1.  Eat 3 times a day; if you are eating 6-8 x a day you have a blood sugar/adrenal imbalance that needs to be addressed.  By eating 3x a day you will allow time to detoxify and burn fat in between meals.

2.  I always recommend making your larger meals at breakfast or lunch, giving your body the nutrition it needs and not skipping meals.  If you skip meals your body becomes hormonally imbalanced in favor of sympathetic excess (cortisol, adrenalin etc..) which over time leads to hormone resistant syndromes and eventually a diagnosable disease.

3.  Belly breathing through the nose is the best way to keep yourself in Autonomic Balance.  When you start to breath through the mouth you tell your brain there’s a threat when there is really no threat.  Most Americans are literally addicted to neurologically and hormonally to sympathetic excess; then disease follows.  Even during exercise use “breath rights” if you need to keep to nose/belly breathing as a means to not over extend your training intensity.   Yes you can go harder, yet in my office and during consultations with athletes, I find that people push themselves harder, getting great performance/fitness results then getting injured.  They are fit but not healthy.  The sad thing is they repeat this cycle of over training, injury, allopathic symptomatic care and back to over training, never learning the lesson.  This corresponds to the Ayurvedic/Chinese principle of 70% -during exercise, meals, etc.  Going to 70% capacity and living in moderation allows room for recovery, detoxification and rebuilding.

4.  Develop an attitude of gratitude.  The most important thing I can impart to anyone, and this is now substantiated by hard data (Functional Magnetic Imaging, Squid Computer), is that our thoughts and the emotions we generate create our biologic terrain, greater than any of our other choices (eat, drink, rest, exercise, breath).  Various organs in oriental health care have an affinity and predisposition to various positive and negative emotional states.

For example:

Liver/Gallbladder – (+) happiness (-) anger, rage

Lung/Large Intestine – (+) gratitude (-) guilt, grief

Stomach/Spleen – (+) positive self esteem, contentment (-) low self esteem, exaggerated sense of self, worry

Kidney/Bladder – (+) self control, harmony (-) impatient, fear

Heart/Small Intestine – (+) forgiveness, balance (-) abandonment, rejection, loneliness, paranoia, not feeling

5.  Get a body fat measurement; As our waists increases, our incidence of cardiovascular disease, stroke, type II diabetes and chronic disease increases.  See steps 1,2 & 3.

6.  Get a better nights rest: our bodies have natural cycles of healing.  We function best when we do not eat late, which disrupts our detoxification cycle.  We also need to be in bed, optimally, by 9:30-10:00 pm.  This allows ample time to revitalize and rebuild and not interrupt circadian cycles of detoxification.

In Health & Service,

Dr. Roland Phillips