Water: It’s Not Just for Drinking Any More

Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”

~Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize for Medicine (1937)

Water is truly life’s elixir, as the good doctor noted. By now you may have heard the advice to drink at least 8 glasses of pure of water each day for greater health. That’s a great idea, and as good health involves body, mind, and spirit, I’d like to pass along some other really fabulous and stimulating tips from wellness experts John Travis and Regina Sara Ryan in The Wellness Workbook.

For incorporating the planet’s most abundant element into your life, here are six super ideas to add energy, fun, and even intimacy and meaning to your day.

1. Wake up in the shower. When you want to stimulate your circulation, take a shower alternating hot and cold water for 30 seconds each. You’ll be rarin’ to go!

2. Have a water fight. Make yourself laugh! Those belly laughs are good for your spirit and your health, plus having fun with someone is a great way to really connect.

3. Gentler Exercise. If you are looking for a low-impact workout, water aerobics could be your thing! Check out classes at local Y’s and gyms.

4. Create your own foot spa. Add hot water or mild soap or baking soda to a basin. Add feet, and notice how your whole body relaxes as well as your bubbly toes! Dry with a coarse towel and massage. For more pleasure, exchange this favor with someone you adore.

5. Visit a hot springs. If you don’t live near one, put it on your next vacation itinerary and discover why their curative powers have drawn adherents for ages. How about making it an annual ritual? Imagine the possibilities with a partner or group of good friends? Now that's natural skin care!

6. Cleansing your energy field. When you need to move on from the “heaviness” of an illness or sadness, create a ritual involving water in which you purify your spirit. You might want to incorporate healing or sacred water in the ritual. May peace be with you.

Remember that you, like the earth, are composed primarily of water. We come from water. Like air, it can completely envelop us. Let the waters surround you, enter you, and heal you. As you continue, complement your holistic experience with water with the whole food vitamins and whole food supplements that will sustain you on your journey toward wellness.

Four Tips for Fabulous Mature Skin

Good self-care involves taking care of our whole bodies, outside and inside. Being in vibrant health means having energy, a light step, and glowing skin. For us women, as our skin ages, we need to take extra care if we want to keep our healthy glow!

This will mean changing some of our old routines. For one thing, our skin does not produce new cells as quickly. Also, we can see how biology and environment seem to conspire against us, conjuring up wrinkles, freckles, and age spots.

Here are five well-tested recommendations for “mature skin” from dermatologists and skin-care experts:

1. Wear sunscreen daily. As the days are now lengthening, this is especially important. Did you know that wearing sunscreen daily can reduce signs of aging (including age spots and wrinkles) and also decrease your risk for developing skin cancer? Fortunately there are new sunscreens that feel GOOD to put on your skin. Try some of the natural skin care products that are on the market now with the SPF you need for your skin. You will feel the silky smoothness!

2. Change to the skin care products you need now. More mature skin can be easily irritated by the alcohol-based products we needed for teenage skin! By age 40 or so, most women find that using mild, unscented products year round helps their skin feel better. Seek out skin care products that help you manage your skin, such as creams with ingredients such as retinol and vitamin C. Be sure to apply moisturizers, especially after bathing. There are many natural, plant-based and fruit-based products that can refresh and moisturize your skin. If you are not sure what your skin needs, see a dermatologist.

3. Manage stress. Chronic stress raises your level of cortisol, which in turn increases oil production and related skin problems. It also slows down the skin healing process and appears to in increasing the risk of developing skin cancer.

4. Eat a well-balanced diet. When you eat lots of good healthy food and drink plenty of water, you area giving your body the elements it needs to both repair and hydrate your skin from the inside out. To make sure you aren’t skimping on those vitamins and minerals, add a quality supplement. (There are many out there available from reliable health supplement vendors; personally, I take New Chapter Inner Beauty Every Woman’s Multivitamin.

What you don’t know will hurt you

For years I thought that as long as I don’t overindulge in certain foods I didn’t have to worry about their effects on my health. I finally realized that the perfect food in one man’s eye is not always so in another man’s eye. It’s very important to know everything that goes into the foods you eat so that you can understand how that particular food is helping or hurting the systems of your body.

You see, food lost its value a long time ago; people don’t generally pick a food to eat because it is going to help give them soft and healthy hair. People eat foods because they taste good and because they crave them. A billboard isn’t going to have a picture of a bowl of vegetables and say how that food will help your heart. Advertisers use billboards to speak to food cravings, such as having a picture of a fat, juicy hamburger. That entices a craving and a run by the drive-through. The dietary benefits to food is lost to taste. This is why so many people have to add whole food multivitamins to their diet; because they don’t get enough of the recommended vitamins from the foods they crave every day.

We need to be teaching our children a new way to look at food so that they don’t get caught up in using food as a crutch or for comfort as so many over-weight individuals do now. We need to be teaching the importance of weight loss and how living in a country with record numbers of obese people is a major factor in our health care system. Getting our kids back on a healthy track should be the main concern of our educators and parents alike. We are raising unhealthy kids and it never used to be like that.

You are what you Eat

The next time you fill your plate and your mouth with that hamburger and fries from that fast food restaurant you might want to know exactly how that food is going to help or not help your body. You might want to consider your digestive health before you eat a large helping of red meat that can sit in your digestive track for days and cause you all kinds of problems.

So many people don’t think twice about what they put into their bodies; they just think if its food, it has to be helping them. This isn’t always true because foods are supposed to have specific purposes for the different systems of our bodies. There isn’t a perfect food so much as there is lots of perfect foods that work together to fuel the cells that feed our bodies. The problem with food is that it tastes so good and we want to consume too much of it. Certainly there are foods that are very bad for us and should only be eaten in very limited quantities.

