Move In For The KILL!

Take Control! [Part 5]

Take Action

So, it's time to take action: to purge our bodies of toxins, replenish our systems with essential vitamins and nutrients, rebuild our bodies at the cellular level, and lose weight naturally, while slowing the effects of aging and curbing degenerative disease. We can live longer. We can have more energy. We can look younger and feel better. And once we do, our family will notice, our friends will notice, everyone will notice. And they'll want to know how, why, what's changed in our life. It's our duty to tell them. Sharing the secrets to better health really shouldn't be an option; it should be an obligation. We should be the first-responders on the frontline to take action. Yes, we are in a state of emergency. But now you have an incredible opportunity to change it!

Checkpoint

So far in this 5-part series, this is what has been covered:

• Take Control! [Part I] Humans live most of their lives being tired, sick, and virtually defenceless to many other life-threatening diseases.
• Take Control! [Part II] And, although very undesirable, many still neglect the 3 main factors (rest, exercise, diet) which determine health and quality of life.
• Take Control! [Part III] These unhealthy choices expose individuals to lifestyle diseases, which can only be reversed by making healthier choices, especially with regards to rest, exercise, and diet. Diet, the most important of the 3 elements, has been neglected the most, as persons tend to eat the reverse of what is required by the body. And, since the body requires the GROW-GLOW-GO foods for proper function, then giving it the wrong proportions of these nutrients only puts it in a dangerous state. 
• Take Control! [Part IV] If unhealthy persons wish to change their fate, then they are highly advised to feed their cells with the correct intake of Whole Grains, protect their cells with the correct intake of Fruits & Vegetables, balance and regulate their cells with the correct intake of fish and plant-based Protein, limit their intake of Fats & Sugars, while giving their body adequate amounts of rest and exercise.

No citation is needed for any of this. It is the same chorus that is chanted by the leading health organisations worldwide. Give your body what it needs, and it will be able to do what it should. God made human in His image; He designed the human body, and nothing He creates is supposed to be sick and tired. Stop taxing your body; stop taxing yourself from a lifetime of good health, energy, and vitality, and you'll start feeling, seeing, and living the difference.

Now, to bring this series to an end, some strategies to achieve good health will be explored.

