Enjoying Healthy Living

I started an Enjoying Healthy Living online community, not because I am a perfect specimen of healthy humanity, but because I love doing just that…enjoying healthy living, and I want to share it with others. I love the benefits of a healthier life style, and it gives me a lot of pleasure to know that through this website and the FB page, people are inspired to live and eat more healthily and feel healthier!

Enjoying Healthy Living isn’t about just eating salads (as good as they are), the latest diets, starving yourself into skinniness, or being miserable.  It’s about enjoying life and feeling great!  It’s about natural living that helps to fuel your body and mind with the power nature intended.  It’s about reducing as much as possible the man-made toxins of processed living that plague our society and our health with disease, so we can live whole and well!  And it’s about being better stewards of our environment.

Healthy living isn’t about perfectionism either.  It’s not about getting everything ‘right’ all the time.  I have days when I don’t do the exercise I should, or eat something I don’t normally eat when invited to dinner, or buy a product that might not come from the best source as far as conscience is concerned.  It is about caring for ourselves and our families in a way that shows some respect for these precious temples we live in called our bodies, and for this one-and-only earth we live on. The benefits far outweigh the effort of caring.

A more natural lifestyle contributed significantly to the improvement of hyperthyroidism up to a complete cure.  It has improved my skin, my hair, my moods, and kept me looking younger.  It has helped me to maintain a healthy weight, especially through menopause, and to minimize wrinkles, fat and cellulite.  It has helped me maintain good energy levels and think more clearly. It has improved both my conscience and my convictions.  It has also healed my body from frequent migraine headaches and annual bronchitis. If it can do that for me, I know there are benefits for you too!

I haven’t been doing this all by myself.  For the past 30 years, I have thoroughly enjoyed and had the privilege of learning about healthy living together with my family, and passing on to my kids, and others, all the enthusiasm, knowledge, joys, tips and info I can.  We have learned a lot, and always love to keep on learning!

For over 30 years, I have been learning about, cooking and eating natural foods, using alternative remedies, hunting for and using natural products, taking a natural, preventative approach to sickness, and been a ‘health educator and inspirer’ to those around me.  Being able to reach even more people was a great reason to start the Enjoying Healthy Living FB page and include a section on this website. Please take what you need from here to hopefully become better informed and inspired to enjoy healthy living!

I am not a medical doctor and I don’t profess to be a qualified health/medical professional.  And of course, I have to say that none of the information on this site is intended to take the place of seeing a qualified medical health professional should you feel the need to do so.

5 Simple Steps for Looking Younger Longer

(from my forthcoming book, to be published later this year!)

1. Eat the right foods

To stay looking younger longer you need to eat a whole food, living, plant-based diet, which is as organic as possible…and drink plenty of water!

The best way to think about eating the right foods is to think about eating foods as naturally as possible and as close to nature as possible.  That means, don’t eat foods that have been unnecessarily processed, stripped of goodness, or added to in the form of preservatives, artificial colours, synthetic vitamins, hydrogenised oils, high salt content and refined sugars.

There are so many diets, and fads.  But it doesn’t have to be confusing.    We just need to focus on getting back to simplicity and nature.

2. Cut out sugar

We love it, crave it, and soothe our emotions with it, but sugar is an enemy in a sweet disguise! Sugar ages you.  That’s a fact.  Refined sugar is responsible for a very long list of health problems. It has the same effect on the dopamine receptors of your brain as a drug does to an addict. It suppresses the immune system, causes obesity, heart disease, premature ageing, yeast infections, diabetes, osteoporosis…and that’s just the beginning of well over 100 serious health problems!
Cutting out sugar feels hard on those thousands of little taste buds on the tongue, but they are trainable. Once you get use to not eating sugar, you find you don’t want it! Your brain knows what is good for it and helps the body adapt quickly, if you give it a chance. Your body will love you.
You don’t have to ditch sweetness altogether! Try making natural, delicious, wholesome recipes with bananas, dried dates and raisins, or a little raw, unpasteurised honey. These foods have great taste and provide you with some sweetness and vitamins and minerals at the same time. And the sweetest part of all is that you will feel better and be healthier!

3. Exercise

If you don’t exercise, you are missing out on a major part of staying younger longer.  Of course, our bodies do age.  But we can slow down that ageing process through exercise. 

Age causes us to lose muscle tone.  Exercise helps us to build and retain that muscle tone.  Age, some medications genetics, and lack of exercise can lead to pockets of unsightly cellulite.  While some people will be more prone to cellulite than others, exercise helps to minimise it, reduce water retention, and firm up the body again. 

Stress is a major factor in the ageing process.  Exercise helps to reduce and minimise stress.

4. Manage stress

Stress is very damaging, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

When we are under stress, certain hormones, especially cortisol, are released into the body.  These stress hormones cause rushes of adrenaline which cause us to live in a fight/flight mode.  This sets the body on alert all the time and is an exhausting place to live.  This can lower immune function and open the way to illness.  It also puts stress on all the body functions, causing aging.

5. Use natural products

It’s not just what you eat that matters.  The cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning and other products you use are really important!  Everything you use on your skin, in your mouth, on your hair, on your hands, on your floors, on your sink, can be absorbed into your body through your skin, eyes and nose, and respiratory system.

If you use chemical products to clean, brush your teeth with toothpaste which contains unnatural chemicals, use moisturizers and other beauty products that contain toxic chemicals, those same chemicals will be entering into your blood stream and consequently be taken by the blood into every cell of your body.

I can’t emphasise this enough!  What you use outside your body is just as important as what you put inside your body!

Some people change to a healthier diet, but pay no attention to the cosmetics and toiletries they use.  They eat a whole food diet and smear toxic chemicals on their face.  They improve their eating habits and daily plunge their hands into chemicalized dish-washing liquid.

We must think more rationally and sensibly rather than just following habits.  It makes no sense to try and improve our health through healthy eating if we are going to pay no attention to the other products we use.  Staying younger longer is very much about using common sense.