BECOME The WHOLE Healthy YOU
The choices you make every day in movement, sleep and nutrition impact the types of cells your body replaces every minute of every day throughout your life. Healthy cells emphasize your good genes. Weak cells emphasize your bad genes. So make healthy choices regularly to create healthy cells.
You need to surround yourself with the healthiest environment you can. Every single choice has an impact. You will make poor choices every now and then, everyone does. That is normal. It is human. But overall, you want to make good choices as much as you can because all these choices add up. If you think about putting all your choices on a scale, hopefully your good choices far outweigh your poor choices. However, you have to know what the good choices are, know you have control to get and keep your body in healthy balance.
Your whole environment has an impact on your health. Be in as healthy a community as you can. There are many aspects of a healthy community: a clean and safe place to live, positive and content people surrounding you and the ability to be the person you are. It works the other way around too! Just like your community has an impact on you, you have an impact on your community. You need to be a positive and supportive person to other people in your community.
Have you heard the cliché, "What goes around, comes around"? It is very relevant in this context. If you are a healthy part of your community, then those around you can become healthier and then you find yourself in a healthier community.
Never before did an entire generation grow up knowing that it really can control the way its genes work. Take advantage! At the same time, help others become healthy.
Make the Healthy Choice:
Choose to eat whole plant-based food because it is real food and healthy for you.
Processed/fake food is not healthy for you. When you put fake food into your system, the cells that your body is making every minute of the day have a higher likelihood of being unhealthy cells. However, if you continually make healthy choices in food, then your body has a much higher likelihood of making healthy cells.
This is why your health is a cycle, going 'round and 'round. Every choice you make with sleep, movement and nutrition impacts your health.
Refer to pages 88-89 to read more about how establishing a routine is good for you and your community.
Unlike your genes, the trillions of cells inside of you are always replacing themselves. Scientists estimate that 300 million cells in your body die every minute!
As your body replaces your 300 million cells every minute and you regularly make healthy choices - get good sleep, have good movement, eat good food - then you can produce new healthy cells.
Epigenetics is basically everything in your life!
- All the stimuli moving in and out of your body
- What you eat
- Where you live
- Who you interact with (your community)
- When you sleep
- How you exercise
Realize that different circumstances in your life can cause your genes to be silenced or enhanced over time. A vast majority of your health is driven by your choices. A much smaller percentage is determined by your genes. Yes, you can have some bad genes. But if you consistently make good choices you can make those bad genes weaker. You can also make your good genes stronger to compensate and take over.
Refer to pages 83-86 to read more about your ability to impact how your body replaces 300 million cells every minute!
Part I of III on Epigenetics
What more is there to nutrition than food? As it turns out, when you eat food, there is a lot going on inside your body. The natural desire of your body is homeostasis, which means to be in balance.
It is important to know that your body is uniquely you. You have about 20,000 genes in your body. Your cells make up your body, but it is your genes that make you, uniquely you. For example, your genes determine whether you are a boy or a girl or whether you have brown, blue or green eyes.
While you will always have the genes you are born with – your eye color will always be your eye color – you can influence how your genes react within your body.
You have trillions and trillions of cells in your body. All together those cells, whether they are healthy or diseased cells, make up your body.
The good news is: you can make choices in your life to support your healthy cells and minimize the diseased cells to Become the Whole Healthy You.
Shaping your genes – making the good ones stronger and pushing and keeping the weaker ones down – is the study of epigenetics . Epigenetics is how you can either positively or negatively shape the genes within your body.
Make the Healthy Choice:
Know what the word Epigenetics means – the study of cells and physiology that are caused by external or environmental factors that switch your genes on and off. It is how your cells read your genes. Researchers have found that genes can turn themselves on or off and it is not solely due to your DNA structure. The largest external factor that impacts your body is the food you choose to eat.
Part II will discuss why the food you eat impacts your epigenes.
Refer to pages 81-83 to read more about the meaning of epigenetics.
December is the month for sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch. The sight of glistening lights. The sound of soothing songs and bells. The smell of pine branches. The taste of flavorful foods. The touch of hugs from family and friends.
Movement into your body is called consumption and all day long you are consuming so many things through your senses.
The number one thing you consume each and every day is air! No matter what, you need to breathe each and every minute of each and every day. Since breathing is a big part of movement, in fact, it is the center of all movement, you want to make certain you are breathing as well as you can.
The biggest thing you can do on a regular basis to improve the way you breathe is to have good posture!
One of the most important things to breathing well is to have good posture. The normal, healthy shape of your spine, looking from the side, is an S shape.
Your spine should have two slightly inward curves. One contains your neck vertebrae, called cervical lordosis, and one is in your lower back, called the lumbar lordosis. Then in the middle you have one slightly outward curve, called kyphosis.
However, as you sit a lot, or are always looking down, like at your phone or your game controller, you have a tendency to slouch.
This can cause you to lose both your cervical (upper) and lumbar (lower) lordosis curves. In other words, your healthy S shape spine can become an unhealthy C shape spine.
The C shape spine is not good.
Make the Healthy choice