Natural Health - Pt. 2 Learning

As a continuation from the last post, your food journal is one of the first steps to better health. The first being to make the decision and commitment to being a healthier you! Once you have finished your week of journaling your food intake then it's time to take a look at your journal to tell you how to fix your diet for good! While your were keeping your food journal, you should have kept track of your emotions, life situations, how your food was making you feel, etc. By keeping tabs on this for a week, you should be able to find any food sensitivities and problem areas. A few things to watch closely, how you feel after meals and snacks. What ingredients used to prepare meals, the items you ate, and listening to your body's response to all of it.

The key to eating and/or living better is to listen to your body. This is not something that will happen overnight. You have to learn to trust your body and your feelings. Each meal/snack you ate over the past week, think about how you felt. Were you tired, irritable, bloated, or have heart burn types of feelings? Those are sure signs that your body does not like something you were putting into it. Keep track of that pattern, and figure out what it was that you ate when you were having those feelings.

For a lot of people, white sugar, white flour, or white rice will cause many of these feelings. For some, food colorings are a huge sensitivity. Another are of sensitivity is gluten. Gluten is typically found in bleached flours. Most people, if you eat processed/fast food, or drink soda are deficient in your vitamins or minerals necessary for your body to heal/fix itself. I am not saying to go and quit eating/drinking your favorite foods, I am saying if you are having any health issues or want to eat better, you have to take a long hard look at what you are consuming first!

Educating yourself is ALWAYS your first line of defense! Be smart, don't just follow the masses. Being ill is not a normal part of life. Having symptoms, is your body's way of telling you that it is needing something to fight off an illness trying to take hold of your body. Anytime you have a symptom, you need to find the underlying problem. For many, stress will play a big role in your overall health. Stress is the "silent killer," so to speak. Stress is a common underlying problem. Most doctors tell you to eliminate stress, which is nearly impossible. What you need to be told is to find a way to manage the stress you have to deal with. Finding any outlet for releasing your stress is the key to keeping your stress in check. Since eliminating stress is nearly impossible, that outlet could be walking, gardening, exercise, or any number of other activities. You have to find what works best for you, even if it means switching activities up on occasion to make sure you can deal with stress without becoming overwhelmed. Anytime you face a symptom, and incorporate a medication to eliminate the symptom, you are not fixing the problem only masking it. So before you jump on medications, try to find the underlying problem to truly fix it.

We have a wealth of information at our fingertips with internet access. With everyone comparing prices online for everything from building supplies, to insurance, and everything under the sun...why are more people not utilizing the information for better health? Many people don't know where to begin, while many others just trust that their doctor will know everything needed to make them healthy. I do not trust anyone whole-heartedly. I question everything, research everything, and make an educated decision for me....not because a doctor, friend or otherwise tells me something. With so much information at our fingertips, learning and educating ourselves has never been easier.

Study your food journal, find the areas that have conflict, research the ingredients, and remove any ingredients that may be causing illness or food sensitivities. Once you remove those ingredients, give your body a week to eliminate the effects from those ingredients. After a week without those ingredients, SLOWLY start adding them back in...1 at a time. This will give you an accurate idea of what your body is sensitive to. Typical ingredients that cause health issues are: white flour, white sugar, white rice, food colorings, multiple preservatives, gluten, sweeteners, fast food, sodas, caffeine, milk products, products containing nuts, and honestly the list could go on.

When incorporating vitamins/minerals into your diet, keep in mind that the recommended daily doses are a minimum. My personal vitamin intake is D3, Magnesium, Zinc, Co-Q10. Keep in mind that your body will not absorb calcium correctly without proper vitamin D3 consumption. As our body's age, our vitamin and mineral levels decrease. It's necessary for us to stay on top of these levels, and to understand how these levels affect our body. Vitamin D3 is essential in every aspect of our body. Typically, Vitamin D is released to our body through sunlight. With so much advertising and marketing to avoid the sunlight, use sunscreen, and all sunlight causing cancer....many are deficient in Vitamin D. The safest vitamin supplement is D3. I use 35 IU's per pound of body weight(i.e. 100 lbs body = 3500IU's). Magnesium is another vitamin that decreases as we get older. Although you get vitamins and minerals from many of the foods you eat, it's not enough to combat the junk we eat that depletes our nutrients. Magnesium I use is 1200 mg daily. Zinc is another essential to staying healthy. Unless you eat a vegetarian diet, you will need extra. I use 50 mg daily. Co-Q10 is a vitamin that I learned about from a Jamaican doctor. It is another essential that our body would produce itself if not for the processed foods, soda, and medications that interrupt the production. For me, I use the concentrated version called Ubiquinal. It is stronger and only requires a 300mg tablet daily. Even with our natural diets, I find that without these vitamins/minerals, I don't feel complete. By eating healthy, including the extra nutrients in our diets, and incorporating stress management....we are doing the best we can for our health and body's.

Next time, we'll learn more about labels and how to find the best foods without all the chemicals.
~S~