5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Health Now! | Ep 107

Imagine getting up every day full of energy is if you were in your 20s. Again, what would that be? Like?

What would that be worth to you?

What is your health worth to you? Think about it. Your health isn't everything. But without it, everything else is nothing. And yet too many of us are taking it for granted. until something goes wrong. No one wakes up hoping to be diagnosed with a disease or chronic illness. And yet, we've never been taught how to be proactive in our health through our school system, or public health. As a registered health coach and integrative health practitioner, I believe it is time this information is made available to everyone. Combining new knowledge around your health and the ability to do my functional medicine lab tests in the comfort of your own home will allow you to optimize your health for today in all your tomorrow's. Don't wait for your wake up call.

Welcome back to another episode of The don't wait for your wake up call podcast. I am Melissa dealey and I'm excited to be here with you again today. And I want to thank all of my listeners for the time that you spend tuning into these episodes to learn about your health and improve your life and to if you're a brand new listener, thank you for being here as well. I hope you find this information helpful. Today, I want to talk to you about five easy steps to improve your health. So often, when we think about our health, we think that it's we don't know where to start, it can feel overwhelming. There's so much information out there. How do I know what's real, what's true and where to start. So I just want to allow you to start very simply with these easy steps because when you start a process, simply it's easier for you to stick with it than if you were to try and do everything all at once and it gets overwhelming and it becomes too much. But first of all, before I dive into the episode, I just want to share this testimonial with you that I recently received this person Diana Benson says, I went to Melissa to help me get over my craving for chips, it was my go to comfort food for decades, after 20 minutes with Melissa, my cravings are gone, I no longer have to use willpower, as it is no longer even a thought. Thank you, Melissa. And Thank you Diana for sending that in. When I worked with Diana, I used a technique tapping into the power of her unconscious mind so that we don't have to use willpower anymore, in order for her to be able to create lasting change. So five steps to easily improve your health starting now. As you know, this whole podcast is about health education and giving you ways to improve your health. And I also want to empower you in your health by ensuring that you know that you are not at the whim of your genes. And that instead, you can absolutely impact your health outcomes based on the actions you take today. And what I mean by all of that is the fact that epigenetics now proves to us that just because your parents might have had heart disease, or there might be breast cancer in your family or some other form of cancer, that that doesn't mean you're automatically going to get those diseases, and you don't have to feel like I got bad genes. Really, what that is, the amount of impact of your parents health on your health outcomes is actually only five to 10%, that direct genetic connection is five to 10%. The other 90 to 95% is the environment you create inside your body by the lifestyle that you live. And so this is where you can be really empowered in your health because you can choose to create a body that is inhospitable to disease, so that the switches that would turn on your genes for the diseases, you're genetically predisposed, predisposed to never get switched on. I'm going to say that again, those switches never have to get switched on if you create a body that is inhospitable to disease. And so that's what I want to share with you today is you can make the choices you can be empowered in your health. What you do today matters for your health one year, five years, 10 years from now. People can have Alzheimer's for 20 to 30 years before it ever gets diagnosed. And so that's what I mean by what you do today matters and you can just start taking baby steps to make small changes, so that you are changing your long term health outcomes. So these five steps I'm going to share with you today, you probably already know, however, are you implementing them. And I want to not only share the steps, but explain why and how in taking this action, it will improve your health, because