Jacquie Hale
Life Coach
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The Healthy Half Dozen

Here are a half dozen health tips that are among the best things you can do for yourself.

#1 Eat Flax Seeds

You can’t just buy a bag and eat them like sunflower seeds, you have to grind them up so that your body can digest them. Why flax seeds? Well, they’re practically all fiber and therefore provide an important element for your body’s functions. In addition, they are one of the easiest ways for you to get Omega 3 fatty acids.

Why do you need fiber? Fiber promotes good intestinal health. It helps keep things loose and moving and takes toxins and debris out with it. Also, this kind of fiber gives fat something to hang on to so that it can leave the body rather than hang out on your hips!

If you have already being using a fiber supplement like Metamucil® or psyllium you can totally replace that supplement with this one that has the huge added benefit of providing much needed Omega 3 fatty acids. Other sources are oily fish like salmon or walnuts. While those foods can still be an important aspect of your diet, if you have your flax seeds everyday, you get the double whammy!

How to Eat Flax

Buy organic flax seeds in natural grocery stores. You’ll find them in the bulk foods bins. If you find golden flax, get it; otherwise, buy the ordinary coffee-colored flax. Speaking of coffee, also buy yourself an inexpensive electric coffee grinder that will be dedicated to grinding flax only. Each morning or evening (which ever routine is likely to be a permanent one) grind up 2 tablespoons* of the seeds. You can sprinkle them on oatmeal or other foods that might enjoy a slightly nutty taste, or you can do what I do, stir them up in a large glass of water and drink it down. I follow that glass of water with another to avoid a common mistake people make when using fiber supplements: if you don’t drink enough water, you’ll get constipated. Drinking this extra glass of water actually leads to the next health tip.

*If you’re new to this bulk kind of fiber, you may experience bloating and flatulence. This became apparent to our family when my daughter’s dog would come to visit for the weekend. She would have the worst gas! Finally, we realized that I was putting ground flax seeds on her breakfast, just like I do for my own dogs. (It makes their coats beautiful and it ended difficult skin and flee problems.) However, the weekend grand dog wasn’t accustomed to the added fiber and got bloated and gassy. So, if you want to be cautious, start with a teaspoon or two and work up to 2 tablespoons.

#2 Drink Purified Water

There are so many opinions about purified water, it’s hard to know what to choose. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t a perfect solution yet. What I do know is that if your municipal water supply adds chlorine to your water, you must remove it before taking a drink. It’s vital that our water supplies are purified otherwise we’d be fighting cholera and other water-born diseases. Chlorine seems to be the easiest and cheapest way to protect public safety. But what’s good for the masses is not good for our bodies.

How To Purify Your Water

There are pitchers, gizmos that attach to you faucet, and whole house purifying systems. I’ve used several of them, and the most convenient is the type of purifier is one that attaches to your kitchen faucet and diverts the water whenever you want filtered water. That way you can choose to wash dishes with unfiltered water and to boil spaghetti with filtered water. When all else fails, drink bottled water (although there’s lots of speculation about the purity of that water too.)

#3 Breathe

Sure, we all breathe, but some of us (me included) don’t breathe very efficiently. I am a shallow breather and I hold my breath (I just caught myself holding my breath while I typed the previous sentence!) So I make a great effort to remember to breathe deeply.

My daily breathing practice is LifeStream breathing, a technique taught by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. This little exercise takes only a few minutes every day. It’s something like doing daily Yoga stretches. It exercises your diaphragm and massages your innards. It energizes your every cell and revitalizes your body.

How to Improve Your Health with LifeStream Breathing

• Stand in a place where you can open your arms wide.
• Bend your knees slightly, like you were doing a rumba.
• When you breath in, allow your belly to expand, even push your abdomen out. (This is hard for many women, especially those trained by mothers who thought girdles were essential underwear.) At the same time you are pushing your abdomen out, arch your lower back slightly.
• Flatten or round out your lower back when you breath out.

This breathing in and breathing out motion rocks your pelvis and flexes your spine.

That’s all there is to it. Just breath in and out in this manner for a few minutes. I count 25 of these Lifestream breaths each morning. There are other breathing exercises I also incorporate which can be found in the Hendricks’ book Conscious Breathing.

#4 Journal

What does journaling have to do with health? Writing in a journal is a wonderful way to tap into your Inner Wisdom, which is a wonderful way to tune into your health and well being. When you do it at the beginning of the day, it somehow clears away the clutter and debris in your  mind and allows you to stop running that tape of things to do, ideas to cogitate, or disagreements you rehash.

You may want to just start writing or you may want some help with the process. If you just want to write, get a journal and a pen or pens that really appeal to you. Currently I am using a black paper journal with iridescent pens. It’s totally satisfying! If you want to read a bit about the art and craft of journaling, I suggest two books: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

However you do it, writing every morning opens your being to new possibilities. Write whatever comes to your mind or whatever flows from your pen without worry about grammar or your teacher reading it or your snippy little sister reading it. You may never read it again or you may refer to it frequently. The point is to write, period.

#5 Walk

According to Dr. Andrew Weil, walking is about the best exercise you can do. Walk at a brisk pace. If you have been sedentary, start at 5 or 10 minutes a day and work up to 30 minutes. It’s wonderful to walk where the air is clean and plants and trees have been rejuvenating the air with oxygen. But if that isn’t convenient, by all means walk wherever you can. One way to get your daily exercise is to make some local destination one you walk to rather than drive.

I worked in a retirement community in which the average life span was 15 years higher than the national average. The residents had to walk from their townhouses and apartments to the main building to get their mail and at least one meal a day. May statisticians attributed their longevity to this exercise that 80 year olds don’t normally get. They certainly were a vibrant, lively group! I wish you equally good health and longevity.

#6 Don’t Eat Damaged Fats

I’ve made this the last tip for a healthy lifestyle because for me it was the hardest. Andrew Weil, MD made this activity in the first week of his Eight weeks to Optimum Health Program and I found it the hardest part of the whole program.

So here goes. Damaged fats fall into two main categories: fats that have been damaged by heating and fats that have been damaged by a manufacturing process called hydrogenation or partial hydrogenation.

If you totally avoid all things that contain hydrogenated fat, you will not buy much at all in a typical grocery store. When you start checking labels, partially hydrogenated fat is in almost everything (because it has a long shelf life, so expiration dates are longer than your expected lifetime if you eat these fats!)

The fats that are damaged by heating are another difficulty because avoiding them means you never eat deep fried foods, especially foods fried in the fast food manner. The heating and cooling and reheating is the problem. If restaurants only heated the oil once, fried foods would only be a problem of fat content and not that the fat itself cause disharmony in your body.

How to Avoid Damaged Fats

The simplest rule I could come up with was to always cook everything from “scratch.” Since I love cooking, this isn’t too big a problem for me to not buy packaged foods. I just buy ingredients. Avoiding reheated fat means that I give up my favorite food, French Fries. Since my thighs will appreciate my not consuming that food which is high on the glycemic index and simply full of fat, I am much better off ordering the Caesar salad with grilled chicken breast than the hamburger with French Fries. However, if I ever go back to Belgium, I may have to take a vacation from the French Fry restriction. Those frites are beyond good and what got me hooked on fries in the first place.

When you incorporate these health habits, your health will improve in many ways. While the FDA has not approved these tips, you can find ample documentation of their benefits in the writings of three well-know medical doctors: Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and Dr. Julian Whitaker.

  (C) Jacqueline Hale, 1999