The right combination of healthy lifestyle choices can be magical!

     Hi there, it’s Elaine Gardner, the founder of DesignYourHealthyLife.com. And I want to talk to you about your healing process, and being comfortable and honoring wherever you’re at in your healing process, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been working on healing your body and maximizing your health for a long time like I have been.

     We live in a quick fix society and people want results. They want an overnight success and your body just doesn’t respond well to that. Your efforts need to be consistent and you need to be patient because the body, while it’s always in a constant state of breakdown and repair, it cannot fix itself overnight. And the modalities that you’re using or the healthy lifestyle choices that you’re making, need to be examined periodically, because it’s not just one magical piece that you can implement in your life today that’s going to make all the difference in the world – in most circumstances.

     So it takes time to heal, it’s a multi-level healing process – different stages you need to get through to maximize your strength and your health. And also, there’s many factors that come into play that need to work together in order for your body to be able to heal and for you to be able to maximize your health. So sometimes I see people getting frustrated with the things they’re doing, whether it’s taking nutritional supplements, or eating healthy food, or exercising… and they’re not seeing the results that they want to see.

     So here would be a couple of things that I would encourage you to consider if you are in a situation like this. First of all, self-sabotage can be huge. And you need to think about what you’re doing on a day to day basis that could be interfering with the effort that you’re putting in, in other areas. So are you getting enough sleep? This is when your body is actively breaking down, and repairing, and healing itself, and detoxifying. It is non-negotiable. If you’re not getting enough sleep, every other thing that you’re doing isn’t going to have the amazing impact that it could have if you were getting enough sleep. Are you eating healthy food on a day to day basis or are you sabotaging yourself with processed foods? And I know there’s a lot of misinformation about this and it’s a huge job.

     Again, we can talk about that individually for hours on end. But I encourage you to consider, are you putting anything in your body, drinking or eating something either daily, weekly, regularly, that could be interfering with your health goals? And stress… stress is absolutely, overwhelmingly, a huge aspect of the healing process. When your body is in stress mode, you are not in healing mode. So if you’re putting all good things in your body, getting enough sleep, exercising, but you’re overwhelmed and you’re running around like crazy, or you’re unhappy in your job and you feel generally stressed, then none of the other efforts you’re making are going to be able to have the success that they should be able to have.

     And I know, again, this is another huge topic that we could talk about for hours, but you really need to examine what you’re doing. In your relationships, in your home life, how you’re scheduling yourself, how you’re scheduling your meals, how you can reduce and eliminate stress and make your day to day life happier and less stressful. And then to look at what are you doing, a complete package of the things that you’re doing, in order to ensure that you’re healing your body or staying healthy from all of the things that we considered, and then healing modalities as well.

     So you may or may not know this about me, but I spent more than two decades of my life being tremendously ill and in 2000 I made the commitment to find a way to get better no matter what. And since then I have employed numerous modalities to support my healing process, including all of the things that I mentioned – food, and sleep, and reducing my stress, as well as taking whole food nutritional supplements, doing lots of body work from chiropractic to massage, to craniosacral, myofascial release – all kinds of things in that realm, and then doing emotional work as well. Which it took me a very long time to grasp that my belief system and the thoughts that come out of beliefs, could be impacting my health to the level that they were. And that has been absolutely huge for me.

     So I’m in a constant state of, not only maintaining my health, but always trying to improve as well. And considering the modalities that I’m using ,and then the combination, so again one thing isn’t necessarily going to work on its own, but when you put the right modalities together with the right timeframe, it can be like magic.

     So if you’re pointing the finger like, oh I’ve been exercising and that’s not working for me so I’m just going to stop it – maybe it’s not the exercise. We all need to move. Maybe you’re not eating the right amount of proteins for your muscles to break down and rebuild. And again, going back to the sleep, maybe you’re not getting enough sleep because that’s when your muscles are going to be rebuilding themselves. So it’s a whole package, and I’m just encouraging you to look at it in that way. And always be evaluating the choices that you are making, and the modalities that you are using, and to be considering what you can tweak and adjust so that you can get that magical combination of things that move you into healing mode or enhance your own wellness plan, if that’s what you’re on like in the stage that I’m in.

     So I hope that serves you well. I would love to hear from you and know your thoughts about that, and if there was any questions about what I said, or anything that you use that I didn’t cover in this video. And I’ll look forward to talking to you again soon.