The new year is upon us and with it is the desire to get the year started off on the right foot. For a couple weeks now patients have been asking me “should I do a colon cleanse?”, “how can I detox my body?”, “what is the best diet for losing weight for the new year?” Where do we start?
Establishing useful priorities in the health field is challenging. Everyone has their “fad of the month” grabbing your attention. The medical/drug industry spends millions selling their priorities in order to generate more business. Health gurus promote their latest diet or supplement (also to generate business.) If your desire is to be part of the in crowd and have the right conversation around the water cooler or at the club then following the marketed advice will serve you well to generate belongingness and participation. This is a good thing but it does not do much for building your health.
If you want to really improve your health in 2009, then you have to begin with the basics. There are thousands of “miracle cures” and amazing super foods out there and many of them are truly amazing…if you have the basics covered first. The basics are for the fundamental 80% of your health. The miracle products are for those specialty needs that lift you up that last 20%. Miracles are more fun because they address the diseases with fancy names, but they don’t address basic health. Luetin to fight macular degeneration and decrease your risk of cataracts, or ubiquinol to increase lifespan and fight heart disease are wonderful, but what is the point if you are too weak, tired, or sick to even get out of bed in the morning?
Ok, so what are the basics? The basics have been around so long that everybody simply ignores them. Lets make a list and see how well you are doing with the basics.
1. Exercise right
2. Sleep enough
3. Get Sunshine
4. Breathe clean air
5. Drink clean water
6. Eat right
7. Eliminate wastes
Oh yeah, everybody knows those! True, but hardly anybody does them. Lets tackle these one at a time.
Exercise: your body needs to move a lot every day. Rule number one in the body is Move it or lose it. Going to the gym 3 or 4 days a week does not cut it. Invariably the healthiest people in my practice are those with physical labor type jobs. Humanity was built on movement. It takes tens of thousands of years for a species to adapt to a major functional change in lifestyle. We have moved from a physical labor lifestyle to a mental labor lifestyle in just the last 50 years. Our bodies are freaking out and shutting down. When I started practice 27 years ago 80% of my patients came to see me for injuries caused by physical incidents. Now 80% of my practice is stress caused conditions.
So what is “right exercise”? The most natural exercise for humans is walking. The 10,000 steps a day program started several years ago is truly a step in the right direction. Get yourself a pedometer and see just how much walking you are getting in each day. A simple search pulls up lots of sites for pedometers…here is one:
This is one basic of exercise, but not the only basic. Your body needs to be stressed from time to time. By that I mean that you need to push your body to its maximum effort a couple times a week. This means the heart muscle as well as each of your strength muscles. I have an article in the office on how to properly do this each week. Now there is a paradox here that needs to be understood. Regular, repetitive, long duration exercise actually decreases muscle size and strength – including the heart muscle. Think of marathon runners and distance bicyclists…they look like birds – long and thin. Their muscles become specialized and very efficient at doing only one thing – running or cycling. As you specialize, you lose the ability to do other things. I can explain this further another time but for the moment the message is to mix it up – do many different physical activities to maximize your muscles.
Thirdly, you need to work out your balance and coordination muscles every day. That means you need to do things every day that require more balance than you usually do. If you skateboard, or ski, or do Tai Chi daily you have this need covered. If not then you need to challenge your balance daily. There are more muscles of balance in your body than muscles of movement. Movement muscles work out by moving. Balance muscles work out by holding still while you are in an awkward position. I used to have Linda in the office who would teach balance exercises to patients. Hopefully we will get Susan McDonald to get her stretch and balance class up and running to cover this need. In the meantime I have the Vibrational Balance machine to help with being steady on your feet.
Here is a simple beginning balance exercise you all can start practicing. From now on do not use your hands to steady yourself when getting up out of a chair. Only use your legs.
Sleep…what can I say…most of us do not get enough sleep or good enough quality sleep. Sleep is when your body heals – not enough sleep = not enough healing. Your body starts releasing growth hormone to stimulate healing about 3-4 hours after you have been deeply asleep. It needs 4-6 hours to do its job. Add up the numbers – you need 7 – 10 hours of good quality sleep each day to recover from your life. There is also considerable evidence that this sleep needs to be in complete darkness for proper hormone function. That means no TV on, no night lights, no hall lights, and no light from the neighbor’s backyard. Dark. Yes, I know you can make it through the day on less sleep, but this article is about what is healthy, not what you can survive doing in the short run.
Sunshine: years ago people used to travel to special health spas just to lay in the sun to improve their health. The reason: vitamin D. Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin but a prohormone (it becomes the active hormone in the liver and kidneys). This hormone is vital to health in hundreds of ways. All vitamin D comes from sunlight in one way or another. You can not be healthy without it. Now in the past when most people worked outside large amounts of the time this was only a concern in the winter and at northern latitudes where sun is not as strong. But since the industrial revolution when people started working indoors in factories, vitamin D has become seriously deficient in the population. I just ran a blood test for my own D levels last week. Even though I take $200 to $300 dollars worth of suppliments each month, I was shocked to find that I only had 1/3 the minimum level of vitamin D necessary for health. I work indoors. I only get direct sunlight when I take my walks and when I do yard work.
