Healthy Nutrition Program

Improve Diet, Improve Staff Morale

Healthy and nutritious food is the cornerstone of good health.  In the age of self-help book, Google, and Dr. Oz, it can become difficult to navigate the ins and outs of healthy eating.  Good nutrition is more than just a fad diet, avoiding a bad food, or eating a lot of a good food.  Good nutrition is all about balance – balanced nutrients, balanced plate-sizes, balanced eating schedules, and balancing treats.  A balanced diet lays the groundwork for every system, organ, and cell in your body to be healthier and perform at it’s best.  Food is the best medicine and the best prevention.

A healthy balanced diet is vital in the prevention and treatment of a wide assortment of diseases including as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, obesity, digestive conditions, skin conditions, allergies, cancer, mood disorders, etc. This will not only reduce organizational costs for medical coverage, disability and extended sick leave, but good eating habits tend to extend to the whole family, reducing absences for sick children.

Good nutrition will not only help your employees maintain a healthy body weight, but will impact energy levels, concentration and focus, mood, body aches and pains, and much more.  But most importantly, eating well will make your employees feel great – a contagious feeling that will spread from one desk to another, across all departments, and resulting in a huge boost to staff morale and an overall “good place to work” feel that both employees, and visitors can experience.

About The Program

The Healthy Nutrition Program at Well Street is designed by Professional Health Practitioners to help you establish healthier eating habits. In this program, you will learn how certain foods impact the body and how to eat in a way that will optimize your health.  Dietary habits will be introduced and discussions as a group will help you to integrate these habits into your daily routine and pass on the benefits to your family and loved ones. This program will change the way you look at food.

This program isn’t just about counting calories, lo-fat, or textbook nutrition science.  Employees will learn practical information including:

  • What’s the big deal about GLUTEN?
  • Which oils to cook with
  • Organic vs. Non-Organic
  • Clean meats – is it worth to go free range?
  • How to get enough protein through plants and animal sources
  • New foods, new recipes

Program Includes:

  • 3 x 60MIN Group Sessions
  • Food Sampling
  • Tons of Healthy Recipes
  • Program handbook

Healthy Stress Program

Chronic Stress Turns Productivity Into Problems

80% of workers feel stress on the job
50% say they need help in learning how to manage stress
42% say their coworkers need such help 1

Stress on the job is not always a bad thing. Employers know that stress is what drives us to meet deadlines, solve problems, strive for excellence on the job, pursue a career, and even get to work on time! In these instances, stress is not harmful, but helpful and necessary, and helps us to be productive and efficient. But when you become overwhelmed with too many deadlines, too many problems to solve, too many tasks with not enough time to complete them, you set off a vicious cycle. You become less motivated to excel, your work suffers, you lose pride in your work, stress increases, leading to further demotivation. This is when stress jumps out of the productivity zone and into the danger zone where the negative effects of stress can start to appear.

Chronic stress is implicated with a number of health problems including high blood pressure, diabetes, insomnia, depression, headache, indigestion, frequent colds and flus, infertility, low back pain, neck pain, and much more. When a workplace relies on teamwork and cooperation with co-workers, stress can lead to issues with anger management, poor listening skills, poor communication skills, inability to keep up with assigned tasks, and absenteeism. Job stress is costly for employers, carrying an annual price tag of over $300 billion in the US 2 for accidents, absenteeism, employee turnover, decreased productivity, medical costs, insurance costs, and workers compensation awards. And we aren’t immune to it in Canada. Statistics Canada reported in 1999 that the annual cost of work time lost to stress was $12 billion. As of 2001, 40% of worker turnover was found to be due to stress, 3 costing employers an average of 120-200% of the salary of the position affected to replace the employee 4

The 6-Week Healthy Stress Program helps employees cope and adapt better with stress, by improving their ability to respond to stress-inducing work and life situations in a positive and constructive way. The program will build employees’ self-confidence, self-control, communication, and adaptability, enabling them to recognize and actively combat stress instead of allowing a stressful situation to impact job performance. Participants will learn how to stay in the productivity zone every day.

Weekly meetings are held over a 6-week period, led by Professional Health Practitioners. A new stress management tool will be taught and practiced each week, followed by a group discussion to allow participants to share their experiences with the group as they learn to live a healthy-stress lifestyle. Techniques, tools and knowledge transferred during this program will include:

  • Understand how stress affects body & mind
  • Understand how stress affects job performance & satisfaction
  • Individual evaluation of personal stressors
  • Realistic expectations and combatting perfectionism
  • Time management
  • Setting priorities
  • Muscle tension
  • Insomnia & disturbed sleep

Healthy Mindfulness Program

The 6-week Healthy Mindfulness Program aims to help participants cope and adapt better to stress, by increasing mindful awareness of self and others. The types of mindfulness practices taught in this course are suitable for every type of person – especially those who find it difficult to “turn off” their overactive mind. The focus will be on learning to become more aware of the mind’s wanderings to be able to cope better with feelings of negative stress.

