I offer an education in the ways of holistic natural health that can improve just about any area of your life. Holistic natural health, or naturopathy, is based on the concept of assisting the whole person in techniques that work together in concert to improve overall health of the body and mind. The body is an amazing machine of super-complex and interconnected living systems that are all designed to work together in harmony and balance. Within these body systems, health is actually determined at the cellular level – of which we have an estimated 35 to 100 trillion cells (maybe more).
One of the oldest belief systems, Tao, otherwise called “the way” to a long, healthy, balanced, and yes, a happy life, originated in ancient China. This ancient knowledge has been passed on and improved over 5,000 years, spreading through many other cultures, which have made contributions of their own. Western science has also made important health discoveries and has actually verified many of the ancient ways of health – while improving on them substantially. Many natural substances have been refined by modern technology to become more effectively used by the body and concentrated to demonstrate profound effects to improve health, prevent and even reverse disease conditions.
YOU are completely, absolutely, and positively unique, based on your unique genetics, environment, and personality – and there is not just one solution to your health – or to anyone’s health for that matter. But there are some absolutes that apply to everyone. One absolute is that “You are only as strong as your weakest link“. And one of the most important keys to health is identifying YOUR weakest links and fixing them.
Epigenetics is the new science of studying and influencing gene expression. This new field of study is helping us to better understand how our genes are affected by our lifestyle and environment – physical, mental, nutritional, and emotional – to determine our true state of health. We may have weaknesses in our genetics that can affect our health – but now we can better identify these weaknesses and address them to improve health, prevent disease, and turn back the clock on aging.
Health is a choice and a State of Mind. Once you make that choice, the rest is just follow through. But like the first step of any journey, that first decision to choose life and all that it can be is usually the hardest.
Some of the natural health techniques I help people with are:
- Nutritional Diet Plans
- Supplement Protocols
- Enzyme Therapy
- Anti-Aging Protocols
- Critical Care Wellness Protocols
- Stress Reduction
- Holistic Lifestyle Coaching
Some basic principles…
To be truly healthy (and happy), you need to have a number of things including:
- Nutrition
- Exercise
- Sunlight
- Rest
- Touch
- Positive Thought! (requires a healthy mind, body, and spirit)
Nutrition. “YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!” This has been held to be a universal truth around the world for thousands of years.
THE most critical factor in improving your health is to improve your digestion and increase your nutrient intake and absorption per calorie.
To be more precise and put this into a formula, we would state: NH=N/CA
Nutritional health equals nutrients per calorie absorbed. The higher the nutrient value per calorie of the food you eat and actually absorb, the healthier your diet will be – and your diet is the most crucial choice you can make about your health on a daily and lifetime basis. If you consistently eat healthy food and digest and absorb it well, you will most likely feel good and look good. Likewise, if you eat too many “empty calories” with little to no nutrition (sugar, junk foods and processed foods) – you’re going to have a lot of health problems, life will seem much more difficult than it already is, and you will struggle to be happy. Trust me, I know – been there, done that!
However, its not just what you eat that counts – its what your body can assimilate (digest and absorb). If your body can’t break down your food through digestion, the food becomes a toxin the body has to get rid of – or it will start to poison your body. It has been estimated that fully 70% of your body’s energy is used just in digestion alone! Fortunately, your body produces digestive enzymes to help break down the foods you eat, especially the cooked foods. Unfortunately, as you get older your body generates less enzymes over time. Enzymes are needed for every bio-chemical process in the body, not just for digestion.
Supplementation with enzymes is very important as you age. Likewise, increasing the amount of raw foods that already have enzymes into your diet becomes important as well. Its not just what you eat – or don’t eat – its how you eat, when you eat, where you eat – and who you share your meals with! The easier you make the digestion of your food for your body, the better your body will treat you. Period! You will have less indigestion, heartburn, gas, allergies, reactions, inflammation (the leading cause of disease), and of course less weight! And in return you will have more energy, endurance, focus – and HEALTH – not to mention less time being sick and much lower medical bills over your lifetime!
