functions of the skin are disturbed when it is dirty; it becomes more easily damaged, the release of antibacterial compounds decreases and dirty skin is more prone to develop infections.

Be assured, scientists are constantly looking at new non-invasive ways to treat acne. With cheap, safe, simple, natural, effective, alternative home treatments for acne and pimples, your skin should be well on its way to recovery. In any case, try not to panic about your acne and take it day by day.

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