How To get Weller - Health and Wellness Are Yours For The Taking by Marcus Antebi
Health and wellness is yours for the taking.
Throughout my career food and nutrition business I have received criticism from people that my solutions to health problems might be too drastic. Or sometimes when I write something on the subject, I say, “do not do this” or “none of that” and some people take that in a negative way, and I understand.
In my opinion the health and wellness industry are filled with people that tailor their speech to maximize their goal to enhance or build a business that is extraordinarily profitable.
When I speak to people about health and wellness, we zero in on their diet so I can recommend how to reach the highest level of dietary patterns within their lifestyle. The goal is to create a ‘mountaintop’ that when you reach it you would plant your flag and there is no higher place to go. What you then do, as an individual, without fear of being judged by others, is to decide how far up the mountain you wish to go. With your understanding where the mountaintop is there will be no diffusion of truth or muddled information.
I was widely challenged years ago when I said, “Eliminate processed food from your diet”. Some in our marketing department wanted to water down the message to make it commercial and consumable by saying “We should reduce as much processed food as possible “. And I had a fundamental problem with telling half-truths.
Here is a list of things that are required to sit at the mountaintop. When you’re there, remember there are no guarantees you’ll live forever because Life and Health are volatile and controlled by many factors.
- Eliminate processed foods from your diet.
- Eliminate stimulating substances such as coffee, drugs, and tobacco. None of these offers nutritive value. The compounds they contain might have been studied somewhere and concluded that the coffee bean is good for ‘this’, or red wine is good for ‘that’, but those studies are not truthful because not everyone will do well with stimulation in their diet, especially people who are battling illness. Their system needs to not be stimulated: it needs to rest.
- Do not eat late at night .The ultimate pattern is to follow the sunrise and the sunset. Be sure to go to bed on an empty stomach so you do not ferment food overnight.
- Do not overeat. Your ideal weight should be a little bit below the suggested weight for your height and age, perhaps by 10%.
- Reduce the intake of protein. Far less protein is needed than we intake in the modern world. It is cleaner to eliminate completely any animal protein but if you are going to consume some animal protein that will be a wall to climb over. That does not mean you cannot be extremely healthy if you include some animal protein in your diet; it is just not necessary. It is a preference. Certainly, many of us are accustomed to the stimulating affect that a concentrated protein or even a concentrated food could have on our chemistry, and that stimulation is what makes us feel good. That is when we mistake that sensation with feeling healthy.
- Exercise, and make sure that during the week you exercise to your maximum ability. There are many studies that show that a high level of physical exertion coupled with a good degree of rest has a positive impact on the body’s chemistry.
- This may be most difficult one: we need to develop a way of dealing with our fears, anxieties and traumas which form the template on how we think. We are full of negative memories from childhood and early adulthood that have shaped the way we think about the present moment. Some of us will never get past those feelings but they could be managed through stress control exercises. The best stress control exercises I know of are articulating your feelings and problems, and meditation.
People often seek someone with a great deal of knowledge to tell them that it’s healthy at best or not so harmful at worst to consume alcohol. Just be clear that the highest level of health that you can achieve is blocked by the type of mistakes you make in your overall lifestyle and diet. Alcohol puts a burden on the liver. You are better off without it. You can find ways to dance around the issue and say “l I’ll only have a glass of wine a day or two glasses of wine a week”, and if this is your best achievement then you’re doing a lot better obviously than consuming more.
The issue gets confusing when anecdotal stories are told of people who drink a lot and live long lives. There are some who break the rules, but these are exceptions to the rule, not the rule. Remember when you think about your chemistry and your immune system and your overall health you are trying to do as many things possible to stack the odds in your favor.
Everybody would agree that having no pesticides in our food system is better than having some or a lot. now it just depends on what you personally are willing to achieve. Mainstream consumers have been bombarded with nonsensical toxic products in the form of hair dyes, shampoos, soft drinks, etc. Many people might have no idea whatsoever that these things are harmful not only to their body but likely to the health of the planet because they are toxic.
It all boils down to this: there are two types of compounds that you take into your body when you eat or consume products. The first one is nutrients hat enhance your chemistry even if only a little. And then there are compounds that are disruptors to your overall system that disrupt the normal functions, and that is it.
Your body has latitude for dietary and lifestyle mistakes. The body does not have to be maintained perfectly. A wise man once told me that if you are truly 80-85% pure with your diet, measured by calories, your body doesnt notice the mistakes.
The liberty for mistakes that your body has is unique to you. No two people have the exact same chemistry at the exact same time, therefore everyone's margin for errors will be different.
Singularly, the most important things to be aware of our are overall lifestyle and dietary habits. This includes exercise, abstaining from the things we discussed earlier, your overall happiness, and of course, environmental factors.
The air we breathe the water we drink, and the chemicals that are in our household are all part of the mosaic. These concepts are simple. One can almost memorize this entire essay. The problem is that living by these doctrines is not easy. Because remember there are emotional and psychological components that affect our decision-making process when it comes to our behavior and the choices we make with our diet. Certainly, getting our diet to the place we want it to be is one of the most difficult struggles in behavior pattern changing.
When we were little children we were frightened of the dark and afraid of what it meant to go to sleep at night. When we grow up much of this fear remains. It tugs at us and prevents us from really being in the present moment of our life, being comfortable and secure. Many of us we have mild to severe forms of anxiety which may be simply natural because being a creature on this earth - and fighting for survival - is certainly a bit anxious. To develop new patterns, you can either be a self-starter who simply follows a program. But for most people self-starting requires a fire be set and then the ability to muster up the strength to put out that fire and rebuild from there. In other words, for most people, it requires that they hit the extreme bottom of behavior where they feel terrible about what they are doing and somehow or other muster up the strength to change.
It does not have to get to that. Many people can see the bottom a long way away and that bottom in sight is enough to motivate some to change.
We don’t have to suffer until the very end of a bady story arc. We can stop the behavior if we have the courage and mindset to take the first steps and so on.
Attempting meditation is invaluable, however, for many it will be too difficult to quiet the mind and feel comfortable in this stillness.
Prayer is easier in some ways because it's a more ingrained practice, it doesnt require a lot of deep training and years of practice.
Meditation is not a spiritual practice, it is an intellectual practice. It’s a intellectual practice of strengthening your ability to control the thoughts that flow at all times. It's obeserving the obssesions and practicing to quiet them. This is like bench pressing 500lbs. for most of us.
There's hope here. The fact that you’re reading this right now means that you have already reached a higher point in your life and you already know these details and are putting them into action, or you’re on the verge of your big break through. The right words and the right effrots will push you over the edge to a positive recognition and a positive shift.
The are no magic pills. Healing is hard work but it is what we were designed to do. It's a matter of getting impetus to get down to it.
