March 4, 2023

5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Health Now! | Ep 107

5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Health Now! | Ep 107

In this episode, I share 5 easy steps to help you improve your health. You don’t need to do them all at once, simply listen to them all and choose the one that you feel will be the easiest shift to make and then once you’ve mastered that you can move on to the next one. I share why each of these steps is so important, in the hope that in understanding the why, you will be more motivated to take action, instead of taking your health for granted, until you don’t have your health and then wishing you’d taken better care of it.

 

Just Get Flux Bluelight blocking software:

https://justgetflux.com

Link to 5-5-7 breathing technique mentioned in episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdWQnPhH-dA&list=PLt1E3U28wOB9HDspRlX5le1Da0Gkyv39d&index=18&t=11s

Health Kickstart Program:

https://yourguidedhealthjourney.com/health-kick-start-detox/

Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney

Your Guided Health Journey Membership

https://yourguidedhealthjourney.com/membership-programs/

About the Host:

Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and Master Practitioner in NLP and Timeline Therapy and a Board Designated Hypnotherapy Teacher Trainer,  helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements.  Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.

Melissa is the winner of the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022 for Whistler.

Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 60 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get get started.

 

Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney

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Transcript
Unknown:

Imagine getting up every day full of energy is if you were in your 20s. Again, what would that be? Like?

Melissa Deally:

What would that be worth to you?

Melissa Deally:

What is your health worth to you? Think about it. Your health isn't everything. But without it, everything else is nothing. And yet too many of us are taking it for granted. until something goes wrong. No one wakes up hoping to be diagnosed with a disease or chronic illness. And yet, we've never been taught how to be proactive in our health through our school system, or public health. As a registered health coach and integrative health practitioner, I believe it is time this information is made available to everyone. Combining new knowledge around your health and the ability to do my functional medicine lab tests in the comfort of your own home will allow you to optimize your health for today in all your tomorrow's. Don't wait for your wake up call.

Melissa Deally:

