Franklin Chiropractor Talks About Weight Loss

When chiropractors can release their patients from their symptoms through chiropractic therapy, there's no more rewarding feeling. With that being said, chiropractors are often held back because they can only see their patients for a brief glimpse of their day.

While patients may leave the clinic feeling much more flexible and agile, their pains have come back by the time they return, and they are looking for another readjustment. 

The reason patients often have recurring pain is not due to the adjustments not working. Instead, outside of the chiropractic practice, the patient's lifestyle leads to excessive inflammation, worsening even the mildest of pains. 

Why Your Weight Might Be Causing Your Pain

When a patient comes in with excess body fat, it makes a chiropractor's job much more difficult. Not only does extra body fat increase the amount of stress on a patient's joints and muscles, but body fat will produce inflammatory compounds that increase levels of inflammation throughout your entire body. 

An investigation into the root cause of low back pain showed that obesity is a standalone root cause of low back pain.  

"When clients lose weight in tandem with my adjustments, they always report having much less pain," says Dr. Franklin from Idea Health and Wellness. 

How Weight Loss Can Improve Your Flexibility 

While weight loss has several benefits for your health and longevity, weight loss will also improve your flexibility and range of motion. A better range of motion allows patients to get into new positions throughout the day, which may decrease the chronic load on a weak joint.   

A patient often learns to live with different pains, including shoulder, back, and hip pain. They will make structural adaptations that can have harmful long-term effects.

Many structural issues manifest because the body is put into an improper position for long periods throughout the day. Frequently this is caused by structural factors that may display because a patient cannot get into any other position throughout the day because their physical structure restricts them. 

Losing body fat can also allow an individual to enter positions they would not have otherwise been able to get into when they were carrying around extra body fat. 

How Weight Loss Benefits Your Exercise  

Physical exercise is a practice that almost all chiropractors encourage their clients to do during their time outside of the chiropractic clinic. However, often clients are limited by their weight and cannot perform physical activity without extreme fatigue and excess joint pain. 

In some cases, a client must first use their diet to lose weight and reduce their inflammation. Now that they do not have as much pain they open up a new world of physical activities they could not partake in before the weight loss.

Once patients can exercise, they can increase their metabolism and caloric expenditure, further expediting their weight loss! 

Finally, weight loss can improve a patient's mental and emotional well-being and open up novel adventures. Weight loss can give a patient the confidence to go outdoors and explore the world, and even throw on that new tank top they did not previously feel comfortable in! One such activity is to get out and explore nature, the benefits of which could provide emotional relief and the use of additional exercise! 

Why Chiropractors Recommend Weight Loss 

It can improve patient symptoms while they are in practice, but it is often up to the patients to improve their lifestyle habits outside of the practice if they want to see the best results in the long term. 

Additionally, a client's body weight can sometimes inhibit a chiropractor from using certain chiropractic adjustments because the client is unable to access certain positions. Weight loss can provide chiropractors with more flexibility in terms of what they can provide the client, improving the quality of their chiropractic sessions.

How Can You Lose Weight?

While there is a multitude of fantastic strategies to help with weight loss, they all feedback into the same mechanism. To lose weight, one must be in a caloric deficit, which means you must burn more calories than you eat. Therefore as long as you can eat less than you burn every day, you will begin to lose weight.  

However, it is not weight loss that improves physical symptoms; it is fat loss. It is beneficial to have sufficient muscle mass for health and longevity. Therefore, we always try to preserve our muscle tissue when we lose weight. 

One strategy to ensure that the weight we lose comes from body fat, not muscle, is to include some resistance training in our exercise regimen. Additionally, to support resistance training, eating at least  0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight every day is always recommended. 

In addition, walking is a low barrier-to-entry exercise that does not cause as much joint stress as other forms of cardio, such as running and jumping. Anyone could add walking to their daily routine by simply tracking the number of steps they get every single day. A great goal for most individuals is to get 10,000 steps daily. However, if you are only getting 2,000 grades a day, aiming for 3,000 steps every day is a great start! 

In Conclusion

Excess body weight is detrimental to a patient's current and future health. Excess weight has many physiological effects, including inflammation, fatigue, and flexibility. Additionally, it can reduce a patient's confidence to get outdoors and try new things, causing rigidity in their daily activities. 

If you're currently getting chiropractic adjustments but feel you need to get the results you had hoped for, losing weight may be a productive way to improve the results you are getting from your chiropractic treatment.