Optimal Wellness classes, Fall 2009

Our fall series of Optimal Wellness classes is off and running at the Jutila Center! Last week, I taught "Detox 101: Simple Ways to Avoid Toxins and Build Health," and this coming Wednesday, September 23rd, Vicki Usitalo will teach "Internal Cleansing for Vitality, Wellness and Weight Loss."

We have a good time at these classes and cover a wide range of natural wellness topics. Vicki's class promises to be very informative as she gives an overview of homeopathy and field control therapy, two holistic health tools that can cleanse the body on a cellular level. I've been a very satisfied client of Vicki's for field control therapy, and find it a very powerful yet gentle healing technique.

Below is the entire fall schedule of Optimal Wellness classes. Classes meet Wednesday evenings (except one on the Monday before Thanksgiving) and run from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. with informal discussion to follow. They're held in the Jutila Center's Room 324, at 200 Michigan Street in Hancock, MI. Cost is $10 per person at the door. For more information call 487-7451 or email NorthCoastHolistics@gmail.com. Hope to see you there!

Here we are teaching meridian tapping techniques at one of our spring/summer wellness classes. Thanks to Gustavo Bourdieu for this photo.

OPTIMAL WELLNESS:
Creating a Healthy Balance in Mind, Body and Spirit

FALL SCHEDULE
Sept 16 - Detox 101: Simple Ways to Avoid Toxins and Build Health, taught by Kate Alvord
Sept 23 - Internal Cleansing for Vitality, Wellness & Weight Loss, taught by Vicki Usitalo
Sept 30 - Healthy Buildings, taught by Karen Rumisek
Oct 7 - Mindfulness and Stress, taught by Kim Menzel
Oct 14 - Herbs & Essential Oils for Winter Health & Holiday Stress, taught by Karen Rumisek
Oct 21 - Finding Silence in the Season, taught by Dorothy Riutta
Oct 28 - What Do Our Chakras Have to Do With Health? taught by Patty Peterson
Nov 4 - Journaling for Wellness, taught by Kate Alvord
Nov 11 - Unwinding Habits of the Mind, taught by Kim Menzel
Nov 18 - Adrenal Fatigue, taught by Vicki Usitalo
Nov 23 (MONDAY) – Food as a Metaphor, taught by Kim Menzel
Dec 2 - E-Z Fitness Methods: When You Can't or Don't Exercise, taught by Kate Alvord
Dec 9 - Love Your Self, Love Your Body, taught by Kim Menzel
Dec 16 - Tenderheartedness, taught by Dorothy Riutta

Instructors:
Patty Peterson RN of Keweenaw Natural Wellness is an energy healer who has taught several previous classes on wellness and intuition.
Kim Menzel LMSW of Indigo Creek Counseling is a clinical psychotherapist who works with area health care providers in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders.
Katie Alvord of North Coast Holistics is an award-winning writer and educator with training in holistic health and nutrition.
Vicki Usitalo RN of Preventive Health Maintenance is a specialist in Field Control Therapy, a method of internal cleansing using homeopathy and herbs.
Dorothy Riutta of Peaceful Niche, a meditation practitioner who has studied in a variety of meditation traditions, teaches introductory and advanced meditation classes.
Karen Rumisek has a background including postsecondary education and training in nutrition, herbal remedies and feng shui.

Pop Diets vs. The Unique You - Quick Intro

Pick any popular diet, and you will find some dieters who succeeded wildly at losing weight with it, but others who just could not. Diet books claim that their program should work for all, yet we find these differences.

I'm convinced that there is no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" diet. Not only are we all different, with different dietary needs, but those needs can change over time, often more significantly than we might realize.

I'm teaching "Pop Diets vs. The Unique You" to explore this idea that each of us is biochemically unique. That uniqueness can influence which diets might work – and which might not work -- for each of us.

Possibly the best way to determine an appropriate diet for "The Unique You" is by using a good system of applied kinesiology, or muscle testing. My class won't be covering that, but there are other instructors who do -- Patty Markham Peterson, for instance. I highly recommend learning more about this as it can be quite helpful.

In addition, there are some "typing" systems from the natural health world that can provide useful information about your general tendencies. These can supplement or support what you might get from muscle testing and lead to a better understanding of your own biochemistry.

"Pop Diets vs. The Unique You" will look at three such "typing" systems – Metabolic Typing, Ayurvedic Types and Blood Types. It will also survey the features of several popular weight loss diets and see how "types" can help in picking an appropriate diet.

