Below you will find an easy to read transcript of Dr. Dennis James’ monthly podcast interview. You can click the video to listen to the podcast or simply read the easy to follow transcript below. Enjoy!
Podcast Interview:
Hello everyone. This is Liz Harvey coming to you from our studios in New York City where we are dedicated to bringing you top quality advice from many of the leading expert professionals across the U.S.
In today’s episode, we are speaking with chiropractor, Dr. Dennis James, a performance chiropractic clinic located in Keller, Texas. Dr. James is a nationally recognized chiropractor and a member of both the American and Texas Chiropractic Association. He is also highly trained in acupuncture and a Fellow of the Acupuncture Society of America. Dr. James specializes in family chiropractic care, treating infants to seniors.
Today we’re going to talk about a very important topic:
Women’s Health
RC: Hi, Dr. James. How are you today?
Dr. Dennis James: I’m great, Liz. Thank you.
RC: Thanks for joining me.
What do you think is the number one health concern for women in our country?
Dr. Dennis James: What I see or most questions and concerns we get are either about hormonal balance for women or thyroid concerns and how it affects the metabolism. Between chiropractic and acupuncture, restoring the function of that system, we’ve been able to see a lot of cycles get better, fertility issues get better, balance of the hormones through there. We tend to see the energy start to restore, sleep get better, and all different types of things happen once that system gets better.
Are there any nutritional habits you believe women should have in order to stay healthy?
Dr. Dennis James: Absolutely. First and foremost, they need to make sure they are drinking enough water. It is a very, very common mistake that many people actually think that they are hungry when in reality, they are just thirsty. If they would go to water first, they would kind of get rid of that hunger, and that also helps the metabolism.
Number two, enough water is going to also help eliminate the toxins from the body in order to keep them healthy, but it’s also crucial to eliminate the other side, which is the sodas and diet sodas. Some of the diet sodas still have aspartame in them, which is actually going to help the body store fat, which is something that we don’t want to do.
We also want to limit different types of foods, especially the foods that have chemicals in them, because of the way they can affect the thyroid in a negative way. Some of these foods are kind of soft drinks, french fries, I would say pastries and potato chips, white bread. You definitely want to look out for hydrogenated oils.
When you want to think about what you want to put into the body, you want to kind of look at different fruits and vegetables, you want them to be as organic and pure as possible, and you want to get a wide variety of colors as well. When you go to the light colors, such as oranges, bananas and pineapples, those are going to help you feel younger and look younger, improve your immune system and even decrease wrinkles.
You can take dark green, leafy vegetables and those are going to help reduce risk of breast cancer and also osteoporosis because the calcium that they have. Then we can also have a lot of blues and purples that are very high in anti-oxidants, and that helps create health, improve the immune system and counteract cancer as well.
How much exercise, and what type of exercise, should women be doing every week?
Dr. Dennis James: It’s going to be different per individual, but the basic numbers are, if you just go on a 30-minute walk, five days a week, that is going to be wonderful for you. Number one, it is going to decrease your risk of heart disease by about 50 percent. Number two, it is going to double the bone density in the hips because it is weight-bearing. Then you can have the same effect if you choose to do modern exercise, which is going to be more step classes, aerobics, weight, things like that, but you would need to do that three times a week.
If you go high intensity, you can do it twice a week for about 45 minutes, but you also want to make sure that your bones are strong enough to handle that and you are healthy enough to handle that as well. Once that happens, they’re going to be able to have improved mind function and memory, digestion gets better, overall health improves and the immune system is going to stay stronger for them as well.
Women can be pulled into many different responsibilities throughout the day. What are some ways women can manage stress?
Dr. Dennis James: They have to. Stress is the silent killer, so we want to make sure that we keep it off, because stress is extremely cumulative. It continues to build up every single day. I would say that we need to make sure, most importantly, that we have a routine. If it is not a habit, it is not going to be happening. Kind of the habit that we want to create is making sure that you get a minimum of 20 minutes a day that you can kind of create your life for you, take that pressure off. I would suggest some down time, some quiet time, maybe some music without lyrics, meditation or prayer is always wonderful.
Once we do those things, we also want to make sure that we are getting adequate sleep. So many people ask about, “Hey, how much sleep should I get?” The truth is, Liz, that it is different for everybody. There’s a couple of things that we do want to be aware of. Number one, we want to make sure that we’re getting consistent sleep and, if we’re not sleeping consistently through the night, then we know that there’s something going on neurologically that needs to be fixed. We also know that that is going to lead to insomnia, which is a major risk of actually shortening our life span, so we want to maximize that.
Number two, what a lot of people don’t understand is, the last thing that you do for the hour that you go to bed is going to be kind of what you think about at night. Many people are on their phones, reading negative news, and they’re watching the news on TV or whatever it is. Whatever it is that you’re putting in during that last hour will actually be processed in your subconscious mind six times before you wake up the next morning.
Negative input is obviously going to be negative output. So many people are waking up the next morning already, after their body was creating negative stuff all night long. If we can get focused on the good stuff, the things that we can be grateful for, the direction that we want our life to go as we go to bed, we can be focused on waking up feeling rested, rejuvenated, refreshed, and our body actually won’t be in a stress state while we sleep. Now we can overcome it even more and then wake up more well-rested.
How is chiropractic beneficial to the wellness-type lifestyle that many women choose?
Dr. Dennis James: It goes back to the stress that we just talked about. We have to get that off the spine so that we can keep it off the nervous system. Chiropractic is actually a hands-on profession and studies have shown that it actually decreases stress by about 75 percent. Overall, our goal is to actually break the mold and get them into the wellness and health investment mindset, because everything that you do is either investing and adding to your health or it’s diminishing and taking away.
From a chiropractic perspective, most know we’re great at back pain, neck pain, headaches and migraines, but what we’re really good at is finding that neurological disturbance and finding a way to allow to make sure the body is healing itself naturally. When we take a look at the biggest women concerns, you can go up to the neck where the nerves exit out and it controls metabolism function and it controls high blood pressure and it controls the ability of the thyroid to work properly.
Then we can go the low back and those nerves go out to all the female reproductive parts and things of that nature. Being able to take a global look at the patient and not just address the pain and discomfort allows us to be able to walk that wellness model that allows the patient to stay healthy, be healthy and not have to catch up later on in life.
RC: Great. Thank you so much, Dr. James. We know you’re extremely busy, so I just want to say thank you for your time and help today.
Dr. Dennis James: Thank you, Liz. I appreciate you having me on.
RC: For our listeners across the country, if you’re interested in speaking with a doctor, please visit www.performancechiropractic.clinic or call 817-337-3636 to schedule an appointment. On behalf of our team, we want to thank you for listening and we look forward to bringing you more top-quality content from our country’s leading experts.