MANAGING YOUR HEALTH & WELLNESS
BY: FITZ-GEORGE RATTRAY
Your best management of wellness probabilities is the key to a healthy life. Avoiding pains, suffering and avoidable death is a matter of avoiding illness probabilities, that is, the likelihood of suffering from a disease eventually, and why.
Think of probabilities like a tabletop (life) with funnels (risks) inset in the surface. There are multiple marbles spinning all over the table.
The width of the opening of each of these funnels is dependent on your choices and lifestyle. Better choices will reduce the diameter of related funnels and worse choices will increase the related widths, increasing your chances of falling in. Some choices will make the opening so large, that your probability of falling in is great and others so small that the marble simply will not fall in.
Yes, genetics can greatly increase or reduce the probabilities, but it is your lifestyle and choices which will reduce or increase your chances.
FOUR (4) FACTORS WHICH WILL AFFECT YOUR HEALTH PROBABILITIES
- Micronutrients
Vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants are necessary for sustaining life. Without the essential vitamins you will get sick and die. Without sufficient regular quantities, your chances for infection, cardiovascular disease, neural diseases and much more will increase significantly.
Continuing research is showing that regardless of some benefits, vitamin supplements are not as effective or safe as natural sources. Its better to have two to three servings of dark green leafy and varied colored vegetables and one or two servings of fruit, spices, berries, peas, beans or nuts than depend on supplements.
2. Avoid sugars, additives and processed foods
If you love comfort foods and overindulge in them, know that sooner or later they will come with a price, ranging from aches and pains, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune illnesses, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, blindness, stroke, nerve death, dementia and many more.
You may be realizing that younger and younger people are suffering and dying from diseases once connected to aging. Your observations are accurate. Younger men and women are dying from heart disease and cancer.
Avoid sugary drinks, including fruit drinks and alcoholic drinks, sugary foods and even an excess of the natural sugars, found in fruits, berries, honey etc. Any more than 25 grams of sugar per day will increase your probability of several deadly diseases. To put that into perspective that is the less sugar than found in 1 medium banana and 2 teaspoons of honey.
3. Manage your macros
Your macronutrients are essentially any nutrient you can recognize on contact. Most people can identify proteins, carbohydrates (complex… ground provisions, or simple … flour sugar etc.), oils and water on sight.
4. Balance
The successful healthy balances of macros vary significantly, but a safe rule of thumb, for most of your meals is:
• 50% vegetables
• 25% protein (relatively little to no red meat)
• 10-15% carbs and 10-15% oils
Portion Sizes
There are many individuals who state that they do not indulge in snack or fast foods, and proudly say that they only indulge in natural foods. However excessive calories, and improper proportions is proven to cause illnesses and early death, even from natural foods. Keep your servings light, your waistline can be your guide.
Balance your Microbiome
Even when you have done all of the above perfectly, there is still a potentially deadly gap in your nutrition, known as your microbiome or healthy gut bacteria. These are the good bacteria which exist in your guts and work with you to keep you alive and healthy. Imbalances in the microbiome have been connected to intestinal diseases, bleeding, cancers, dementia, depression, obesity, heart disease and more.
Sadly, many societies have raised children to turn their backs on foods known to improve healthy gut flora (bacteria). Processed foods, antibiotics, preservatives all destroy our good flora and elevate our damaging flora. It is on us to consciously replenish our gut flora with probiotics; (foods with good bacteria) and prebiotics (fiber which the healthy bacteria feed on). Start looking for probiotic foods such as sauerkraut (fermented cabbage), pickles, meso soup, cottage cheese, greek yogurt and others. Make them a regular part of your diet. Don’t be unadventurous or scared of them, these can make the difference between life and death.
Make the changes before it is too late
All these nutritional factors must be covered to avoid serious illness. You may have the perfect macro balances but insufficient micronutrients and that one factor, will leave a set of disease probabilities wide open.
If you are overweight there is a good chance that you need to make important dietary changes. However, It does not matter if you are slim or not, if you are fit or not, if you slip up with any of these factors you are widening the probability funnel of many diseases, simply by missing one factor or another.
Other lifestyle changes including exercise are also important for your total wellbeing; but even if you have all the fitness factors perfect, any weakness in your nutrition will result in your body failing at some point.
Make the changes today. Change is a process, you may try it alone or get help from a proven system, in any case, your life may depend on it.
