Smoking throughout the day is akin to living inside a burning building. Smoking degrades the collagen of your skin causing premature aging, destroys the cells inside your lungs, and promotes heart disease, cataracts and cancer because of the oxidizing radicals released into the blood stream. It can contribute to back pain by dehydrating the spinal discs.

People stop smoking every day and so can you. Some people find acupuncture to be very helpful at reducing cravings and many people have used nicotine patches for the same reason. But these are not as effective as your unswerving, absolute commitment to do whatever it takes to not smoke today. Just limit your not smoking to today only. You can tell yourself that you can have a cigarette tomorrow if you just make it through today. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, tell yourself the same thing.

There are many addicts who have successfully kicked their alcohol, heroine or cocaine addictions this way. Kicking any addiction is tough. You can expect to feel stressed, anxious and irritable at first. To expect anything else is unreasonable. But you can also expect that over time it will become easier and easier to not smoke.

Learning how to read food labels is like looking at a prescription for your health and your life. We recommend looking for red-flag ingredients- if a Hall of Shame ingredient is listed among the top five ingredients overall, steer clear!

Just about every packaged food made in the U.S. has a food label indicating serving size and other nutritional information. The "Nutrition Facts" food labels are intended to give you information about the specific packaged food in question. Measurements of fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate, protein, vitamins and minerals are calculated for a "typical portion." But, reading these labels can be confusing. Below are some explanations of its components.

Serving Size. Serving sizes are based on the amount of food people typically eat, which makes them realistic and easy to compare to similar foods. This may or may not be the serving amount you normally eat. It is important that you pay attention to the serving size, including the number of servings in the package and compare it to how much you actually eat. The size of the serving on the food package influences all the nutrient amounts listed on the top part of the label. For example, if a package has 4 servings and you eat the entire package, you quadruple the calories, fat, etc. that you have eaten.

Calories and Calories From Fat. The number of calories and grams of nutrients are provided for the stated serving size. This is the part of the food label where you will find the amount of fat per serving.

Nutrients. This section lists the daily amount of each nutrient in the food package. These daily values are the reference numbers that are set by the government and are based on current nutrition recommendations. Some labels list daily values for both 2,000 and 2,500 calorie diets.

"% Daily Value" shows how a food fits into a 2,000 calorie/day diet. For diets other than 2,000 calories, divide by 2,000 to determine the % Daily Value for nutrients. For example, if you are following a 1,500 calorie diet, your % Daily Value goal will be based on 75% for each nutrient, not 100%.

For fat, saturated fat and cholesterol, choose foods with a low % Daily Value. For total carbohydrates, dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals, try to reach your goal for each nutrient.

Ingredients. Each product should list the ingredients on the label. They are listed from largest to smallest amount (by weight). This means a food contains the largest amount of the first ingredient and the smallest amount of the last ingredient.

Label Claim. Another aspect of food labeling is label claims. Some food labels make claims such as "low cholesterol" or "low fat." These claims can only be used if a food meets strict government definitions.

There are three major trends in the health of both children and adults that have public health workers concerned: an increase in obesity, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and the amount of time spent watching television. Several recently published research studies indicate that television may be the culprit that leads to both of the others.

Watching television leads to obesity in two ways. First, every hour that you spend sitting in front of the television, is an hour spent being inactive. Kids should be outside running around, riding bikes and playing with their friends. Adults ought to be involved in hobbies and community activities. Sitting in front of the tube results in burning fewer calories and a reduction in overall metabolism. Also, a number of studies have shown that people who watch television just eat more food.

Watching television also has detrimental effects on the brain's cognitive function, especially in kids. Studies published by the American Academy of Pediatrics have shown that children who watch more than two hours of television per day struggle more with aggressive behavioral problems, difficulty in concentrating, sleep disturbances and a dramatically increased risk of alcohol consumption as teenagers. Although most studies have been conducted on children, other studies have shown that the results are just as valid for adolescents and adults as well. These negative effects can be explained by understanding the effect television has on the brain.

Broadcast television in the United States has a particular frequency of flicker that cannot be seen, but which has an effect on brain function. A number of studies measured brain wave activity in people while they watch television. During these studies it was noticed that the brain waves in people watching television were similar to people who were in a trance. This trance-like state is associated with a decrease in the function of the cerebral cortex - the critical thinking part of the brain. When people are in this trance-like state for several hours per day, it becomes more difficult to focus their attention and control their impulses.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children watch no more than two hours of television per day, and it would be better to reduce this even further. Many health experts are now encouraging parents to completely eliminate watching television for children under the age of seven, by which time their brains have the chance to develop a bit more.

