Think for a moment about all the factors that affect your health and what is the first thing that comes to your mind? You might think it’s what you eat, but it’s not! Actually, your attitude is 50% responsible for your total health. So, fix your attitude and you’re halfway there.
According to the Hippocrates Health Institute, here’s how the equation for good health breaks down:
Attitude - 50%: This is the most important component when seeking great health. If we criticize ourselves, allow negative distractions and deal with stress, we will impair our mental, emotional and physical being.
Food - 25%: You must take a holistic nutrition approach and select a balanced diet for optimal health. An unhealthy diet has both immediate and long-term consequences that range from unpleasant and inconvenient to serious and life-threatening.
Exercise - 25%: Exercise helps all of our body’s systems run more smoothly. It also delivers an emotional lift due to the release of endorphins. A sedentary lifestyle gradually takes away the ability to perform physical tasks, and also increases the risk of serious illness and disease.
The first necessity for a positive mental attitude is to let go of our unrealistic ideals. We all have certain expectations of ourselves. Often, these expectations are unrealistic. How often have we referred to what the “perfect” person should be, in our image dominated world and determined that we are far from being this person, sadly?
Even though we know that perfection really isn’t achievable, on a deep subconscious level, we still expect ourselves to be perfect. We find it really difficult to accept our weaknesses, and sometimes even our strengths. Instead, when we find ourselves addicted to food, especially sugar, and in a battle with our inner and outer selves, we’re our own harshest critics. We begin a downward spiral by berating ourselves for being overweight and for being unable to eat normally. But there is hope. You can be at peace with who you are, adopt sensible holistic nutrition concepts into your life, overturn any addiction to sugar and balance your weight correctly.
First of all, accept where you are right now! It doesn’t matter whether you crave sugar, are not at an ideal weight and know that you eat unhealthily. Do you know something? You’re human and there is no such thing as perfect. Having empathy and compassion for yourself is the first step on your journey to a healthier mind and body.
By accepting who you are, you will notice that all the pressure and stress that you had borne for so long, starts to float away. Accept “you” for who you are and you will be able to bring on board some good habits that will enable you to become the healthier person that you know you can be.
Next, surrender to the passage of time! The next step on your journey is to develop patience. As much as we all want a quick fix to our problems, remember this: the solutions that require the most effort and time to apply will often yield the greatest rewards. These days, holistic nutrition can make so much of a difference in your life and with persistence, you can go on to achieve your greatest dreams.
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We all know that we need to change our diets to a holistic nutrition approach, and avoid the sugar, dairy, processed oils and white flour. This list of products is very bad for us, causes disease and aging and it is amazing to see how people recover from chronic diseases by eliminating them. These products also cause inflammation and severely damage tissues and arteries throughout the body.
If you don’t change your ways, flour and sugar can help to ruin your life. Unbelievably, 160 pounds of sugar and over 200 pounds of white flour will find their way into our bodies in any one year and children get involved with this habit from a young age. Without knowing it, they will build up such an addiction that they will have to deal with high blood sugar levels and other health problems. With elevated blood sugar, free radicals swarm around our body, causing inflammation and starting disease. What we consider to be a “staple” diet is littered with these poisons — for example cakes, bread, breakfast cereals, candy, soft drinks, pasta — the list goes on.
Milk products are also hazardous to our health these days as modern cow herds are fed with tainted grain, altering the proportion of fatty acids contained. Omega-3 fats are stripped and an imbalance is created. Did you know that every other one of us is thought to be allergic to dairy, often without knowing it?
Our dietary position gets worse, as our intake of fats and oils contains excessive omega-6 fatty acids. Adverse reactions continue to take place within our bodies, triggering chronic inflammation. If we consumed them in equal balance as we once did, there would not be so much of a problem, but the sad truth is that we ingest up to 30 times as much 6 as we do 3.
If you notice depression, you can make a dietary change by improving the oil quality used. How about making your own salad dressing? You should consider using flax seed oil or extra virgin olive oil. Heated oils such as soy, safflower and canola can all cause inflammation.
It doesn’t stop there, as beef fed with grain, poultry and farmed fish have excessive omega-6 fatty acids as well. It all stacks up to a huge excess of inflammatory compounds. As inflammation continues, disease results and the only way to avoid this is to replace poor choices with healthy fats and oils.
Within the last couple of generations, as holistic nutrition has become ever less present in our society, we have markedly changed the way that we consume foods and we are setting ourselves up for serious and considerable problems.
