Have you ever wondered if there are steps to better health that your doctor is not talking about?
According to David Simon, author of Vital Energy: The 7 Keys to Invigorate Body, Mind & Soul (2000), “We have learned a lot about how to treat illness, but not much about how to create health.”
With all the resources available today, you can educate yourself and take steps to better health.
Read on to discover three changes you can make.
Why I am writing this post
For most of my life I have been interested in health and what I can do to stay healthy. Much of my knowledge came through self study and personal experimentation. I am only qualified to provide information in one area. For the other two areas, I tell my story and hope you are inspired to do your own research and start your journey.
The three areas I am focusing on are:
1. Food choices
2. Chemical toxicity
3. Emotional stress
According to Candace Pert, who wrote Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d (2006), modern medicine doesn’t seriously address these three areas.
Making better food choices
Making good food choices can improve your health. My own philosophy toward food is very simple: eat real food.
Eating real food these days is not as easy as you might think. Our grocery stores are filled with processed foods, chemical additives, and genetically modified foods.
Many of these non-foods create inflammation in the body and the brain. Inflammation can cause many health problems including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and even depression. In a recent continuing education class, I learned that lowering inflammation in the body can heal depression when nothing else worked.
There are 7 food that affect many people. They are wheat, corn, soy, dairy, eggs, sugar, and peanuts. If you want to learn more about how these foods affect you, J.J. Virgin’s book, The Virgin Diet (2012 ) is a good resource.
You will need to find your own food sensitivities. For me even a crumb of wheat creates problems, but I can eat an occasional organic egg or a bit of cheese when I am eating out.
Reducing chemical toxicity
The amount of chemicals in our environment has increased dramatically in recent years. Our body does not know what to do with these chemicals.
At a young age my family discovered that I had an unpleasant reaction to artificial food coloring found in popsicles. As I grew up, I ran into more products that caused unpleasant reactions, including fragrances, cosmetics, cleaning products, and even mineral oil.
When I finally realized that the common ingredient in all these products was petrochemicals, my life got a lot easier. I could now avoid problems by reading the label.
I try to choose natural and organic products as much as possible. I even make my own cleaning products. Directions are readily available on the internet. My body is much happier without these chemicals.
Reducing emotional stress
Emotional stress can contribute to many health issues.
According to Candace Pert our memories are stored throughout the body at the cellular level. These emotions “can affect your perceptions, decisions, behavior and even your health all unconsciously.”
By letting go of the past you free up your cells to experience more positive life-affirming emotions and better health. Dr. David Simon tells us that healing in older cultures is more integrated. “Disease was viewed as a lack of integration between body, mind and spirit, and healing was the reintegration of these layers. The idea that illness was a purely physical event was unimaginable.”
Since your memories and your emotions are in the body – not just the mind, you need a body centered approach. I developed the poetry of emotion process because I was not able to find a body-centered approach that worked like I wanted.
What you can do
If you want to improve or maintain your health, you can educate yourself on food, chemicals and stressful emotions. Information on food and chemical toxicity is available online and at your local library.
You can find more information on emotional stress on this site. I will be writing more about emotions and health in my next posts. In the mean time, click here to read more about the poetry of emotion process.
I hope this post encourages you to take charge of your life and make healthy choices. You may be surprised at how much of your health is within your control.
(Image: LollyKnit @ Flickr)