Welcome back to another episode of The don't wait for your wake up call podcast. I am Melissa dealey and I'm excited to be here with you again today. And I want to thank all of my listeners for the time that you spend tuning into these episodes to learn about your health and improve your life and to if you're a brand new listener, thank you for being here as well. I hope you find this information helpful. Today, I want to talk to you about five easy steps to improve your health. So often, when we think about our health, we think that it's we don't know where to start, it can feel overwhelming. There's so much information out there. How do I know what's real, what's true and where to start. So I just want to allow you to start very simply with these easy steps because when you start a process, simply it's easier for you to stick with it than if you were to try and do everything all at once and it gets overwhelming and it becomes too much. But first of all, before I dive into the episode, I just want to share this testimonial with you that I recently received this person Diana Benson says, I went to Melissa to help me get over my craving for chips, it was my go to comfort food for decades, after 20 minutes with Melissa, my cravings are gone, I no longer have to use willpower, as it is no longer even a thought. Thank you, Melissa. And Thank you Diana for sending that in. When I worked with Diana, I used a technique tapping into the power of her unconscious mind so that we don't have to use willpower anymore, in order for her to be able to create lasting change. So five steps to easily improve your health starting now. As you know, this whole podcast is about health education and giving you ways to improve your health. And I also want to empower you in your health by ensuring that you know that you are not at the whim of your genes. And that instead, you can absolutely impact your health outcomes based on the actions you take today. And what I mean by all of that is the fact that epigenetics now proves to us that just because your parents might have had heart disease, or there might be breast cancer in your family or some other form of cancer, that that doesn't mean you're automatically going to get those diseases, and you don't have to feel like I got bad genes. Really, what that is, the amount of impact of your parents health on your health outcomes is actually only five to 10%, that direct genetic connection is five to 10%. The other 90 to 95% is the environment you create inside your body by the lifestyle that you live. And so this is where you can be really empowered in your health because you can choose to create a body that is inhospitable to disease, so that the switches that would turn on your genes for the diseases, you're genetically predisposed, predisposed to never get switched on. I'm going to say that again, those switches never have to get switched on if you create a body that is inhospitable to disease. And so that's what I want to share with you today is you can make the choices you can be empowered in your health. What you do today matters for your health one year, five years, 10 years from now. People can have Alzheimer's for 20 to 30 years before it ever gets diagnosed. And so that's what I mean by what you do today matters and you can just start taking baby steps to make small changes, so that you are changing your long term health outcomes. So these five steps I'm going to share with you today, you probably already know, however, are you implementing them. And I want to not only share the steps, but explain why and how in taking this action, it will improve your health, because I believe when you understand the why it drives you to taking action rather than just being told to do something. And so that's why I love sharing the why. And you don't have to implement all five at once, as I said, implement them one at a time, start with the easiest one for you do that for a few weeks. And then when you feel you've got that one down, move on to the next one. And these are in no particular order either. So like I said, pick the one that feels the easiest to you that you want to start implementing now. Hydration, how much should you be drinking, on any given day, in order to give your body the hydration that it needs and hydration is incredibly important for our body, our brain is made up of fat and water, our body is largely made up of water. And when we're not giving ourselves enough hydration, we can get a headache. As the brain starts to kind of dry out, we age faster as the body and the cells and the organs start to dry out. And they can't function as well. So hydration is incredibly important and is one of those things, well, how much is the right amount to be drinking, you might have heard eight cups a day. And then you think, Well, I'm way smaller than the next person is that really true. So I'm going to give you a ratio that works with the size of your body. And that is that on any given day, you should be hydrating 50% of your body weight in ounces. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 50% of that is 75 pounds. So can we say 75 ounces when we're converting to water. And that is almost eight cups, right. But if you weigh 200 pounds, then you need to be drinking 100 ounces. If you weigh only 100 pounds, you need to be drinking 50 ounces. That is a way to easily be able to calculate how much you need to drink based on your body size. And that's on any given day. Now, you want to increase that if it's a super hot day and you're running around and you're sweating a lot, you want to increase that when you're doing a detox program, when I run my detox programs with people, I have them increased to two thirds of their body weight because we really want to flush all of those toxins out at 50% of your body weight on a normal day is a great starting point. And you may not be drinking that much right now. And so you don't want to just suddenly go from maybe you're drinking only 30% of your body weight. And if you suddenly go to 50% of your body weight that can feel like a lot. So just increase slowly over the course of the next week until you get to that 50% point. And some people say they forget to hydrate, I always have a mug at my desk in my car, everywhere I go, I always have something with me. And you may not be in that habit yet. But you can start to create that habit. Put a water bottle in the car, put a water bottle beside your bed, have one at your desk, et cetera, so that you can easily hydrate because by the time you feel thirsty it already means the body is dehydrated. And ideally you want to be drinking throughout the day so that you don't even feel thirsty. You can buy water bottles on Amazon and I'm sure elsewhere that actually have the times of the day marked on them. So that if to build the habit, you could use that and then by 10 o'clock you have to have drunk this much and by 12 o'clock this much By two o'clock this much. And in following that it just helps you realize oh I haven't drunk enough and it's now noon I need to catch up on my how much water I've drunk. So that works well for people. And then also I want to share with you what is considered hydration. So really good hydration for the body is water and herbal teas. Protein shakes or shakes that are full of all your vitamins and minerals as well. So the detox shakes that I use with my clients that's also considered hydration. Water that you've added the juice of half a lemon or half a lime is considered hydration and it gives you some good electrolytes in there. The things that are not considered hydration and don't count in the amount that you're calculating for 50% of your body weight. Are your coffee your Are caffeinated teas, any alcohol, any pop, any energy drinks, none of those are actually considered hydration for the body. So, in your calculations, you don't include any of that when you're figuring out your 50% of your body weight. Also, the body does better when it hydrates with warm fluids. So room temperature, or warmer rather than ice cold, the body is better able to absorb the warm hydration rather than cold. And so that's something else for you to factor in, as you slowly start to increase your hydration levels. So the next