Not all foods are meant for all people! It is very important in your diet, that the liquids and foods (and supplements) you eat are not actually poisoning you. Some people have food allergies or intolerances that lead them to have reactions, including gaining and retaining weight! Some people eat all the wrong foods, with all kinds of chemicals and carcinogens and toxins. These people become addicted to these chemicals and the taste sensations, much like substance abusers. Sugar has been demonstrated to be as addictive as hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. A great number of people are toxic and have compromised immune systems, which makes them susceptible to disease and makes it impossible for them to lose weight, no matter which diet or exercise program they try. This tends to make them very unhappy and very unhealthy, too. These people need to detoxify, and then begin a program of increased nutrition, supplementation, and exercise.
Exercise. It is generally better to do less of it more often than trying to survive marathon 3- hour workouts. It is crucial to get your cardiac rate up if you wish to get cardiovascular benefits and release endorphins (these help make you happy for no particular reason at all!), and that requires at least a 30 minute workout. You should try to at least work out for 30 minutes three days a week. If you have not been working out or been sedentary for awhile, start slow! Try stretching and walking and gradually build up each day – start at 10 minutes a day if you need to. A goal of 30 minutes a day is good, preferably in the morning, so that your hormones are stabilized for the day and you don’t affect your sleep patterns. I recommend cross-training, meaning one day you should walk/jog a few miles, another day you should use resistance weights and weight train, yet another day you should swim, and then one day do pilates or yoga/stretching. Selected workouts should last anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 minutes. Even the best exercise program will not make as much difference on body weight as a good diet. But it will certainly speed up your weight loss. And it does wonders for depression and bad moods. Recent studies have shown that getting your heart rate up to 50% to 85% of your maximum heart rate level for 20 minutes through intense exercise activates the PCG-1-alpha pathway, which has been shown to be a major key to anti-aging.
Sunlight. If you are lucky enough to exercise outside, you should always take advantage of that. The gym environment is full of sweaty (sometimes very sweaty) people spreading germs! Not always a healthy place to get healthy. Worst of all, it is enclosed with typically poor air circulation and NO SUNLIGHT! Sunlight and fresh air are absolutely essential for good human health. Our bodies do not make Vitamin D and it is only added to few foods such as dairy milk. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to approximately 80 percent of all cancers, according to research compiled by the Vitamin D Council. It is largely responsible for the high rate of flu infections during the winter months. The Sun has been unfairly slandered by the medical profession for the increasing rates of skin cancer and melanoma. The truth is much more complicated. While people exposed to sunlight for long periods are definitely more susceptible to these ailments, the reasons are varied. Most of these people are Vitamin A deficient and the more they eat fried and processed foods, the more they are vulnerable to the ravages of the sun’s rays.
Another factor is sunscreens – the overwhelming majority of these are full of cancer-promoting chemical toxins. So we have the strange irony of people, with a natural tendency to seek Sun, slathering on harmful chemicals to protect themselves from the Sun, while blocking the very Vitamin D they need to survive. Healthy people, who eat large amounts of superfoods with Vitamin A, and who don’t eat fried, fatty, processed foods, normally can be exposed to sunlight for moderate to long time periods WITHOUT sunscreens. At the very least, you can get a natural, organic sunscreen that will help protect your skin while allowing the Vitamin D to be generated in your body. Sunlight is also very essential to keep you happy – it is well known that people develop SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) in the winter months without Sun – and a definite decrease in serotonin and melatonin production has been verified. This decrease leads to hormonal imbalances, sleep disorders and generally really bad moods. Not happy – and definitely not healthy. So if you want a sunny disposition and outlook on life…..walk on the “Sunny Side of the Street”!
Rest. Rest is not just essential to good health – Sleep is the undiscovered kingdom of health. There is just nothing quite as good as a good night’s sleep – with lots of lucid dreaming! Unfortunately, you don’t remember how good it truly is until you get it again – and sleep is another thing that tends to suffer as you get older. It has been a neglected aspect of health studies for too long, and has recently been discovered to have profound effects on hormones, WEIGHT GAIN, aging, brain health, mood and depression disorders – and of course, your ability to be HAPPY! Too many people find it difficult to get to sleep and almost impossible to stay asleep all night or get enough sleep. This leads you to try to “shock your system” by taking mass amounts of caffeine from too much coffee, “energy” drinks like Red Bull or 5-hour Energy, sugar-loaded soft drinks, etc. You’re either taking something to wake you up, keep you up, or help you get to sleep (Nyquil or some other such “nightmarish” pharma-potions) – and these are all bad options for you. By taking these stimulants and sedatives, you can seriously disrupt your hormones, causing an ever-worsening downward spiral of less sleep, more weight gain, irritability – and never getting true, high quality REM-stage sleep. REM-stage means dreaming, deep lucid dreaming which we all need. Sleep is designed to repair your mind and body of all the stress it goes through every day – so you can be ready to seize the day again in the morning. Without good sleep you will always feel like you’re behind the curve – and you can never catch up. Fortunately, I can recommend several good supplements that can help you to regulate and improve your sleep cycles.
