5 Benefits of Biohacking

5 Benefits of Biohacking

Biohacking is an individualized system of techniques that gives you the feeling of full control over your own biology. It’s noticing areas you feel you need to improve and implementing hacks to improve it. The benefits of biohacking, due to its personalization, are truly endless but, here are the top five benefits that you are sure to experience.

A Better Understanding of One’s Self

By far the best benefit of biohacking is learning who you truly are. With meditation and experimenting different things each day, you learn exactly what your body and soul need to be happy and healthy. During the journey of biohacking, you may identify new characteristics about yourself or identify new areas of interest you may have never discovered before.

You will learn that you are powerful and strong and that you can do almost anything by doing the work. You will understand what works and doesn’t work which will prevent you from experiencing most frustrations. Once you understand your true self, getting to your goals will be streamlined and easy.

Improved Mood

Biohacking improves your mood in several different ways. Through hacking your mind, diet, and soul you’ll discover the causes and fix them. Chemical imbalances, as well as poor diet and exercise, are the main culprits of poor mental health. Improving your mood can truly open the gate to a better life.

More Focus and Boosted Productivity

Implementing hacks into your diet and exercise will increase your energy levels which in turn increases your productivity. It will lift the mental fog and keep you focused. Drinking bulletproof coffee each morning, drinking plenty of water each day, and getting a full night rest each night are just a few ideas that help in these areas.

Reduced Stress and Anxiety

Dopamine and serotonin are hormones that are responsible for the “feel good” feeling. These hormones, in turn, reduce stress levels. Biohacking techniques such as meditation and eliminating sugars and processed foods from your diet will help increase these hormones. A very common goal of most biohackers is finding things that increase these hormone levels whether it be medication, diet, exercise or meditation and then doing them every day.

Optimal Health

Optimal health is when your physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual health is balanced. Getting to a balance is all up to you and dependent upon where you feel you need improvement. Biohacking is all about getting to that balance and finding those areas to improve. Just remember that optimal health is a never-ending journey. It always needs to be worked on to get to where you want to be.

Overall there is really no reason you shouldn’t use biohacking. Everything you do with biohacking is meant to improve your quality of life in every single way. To hack your system into better cognitive functionality, greater strength, and wellbeing, and to improve your mind and soul can all be accomplished with biohacking. If you do it properly there really are no side effects. The journey to overall wellbeing is all your own.

Reach optimal health with Biohacking. Learn how by downloading your free workbook today!

How to Eliminate Constipation

What is it about the Standard American Diet and the biggest complaints doctors get in relation to gastrointestinal issues?   Constipation.  And what happens if you aren’t having enough BM’s?  Food that is sitting and rotting in your gut, causing intestinal issues.  

I believe that your health starts in the gut.  And eating enough fiber to keep things moving in your gut is one of the keys to keeping it healthy.  

The larger and more frequent your BM’s are, the healthier you may be.  But even though you may be having a daily BM, you can still be constipated.  You just may be passing today what you ate last week!  No wonder we get bloated and have unexplained weight gain!   

Adding more vegetables and plant-based meals can help lessen the time it takes for your food to be digested and the eliminated.  And when you add more vegetables, you add more fiber, which creates a much easier, less painful BM.  Studies show that it takes around a day or two for plant-based meals to be digested and eliminated, but compared to a conventional diet, it took four days to digest and get eliminated.  No wonder people complain of bloating, gas, and other intestinal problems!  When you have food sitting and rotting in your gut, it can create some uncomfortable patterns.  If you want to measure transit time to see how well your digestive system is working, add a beet and watch for pink stools, or eat some corn and you can watch for when it comes out because corn doesn’t digest.  

Constipation can be a problem for gut health and weight loss - it is one of the most common complaints leading to millions of doctor visits per year.  Not only is constipation a problem, but it can lead to other issues due to the straining as you try to pass stools, such as hiatial hernia, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and anal fissures.  

Currently the average American only eats about 15 grams of fiber, when they should be eating 25-30 grams of fiber!  So people are eating less than half of the recommended daily serving of fiber than they should!  