Melissa Deally:

tip that I want to share with you point number two is sleep. Now 70 million Americans struggle with sleep every single night. And when we don't get enough sleep that is negatively impacting our health, sleep is absolutely critical to our body, being able to restore, rejuvenate, heal, as well as detox overnight. And the average human needs seven to nine hours of sleep every night. If you're unwell and healing, you need to be closer to the nine hour mark. If you're doing really well and you feel good. Maybe you only need seven hours of sleep. But too many people are surviving on five and six hours of sleep a night. And that's surviving it is not thriving. And you might think you're okay with it right now. But again, what you do today matters and down the road, you are going to have negative health issues because of the fact that you weren't getting enough sleep right now. So sleep is absolutely critical. When we don't get enough sleep, it starts to break down the balance in our gut of our good healthy gut microbes. It makes us less resilient to the stresses that we face each and every day when we go out into the world in this stressful world that we live in. And as a result between the stress being higher, and then our gut health being lower, it wreaks havoc on our immune system. And it when we're not getting enough sleep, we are more prone to getting sick. And again, you probably already know that. But maybe you just needed to hear that reminder today, so that you can start to focus on prioritizing your sleep. And that's really what I invite people to do is prioritize your sleep. So often, we simply get busy in our day. And we just want to get that one more thing done. And we squeeze out our sleep time rather than prioritizing our sleep. By figuring out what time do I have to get up tomorrow morning to start my day based on wherever I need to be. And then making sure that you're getting into bed, seven and a half to eight hours prior to your wakeup time. So that you have time, once you're in bed, to be reading, having some quiet time and then the time it takes to fall asleep after you turn out the light. So in order to do that, it might mean that you need to be getting off screens earlier to get yourself into bed earlier. And again. That's something that it's very hard for people to suddenly go to bed one hour earlier every night. But you can do it in small increments, you can set alarms in your watch, to remind yourself to get off the screens earlier. But just shift your bedtime 15 minutes earlier every night for a week. And then move it forward again 15 minutes the next week. And so at the end of the month, you'll be going to bed an hour earlier. And that's a lot more doable for people. Getting off screens is really important too, because screens put out blue light, and blue light actually blocks the production of melatonin from in your body for 30 minutes after you get off screens for every hour you've been on screen. So if you've been on screens with blue light coming into your eyes, which is the light of high noon, for three hours in the evening, when you get off your device, then you won't be able to produce melatonin for another 90 minutes after that. And your body needs to produce melatonin for you to get into that deep restorative sleep. So if you get off screens earlier, you're going to have a much more deep restorative sleep. And if you can't get off screens earlier, you want to be blocking that blue light that's coming into your eyes. And you can do that on phones with night shift options in your settings. You can go into display and brightness you can turn on night shift. Mine's turned on from 5pm to 7am every day so it automatically turns on. So if I'm looking at my phone after dark I'm getting yellow light rather than blue light. You can do the same on your laptop computer's, you might have that option, I just noticed that mine had that option. The other day, however, I've been using something else for quite some time now called just get flux, which is a free download. And I'll put it in the show notes. And you can simply download that, download that and it has a GPS system in it, it knows where you are, it knows what time dusk is in your region, and it will automatically turn on yellow lights. For television screens, you can buy blue light blocking glasses and wear them. And that can have a profound positive impact on people's sleep that I've had clients tell me they were night owls, and they could never go to bed between before two or 3am. And it's because they were watching television late into the night with this blue light coming into their eyes. And their body wasn't able to produce melatonin and they weren't able to get to sleep. And as soon as they started using blue light blocking glasses, they noticed a profound improvement. And blue light blocking glasses are not expensive. If you have prescription glasses, you can actually take them in and have a blue light blocking glaze added to your prescription glasses as well if you haven't already done that. So I highly recommend that you address blue light that you may be getting into your eyes from all of the devices that we have in our world today. In order to help improve your body's ability to produce melatonin and you to be able to get into a more deep restorative sleep. If you're enjoying my contents, and someone that wants to step into being proactive in your health and learning more, I would love to invite you to join my membership community. There's a link in the show notes for only 1999 a month, you get access to all of my content. And there's a lot as well as weekly calls that you can come and get your health questions answered.

