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Mindfulness is all about paying attention. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when mindfulness is applied to systems that need all the attention they can get. If there’s an industry that needs some CPR and TLC, it’s healthcare.

Cindy Jimmerson is a 30-year trauma nurse who is passionate about streamlining healthcare processes. Her consulting company, Lean HealthCare West, is blasting through always-done-it-that-way thinking to reduce waiting time for patients, eliminate staff errors, and save hospitals and patients millions of dollars.

She is the Queen of Lean in hospitals, and she’s on a mission to improve the health of our country’s largest industry–$1.76 trillion in 2002, and soon to explode as the baby-boomers hit their sixties.

When it comes to looking for powerful tools for transforming processes, we’re fortunate to have a proven model that continues to outperform peers around the world. The Toyota Production System was originally developed by an American, W. Edwards Deming, who couldn’t get anyone in the U.S. to pay attention to his approach. The Japanese listened and learned. Today, TPS continues to propel industries toward greater productivity, less waste, improved quality, and increased workplace appreciation.

Cindy’s firm takes TPS straight to the ER and beyond. Now, you might think that a model focusing on getting product moved through the assembly line more efficiently is completely inappropriate for handling human patients. You would be dead wrong.

TPS focuses on adding value to what matters most–in this case, caring for patients. In doing so, it takes a hard look at every step taken which results in less contact with those who need care. The customer is king, and in healthcare, the customer is the patient. Instead of developing ways to make hospitals more profitable by relegating the patient to widget status, TPS restores the patient as the primary focus. How refreshing!

There’s a common misconception that people do not like change. I happen to love rearranging rooms every season. However, I’d probably get a little cranky if I walked into my house and found that someone else had moved all the furniture.

The real story is that people do not like change that is imposed upon them, but they appreciate being part of the solution. Employees using TPS love having the opportunity to creatively explore options that allow them to perform their work with greater efficiency. And why not? It helps them reconnect to the best parts of their job.

Toyota walks its talk. It would be one thing if the company had a policy of being “open to suggestions” while rarely making any changes. But Toyota consistently acts on its employees’ recommendations. In fact, the most recent figures indicate that the company implemented 99% of its yearly total of over 700,000 employee ideas!

That same emphasis on valuing the knowledge and experience of employees and trusting them to develop better processes is the key to tackling healthcare’s estimated waste–a whopping 50%.

TPS is mindfulness in action–paying attention to extra steps, inconvenient sequences, and indirect communication. The best part? Anyone can do it.

Doctors, nurses and other hospital workers are hard-working, compassionate people who are committed to providing their patients with top-notch care. Broken systems get in the way. Mindful management can repair those systems, and in the process, everyone wins.

Mindfulness at work? It works.

Talk to your doctor about getting lean.

About The Author

Maya Talisman Frost is a mind masseuse offering specialized mindfulness training to indiviuals and corporate groups in the Pacific Northwest. To subscribe to her free weekly ezine, visit http://www.massageyourmind.com. To learn more about lean healthcare, visit http://leanhealthcarewest.com

maya@massageyourmind.com

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Food manufacturers can easily manipulate a whole population by the products they make available at a cheap price. The way those foods are processed and the things that are added to them can decide the level of health that millions of people experience. These days the most widely marketed and consumed foods in the western world create health problems that have turned entire populations into ‘cash cows’ for the drug companies and medical industry. You have a choice about the foods you eat and you can choose good health or sickness.

You can also use supplements to help protect you from the glues, synthetic hormones and genetically modified pseudo-foods that are found in many mass marketed products and restaurant fare. Healthy foods are also available. Know your enemy! The biggest glues that have helped transform America into the land of the sick in the 21th century are gluten, found in wheat flour and casein, found in cow dairy, the same casein that is used to make Elmer’s glue.

Why else would there be a cow on the label? Before the 20th century and the invention of steel rollers, most breads where made with a mix of whole, spouted grains. Sprouting a grain converts the sticky, acidic gluten into alkaline vitamins and amino acids. Including the outer husks increases the food’s mineral content. Sprouting grains for breads was the traditional method because it was an easy way to break open the hard seed and make the tough, outer husk useable.