Touch. From our first entry into the world, into the arms of our mothers and fathers loving embraces, we all need touch in our lives – whether it be a hug or a kiss or just a friendly handshake, a smile or hello, an unexpected phone call (or text!) – we need to know that we are not alone. The World can be a harsh and unbearable existence – if we let it be that way. Much of it depends on our outlook. To be truly happy, we must all be responsible for ourselves, our health – but we also need the support of others and to know they care – even if they don’t know us – we are all in the same boat of Life: we are all born into this world alone and we will all eventually die alone, even though others may be with us when it happens. And we all share that single fact of Life with every other creature on Earth. Ancient cultures knew the value of touch and community and now science has been able to demonstrate it as well. Massage Therapy can have dramatic power to heal. Recently, hospitals in England have begun to incorporate the healing powers of Reiki in order to help patients recover from their illnesses. It all seems so obvious – but we have lost our connection to that most basic understanding of its importance. Even prayer has been shown to have the power to positively affect others, to touch them from long distances. This has also been proven in Quantum Physics, in what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” involving entangled particles. A very vivid demonstration of these concepts was depicted in the 2004 movie What The Bleep Do We Know? The truth is – we can create the World we want to live in – and the power of your mind is incredibly strong.
ANTI-AGING
The true measure of your health is determined at the cellular level. A great number of your estimated 35 to 100 trillion cells are replaced every day. The new cells you generate can be healthier than those they replace. You can also rebuild and restore optimal organ and body systems function. That means that whatever damage you have done in the past to your health can be reversed and health can be restored in most cases.
Your true age or inner age is not your chronological age – it is actually more important. With the advent of advanced scientific research into the aging process, programs utilizing certain high nutrient “superfoods”, supplements, and herbs from the proper sources and in the right amounts, combined with healthy diet and lifestyle, can actually halt and reverse the aging process. Your date of birth may be fixed in time (and your driver’s license) forever, but you can still turn back the clock on your inner age!
MIND/SPIRIT
The mind is the most powerful force within your body. Some say the mind doesn’t even reside in your body or your brain (or even your head), as we have been taught from birth. According to Deepak Chopra, in his book, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, the mind resides in what he calls the Zero Point Field. This field has also been called the Akashic Records by the rishis, the sages of Vedic India, and was the source of knowledge credited by Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet. When we “think” we are thinking with our mind, we are actually accessing our little section of this field of all knowledge, all consciousness, encompassing all time and space. When we pass from this Earth, we are most likely going to go back into this field and re-emerge in some other form or space/time.
SPACE
The space around you, your environment, affects you both positively and negatively. Ensuring that your space is good for you is as essential as making sure that your plants have good soil in which to grow. You need to have room to grow, think, create, and excel, and you need the positive reinforcements around you to help you to have the life of your dreams and be happy. Friends, family, peers, pets, plants, clean air, adequate (and energetic) space are all very important to your well-being. Getting outside and getting in touch with nature is always healing and traveling to new places is energizing and can give you a new lease on life. Stagnation is never good at any level.
Too much clutter from things in your past can hold you down. Many people become overly attached to objects, keepsakes, and other things from their past, and many times these objects are attached to emotional issues they also can’t resolve. They haven’t “moved on”. A good housecleaning twice a year is recommended to keep clutter from building up, losing things you really need, and affecting you emotionally. You must be able to let go of your past, keeping only the lessons and the helpful memories of loved ones and special moments. Many times, a cluttered closet, garage or house is a sign of someone who hasn’t resolved past issues. A good “spring cleaning” can be a detox for the soul and allow you to revisit those issues and resolve them. It also helps you to realize where you are in the present from the perspective of the past. The other benefits are having more space and being able to better organize and find things when you need them. You have no idea how much this can aid your peace of mind until you do this. You will be more productive and more happy. A really good housecleaning can be the best free vacation you ever take.
The Happy Holistic 