Health Blog

We’re in the home stretch of the 6-week Spent program and hopefully we’ve been able to incorporate a lot of the changes suggested by Dr. Lipman into our lifestyle.  I know that the restorative exercises have been particularly useful to me, to relax at the end of the day or take a breath during work.

While Week 6 is called Sustain, most of the Daily Beats contain new information. For example, Daily Beat 36 recommends removing chemicals from our medicine cabinet.  If you take a look at the list of ingredients to avoid, it’s quite daunting.  However, Dr. Lipman does a nice job of telling us what to avoid and where to look for alternatives.

Daily Beats 38 and 39 remind us to relax more, including slowing down and meditating. Some of the suggestions are very easy to incorporate into one’s day including listening to music in your car for a few minutes before going inside your house/work and sitting outside and concentrating on your breathing.  The Meditation with Nature advice provided on pages 216 and 217 is a nice way to ease into meditation, with the bonus of getting some time outside, some sun and a walk.

In Daily Beat 40, we learn about the differences between food allergy, sensitivity and intolerances.  Symptoms of sensitivity can run the gamut from unexplained fatigue to unexplained joint/muscle pain to irritability. The purpose of providing these symptoms is to show us that, if we’ve made major changes to our diet to eat in the Spent restorative way, as we begin to incorporate those foods we’ve eliminated back into our diets, we can and should watch for food sensitivities.

Finally, the 6-week program ends with Dr. Lipman’s explanation of Ubuntu and the role it should play in out lives.  The concept of Ubuntu is explained in Spent as “humaneness, kindness, understanding, compassion, tolerance, caring, sharing, sensitivity, and respect.”  Dr. Lipman has found through his experience that people who begin to live life this way and find meaning in their daily activities are happier, feel more fulfilled and are generally less Spent.

This Thursday, Dr. Tony will discuss Week 6 in much more depth.  The second installment of the author’s blog will be posted this Friday – if you missed the first one, I encourage you to read it here.