Weekly meetings are held over a 6-week period, led by Professional Health Practitioners. Each week, participants will be given a new tool to decrease and manage stress and increase mindfulness. There will also be a group discussion portion to allow participants to share their experiences (including obstacles and successes) with the group as they learn to increase their mindfulness. Techniques, tools and knowledge transferred during this program will include:

  • Understand how stress affects body & mind
  • Understand how stress affects job performance & satisfaction
  • Awareness exercises
  • Deep breathing exercises
  • Muscle relaxation
  • Self-awareness
  • Guided visualization
  • Yoga

Healthy Me Program

Building A Healthy Workforce From the Ground Up

Health is more than just the absence of disease.  Health is when your body is performing optimally and in balance.  When your body is functioning the way it’s designed to, you not only look, feel and think at your best, but you also lower your risk of development illness.

In a 2013 report that surveyed workplace wellness practices of over 400 Canadian companies, the top motivator employers cited for offering wellness to their employees was to “improve employee physical health” followed next by “improve employee mental health.”  More and more employers are recognizing that instead of dangling carrots in front of employees, shifting the focus to providing support for both the physical and mental health of their employees will lead to sustained measurable changes like increased productivity,  employee retention, and engagement, while decreasing absenteeism and drug spending.

Holistic (aka whole body and mind) health is the cornerstone of the Well Street philosophy.  Our healthcare team has seen from their vast experiences that focusing on one area of health leads merely to temporary changes, while long-lasting shifts in health occur when we account for all aspects of health simultaneously.  From this, we have developed the “4 Spheres of Health”:

About The Program

The Healthy ME Program is a “wellness for life” starter program designed by Professional Health Practitioners to help participants start to build a strong foundation for complete health and wellness. In this medically supervised program, participants are transformed across the “4 Spheres of Health” – Nutrition, Fitness, Body, and Mind. Not only will participants learn about healthy eating and fitness, they will learn tools to help manage stress and mood, as well as reduce existing symptoms and prevent future disease development.

Employees will learn practical information including:

  • Navigate through the complexity of today’s modern choices to build a diet that promotes ideal weight, disease prevention, and optimal body function.
  • Integrate a complete fitness regimen to increase endurance and strength for better energy and an optimized metabolism.
  • Utilize appropriate tools to cope with stress and cultivate a sharper mind.
  • Promote physical health including reduced chronic pain and inflammation, improved sleep and increased immunity.
  • Maintain the “4 Spheres of Health” in a life goal map to achieve lasting optimized health.

Program Includes:

  • Three (3) 60MIN sessions with a health professional
  • Group setting to provide ongoing support and motivation
  • Easy recipes and techniques you can do at home
  • Supplement and herbal medicines
  • Program handbook with all the information you need to succees

Healthy Weight Program

Fighting Obesity in the Workplace

Obesity in the workplace is a growing phenomenon, with repercussions for both workers and their employers. Studies have found that the combination of a sedentary job and poor eating habits can lead to obesity, and pave the way for a litany of diseases, from arthritis to infertility, heart disease to cancer. Linda Barrington, research director of The Conference Board management excellence program, explains how this affects employers:

“Employers need to realize that obesity is not solely a health and wellness issue. Employees’ obesity-related health problems in the United States are costing companies billions of dollars each year in medical coverage and absenteeism.”
– Linda Barrington, The Conference Board

About The Program

The 10-Week Healthy Weight Program teaches strategies and healthy habits to help employees effectively optimize and manage their weight. Designed and delivered by Naturopathic Doctors, participants receive a blend of holistic nutritional and dietary guidance as well as fitness and lifestyle strategies to establish a life changing transformation in both physical health and lifestyle habits.

This is not a fad diet, a crash diet, or a starvation diet. This is not a weight loss program where participants count calories or points. This is a weight loss program that gives its participants the knowledge to eat and live in a balanced and healthy manner, which they can continue after the completion of the 10-week program and implement in various degrees at any time in the future to maintain a healthy weight. The healthy habits established in this employee wellness program will last a lifetime, and can be extended to the whole family.

“A life changing experience. The Healthy Weight Program is realistic. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a healthy weight loss.”
– Elsa, GO Transit

Rather than going it alone, the group support setting gives participants a network of professionals and peers they can rely on. It is a proven fact that groups tremendously boost motivation and willpower. We have seen time and time again that groups raise the success level of every participant, through the sharing of experiences, encouragement during difficult times, and cheering on during successes.

The 10-Week Healthy Weight Program includes:

  • Easy to follow dietary plan
  • Lifestyle-customized exercise plan
  • Stress management techniques
  • Science nutrition knowledge
  • Metabolism boosting tips
  • Healthy recipes
  • Taste-testing new foods
  • Food triggers management
  • Portion control strategies
  • Medical supervision