The 5 things you need to do to be healthy

If you don’t know how to be healthy and don’t have health and wellness as a priority in your life, your business is going to suffer.

There are 5 things you need to do to be healthy.

Your overall health and wellness, the mind, body, and soul connection, impact your business and the level of success that you can achieve. When your body is not healthy, when your hormones are out of whack, or when your body is deficient in something that it needs, you will not feel well and therefore won’t perform as well.

Many different physical signs and symptoms can occur, which are going to impact your mental health, your mind, whether you’re foggy in the afternoon, or not foggy in the afternoon, your productivity level, and overall happiness. And if you aren’t in a place where you have complete health and wellness, you could be experiencing a lack in other areas of your life, like your business.

Five strategies that you can implement to help your body heal and become more healthy so you can be more productive, more successful, and more abundant.

Health and wellness are very critical in terms of how we not only perceive ourselves and our lives but how we put ourselves forth into the world. And it really does impact our businesses, our relationships, and our lives as a whole.

The industry of functional medicine – how to be healthy naturally

Functional medicine is unique and different from other licensed medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, and PAs. All of these have licensed medical boards in the world of functional medicine, there is no universal licensing board, as of yet.

There are currently several programs and areas of study that you can go through, and you have to have prior certifications to be able to qualify. Functional medicine is more of a study of the interconnectedness of the body systems and how they are all related.

Nutrition and food are a component of knowing how your body has the ability to detoxify and handle hormones and stressors in the body. Your mind-body connection is so critical to balancing that sympathetic or parasympathetic state. All of these different components in the body systems work together in a unique, brilliant fashion.

The natural hormone solution – how to be healthy using the 5 Rs

Root Cause

The first is identifying the root cause. Each person has a unique set of circumstances and biochemistry that is going to impact her body. You need to get clear on what that is and know where your hormone levels are. Knowing how your body is processing and handling stressors and waste and whether it needs to detoxify or not.

An Example of a root cause for someone who wanted to be healthy and pain-free

Someone struggles with feeling low energy and it’s hard for her to get up and go. She’s had a hypothyroid diagnosis and has been on thyroid medication but still gained weight.

In the mornings she feels drained and energetically low. In addition, she had aches and pains in her joints and body. When looking at her hormone levels, we saw that she doesn’t have what’s called the cortisol awakening response.

Her CAR activity is really low. She has a flat-line cortisol curve. Cortisol, a stress hormone, usually peeks shortly after arising. It gives us our get-up-and-go energy and then gradually tapers off throughout the day and into the evening. Then the body makes more melatonin.

She didn’t have that. Her body didn’t have the ability to produce enough cortisol. After further evaluation, we realized she was taking a statin medication for the past eight years. Statin medications can be helpful because they reduce the production of cholesterol in the liver.

However, cholesterol is a necessary component to be able to have your body make cortisol in the adrenal glands, and it has a strong mitochondrial function. The result was that she had depleted levels of CoQ 10. We know that statin medications deplete CoQ 10 intentionally, and she hadn’t been supplementing CoQ10. Healthy fatty foods and a CoQ 10 supplement were key for her to gain more energy and live pain-free.

The importance of functional medicine labs for women over 40 who want to be healthy

Functional medicine labs are very important, but they aren’t necessarily traditional lab tests.

Typically when you go for an annual checkup with your primary care physician, they’ll do a series of labs. Usually, it’s a lipid panel, a cholesterol check, a blood count, and perhaps a metabolic panel. It’s a good starting point.

However, looking at health through a functional lens is what is optimal. What is ideal is very different than looking at just the general markers through what we call the reference range.

Your doctor will typically tell you if something is diagnosable because it’s outside of the reference range.

However, the reference range is actually simply reflecting what is 95% of the population, it’s two standard deviations of the people tested in this country. We know that the majority of the average American population is not optimally healthy. Therefore, it means you’re common if you’re within the reference range, but it doesn’t by any means, mean that your body is functioning at an optimal level.

