It never seems like you have enough time - or motivation. You think your dreams and aspirations are within your grasp, but no matter your efforts, they always feel just out of reach. Don't give up or think of your efforts as futile; instead, you might ask yourself, how do you get the energy to achieve your goals and manifest your dreams? What fuels you? To start, the goals and dreams themselves, if they speak to your heart and soul, energize your spirit. But you also need physical health to manifest them. To be a human dynamo, you need to go beyond "health" as simply the absence of a disease diagnosis. True health is a condition of vigor, stamina and exuberant energy that is rare in today's world. True health means every cell in your body is bursting with vitality! That is the vision for you that drives us at Beyond Health - to go beyond conventional definitions of health and beyond what you may have imagined for yourself. No matter where you are now, we know…

"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." - Hippocrates Do your meals leave you feeling light and full of vitality, or do they weigh you down, making you feel sleepy and dull? Although all food supplies calories, how well your body utilizes those calories to provide you with energy depends on the "life force" in the foods you eat. And foods vary widely along a continuum in this respect, from producing vitality, rejuvenation and healing to sapping your energy, adding unwanted weight and contributing to premature aging and disease.Food also influences mood and mental abilities, from raising your spirits, making you optimistic and heightening your awareness and mental function to bringing you down and dulling your brain.A number of factors determine a food's vibration or life force. Overall, foods are most energizing and health-promoting when they're consumed raw, or as close as possible to their natural state. This gives pride of place to the multicolored fruits and vegetable…

Have you been to a local farmer's market lately? By being outside in the fresh air, surrounded by nature's colorful bounty and the good people who spend their lives tending farms and growing nutritious produce, you already feel healthier and inspired to include more delicious fruits and vegetables in your diet. Using your recently purchased produce to make lunch when you get home is a reminder of how much tastier (and healthier) fresh fruits and vegetables are. Health exists along a continuum, from near-death all the way to bursting-with-energy optimal health. Including more fresh fruits and vegetables in our diets is a major way to keep moving along that continuum towards greater vitality, strength, endurance, mental clarity and optimistic mood. Still, getting in fresh produce each day and adhering to a plant-based diet can feel like a hurdle. Including more fruit isn't hard - just remember to buy it and keep it where it's visible and handy. Fruit is the original…

You never feel like you have enough time. Your day seems like it just doesn't have enough hours, or you're too tired to tackle everything on your list. However, rather than attempt to speed up your pace or try another time management technique, consider addressing your sleep - specifically if and how much restorative sleep you're getting in each night. What Is Restorative Sleep?To operate at top energy and efficiency, getting a good night's sleep - seven to nine hours of "restorative sleep" that leaves you waking up feeling rested and refreshed - is essential.The body is self-healing, self-repairing and self-detoxifying - but only if it gets enough rest and sleep, because all this healing, repairing and detoxifying work is done when the body is at rest.To put it straightforwardly, when you wake up feeling alert, rested and ready to start your day, you've had a night of restorative sleep. Restorative sleep applies to the period lasting from deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM), durin…

Whether through burnout or emerging as cardiovascular or other health issues, chronic stress takes a toll on the body. Recently, we've been focusing on the importance of balancing activity with rest and relaxation for sustaining maximum energy and efficiency. R&R is also essential for combating the negative effects of stress. Today we'll be giving you a "quick fix" through a breathing exercise to help you shift quickly from stress mode to "rest and relax" mode. The Relationship Between Stress and the Nervous System As you may remember, central to the topic of stress versus rest is the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the part of our nervous system that controls involuntary actions like breathing, digestion, the heartbeat, etc. The ANS has two complementary halves, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which control stress and relaxation in our bodies. The SNS responds to challenge or threat with the classic "fight o…

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Will Durant, summarizing what Aristotle had to say on the subject of habits What does it mean to develop good habits? What does it mean - and what are the effects of - having a "bad" habit? Let's start with a more personal perspective: It was decades ago, an unseasonably hot spring day in a high school chemistry class. Along with my fellow students, I was already having trouble concentrating on the droning voice of our dour teacher, Mr. Barkley, when a loud motorcycle came roaring to a stop right outside our window. Eager for distraction, we rushed to the open window and saw a cyclist dressed from head to toe in black leather. He'd stopped to pick up, of all people, a nun in full traditional garb. As she hopped on the back of the motorcycle, and it sped away, we students were amazed and delighted to hear Mr. Barkley sigh and remark in his usual dry monotone, "I guess it's all right as l…

Sometimes the sensation creeps up on your or comes on suddenly: You have no energy to do anything. Work feels like a slog. You put off household chores like washing dishes or taking out the trash. In between, you settle for takeout because it requires minimal effort. Day after day, the sensation persists, and rather than attribute it to lifestyle habits, you conclude that you have a lack of willpower. According to psychologist Caterina Lino, "Overall, self-control appears to be a better predictor of academic achievement than intelligence. It is also a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma, and more important for marital satisfaction than empathy." Willpower and Your Brain Do you believe you lack willpower? The reality is, you probably have more than you know. The truth is, everyone has two parts in their brain that are often in conflict. There is an older, "primitive brain" governed by the pleasure principle; it wants what it wants right now. Another part…