The big distinction about wellness psychology is that it is largely a manifestation of your identity, who you believe yourself to be. If you consider yourself a well person, it goes a long way toward producing well habits and a well mind. Your identity is your self image, your self concept, your beliefs and your values. Choosing beliefs and values that are consistent with well behaviors leads to a well mind.

For example, if you were told as a child that if you washed your hair and went outside with a wet head, you'd get sick, there's a good chance you either don't do that, or when you do, you either get sick or worry that you will. This belief, imposed on you by well-meaning but misguided advisors, has no grounding in fact, so merely noticing when you dredge up stuff like this and challenging it to see if it's really true for you can eliminate interference to normal function caused by faulty thinking. You'll actually heal better and faster when you catch yourself in these limiting beliefs and adjust them.

Your identity is based on your sense of self, which largely came from the beliefs of such well-intentioned people who shaped your early life - as Dr. Larry Markson says, your Mothers, Fathers, Teachers and Preachers, MFTP. Discovering the beliefs that prevent you from expressing yourself as you wish, and replacing them with beliefs that empower you and help you grow, lead to a well psychology.

Examine your values, what you consider to be important, and be sure they match your ideals. Honoring your innermost needs and wants instead of denying them creates an internal environment of self-acceptance, integrity and inner peace. Love, respect, honesty, freedom - everyone has a different formula, and investigating yours can help you feel more comfortable in your own skin.

The technical end of wellness psychology encourages normal responses to the challenges of life, rather than just treating mental and emotional conditions. Understanding the concept of personality makes this approach clearer. For example, people tend to have patterns of behavior, some of which work better than others, but the patterns usually persist until they are broken or replaced. Noticing these patterns and evaluating them to see if they are constructive or destructive, and shifting the patterns accordingly, make wellness more accessible.

There are many ways to group or evaluate personality types. People tend to favor one of the three major ways the brain processes - visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), and kinesthetic (feeling), and each group has common patterns of behavior. Or, you can divide people by personality style, such as: drivers, expressives, analyticals, and amiables. You can notice typical behaviors, known as metaprograms, such as moving toward benefits or moving away from consequences, or having an internal or external frame of reference. There are more technical systems of personality also, like Myers-Briggs or the enneagram, which offer a deeper understanding of personality and can help create a pathway to personal growth.

Why is personality important? Healthy people express themselves consistent with their personality types, and those types vary greatly, so there is a wide spectrum of normal behaviors that could be considered well behaviors. Knowing yourself, and understanding others you have a relationship with, can give you insight into the unique nature of your personality. You can also understand the likely patterns of health, so you can choose the actions that support wellness for someone of your personality type. Patterns of personality also provide clues for wellness professionals to intervene in a way that is custom-tailored for the needs of each individual. This guides the person toward a well state and even amplifys their health, wellness, and peak performance through personalized wellness counseling.

The most obvious and desirable benefit of a well mind is a better quality of life, which of course is determined by each individual's model of the world. Our values and beliefs will shape our definition of a great quality of life. A well person or family seeks to live consistently with their own meaning of living well, so identifying the details of your desired outcomes makes it easier to tell when you're getting close.

To increase your quality of life, think about what a happy, satisfying, fulfilling life would be like, and pay attention to how you would have to show up to have the best chance of creating that life for yourself. The more you act like the kind of person who has the life you want, the more likely you'll do the things that kind of person would do, and that will lead to having those things in reality. By noticing how you are already like this ideal version of you, and by recognizing where you need to focus your energy to build the resources you need, you can grow into an enhanced version of yourself, more capable and more attractive, which leads to a better quality of life, by your standards.

While you can't be responsible for someone else's behaviors and values, you can help to create an environment that makes relationships work better. Gaining and maintaining rapport establishes a bond or connection that improves communication. Sharing and committing to support each other's values calms rocky waters and sets the stage for happiness and growth in relationships.

You can gain rapport by matching and mirroring someone - in other words, communicating in a similar style, to make it comfortable for the other. By giving the person back their facial expression, voice tonality, body posture, word choice or breathing pattern, you connect with the other person on a deep level. Discussing values comes easier when you have rapport. Ask questions to find out what's important and why, so you can support them, and reasonably expect their support, too. Make your needs and wants understood too, so you can be supported in pursuing what is important to you.