Unknown:

It's truly priceless. I'd love to see you join the community, check out the link in the show notes.

Melissa Deally:

The other thing that's important with that is having a bedtime routine, because the brain also needs to have a trigger as to when it should start producing melatonin because it knows you're starting to get ready for bed. Back in our hunter gatherer days, we didn't have electricity. And the brain knew when to produce melatonin because of dusk. But we no longer have that trigger with all the lights we have in our house. And they then again screens. And so we need to teach our brain when it is time to start producing melatonin. And the brain figures that out when you follow a specific routine. And that routine can just be four to six steps that you do in the same order every night as you're getting ready for bed. And it can take you know half an hour. And it can be things like you know, walking the dog around the block, maybe it's tidying up the kitchen, maybe it's taking a shower or bath and then brushing your teeth and putting on your PJs and getting into bed and writing your journal or reading a book. Do these in the same order every night over the course of the next month, as you bring your bedtime forward by 15 minutes each week. And you will notice that you are much better able to sleep. Right now what most of the population is doing is trying to sleep on demand. They go go go all day, do everything that they do. And then now they're tired and it's time for bed. And they get into bed and they turn up a light and they expect the body to just be able to sleep. And it doesn't work that way. It's impacted by you know what we've eaten how close to bedtime we've eaten how much sugar has been in the food we've eaten today how much coffee we have running through our veins, whether the body is still hopped up on cortisol, which means it's not producing melatonin, are we producing melatonin? All of these things impact our sleep. And we're not taught this. Because we believe since we come out of the womb and we know how to sleep, that we don't need to learn how to sleep. And yet this information is so important because we have so many things in our busy lives these days that are negatively impacting our sleep. So sleep again, just pick one of those areas that you want to improve upon. And you know, even if with hydration, if you're reducing your coffee, because it's not hydrating and you're choosing other forms of hydration, you're also going to be benefiting your sleep, because coffee has an eight hour half life. And if you have a cup of coffee at eight o'clock in the morning, you still have half of that caffeine running around in your veins at 4pm and half of that again at midnight. And if you've had more than one cup of coffee in the day, that can be negatively impacting your sleep depending on how sensitive you are to it. And a lot of people don't realize this, and they drink coffee to give them the energy and wake up their brain to get them through the day. But then it's negatively impacting their sleep. And then the follow up You haven't slept well the following morning you wake up and you start your day with coffee and you do it all again. So when I work with clients, I have them removed coffee for a couple of weeks so they can start to understand their sensitivity to coffee and how coffee is impacting their sleep. And in many cases, they choose not to go back to coffee because they realize they sleep better without it and they wake up feeling more mentally alert, and energized. So you can do that for yourself as well. Tip number three is to give yourself brain breaks during the day, we are always go go go trying to get everything done. And we're not giving our brain a chance to take a break. And in this stressed out world that we live in, we really do need to give our brain just little five minute breaks. And they can be done in so many different ways. So it's whatever resonates with you, it could literally just be going outside for five minutes and breathing in the fresh air and a short little walk. It could even be just sitting at your desk and closing your eyes and kind of putting your head down for five minutes. And just really focusing on your breathing. It could be literally just taking a five minute break to chat with a friend and get out of work mode and just kind of get into fun mode and play mode. It can be so many different things that you can do in your day, just getting up and changing the location of where you're at moving away from your your desk in your office, and moving into a different space in the office or in your home if you work from home, and