How Acupuncture Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

How Acupuncture Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
We’re willing to bet your list of New Year’s resolutions includes some of these common pledges: to eat healthier, to lose weight and to get more exercise. Those three seem to always be on the “self-improvement top 10 list.” According to Nielsen, the popular survey company, the top resolutions include getting into shape, losing weight, learning something new and “enjoying life to the fullest.”

Acupuncture is a helpful tool that can go a long way toward helping you keep those resolutions throughout 2018. If you’ve made these pledges before without success, maybe it’s time to give acupuncture a try. Let’s take a look at how acupuncture helps you tackle these resolutions.

Can acupuncture help you lose weight?
While there’s no “magic pill” or instant formula for losing weight, studies have shown that acupuncture, when used in conjunction with diet and exercise, enables patients to lose more weight than they would without acupuncture, according to information from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine.

Acupuncture and exercise
Acupuncture helps take care of your muscles and joints to ensure that you feel like exercising and that you’re always in peak condition. Many athletes use acupuncture along with a technique called cupping to enhance their performance.

Cupping uses heat and small glass or bamboo cups to draw toxins to the surface. This restores circulation, enabling your body to rid itself of these toxins naturally.

Acupuncture improves digestion
If you’re having difficulties digesting food, it’s harder to stick to a healthier diet. Acupuncture enables your body to pinpoint the exact systems and areas that need care. Using its natural ability to heal itself, your body is able to restore optimal functions without medication and the side effects that often occur.

Acupuncture helps you sleep
Catching a great night’s rest may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of living healthier, but according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, sleep is vital for building up your immune system, giving your brain a chance to “reboot.”

In addition, sleep:

Helps improve your ability to learn (which is great for those who resolved to “learn something new” in 2018—that was another common resolution.)
Activates parts of your brain that are vital for decision-making
Decreases your risk of becoming obese
Helps repair and heal your heart and blood vessels
Affects how your body uses and processes insulin

Acupuncture reduces stress
“Living life to the fullest” means different things for different people. However, we’re sure of one principle: it never includes anxiety. Traditional Chinese Medicine is very effective in treating nervousness, worry and stress.

By prompting your body to release natural endorphins, acupuncture transforms your outlook. Stress is often triggered by hormones and neurotransmitters involved in the “fight or flight” response that helped our ancestors survive. Today, we don’t need the fight or flight response as much as they did—but it is hard-wired into our body and our psyche.

Acupuncture blocks the transmitters and chemicals that trigger the anxiety and stress caused by this response, enabling you to relax and freeing you from the health problems caused by consistent stress.

Is acupuncture right for you?

Perhaps none of these resolutions match your hopes for the New Year. Perhaps you’ve already lost weight and you regularly eat healthy, organic foods. If so, we’re proud of you for taking positive steps toward a better life. Still, we want to be sure you realize that acupuncture offers other tremendous benefits. We’ve helped patients find allergy and pain relief without troublesome side effects of medication.

If you’d like to learn more (and check off the resolution to “learn something new,” contact us to schedule a free, 20-minute consultation.

Let 2018 be the year you give acupuncture a try!

Source:

National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “Why is Sleep Important?” Online.