How do you feel? Getting through your day with lots of energy, or do you drag through many days?
It’s been 41 years since we started on our natural nutrition journey, and we love to have a nutrition discussion both online and off.
We have been far from perfect in terms of our nutrition and daily diet. But we have learned so much, including rounding out what we don’t get from our food with quality nutritional supplements, and we try to do more good than bad beyond our nutrition.
The most amazing thing we have learned is how our body was made to be healthy, and even heal itself. Give the body what it needs and it has an amazing way of helping to keep us healthy.
Think about the nutrition needs throughout your body: cardiovascular and digestive, muscular and skeletal, lymphatic and endocrine, reproductive, urinary, and even your nervous system.
Do you have a health challenge that you’ve been putting up with, including symptoms that you’re tired of dealing with on a daily basis?
What have you tried in terms of nutrition that might help?
Often when we are struggling with a health issue, the problem is we aren’t giving the body all it needs. On top of that we make a lot of other decisions in our life that affect our optimal health.
It’s not only what we EAT that is important for a healthy body. It can be lifestyle factors as well.
When we are hurting with various health challenges, the need for quality nutrition is even greater.
Many illnesses, including stress, can cause nutrients to be depleted from your body.
Here are some common health struggles that can have nutrition connections.
Health Challenges
- Chronic Stress
- Sleep problems
- Overweight or obesity
- Allergies and Asthma
- Cancer
- High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease
All of these are indicators that your body is in dis-ease.
When you are dealing with health challenges on a daily basis, your body is under stress and actually requires better nutrition to help fight the stressors and keep your body optimally nourished.
LIFESTYLE
We get so busy in our day to day lives and don’t always think about how lifestyle factors directly affect how we feel, and specifically how changes can help us improve how we feel.
When we make poor choices in terms of nutrition, and also fail to make lifestyle changes that could help improve our health challenges, we struggle to feel better.
LIFESTYLE CHOICES
Let’s look at a few lifestyle choices that can hurt more than help us: Stress, Alcohol, Smoking, Sleep and Chemical Exposure.
Make some adjustments here and combine that with better nutrition choices and let your body help you heal.
Stress can result in craving foods with low nutrient content. On top of that stress can affect metabolism and deplete our body of certain nutrients such as B vitamins, including risk for deficiencies. Stress affects so many people. Even if you don’t feel stress in terms of anxiety or worry, your body is under stress if you have any health challenges.
Alcohol not only has no nutrition, no proteins, no minerals or vitamins, it interferes with the absorption of nutrients our body needs – especially B vitamins and zinc. There is also lots of research on how alcohol negatively affects the brain, throws off your calcium levels, weaken your immune system, and of course damages your liver.
Smoking affects vitamin and mineral absorption, especially vitamin C, vitamin D, and calcium. If nutrients don’t get absorbed, they can’t keep us healthy. Also a problem with smoking is that it affects blood circulation and increases risk that blood vessels will narrow and become blocked. I have never been a smoker, but given all that we know about the dangers of smoking this is one area I would put major effort in trying to stop as soon as possible. There is help out there to address what your reason for smoking is and how you can tackle replacing smoking with a healthier habit.
Sleep is an issue for many. Struggle with sleep and fatigue during the day leads to increasing caffeine to help stay awake, and also may result in making poor food choices or eating excess calories. I just listened to a 90 minute podcast on sleep and it was so fascinating that I plan to do a blog post about what I learned (watch for that soon!).
Chemical Exposure in our home, including in personal care products and home cleaning products, and in the environment, can have a direct effect on both short term and long term health. Allergies and asthma and other respiratory problems can happen quickly and risks for reproductive health and cancer are serious concerns as well. We have kept chemicals out of our home as much as possible, and it is actually an easy thing to do to swap out toxin free products that you use daily (something that is much easier for many people than changing what they eat).
All of these health issues affect our body’s ability to stay healthy.
NUTRITION DISCUSSION
Nutrition plays a huge role in health.
Nutrition is complex. We have been learning for 40 years and there is much still to learn. Plus not all has been discovered so we will continue to study.
We do know that nature is balanced, and it is us that rocks the boat. What suffers is our body and our health.
Strong healthy cells are a direct result of nutrition and good choices.
We hope that you become interested in, or stay interested in, learning about ways to stay healthy.
It feels so much better to wake up feeling well, feeling strong, and feeling healthy, than it does to wake up feeling sick.
This month is Nutrition Month but we think nutrition should be a focus of your day every month of the year.
We encourage you to look for nutrition info that can help you keep your body healthy and armed for whatever comes along that tries to threaten your good health.
Check out our previous NUTRITION MONTH post, including five supplements that can help bridge the gap between what we don’t get from our food and can help us feel healthier.
We post lots of nutrition and lifestyle info on our social media accounts as well. Connect with us on your favorite: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Let us know if anything you view resonates with you!