What is the key to preventing constipation?  Add fiber!  Fiber is only found in plant foods, so the more plants you eat, the better and easier your BM’s will be.  Here are a few tips to add extra fiber to every meals: 

• 1 tablespoon ground flax seed to your oatmeal or morning smoothie

• Add 1/4 cup or more of black beans to your home-made nachos

• Add a sprinkle of beans on top of your salads (chick-pea, white beans are really yummy on salads!)

• Add a more high-fiber veggies to your dinner plate such as steamed broccoli, cauliflower

• Add brown rice instead of noodles to your home-made chicken “noodle” soup

• Swap your bread for whole grain (if you don’t have a gluten sensitivity)

• Swap your white rice for brown rice

• Swap your conventional pasta for brown rice pasta or chick pea pasta

• Add berries to your smoothie, salad or cereal

• Top your salad at the salad bar with foods like broccoli, cauliflower, and beans

• Add a sprinkle of nuts: pumpkin seeds on salads, walnuts to cereals, sunflower seeds to stir-fry’s

Adding more fiber to your diet is not only going to help your digestion and hopefully eliminate constipation, but studies show that adding more fiber will help you fill fuller faster - foods full of fiber take up more space and trigger a signal to the brain that says “I’m full”!  

How Not to Die,  Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

The Whole Foods Diet, John Mackey, Alona Pulde, M.D., Matthew Lederman, M.D.

Biohacking: The Simple Way to Reach Your Goals

Biohacking: The Simple Way to Reach Your Goals

There is a new buzzword floating around social media that by now you may have heard of; biohacking. But what the heck is it? Biohacking is a systematic approach to reaching optimum health. It is implementing small changes or hacks to improve areas of your life. According to Dave Asprey, the founder of bulletproof coffee, it is making changes in your life to becoming superhuman.

Most biohackers strive to be the best version of themselves. Any areas of your life can be hacked whether it be physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual. The journey of biohacking is up to you and where you see the need to change.

The following is a must when starting your biohacking journey:

Assess

What areas of your life would you like to improve? Maybe you simply need to fix your sleeping schedule. Perhaps you have a lot of stress that you would like to reduce or eliminate. Whatever it may be there are hacks that you can do to help improve those areas. Some common areas that biohackers target include improving happiness, productivity, diet, athletic endurance and mental performance.

Implement

Now that you have assessed yourself and know what areas of your life you would like to improve on, it is time to implement hacks to reach those goals. It can be as simple as tracking your daily exercise or taking an anti-anxiety pill. Whatever the hack may be it’s important to start doing them right away and track your progress as you go along.

Document and Evaluate

Although implementation is the key to biohacking the other area of importance is to include tracking your results and evaluating them. This way you can be sure that the hack you implemented is accomplishing the goal you had in mind. Maybe the hack will improve other areas of your life that you were not aware of. Take a just a few moments out of your day each night to record any little thing you have noticed throughout your journey. At the end of each month create some kind of challenge such as a test to see if the hack you implemented has truly made an impact. For example, maybe you wanted to increase your stamina. Before you implement the hack test your stamina and then in a month do the same test to see if you’ve improved.

Adjust

Once you evaluate your results it is time to determine if the hack you implemented provides the results you were hoping for. If not, adjust the hack or implement a brand new one. If you received benefits from the hack determine if it is worth continuing or not. Obviously, if the hack didn’t produce the results you were hoping for it may not be worth continuing.

Repeat

If there are more areas in your life that you want to improve to reach the goals that you have set for yourself add more. If what you are doing is working keep doing it. Once you have mastered the hacks that you implemented you may even want to take it one step further. The choices are truly endless.

Biohacking is a never-ending journey. It is not a fast-track system to optimal health or the perfect life. It is a cumulation of lifestyle changes that take work and dedication. Implement, evaluate, adjust and then repeat until you reach all your goals. You can truly accomplish whatever it is that you want to with biohacking.

Learn how to become the best version of yourself by downloading your free workbook on Biohacking.

Forming New Habits: Change What Doesn't Work

Forming New Habits: Change What Doesn’t Work

After you have created some simple habits to change in your life, take a step back and look at the results so far. This is where you can decide if you will continue with this habit, or if it might be time to call it quits, or just adjust part of it.

