You CAN make small health improvements....

Today's post: Thursday, 7-17-2008

In any given part of the actions that protect your health, you may be a total beginner or even really used to doing the opposite.

If it was super easy to make massive changes in the actions you now take by habit that impact your health for good or for bad, everyone would do it.

In the same way, although it’s quite possible to become fluent in a language you don’t yet speak or learn a martial art to a black belt level or any other skill, it’s usually not possible to do it in a week.

What DOES work is: to learn the background information of the important parts of a new skill; & to begin immediately making small but immediately DOABLE progress on several key parts of the skill.

It can also help to get support for your efforts, new relevant infomation that supports your efforts, &, information on tips to help you successfully learn to do each part.

That’s precisely what we try to do with each of our posts.

What sometimes happens is that people who begin to take action to protect their health make one of three mistakes.:

1. They try to do or achieve so much more than they are as yet capable of doing in an area of it that they burn out or feel like a failure at the effort & then quit.

2. They see some high level way to succeed at some part of taking action to protect their health they aren’t in a position now to do & plan to do that someday – BUT, having done so, they do NOTHING AT ALL NOW.

3. Or, they completely underestimate the combined effect of tiny changes in several of the key areas at the same time or presume they cannot handle dealing with more than one area at a time.

The solution is essentially to do the reverse in each case.

1. Think through in key each area some step you clearly could begin to do within a few days. It can even be a truly tiny step that hardly would be an effort at all for you to do.

The critical point to remember is that once you are doing this step or effort regularly, you can then take other additional & easy steps or gradually improve on each one. Once you have some experience & have begun well at an easy level, you can make careful efforts to achieve doable improvements by aiming at worthwhile improvements that would be moderately difficult but which would be achievable with a bit of extra effort.

This plan IS doable. YOU can do it. And, it WORKS & will improve your health.

2. Decide to start doing the things you realized you would find doable & decide when you will begin -- & DO it.

It can be fun to imagine what wonderful things you’d do for your health if you had the money & time to do them that you do not have now.

But, even if that does happen for you some day, your health will be impacted between now and then by what you actually do between now & then to protect your health.

So, DO the things you CAN do & start now.

That way if you do get to a time where you can do all the things you’d like to do that cost money, you’ll have good health between now & then; & you’ll still be in good health when that happens; and you’ll stay alive until that time.

3. Do this process in EVERY key area right away. Since in every one of the areas, you are taking an action that you find easy & quite doable, there really isn’t any good reason why not.

The benefits are truly astonishing for doing this.

For any ONE of the small initial things you do, the health effect may be quite small at first; but if you do five or six different kinds, the combined & interactive effect of your new actions may be surprisingly powerful.

But, by far of most importance, is the impact on YOU & your feelings that you are beginning to successfully be in control of your health and to see yourself as someone who takes regular, effective action to protect your health. Doing one tiny thing for a few weeks might not have this effect. But doing one thing in four or five different areas WILL produce this effect.

And this effect is enormously powerful. Once it happens, you’ll find more useful information you can use & begin to see opportunities to improve and feel comfortable trying them.

It’s quite literally like successfully retargeting a missile; & you will be on your way to MUCH better health. Taking charge of your health will become your normal course of action that becomes part of your self concept. And, you’ll see yourself as someone who does that.

Here are some ideas to consider trying in several of the areas.

A. One of the best areas to try is to add MORE things to what you eat & drink that will improve your health.

Start with even one you like or think you might like or one you find doable.

Eating blueberries will boost your HDL levels & protect your heart and has proven to be protective of your brain & even will often restore some capacity if you are older. You can get frozen blueberries at most grocery stores. Bring them home & thaw them in the refrigerator and begin to eat a package of them each week. I started putting them on my oatmeal three times a week instead of brown sugar. I now really enjoy them. And, I probably added 5 points to my HDL level too.

Since avocado is both incredibly good for you & contains virtually all heart health OK monosaturated oils, try having some guacamole as a snack.

Add a single serving of some kind of vegetable to your lunch or your dinner each day.

Any one such step is easy. But once you have tried a few more & kept the ones you liked or found doable, you can even build up to several dozen over each week. THAT has a huge effect. But it all starts with doing one.

The trick to get started is to begin doing just one right away.

B. A delightfully easy area to work on that can have truly astonishingly large benefits is to take supplements.

If you haven’t been taking them, even adding one or two of the most valuable can have such effects.

And, if you already take some supplements already, adding one that you discover has benefits you want or need can help also.

It’s long been thought that taking 500 mg to 1,000 mg a day of vitamin C is good for your health & will protect your heart. This turns out to be quite true. Taking this much vitamin C has lowered blood pressure by a few points in people where it was high. And, I read recently of a study that found that taking this much vitamin C lowers LDL cholesterol AND increases HDL while lowering triglycerides. (If you read our post earlier this week on managing your blood biomarkers of health, you KNOW how heart protective these effects are.)

And, 500 mg of vitamin C is inexpensive enough to be quite affordable, almost cheap in fact.

Taking 1,000 iu of vitamin D3 once or twice a day may have even more powerful health effects recent research has found. Taking this much vitamin D produces improved mood, stronger bones, probably less colds and flu, a lower chance of getting ANY & ALL kinds of cancer and a lower chance of developing autoimmune diseases.

And, just like vitamin C, 1,000 iu of vitamin D is inexpensive enough to be quite affordable, almost cheap in fact.


Am out of time today so I’ll finish this post with a part II tomorrow.

We’ll have a couple more supplement ideas & ideas for exercise & what to STOP eating and how.