The nutrients we need – which we would receive in abundance from a holistic nutrition diet, are removed from processed foods — basically anything that comes in a box, can or a jar. In place, we add preservatives, artificial flavors and colors, or toxins, making our bodies work extremely hard to try and detoxify and causing a serious problem if we try and lose weight. Other elements, added to our foods are causing us to gain weight. Processed foods contain dangerous trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and neurotoxins such as aspartame.
Chemicals proliferate in our food system as we try and maintain a more functional distribution and production system. It’s not very nice to think of all the insecticides, fungicides, larvacides and pesticides that find their way into our systems. Our foods are low in nutrients, but high in calories and chemicals. Little wonder that we feel lethargic, overweight and drained all the time.
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April 18, 2010
Superb Tips On The All To Real Dangers Of Sugar
There was a time, thousands of years in the past, when holistic nutrition was standard, with sugar only available from honey or fruits and no indication that human technology would one day seek to refine sugar from beets or sugar cane into a sweetener.
Unfortunately, our bodies were not built to process refined sugar—it is alien to our systems. Raymond Francis, DSc, MSc, RNC, author of “Never Be Fat Again,” says that “feeding refined sugar to a human body is similar to burning high-octane aircraft fuel in an automobile engine. Impressive amounts of energy, but after a while, you damage the engine.”
And that is exactly what has happened to us. Our “engines” are definitely damaged. Diseases are much in evidence as we have accelerated our sugar consumption over the decades.
While our bodies are trying desperately to somehow process these useless refined sugars, they are forced to deplete important vitamins and minerals that would otherwise be keeping us balanced, healthy and functioning properly. The body’s balanced state is known as homeostasis, and intense disruptions to it over years of time lead to all kinds of life-threatening, yet preventable situations, such as stroke, diabetes, heart disease and cancer among them.
When our body is trying to deal with this sugar, it re-directs some vitamins that would ordinarily help us to digest food. As our food is not digested correctly, many of the nutrients that ARE contained within the food that we eat, are wasted. Improper digestion also promotes food allergies. Such allergies can lead to a decrease in immunity, cognitive problems and serious physical and emotional issues. In truth, digestion is just one of the badly affected bodily functions that are impacted when we consume sugar. And just look at all of the problems that causes!
Sugar also causes reactive hypoglycemia, a dramatic rise and fall of blood sugar which creates a strong craving for more sweets (which starts the cycle all over again). Almost unbelievably, sugar intake can lead to amnesia, hallucinations, trembling and violent outbursts, not dissimilar to the effects of addictive drugs. You could almost imagine mental illness.
The calories in sugar are considered empty calories because they contain no vitamins or minerals. Just look at people who eat mainly sugary foods and you will see why they always feel sluggish. Overconsumption of sugar will lead to fat deposits in the areas of the breasts, hips, buttocks and belly.
If you are not familiar with holistic nutrition, you won’t be aware that once these areas are full of fat deposits, your liver will start distributing the fat around vital organs, such as the kidneys or heart. Consequently, high blood pressure will result and your brain function could be impaired. Even in the short term, your brain is affected by sugar. In fact, you’ll likely feel the effects right away. When the “low” arrives, sugar affects the brain and makes you feel sleepy. You will have trouble doing simple calculations and will also start to forget things.
The next time you have a craving for cookies or ice cream or doughnuts, imagine the chaos you are about to set in motion inside your body. Are you really willing to take on the prospect of heart disease, kidney stones, cancer, stroke, yeast infections, diabetes, arthritis, allergies or headaches? How about it? Take a moment while giving some serious thought to that scoop of chocolate ice cream, and actively consider holistic nutrition and how your life could improve significantly through making positive decisions.
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April 13, 2010
Great Points On Ways To Change Unhealthy Eating Habits
If you think about it, as your habits took years to develop, you must allocate the same amount of time as you try and establish a new skill. The founder of the Preventative Medical Center of Marin, California, Dr. Elson Haas, establishes that you need “greater attentiveness and willingness to deal openly with emotions and other adversities, that may block your way to healing.”
Experts who may help you include a holistic nutrition specialist and a trained health professional and you should look for a support group or program that specializes in food addiction. They can help you develop coping skills that are not food-focused—effective interventions that will help you break the cycle of emotional eating and live an emotionally and physically healthy life. From a holistic nutrition perspective, it’s also helpful to look at what the food is actually giving you, which you might be able to get somewhere else.
Some people say that if you crave sugar, you are lacking something sweet in your life. Cravings can often be distractions from what we really want in our lives. Think about what happens when you eat the food you are craving. If, for example, when you consume sugar, do you feel at peace, euphoric or warm? Where are you missing those emotions in your life? What could you be doing that would allow you to experience them without food?