When a New Habit Doesn’t Work

To start with, every new habit you start is not going to be something you stick with forever. There are some that absolutely will and will probably change your life for the better. But just like other things you attempt in your life, they are not all going to be perfect from beginning to end.

It is okay to take a step back, consider where you are, and whether or not once of your new habits is working for you. This doesn’t mean you chose a bad habit, but that it doesn’t work for you personally, for your schedule, your lifestyle, or where you are right now in your life. Remember that your priorities and goals can change as you go through life, and it’s okay for your habits to change along with them.

Did You Give it Enough Time?

Before you decide to ditch or change one of your new habits, give it enough time. The amount of time changes depend on the type of habit and your personal goals, but about 30 days is a good amount of time. This is long enough where it became something you did every day, and should have gotten to a point where you didn’t even have to think about it.

However, if you have been doing one habit for 2 months, and you still don’t see any benefits from it, or it still feels like pulling teeth every time you get up to do it, then maybe it isn’t the right one for you.

Tracking Your Progress and Making Changes

This is why tracking your new habits is so important. You can actually see how long you have been doing it, if you have been consistent, and in what ways it is benefiting you. If you start a new job and put in the work, you expect to be paid for your efforts. The same can be said for when you work really hard on a new habit or goal, and it just doesn’t pay off in the end. You want to choose habits you can keep track of and that will have some type of benefit for you.

How Do You Prevent Shrinkage as You Age?

How do you prevent shrinkage as you get older?

We women over 40 will eventually start dealing with pre-menopause/menopause and may face possible osteoporosis.

My 2 best tips to prevent bone loss is to eat foods high in calcium and do weight bearing exercises.

Eating these foods are better than just taking a calcium supplement or drinking more milk. They provide fiber (essential for digestion) and other important vitamins and minerals.

Best veggies and seeds for calcium:

1. chia seeds

2. dark leafy greens (spinach, bok choy, mustard greens, turnip greens)

3. almonds

4. chickpeas (garbanzo beans)

5. wild-caught salmon

So eat those greens, grab a handful of almonds and dip those veggies in hummus for a great snack while boosting your bone density!

Don’t forget to add in weight bearing exercises - ask your local fitness instructor for great exercises that you can do that suit your fitness level.

Here is a delicious breakfast recipe from my upcoming fall program that uses quinoa (high in calcium and fiber) where you can add a few tablespoons of chia seeds to boost your calcium without adding dairy:

1/4 cup quinoa

1 cup dairy-free milk, divided

1 tablespoon unsweetened cacao powder

1 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon unsweetened coconut flakes

1/2 cup berries

2 tablespoons chia seeds

Add quinoa, chia seeds and 3/4 cup dairy-free milk to a small pot over medium heat. Stir well and cover. Cook for about 15-20 minutes until the liquid has been absorbed. Add cocoa powder and honey. Stir well. Add additional 1/4 cup dairy-free milk to make it creamier. Top with coconut flakes and berries before serving.

What You Can Accomplish By Waking Up Early

What You Can Accomplish By Waking Up Early

 A lot of families around the world begin their day with a mad dash straight from the shower to the car. When children, work and home tasks are all competing for the same time frame, it's inevitable that some things will either be rushed, or forgotten about altogether. If this is something that you find common in your home, then you should really consider how different things could be with one small adjustment. This article will be exploring what you can accomplish by waking up early.

Activities You Don’t Usually Have Time For

The most obvious answer to what you can accomplish is simply anything that you don’t normally have time for. This can come in many forms, especially with regard to spending time talking to the family and getting their mindsets in line for the day ahead. Morning are a great time for families to calibrate and realign. Studies show that more functional morning habits garner greater focus from all family members.

Morning Exercise

 If you’ve been wanting to get into a morning workout routine, then getting up earlier is the perfect way to make sure that you can add that acuity to your weekly regimen. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to spend 20 - 45 minutes working out. Any morning routine can be as short as 5 - 10 minutes, and you’ll still benefit. Just be sure that you do something different each day to break up the repetitiveness. You can walk pets, have short jog, or just do some isometrics to get your heart pumping.