The steel roller permitted manufacturers to grind the seed, separate out the mineral rich outer husks, isolate the sticky gluten and use that to make soft, acidic white bread. Why is wheat 40% of the American diet? Because it’s cheap and in it’s refined, hybridized state, it can be shaped into anything, except healthy nutrition. It is a major contributor to society’s dangerous over consumption of carbohydrates. What is made out of wheat flour? Bread, pizza, pasta, bagels, muffins and pastries.

It’s used as a thickening ingredient in all kinds of foods, soups, candies, and sauces. Wheat gluten paste makes a great glue, but do you want to eat glue? Use 100% sprouted breads that you’ll find in the freezer section. Cows are big animals with little heads. Goats and sheep have large heads and small bodies, proportioned more like humans. Cow dairy products are high in sugar and casein, both of which are sticky glues. Goat and sheep milk products aren’t.

Why do companies use such a sticky, sweet food? Because cows are big milk producers and not very picky eaters, in comparison to goats and sheep, so cow’s milk is cheap! Gluten and casein stick to the walls of the digestive system, blocking absorption and slowly degrading the health. Soy is not a good alternative. Rice Milk and Rice Ice Cream are better. For infant’s and children, goat’s milk mixed with carrot juice is a complete food and quite tasty.

Goat and sheep cheeses are better for people and sheep’s cheese is sweeter than goat’s cheese. Use the enzyme combination Proactazyme Plus #1525-0 to clean out both the gluten and casein . For stronger, short term cleaning use Small Intestine Detox #848-2. White cane sugar is a sticky, highly refined, acidic poison completely lacking in nutrition, that is designed to create sugar cravings that it can never really satisfy.

The average American consumes a cup of white sugar daily in their various foods. It’s so potent and toxic that if it were introduced today it would be available by prescription only. White sugar is added to practically everything. A couple of tablets of GTF Chromium #1801-6 daily provide the minerals chromium and vanadium. The sugar cravings are the way that the body says that it needs those two minerals that are naturally found in sweet foods, but have been removed to make white sugar. Stevia Powder Extract #1386-7 (powder) & #1381-6 (packets) is a wonderfully sweet and nutritious herbal product that can be used safely in all those foods and beverages that you would like to sweeten up. NSP’s has no bitter aftertaste.

Soy is another one of the high estrogen foods that have been mass marketed for the purpose of reducing fertility, increasing tumor and cancers and generally reducing the size of the global population. Most of it is genetically modified and it’s all much too high in estrogen to do most people any good. In China, soy was considered “poor people food”. Herdsmen wouldn’t let their animals eat soy. It was used as a rotation crop to put nitrogen into the soil, in the way that Western farmers use red clover, another high estrogen plant.

Part of America’s epidemic obesity, infertility and tumor problems can be traced back to soy. While a little soy sauce now and then may not bother you, adding it wholesale to your diet is putting trouble into your future. For women, Pro G Yam 500 #4936-5, and for men, Men’s formula #3112-7 and Sarsaparilla #620-8 are products that clean out excess estrogens and protect the body from picking them up in the foods.

Food manufacturers use fats that are cheap to produce, have a long shelf life and are difficult for the body to use. Always use olive oil, minimize canola (It means ‘Canadian oil’) which comes from genetically modified rapeseed oil. Supplement with Super GLA Oil Blend #1844-5 to feed your immune and hormonal systems and push the junk fats out. Remember, Real Men Take Supplements! (So do Real Women!)

About The Author

Excerpted from The Ten Minute Herbalist by Drs. Ralph & Lahni DeAmicis, © 2004 For more information about their books, educational programs & Nature’s Sunshine Products visit www.spaceandtime.com. This information is for educational purposes only and is not meant to diagnose or prescribe. If you are suffering from a health challenge the authors suggest that you consult a competent health practitioner of your choice who will work with you to optimize your level of health.

