Healthy Living Strategies Kuel Category Expert: Diana Devi
What you consume can age you or turn back the clock …. What are you consuming? Do you know the impact on your body?
We consume in many different ways. Consume, by definition, means to eat, drink or ingest.
August is the time of a bountiful harvest. Fresh food is readily available at farmer’s markets and many grocery stores now carry local organic or pesticide free vegetables and fruit. This is one form of consumption. To broaden the discussion, consider what you are consuming on a daily basis beyond what you eat and drink. Think of what you ingest as only a part of your total consumption.
3 Key Areas Of Consumption:
- What you consume by mouth : eating and drinking. This is the more traditional definition of consumption.
- What you consume through watching and or listening. This includes the news, videos, social media etc.
- What you consume through relationships. Do they uplift you or do you feel emotionally and physically exhausted after you talk to them, even if it is only for a few minutes?
We all want to look and feel beautiful. Of course, we want to do things that will help our bodies to look and feel their best. We know that exercise, sleep and eating “right” can positively affect how we look and feel. Do we have energy afterwards or are we tired? Is our skin sagging more today after a night of not enough sleep or water?
Did You Know Other Things Can Cause Premature Aging?
“We need to expand our view of consumption in order to understand how some of the little things that we are doing impact our bodies ability to repair, restore and revitalize us.”
You should have just enough wrinkles to show the world that you have been here long enough to have earned your “character wrinkles.” It would look very strange for a woman my age ( 63) not to have ANY wrinkles. They give me street cred, for lack of a better term. I am not 30 years old and I would not go back to that for any amount of money. You do want to look and feel your best. You want the world to look at you and say “WOW! I want to be like that.”
We need to expand our view of consumption in order to understand how some of the little things that we are doing impact our bodies ability to repair, restore and revitalize us.
What We Consume By Mouth:
Most of us know and understand this one. We see it all the time. Don’t eat this or that. I want to share with you a different approach to eating. Look at why you are eating. Are you eating because you are hungry or are you eating because you are thirsty, tired, frustrated, angry or just plain exhausted? Many of us turn to food to give us the energy to push through challenges in our life. Next time you eat something, do a quick internal check. Ask yourself, am I eating because I am hungry? If the answer is no, find another solution to resolve your stress. Maybe spend sometime trying to discover the real reason you reach for food.
What We Consume Visually and Aurally
“Spending too much time listening to, or watching bad news has a direct impact on our body.”
Martha Graham, – a famous dancer and choreographer, used to say “ Misery is a communicable disease.” She is not the only one who has stated this. A large study conducted by Harvard University came to the same conclusion. Spending too much time listening to, or watching bad news has a direct impact on our body. Exposure to too much bad news causes our bodies to release stress hormones. Stress hormones negatively impact our ability to restore, repair, and revitalize. Stress hormones create inflammation in your body. Inflammation in the body manifests as pain, puffiness in the face, weight gain around the mid-section and headache, just to name a few of our body’s reactions. Chronic exposure to inflammation is linked to heart disease, cancer and auto-immune diseases such as arthritis. Inflammation slows or stops our ability to repair and rebuild our bodies.
Think about the last time you watched a TV program or a movie that was particularly dark or violent. How did you feel afterwards? Did you feel drained or energized? Once you are aware of the impact that violence, either real or fiction has on your body, you can decide if that is something that you want to continue to consume. Maybe you want to limit the amount of time you spend watching or listening to the news, violent movies, or negative information.
What We Consume Relationship Wise
“Bad news or misery causes stress in our bodies even though it is not our life that is miserable.”
Everyone has a friend or family member that is a “drama queen”- right? Someone who seems to make all the wrong decisions for all the right or maybe wrong reasons? Ask yourself how you feel after a conversation, meal or spending time with them. Are you physically and emotionally drained? Or, are you happy that you had the time together and can not wait to do it again? We have all seen this in the faces of people that we know and or love. Think about the last time you saw someone you knew who was going through a difficult divorce or perhaps a troubled child. You can see the wrinkles, the rounding of the shoulders, the hollowness around the eyes. Even the way they walk is affected.
You can chose who you spend your time with and what kind of interaction you want to have. Do you want to surround yourself with drama queens that increase your stress level by just listening to them talk about what is going on in their lives? Remember what was just stated. Bad news or misery causes stress in our bodies even though it is not our life that is miserable. Stress causes inflammation; inflammation reduces our body’s ability to repair, restore, and revitalize. Remember what I shared with you about the negative impact stress has on our bodies?
Moderation Is Key
When we don’t moderate our consumption of these stress inducing factors our bodies age prematurely internally. And, we wear it on the outside. We look and feel older than our age. This means more wrinkles, more weight gain around the middle, and things you can not see such as heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Understanding this holistic approach to consumption will help to keep you healthy and youthful. Remember this is just the beginning of your journey to your “Ageless Oasis.” Be Bold. Be Beautiful . Be Ageless
About the Author:
Diana is an empowerment coach for women over 50, building on her 30 years of experience as a clinical pharmacist and as an Argentine tango dancer. Diana’s goal is to help her clients become a W.H.I.P. “A Woman, who is Hot, Intelligent and in her Prime at EVERY age. When Diana is not working with clients or on the dance floor she is training her cats, CleoCatra ( an Egyptian Mau) and D’Artagnan (a Savannah) while patiently waiting for the day she can travel around the world to dance tango again. You can checkout Diana on her website: An Ageless Life.
