Monthly Archives: April 2018

Feel Your Best With Holistic Healing

Posted on by

fell better with holistic healing approach

 

This week, we are taking a closer look at holistic healing. What is it? And how can it benefit you long term? At the core of holistic healing, or whole health, is the idea that body, mind, spirit, and emotions all effect your state of being. Good health relies on balance and wellness in all of these areas, which are intimately linked. Therefore, holistic healing is fostered by a whole health approach that encompasses all of these field.  In order to look and feel your best, in addition to reducing your risk of cancer or heart disease, you should start by considering each of these facets.

Eat Well

Many of us fall into the trap of eating the same foods the majority of the time. So, it’s easy to slip into eating habits you aren’t even aware of. There are basic rules that we should live by. We should aim to drink an eight-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning, which helps to rehydrate and make us more alert.  Throughout the say we should drink a total of at least 64 ounces of water daily to hydrate our body and skin.

At every meal, we should sit down — and eat slowly. Not only do we enjoy the food more this way, but we consume less. Breakfast is still the most important mean of the day. It should be the biggest meal of the day, filled with whole foods and whole grains. For example, half a grapefruit, one slice of whole-grain toast with butter and two scrambled eggs. A balanced lunch might include turkey or chicken with a complex carbohydrate, such as sweet potatoes, and veggies or half a tuna sandwich on whole-grain bread. Dinner should be light for easy digestion before bedtime. A healthy dinner example is salmon, tomatoes and vegetables. This should be consumed no later than7 pm. Snacking throughout the day should be limited to fruit, especially apples, or protein drinks made with whey. Going too long between meals or snacks will cause us to get hungry. That’s when we overeat.

Opt for natural carbohydrates, the ones that come from the ground, such as rice, yams, sweet potatoes and beans… and whole-grain breads and cereals in moderation. And when eating carbohydrates, add some fat or protein. When you eat a carbohydrate by itself, you get a bloated-belly feeling.

Move Often

Think of working out as the secret weapon that provides the stamina for everything else we want to do in life. Try to include a 30- to 45-minute routine every day. A nice balance would include 30 minutes on a treadmill or elliptical trainer, or walking outdoors, followed by 15 minutes of weights for the shoulders, biceps and upper body.

To find an exercise regimen that works for you: Do something you like enough to stick with. Try daily power-walking, join a class at your gym, play tennis, do Pilates. Or go back to what was fun when you were a kid, such as bicycling and/or swimming.

 

Sleep More

Try to get at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. Sleep is how your body repairs itself from the day’s activity. Our bodies are a chemistry lab, not a bank account. When you shortchange your sleep patterns, you’re not only tired the next day — you’ve also lost out on critical healing.

Good Communication

Look people in the eyes and smile when you talk to them. When you greet someone, focus on sending out positive energy, and this energy will translate through your own eyes. People will experience you as radiating warmth — and, yes, youth.

Positive Attitude

Think positively all the time. According to the National Science Foundation, we have more than 65,000 thoughts per day, nearly 95% of which are the same thoughts we had the day before. We have the ability to create and shape our life experiences through our thoughts. This is essential for older people because it’s downright rejuvenating to believe that there is still plenty of time left to create positive experiences in life.

As you go through your daily exercise routine, practice turning every negative or fearful thought you have into a positive one.

In Summary

These basic guidelines affect your body, mind, emotions, and spirit to elicit holistic healing. Everything you do daily affects your health, and how you look and feel overall. From the foods you eat, to the thoughts you think, everything encompasses the realm of whole health.

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Loving Again After Loss

Posted on by

Meaningful relationships, belonging and love are essential to our health, happiness and what we want, need and desire. It is one of psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs and one of the most conflicted areas of human interaction. The willingness to be vulnerable after things go badly in an intimate relationship requires both courage and resilience to traverse the landscape of such deep emotion.

Losing love by breakup or death is one of the most profound and stressful things we as human being can experience. The loss of love can literally “break our hearts” and can even undermine our will to live. Sigmund Freud, MD, the well-known father of modern psychoanalysis, many decades ago stated that we "are never as hopelessly unhappy as when we lose love."