No discussion of wellness psychology would be complete without mentioning the impact of spirituality on wellness. Appreciating religious values and spiritual beliefs can help to form a solid foundation of wellness in your life. Learning to balance physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual harmony is a theme found in many spiritual traditions and correlates with the goals of wellness psychology.

Wellness psychology is the study of mental and emotional wellness - in other words, the way to create conditions of thinking and feeling that are consistent with healthy living.

Wellness psychology is a way of responding to the challenges of life with positive expectancy and self-esteem, based on the awareness that our natural state is harmony and inner peace, if we can reduce or eliminate whatever is interfering with that state.Wellness psychology is based more on lifestyle decisions than the treatment of a professional. Learning to interpret the events of your life with positive realism gives you a perspective from which you can assign uplifting meanings to those events. Tony Robbins says, "Nothing has any meaning but the meaning you give it," and putting a positive spin on things sets an internal environment that is more likely to encourage overall wellness.

But there's more to wellness psychology than just positive thinking. Rather than waiting around for mental and emotional symptoms, you can be proactive and develop habits that make you mentally and emotionally healthier on an ongoing basis.

When a subluxation occurs, a chiropractor can correct the misaligned bone and allow it to return to its proper position. This procedure is appropriately called an adjustment, and the adjustment enables the body to heal. The chiropractic adjustment is a quick thrust applied to a vertebra for the purpose of correcting its position, movement or both. Adjustments are often accompanied by an audible release of gas that sounds like a "crack." The sound sometimes shocks people a little bit the first couple times they get adjusted, but the sensation is usually relieving. Occasionally, minor discomfort is experienced, especially if the surrounding muscles are in spasm or the patient tenses up during the chiropractic procedure. There are times when the audible "cracking" does not occur. This is often due to either significant muscle tightness or that the patient may be having a hard time relaxing during their adjustments. However, the chiropractic adjustment is still important. The leak is fixed. The wiring is fixed. Information is flowing again. To keep the wiring fixed, several adjustments over a course of time may be necessary, in addition to massage, physical therapy, stretching exercises, or strengthening exercises. In the chiropractic world, keeping the problem fixed and preventing its reoccurrence is just as important as the initial remedy.

There are actually five components that contribute to the vertebral subluxation complex (VSC).

• Bone Component - where the vertebra is either out of position, not moving properly, or are undergoing degeneration. This frequently leads to a narrowing of the spaces between the bones through which the nerves pass; often resulting in irritation or impingement of the nerve itself.

• Nerve Component - is the disruption of the normal flow of energy along the nerve fibers, causing the messages traveling along the nerves to become distorted. The result is that all of the tissues that are fed by those nerves receive distorted signals from the brain and, consequently, are not able to function normally. Over time, this can lead to a whole host of conditions, such as peptic ulcers, constipation and other organ system dysfunction.

• Muscular Component - since nerves control the muscles that help hold the vertebrae in place, muscles have to be considered to be an integral part of the vertebral subluxation complex. In fact, muscles both affect, and are affected by the VSC. A subluxation can irritate a nerve, the irritated nerve can cause a muscle to spasm, the spasmed muscle pulls the attached vertebrae further out of place, which then further irritates the nerve and you have a vicious cycle. It is no wonder that very few subluxations just go away by themselves.

• Soft Tissue Component - the VSC will also affect the surrounding tendons, ligaments, blood supply, and other tissues as the misaligned vertebrae tug and squeeze the connective tissue with tremendous force. Over time, the soft tissues can become stretched out or scarred, leaving the spine with either a permanent instability or restriction.

• Chemical Component - is the change in the chemistry of the body due to the VSC. Most often, the chemical changes, such as the release of a class of chemicals called "kinins," are pro-inflammatory; meaning that they increase inflammation in the affected area.

These changes get progressively worse over time if they are not treated correctly, leading to chronic pain, inflammation, arthritis, muscle trigger points, the formation of bone spurs, loss of movement, as well as muscle weakness and spasm. Chiropractors have known the dangers of the vertebral subluxation complex ever since the birth of the profession. More and more scientific research is demonstrating the tremendous detrimental impact that subluxations have on the tissue of the body. In order to be truly healthy, it is vital that your nervous system be functioning free of interference from subluxations. Chiropractors are the only health professionals trained in the detection, location, and correction of the vertebral subluxation complex through chiropractic care.