wellness tips

Say you are not quite feeling right – nothing major, but perhaps you are feeling tired a lot, or maybe you get frequent headaches or stomach aches. You just don’t feel as well as you think you should. You have been to the doctor, and all the tests came back clean. What do you do then? Accept that you don’t feel good?

Presuming you have been following the basic guidelines provided in these tips – drinking adequate water, eating quality real food, avoiding processed food, sugar, flour, transfats, refined vegetable oils, exercising regularly, getting adequate sleep and dark time etc., what more can you do? 

Most likely your body is suffering from some kind of stress response, and finding and treating the root cause of that stress will bring you back towards homeostasis and feeling great.  Even if you are dealing with very serious health issues, it would be well worth your time to consider the following:

• If you suffer from digestive issues (and even if not), I would suggest taking a quality probiotic in order to implant good-quality bacteria into the gut which is necessary for digestion.  Antibiotics kill all the bacteria in the gut including the good ones, so taking probiotics after a round of antibiotics is critical to maintaining digestive health.  I find it interesting that physicians rarely suggest this after giving out a prescription for antibiotics.  Eating a poor diet of processed food gradually replaces the good bacteria with bad, also making it challenging to digest one’s food properly.  Generally speaking, I am not one to promote a lot of supplements, but I do think that this is important for almost all of us.  Primal Defense by Garden of Life is the best probiotic I’m aware of.  Remember that a healthy gut is important for a healthy immune system.
• Get yourself tested for food sensitivities and avoid those foods. You may feel better quite quickly after eliminating the offending foods, and after 3 months get yourself retested. Frequently when exposure is eliminated for a period of time, the gut can heal, and you can re-introduce those foods. Not always though. Some food allergies require lifetime avoidance. Food-sensitivity testing is a no-brainer for any digestive issues, although the symptoms caused by food sensitivities can go far beyond the digestive tract.  Very few physicians do this kind of testing, but almost all Naturopathic physicians do it.  I had a gut problem since about age 6 – medical test after test came back clean, and my doctors were telling me everything was fine.  ‘But doctor, my stomach hurts! How can there be nothing wrong?" Finally a friend suggested food-sensitivity testing, and my daily stomach aches ended.
• Get yourself tested for pathogens like mold, parasites, fungus, bacteria like H. Pylori, heavy metals.  These pathogens can cause a variety of low-grade symptoms and are frequently at the root of a wide variety of health issues. They can make you quite sick, too. Ask your doctor what testing they can do, or see your Naturopath. If you have trouble finding someone who can do this kind of testing for you, Biohealth in San Diego can test you and assign a doctor to you.
• Eat right for your metabolic type. Even if you are eating healthy foods, if you are not consuming them in the ratios needed for the optional functioning of your own biochemistry, you won’t feel at your best. Look here to find a metabolic-typing advisor near you.
• If your main complaint is fatigue related, I would get the circadian rhythms of your hormones tested. Saliva testing is usually how this is done – you spit into a test-tube 4 different times in one day, and the various hormones levels are plotted over the course of the day. Much about how your body is functioning can be learned from this kind of testing. For example, normally cortisol levels are low in the evening, but if they are high, that indicates a chronic stress response, which may lead to future disease. If the problem can be corrected at this stage, diseases can be avoided. Biohealth also does this testing.
• Neurotransmitter testing may be helpful as well, as these brain chemicals need to be at the optimal levels and in proper balance with each other to feel healthy and happy. Neurotransmitter imbalance creates a wide variety of symptoms, from depression to sleep issues to ADD ADHD to carbohydrate and sugar cravings. Currently, Neurogistics.com is the only company that I am aware of that does this kind of work. Having personally gone through their program, I must say that it helped my sleep significantly.
• Find a way that works for you to deal with the emotional stressors in your life.  ANYTHING you can do to reduce the stress on you and your body will help.

Related tips:
Food sensitivities, digestive problems and joint pain
It is not what you eat but what you digest that counts
Adrenal Fatigue
Customized Nutrition

Chek, Paul; How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!  Chek Institute, San Diego, CA, 2004.
Woeller, K. & Timmins, W. Resolving Chronic Stress Disorders Biohealth Diagnostics Seminar Handout 2006

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It may be hard to believe that watching TV can damage our health, but there are many reasons that this is true. The obvious one is that time spent watching TV means less time spent doing physical activity, and inactivity is definitely very damaging to one’s health. Many people watch over four hours of television a day, and that is frequently in addition to sitting at work for eight hours! The more the TV time, the fatter we are. Childhood TV watching is clearly linked to childhood obesity.

