The internet and social media is full of “experts” telling you about the latest and greatest health tools of all time – cold plunges, lectin avoidance, vag steaming, seed cycling, fasting, celery juice, ceremonial cacao, etc, etc, etc. While most of these things are probably not doing much harm they are also fairly pointless if you’re not doing the basics most of the time.
The basics are the foundational things we all need to be doing to help us feel our best on the daily and also for long term health, you know the old story of needing good foundations for a rock solid, long lasting house.
Eat a nutritious diet of unprocessed food without additives, artificial colours, flavours, preservatives. Base your diet on wholefoods – vegetables, fruits, legumes, meat, nuts, seeds, dairy and whole grains. Eat three square meals a day with adequate protein. Stop eating and drinking crap.
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate with filtered water that has had the chlorine and fluoride adequately filtered out.
Avoid alcohol. It’s hurting your liver, gut and brain, it’s depleting your body of important nutrients and disrupting your hormones.
Exercise and move your body daily. Walking daily is what our body is designed to do and strengthening our muscles is incredibly important especially as we age.
Get some sun on your bare skin, how else are you going to make vitamin D? The sun is also having other actions on the body including – regulating mood, hormones, appetite, sleep and blood pressure.
Get to bed early and get at least 8 hours sleep. Without adequate sleep nothing else you do will help you to function at your best. Staying up late, looking at screens, not rising with the sun will impact many areas of health including our circadian rhythm, hormonal balance, brain function and mental health.
Part of the reason that we look for the magic cure and band aid is that doing the basics sounds too basic and not very cool. We’re also looking for a guru, someone with exciting info that’s going to save us. Unfortunately there’s no magic cure without the basics and the gurus probably just want your money. We’ve got to look after ourselves and that starts with the basics.