March 13, 2016

Staying healthy is cheap

I hope you all had a nice weekend. I am on my way home from the Equinox

High Performance

Living Symposium in New York City. I always love attending this event as it showcases the brightest minds in the health and wellness field. This event is all about helping people live

high performance

lives, helping people feel and perform at their very best every day and be able to sustain good health for a lifetime. I want to share with you a few of the takeaways from the 15 lectures and hands-on workshops that I attended over 3 days.

1. Learn how your body works and how to use it. Our body is our vessel or vehicle, learn as much as you can about it so you can know how to take care of it. Build a body that works. One thing that is inherently important when it comes to long-term mobility, we need to learn mastery of the fundamental movements. There were many workshops on regressing movements down to basic movements of babies and animals. We do not want to train dysfunction.
2. Staying healthy is cheap, especially when compared to paying for sickness and the best investment you can make. What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful that any drug in a bottle. Quality matters. We should be focused on creating health instead of treating disease.To create health we need to remove toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, and poor diet. To thrive we need healthy foods, vitamins, light, water, air, movement, rhythm, love, connection, meaning and purpose.
3.  Your mindset or biology of beliefs controls your actions. Set your expectations according to what you want.
4. We compress our time so much to fit everything in, get from place to place with little time in between and this causes major stress. Meditation should be our operating system to help reduce the inflammatory response caused by increasing levels of cortisol. Be aware of your breath and breathing and integrate breath with movement. Herbert Benson, a Harvard researcher said that “practicing conscious relaxation activated many disease-fighting genes that helps fight inflammation and improves immunity.”
5. Your gut microbiome is incredibly important. You want it to be rich in diversity as that leads to greater health. A healthy gut barrier is the best protection against systemic inflammation. What can you do to help cultivate a healthy gut barrier? Eat a variety of vegetables and lots of them, especially asparagus, onions, dandelion greens, garlic, bananas, broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts. Try not to take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them. Avoid GMO foods and try to buy organic as much as possible as Roundup is an antibiotic sprayed on GMO foods and is killing our gut microbiomes. Don’t worry about the “3-second rule” when you drop things on the floor, as our over-sanitized lifestyle is not good for our guts. Also, fermented foods such as kombucha and kimchi are great, a good quality probiotic supplement is also recommended. And last but not least, breathe lots of fresh air!
6. Chronic sleep disruption impacts long-term cognitive functioning. Please try to get 7+ hours of good quality sleep every night. The consequences of long-term sleep disruption may persist long past the couple of days it takes to feel normal again after an all-nighter. You should be able to hold on to your cognitive faculties until you die. Brain function can be preserved and enhanced over time.