The Eight Pieces of Health
I believe there are eight components of health that need to be addressed for optimal functioning.
Movement
Nervous System
Light
Sleep
Breath
Water
Food
Mindset
Movement is not just exercise, but also the absence of stationary behavior. The longest living people in the world don’t spend a lot of time in a gym. They move in lower intensities more frequently throughout the day. So you’re 55-minute Pilates session 1-3x/week is a good start, but you also need to examine how much you’re sitting the rest of the time.
The aspect of the nervous system that I like to work with is the Autonomic Nervous System, which can be sympathetically driven like when you’re stressed or in danger or parasympathetically driven like when you’re relaxed. We need to be in a parasympathetic state more often for good health. When our nervous system is operating more parasympathetically, we can run repair and regeneration programs. We don’t run clean up on our cells when we are worried about our survival. So if you’re chronically stressed, you’re not repairing your proteins, organelles, nor replacing cells not worth using anymore. Years and years of this improper maintenance, and you’re functioning sub-optimally.
Light affects our biology more than we know. Every cell in your body wants time information so it can understand when to run certain programs. The time information is gathered by the light our eyes and skin are exposed to. This not only sets circadian rhythms, but also affects production of neurotransmitters like serotonin and hormones like melatonin and even endorphins (yes, you can get a “runner’s high” from sun exposure). The modern lifestyle of spending over 90% of our days indoors under artificial light and then blocking sunlight when we finally go outside with sunglasses, sunscreen, and clothes, means that our cells are confused about what time it is and not making the right chemicals at the right times.
You absolutely must sleep well if you expect to fully benefit from the exercise you’re doing. Exercise doesn’t make you stronger, it actually creates microinjuries in the tissues. It’s during rest and recovery that they’re repaired to make you more resilient to that same exercise load next time. So if you’re not sleeping well and at the right times, you’re missing out on major repair programs in the body. Furthermore, when you sleep, your brain shrinks, your cerebral spinal fluid production increases, and you essentially power wash your brain. Inside the cells, you run autophagy and mitophagy (where you break down proteins or mitochondrial proteins that are no longer functioning well and replace them) and even apoptosis (programmed cell death for cells not performing well). Good sleep is under appreciated for how much it does for the body. And medication-assisted sleep is not as restorative, nor is sleep after exposure to a lot of artificial light (like watching TV before bed).
Our breath is the only part of our autonomic nervous system that we can consiously control. You cannot consciously change your heart rate, blood pH, or digestive enzymes. But you can change your breathing rate, volume, and timing. This makes it a wonderful “hack” of the autonomic nervous system. Joseph Pilates said “above all, learn how to breathe correctly” and while we choreograph the breath during Pilates exercises, there’s so much more power behind the breath outside of the studio and in your everyday life. One way to determine the potency a strategy might have on your body is to determine how important that strategy is to life. We can go without food for weeks, without water for days, but only a few minutes without breathing.
The most people usually think about water’s affects on health is in hydration and trying to drink more of it. But it’s not that simple. We need water closer to its natural source—water that’s been filtered through the earth and picked up minerals along the way. Water that moves in a manner supporting its clustering and potential. Water free of additives, like chlorine and flouride, that have deleterious affects on our tissues. And in addition to drinking water that is full of life, there are also strategies to support your body’s own production of water. You see, the food you eat gets broken down into electrons that are utilized by our cell’s mitochondria to create ATP. The fourth protein in the electron transport chain actually generates a biological form of water called Exclusion Zone (EZ) water. This water behave differently than typical liquid water in a glass or the bulk water found in your lymphatic system. It’s more like a gel water, similar to the gel that forms around a chia seed. With the right strategies, you can not just drink pure water but also generate more biological water in your cells. If you’re chronically dehydrated or dry, this is especially important for you.
The way we usually think about food is in terms of macronutrients—carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. But really, food is light. There is no food on this planet that could grow in the absence of light. Plants utilize light to make carbohydrates and animals eat plants. So everything you eat is light information. What if the light from your food going into your gut doesn’t match the light from your eyes and skin? What is your body to make of those mixed messages? Additionally, we think a calorie is a calorie and if your input of calories matches your output, your body weight is stable. It turns out that timing also matters. A calorie eaten in the morning under natural light will affect your cells differently than a calorie eating after sunset under artificial light.
If you want to have the most potency on your body, I think you will find it by working on your mindset. So many research studies have shown that your mindset has the power to completely change your physiology, from making painful joints function just fine because subjects thought they had a surgery when they hadn’t, to literally turning back the clock on multiple aging metrics just because subjects were asked to act like they were decades younger (the 1979 Counterclockwise study conducted by Harvard professor Ellen Langer). At Optimize, we’ll teach you a variety of tools for altering your mindset and some of the most potent ones rely on the mind the least. After all, it is hard to change the mind with the mind.
By tackling these eight pieces of the pie of health, you’ll be giving your body the best foundation for proper functioning. When nagging symptoms appear, like depression or brain fog or joint stiffness or low back pain, don’t suppress them with medication. Listen to the signals your body is giving you and realize that the cells are operating suboptimally. That is the best time to start making lifestyle changes to support them, before they snowball into a more significant issue.
If you feel a little off and know that you could be sleeping better, having more energy, experiencing more mental clarity and creativity, feeling like your body is operating without chaos and inflammation, then consider my Lifestyle Coaching. The best time to act is early and preventatively. With a few changes to your movement, nervous system, light, sleep, breath, water, food and mindset, you can give your cells and tissues what they need to function optimally.