The information provided by this short class will be very general, but I hope it will help each of us who take part to learn more about our unique physiques! The class will be taught tonight -- Wednesday evening August 19th at 6:30 p.m. at Room 324 in the Jutila Center (old hospital), 200 Michigan Street in Hancock, Michigan. Cost is $10 at the door and it will last about an hour. Hope to see you!

Many thanks to Kacey Berry for letting me use her beautiful meal photo above, taken in Italy.

Free Analysis of Your Diet

If you would like a free case study of your diet and nutritional status, please read this. I'm offering this service right now as part of a certificate course I'm taking. It's pretty simple and works like this:

You fill out a form that I provide you (electronically or in hard copy) by answering a few simple questions and listing what you eat over three days. Then I look over your answers and give you feedback about how your diet looks and where you might make improvements. I will be turning in a copy of your case study form with my certificate course materials, but because the form lists only a first name, it is essentially anonymous. The course, for those interested, is one offered by the Global College of Natural Medicine.

If you'd like to do this or if you have questions, please comment here. I'll do this for the first five people to contact me.

Journaling for Wellness

I spent the morning writing up a handout for the next class I'm teaching, "Journaling for Perfect Weight and Wellness." So go ahead, call me a geek, but I love this process of surrounding myself with books, paging through them to find just the right reference, then distilling and organizing information on an 8 ½ x 11 page. Ah, the handout! Preparing one usually starts out as review and almost always ends up with discovery.

This time, the process has renewed my enthusiasm for writing as a healing tool. In my class, I plan to cover wellness journaling, affirmative journaling, and expressive writing, all of which I've done and all of which can support physical wellness in different ways. But I am most excited by what I've reviewed and discovered this morning about expressive writing -- a method of therapeutic writing which links description of a traumatic or emotionally upsetting event with uncensored expression of the deep emotions felt during and after its occurrence.

This kind of expressive writing, studies show, can enhance immune function, reduce blood pressure, decrease arthitic pain, reduce stress, and generally improve mood and happiness over the long term. It has even raised grades among college students (probably by improving working memory) and increased employment prospects among job seekers (probably by alleviating depression and hostility and making them more appealing to employers). And it cuts down doctor visits. With research results like that, I'm surprised health insurance companies don't require it as a condition of coverage.

It certainly has the potential to reduce personal health care costs as it boosts wellness for those of us willing to try it. In the class tomorrow night, I'll be passing out basic expressive writing instructions and leading exercises in this and other forms of journaling.

If you want to join us, class starts at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 8th, 2009, and runs for one hour. It's at the Jutila Center (aka the old hospital), 200 Michigan Street in Hancock, Michigan, in Room 324. Cost is $10 at the door. Hope to see you!

Tapping Away Cravings

Does tapping really work? From the time of their inception in the 1980s, tapping systems have been controversial in scientific circles. Also known by the umbrella term "energy psychology," these techniques are based around systematic tapping of meridians or acupoints while focusing on a particular issue, malady, or problem. Fans report remarkable successes with tapping systems like Thought Field Therapy (TFT), Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), Mental Field Therapy/Technique (MFT), and others. But critics say there have been few peer-reviewed studies supporting their effectiveness.

Recently, though, that has begun to change. For instance, the abstract for David Feinstein's paper "Energy Psychology: A review of the preliminary evidence" states that "energy psychology has reached the minimum threshold for being designated as an evidence-based treatment." In other words, there is now enough evidence that it works to take it seriously.

There is still the need for much more tapping research. In the meantime, individuals have many ways they can evaluate these techniques for themselves. The tapping system I use is Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt's Mental Field Technique, or MFT, and I am still learning about ways it can work for me.

The most recent way I used MFT was in dealing with some food cravings. Though I have used the technique for a few years now, my cravings on this night were so strong that I really didn't expect tapping to quell them. But I went through the process anyway – it only takes a couple of minutes – and darned if it didn't work. As I began tapping the first of nine spots in the MFT sequence, the craving was still strong and I fully expected to head to the cupboard for a snack after I was done. But by the time I finished with the ninth spot, my craving had simply evaporated. I felt indifferent to food, and didn't need anything more to eat that night.

It was a great reminder for me that this really is an effective and worthwhile technique. Tomorrow night, we'll be teaching a class about tapping and will go into more detail about how it works and how to do it. That's at 6:30 p.m. at the Jutila Center in Hancock, $10 at the door. If you live in the area, please join us.