“So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.” – A. J. Reb Materi
Good health is a combination of everyday consistent actions—lifestyle habits. To make achieving health possible, think about what’s good for your gut. When the gut is strong, your body will be too. A healthy gut wards off diseases, and it’s only when weakened or overloaded that you become aware that something is wrong.
Since the majority of your immune system is in your gut, strong immunity is the same as good gut health. These simple natural steps are essential to a healthy gut:
Maintain a clean diet
Sometimes you may want a junk snack or meal. Occasionally you can enjoy this knowing that the majority of the time your diet is clean and nutritious. In other words, eating well allows you to get away with eating bad once in a while. The body can handle this.
Your main meals should provide you with the energy and building blocks you need from lean meats (protein), healthy fats (like extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil), and healthy carbohydrates like sweet potatoes, yams, brown rice, salads, etc.
However, micronutrients are often taken for granted because they do not make up the bulk of our meals, and they are needed in small quantities. Paradoxically, without them we don’t function well and become ill eventually. Examples of these are magnesium, which helps our body systems to function properly, and potassium, which helps with heart function and balances blood pressure levels.
A wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, nuts, and seeds will help you get these in.
Minimise infections:
The key is to keep the immune system in top working order to do what it does best—fighting off invaders and helping the body heal. It manages pathogens and toxic build-up. But when weakened or overloaded, this can manifest as sickness, especially when there are underlying problems.
So if you’re sick, focus on raising the efficiency of your immune system because when you do this, you’re already healing. Don’t wait for sickness to occur—stay ahead of it. By maintaining this God-given defence mechanism, you’re unlikely to experience sickness, and when you do, you can manage it confidently.
There are simple things you can do to maintain your immune health. Regularly consume antimicrobials to combat viruses, fungi, bacteria, and parasites on a regular basis. Antimicrobials are substances that kill or neutralise invaders that cause sickness. Examples of these are lemon, ginger, oregano, cinnamon, garlic, turmeric, apple cider vinegar, and honey. Some of which can combine nicely as a tea.
For parasites, which have become a growing problem, natural antimicrobials that have proven effective are papaya seeds, clove, garlic, wormwood, and black walnut.
Giving the body the needed time to rest and recuperate is essential to good recovery. So if your sick, good sleep is necessary to healing because the body repairs, rebuilds, and detoxes while resting. Staying hydrated and increasing your nutrition provides your immune system the tools it needs to recover balance in your body. Imagine a soldier without his weapon!
Your body can take up to 14 days or longer to recover from infections depending on your physiological and emotional stresses. This brings us to our next point, managing stress.
Minimising stress
When people become ill, usually stress is a major contributor. You may take stress for granted because it’s common. Childhood trauma, persistent worrying, and negative self-talk depress your body’s systems. Your body feels your emotions and is activated by them when you’re happy, sad, or angry. When you’re laughing or hating on someone, your body carries these energies. In other words, your cells response to every emotion you feel and behaves accordingly.
Negative emotions create an imbalance in your body. You have the power to generate healing in your body by nurturing healing energies. It’s not just about being positive. It’s about training your cells to remain in a healing state.
The digestive system houses the majority of your immune system, and it’s grossly affected by negative emotions. Persistent anxiety depletes your gut of its energy and limits its function during infection. This enables invaders to have a field day, which you experience as prolonged sickness.
Learning to reframe the way you view challenges can immediately improve the function of your internal defences. This brings us to another stressor on the body—drugs.
Avoid long-term drug use (when possible)
We are referring to both illegal and legal drugs. Illegal drugs are unregulated, making overdose possible. Their addictive nature drastically increases health risks and oxidative stress in the body, i.e., damaged cells. Unfortunately, legal drugs can have similar effects.
If a legal drug is supposed to help heal the body, why are some drugs used indefinitely? They may argue that drugs generally don’t promise healing—which only leads to more questions. Like, what’s happening at the source of the problem that is not being addressed?
An example of one such drug is statins, used for high cholesterol. Some drugs may provide benefits in the short term but can be harmful over a long period of time. Statins have been linked to liver damage, cognitive issues like Alzheimer’s, and increased risk for diabetes, to name a few health threats.
Most legal drugs are less about healing and more about managing symptoms. This further proves their use should be temporary at best since they are not focused on addressing root causes. In addition, the side effects they cause only increase the number of pills a patient will have to take. More pills are given to mask side effects from previous drugs.
The benefits of limiting long-term use of meds were clearly observed when working with non-medicated patients in their 80s and 90s, who had their full mentality, as opposed to younger patients on prolonged meds who died from Alzheimer’s.
In conclusion
As the good old book says: “He that is faithful in little is also faithful in much.” Luke 16:10. The opposite is also true. He that is not faithful in little is unfaithful in much.
The many little things we do have a great impact on the quality of our health overall.
