We place so much emphasis on success and completion of tasks, and not enough on taking care of ourselves.
This weekend’s “Be Well Weekend,” held at the Omni Bedford Springs Resort in Bedford, Pennsylvania, featured speakers and experts touching upon all manner of subject from healthy eating to mindfulness and music as a tool of community-building. Attendees could also attend yoga and meditation seminars and discover new ways to bring themselves greater happiness and a more fulfilled modern existence.
“I used to stay up two nights a week to get work done and take care of family. I thought it was really strong if I could not sleep, not eat and not pee for a whole day, because it made me a determined entrepreneur,” said Beth Caldwell, a Pittsburgh writer who led a Saturday session entitled “Yes You Can Do It All: You Just Can’t Do It All at the Same Time!”
“It made me very sick,” Ms. Caldwell explained.
In her session, Ms. Caldwell, a mother of two and a self-admitted workaholic who often had a difficult time saying no, outlined a nine-point strategy designed to help attendees realign their energies and focus to “stop doing it all” and to be more proactive rather than reactive in one’s life choices and time management.
“Sometimes people don’t know what they want to be, but they know what they don’t want to be,” she said, adding that because of her inability to turn down the entreaties of others, she developed a reputation of being always available. She even recalled someone calling her for advice with a Microsoft Word question at three in the morning.
When she became more selective about her activities, she was able to publish seven books, join a prominent Pittsburgh women’s organization and spend more quality time with her family.
Her mantra became: What do I need to release from my schedule?
Ms. Caldwell’s nine-point strategy was designed to assist attendees craft a more time-efficient schedule. Among her suggestions: Determine your new daily habits; create your ideal schedule; become mindful, present and intentional; always be learning.
Dr. Joe Gattuso, a cardiologist from Altoona, Pennsylvania, presented “A Different Perspective on Health and Illness,” which, in an hour, aimed to take down what he saw as several overriding myths of food consumption and how what we eat affects wellness.
One of Dr. Gattuso’s main premises during his talk: 1,000 calories of soda and 1,000 calories of broccoli, despite what many of his colleagues express, are not equal. He also warned his audience that 100 million Americas have a gluten problem without even realizing it.
“There’s a place for everything [food-wise], but, at the same time, recognize that’s not the way you live,” Dr. Gattuso explained.
Dr. Gattuso told of a former patient who’d had an angioplasty. However, even then, the patient stonewalled his physician’s advice to alter his diet and lifestyle — suffering a heart attack a few years later.
“If we’re not watching” what we eat and how we exercise, “all of us are” on the way to death’s door, he explained.
Another of Dr. Gattuso’s premises is that people do not “get old,” rather, their cells simply do not regenerate as quickly. As with other health problems, diet and exercise can help. The aging process is accelerated, he said, by our bodies being less able to eliminate “bad guy” free radicals.
Dr. Gattuso also called the much-maligned cholesterol a “necessary friend” in one’s overall health picture.
“It has to do with the content of the food,” he said, again striking the chord of balance.
Dr. Gattuso also broke from the current orthodoxy in his distaste for statins, medicines that reduce harmful LDL cholesterol in the blood. He said that heart medicines are actually harmful, and believes the medical establishment will catch up with his thinking only in a few decades because, as it stands now, big pharma “will lose money.”
And of caffeine, Dr. Gattuso said 2 teacups a day, or 5 oz., is beneficial to one’s concentration and focus.
In “Spine Health,” Dr. Steve McNeil, a former high school and college football player, related how his own back troubles led him first to yoga and then to chiropractic.
“Uneven twisting of the body [and] repetitive micro trauma … causes back problems,” Dr. McNeil explained, adding that chiropractic is a highly effective way of “fixing” the spinal curvature often seen in the elderly. Problems, he said, typically begin in the feet and posture.
Dr. McNeil then asked for volunteers suffering from various bodily pains to experience microsessions on his own chiropractic table. This reporter, who endures chronic back problems and arthritis, allowed Dr. McNeil to work on him in front of the gathered — experiencing a tremendous reduction in pain with the briskly applied medical science.
The final session of the weekend was a drum circle exercise led by Jim Donovan of Pittsburgh. Mr. Donovan, who formerly played drums in the rock band Rusted Root, entreated participants to each pick up an instrument for a directed, spontaneous percussion ensemble. Mr. Donovan, who teaches courses in world music, African music, hand drumming and fine arts courses at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, began with call-and-answer exercises that increased with difficulty as he soon asked the class to follow his lead with their eyes closed.
“Try to play as if there were” a single drum in the exercise, Mr. Donovan said, gently coaching the ersatz percussionists to tap in time — and intensity — with their classmates as smiles broke out across the room.
Be it music, diet or time management, the participants of the Be Well Weekend came away feeling refreshed and reinvigorated — and perhaps just a little bit more open and optimistic heading back to their busy daily lives.
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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