Learn the practical easy-to-follow steps you need to take in order to give your body the tools to not just heal from your health challenges but to experience abundant health!
Building Disciplines
Discipline is a scary word for many, but it is a necessary part of your journey. Before you get started on your health and healing journey it’s essential that you build healthier disciplines into your life. Give yourself some compassion, too. You’re changing the way you have lived for many years, and for some, since you were born. It doesn’t happen overnight.
You can start with a method known as “subtraction by addition.” For example, in the case of nutrition, whatever you do, DO NOT focus on avoiding the consumption of certain foods or even avoiding certain habits. Only focus on adding one healthy food or habit into your life.
Feel free to continue eating a standard American diet (SAD) if it is too difficult right now. The goal here isn’t diet, it’s discipline. What you will notice over time, is as you build more discipline, the negative health habits will begin to wither away as you incorporate more positive ones.
Make it your goal to do only one thing for the next 30 days…. have a fruit juice or smoothie every day. Then the next month, add in another discipline like drinking more water or going to bed at 9pm. After twelve months, you’ll have twelve new healthy disciplines and you won’t have room for the bad habits or harmful foods in your life.
What to Do: Pick one healthy habit like spending at least 10 minutes outside everyday standing on the grass (without sunglasses) in your bare feet. Do this exercise every day for 30 days. After 30 days, continue this habit and add (don’t replace) another one.
Light
Mainstream media loves to put the fear of God into you when it comes to sunlight. I’m here to tell you that regardless of what the mainstream doctors and media say, sunlight is essential for our health and our healing. In fact, I’d argue it may be the single most important factor. Why? The sun just happens to be the one thing that makes every single form of life on this planet viable. Obviously you want to avoid getting sunburned or spending too much time in the sun if your body has not been properly prepared for such exposure, but that is a topic for another day.
Part of your overall health program needs to include regular daily sunlight on at least 60% of your skin.
Sunlight creates Vitamin D in the body, promotes healthy metabolism, lowers blood pressure, provides the building blocks to your mitochondria (which determine genetic expression) as well as regulates melatonin cycles and circadian rhythms. Sunlight is NOT damaging to our bodies, but actually incredibly healing and necessary for optimal health. For those who sunburn quickly, this is fixable, once the cause is determined. Many times, it is related to poor nutrition. Herbal remedies and nutritious foods can be used to help slow this process depending on the cause. Some examples include Astaxanthin, Vitamin A/E, antioxidant-rich foods, and proper nutrition.
Sunlight is essential for your healing.
What to Do: Make getting regular sun exposure a part of your daily routine. Spend at least 10 minutes in the sun every single day between 10am and 3pm.
Bonus: If you can do this while you are grounded (bare feet on stone, grass or dirt) without sunglasses on, you’ll supercharge the effects of this practice.
Choose More Plants
Only one in ten Americans get the daily recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. Meals high in fruits, vegetables, and fiber help your body naturally restore balance and thrive. Across the board, a plant-forward approach is best for optimal human health.
Slowly replacing animal foods with a variety of plant foods is a tremendous way to reach your ideal weight and improve your health!
Your nutrition approach should mostly consist of raw fruits, raw vegetables, raw nuts and seeds, and pure spices and herbs. Consuming mostly raw fruit and vegetables will not only help restore proper balance to the gut flora, but it can help flush the organs of retained waste, optimize lymph flow, and allow for proper elimination.
What to Do: An Anti-Inflammatory, Alkaline Approach is the baseline!!! Stick to at least 80% plant sources. Start slow. Add one piece of fruit per day to your normal day of eating. As you get comfortable with that, add another, and add variety too. Over time, your plate will look completely different!
Choose Organic Food
If you can and have the means, choose organic over conventional produce that has been sprayed with chemical pesticides, glyphosate, and other toxic materials.
If you’re juicing these vegetables and fruits, it’s even worse as you’re concentrating the chemicals.
If you’re consuming conventional raised animal products, this is exponentially worse because you are also consuming meat that has been laced with antibiotics and hormone disruptors, which are added to the animals’ food.
Organic isn’t even the best option. The best option is home grown fruits and vegetables grown in your own garden using healthy soil, diluted ocean minerals, compost, copper antennas, and organic compounds.
Your body is a temple, don’t destroy it by ingesting chemicals (no matter how you wash them) that are in your non organic produce.
You vote with your dollar. Start investing in organic farmers.
What to Do: Start with one item you normally buy conventional. Switch this one item over to organic for the next 21 days. Then repeat the process until everything you buy is organic. The switch could take three months, six months, a year, or even longer, but if you do it gradually, you’ll not only feel better but because of that, you’ll have no desire to support conventional farming and its practices.
Bonus: Think about one thing you do every month that might cost extra money (like getting overdraft fees at the bank or getting late fees on your monthly bills). Seek to fix this problem, which will free up more money for organic food.