Whether you are an emotional eater or a nail-biter, you’re not alone. We endure a range of unhealthy habits, some of which are relatively benign, but others threaten our well-being and health. The truth is that anytime that you are a slave to a habit; it is holding you back from your true potential and interfering with your success. However, you are certainly capable of changing the situation! Don’t let these bad habits overwhelm and ruin your life and opt to make new decisions right now, kicking your reliance on sugar, for example, and building yourself a better future.
You can develop life-enhancing habits that revolve around your desire for health, happiness, financial independence and success. So many people endure very unhealthy habits because they haven’t connected them with mental skills. It takes a lot of mental effort to replace an old habit with a new one, just as learning a new physical skill requires practice and repetition.
Every action starts with a thought—though so many of our habits and actions are so ingrained that we do them subconsciously. And that’s where the mental practice begins. When we can stop in the moment and become aware of what we are about to do, we can think about whether or not we want to do it. We could classify this as a healthier choice.
Once you make the conscious decision that your old habits aren’t helping you achieve your goals and that they are, in fact, holding you back, you can begin choosing new habits that you would like to adopt. And it doesn’t matter where you are in your life. Whether you are a college freshman or a retiree starting a new career is irrelevant. You’re never too old or too young to make the change to holistic nutrition and to improve the overall quality of your life.
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April 12, 2010
Valuable Pointers On Healing From Emotional Eating
While there is no shortage of diet books, holistic nutrition strategies and new fitness equipment on the market, the problems of being overweight and obese continue to grow with the number of people being affected by these serious but preventable conditions. There must be something else going on here.
We all seem to have some kind of relationship with food. We don’t just use food to satisfy our physical hunger; we sometimes use it to quell our emotional hunger as well. If we educate ourselves about why we eat and why we choose the particular foods that we do, we start to see how our emotions play a pivotal role in our health. In the book “Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever,” Roger Gould, M.D., the Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, says that emotional eating is a way of satisfying emotional hunger. By doing this, you are just using food as a way of coping, to comfort yourself and to deal with life. That means you eat for reasons other than what your body needs.
At one point or another, we all take part in emotional eating behavior. For example, you could consume an entire pizza after a bad day at work, or comfort yourself by eating chocolate if you have had an argument with your significant other. But when this condition goes too far, it crosses the line into food addiction, where you actually lose control over what and how you eat.
Dr. Gould points out that all of us have emotional hunger. The difference between an emotional eater and a non-emotional eater is how they respond to this hunger. When presented with a challenge, an emotional eater has a knee-jerk reaction to reach for whatever food will offer him or her a moment of comfort. Comfort foods do not represent healthy choices and are far from what we might term “holistic nutrition,” such as heavy pastas, refined carbohydrates, ice cream and other fast foods.
We pay little regard to nutrition, health or even real hunger when we engage in emotional eating. In fact, eating is usually hurried, with very little awareness of what is being consumed, and therefore emotional eaters are more prone to overeating.
Food offers relief from stress or emotional discomfort and provides a refuge and safety net that we can quickly turn to for solace and security. Food becomes the drug that distracts us from whatever discomfort we are feeling. By focusing on our emotional eating habits, we ignore the real cause of the issue.
But food is just a temporary bandage. Whatever is causing you to emotionally eat will inexorably return to haunt you. And worst of all, now there are usually new feelings of guilt, remorse, anger, and isolation once you have given in to the emotional eating.
There is a very large difference between wanting to change and actually changing. It’s difficult for the person who is prone to emotionally eat to see the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger. This is why it is so important to examine how your relationship to food triggers your behavior.
Understanding food addiction’s powerful grasp and the underlying issues that lead us to emotional eating are paramount in helping us to recover and heal. As soon as this understanding begins, you can start your process of recovery and your concentration on holistic nutrition concepts, based on a really solid footing.
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If you restrict your morning menu to liquids only, you will be doing a lot to help your body repair its natural cycles. If you like to have breakfast every morning, by sticking to juices only you can still maintain this habit. As juices may be easily carried around, the chances are that you can persuade your spouse or your kids to indulge in this healthier habit.
Fasting on juices, or drinking vegetable juices regularly is not hard, and it has tremendous health benefits, if you do it right. This means choosing the best and HEALTHIEST method of cleansing your body of the buildup of toxins that have accumulated over days, weeks, months, and, for some of us, even years! You can fast once a week with vegetable juices and drink mostly vegetable juices almost every morning for breakfast, which is a healthy way to keep your body fresh, strong, and best of all, healthy!