I believe when you understand the why it drives you to taking action rather than just being told to do something. And so that's why I love sharing the why. And you don't have to implement all five at once, as I said, implement them one at a time, start with the easiest one for you do that for a few weeks. And then when you feel you've got that one down, move on to the next one. And these are in no particular order either. So like I said, pick the one that feels the easiest to you that you want to start implementing now. Hydration, how much should you be drinking, on any given day, in order to give your body the hydration that it needs and hydration is incredibly important for our body, our brain is made up of fat and water, our body is largely made up of water. And when we're not giving ourselves enough hydration, we can get a headache. As the brain starts to kind of dry out, we age faster as the body and the cells and the organs start to dry out. And they can't function as well. So hydration is incredibly important and is one of those things, well, how much is the right amount to be drinking, you might have heard eight cups a day. And then you think, Well, I'm way smaller than the next person is that really true. So I'm going to give you a ratio that works with the size of your body. And that is that on any given day, you should be hydrating 50% of your body weight in ounces. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 50% of that is 75 pounds. So can we say 75 ounces when we're converting to water. And that is almost eight cups, right. But if you weigh 200 pounds, then you need to be drinking 100 ounces. If you weigh only 100 pounds, you need to be drinking 50 ounces. That is a way to easily be able to calculate how much you need to drink based on your body size. And that's on any given day. Now, you want to increase that if it's a super hot day and you're running around and you're sweating a lot, you want to increase that when you're doing a detox program, when I run my detox programs with people, I have them increased to two thirds of their body weight because we really want to flush all of those toxins out at 50% of your body weight on a normal day is a great starting point. And you may not be drinking that much right now. And so you don't want to just suddenly go from maybe you're drinking only 30% of your body weight. And if you suddenly go to 50% of your body weight that can feel like a lot. So just increase slowly over the course of the next week until you get to that 50% point. And some people say they forget to hydrate, I always have a mug at my desk in my car, everywhere I go, I always have something with me. And you may not be in that habit yet. But you can start to create that habit. Put a water bottle in the car, put a water bottle beside your bed, have one at your desk, et cetera, so that you can easily hydrate because by the time you feel thirsty it already means the body is dehydrated. And ideally you want to be drinking throughout the day so that you don't even feel thirsty. You can buy water bottles on Amazon and I'm sure elsewhere that actually have the times of the day marked on them. So that if to build the habit, you could use that and then by 10 o'clock you have to have drunk this much and by 12 o'clock this much By two o'clock this much. And in following that it just helps you realize oh I haven't drunk enough and it's now noon I need to catch up on my how much water I've drunk. So that works well for people. And then also I want to share with you what is considered hydration. So really good hydration for the body is water and herbal teas. Protein shakes or shakes that are full of all your vitamins and minerals as well. So the detox shakes that I use with my clients that's also considered hydration. Water that you've added the juice of half a lemon or half a lime is considered hydration and it gives you some good electrolytes in there. The things that are not considered hydration and don't count in the amount that you're calculating for 50% of your body weight. Are your coffee your Are caffeinated teas, any alcohol, any pop, any energy drinks, none of those are actually considered hydration for the body. So, in your calculations, you don't include any of that when you're figuring out your 50% of your body weight. Also, the body does better when it hydrates with warm fluids. So room temperature, or warmer rather than ice cold, the body is better able to absorb the warm hydration rather than cold. And so that's something else for you to factor in, as you slowly start to increase your hydration levels. So the next