allowing yourself to breathe. Breathing really is a fabulous way to get out of the stress state and into the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest state. And we have our breath with us all the time. And it's so powerful because in so needed, because when we are in this stress state all the time, we are negatively impacting our health. Just like with our sleep, we are breaking down the balance in our gut microbiome. Because high stress is killing off the good bacteria in our gut, just like poor sleep does the same thing. And as a result, we end up with imbalances in our gut, which can cause to cause all sorts of health issues down the line from Candida overgrowth, to bacterial overgrowth, to digestive issues, not being able to, you know, enjoy eating food, because we've got pain associated with eating our food, or we've got gas and bloating, et cetera, et cetera, maybe constipation, maybe diarrhea. Stress is very often the root cause for all of this. And so if you can mitigate your stress by taking little five minute breaks through the day, just start off with taking one five minute break a day for the first week. And then in the next week, can you build into five minute breaks. And the next week, maybe you get three five minute breaks into your day. And notice the difference in how you feel and know that you are significantly helping your body and your brain be able to cope and be on a healthier trajectory. When we are under high stress, and we're not giving ourselves these breaks, we can't even digest our food properly, because digestion is turned off in the high stress state. And I've done podcasts solely on stress in the past. So very early on, you can go back to the very beginning of my episodes, and go dive deeper into those episodes. To understand why. However, I just want you to know that high stress has our digestive system shut down. And if we continue to put food into our mouth, the body can't even break that down properly. We're not getting the vitamins and minerals that we need in order to function well. We burn through our reserves. And pretty soon we get to a place of depletion. And that's when you're dragging your butt you're feeling exhausted, you're not able to function at your best. And you need to assess the stress in your life. And what do you need to do in order to support that And who might you need to get help from at that point too. high stress can also cause hormonal imbalances. And I see this all the time, particularly in women, because in a high stress state, the body not only has shut down digestion, but it's also shut down procreation, the body's trying to produce more cortisol and adrenaline to give you the energy to get to safety because that's what it thinks you need. And as a result, it's not producing progesterone, and yet it's still producing estrogen and we're getting estrogen through Xeno estrogens from a lot of personal care products and plastics and toxic forms of estrogen that the body's getting in. And we end up in an estrogen dominance state. And that's not a state that anybody wants to be in either because an estrogen dominant state can then drive slow your thyroid, it can put you on the path to type two diabetes, it can put you on the path to breast cancer. All because stress has caused an imbalance between your estrogen and progesterone levels. So these are things that are really important to know about. They're also things we can test for So if it's something that you're concerned about, oh, that could be me, we can test for this and see if that's where you're at, and then know exactly how to rebalance the hormones. A lot of people are popping and acids day in and day out because of digestive struggles. And if you read the label on the bottle, it actually says they should not be taken for more than two weeks at a time without your doctor knowing about it. And yet people are buying them over the counter and using them for years and years and years. And that further worsens your digestive health, even though in the moment you think it's helping, because it's helping resolve your heartburn issues, et cetera, is making things worse, because the fact that you need them in the first place is because of high stress that has caused a sphincter at the bottom of your esophagus to malfunction. And basically, it doesn't seal up nice and tightly anymore, once it lets food into the stomach cavity and it gets floppy, which means the little bit of stomach acid that you have can get out and escape up into the esophagus. And that's what you associate with being heartburn. And what we need to have happen is we need to be lowering the stress we need to be

