5 Steps for Staying Young and Active
Getting older can be frustrating, especially when your body starts to slow down and not able to move like it used to. But many people don’t realize that there are natural anti-aging techniques to keep them young and vibrant for longer than they can imagine. Here are five natural anti-aging tips for staying young and active.
Hydration
Staying hydrated seems simple enough, yet so much of our population is chronically dehydrated. This can happen just by drinking less than half of the amount of water we should drink in a year. We should be drinking half of our body weights in ounces of water per day and most of us have a hard time getting there. Staying hydrated is the first step to saying young and healthy. Check out this video on how I teach you to catch up.
Movement
The second step to staying young and healthy is to get moving. Movement takes on different roles for different people. It can mean walking for some, but running, swimming, biking, or CrossFit for others.
Why is it important to stay active? It’s been said “strong women stay young,” and this is true for men as well.
Start moving your body for 30 minutes a day to stay young and healthy by getting your body to start working now. If you’re not getting out much right now and wondering how to stay active at home, the answer can be as simple as just walking.
If you have something that makes it difficult for you to walk or stay active, you need to get checked out somewhere that’s safe and easy to access, and that help comes from a chiropractor.
Maintain proper nerve-body communication
This means that you need proper nerve information going to every tissue, organ, and cell in your body for your body to function optimally. The brain is responsible for telling every tissue, organ, and gland in your body exactly what to do by pouring energy down your spine, out your nerves, to every tissue in your body (and your tissues depend on it).
Through life, we experience stresses, some that happen suddenly, and some over time. These stresses cause shifts in how energy goes from the brain through our spines with vital information that needs to reach every tissue and organ. When this energy is compromised, the organs at the end of these nerves don’t know what to do. They become weak, degenerate, and diseased.
The person to properly assess and correct the communication from the brain to the body is a corrective chiropractor.
If you’ve never been to a corrective chiropractor before, especially if you’re in Highland Park or its surrounding areas, feel free to reach out to us at Align Wellness Center. We’ve helped people all around the world manage their spines and nervous systems.
Nutrients
What goes into your body in terms of nutrients is vital to staying young and healthy. Nutrients are vital and essential and will take up steps 4 and 5 to being active and healthy.
First, let’s talk about food. We get most of our nutrients from food and while we want to eat a variety of foods and put in a variety of nutrients, there is a right way to do it and also foods to avoid. Through his 18 years of research and experience managing patients, Dr. Gregg has learned that the best diet for all of us is focused on a plate of 75 percent fresh fruits and vegetables and 25 percent clean, lean protein. That means to avoid grains, sugars, and processed food. Your first thought may be that you don’t love the idea of avoiding those things, but the closer you get to that, the better it will support you in being active, healthy, and remaining young longer.
Micronutrients
Micronutrients are the second component to what we eat. They’re things like vitamins and minerals that you consume regularly. But life can make it difficult to get these micronutrients with just our diets.
Dr. Gregg likes to start his patients off with the foundational three.
- Essential fatty acids or fish oil. You can get Dr. Gregg’s favorite ones here.
- High potency multivitamin multi-mineral. This is essential to cover the broad spectrum of nutrients you need to stay young and healthy, in a way that allows your body to absorb them.
- Vitamin D. Vitamin D is a nutrient that we typically get from the sun, but in Highland Park and the rest of Illinois (actually, all of the Midwest), there are about 6 months of the year we don’t get a lot of sunlight. This lack of sunlight leads to a significant amount of vitamin D deficiency.
Using the sun as a natural resource for vitamin D is better than having to supplement, so if you can, try to get in 30 minutes of sunlight outdoors every day. But most of us just can’t do that, so you may need support with a vitamin D supplement.
There are a lot of supplements out there and they aren’t all created equal. We use Metagenics which provides a physician’s grade supplement to guarantee potency and effectiveness, so you’ll know your body is getting what you take.
Please note, when using our links to purchase supplements, you’ll want to use AlignWC as your provider.
Once you’ve added these three supplements into your routine and eat clean for about 3 months, many troubling health conditions will go away and you start to feel energized.
If not, we can dig into deeper biochemistry to understand where the damage is stemming from and work on repairing it naturally. Check out this link for a 15 minute virtual consultation to see how we can help.
Bonus Step: Mindset… Think young, stay young
Here’s a bonus step to maintain activity levels in health and fitness. It has to do with your mindset. If you think you’re old, you begin acting old. So if you have it in your head that you’re young, vibrant, and active, then you’ll be young, active, and vibrant.
If you’ve never worked on your mindset concerning this, it can be really hard. There are a ton of great resources for this and we’re looking to do some follow-up blog posts relating to this, these 5 steps (and bonus #6), to massively help you to stay active, young, and vibrant for way longer than you thought you could.
If you feel that you’ve lost your vibrance, activity, and engagement, implementing these steps can reverse how you’re feeling, helping you get right back on track.
If you’re in Highland Park or any of its surrounding areas and would like some help with becoming your most active, vibrant self, contact us at Align Wellness Center. We’re located at 900 Skokie Blvd., Suite 113, Northbrook, IL, 60062.
