A New Year How About A New You

Of the 2.4 million deaths in the US each year 75% of them are a result of nutritional related factors
-Former US Surgeon General Dr C. Everett Koop

The cost of health care continues to go up, but if you could avoid spending all your retirement sitting in a doctor’s office and spending all your money on health expenses, would you?

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, if a 65 year old couple wanted 90 percent certainty of affording their future retirement health expenses, they would need to have saved $807,000 if they turned 65 and retired in 2009. This would include out of pocket expenses as well as Medicare and supplemental insurance premiums. For a couple turning 65 in the year 2019 wanting to have that 90 percent level of assurance would require them to have nearly $1.4 million in savings.

If you invest in you now and set aside a wellness fund to keep yourself healthy, improve your diet and pay what you need to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle that cost would be a much smaller figure. But would you do it?

Think about it as you would any financial investment, investing in a healthier you can save you enormous amounts of money in future healthcare expenses.

Let’s look at what happens as we age, things that you can control. “Most aging is just the dry rot we program into our cells by sedentary living, junk food and stress.” (Dr. Henry S. Lodge) Normal aging isn’t normal at all. It is a choice you make by what you eat and the way you live your life.

Eat natural foods, get back to preparing wholesome foods for you and your family. Get rid of refined sugars and white foods, the high carbohydrate foods that contribute to weight gain. Try to eat whole living foods, shop the outer edges of the grocery store. If you would like more proof that nutrition plays a key factor in health read Dr. Weston A Prices’ book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”.

Our bodies are designed to age slowly and remarkably well, decay is a choice we make, why not make the choice to tell our cells to grow and build a strong body and mind. Why not choose quality of life and in turn this will give us a longer healthier life.

Not only do we need to look at our dietary choices but our choice to be active or sedentary. “When you don’t exercise, your muscles let out a steady trickle of chemicals that tell every cell to decay, day after day”. (Dr. Henry S. Lodge) Movement is a signal that it is time to grow. When you exercise, your muscles release specific substances that travel throughout your bloodstream telling your cells to grow. An active lifestyle can tip the balance in your body toward growth and renewal.

People who go from sedentary to fit, cut their risk of dying from a heart attack, men by 75% women by 80%–heart attacks being the single largest killer of women. With 3 months of exercise both men and women can double their leg strength, another 3 months you can double it again. You can be in your 30s or your 90s it doesn’t matter, It is your biology and you are in charge you can do it. There is no mystery it’s not a miracle, it is a matter of movement.

Exercise works at the cellular level, your body is made up of trillions of cells that live for a few weeks or months, die off and are replaced by new cells in an endless cycle. Your taste buds live only a few hours, white blood cells live 10 days, and muscle cells live about three months. Your bones dissolve and are replaced, over and over again. Only a few key stem cells in each organ and your brain cells are there for your lifetime. All other cells are in a constant state of renewal.

You replace about 1% of your cells every day, so you get a whole new body pretty much every three months. How that new body is functioning, younger or older, is a choice you make by how you live. It is up to you how those new cells come in, if they are stronger or weaker, if they grow or decay.

There is another master signal to our cell just as equal and in some aspects even more important and that is emotion. Anger, stress and loneliness are signals for “starvation” and chronic danger. They “melt” our bodies as much as sedentary living. Optimism, love and community, triggers the process of building our bodies, hearts and minds.

“Your emotions affect every cell in your body. Mind and body, mental and physical, are intertwined.” (Thomas Tutko, Sports Psychologist and Author)

Every feeling you have saturates every cell and organ in your entire body. When you have good feelings, you are giving love and you receive the full force of health through your body at an astounding rate. When you have bad feelings, the tension causes your nerves and cells to contract, the vital chemical production in your body changes, your blood vessels contract, and your breathing becomes shallow, all of which reduces the force of health in your organs and your entire body. Disease is simply the result of a body’s not being at ease over a long period of time, because of negative feelings like stress, worry, and fear. (Excerpt from the book The Secret, The Power by Rhonda Byrne)

Our busy daily lives make it hard to exercise every day as well as finding time and energy to maintain relationships and build communities, but it is definitely worth it when you consider the alternative. We are designed to move and to care, your cells are listening so make this year your year of change, you will not be sorry and in the long run you will save money.