Evening television disrupts sleep, as the light emitted from the television is too stimulating to our systems. So get that television out of the bedroom! Our night-time rest and repair hormones like melatonin don’t get activated if there is light flickering from the TV. And if you turn on the TV in the middle of the night, those ever-important-for-health hormones get shut off, unable to complete their overnight tasks of immune-system building and tissue repair. To get adequate repair time, we need 8 to 10 hours of complete darkness each night. Amazingly, the sleep cycles of children, even those under the age of 2, are disturbed by as little as an hour of TV a day. When children’s sleep schedules are disrupted, usually so are the parents. Poor sleep has real health consequences over time.

Television viewing is particularly unhealthy for children for a variety of reasons. Using a television set as a babysitter may seem easy and be extremely tempting, but it is important to remember that television is a form of mind control which can have a huge influence on the attitudes of children as they grow. Research has shown that children are very susceptible to television commercials, making them more materialistic than they otherwise would be, negatively affecting their food choices, making them more likely to smoke as teens and go into debt as adults, and increasing their reliance on pharmaceutical drugs. Watching television also tends to make kids more aggressive by desensitizing them to violence, and surprisingly, makes them more susceptible to injury, probably because they do not realize that an activity is risky after watching TV characters continually surviving incredibly risky behaviours.

Weaning oneself and the kids off TV is tough, but families that have managed don’t regret it. They have much more quality time with each other, improving their family relationships. They are healthier and happier, and the kids are better adjusted socially. So, either go cold turkey and get rid of the television sets in your home, or remove them from the bedrooms first, and then gradually decrease viewing times by planning other activities instead, until the TV is never on. Then get rid of it.

Related Tips:
Light pollution messes with our hormones
The dark of the matter

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Well, the UN report on Global Warming was just released in Paris on Friday, and the scientists say that there is a 90% chance that human activity is causing climate change. As David Suzuki said in a radio interview the other day, we all buy insurance to protect us in case of injury, fire or burglary and the chances of those things happening are usually far less than 90%! So the time for debate is over. Global warming is a reality, and we must do something about it now in order to preserve a bright future for the next generations. If you have not yet viewed Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, buy it or rent it and learn what the world will look like when the ocean rises to the extent predicted, and how many coastal cities will be partially or completely under water. Three of the biggest causes of global warming are the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and intensive agricultural practices, which have big impacts on our personal health as well, and as a global community we must learn to live differently.

So, what can we as individuals do? Lots. So let’s get to it!

• We can choose not to support industrial agriculture and factory farming. 
  We can support sustainable farming by buying organic produce, free-range
  eggs and chicken, and pasture-fed meats and dairy.
• We can buy local whenever possible so less fossil fuels are used to
  transport our food and goods.
• We can choose not to eat red meat at least one day a week.
• We can choose products with as little packaging as possible.
• We can bring our own bags when we shop.
• We can walk, bike or use rapid transit rather than drive whenever
  possible.
• We can get rid of the car and join a car coop for those occasions when a
  car is really really necessary.
• We can convert our car to run on bio-diesel, or possibly purchase a
  hybrid.
• We can make sure our tires are properly inflated – under-inflated tires
  waste gas.
• We can turn off the car rather than idle it.
• We can check the air filter on the car monthly and replace it when
  necessary.
• We can buy carbon credits to offset the emissions caused by driving and
  flying from Terrapass or Native
  Energy.  It is extremely affordable so let’s do it!
• We can turn out the lights when leaving the room.
• We can caulk and weather-strip the doors and windows, and ensure the
  walls and ceilings are insulated.
• We can turn down the thermostat.
• We can exchange the light bulbs for energy-efficient ones.
• We can unplug electronics and battery chargers when not in use.
• We can choose energy-efficient home appliances.
• We can run the dishwasher only when it is full.
• We can keep our shower time short.
• We can install a low-flow showerhead and toilet.
• We can use cold or warm rather than hot water to wash our clothing.
• We can use a clothesline to dry our clothes instead of a dryer.
• We can donate old clothing rather than throwing them out.
• We can use 100% recycled paper, and not print a copy of everything.
• We can reduce, re-use and recycle, and compost our food waste.
• We can plant a tree.  Or two.  Or a hundred.
• We can tell our government representative that global warming is the
  most important issue there is, and demand government action.
• We can encourage our friends and family to do the above as well!

Related tips:
Choose local and save the world!
Worm composting to eat your garbage and feed your garden
Clean water for streams by Karen Munro M. Sc. Environmental Scientist
Urban growth and affects on streams by Karen Munro M. Sc. Environmental Scientist

Online at cbc.ca Paris report calls climate change “unequivocal”
Online at David Suzuki.org
Online at Take the Green Challenge

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