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The quest to develop a stunningly fit, lean and attractive body is a long, slow journey. It’s not something you achieve overnight by popping a few pills or strapping an electric gizmo to your belly.

Which reminds me, did you know that by the time the FTC finally blew the whistle on the electronic ab belt scam, the makers of those “ab zappers” had swindled over $100 million dollars from unsuspecting consumers? Fortunately, some of those companies had to pay it back, and then some! The FTC charged three companies - Fast Abs, Ab Tronic and Ab Energizer - with false advertising and deceptive warranty practices for these “ABSurd” gimmcks.

But I digress back to what I was saying about the journey to a better body…

Last week I looked out my window, and where there was once nothing but a dirt-filled empty lot, there stood a sprawling six story brick condo complex. If someone looked at this massive completed structure for the first time, they might not be impressed. However, since I observed the entire construction process unfold from my living room window, I was impressed - amazed even - at what goes into erecting this kind of structure.

I remember watching the crew humming around diligently every day like busy bees, laying one brick after another. From one day to the next, it didn’t seem like much changed. But slowly, over a period of a year and a half, I watched the building gradually morph into the finished product.

When you look at someone with an incredible body as a finished product, you often tend to dismiss the long, arduous journey and hard work it took to build that body. Unless you were side by side with that person in the gym (and in the kitchen), observing the work involved, it’s easy to attribute such a chiseled physique to genetics or give credit to a supplement (they just took product XYZ and voila - overnight abs). What you don’t see or appreciate are all the months and years of sweat and hard work.

Getting in shape is a lot like a construction project. First, there must be a picture in the mind. Then the vision goes onto paper as a blueprint. It takes months just to lay the foundation. More months of work will follow. On a daily basis, it doesn’t seem like much is happening. You look in the mirror and appear, for the most part, the same as you did yesterday. But sure enough, the small improvements are slowly accumulating like compounding interest in the bank. One day, you look in the mirror and “suddenly,” your blueprint has become reality.

The body of a fitness model, figure competitor or bodybuilder is no more likely to be built overnight than a high rise is to be built overnight. It’s not physically possible. Accepting the idea that any type of pill, powder, drug, supplement or machine of any kind will make it happen sooner than nature intended (without negative consqeuences or side effects) is pure folly. You can’t force it.

Growth and development of any kind always requires a gestation period. For a baby, it’s nine months. For corn, I believe it’s about three months. If you were an expectant mother, would you want to hurry the process? Could any new development in nutrition or medical science speed up this wonderful miracle even one iota? If you were a farmer, would you try to harvest your crop before it was ripe? Would you dig up your seeds to see if anything was growing down there?

The answers are obvious. If only we would adopt the same patient, nurturing “mother’s” or “farmer’s mindset” towards getting in shape, then no one would waste their money on “fast abs” or “exercise in a bottle” or any such silliness ever again. We would understand that one must sow first, then reap the harvest, but that you can’t sow and reap in the same season.

If you ever get frustrated with the rate of progress in your fitness or weight loss program (and who doesn’t), just remember; success is always guaranteed to the persistent. Nothing in the world can stop someone who knows what they want and is willing to continue paying the price until they get it. It just takes time.

Become the architect and builder of your own dream body. You WILL build the body you want eventually if you’re patient enough and you refuse to quit. And set your goals HIGH! Create a fantastic blueprint. Michelangelo said, “the greatest danger is not that we set our goals too high and miss them, the greatest danger is that we set our goals too low and we reach them.” Envision a castle - a veritable Taj Mahal of a body! There’s nothing wrong with building castles in the sky, as long as you patiently work at putting the foundations underneath them. There are very few unrealistic goals; only goals with unrealistic deadlines.

So keep laying those “bricks” - every day - one at a time - and sure enough, eventually, you’ll build yourself a palace.

Copyright 2005 Tom Venuto

Tom Venuto is a certified personal trainer, natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle. You can get info on Tom’s e-book at http://www.burnthefat.com. To get Tom’s free monthly e-zine, visit http://www.fitren.com

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