Strategies

1. Rest
• Set apart 8 hours of each day to rest, relax, and rejuvenate. An 8-hour period for rest alone sounds very mind-blowing, especially for those who spend much of their time working. Indeed, most of that time could be used for more productive activities. But you have to watch the game more closely. Limited rest stunts your overall productivity in the short run. And, a lifetime of this negligence overtime wears your body; you age faster, and the extended productivity you could've earned from a healthy lifestyle would pretty much be non-existent.
• If you look even further, you'll realise that humans are supposed to spend 1/3 (one-third) of their time resting [animals are far less productive than that!]. This means that with every 2 hours you deplete your body, it asks for only 1 hour to recover. Can you imagine reducing that recommended sleep time from 8 to 4 hours? The body would be out of balance, as it would have to use that same hour to now repair and recover from every 5 hours of depletion. Dead end!
• You have 24 entire hours in each day. Find 8 hours to dedicate to replenishing the resources of your body. It will literally thank you for it, and the baseline for your both your short- and long-term performance [whether at school, work, or hobbies] will improve considerably.
• Additionally, try to keep periods of rest as closely knit as possible, and consistent. A straight 8 hours of rest will do you much better for a number of reasons, particularly because it's the natural process. Furthermore, exercising some level of consistency, for example a 9pm to 5am resting schedule for the entire week, would allow your body to naturally prepare for each sleeping time, as well as each awakening time. Whew! Time to give the snooze button a break. After all, you won't need an alarm clock anymore!
2. Exercise
• Now, exercise is an activity that is highly versatile. You can go from as little as walking to cycling to swimming to even as much as mountain climbing. Of course you'd wonder why people can tolerate such consistency and intensity. Part of it mainly has to do with your physical ability, but another great deal of it comes from the mind. If you find out that you need to do something, don't look at it as if it's compulsory. Fix that mindset; make it lovable, something to look forward to. If walking is boring, change the activity; try jogging. If both are boring, find something to make it more appealing. Go get your friend to come along with you, so that you are distracted from the activity. Just be creative: add purpose, add fun, add challenges, and you'd have already won half of the battle, because you have controlled your mind.
• If you are just starting out, and you've been living a rather sedentary lifestyle, or maybe out of shape, try working with a 10- to 20-minute activity, as well as  5 to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching for 3-5 days a week. You can also go to the full 7 days.
• If you've only had low to moderate activity, work with 20- to 30-minute activity, and 5 to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching for 3-5 days a week.
• If you have moderate to high activity, you can go with a 35- to 45-minute activity, and 5 to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching for 3-5 days a week.
• For more details, there will be a future post to help guide you a simple exercise routine. Sounds good?
3. Diet
• This is really the more difficult part. The two main options to achieve a good diet are eating the actual food, and supplementation. Both aren't perfect, and so, they have flaws and faults.
• Eating actual good foods means all those challenges explored earlier in the series: convenience, accessibility, affordability, and taste. Persons don't usually have time to prepare a healthy meal, much less time to prepare healthy meals [about 5 per day]; they simply take too long. Meal preparation takes away time for fun and other activities. You also have to go all the way to the market to get good food [staying away from processed foods], when the restaurant is right around the corner. It places a huge load on your pocket, and hell, it doesn't even taste good [for most parts]. Also, the very same processed foods that persons try to evade are pretty much unavoidable: they are everywhere, especially for the whole grains. Have you ever heard of weevils [they're twice as e-evil!]? They are insects that you'll find in your bread, flour, rice, and cornmeal [among others] if certain nutrients aren't stripped from our foods! In order to extend shelf life, and to allow people to eat with comfort, the important lipids, sterols, and essential fatty acids have to be taken out. And the fruits and vegetables? Those are loaded with fertilisers and [in some cases,] genetically modified ingredients which spell the word T-O-X-I-C for human beings. That's not all. The fish are often unclean, and potentially filled with over 200 contaminants like mercury and lead, which are very poisonous for individuals. So why even try? Well, persons still manage: they find it a mind over matter. So, if they don't mind, then it doesn't...matter! If it really boils down to your health and your well-being, then why not add some priority, and spend a little more time and effort to get things done right? You can still work your way around it. Strive for the whole food sources, the cleanest of foods, the deep sea fish, and of course, as little processed foods as possible. 
• On the other hand, supplementation isn't complete, especially if it is from synthetic sources. Supplementation, as the name suggests, means to add to, in order to make something more complete. So, it should actually go hand-in-hand with a good diet, in order to make it more wholesome [rather than to act as a substitute]. Taking natural, whole-food supplements is always the best option here, because it would be just like you eating the food, but just not feeling full. If you actually ate, the body would take the nutrients [what you'd get from the supplements], and then release everything else it doesn't want, in the form of waste. So, with natural, whole food supplements, the body usually knows how to handle these nutrients, as opposed to taking from synthetic [or unreal] sources, which have only a shocking 10 to 30% absorption rate by the body. Synthetics are also known to create increased risks for health, since the body is greatly unable to process these 'nutrients'. In a future post, tips on how to differentiate between the two types of supplementation will be covered.
• The recommendation here is to eat foods that are close to that recommended by the Health & Wellness Pyramid, and then fill in the gaps as much as possible using natural, whole-food supplementation. You can't go wrong.
• And, nothing is wrong with eating in moderation. It doesn't kill you to have a snack or some fast food every once in a while. Spacing them out gives the body time to properly get rid of them, and to recover from their damaging effects. So, just remember where you stand, and what you want to achieve from living healthily.

Lastly, it makes complete sense to do all three [rest, exercise, diet] at once! It's okay to go start small, and then take your time to move up. You will feel, see, and live the results. But can you just imagine when your body gets all 3 at the same time? The only regret you'll have is that you didn't start earlier! There is a word that the human body loves: synergy. Each part of a team working at the same time, like a team, brings forth a majestic effect and experience that logically cannot be achieved if the parts were on their own.

And there you have it! Rest...check! Exercise...check! Diet...check! Healthy & Vibrant Zone, and a life filled with good health, energy, and vitality?! CHECK CHECK CHECK CHECK CHECK!!!!!

D-Day

It's D-Day! It is time for that very important operation. Certainly not in the hospital, unless you're going there to stop someone from having their [pretty much worthless] operation. But, it's time to invade this disease-filled camp [this disease-filled world], and change lives for the best. It's never too late, and you're now encouraged to be a first-responder on the frontline, and ready to take action, because it is a stone-cold fact that this is a better way. Now let's go tell the world!