Functional medicine labs are different. Through these labs, you can look at hormone metabolites. The Dutch hormone Complete is one of my favorite hormone tests, and it gives you an indication of cortisol, melatonin, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and a lot of your key hormones. Through their levels, we can see how your body is able to not only utilize the hormones but detoxify and process them or not. In addition, we can see reactive activity happening because of a lack of nutrients.

This can be especially helpful for women, 40 to 65, when hormones are fluctuating and it’s more common to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. Other challenges like hypercholesterolemia or diabetes are more common during this age range as well. So it’s important to have a pulse on what’s going on in your body.

Replenish Nutrients in your body to be healthy and have energy

Every single cell in the body is nutrient driven. Therefore, nutrients are needed to be able to make hormones and properly detoxify the metabolites of hormones. This is important for all organs in the body. They all need nutrients. And it’s important to note that the food you eat also influences how you think.

Protein levels and amino acids are the most common nutrient lacking for women in their 40s, 50s, and early sixties. To replenish protein levels, Amanda recommends animal sources of protein, which may seem contradictory.

You can obviously get protein from vegetarian sources as well. However, it typically takes more steps for your body to be able to convert and to process vegetarian protein sources. Therefore you need a bandwidth of extra energy to do that. If you’re in a healing phase or trying to rebalance, making it as easy as possible for your body to find that balance is beneficial.

Animal proteins include poultry, fish, shellfish, and eggs. Lean meats and high-quality meats are best. But recognize that protein is critical for the formation of amino acids. And also fiber. That’s the other area that is often suboptimal in women. Good sources of fiber are fresh fruits and veggies. Even more specifically, beans.

For the purposes of healing, you may need to create new pathways in the brain. You need new cells to be able to create new pathways. Amino acids can be beneficial.

Restoring digestive fire to be healthy long-term

Eating food is oftentimes a far cry from actually getting those nutrients inside the cell. You need digestion and the absorption of nutrients. To understand your digestive process, ask yourself what the experience of eating is like for you.

Do you often eat unconsciously? Do you do other things while eating, do you sit or stand or pay attention? Because if you’re not adequately chewing, and noticing the texture and the taste of food in your mouth, your body is not able to fully digest those nutrients, whether it be the vitamins and the minerals or the enzymes and the amino acids.

The nutrients won’t be broken apart. Even if you choose healthy foods, but you’re eating on the go, your body’s not getting the benefit of all of the nutrients. Be willing to learn new ways. Through functional medicine, there are ways to test the adequacy of stomach acid levels and gut health to see if the nutrients are getting to the cells to be absorbed.

Restoring digestive fire starts with what happens in your mouth. If you can chew roughly 20 bites before swallowing, which feels different from what most of us do day in and day out.

Saliva is the first step in the digestive process. It’s the only part that is voluntary, so you can influence it and it has a huge impact because once the food is in the stomach only a quarter of a tablespoon, every 20 minutes is passed through to the small intestine to start to utilize that process.

Many times eating is more like chewing, chewing, and swallowing down the hatchet. That means that the bolus of food is sitting in your stomach and your stomach acid may not have the strength or the bandwidth to really continue to break it apart well enough.

Learn more about gut health.

Reset your thinking to be healthy in mind and body

Become aware of your thoughts and your perceptions about daily experiences. Most of us have a lot of stressors to think about.

It is important to be aware of how many times you experience negative emotions or anxiety. Note when you experience a negative emotion like frustration, worry, overwhelm, or not having enough, whatever it is that is signaling through your nervous system that your world is not safe.

Even though your well-being and safety are not on the line, your nervous system, your brain, does not know that.

As a result, it will trigger the sympathetic stress response in the body, and that essentially tells your body to store fat because we have to keep a reserve of energy in case we need to save our life. This deprioritizes digestion healing recovery because it thinks we have to be on high alert.

Thoughts always precede an emotional response. When you feel a negative emotion, use this phrase “I feel ______ (insert the negative emotion you feel) because the story I’m telling myself is. . . and start to allow yourself the space and the bandwidth to unpackage what it is you are believing.

