There’s something really important I want to remind you of:
Your health is about how you choose to live your life.
As in, all the healthy habits matter.
That’s a broad statement, what do I mean specifically:
It is not about singular things in isolation that allow us to be healthy.
And we can’t fake our way around it.
Let’s use 3 areas of health to look at this.
Sleep is kind of the base for health.
Because if sleep is bad, there is nothing to make up for it.
Because without good sleep:
Healing slows down
Memory and cognition don’t function quite right
Cravings for sugar and carbs go up
Mood goes down
etc…
And with sleep, I’ve talked about needing true darkness.
We actually need true darkness for proper melatonin production.
Which in turn is actually cancer protective for us.
The easiest way to ensure this is simply wearing a sleeping mask (the kind over the eyes, even studies have proven this effective).
And your body needs to be capable of the actual function of sleep.
It’s why taking a sleep drug is more akin to getting knocked out, not getting good sleep.
We can’t fake our way around sleep.
And then there is also exercise…
Aside from the multitude of benefits from being active (I don’t have to go over all of them now, do I?)…
There was an analysis done of 97 systematic reviews that showed exercise is 1.5 times more effective for mental health…
…when compared to medications or counseling.
If you consider the amount of people struggling with mental health, and how many people live a sedentary lifestyle, it starts making more sense.
Because we can’t replace exercise.
We can’t fake our way around exercise.
And bonus, exercise lowers risk of death (that goes for all cause mortality in both men and women).
And then there is food…
Food is meant to nourish us, but there are a lot of “foods” in grocery stores nowadays that aren’t food and do harm us.
When we clean up the diet, as in not eating sugar, additives, processed food, high fructose corn syrup…
… and start eating real food, we can start trusting our cravings and instincts.
If you actually listen to your body (or take the steps to start hearing your body), you will start reaching for the foods you are needing in that point in time.
And instead of just hunting after one single nutrient, because it was highlighted in an article, I would highly recommend working with your body’s signals.
So do supplements have their place in health? The good ones do, yes.
And you may have noticed the ones I recommend are based on real food and are always in a symphony of ingredients so your body can actually use them.
But I hope you can see why I put so much emphasis on all the healthy habits when we talk, and not just tell you take this supplement and you’re good to go.
We can’t out-supplement an unhealthy lifestyle.