Emotional and Mental Wellness

Writing a journal can do a lot to help you keep centered and keep track of whatever personal progress that you’ve been making. Writing thoughts and feeling down for later review also gives you a completely unbiased, honest view of how you were thinking about things at the time.

Productive Quiet Time

Sometimes there are small tasks that seem to pile up everywhere when you’re in a hurry, but when you get up earlier, you have the tie to focus and complete these tedious tidbits. In the morning, it’s also usually quiet, so you can get some small tasks or side work done while you contemplate your next move for the day.

Cook Real Breakfast

There’s no substitute for a complete breakfast. Eating some nutrient rich foods that you enjoy can help put you in a great mood and give you all that you need to stay alert and effective from sunup to sunset.

Morning Rituals: Practice Self-Care in the Morning

How do you start your day? If you’ve been trying to get up earlier so you can attain greater focus during your day, then you probably have heard that one of the key parts of getting there is through having a solid morning ritual. When you do a morning ritual, you’re more likely to have quiet reflective time to yourself. The next few paragraphs will be sharing a few ways for you to practice self-care in the morning.

Self-Care Starts in Bed

When you wake up, there’s no reason to jump up and start doing things immediately. Some health professionals say that such instant activity could harshly shock the system. That means that some light activity to help increase blood flow would be preferable, and even recommended. Give your body a chance to begin circulating your blood.

Stay Tech Free

When you first wake up in the morning as a tech connected person, the first thing that you think about is what might be going on in the digital world. Unfortunately, studies have begun to look at how the constant connection that people have with technology is starting to affect people and the information doesn’t look great. The amount of stress that people experience as a result of this continuous unbroken contact is kept at a consistent level at all times. Disconnecting can help break you away from that stress and give you time to think without the constant noise. You can reflect and process your thoughts. 

To do this, keep your phone turned off and not anywhere near you when you’re sleeping. Wake up with a regular alarm clock instead of a phone alarm, and don’t check your phone until you have completed the rest of your morning routine.

Enjoy Fresh Morning Air

 Even though you are breathing in and out every day of your life, breathing correctly still takes focused and deliberate effort until it becomes natural. It’s easy to forget about the rewards that you can gain from simply increasing the efficiency of one or more physiological systems.

 Beauty and Pampering

 One of the greatest things about having more time to take care of yourself, is that you get to spend time doing proper skin care. That’s a lot more comforting than tumbling out of bed, rolling your hair into a bun and trying to put on eyeliner while running full speed down a hallway to your car. Moisturizing skin and conditioning your hair does more than make you look and feel good, it can also help protect you from genetic damage caused by sun exposure and pollution.

Keep it Simple and Flexible

At the end of the day, what really matters is how you feel. Ask yourself if you feel good. There’s no reason why there have to be an arbitrary number of things that you have to do to make this experience complete. This is simply a guide that gives you options of things that you can try.

HOW TO HAVE A POSITIVE MORNING

How to Have a Positive Morning

When things aren’t quite going the way that you’d hoped, it can be really difficult to meet the challenges of your day with a calm smile. For some this can be even more difficult if they were raised in a household where there was a lot of focus on negative talk, attitudes and ideas. If you’re looking to make a change to your mindset, then you’ll probably be excited to read the following article on how to have a positive morning.

Shift Your Mindset

 When you first open your eyes, it can be tough to get out of bed to go to a place that you’re not the biggest fan of, but a lot of that can be changed by adjusting the things that you’re focusing on. By making a shift in your mindset, you job can become a means of providing for your life and family instead of an oppressive force. Take the time to look at what you’re creating or sustaining by getting up, and it’ll get easier with practice.

Be happy to be awake, happy to be alive. Shift your mindset to being positive about the morning and the day ahead.

Express Gratitude Whenever You Can

Another thing that can help push the shift in mindset further is the habit off expressing gratitude. Giving thanks, and really focusing on how grateful you are to be in a place when you are physically able to go to work can help you to keep things in perspective. Even just the simple act of being thankful can give you a more positive feeling during the times you’re thinking about them.

Set Your Intentions

 Have you noticed that when you don’t have a focused plan it can be really hard to get things organized? Taking the time to set your intentions helps you to give a priority and order to the things that you have to consider for the day.  Instead of completely random selections, you can make an organized, cohesive plan that will put you on the right path and keep you there.

