According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 67% of Americans over the age of 20 years old areoverweight. You read that right, two thirds of adults in America are overweight! We don’t need a terrorist threat to be alarmed! So what, you say? According the the National Institute of Health (NIH), weighing too much may increase your risk for developing many health problems. If you are overweight or obese, you may be at risk for:
type 2 diabetes
coronary heart disease and stroke
metabolic syndrome
certain types of cancer
sleep apnea
osteoarthritis
gallbladder disease
fatty liver disease
pregnancy complications
You may be able to lower your health risks by losing weight, doing regular physical activity, and eating natural healing foods. Not to mention what being overweight can do for your out look on life?
PEOPLE, WE HAVE A HEALTH CRISIS ON OUR HANDS!
How can this be? We Americans are commiting slow suicide by eating our way to an early grave. Even if the result is not an early grave, the journey to our final resting place is not a happy one. No wonder we have a health care crisis. By the way folks, our health insurance system didn’t cause this problem and it’s sure as hell not going to solve it. It seems to me that the problem comes from a lack of knowledge and self control. Yes, there are some of us who have medical conditions that are beyond our control, but with the right knowledge and habits, these can also be managed.
Getting Back to Basics
The solution begins with knowledge. First and foremost, knowledge of ourselves. As I mentioned above, some of us have pre-existing medical conditions and don’t even know it. We each have to establish our baseline. That is, gather the basic information about our own health. We have to get intimiate with ourselves, before we can make any progress. No one knows us or can really know us better than ourselves. No other human is with any of us 24 hours 7 days a week 365 days a year, for our entire life.
We need to know our own body type. There are three basic body types, ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph. They categorize certain body characteristics such as muscle, fat, skeletal frame etc. For example, endomorphs tend to have more fat cells and their body shape is different. Oh, and by the way, it’s not like you have to be one of these three, they are just three points with infinite variation in between. The point is that this is one place where one may begin to know more about themselves. It also doesn’t mean that if you have an endomorph body you can never have the shape of a mesomorph. It does mean that an endomorph will have to work to achieve the body a mesomorph naturally has.
We need to know our emotional makeup. Are we generally happy, sad, angry, depressed etc. Some of us are sociable, others prefer to be alone. We need to know our basal metabolic rate, the speed at which our body use energy while at rest, kind of like a car idling. Our interest also impact our health, whether it be athletics, music, art, entertainmet or research to name a few. In addition to all of that, and this is a short list, we need to know how our bodies assimilate food. How does the food that we eat get converted into energy and the stuff that we’re made of?
That means we also need to know about the food we eat, what is good food and what is not even food that we eat. Since the food we eat is both the source of the energy we burn and the source of the materials our body is made of, we better know the quality of what we eat…
We all know how moms are always saying eat your vegetables? Well they have a reason for it, and it probably has little to do with wasting of food when you don’t. Doctors and Scientists have found out more and more through advances in research and studies that food has a direct effect on our outlook on life. Food can make you sick, happy or sad. It can also help reduce your risk of heart disease, decrease the painful effects of osteoarthritis, and help to improve your eye health. Research has uncovered chemicals in our fruits and vegetables called Phytochemicals, these are naturally occurring chemicals, in other words healthy chemicals that are good for our bodies.
You may have heard of antioxidants, this is the most popular type of phytochemicals. We should all know how good antioxidants are for good health, they remove free radicals and lower our risk of most common ailments. Did you know there are over 100 different phytochemicals in a single serving of fruits or vegetables? Did you know that different colored fruits contain different amounts of phytochemicals? These are the unltimate health food that help our bodies to detox and provide natural remedies.
Among the list of phytochemicals are found Beta Carotine, Lycopene, Cryptothanxin, Indoles, Anthocyanins, and Allicin. These naturally occurring chemicals help to maintain a healthy body. Did you know that Beta Carotine is a natural healing food that may help prevent Lung Cancer? Studies suggest that it most certainly does. How about that it can also fight against oral cancer, cancer of the stomach, and for the ladies cancer of the uterus and cervix.
It is well established that fiber is a great reducer of Blood Pressure. We all need to make our blood pressure is normal to keep our heart healthy. Boron helps delay the onset of osteoporosis. Most of us have heard that vitamin C fights Cancer and Cataracts.
We should do everyting in our power to improve the chances of living longer lives to see our children and grandchildren, maybe even our great grandchildren grow up to be healthy adults. One way to do this is to make sure we are finding great sources of Vitamin C. So you are feeling stressed and tired and just ready to go to bed? Don’t! How many times did you think, Hey if I am tired and stressed why don’t I just go and run a mile or hit something? You should definitely NOT have thought hey why don’t I sit down and have something to eat.
Some foods such as fresh fish and nuts may help with depression and mental/emotional disorders. Sometimes, happiness is just a walnut away. Believe it or not, sunflower seeds are not just to spit and chew, they actually a fantastic source of Vitamin E. This cancer fighting antioxidant can reduce the risk of heart disease by 40%. Now that is a natural healing food to cheer about!
Folks, we need to be watching our intake of Triglycerides! A natural healing food we need to be eating more of is fresh fish with omega 3 fatty acids; this will help us reduce our hearts blood fat content. Cod Liver Oil may even help keep our cellular PH levels balanced. Lowering our cholesterol is essential in maintaining good health. Eating a variety of nuts helps to reduce overall cholesterol and risk of heart attacks. Just 2 ounces of Walnuts five times a week, helps reduce cholesterol by 12 percent! That is a significant drop for those who are borderline high cholesterol. For those of you who like to cook, try replacing your vegetable oil with olive oil. Not only is it healthier but also it helps reduce your LDL (bad) cholesterol. Fiber is a good way to lower insulin resistance (diabetes), reduce obesity, heart disease, cancer and constipation. As the saying goes, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apples are catabolic, that means it takes more calories to digest them than the calories they contain. Whole grains are another good way to keep that doctor away also. Whole grains contain a variety of phytochemicals, they help clean our system and keep us healthy. Healthy is the baseline where we all want to be.
The Bottom Line
Health care is on everybody’s mind these days. If we all did our best to get and stay healthy, we would reduce the burden on our health care system. No matter how one slices it, ultimately we pay a great price for not taking the best possible care of our selves, starting with eating natural healing foods. As anothe old saying goes, “pay me now or pay me later.” We either pay the piper now by living a healthy lifestyle or pay the later by, being sick, diseased and relying on a faling system of health and medicine.
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