Live Healthy - Age Slowly
By Vickie Adair
We have become a society of very busy people with lots to do everyday, and we use our lack of time as the excuse for not staying fit and healthy. We often grab fast food, substitute fatty or sugary drinks for water, never take thirty minutes out of our hectic day for exercise, and convince ourselves we are too busy to get enough sleep or even tend to bathroom needs immediately. Our diet has too little nutritional value and too little fiber, and our bodies don't get enough movement for muscle toning and good cardio vascular health. We don't get the amount of vitamins and minerals the human body needs everyday to function properly and remain healthy. Our diets often are loaded with chemicals and we don't get enough sleep or water for our bodies to heal and purge all the toxins.
What does all this unhealthy lifestyle mean for us? It means we're becoming an overweight and sick group here in the 21st century. Type II diabetes is escalating among the young as fast as obesity, and more people are taking blood pressure medicine and depression medication than ever before. Pain medicine for arthritis is brining in billions of dollars a year to the pharmaceutical companies. Vitamin deficiency is very common these days, and thyroid disease has escalated rapidly since WWII. Our bodies are aging faster than our chronological ages.
Our individual attempts at solutions have been disasters for most, ranging from all kinds of crazy and faddish diets to obsessions with prescription drugs that we hope have the miracle answer for our failure to live healthy. Is there a simple answer to getting healthy and staving off some of the ravages of age? Yes, but it takes a stick of dynamite under us for most people to go the simple route. Here are the only five things you have to do:
1.) Make sure you eat all the things your body needs everyday, use supplements when necessary, and eat none of the things that harm your body,
2.) Drink eight glasses of water everyday,
3.) Exercise thirty minutes a day, walking or salsa it doesn't matter,
4.) Go to the bathroom immediately when you feel the urge, and
5.) Get at least eight hours sleep a night.
Gee, that sounds simple doesn't it? Of course, if it were really simple, we'd all be thin and healthy. The hard thing isn't the doing it; the hard part is the wanting to do it. It took a major stroke of my sixty-one year old husband and the subsequent failure of modern medicine and drugs to bring home to him and to me just how personally important a healthy lifestyle can be. I had been semi-serious about eating right and natural cures for about ten years, but when my husband was left with some physical damages from the stroke, diagnosed with Type II diabetes, high-blood pressure, high cholesterol, and hypothyroidism, and after six months of increasing medicines continued to go downhill, I got very serious.
I started reading, and there are lots of good books on proper nutrition and eating for healing at your local bookstore. As a matter of fact, I think one of the best books I read was actually titled Eating for Healing. I read books on alternative health and keeping fit. That's how I came up with my five things to do.
Whatever your problems are, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, Type I or II diabetes, hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, or any other problem, there are foods that you definitely should eat and foods you shouldn't. Find out what they are and eat all the foods you should; which is where the supplements really come in handy. For example, if you have hypothyroidism, you should eat sea greens (you may call them seaweeds) everyday. Quite frankly, I can't eat them because I can't stand the taste, but fortunately you can get a good daily dose in capsule form. So find out what your body needs and eat those foods and leave off the ones you shouldn't. I would like to mention here that it is best to use as much organic food as possible. One thing few people can get, no matter how good their food intake, is enough vitamins and minerals, so take a vitamin, preferably liquid, everyday.
There really isn't enough that can be said about the importance of drinking water. Water hydrates the body first and helps to cleanse and heal the body. Water is extremely important in controlling blood sugar levels. Other drinks do not work nearly as well as water in this endeavor, and some, such as soda or high sugar drinks, can have the opposite effects. Water also helps your skin retain its elasticity, so you can have healthier, younger looking skin just by drinking enough water.
We all need to move! While this seems a little too simply stated for most, getting up and moving is one of, if not the absolute best way, to keep your body healthy. The simple truth is that your body needs to use as many or more calories than you consume, depending on whether or not you need to lose some immediate weight, but you should never consume so few calories that you are cutting necessary nutrients, so use exercise to burn more instead of eating too little. Movement also keeps our muscles toned, helps those joints, and helps blood circulation. Walking is one of the best exercises, but even cleaning house requires movement and energy, and if you dance around a little to some good music in the process you might get a lot of exercise and have fun cleaning at the same time.
You might wonder why going to the bathroom is on my list. Well, elimination is extremely important in ridding the body of toxins and for keeping plaque from building up on your intestinal walls. That's one reason the colon cleanse has become so popular. Also, letting your bladder stay too full for extended amounts of time can cause costly medical problems. For example, simply failing to empty my bladder often enough cost me a surgery. I had to have my bladder reattached because it tore lose. Not fun.
The last thing on my list is sleep. Like water, the importance of enough sleep cannot be overestimated. Your body needs sleep to repair all those little things that happen to it each day - no sleep, no repair. Lack of sleep also has affects on your body such as making you feel extremely hungry the next day, mostly for sugars. Did you ever notice how candy bars and sodas can keep you going late night if you feel like you have to keep yourself awake to finish that project? Same thing happens to you the next day if you don't get enough sleep; your body craves fast energy to keep going after it has run out of energy and needs repair time. So, just don't give up the sleep for anything.
How well does my list of five work? After only two weeks, my husband's counts on everything started to normalize, and he was able to almost immediately cut his medication in half. (Let me mention here though that he is still under a doctor's care, and I recommend that anyone consult a doctor before changing any habits, diet or exercise, and to find out any problems they already might have.) As a side benefit to putting my husband on this plan and trying to do much of it with him for support, I have lost 10 pounds and feel younger than I have in twenty years, and both of us are getting younger looking skin and posture.
Vickie Adair is the senior technical writer at Media A-Team http://www.mediaateam.com and also publishes as a freelance writer. She writes for http://www.houstonmanufacturers.com, a website for Houston manufacturers, providers, and suppliers, and http://www.natural-products-directory.com, a directory of online business that sell or manufacture organic and/or natural products.
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