Becoming more healthy doesn’t have to involve major diet changes or completely rearranging your life. Here are three easy things that you can do, starting today, that can make a significant impact in your life.
#1 – Eat More Vegetables (and a Wider Variety of Vegetables!)
Here’s the thing about vegetables – most people don’t eat enough of them. Vegetables are like free calories. You can eat as many as you would like and it’s not going to have a negative effect on your health (unless you are sensitive to certain ones). Additionally, the more vegetables you eat, the less likely you are going to eat other things that are bad for you. If you think about what is on your plate when you eat a meal, the majority of your plate should be vegetables.
In addition to not eating enough vegetables, people tend to eat the same types of vegetables. It’s important to eat a wide variety of vegetables. Fortunately, vegetables are color-coded. All you have to do is pick different colors of vegetables and you will most likely get a wide variety of nutrients. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t rotate your green vegetables. Rotate your greens to ensure your getting all the nutrients and so you don’t get bored. Lastly, in order to get the most benefit out of vegetables, try to eat them raw. Cooking them takes many of the nutrients out of the vegetables. So, for maximum efficiency raw is almost always best.
To take it a step even further the most recent research shows that maintaining gut microbiome diversity is the best thing you can do to stay healthy! And the way that you do that is by eating as many different types of vegetables as you can. Not just different colors, which helps with micronutrient diversity, but different types! So make sure to explore different vegetables and don’t be afraid to try new things all the time. The bacteria in your gut feed off of these and the only way that you can keep them healthy is by feeding them all the different types of vegetables.
#2 – Sleep More
Sleep is one of the most vastly underestimated components of your overall health. Sleep is where we regenerate, grow and heal. It’s where all the damage that the body goes through during the day is able to heal for the next day. This includes your brain, which needs sleep to be able to function at its highest level. There are three pieces of sleep that you should understand: duration, timing and quality.
- Duration: This is how long you sleep in a given night. Everyone is a little different, but a good number to shoot for is 8 hours of sleep every night. Just know, if less than 8, more is always better.
- Timing: This is what time during the day you are sleeping. As a general rule of thumb, you should try to get as close to circadian rhythms as possible, which means going to bed when the sun goes down and waking up when the sun comes up. That is what our body is naturally meant to do. If we don’t do that, or at least don’t have a consistent time of day we go to bed and wake up, it can seriously throw off your hormones, affecting your health in a significant way.
- Quality: This is the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. When you go into a deep sleep or REM sleep, your body is able to heal and regenerate. If you are constantly waking up, or if you are still sleeping, but you aren’t achieving deep sleep, it can cause problems. There are a variety of things that can cause this, including dysfunctional hormone levels.
Make it a goal to work on sleeping better. Try all the tricks that you can for better sleep, but seek out professional help if those don’t work so you can start dramatically improving your brain health and recovery potential.
#3 – Exercise at a High Intensity
Exercise is not just important for your muscle and cardiovascular health. It’s essential for your body to be able to function at 100% capacity. However, in order to get the full benefits of working out, you have to exercise at a high intensity. It doesn’t have to be for long, even just 5 minutes of high intensity working out activates hormones for growth, blood flow, reducing inflammation, and many other things that can drastically improve overall health. Exercise is the number one way to reduce stress, and overcome anxiety and depression.
However, the flip side to this is also true. Excessive high intensity exercise can actually start to damage certain systems in the body, creating excess inflammation and affecting the adrenal system. The trick is to be sure to exercise consistently, but just not too much!
If you want to be healthier today, follow these three steps. They are minor changes, but can vastly improve your overall health.