For your morning meal, select something light and centered around holistic nutrition, leaving you energized and ready to attempt anything that the day has in store for you! At breakfast time, you’re looking for something easy to digest and fruits and juices are ideal, high in nutrients, yet with few calories. Not to be compared with fried bacon and eggs! You should also consider that your stomach will be empty when you wake up in the morning and this is a good time to perform a cleanse with fresh vegetable juice. You will not have to worry about constipation anymore with this form of holistic nutrition.
I want to tell you how easy it is to take on board the concept of holistic nutrition and transform your life. We’ll start by asking a few simple questions: What’s in your wellness regimen? Does it include aerobic exercise? Adequate rest? Meditation? Do I eat nutritious food? Ideally, your regimen should include on top of this juice fasting to cleanse and revitalize the body.
Picture the vitality of fresh juices flowing through your digestive tract as you begin the body cleansing process of juice fasting. If you like, you can picture these juices as a powerful river, replenishing your body with antioxidants, vitamins and essential nutrients, while eliminating those mucus forming foods from your food chain.
Mucus forming foods? They sound terrible! In a nutshell, these are foods that are acid forming, reducing your body’s vitality and making recovery difficult. Foods with a higher acidic content include dairy products like milk, butter, and cottage cheese. Not surprisingly, this list also includes fish, poultry and meats. If you haven’t already made the connection, they’re foods you likely buy at the grocery store every week and consume as part of your regular diet.
When you fast with juice, you get rid of the buildup of messy mucus in your system that takes place when you consume acidic foods — it sounds graphic and upsetting, but that’s the way it is. It also cleanses the body of chemicals, toxins, and other harmful materials that you consume, inhale, or otherwise absorb through your environment. At the same time, the healing properties of the fresh juices revitalize and rejuvenate the body.
Juice fasting is a great way to tune up the body from the inside out. Your internal systems and organs will thank you for this and you will aid in weight loss, make your skin look much more vibrant and it will leave you with more energy too. There are many other health benefits to be enjoyed, as well.
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From time to time, we’re all guilty of overeating. Well, all of that food might have been yummy going down, but it’s something you’re going to eventually pay for, in more ways than one.
This kind of splurging or binging also causes people to not chew their food properly—until liquefied—which results in swallowing large chunks of food that strain the GI tract. It’s not recommended that anyone should eat like this, certainly not on a regular basis. However, as human beings we all tend to do things that we shouldn’t.
So, if you find that you’ve splurged on a heavy meal, it’s a good idea to expel this toxic material as soon as possible. A colon cleanse represents the fastest and easiest way to do this. All of this may sound overwhelming, but I’ve spent years studying and researching the incredible impact that good nutrition and bad nutrition has on the body; and I know that we have the power to change bad habits and to experience a healthier way of living through holistic nutrition.
If you exercise on a regular basis, consume the right foods with high nutritional elements, rich in antioxidants, you can add fasting to your schedule. The good news is that food rich in antioxidant properties can help slow the harmful processes that cause cellular damage in the body. If you don’t slow cellular damage, it can lead to premature aging and the spread of diseases and cancers.
There is nothing new about the connection between good diet and health care and aging. However, it bears repeating because individuals today, many of whom are considered overweight, need to hear this vital message again and again.
After looking at this for a long time, I am sure that the only way to ensure a healthy and long life is to eat the right kind of foods, pay attention to holistic nutrition guidelines and to cut out all those harmful foods that we typically ingest, daily. By no means do I expect you to starve, but the typical quantity that we consume every day is without a doubt overloading our systems and some of this food will definitely make us sick and in the long term, will even kill us.
For centuries, experts have known and understood the necessity of having a good, healthy diet, based around holistic nutrition. But in this fast paced, hectic world we live in, where it’s easier to dine out or grab a bite on the run, we sometimes forget what we’re shoveling into our mouths. To put it to you in a friendly way, always nourish your body with the right food types and take time to cleanse, heal and rest through the use of fasting procedures.
Fasting is certainly not a new way to care for the body, and I was fascinated to discover that even Socrates and Plato fasted to “attain mental and physical efficiency.”
The second century Greek philosopher and physiologist Galen agreed. Mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras would fast for up to a month. We are told that one of the original founders of medicine, Paracelsus, observed that “fasting is the greatest remedy.” Even the great Hippocrates, “father of medicine,” regularly prescribed fasting to his patients.
Following in those great footsteps, the Hippocrates Health Institute, since the mid-50s a leader in complementary healthcare and natural alternatives, promotes the virtues of fasting one day each week. Don’t you agree that these are some impressive words of wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers over the ages?
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