Melissa Deally:

allowing the digestive system to turn on properly by lowering the stress and the body will heal that sphincter because that is what the body is designed to do. While we keep taking antacids, we're simply ignoring the root cause of why you need them. And also stopping the body from making hydrochloric acid, the acid that you think you have too much of and then we put food in and we expect the body to break it down. And they can't because we've stopped all of the hydrochloric acid being produced. So we get into this negative cycle with our digestive system, which causes all sorts of gut health issues. And we don't want that, because Hippocrates said over 2000 years ago that all digestion or sorry, all health starts in the gut. So we don't want to be damaging our gut health. And we definitely want to be focusing on it. So brain breaks, taking little breaks, taking the time to breathe and breathe deeply. I've done health hacks on 557 breathing, I'll link that up in the show notes as well. So you can learn about that technique that's really easy to do takes less than five minutes. And you can start to implement that, you know, in the first week, once a day. And in the second week, maybe try to get it in twice a day. Find things that you enjoy for your brain breaks, just give your brain that break, allow your stress levels to come down in order to ensure that you're looking after your gut health, your hormone health, et cetera, and that you're not ending up really deficient in your vitamin and mineral levels. The fourth tip that I want to share with you after I hydrate from all of this talking is detoxing. It's something I talk about all the time we live in a toxic world. Since World War 244,000 manmade chemicals have been introduced into our world and they are getting into our body, through our waterways, our airways, our skin, etcetera, etcetera, our food. And it's too much for our liver and our kidneys to be able to deal with. They are our detoxifying organs, but they are overburdened and undernourished, overburdened because of that high number of toxins that we have. And then undernourished because of our soil depleted systems, soil systems that mean that we're not getting the nutrients that we need for our liver and kidneys to be able to actually convert those toxins to being water soluble, so we can excrete them from our body. And so what happens is, the liver tries to just keep those toxins out of our bloodstream, and it will store them in our fat clauses which are in our brain. I said earlier, our brain is largely made up of fat and water, in our breasts in women, we've got dense fat tissue in our breasts, and then anywhere else, we're carrying extra weight on our body. I don't know about you, but I don't want toxins running around in my brain or in my breasts. And just look at all the Alzheimer's and dementia we do have in the world. Look at all of the breast cancer that we have in the world. Do you think there might be a connection between our toxic loads and the illnesses, the chronic illnesses that we have in the world today? There's absolutely a connection there. And it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to get chronic illnesses, even if we're genetically predisposed to them. Remember, it's all about the environment you create inside your body. And that's why I really love sharing this information about detoxing because it is such a critical step in alleviating the chronic illness that we have in the world today. And it's not hard to do Do I run detox courses throughout the year. And you can hop into one of my group programs and learn how to detox along with the right way to eat for your body, understanding digestion, where we do dive into digestion and the connection between that and stress, sugar because it's in everything, as well as how not to retox after your detox. My next program is starting at the end of March 2023. But regardless of when you're listening to this podcast, I will have a upcoming program that you can hop into, or you can do a detox program one to one with me if the timing of my group program doesn't work for you, that this is a profound way to change your health outcomes, and start to understand it at the root cause and get those toxins out so that your body isn't storing them inside your body. I don't think anybody wants that. And then the other tip that I want to share with you is coming back to the gut, and making sure that you don't have a leaky gut, so we want to be healing your gut. Now, leaky gut is caused by many different factors such as too many non steroid, steroidal anti inflammatories, from birth control from gluten and from dairy, because they are both highly inflammatory foods can be triggered by chemotherapy treatments can be triggered by alcohol, chronic stress, chlorine, and fluoride. So these are all factors that can trigger something called leaky gut. And what leaky gut is, is when the lining of your gut wall starts to separate, so if you think of it like a fence, and then there's, you can for those of you watching on video, you can see my fingers separating. And there's gaps between each of my fingers, which are the fence of your gut lining. And what happens then is because it starts to separate food particles and toxins and birth control, and antibiotics can get out of your digestive tract and directly into your bloodstream through this fence, which is now leaky. And we absolutely don't want that to happen, because leaky gut is the root cause of autoimmune diseases. Because what happens is, the immune system sees these pathogens in the bloodstream going, this isn't meant to be here and starts attacking it. And it's basically our own body attacking itself, because food and other things that shouldn't be in our bloodstream directly have gone into the bloodstream before they're properly broken down in the gut wall. So we need to ensure that we don't have a leaky gut. Again, it's something we can test for to see if you have a leaky gut. If you are struggling with any gut related symptoms, you want to check into that don't just ignore it. So often, we're taught to you know, push through and suck it up and be strong. However, when it comes to our body and our symptoms, the symptoms, our body's way of talking to us and asking us to do something differently. And we're not to ignore them. They're the early warning signs that we can, when we get curious about why do I have this symptom, we can start to resolve the issue much more quickly than if we ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, and then down the road. Now we have an autoimmune disease that we don't want to have. Too often, we are ignoring our symptoms, and we're writing them off as aging or seasonal allergies, or our genetics. And we shouldn't be doing that we really do have to get curious about why we have these symptoms and look into them. And the sooner we do that, the sooner we can bring the body back into balance so that it can heal. So cut some things that you can do really easily there are starting to reduce the amount of dairy and gluten that you're eating, even if you don't think you have sensitivities to them just know that they are highly inflammatory and can cause problems in your health. So if you're eating them every day, maybe you want to cut back and just not have them one day a week and then over time reduced to having them maybe only three to four times a week or less. Reduce the amount of processed foods that you're eating as well. Some some people might have some processed foods every single day. Maybe you want to cut it back by three meals a week in order to start changing your habits and then making more meals at home because when you make meals at home, it means you actually know what is in the meal that you're eating because you've put all the ingredients in it. And when you are buying at the grocery store you're buying processed ready made me ELS, read your labels, look for the sugars, look for the vegetable oils that you have. And look for ingredient names of things that you can't pronounce. And if you're seeing high sugars, if you're seeing high levels of canola oil, vegetable oil, sunflower oil, sesame seed oils, these are all really high in Omega sixes. And they're all very inflammatory. And you want to limit your the amount that you're eating these foods. So start reading those labels. And if there's a lot of ingredients of foods that you can't even pronounce, it's probably not food, it's chemicals that are in your food. And you don't want those in your body either. So those are some easy steps of small things that you can take in order to start improving your health and being empowered in your health. And learning how to create a body that is inhospitable to disease. Because you can absolutely do that. You don't have to live in this place of I'm going to ignore my body until I get sick. And then I'm going to really regret that I

