How to Start Living a Healthy Life

“Keep it simple and small, don’t till the garden and then go ‘Well may as well till the rest of the acre.’”- My Dad

When it comes to starting a new healthy lifestyle, the amount of information that we have access to is overwhelming. Unless you are a certified fitness trainer, grew up on a farm, or are a licensed nutritionist, how would you know the optimal way to navigate everything without someone from the internet screaming at you that you’re doing it wrong or that there is a better way?

Well lucky for you, I exist.

I got sick of the ocean of knowledge where incorrect information is often being said louder than what is actually right. I also found myself falling into the trap of going balls-to-the-wall and then falling off. My belief was that if I was going to do something right that I may as well do everything right, but reality is that wasn’t and isn’t sustainable. With Wellness Roots, we believe in focusing on ONE thing at a time. Master one (maybe two, I will let you have a second thing if you’re a go-getter like me), and then you can earn working on the 3rd. Here is my not-too-simplified but certainly not-lacking instruction manual for how to start living a healthy life:

1. Water.

Don’t roll your eyes. Let me tell you the science of something that changed my perspective on this: When a plant has roots in soil and it needs to eat the minerals and nutrients in that soil, how do those very-much-not-alive atoms and molecules get from dirt to root? Water. Water has a slight energetic charge to it where it interacts with other ions (such as calcium) in the soil. It’s kind of like someone grabbing your hand and pulling you onto a dance floor. Water is the transport substance that, through charges, allows minerals and ions to get from one place to another. Now imagine this inside of your body.

You excrete 2.2L on average a day just in urine¹ (that’s about 2 Nalgenes or Stanley cups), which is why the general recommendation has always been to drink at least 64oz of water a day. Why would this matter? Well your blood cannot move through your body without enough of this magical transportation substance.² Did you know that water regulates your serotonin and uetrotransmitter levels (the things that help you feel happiness)?³ Not to mention, your skin, the largest organ of your body, needs water to maintain its function and youthfulness.⁴ If you don’t drink enough water, everything else falls behind too. Why? Because each of these vital systems in your body needs certain nutrients, chemicals, molecules to interact with. If those things can’t reach the right places because of lack of transportation then you are left feeling lethargic, tired, out of breath, loopy, or just not quite your best.

Water itself is not a nutrient, water allows all the nutrients to get to you. Without nutrients we cannot function, so drink up!

How much water should you drink? There’s options, pick one (or create your own) that you can accomplish today:

At least 64oz
1 oz for every lb you weigh
A gallon (128oz, or 4 nalgenes/hydroflasks/stanley cups)

Also, it’s best to sip about 4-8 oz every 15 mins to an hour rather than chugging, and to consume your water within the first 10 hours of waking as that is when your kidneys are most active at filtering.⁵ In all honesty I found this method annoying at first but later it helped solidify my new hydrated lifestyle because it just became a part of my everyday. My water bottle is always attached to my hand and I don’t even realize when I am sipping out of it anymore.

2. Exercise

If you don’t use it you will lose it. This is true for your brain, your muscles, your bones, your mind, and your soul. The human body was designed in such a fascinating way that it adapts not just to challenge, but to be stronger than that challenge if it were to happen again. If we were just meant to sit around then our bodies would repair themeselves to their original state but they never do. They go above and beyond and we do ourself a disservice by not challenging them so they can grow and improve. This is also reversible when it comes to sitting 8 hours a day at work, or walking in pointy toed shoes. Your body will become very very good at whatever you constantly give it to do. It is going to be very very good at slouching if you have it slouch all the time. It will have toes that slowly start to look shoe-shaped instead of foot shaped, it will have weak bones because they’ve never been challenged by weight bearing exercise and so they use their calcium deposits elsewhere. ^{6, 7} If challenging your body to improve isn’t enough to convince you, then here are a few more reasons:

A study came out this past year with an insurmountable conclusion of evidence that exercise was the best medicine for depression compared to any and all other drugs on the market.⁸

Your muscles have mitochondria in them (the powerhouse of the cell whoop whoop!) but what makes your muscle cells extra cool is that when you workout they can build EXTRA mitochondria. This means the more you workout the more energy your body is capable of producing.⁹

Exercise, primarily getting your blood pumping, has also been shown to help your body clear out junk. It helps move your immune cells around and delivers oxygen to all the places in your body that you need it most. It can even combat cancer.^{10, 11}

3.) Food

I won’t go in depth here, but food is fuel. Stop believing things that you WANT to be true and start allowing yourself to learn what is actually true. Farmers are not evil and not everything is poisoned, but learning what to buy and how to cook and how much to cook is a skill that will take a while to hone and that’s okay. Many additives, preservatives, and processing techniques can take the nutrients out of the food you’re eating, so the sooner you take some cooking lessons from YouTube and Pinterest, food marketing and label webinars from yours truly, and get comfortable with being uncomfortably non-efficient on grocery shopping days, the happier you and your body will be on your health journey, trust me.

