We live in remarkable and mind-blowing times – Space travel, flight, the world-wide web, incredible medical advancements and technology that can give sound to the hearing impaired and sight to the blind; in these times, the possibilities are endless but yet, as human beings we are struggling with depression, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disease and other chronic health conditions.
Reduce Stress
One would imagine that the prescription for such problems is simple enough – Reduce stress, get plenty of sleep, play as often as possible, learn to love others and eat wholesome clean food.
Though finding the balance between stress, sleep, play and love is at times difficult, eating wholesome clean foods should be a right that we should all insist upon.
In a food market research study by the NPD Group, analysts found that that 31 million Americans skip breakfast, with males aged 18 to 34 having the highest incidence and adults aged 55 and older being the most likely to eat the most important meal of the day. Teenagers aged 13 to 17 had the highest incidence of going to school hungry, with 14 percent skipping breakfast altogether.
Controlling your portions goes a long way toward Live a Longer & Happier Life. Good nutrition with caloric restriction will keep you healthier and live longer.Image via Flickr by Rich Moffitt
Change Our Eating Habits
In addition to skipping breakfast, nearly a quarter miss lunch or eat in a fast-food place each week, even though 66% say the food is worse than at home!
We have built nutritional concentrations camps for ourselves with walls built out of propaganda and marketing and whilst we live in a world of plenty, we starve when compared to what is nutritionally available and we are now in a health crisis getting sicker and fatter every year.
Some people are content to remain prisoners, but some will make it through to achieve a Hypernutrition level of excellence, and these are the real winners.
The days of nutritional deficiency have largely passed in the western world and we are now living in a nutritional sufficient age with the opportunity to evolve into an age of nutritional excellence. We deserve it and should stop at nothing until we achieve it.
Balanced Diet
So when talking about a BALANCED diet, we need to ask: “Relative to what – deficiency, sufficiency, or excellence?” Surely, the correct answer must be nutritional excellence – the achievement of ultimate performance, be it in sport or in life, through OPTIMUM nutrition.
The first basics of nutrition that are important to understand correctly are that you need to make sure that you eat a variety of foods of all colours and preferably organic. If you can, try to buy your foods from farmers market where you will be able to talk to the people who grow the foods. Also, remember that there is no one single special food that can guarantee your overall nutrition.
Good Nutrition
Don’t eat foods that are full of calories and fail to provide vitamins and minerals essential for your well-being, and always avoid convenience foods.
Gluten and sugar filled biscuits and cakes, doughnuts, white bread, sugary spreads, soft drinks, artificially-flavoured foods, and highly fatty foods like deep-fried chicken will only take you down the path of nutritional despair. Love your self and just say NO.
We all love coffee and tea, if for no other reason than the social aspect, but remember that these drinks take the place of nutritional food and decrease muscular efficiency because of their bio-chemical effects. They affect your adrenals and also tend to stunt performance by causing dehydration.
The pattern of your eating is as important as the actual food you eat – Always remember that Less is More. If you eat regularly spaced smaller meals you will protect yourself against the effects of hunger, unstable blood glucose levels and fatigue.
Vitamins and minerals are essential for a good quality of life.
Daily Supplements
Daily supplements of vitamins and minerals such as superfoods and protein powder supplements are vital for a number of reasons. One of which is that significant food value is lost between the farm and the plate. Another is that it is impossible to know if they were grown in depleted soils from over farming and how long the foods have sat in the supermarket refrigerators. And another is that food alone may not assure us of the important nutrients if for no other reason that it would be near impossible to eat optimally all of the time.
Exercise Every Day
If you are training or are overly active, nutrient supplements such as vitamins, superfoods and protein powder supplements also reduce injury rate during performance, speed recovery from injury, and improve overall performance.
Keep your fluid intake high at all times.
It’s an amazing fact, but very few people drink as much water as they should to function at their best.
Prevent dehydration at all cost. A minimum of 2-3 litres of fluid should be drunk every day.
Don’t be afraid to detox on a regular basis. Doing regular detox not only keeps your weight, digestion and mental clarity in check but is essential for long term health
Getting and keeping your body alkaline will stop a lot of diseases and keep you much healthier.
Keep Your Body Alkaline
Alkalizing and detoxifying are the two most important things you can do for your long-term (and short-term) health – this is because all disease, complaints of weight gain, digestive trouble, mental fogginess and so on, are ultimately the result of being overly acidic (opposite of alkaline) and full of toxins. Cancer, as well as other diseases cannot survive in an alkaline body.