Goal: Health & Wellness
10 Tips For Optimal Health & Wellness
The best approach to achieving optimal health and wellness is to take a holistic fitness lifestyle approach.
A lot of factors contribute to your overall well-being.
Working out, dieting, and taking supplements are important, but just the tip of the iceberg.
The 10 tips below are a good starting point to help you maximize your health and promote longevity.
1. Lift Weights
It’s no secret that resistance training plays a significant role in our ability to release growth hormone and keep testosterone levels high naturally1.
While we’re younger, the reasons behind why we resistance train may be superficial. But establishing a regular workout routine that incorporates weight lifting while you’re young will pay off greatly as you get older.
As we age, our body naturally loses lean muscle mass2. And it’s important to maintain as much muscle mass as possible as we get older to help prevent falls, remain active, and fight off chronic illnesses that come with the increased amount of inactivity we experience with age.
So, if you’ve already developed a strong muscular frame in your youth, you’ll have an easier time maintaining your health when this time of your life comes.
2. Move Regularly
To optimize health and wellness, it’s important to move regularly - Walk, run, dance, stretch, perform yoga, whatever. But you’ve got to move and you need to move every day for at least 30 minutes a day.
A combination of the activities listed above paired with sound resistance training will allow you to maintain elasticity in your tendons, keep your bodyweight normal to keep your joints healthy, and will ensure you’re challenging your cardiovascular system regularly.
So, if you’re looking for optimal (emphasis on the optimal) health & wellness, it’s important to include a variety of activities regularly in your routine consistently throughout the duration of your life.
3. Sleep Well
The amount of hours you sleep and the quality of sleep you get during that time plays a significant role in almost every bodily process. So, when it comes to optimizing health, ensuring you’re getting 7-9 hours of quality sleep each night is probably one of the best things you can do for yourself.
In fact, poor sleep is one of the biggest indicators in the development of obesity in individuals3. And it likely has to do with the fact that not getting enough sleep makes it harder to lose fat, improve performance, and build lean muscle4.
Now, with all that said, make sure you’re going to bed early and sleeping soundly through the night.
4. Eat Better
By better, we mean incorporating more healthful options into your diets that you’re probably not getting enough of. You should make sure you’re consuming plenty of veggies, fruits, and other plant-based foods. Most would probably benefit from more omega rich fatty fish consumption as well.
The focus of this subheader will be on vegetables though, as vegetable intake is associated with lower risk of chronic diseases.5,6,7,8 And the vast majority of the population (~12% of the U.S. population) simply does not get adequate vegetable intake in their everyday diet9.
So, if you fall into this statistic, start upping your vegetable intake today to optimize your health and wellness.
5. Manage Stress
Believe it or not, emotional stress can play a huge factor in what kinds of foods we select to consume and how it’s inevitably stored after being digested10,11.
Which makes it so important to find ways to manage stress when you’re going through tough times. Ironically enough, implementing some of the strategies above and below this particular subheader can help cut down on the overwhelming feeling stress can cause – and possibly even prevent/eliminate emotional stress altogether.
6. Supplement When Needed
We already mentioned that the vast majority of the population doesn’t consume an adequate amount of vegetables from their everyday diet. So, naturally we can assume they’re missing out on other beneficial vitamins and minerals from other food sources as well.
That’s where supplementation can play a beneficial role in your everyday routines. Struggle to meet your daily protein requirements? Snag a whey protein. Don’t like the taste of fish even though you know it can be beneficial to your overall health? Consider a fish oil supplement.
At the end of the day, you need to examine your overall diet – make an effort to include more healthful options into it, and supplement key minerals and vitamins you’re likely to be deficient in.
7. Maintain Healthy Relationships
There are so many benefits to maintaining healthy relationships in life – both romantic and non-romantic. However, the key is making sure you’re surrounding yourself with the right kinds of people and not putting yourself in a toxic environment.
When it comes to romantic relationships, those who are supported by their partners tend to engage in healthier diet and exercise behaviors12. Having a significant other can influence you to be a healthier individual since you have a partner in life (who wants you to be around throughout their life). And, if they support you, they can provide the external motivation needed to complete your goals.
8. Get Sun Exposure
When people think of sun exposure, their first thought usually goes to the results of over-exposure of UV rays – which can be dangerous.
However, regular sun exposure can actually be beneficial to your health and is correlated in the prevention of several chronic diseases including cancer and diabetes.13
The assumption behind these correlations is that those who regularly get sun exposure absorb more vitamin D, have regulated circadian rhythms, improved sleep, and are likely more active than those who do not go outside.
So, if you’re looking to maximize health – get outside and do something active when able to.
9. Maintain a Healthy Weight/Body Fat Percentage
A lot of the recommendations listed in this guide result in better weight management over time.
Maintaining a healthy weight assists in the prevention of chronic diseases commonly associated with being overweight or obese.
That being said, there is another end of the spectrum you should try to stay away from – which involves an extremely low body fat percentage or being underweight. A lot of the people you see in magazines or in competitive bodybuilding, who are shredded and have an extremely low level of body fat, suffer from poor sleep and irregular hormone functioning.
To truly optimize health you don’t want to be overweight, but you don’t want to be too shredded either.
10. Be Mindful
Lastly, to optimize health and wellness we’d recommend practicing meditation for 5-10 minutes a day. As mentioned, stress management is crucial to maintaining your health during your life. And meditation can help.14
Checking in with your body and mind each day through meditation can also benefit you physically as well. If you take time to evaluate how you feel, you’ll better notice if something is wrong with your body – which can be extremely beneficial in injury prevention.
Also, being in control of your mind plays a critical role in accomplishing the mind-muscle connection needed to maximize lifts in the gym each training session.
Summary
Optimal health is very much achievable.
But it takes putting in effort in several facets of life.
Each is highly correlated with each other and making one positive step to include any of the 10 tips into your everyday life can easily snowball into you having all 10 in your life regularly.
References
- Hormonal responses and adaptations to resistance exercise and training.
- Body Mass Index Trajectories in Relation to Change in Lean Mass and Physical Function: The Health, Aging and Body Composition Study.
- Sleep duration predicts cardiovascular outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies.
- The association between short sleep and obesity after controlling for demographic, lifestyle, work and health related factors.
- Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Overall Cancer Risk in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)
- Fruit and vegetable intake and mortality from ischaemic heart disease: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Heart study
- Fruit and vegetable intake and risk of cardiovascular disease in US adults: the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidemiologic Follow-up Study
- Fruit and Vegetable Intake in Relation to Risk of Ischemic Stroke
- Disparities in State-Specific Adult Fruit and Vegetable Consumption — United States, 2015
- Stress exposure, food intake and emotional state.
- Perceived stress and high fat intake: A study in a sample of undergraduate students.
- Examining diet- and exercise-related communication in romantic relationships: associations with health behaviors.
- Regular sun exposure benefits health.
- Mind-body response and neurophysiological changes during stress and meditation: central role of homeostasis.
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.