Treat yourself like a lamborginni. You can’t put 87 octane in a lambo, so don’t put junk into your body out of convenience and expect great long term results.

4.) Get right with God

I don’t care what you believe God is, if it is the big man in the sky or just your innate inner gut feeling, you gotta get straight with it. Why? Studies show that emotions are stored in our bodies. There are many studies proving an emotional connection to muscle tissue, both capable of influencing each other. ^{12, 13, 14, 15, 16} Why when we get anxious does our heart muscle pound faster? How come if we stand up straight we feel more confident? Emotion-muscle connection.

I have seen people surrender their lives to Christ and their skin, muscles, or mental health conditions heal. And there is something to be said for how quantum physics proves that prayer and good vibes quite literally change the inner functioning of cells and matrixes through frequencies. ^{17, 18} Get right with God, upgrade your inner energy to be focused on positivity, humbleness, fierceness, and confidence, and you’ll be shocked how much you’re capable of with your new mindset. ¹⁹

5.) Get some sunshine and sleep

Get at least 10 minutes of sunlight into your eyes shortly after waking up (or ideally just as soon as possible). Make sure it is direct, not through a window or your blue-light blocking glasses. Straight up stand and bask in the sun in the morning. This is what sets your circadian rhythm for the day.

Get at least 10 minutes of sunlight into your eyes shortly after waking up (or ideally just as soon as possible). Make sure it is direct, not through a window or your blue-light blocking glasses. Straight up stand and bask in the sun in the morning. This is what sets your circadian rhythm for the day.²⁰ For me, viewing sunlight in the morning helps to make me feel like a real person amidst my busy-ness. It forces me to pause and just feel the air on my skin and be for a whole 10 minutes before I start tasking. After all, we are human be-ings.

If you’re interested in the science behind all of this, listen to Huberman’s podcast on sunlight and sleep (linked here).

In regards to sleep, my friends will laugh at me when I type this but sleep is very important. In fact, its lack (and even just circadian shift) can have a majorly significant negative effect on health.^{21, 22, 23, 24, 25} While I have happily taken advantage of my time by foregoing sleep in order to accomplish just one more thing, I cannot say it has been good for my body. While I love being busy, I have to forcibly make time to rest, but waking up knowing my body had time to recharge allows me to hit the ground running in morning.

6.) Get some routines.

Bleh, “routines.” Boring. Nobody likes them except everyone has them, even the person who claims they don’t. The trick with routines is to build systems that work for you. Here are some unconventional ones that I have in place that help keep the balance in my world:

Wind Down Routine- Whenever I get around to finally getting to bed (because I personally hate bedtimes right now) I have a wind down routine. At this time, I speed reset the kitchen and house, take a shower, brush my teeth, do my skincare, lay out tomorrow’s gym and work outfits, and crawl into bed. When I am on my grind I set an alarm to go off at 8pm to do my wind-down so I can be in bed sometime around 9 but there’s also no major pressure. If I don’t fall asleep right away too that is okay. Just resting is also great for your body. Either way, having a wind-down routine has taken so much stress out of the nighttime/bedtime stuff for me. I highly recommend it.
Weekly routine- you don’t need to hold yourself accountable for hitting every single Monday exactly the same. For me, I have a beginning of week, middle of week, end of week system. I have some tasks that can be done either Monday or Tuesday. Some tasks Wednesday to Friday, and other tasks are Saturday and Sunday. Splitting it up like this allows my life to be flexible while also held accountable to still getting things done. I take care of my plants, accomplish an entire house reset, meal plan, grocery shop, meal prep, and host girls night all somewhere in my beginning/mid/end of week cycle. Get a grip on your calendar and your list, I promise you will find a rhythm that works for you. You got this.

7.) Glass Balls vs Rubber Balls

One of the most fun parts of improving your health is lowering your stress. For many, this is hard because prioritizing is difficult. The way I view it is that you are juggling a hundred little balls. Some of them are rubber and some of them are glass. The rubber balls are okay to drop occasionally because they will bounce back up such as missing a gym session or forgetting to drink water. But some balls are glass such as your kid’s recital and that big report due at work. Part of being healthy is assigning the actual value and weight to the right tasks and how they fit in your world so that you can move through your tasks in an unstressed manner, knowing it is handled appropriately and that you are okay.

8.) Be Clear With Yourself

Set big goals with thousands of mini-steps. Why? Ever tried to climb a 12 ft ladder with only 3 rungs? Pretty hard to think about. But climbing a 12ft ladder with 12 rungs… now that is way easier. So, set some big goals for yourself, but give yourself 100 little rungs to use on the way to the top. Oh, and WRITE. IT. DOWN. Make it actionable by adding some check boxes. Choose one of those tasks that you can handle right now.

Now go out and crush it with your new healthy lifestyle journey.