That Is Natural Health? A Comprehensive Guide to Living Healthy (2)

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Starting the Natural Health Lifestyle: Out with the Bad

“The bottom line is that it’s empowering”, says Dr. Izakson. “You have the power to change your health and your life. The downside is you have to do it.”

In other words, there is no magic bullet solution to health. Instead, natural health requires taking positive action to change your life. So where do you begin? First, you remove harmful elements from your life, as much as possible.

Removing Toxic Chemicals from Your Home and Products

Green living and a natural lifestyle go hand in hand. One of the first steps you can take when choosing a more natural lifestyle is to eliminate products that contain toxic chemicals – such as traditional cleaning products, beauty and body care products – and replacing them with healthier, environmentally-friendly, or organic options.

Eliminate products that contain toxic chemicals and replace them with healthier, environmentally-friendly, or organic options.
Many companies sell green toxic-free cleaning solutions and are better options for your home. Some people create do-it-yourself cleaning formulas – such as baking soda to clean a toilet or bathtub, or vinegar to clean windows, or more complicated solutions.

Approved Chemicals Aren’t Always Safe

Many people think that because a chemical is present in a product, it must be fine – perhaps at least studied and tested by a government agency. The truth is, many chemicals present in beauty products, home cleaning products, and even furniture, pots and pans, or clothing receive minimal to no testing.

As a result, many chemicals have been later recalled and removed from circulation after enough evidence accumulated that they were toxic and could harm health, as well as the environment.

Getting Rid of Household Toxicants

Think about where toxic chemicals may lurk and then go through your home eliminating them where you can. You can get replace nonstick cooking pans with cast iron or stainless steel, choose glass storage containers and avoid plastic and Teflon for storing and cooking.
You can choose organic cotton clothing, sheets and mattresses. And of course, you can choose to buy organic makeup and beauty products that do not have chemicals that make aging worse.

Eliminating Toxins from Your Body: Detox and Cleansing

A core part of a natural health lifestyle involves detoxing or cleansing the body organs. Cleansing the body can boost your overall health and quality of life. For optimal health, you should detox different organs in your body.

Why You Need To Detox

Detoxing is necessary because the standard Western diet (or Standard American Diet, SAD) includes a lot of processed and deep-fried foods, meat, and non-organic fruits and vegetables.

Even if you eat relatively healthy, most foods contain trace pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). During digestion, these toxic chemicals get into the bloodstream and end up stuck in body tissues, but particularly your colon.

With any detox or cleanse, you may experience a healing crisis when you first begin to eat raw. A healing crisis is a short-term increase in fatigue, headaches, aches and pains, among other symptoms, as your body eliminates stored up toxins.

Types of Body Cleanses

You can do a whole body cleanse, which means you detox all organ systems, one at a time, or you can just focus on one. To detox, you can use specific cleansing kits, herbal supplements, and detox-friendly foods.
Some report colon cleansing is the single most effective natural remedy for detoxing the body.

You can eat foods to cleanse the liver, you can detox your kidneys to prevent stones, or you can do deep breathing along with specific herbs like peppermint or oregano to cleanse the lungs. But many people report that colon cleansing is the single most effective natural remedy for detoxing the body and starting their natural health lifestyle – or keeping it on track.

Eliminating Toxins from Your Body: Fasting

Fasting is another way to detox the body. If you’re interested in getting healthy, water fasting can be an extremely effective way to jump-start weight loss, detoxification and a new lifestyle.

Studies show that intermittent fasting in both laboratory animals and people has profoundly positive long-term impacts on health.

The Health Benefits of Fasting

A prominent study summarized the research this way: “periodic fasting protects against diabetes, cancers, heart disease, and neurodegeneration, …[and] helps reduce obesity, hypertension, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis.”

Scientists found that intermittent periods of fasting increases longevity in many organisms, including people, and this works by reprogramming the metabolic pathways and increases the body’s resistance to stress. Fasting helps cells regenerate and improves their ability to repair any damaged DNA.

Intermittent fasting in both laboratory animals and people has profoundly positive long-term impacts on health.

