exQUIZZme !

You really are what you eat. You are also very much affected by the lifestyle you live. Every item that enters your mouth will be digested and reconstructed into your living cells for use. Although it is true that everything is broken down into general building blocks necessary for life (such as sugar, fat, proteins, etc), the quality of what you eat really affects how healthy each of your cells are. A diet high in processed foods, sugars, fats, chemicals, additives, preservatives, and low quality nutrients is harder for your body to process and leads to the building of lower quality cells. If you rarely exercise, experience high stress, do not sleep well or enough, and do not partake in favorite leisure activities, this also stresses the body and reduces its effectiveness in maintaining balance and health.

It can be difficult in today’s world to fit in all that is conducive to an optimal life. Missing one or two steps occasionally will generally not be a problem, as your body is very resilient and made to work under less than optimal conditions for a time. Many people take advantage of this, however, and conclude that since they live the way they do and no signs of illness have appeared thus far, that they are living well enough. It can take days, months, or years for various signs of body ‘dis-ease’ to begin to appear. By the time these signs appear, it can take just as long to reverse the damage, if reversal is possible.

The key is prevention. Although it is nearly impossible to anticipate exactly which prevention measures should be taken for each individual, there are general prevention methods that can be included in a healthy lifestyle that are useful to ward off the majority of common complaints.

Not too long ago my teenage daughter approached me with a very special request… one that not every father gets from his loving daughter. I was sitting in front of the TV after a hard day at work and while I was fidgeting with the defective cable company-provided remote (the one the kids only know how to operate) trying to find a movie I hadn’t yet seen ten times already on cable, she blurts out, “Dad, can I have a breast reduction?”

Now, if you’re a parent then you know there exists a certain ‘conditioning’ that occurs over the years when responding to questions from our children, especially if your attentions are focused elsewhere at the moment. They all have this tendency to ask questions at the most inappropriate times. For example, one time I was wrestling with a stubborn pipe while fixing a leak under the kitchen sink. To begin with, I was in a seemingly impossible body contortion trying to manipulate a wrench in a confined space so my frustration level was accelerating. At that moment a passing kid asked, “Dad, can I have ddgrfguff?”. I didn’t hear the last part of the question but I was safe in responding back, “Yeah, sure.” You see, it was a ‘can I have’ question which was usually food-related as opposed to ‘can I go’ which requires some passing thought to respond (later I caught holy-heck from my wife for letting my son eat something too close to dinner, but that’s a whole other story). But as the kids got older the ‘can I have’ questions became less about food and more about a request for money… lots of money. Read the rest of You Want What? »