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Here are the top 10 things you can do to get healthy. These are the most important nutrition and lifestyle changes that everyone can make to gain or maintain optimum health.
I encourage everyone to follow this program for at least 90 days, and then reevaluate their health concerns.
1. Take 10 deep breaths whenever you feel stressed. Slowly fill your lungs with air from the diaphragm up, and slowly exhale completely. Deep breathing is an excellent, fast, efficient way to relax, and it doesn’t cost anything. When you breathe deeply, your brain receives the message to calm down, and the symptoms of being stressed, anxious, or worried (higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, shallow breathing) are generally alleviated. You can release tension and relax no matter where you are, and this contributes a great deal toward longevity.
2. Drink water, and plenty of it. You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: everyone needs to drink plenty of water each day. The more you weigh, the more you need to drink, but a good rule of thumb for most adults is three liters per day. Coffee, tea, soda or other sweetened drinks (such as sports drinks), and fruit juice, don’t count… if it’s not pure water, it’s not part of the three liters you need. In fact, caffeinated and sugary beverages require that you consume even more water, so be aware of your consumption of other liquids.
3. Eat plant-based, whole-foods at every meal, and make it the biggest part of the meal. While changing the way you eat can be daunting at first, there are truly delicious options available to a person following a plant-based diet. It is important to eat wholefoods, which are foods that haven’t been processed and are not cooked (raw), or are lightly cooked. Fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains should make up the bulk of your diet. Nuts and seeds are also necessary, but the volume should be no more than a handful a day. Ideally, you should eat animal products sparingly: less than once a week.
4. Go to sleep at the same time and get up at same time 6-or-more days of the week. Get at least 8 hours of sleep daily.
5. Eat a clinically validated, whole-food based supplement. In addition to eating foods in their whole-food form, you should also eat a whole food based supplement. In the toxic environment that we live in today, we need more antioxidants than we are able to get from our food in order to offset the damage that is being done to our bodies.
6. Eat processed foods sparingly, less than once a week if possible. As a rule of thumb, all packaged foods are suspect. People don’t appreciate this because the convenience of packaged foods is so very tempting. But, generally speaking, in order to create foods that sit on a shelf, something has to happen to that food – it may be over-processed; it may have preservatives added, which are toxic to the body and make us retain extra fat and water along with those toxins; it may have been irradiated, in which case it has very little nutritional value left.
7. Make breakfast and lunch your biggest meals, preferably between 10 am and 4 pm when your digestion is strongest. Try to eat these two meals at the same times each day so that your digestive organs expect to go to work each day at the same time. This helps tremendously with proper digestion and absorption of nutrients.
8. Get outside and move a little bit each day. Exercise is important, but not in the ways that we’ve traditionally thought. A bit of fresh air and time to let go of the day’s stresses is very valuable, and taking a thirty-minute walk each day, for starters. Until you are getting adequate nutrition, vigorous exercise can actually do more harm than good, so make sure you’re following the food and nutrition recommendations if you’re engaging in more strenuous activities. Yoga,poses as a way to reconnect with your body and focus your mind. A good weekly yoga class is an excellent way to learn proper form, and you can tailor a shorter practice that you perform daily, or whenever you feel the need, at home.
9. Start each day with a Green Drink. Freshly ground flax seeds (not flax oil), ground milk thistle (for liver health), fresh or frozen fruit (whatever we have around, and anything that’s beginning to get overripe), and plenty of dark leafy greens. Spinach, chard, and kale are excellent choices. Raw spinach has very little flavor, so for those people who aren’t big fans of greens, that’s the best place to start.
10. Think good, healthy thoughts. Just as we are what we eat, our thoughts define our reality. If we’re focusing on negative, angry, limiting thoughts, we become negative, angry, limited people. Focusing on what matters most and thinking positively is more than just New Age mumbo‐jumbo: happy people live longer than unhappy people!