Love is what sustains our lives. Research shows the impact of grief on the development and exacerbation of unresolved grief, and how it can result in the development of serious illness or fatal heart disease. The loss of love is something many of us fear and something many of us don’t imagine can happen when, on the surface, things in our relationship seems to be on an even keel.  Yet, for most of us at one time or another to experience the crushing pain of losing love and the almost obsessive reaction we have to regaining that love or finding a way to end the pain and sense of emptiness that can often accompany such loss.

If you are familiar with a small press literary publication, The Sun, you may not have read this poignant essay, published in that magazine, written by Poe Ballantine. He provides insight to the necessity of trust within love. Trust is the element of love which provides the safe place necessary to share our lives and hearts with others. Trusting, and dealing with the loss of trust within love, requires great courage to be able to move beyond the loss and love again. It is interesting that we are inundated from many sources these days with information about wellness and how to prevent illness, when what many of us need is information about how to create more fulfilling and healthy relationships and prevent the heartbreak of losing love.

Ballantine's essay tells a story about his father:

"He kept a close ritual of coffee, then work, dinner, his television shows and his cigarettes. The newspaper stayed on the table open to the personals. He had opened them the first day she had left him, like the reflex of a man covering a wound after being shot. His face was gray from survival. He was a man who could not allow himself to break. The despair stretched out. The music from the stereo could not fill the emptiness. Our conversations were automatic, clock talk. His single guiding hope was that she would return."

"What had happened to my father he never believes would happen. He was fifty years old, settled, comfortable, secure. His children were raised. He had worked hard all his life and now he could relax. I understood why my mother had left him, but I still condemned her for leaving – for taking the easy way out. My father and I played cards and watched private-eye dramas on television. He looked in the personals, called once at something that looked right, but cancelled soon after; it just wasn't in him."

"One Sunday afternoon I heard him crying in the bedroom. I didn't know what to do with a father who cried. He taught me all I knew, the important things: honesty, loyalty, firm handshake, the love beyond self-love, the duty of a man. Trust was his only religion and it was failing him and in turn it was the failure of the world."

"The one thing a human being asks for on this earth is to be loved. Why should it be impossible?"

Trusting, loving and the resilience to come back from the loss of love may be the next "health frontier". Nutrition, one of the more popular health topics, is not just about nourishing our tissues. Nourishing our hearts, which are hungry for love and acceptance, is another skill we need to learn. If we should be mindful of what we eat, how mindful should we become about how and who we love?

 

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my hit radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.

Can Better Relationships Improve Your Health?

Posted on by

can better relationships improve your health? georgianna donadio

A report in the Harvard Women’s Health Watch notes that research supports the benefits of relationships for overall well-being and longevity. The newsletter notes that “dozens of studies have shown that people who have satisfying relationships with family, friends, and their community are happier, have fewer health problems, and live longer. [A] lack of social ties is associated with depression and later-life cognitive decline, as well as with increased mortality.” 

A study of more than 309,000 people demonstrates that folks who lack satisfying relationships with family, friends and community experience an increased risk of premature death from all causes of 50 percent. While this alone is an amazing statistic, the same study shows that you face greater threat to your mortality from social isolation than from a lack of exercise, obesity or even smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Having enjoyable, fulfilling companionship with others reduces stress levels and keeps cortisol (a stress hormone) under control. If cortisol rises, it can adversely impact insulin function, suppress the immune system, clog the arteries and wreck digestion.

can healthy relationships improve your health?Other studies demonstrate that women in their 40s who endure difficult or negative marital-type relationships experience a higher risk for cardiovascular disease than women with fulfilling relationships.

A Swedish study of people 75 years and older shows that dementia risk is lowest for people who maintain satisfying relationships and have a large group of friends and family they enjoyed.

The foundation of all relationships is good communication. Most people are unaware of how their lack of communication skills adversely affect the quality of their relationships.

Working to improve your communication skills may be easier than you imagine. It requires only desire and a few simple, proven steps to make a big change in the quality of your interactions.

For more whole health discussions like this, listen to my weekly radio show Living Above The Drama available on iHeartRadio.