A couple decades ago some marketing genius found a goldmine opportunity to make big bucks by making people afraid of sunshine so they could sell sunscreen products. Dermatologists knew that too much sunshine on fair skin would stimulate basil cell carcinomas – a non-dangerous type of skin cancer. Yes, too much of anything is not good for you…too much water will kill you. The whole reason different people have different skin colors is to regulate sunlight absorption for vitamin D production. Black people are black because they came from a high sunshine part of the world. Black skin blocks the excess sunshine. All the skin shades in between are all about sunshine intensity differences over hundreds of generations. So now you have everyone afraid of sunlight and it is creating massive health issues. It is even creating a sharp rise in melanomas – the deadly type of skin cancer that sunlight protects you from. Ignore the hype, don’t use sunscreens (use common sense instead) and get your sunshine. How much you ask? For white folks we are talking 20 minutes of full body exposure during the brightest time of the day in the summer three times a week (work up to that level – you don’t want to burn.) Winter sun takes longer as it is weaker. Black folks require up to three times as much sun because their skin color blocks the vitamin D producing rays of the sun. If your skin color is in-between, your time in the sun is in-between. If you want to take suppliments the new range being suggested is 2000 IU up to 10,000 IU.
Breathe clean air: now that seems simple enough so why do so few people do this? Pollution, that’s why. We are not just talking smog either – indoor pollution is worse than outside pollution in most homes and work places. Just in case we have slipped into denial, pollution means air-born poisons. You can not be healthy if you are being poisoned. Air-born poisons pass through the lungs directly into your blood stream. What can you do? Lets start with the obvious – don’t smoke… that goes for “herbs” as well. Once burned it produces poisons that go straight into your blood stream. Don’t use air fresheners and pretty smelling plug-in fragrances – toxic in the extreme. Don’t use aerosols in products. Don’t use toxic cleaning products…they evaporate and go right into your body. The list goes on and on – basically get the poisons out of your environment and your life. Some of the harder places to get rid of poisons are in the building materials your house/work is made of – carpet, plywood, paint, insulation, etc. It can be done but you basically have to build fresh from scratch and use non-toxic alternatives. If you are not ready to do that, the most common toxic poison from building materials is formaldehyde, and NASA has found tha t Heart Leaf Philodendron and Aloe Vera plants will actually cleanse the air of this toxic gas. So buy some pretty house plants that will help clean your air!
For air-born particulate pollutants I recommend air purifiers like the negative ion generators I use in the office. A whole issue could be dedicated to the air purification technologies available. A little internet research will give you a good idea about what is available. If you have problems with air-born allergens (a special class of poisons) HEPA filter air purifiers can be very helpful. Frequently I can get rid of the allergy reaction through a chiropractic bio-magnetic adjustment which turns down your immune system’s hypersensitivity to what should be a normal substance.
The last major concern with breathing good air has to do with simply getting enough oxygen into your system. Without oxygen, nothing works in your system. Oxygen is the most critical nutrient to your body . Without it you die within minutes – too much of it (like in distance running) and it burns your artery walls and other tissues. On planet earth the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere is 21%. Burning fossil fuels (like gasoline) uses up oxygen. In some downtown regions oxygen levels have been found to drop as low as 11%. Anyone downtown at these times is literally dying of oxygen starvation. Their brains and bodies are not functioning normally. Far more commonly however is a problem which most of my patients have heard me talk about at one time or another – stress induced oxygen starvation – or as they know it the diaphragm spasm. When you are under stress your body goes into flight or fight mode. One aspect of this is that your diaphragm muscle (the primary muscle for pulling air into the bottom half of your lungs) tightens up to build core strength and stability to enable you to run or fight. If you run or fight you get winded and this resets your diaphragm muscle back to normal tone. But in this day and age we don’t run or fight when under stress. We sit still and try to cope. Unfortunately this does not reset the diaphragm muscle and the primary muscle for getting oxygen into your lower lungs stays locked up. You slip into shallow upper chest breathing which does not recharge your red blood cells with a full load of oxygen to carry to your body. Sitting still you end up starved for oxygen. Not enough oxygen means lower energy for all the vital systems in your body…it means you are sick. Often the oxygen level gets so low your brain freaks out and causes a panic attack to get you to breath heavily again. Watch your breath during the day – where is it centered – in the belly where it belongs, or is it stuck as shallow breathing in your upper chest? Learn to breathe into your belly and check yourself frequently during the day.
Drink clean water: this is vital. Entire books have been written on the importance of having good healthy clean water to drink. The formation of human civilization begins around water sources, and most wars throughout history really had competition over water rights at their base. After oxygen, water is the next most essential nutrient for your body. You are mostly water. All the chemistry that allows life to happen only happens because it is in water. Polluted water is poisonous to your system. Chemicals added to your water supply (for whatever reason) are poisonous. Personally I use a reverse osmosis water purification system for all my drinking water (to remove fluoride, chlorine, lead, and a mess of other contaminates) and a special KDF filter on my shower head to clean my shower water (your skin absorbs poisons just like your GI tract). And in case anyone should ask, my personal feeling is that allowing the government to add drugs into our water supply “for our own good” is criminal. We are too biologically unique for that to do anything but create disaster.
The subject of eating right will take a whole issue on its own, as will the subject of eliminating wastes. I will address these in the next two newsletters. The burning question of “Do I need a colon cleanse?” will have to wait until then. I have started a new idea in this newsletter of turning the action steps in the article blue. That way if you only want to skim the article for the “what to do” information it will pop out for you.
In the meantime this information should provide you with enough to work with to start making some significant improvements in your health. Start walking, join a gym or learn how to strength train your muscles at home. Get a therapy ball or rocker board and start engaging in more balance activities. Start a dance class or a yoga class. Make quality sleep a priority. Start on your tan now at a salon that includes UVB rays – or take vitamin D3. Get an air purifier and some house plants. Get a water purifier or some other clean water source and actually drink that water. Some of these things call for an investment of time and money, but without your health, nothing else matters. Health is priority one in life – everything else comes after that. The beginning of the new year is a time full of promise. Will you fulfill that promise by doing your life differently? Take on small acheivable changes. Each small success builds you up to take on larger challenges down the road. Starting with the big stuff just sets you up for failure so start small. Take the time to get comfortable with each little change before adding another. Bit by bit you will transform your life.