Nourish Your Body

 Without the proper nutrition, there can be no healthy mind. It’s very important that you always make sure that you have enough time to get some kind of nourishment before you begin your day. That will help you to keep your focus and stay at an efficient energy level. When people get tired, they often turn to artificially enhanced drinks that aren’t very good for your health and heart. At the very least, you can be sure to get u early enough to blend some frozen fruit so you can simply drink your breakfast on the way to work.

Microgreens - What Are They and Why You Should Be Eating Them

What are Microgreens?

Would you like to try and interesting new way to add nutrition to your food? If so, then you should give microgreens a try. If you are unfamiliar with microgreens, then you might be surprised to find out that they can supply you with some really great benefits and taste options that can increase the enjoyment of the food you love. Microgreens are vibrant, and beautiful to look at, but there’s a lot more there than just bright green color to discuss with some examination.

Microgreens: Tiny Plants with Big Flavor-Flav

To put it simply, microgreens are really basically just baby plants. These little versions of plants can be amazingly flavorful in addition to providing a very different taste than you would find in the adult version of the plant. These little plants will add nice textures and colors to anything you put them with. When you get a chance, you can try some young versions of plants added to your salads and smoothies to spice up things a bit. Notable ones to try would be cilantro, sprouts, red cabbage, and green daikon radishes. Each of the families of varieties can produce a different flavor profile, so experimenting with them is a must!

They Contain Concentrations of Nutrients

A few studies of microgreens have been able to determine that many of the species of plants contain massive concentrations of nutrients in them. This is a major reason why people have begun to look at them so closely. The lack of natural nutrition in food has people in the health community looking for any new and exciting way to make their food more nutritious, and science appears to support their hopes, although there are some varieties of young plants that contain the same amount of nutrients as adults plants, so these findings can vary depending on which species is being looked at as a potential nutrient boost.

How Feasible Are They Really?

While it’s relatively encouraging that microgreens have some big benefits in your food, you might also need a really big wallet to be able to afford them from a grocery. Microgreens tend to be very expensive, so it might be a better idea for you to get a growing kit and start to grow some for yourself. They won’t require much water, and they won’t even take very long to grow. You can find various supplies for growing little plants indoors so you can keep your little greens fresh and low cost for your food. 

Natural Ways to Boost your Immune System

Natural Ways to Boost Your Immune System

Boosting your immune system isn't something that is reserved for colder months of the year. Anytime the seasons change you should boost your immune system. You should also keep it boosted off and on throughout the year as you make changes to your routine, your diet, or following a trip. When you are trying to boost your system, you may be inclined to grab an over the counter option, but those options have far too many preservatives and chemicals. There are natural ways to boost your immune system that you should consider first.

Citrus Fruits and Juicing

One of the immediate ways you can boost your immune system is to add citrus fruits to your daily routine. If you feel like you would have to add too many, then juicing is the way to go. All you have to do is add oranges, lemon, and some other citrus fruits and create a juice. If you want to boost the immune qualities that citrus provides then you should consider adding a tablespoon of raw honey. This won't make the drink too sweet and it will give you not only the vitamins of the citrus, but the immune properties of the raw honey.

Replace Sugars with Raw Honey

 Most people drink either hot coffee or hot tea at least once a day. In fact, most of the people who drink a hot drink tend to add sugar to the beverage. This can add up, especially when you are doing it a tablespoon at a time. In fact, it can derail your weight loss plans and it can damage the benefits you are trying to get from other immune boosting agents. Instead, use raw honey in place of sugar. With each tablespoon you are gaining more immune boosting properties and helping your digestive system remove toxins from your body that can cause bacteria and viruses.

One Vegan Meal a Day

 You may not think about this as something that can help, but try to eat one vegan meal a day. This can be your juice in the morning or it can be your lunch or dinner. Just make sure that one full meal is 100% vegan. This will help you boost the fruits and vegetables in your diet as well as the nuts and oils that will boost your immune system and digestive properties. This will help keep your body going and help keep your energy up during immune degrading times of the year like cold and flu season.

These are the three most common natural immune boosters. They are also the easiest to find and can be found in most stores, both general and health food based.