Our digestive system is an amazing thing. Once the food gets to our digestive track it gets broken down and picked apart to get all the good stuff that we need and is picked up by the cells and delivered to all areas of the body. When the digestive track gets sick we don’t get the good stuff that we need. That is why adding probiotics to your diet can help you in so many different ways. It helps to make the digestive track run smoothly to get all the good stuff and to efficiently remove all the bad stuff that can send toxins throughout your body. Getting proper digestive track health is vitally important to good nutrition.

Natural Cures

When I became ill with chronic digestive problems my doctor put me on several different types of medications. One medication was for the inflammatory problems in my digestive track and the other two were for side effects from the first medication. I decided, early on, that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life taking medications. I began researching the effectiveness of probiotics to help build a healthier digestive system. Once I had gotten enough information I began using them daily and within a month I noticed a significant difference in how my digestive system was working. I had less pain and a much more normal routine.

I completely eliminated the medications my doctor put me on and added whole food supplements to my diet. The more I researched about my condition the more I realized how much of this problem lies with the diet I was on. I changed my eating habits and began eating foods that help to make my digestive system function properly and with less effort. The foods I had been eating worked against my natural digestive system and caused it to have to work too hard which caused inflammation which in turn caused the pain I was having.

I gave up carbonated drinks and began drinking a lot more water and real fruit juices. I found that fried foods were a main cause of my digestive dysfunction so I stopped eating all fried foods and began eating baked or BBQ. I subscribed to ahealth newsletter that comes monthly and has many recipes and tips to help me continue living a pain free and medication free lifestyle. Too many people think they have no control over their bodies especially when it comes to illness. I have proven that we can take control and eliminate many of the dysfunctions of our bodies simply by changing what we eat and what we put into our bodies. I have never felt better.

The Business of Health

I am a certified and licensed nutritionist and have spent most of my career helping people to change their unhealthy lifestyles. I own and actively work in a health spa. We teach and guide people through weight loss clinics that help them to establish a long term healthy routine in their lives. We like to call it a total mind and body overhaul and we have successfully helped hundreds of people make major changes in their lives.

I personally teach classes on nutrition and have developed a diet that is both healthy and satisfying. The problem with so many people is they think they have to completely give up all the foods they have enjoyed over the years. I teach moderation as well as improving the diet by adding more organic and whole foods to the diet along with herbal supplements to ensure their bodies are getting all the vitamins and minerals they need. I stress how important these foods are but also explain that it’s ok to have the occasional piece of cheesecake or slice of pizza now and then as long as it doesn’t turn into a pattern of unhealthy eating.

I also stress the importance of using probiotics to help build a healthy and strong digestive system which then, in turn, helps to build a healthy immune system. All the systems of the body are connected and if one system isn’t functioning well, the other systems will suffer. When you have a healthy digestive system the food you eat can be properly broken down and then distributed to all the cells of the body. When the digestive system isn’t working well, your body isn’t getting fueled properly which leads to it not functioning at top performance. What you eat and how it affects the body is the foundation of a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle. I am dedicated to ensuring that all my clients understand the importance of dietary supplements and eating a healthy diet.

Living a Long Healthy Life

I learned a long time ago that in order to live a long and healthy life I had to take care of the one and only body I was given. It’s so easy to be tempted into an unhealthy lifestyle by eating the wrong types of foods and not taking enough time for proper exercise but I know doing this will shorten my life and not help me to stay healthy during the flu seasons. By eating a good diet and taking herbal supplements and getting plenty of exercise I know I am better prepared for what life has to throw at me.

I’ve also began using probiotics to help maintain a healthy digestive system. When we have a lot of stress in our lives related to our work or relationships, our digestive systems can get out of whack. When the digestive system isn’t working right, we aren’t getting the nutrients from the foods we eat. I have a great deal of stress in my life so I found it quite necessary to include the probiotics in my diet so I wasn’t losing any of the vitamins and minerals from the food I was taking in.

I began using natural skin care products that have no artificial and harmful preservatives. My skin feels and looks at least ten years younger. I know that using natural products is much healthier for my skin than the other products on the market. I decided long ago to do everything I can to ensure my body gets the best of what it needs. Getting the best of what it needs doesn’t always mean the most expensive; it means the best of what makes my body responds and function in the most natural of ways. We can’t always get everything we need from the food we eat so it’s important to include whole food supplements along with plenty of exercise, rest, and a healthy diet.

Your Body, Your Health

Some may say the garden of life begins with what you put into your body to make it grow. Consider the health of humans long ago prior to manmade preserved foods. There was far less sickness and diseases before preservatives came along and I’ve come to realize that the more we get back to the natural food sources the better.

I put myself on a strict diet of only organic foods and began using organic whole food vitamins. Within two weeks of beginning this new life style I found that I was sleeping better, had much more energy, food tasted much better, my skin and hair had a new look to it, and overall, I felt 15 years younger. I removed harmful foods from my diet such as soda, sweets, fattening carbohydrates, and anything that wasn’t natural. All the meat that I eat is organic and has no preservatives.

Using the whole food multivitamins has made a big difference in my life. I can almost feel my body working more efficiently in the manner it was designed to function. My digestive system is working much better than it ever had before. I haven’t had the irritated bowl symptoms I used to get after every meal I ate. Because I have stopped drinking soda and started drinking more water, I can tell that my skin looks and feels much healthier and younger.

I feel it is very important to take care of our bodies in the way they should have been taken care of all along. By making much needed changes in your diet and by taking whole food vitamins, you could extend your life by ten or twenty years at least. There really is no telling how long you can live as long as you maintain your body and keep it healthy.