Here are the top 10 things you can do to get healthy. These are the most important nutrition and lifestyle changes that everyone can make to gain or maintain optimum health.
I encourage everyone to follow this program for at least 90 days, and then reevaluate their health concerns.
1. Take 10 deep breaths whenever you feel stressed. Slowly fill your lungs with air from the diaphragm up, and slowly exhale completely. Deep breathing is an excellent, fast, efficient way to relax, and it doesn’t cost anything. When you breathe deeply, your brain receives the message to calm down, and the symptoms of being stressed, anxious, or worried (higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, shallow breathing) are generally alleviated. You can release tension and relax no matter where you are, and this contributes a great deal toward longevity.
2. Drink water, and plenty of it. You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: everyone needs to drink plenty of water each day. The more you weigh, the more you need to drink, but a good rule of thumb for most adults is three liters per day. Coffee, tea, soda or other sweetened drinks (such as sports drinks), and fruit juice, don’t count… if it’s not pure water, it’s not part of the three liters you need. In fact, caffeinated and sugary beverages require that you consume even more water, so be aware of your consumption of other liquids.
3. Eat plant-based, whole-foods at every meal, and make it the biggest part of the meal. While changing the way you eat can be daunting at first, there are truly delicious options available to a person following a plant-based diet. It is important to eat wholefoods, which are foods that haven’t been processed and are not cooked (raw), or are lightly cooked. Fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains should make up the bulk of your diet. Nuts and seeds are also necessary, but the volume should be no more than a handful a day. Ideally, you should eat animal products sparingly: less than once a week.
4. Go to sleep at the same time and get up at same time 6-or-more days of the week. Get at least 8 hours of sleep daily.
5. Eat a clinically validated, whole-food based supplement. In addition to eating foods in their whole-food form, you should also eat a whole food based supplement. In the toxic environment that we live in today, we need more antioxidants than we are able to get from our food in order to offset the damage that is being done to our bodies.
6. Eat processed foods sparingly, less than once a week if possible. As a rule of thumb, all packaged foods are suspect. People don’t appreciate this because the convenience of packaged foods is so very tempting. But, generally speaking, in order to create foods that sit on a shelf, something has to happen to that food – it may be over-processed; it may have preservatives added, which are toxic to the body and make us retain extra fat and water along with those toxins; it may have been irradiated, in which case it has very little nutritional value left.
7. Make breakfast and lunch your biggest meals, preferably between 10 am and 4 pm when your digestion is strongest. Try to eat these two meals at the same times each day so that your digestive organs expect to go to work each day at the same time. This helps tremendously with proper digestion and absorption of nutrients.
8. Get outside and move a little bit each day. Exercise is important, but not in the ways that we’ve traditionally thought. A bit of fresh air and time to let go of the day’s stresses is very valuable, and taking a thirty-minute walk each day, for starters. Until you are getting adequate nutrition, vigorous exercise can actually do more harm than good, so make sure you’re following the food and nutrition recommendations if you’re engaging in more strenuous activities. Yoga,poses as a way to reconnect with your body and focus your mind. A good weekly yoga class is an excellent way to learn proper form, and you can tailor a shorter practice that you perform daily, or whenever you feel the need, at home.
9. Start each day with a Green Drink. Freshly ground flax seeds (not flax oil), ground milk thistle (for liver health), fresh or frozen fruit (whatever we have around, and anything that’s beginning to get overripe), and plenty of dark leafy greens. Spinach, chard, and kale are excellent choices. Raw spinach has very little flavor, so for those people who aren’t big fans of greens, that’s the best place to start.
10. Think good, healthy thoughts. Just as we are what we eat, our thoughts define our reality. If we’re focusing on negative, angry, limiting thoughts, we become negative, angry, limited people. Focusing on what matters most and thinking positively is more than just New Age mumbo‐jumbo: happy people live longer than unhappy people!
Author: Dr. Mitra Ray
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