Increase Your Fiber Intake
Like humans, bacteria need food to survive. Enter: prebiotics. Prebiotics are the food our good bacteria need to survive. Prebiotics are viable for daily use, but they require good bacteria to be present to work. We can encourage good bacteria to stay by eating prebiotic foods. Prebiotics supply the stuff good bacteria need and bad bacteria stay away from. What may seem small to us are huge to bacteria given the difference in scale. Fiber, for example, cannot be digested in the small intestine. However, when fiber molecules make it to the large intestine, the good bacteria begin to feast!
Fiber is found only in plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. Fiber is actually indigestible, and therefore does not provide us with energy in the form of calories.
Fiber has a number of health benefits. Consuming adequate amounts of fiber (at least 30g of fiber daily) will keep you fuller longer, help control blood sugar levels, lower cholesterol, and prevent gastrointestinal issues like constipation, diverticulitis, certain cancers, and hemorrhoids.
What to Do: In an ideal world, optimal health seems to be associated with at least 50g of fiber per day. Unfortunately, a majority of Americans are only consuming between 8-11g of fiber daily. If you begin to consume more plants, you will easily reach 30g of fiber per day, and beyond! Start by increasing your fiber intake by 5g/day each week until you can reach 50g of fiber daily. This is done to avoid any digestive upset which can happen if you overload on fiber too quickly. This may take some weeks and months, and starts low!
Get Your Fruits In!
Fruits contain flavonoids, which protect the fruits from ultraviolet damage via the sun. This is a main reason why the best protection from sun-derived UV radiation is actually what you eat! These compounds have shown cancer-preventive properties and also stimulate multiple anti-cancer pathways. Incorporating organic fruits and vegetables are the first and most important step to build a foundation to leveling up your health in all ways.
Most nutrients also require a helper or carrier to assist in this movement through the cell wall into the cell. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the cell’s form of energy. You need ATP for active transport (the assisted transportation of nutrients across cell membrane walls) to take place. Glucose, for example, needs insulin for this active transport. Fructose requires no ATP or insulin, and is absorbed through the cell wall via diffusion.
For diabetics, fructose (from whole foods!) is a fantastic energy source. Raw fruits and vegetables are always your best sources of simple sugars. This is partially why the body becomes stronger and more energetic when consuming high amounts of these foods. Foods high in protein and low in sugars rob the body of vital energy as it is needed for further digestion, and can create acidosis and elevate blood sugars. Fructose from real, whole fruits are the highest electrical sugar in nature and is superb for brain and nerve regeneration.
Make sure to get your share of fruits each and every day.
What to Do: Make it your goal to consume some more raw fruits and do this for the next thirty days. Your life will change.
Optimizing Sleep
Sleep is one of the most important parts of your day. It’s so important that we spend roughly one-third of our time here doing it!
But first- what is sleep? Why do we need it? Most people think sleep is to build up energy for the next day. Untrue! Sleep actually REQUIRES energy! That means proper nutrition, digestion, and metabolism all lead to better sleep! The primary role of sleep is to REPAIR damage to the brain and body that occurred in the day from movement, learning, thinking, etc. Sleep only appears to build energy for the next day, because our brains and bodies work better when they are functioning at full capacity. Sleep is also needed for proper weight regulation, happiness, putting what you’ve learned the day before into long-term memory, and for maintaining our sanity.
A lack of sleep can have negative effects on your health in a variety of ways. It can affect how well you think, react, work, get along with others and learn. From an athletic standpoint, a lack of focus and decreased reaction times could be the difference between reaching peak health or not!
If you are losing even 1 to 2 hours of sleep a night, after a few nights your body will begin to function as if you have not slept in the past couple of days.
If you want to live a long, healthy, disease-free life, sleep must be of utmost importance. It’s important to remember that you need to live close to the cycles of nature. That means going to bed not long after the sun goes down and waking up with the sun as well.
What to Do: Get into the habit of lowering your exposure to blue light before bed. Install a program called Flux on your computer and consider getting some blue blocking sunglasses. Get into a rhythm! Get consistent with your sleep and wake cycle. Go to sleep and wake up at the same time each day, even on weekends. Choose an approximate time that will work every night to fall asleep and a time every morning to wake up and stick to it! (but only go to bed when you’re tired.) If you wake up before your designated time and can’t get back to sleep, GET OUT OF BED! Get sunrise and sunset and midday sun on your eyeballs (not directly) and skin (without sunglasses). This all helps reset your circadian rhythm.