And this is remarkable: fasting for three days before chemotherapy protected normal cells and triggered stem cell regeneration of damaged immune system cells.

Natural Health Lifestyle: In With the Good

The natural health lifestyle encompasses the body, mind and spirit. Each person has age-specific needs to keep your body functioning properly.
But no matter what your age, everyone needs physical exercise, nutritious food, and a healthy outlook on mental wellness and spiritual life. The natural health approach takes into account all these spheres of life.

Mental Wellness Habits: Meditation, Yoga, Mindfulness, and Sleep

Having a healthy mental outlook is a key part of the holistic approach to natural health, since there are known connections between the mind and body.
When your body is hurting, it is sometimes hard to have a positive outlook and it can affect your mood. But there are also tools and techniques that you can use to feel better and get stronger, no matter what personal situations you are going through.

Natural Approaches to Mental Wellness

Scientists have evidence that mindfulness meditation, acupuncture, music therapy, and relaxation techniques have a positive impact on depression, anxiety and stress. The NIH is studying the use of mindfulness meditation and self-hypnosis for managing chronic pain in military veterans.

NIH studies have already found that using complementary natural health approaches with cancer patients resulted in less anxiety and pain. Other studies found that yoga and mindfulness meditation helped people quit smoking, and yoga reduced fatigue in patients.

You Need Sleep for Mental Health

It’s also important to get enough sleep every night if you want to have a positive outlook during the day. There are natural solutions for sleep problems, including essential oils, avoiding foods that keep you awake, and herbal remedies.

A natural approach seeks to identify the root cause of something like sleep problems. Then, the goal is to manage symptoms based on that knowledge, rather than immediately taking a pill. Getting sleep is very important to your overall health because during sleep your body strengthens brain cells stressed during wakeful periods.

Mental Wellness: The Advantage of Outside Help

Psychological counseling can also be an important part of a mental health approach.
There are many life coaches, licensed therapists, and social workers who actively recommend and practice alternative therapies in mental wellness treatment, from color therapy to music therapy to biofeedback – training the mind to tell the body to reduce anxiety, slow heartbeats or other physical conditions.

Physical Fitness Habits

Exercise is an important part of staying healthy, and staying physically fit is a key part of a natural health lifestyle. Exercise is the best medicine!

The Health Benefits of Exercise

Physical activity has countless benefits to your mental wellness. Studies show that exercise improves mood, decreases the incidence of depression, and helps you sleep better. It also improves cognitive function – the ability to think and learn – especially as you age. But even physically active children have lower rates of depression than those who are not as active.

Exercise is the best medicine! An integral part of a natural health lifestyle, it improves mood as well as physical health.
Exercise has many benefits to your overall health, as well. It helps the heart and lungs deliver oxygen throughout the body, lowers bad cholesterol and raises good cholesterol, and reduces inflammation and insulin resistance. Exercise strengthens the heart muscle and reduces the risk of heart attacks.

Easy Exercises to Get Started

Your physical fitness level can be improved with cardiovascular exercise, like aerobics, running or sports, but also gentler methods of exercise can have remarkable benefits, including yoga, tai chi, and pilates. Weight training is another great way to improve your overall fitness.

Exercising outside can be a great way to get fresh air, sunshine for vitamin D, and the healing power of being in nature. You can walk barefoot to ground yourself in the Earth. There are even specific exercises to improve your erotic drive.

Protecting the Environment

Many people who adopt a natural health lifestyle are also interested in living green, or in other words, considering how our actions and consumer choices affect the environment. The only way that our children will live healthy lives in the future is if we make efforts to clean up the environment today, and make choices that reduce our impact.

The only way that our children will live healthy lives in the future is if we make efforts to clean up the environment today, and make choices that reduce our impact.
To reduce the toxic burden on our children, people will need to collectively clean up the environment. This means reducing the impact of our daily choices, from the cars we drive to the electrical power we choose to the products we buy. Each choice has an impact on overall air and water pollution, toxic waste accumulation, and global climate change.

Read the third part of the article

yogaesoteric
December 2, 2018