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The other thing that's important with that is having a bedtime routine, because the brain also needs to have a trigger as to when it should start producing melatonin because it knows you're starting to get ready for bed. Back in our hunter gatherer days, we didn't have electricity. And the brain knew when to produce melatonin because of dusk. But we no longer have that trigger with all the lights we have in our house. And they then again screens. And so we need to teach our brain when it is time to start producing melatonin. And the brain figures that out when you follow a specific routine. And that routine can just be four to six steps that you do in the same order every night as you're getting ready for bed. And it can take you know half an hour. And it can be things like you know, walking the dog around the block, maybe it's tidying up the kitchen, maybe it's taking a shower or bath and then brushing your teeth and putting on your PJs and getting into bed and writing your journal or reading a book. Do these in the same order every night over the course of the next month, as you bring your bedtime forward by 15 minutes each week. And you will notice that you are much better able to sleep. Right now what most of the population is doing is trying to sleep on demand. They go go go all day, do everything that they do. And then now they're tired and it's time for bed. And they get into bed and they turn up a light and they expect the body to just be able to sleep. And it doesn't work that way. It's impacted by you know what we've eaten how close to bedtime we've eaten how much sugar has been in the food we've eaten today how much coffee we have running through our veins, whether the body is still hopped up on cortisol, which means it's not producing melatonin, are we producing melatonin? All of these things impact our sleep. And we're not taught this. Because we believe since we come out of the womb and we know how to sleep, that we don't need to learn how to sleep. And yet this information is so important because we have so many things in our busy lives these days that are negatively impacting our sleep. So sleep again, just pick one of those areas that you want to improve upon. And you know, even if with hydration, if you're reducing your coffee, because it's not hydrating and you're choosing other forms of hydration, you're also going to be benefiting your sleep, because coffee has an eight hour half life. And if you have a cup of coffee at eight o'clock in the morning, you still have half of that caffeine running around in your veins at 4pm and half of that again at midnight. And if you've had more than one cup of coffee in the day, that can be negatively impacting your sleep depending on how sensitive you are to it. And a lot of people don't realize this, and they drink coffee to give them the energy and wake up their brain to get them through the day. But then it's negatively impacting their sleep. And then the follow up You haven't slept well the following morning you wake up and you start your day with coffee and you do it all again. So when I work with clients, I have them removed coffee for a couple of weeks so they can start to understand their sensitivity to coffee and how coffee is impacting their sleep. And in many cases, they choose not to go back to coffee because they realize they sleep better without it and they wake up feeling more mentally alert, and energized. So you can do that for yourself as well. Tip number three is to give yourself brain breaks during the day, we are always go go go trying to get everything done. And we're not giving our brain a chance to take a break. And in this stressed out world that we live in, we really do need to give our brain just little five minute breaks. And they can be done in so many different ways. So it's whatever resonates with you, it could literally just be going outside for five minutes and breathing in the fresh air and a short little walk. It could even be just sitting at your desk and closing your eyes and kind of putting your head down for five minutes. And just really focusing on your breathing. It could be literally just taking a five minute break to chat with a friend and get out of work mode and just kind of get into fun mode and play mode. It can be so many different things that you can do in your day, just getting up and changing the location of where you're at moving away from your your desk in your office, and moving into a different space in the office or in your home if you work from home, and allowing yourself to breathe. Breathing really is a fabulous way to get out of the stress state and into the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest state. And we have our breath with us all the time. And it's so powerful because in so needed, because when we are in this stress state all the time, we are negatively impacting our health. Just like with our sleep, we are breaking down the balance in our gut microbiome. Because high stress is killing off the good bacteria in our gut, just like poor sleep does the same thing. And as a result, we end up with imbalances in our gut, which can cause to cause all sorts of health issues down the line from Candida overgrowth, to bacterial overgrowth, to digestive issues, not being able to, you know, enjoy eating food, because we've got pain associated with eating our food, or we've got gas and bloating, et cetera, et cetera, maybe constipation, maybe diarrhea. Stress is very often the root cause for all of this. And so if you can mitigate your stress by taking little five minute breaks through the day, just start off with taking one five minute break a day for the first week. And then in the next week, can you build into five minute breaks. And the next week, maybe you get three five minute breaks into your day. And notice the difference in how you feel and know that you are significantly helping your body and your brain be able to cope and be on a healthier trajectory. When we are under high stress, and we're not giving ourselves these breaks, we can't even digest our food properly, because digestion is turned off in the high stress state. And I've done podcasts solely on stress in the past. So very early on, you can go back to the very beginning of my episodes, and go dive deeper into those episodes. To understand why. However, I just want you to know that high stress has our digestive system shut down. And if we continue to put food into our mouth, the body can't even break that down properly. We're not getting the vitamins and minerals that we need in order to function well. We burn through our reserves. And pretty soon we get to a place of depletion. And that's when you're dragging your butt you're feeling exhausted, you're not able to function at your best. And you need to assess the stress in your life. And what do you need to do in order to support that And who might you need to get help from at that point too. high stress can also cause hormonal imbalances. And I see this all the time, particularly in women, because in a high stress state, the body not only has shut down digestion, but it's also shut down procreation, the body's trying to produce more cortisol and adrenaline to give you the energy to get to safety because that's what it thinks you need. And as a result, it's not producing progesterone, and yet it's still producing estrogen and we're getting estrogen through Xeno estrogens from a lot of personal care products and plastics and toxic forms of estrogen that the body's getting in. And we end up in an estrogen dominance state. And that's not a state that anybody wants to be in either because an estrogen dominant state can then drive slow your thyroid, it can put you on the path to type two diabetes, it can put you on the path to breast cancer. All because stress has caused an imbalance between your estrogen and progesterone levels. So these are things that are really important to know about. They're also things we can test for So if it's something that you're concerned about, oh, that could be me, we can test for this and see if that's where you're at, and then know exactly how to rebalance the hormones. A lot of people are popping and acids day in and day out because of digestive struggles. And if you read the label on the bottle, it actually says they should not be taken for more than two weeks at a time without your doctor knowing about it. And yet people are buying them over the counter and using them for years and years and years. And that further worsens your digestive health, even though in the moment you think it's helping, because it's helping resolve your heartburn issues, et cetera, is making things worse, because the fact that you need them in the first place is because of high stress that has caused a sphincter at the bottom of your esophagus to malfunction. And basically, it doesn't seal up nice and tightly anymore, once it lets food into the stomach cavity and it gets floppy, which means the little bit of stomach acid that you have can get out and escape up into the esophagus. And that's what you associate with being heartburn. And what we need to have happen is we need to be lowering the stress we need to be