Then, ask yourself what must you believe to be true right now in order to feel this negative emotion. And then question the validity of that.

Learn more about navigating mindset.

Navigating your thoughts

Robyn recommends her 5 C’s method to catch those thoughts and challenge them. Ask yourself if the thoughts are realistic. Chances are they are not. Ask yourself, would someone you know love and respect be thinking the same thing about your or the situation as you are?

And if the answer to those questions is no, then change those thoughts. The more you change the negative thoughts, the more control you have over them. Then you will be more confident in your decisions.

The more confident you are in the world around you and your life experiences and your thoughts, the more your body is going to be in unity from the mind and the body perspective. Amanda emphasized that when you become aware of negative thoughts and then change the thoughts, it frees up energy.

Likewise, it frees up capacity. An astounding statistic for women is that 24% of women during their forties and their fifties will have to take at least 34 days off of work or away from their profession because of their own health challenges. That means lost income and lost impact.

In addition, it means additional stressors on yourself and your loved ones when you just literally are not in the capacity to be able to function and perform as you would normally want to. Therefore, navigating negative thought patterns has a huge impact on our physiology.

Getting rid of negative thoughts frees up energy that can be used in healing, and that can be used in positively influencing your business. And, it ultimately saves you money.

Every entrepreneur needs a mental health plan in addition to a nutrition plan.

Removing toxins in order to be healthy and enjoy feeling great

Toxin removal happens in two phases. One is your body’s ability to remove the toxins that get inside you, internally in the systemic body. And that has to do with the health of your liver, kidneys, and lymphatic tissue.

The test used to measure toxins in the body is called micronutrient testing. This test looks at the levels of the nutrients inside the cells, not just swimming around in the blood, but what actually makes it into the cells. It’s looking at the health of your body’s cells so that it can remove toxins and metabolic waste.

Secondly, is being aware of your home environment. There are a lot of things that we can’t control, but within your own home where you spend a lot of your time, there are so many choices that you have that can decrease the exposure to toxic chemicals that are in cleaning supplies, makeup, and hair care products, things we use daily.

Examples of micronutrients that are needed to be healthy

Vitamin D is a key micronutrient. It is helpful for immune support and gut health. It’s also important to know that vitamin D3 also has a co-factor. If taking a vitamin D supplement, start low and slow because vitamin D can galvanize magnesium. Magnesium is an important mineral that we need for over 300 reactions in the body. Vitamin D3 supplements need to be balanced with adequate support for magnesium.

Vitamin K2 is another important vitamin that works in concert with vitamin D3. It’s important to look at the big picture of the body, not one nutrient at a time.

Another key area is to know other B vitamins. There are several B vitamins, for example, B5 and B6. B vitamins are depleted with alcohol consumption and oral birth control. Low vitamin B affects functions in the body, including histamine degradation.

Someone who has a lot of headaches, a lot of aches and pains, or a lot of reaction to seasonal allergies – a histamine response it could be because they have suboptimal levels of B6.

Lastly, chemicals to avoid when buying hair products or makeup include parabens.

Learn more about environmental toxins by visiting the environmental working group.

An all-natural cleaning solution tip from Robyn. Save citrus peels from lemons, oranges, limes or any other citrus. Put them in a large mason jar, and store them in the fridge until the jar is full. Then add vinegar and let it sit for a few days to a month or until needed. Funnel into a spray bottle.

Because it’s vinegar, it kills a ton of germs and the citrus makes it smell better.

Learn more hacks to being healthy.

More on creating sustainable healthy habits.

About Amanda Hinman

Amanda is passionate about helping women discover a deep knowing that it is possible to LOVE their bodies and experience the vitality they dream of. She strives to positively impact thousands of women who are able to consistently live with truly vibrant health. In addition, she wants their vitality and sense of empowerment to spill over to influence their families, friends, and loved ones leading to a radical change in our country’s approach to health!