Mailing Address of Head Office:
Wellness Belts Inc.
166 Saunders Rd. Unit #2
Barrie, ON L4N 9A4
Canada
Store Address - Barrie, Ontario, Canada:
454 Mapleview Drive West - Phone: 705-739-9959
Barrie, ON L4N 9G4
Canada
Our Mission
To serve people by helping them to take control and maximize their own health and wellness by giving them the tools to be successful - transforming them from existing or potential unwilling customers (patients) of the "Health Care" industry to healthy, happy, fulfilled individuals.
Our Objective
To see everyone on earth who can walk wearing a Wellness Belt.
Our Philosophy
This product is intended to glorify Almighty God, our Lord and Creator who designed us to have true maximum health when we function in certain ways. The Wellness Belt simply helps us to get more physical activity - something that very few of us are getting these days. It also puts extra forces on our skeleton - as we would get from regular lifting - also not being performed by very many of us on a regular basis. These are activities required by our bodies to achieve maximum health, also known as "wellness". The Wellness Belt can contribute greatly to your wellness by supplying increased amounts of these activities to your body with no change to your daily routines. When you are actually living with the best level of health and fitness, our Lord is glorified in you - one perfectly functioning member of His amazing creation. We hope to help millions of people, one at a time.
To round out our wellness requirements, He also gave us clean water, clean food (unadulterated by chemicals and modern agricultural processing methods) and clean air. You probably know that these are not that easy to come by anymore. We suggest organic food and non-chlorinated / non-fluoridated water as being the closest to our human consumption requirements. As for clean air - may God Bless You with every breath.
Last but not least, He gave us eternal souls. When we are unwell spiritually, we will not have maximum wellness. We encourage you to learn about your Creator - develop a relationship with Him and you may find the joy and peace that passes understanding - good gifts that only come from Him.
How did the Wellness Belt come into being?
I'm Dr. Craig Curphey and I would like to share the story about why the Wellness Belt exists today.
My wife, Elda and I practiced together in Canada. We noticed that a very high percentage of patients entering our office for health care were there, at least partly, because they were degenerating due to insufficient exercise or activity levels. Their degrading conditions produced symptoms that drove them into our offices for care. In almost all cases, we recommended an increase in weight-bearing exercise as part of their care.
However the follow-through by the great majority of those patients was practically non-existent! Only about 1 in 10 patients would actually join a club and get an exercise program going. Why? They gave 3 main reasons:
- No time. Their busy lifestyles often simply don't allow for the time commitment necessary.
- Negative attitude towards exercise. They simply do not like working out!
- Too Expensive. The initial and ongoing costs of follow-through to use the services of a club or purchase exercise equipment or buy a weight loss program requires quite a financial commitment.
We also noticed that there was an alarming number of women coming into our offices over the age of 30 who were on osteoporosis meds such as hormone replacement therapy, and more recently bisphosphonate drugs such as Actonel or Fosamax. On questioning, most were uninformed about the lower effectiveness and the highly worrisome side effects of those medications.
Again, as we attempted to encourage women to perform weight-bearing exercise as a much more effective and safer alternative, the same reasons were given for non-performance. They wanted the pills, even with the very dangerous side effects because of the convenience. "It can't happen to me".
My mother stroked and passed away while on those meds. It does happen to us and it deeply affects the involved families. We believe that people should be made aware that there are alternatives that are far more effective, just as convenient and far safer. Weight-bearing exercise has such a long list of physical benefits that we felt it very important to make it CONVENIENT to obtain.
So, Dr. Elda and I tried to come up with a way to make it convenient for anyone to get enough of an increased activity level to impact their health and fitness and bone strength. We were aware of excellent work performed by Dr. Christine Snow at the University of Oregon with external weights showing the amazing ability of the increase in an individual's weight-bearing to prevent hip fractures and strengthen their bones to prevent and even reverse osteoporosis. It suggests that wearing as little as 8 pounds of external weights may be the most effective way by far to beat osteoporosis. It also suggested that "wearing" external weight during the performance of normal everyday activities produces the same benefits as working out at the gym.
However, there are major drawbacks with weighted vests that make them undesirable for use all day, every day. They are hot, top heavy and no matter what style they are, they always look like "flak jackets". We felt that a normal individual would consider wearing an external weighted device day in and day out ONLY if it was void of these qualities.
So we dropped the idea of the vest and considered a weighted belt instead, at the suggestion of our son Jay. The idea of a belt had the advantage of being placed at an individual's centre of gravity around the midsection where it does not "feel heavy". It also was possible to make it very attractive - in fact our goal was that onlookers would not be able to see that it was anything other than just a great looking article of clothing. And it does not interfere with the performance of daily activities.
During the time of prototyping, our patients told us about the weight loss and loss of inches they experienced. They told us about the increase in energy and endurance they felt. The young ladies even told us that their menstrual cramps disappeared when they put on the belt!
We did not want to send patients for bone density scans due to the large potential health risks from the massive radiation from the testing, but the few who had them done reported increases. None who have been tested and reported to us have experienced decreases in their bone mineral density.
We collected the data and reported to Health Canada in 2004. As a result, our invention was declared a Medical Device, Class 1 for the following conditions: weight loss, osteoporosis, reducing risk of heart attack and stroke, lowering blood pressure in hypertensive individuals and lowering cholesterol in those with high levels.
But don't be surprised - those are simply what happens to you when you increase your activity or exercise. And that's really all the Wellness Belt makes you do! In addition, you will experience increases in muscle strength, muscle mass, endurance and stamina, increased energy levels, improved gait stability (so you are less likely to fall and break your hip). Unlike medical side effects, these are all very POSITIVE things for you!
So here we have a product that is very convenient, but how effective is it?
The answer is that the more active you are while wearing it, the more it does TO you, and therefore the more it does FOR you! If you are on your feet for only 4 hours a day (almost everyone is, apparently) - so around 28 hours a week ... doing just normal activities such as shopping, housework, yardwork, serving customers, and so on ... you will have performed more weight-bearing exercise than someone who went to the gym 3 times that week and performing 10,000+ leg presses. And you don't even work up a sweat. Try doing leg presses for a half hour!
That represents a significant increase of weight-bearing exercise compared to not wearing the external weight. The thing is - every day, you're going to do what you're going to do, anyway! You're not getting the maximum benefit from those activities if you do not have a Wellness Belt on while doing them! So you might as well wear the Wellness Belt and begin enjoying all of those positives personally. That little change can not only change your life, it can SAVE your life!
It doesn't get easier than just putting on a belt. So, don't get dressed without it!
Dr. Craig Curphey
Thanks for shopping with us!