Melissa Deally:

did that. You also don't want to live in that place of ignore my body get sick, and then go to the doctor expecting them to fix you, it's not their responsibility to fix you, it is your responsibility to take care of your health, you have one body, and the more you take care of it, the longer it will function for you at really high level. So you can get out there enjoy your life, right to the end, with good movement, good flexibility, feeling great good mental alertness, etc. Having good energy, we have one life, and you get to make the most of it. So don't give up your power, don't hand over your health to someone else. It's your responsibility. And I've been sharing this a lot lately, that I did some research last year and was really shocked to find that the average North American spends 10 years at the end of their life in a nursing home. And that's not quality of life, because by the time you're in the nursing home, you're not coming out, you're basically slowly dying. So even though they say we're living longer, we're not actually living, if we're in a nursing home for those last 10 years. And there's a huge cost to that. It's at 100 $1,000 per year right now, that's US dollars. And by 2030, that's forecast to be 141,000 US dollars per year. So over the course of 10 years, that's a massive amount of money. And we may not want to invest in our health right now. But do you want to have all of that money set aside to care for yourself for the last 10 years of your life later on? Or do you want to invest in your health now? And then be able to have those funds available to enjoy your life? Right to the end? What do you plan for for retirement? Do you plan for 10 years in a nursing home? Or do you plan for spending time with your loved ones and traveling and taking up hobbies and doing things that you want to do now that it's time for you, all of that planning starts now with you looking after your health? Think about it. The moment the check warning, the check engine light comes on in your car, you're booking your car and to find out what's wrong with your car. And even if you don't have the money to fix it, you find the money to make it happen. Because you know you need your car to get from A to B, you look after your house, you take the garbage out that's detoxing, you vacuum you clean, you renovate you fix things when they're broken. These are your two greatest assets. And you look after them and you find the money to make things happen when you need to. And if you consider your body, your greatest asset, and you start to treat your body the way you look after your car, the way you look after your house, then you will get to live that long life with good energy, full vitality right to the end, and not become another statistic of chronic illness, or having to live the last 10 years of your life in a nursing home. And I hope that inspires you because you absolutely can do this. It's the mission that I'm on for myself. I'm motivated by the fact that my grandmother did that. She died in her sleep at 101. At home she lived by herself right to the end fully mentally functioning and able to care for herself. Research now shows our human body can go right to 150. When we take the time to recognize it, it's our greatest asset, and we need to look after it. So there's five steps for you today that you can just get started. You don't have to do everything at once. Like I said, don't feel overwhelmed. Just get started and come back and listen to the podcast again. Or write down the steps. Work your way through them. So hydrate, sleep, brain breaks, detox, and heal your gut. Ensure that you don't have leaky gut. Those are the five tips So I'm leaving you with today. Thank you for listening and wishing you good health. Always.