10 key ways to Live Long and Prosper….

Today's post: Wednesday, 4-15-2015

Leonard Nimoy’s phrase, Live Long and Prosper, more than lives up to Spock, the Star Trek character he created it for!

It’s another way of saying. “May you have a worthwhile and healthy life and may it last long.”

Here are 10 key ways to do that:

1.  Have a worthwhile purpose you make a focused effort to achieve or contribute to.

(This can be career oriented or a big personal mission or it can be a hobby or volunteer effort you care about or several of these!

Make sure to have at least one!

Most people want to stay healthy.  But to feel as if you are a valuable and competent person and have an incentive to make an extra effort to stay healthy and stay able and live long, having a purpose really helps!

In fact, one of the most effective ways to stop depression is to begin to focus on building a worthwhile life.)

2.  Be kind to people – and when you can do it and it will help be supportive to them.

(Learn to do this well and interact and socialize with people regularly.  Doing so both makes your life worth living AND is a force multiplier – plus doing so helps prevent mental decline!)

3.  Be consistently prudent and follow effective safety policies in the things you do.

(Why have your life end suddenly and far too soon?  Why become badly disabled when it could have easily been avoided? 

Always wear your seat belt.  Don’t take your eyes off the road while you are driving and the car is moving.  Jump into water you can’t see into feet first instead of head first.

You must take risks.  But avoid those that could kill you or disable you when you can avoid it.)

4.  As a personal policy know what foods and drinks and ingredients are harmful and STOP ingesting them and always avoid them.

(Our last post lists most of them and why avoid them:

   Why always read labels…. Thursday, 4-9-2015)

5.  Eat (or drink in a Vitamix drink) 6 or more servings of organic vegetables each day. 

(Greens and cruciferous vegetables and onions and yellow and orange vegetables are all great!)

(Those who do this -- or do it with the help of the new Vitamix 750 -- slash their risk of heart disease, cancer, and everything else.  Even 3 to 5 real vegetables other than some kind of potatoes a day is far better for you than less. 

AND if you do it, you will find it easy or even done for you to lose excess fat and easy to keep it off!)

6.  Eat one or two pieces of organic whole fresh fruit each day. 

(This too cuts your risk of heart disease. Fruit tastes good. And despite being easy to do, dramatically cuts your risk of both kinds of strokes!)

7.  Avoid all tobacco smoke, tobacco products, nicotine, and eCigarettes.

(The list of things you help avoid by doing this is astonishingly large. 

And for many of them ALL smokers get them even if they don’t get cancer. 

Alzheimer’s disease, emphysema and other forms of COPD, insulin resistance, osteoporosis, heart attacks, strokes, ED, PAD, and even foot amputations are ALL on this list!)

8.  Vigorous exercise: Get some carefully built up to but vigorous exercise in sessions of 10 to 25 minutes each most days of every week.  That’s essential. 

(Vigorous exercise slows aging and keeps you mobile and protects you from almost everything from Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease to osteoporosis – even some cancers. 

It helps people keep off excess fat they lose and if well done can help them lose it in the first place.)

(If you can fit in much less challenging exercises like walking and gardening and even doing chores where you stand AND cutting back on your TV watching and sitting time also can help a lot!)

9.  If you can manage it, get a regular doctor who is competent, caring, well informed,

AND who is actually comfortable with YOU managing your health with your doctor as a consultant – NOT the boss where your health is concerned. 

And, get the major preventive tests at least once a year from fasting glucose and HBA1C to the lipid panel with total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, and triglycerides.

(YOU decide what to do if the readings are bad.  But doing without these tests is like driving the car of your health with a blindfold on.  If you can’t see trouble ahead, you may not take action in time to avoid it when you easily could have done so!)

10.  There are vitamins and minerals and herbs and spices and plant extracts and other food concentrates and other natural compounds with real and documented health benefits.

If you learn them well or follow the work of someone who does and buy from reputable companies, you can sometimes more than double the protection of doing everything else right for health issues that are relevant to you.  And, in some cases, you get the protection far faster and sooner.

If you do all these, the chances are excellent that you will:

Live Long and Prosper