Bonus:
Natural light is key! Expose your body to sunlight for AT LEAST 15 minutes every day MINIMUM. This DOES NOT include your commute to work (unless you walk). Sunlight is NOT damaging to our bodies, but actually incredibly healing and necessary for optimal health. For those who sunburn quickly, this is fixable, once the cause is determined. Many times, it is related to poor nutrition. Supplements may be used to help slow this process depending on the cause. Some examples include Astaxanthin, Vitamin A/E, antioxidant-rich foods, and nutrition for genetic variants.
Intermittent Fasting
Fasting is a way for the body to manage energy efficiently. Remember, most modern folks consume foods that rob the body of energy, or worse, require energy to metabolize and rid itself of the toxins consumed. Either way, you end up with lost energy. In fact, one can define “dis-ease” as a lack of energy. It is in this way that fasting can be helpful. Fasting allows the body to rest from extensive digestive and metabolic functions, and instead uses that same energy to clean itself out of toxins and initiate the healing process. Fasting also gives the pancreas, stomach, liver, intestines, and even the kidneys somewhat of a rest. This leaves more energy for the immune, glandular, and lymphatic systems to do their jobs.
There are many ways to apply intermittent fasting to your life. Some people eat normally for two days, followed by one or two days off. Some people eat for 3 days and take 1 day off. Some people avoid eating foods on Sunday. Most days, I allow 16 hours to pass without eating anything until breakfast the next day. If I stop eating at 6pm, then I will not have anything but water until 10am the next morning.
The benefits are endless and you will feel amazing if you make this a part of your daily routine.
What to Do: Pick a window of time that works for you. Sit down and come up with a plan that works with your work and family life. Start with a larger feeding window and slowly, over time, decreasing your feeding window while increasing the time you fast.
Grounding
Being barefoot on the earth helps to neutralize non-native EMF radiation as well as electrically charging your body with negative ions from the earth itself. Being grounded helps you to reset your internal circadian rhythm, similar to a clock that needs to be re-calibrated every so often. When it comes to health, connection (on every level) is everything. The more time you can spend outside, grounded to the earth, the healthier you will be.
What to Do: Identify ways you can spend more time outside. Eat your meals grounded, walk your dogs, read your books outside. Figure out ways to spend more time outside, grounded to the earth and your health will improve and your body will thank you.
Drink Water
Drinking high quality water helps the electrical conductivity between cells so they can communicate with each other, deliver vital nutrients and eliminate toxins. Water is the key to long life, preventing disease, and dramatically improving how your body functions. The more water you drink, the healthier you will be, the longer you will live, the more energy you will have, and you’ll be much happier and vibrant as a result.
What to Do: The goal should be to shoot for ½ of your bodyweight (in lbs.) in fluid ounces of water per day (up to 1 gallon). Hydrating foods can help you reach this goal as well!
Bonus: Eat more raw fruits and vegetables! These are loaded with electrolytes that you need, and can be incredibly hydrating for your body!
Bodyweight Exercises
Some of the most beneficial exercises you can do only require your own body weight. These include: pushups, pull ups, chin ups, sprinting, walking, jumping, squats, sit ups, dips, planks, lunges, and more. By only utilizing your own weight, you will protect your joints and ligaments from potential injury and you’ll gain muscle and lose weight in the process. Living a long, healthy, disease-free life means prioritizing your fitness level. Make sure to do body weight exercises at least three times per week.
What to Do: Come up with a weekly routine along with strength goals and write them down on a piece of paper and schedule it into your day. If you stick with it for 30 days, you’ll transform into a new type of optimized human.
Bonus: Work out in the sun for extra health benefits!
Stretching/Mobility
To understand why mobility is important, we simply have to observe nature. Old or dead tree branches easily snap and are brittle. A young tree easily withstands the strong winds and bends but doesn’t break. The more mobile and flexible you are, the more resilient you become. Stretch/move while you watch TV, try to get through full ranges of motion. Stretch while you read. Incorporate it in small doses all day, every day. Make it a habit. Remember, you are worth it. Stretching and mobility work increases circulation, improves blood supply, and decreases chances of injury.
What to Do: Make sure to either stretch during the day or spend at least 10 minutes before bed stretching your body. Make a goal of touching your toes or doing the splits. Have a goal you’re working towards attached to an end date of when you want to accomplish your stretch goals. Write this goal and work at it every day to become healthier for yourself!
I hope you found this a helpful start in this series! One more part to come!
I’ll see you next week!
Dr. Vincent Esposito
Want More?
Whenever you’re ready, there are two ways I can help you:
- I’m excited to announce the launch of my new book: How to Get World Class Sleep! If you’ve struggled with insomnia, have trouble falling asleep, or wake up feeling sluggish, then this is for you! Fall Asleep Faster. Recover More Quickly. Wake Up Refreshed! Find it here!
- You are designed to heal. This is how Nature works. If you want a partner who is committed to helping you master your own wellness, then schedule a FREE 15-minute call with my team to apply to get your health on the right track.