This year we’re focusing on energy—which of course comes from eating food. But overeating—eating more than we need to meet biological demand—can weigh us down, literally, with energy stored as fat.Our nation is obsessed with food and weight. We love to eat, eat a lot of the wrong things, and eat more than we need, so we’re constantly looking for ways to lose weight. Food psychologist Marc David reports that nearly 50% of little girls in the U.S. ages 3-6(!) are already concerned about their weight and report that they are on a diet, while about 1/3 of American adults are on a diet at any given time.Did nature make a mistake in giving us an appetite that drives us to overeat?Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD, co-author of The Pleasure Trap, has an answer for this. Our primitive ancestors and their appetites were perfectly adapted to their environment. Three instincts gave them an evolutionary advantage: 1) the drive to experience pleasure; 2) the drive to avoid pain; and 3) the drive to be efficien…

One way to prepare your child for a satisfying and successful life is by helping them take on increasing levels of age-appropriate responsibility for taking care of themselves and contributing to the household. According to Janet Lehman, MSW , who specializes in child behavior issues, all children want and need to be given tasks and chores. Successfully completing valuable work feeds a child’s sense of mastery and self-esteem, especially if they’re praised for doing it well—or sometimes for doing it at all! Taking on increasingly more demanding tasks prepares them to become competent and self-confident adults. Lehman suggests explaining to your child that the family is a team, and that everyone in the family has an important role to play in the team’s success. The adults bring in the money to support the family and also do most of the work to create and maintain a home. As children, their job is to go to school and do their homework and to help…

Here’s another reason to unglue yourself from that computer and move your butt—prolonged sitting can lead to deadly blood clots! Although blood clots generally don’t become problematic until after the age of forty, a case report on a 32-year-old man is a cautionary tale. This relatively young man spent a good part of his life sitting at a computer terminal, both during the day at work and at home at night—all told about 12 hours most days and sometimes 18 hours a day. He would typically sit anywhere from 4½-6 hours at a time without getting up. One fine day he blacked out and found himself in the hospital with a potentially life-threatening venous thromboembolism (VTE). Fortunately, he was given clot-busting drugs in time and survived. According to the American Heart Association, a VTE is a blood clot related to two life-threatening conditions: (1) deep vein thrombosis (DVT): a clot in a deep vein, usually in the leg; and (2) a pulmonary embolism (PE): a DVT clot that breaks…

The Opioid Epidemic is big news these days. Committees are meeting to discuss ways to get Americans off these dangerous drugs, while scientists look for new drugs with less destructive side effects than our current choices. Too bad Dr. Stanley W. Jacob, MD, one of the great innovative scientists of our time, was never given the attention he deserved. Dr. Jacob helped to develop two sulfur-based natural supplements—DMSO and its derivative, MSM—and spent his life advocating for them and using them to help thousands of patients alleviate pain. But he died in 2015, at age 91, without having managed to convince conventional medicine in the US of the value of these two compounds. However, that didn’t stop people from coming to his DMSO Clinic at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland from all over the world for treatment. This clinic-of-last-resort for pain problems that nothing else had helped had an estimated success rate of about 70%. Jacob became interested in using DMSO…

Do you seem to catch every cold or flu going around? Do you have an ongoing infection, like the yeast infection candida, that you can’t get rid of?  Or do you have the opposite problem—an overactive immune system leading to allergies or to an autoimmune disease? Do you have, or have you had cancer?  These are all indications that your immune system isn’t protecting you as it should, and it’s likely that a primary reason for that is that you don’t have enough glutathione. Glutathione is a critical protein that your body produces. It can also be obtained from food and supplements.  Glutathione has been called “the mother antioxidant” because our antioxidant system can’t function without it. Neither can our detoxification system. And neither can our immune system. Glutathione has the following six essential roles in immune function: Glutathione patrols the bloodstream directly killing many pathogens before they can begin…

PFAS (per- and profluoroalkyls) are a group of toxic man-made chemical compounds used in a variety of non-stick, water-repellent, and grease and stain-resistant applications. Detrimental to just about every body organ, they’ve been associated with a host of diseases including weakened immune function, cancer, and developmental problems in children.Unfortunately, PFOA, the best known of the PFAS, is found in just about all Americans, and has a half-life in humans of about four years. After a lot of bad press, PFOA and its close cousin, PFOS, were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so their levels in our bodies are going down. But they’re being rapidly replaced by new PFAS that, according to environmental advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), are just as bad. No level of PFAS is desirable in the human body. And since there doesn’t seem to be any way to facilitate their removal (even sweating in an infrared sauna didn’t help to…

Would you like to be smarter? Of course, you would! Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring laser-like attention to the task at hand, assess all the elements in a situation quickly, analyze how they interrelate, and remain wholeheartedly engaged and absorbed until any problem is solved creatively and effectively?Well, vitamin C supplementation can help with that, especially if you’re at all deficient — and most of us are!Recently, Korean scientists assembled a group of 241 healthy, young (ages 20-39) adults to see if their serum vitamin C levels correlated with their “mental vitality.” Indeed, it did. So the researchers went a step further. About half of these young Korean men and women had “inadequate” levels of the vitamin, which the researchers defined as being less than 0.88 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Fifty of these vitamin C-insufficient subjects were invited to participate in a four-week experiment. Half of them took 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, fo…

Good habits are essential in being able to live the lives we desire. Still, we tend to approach willpower not as something we can build up and strengthen but, instead, as an innate characteristic that we either have or don't. We further perceive bad habits as reflective of our lack of willpower. But, as many know, it's not so easy to break bad habits or to start new ones, like regular exercise or a daily meditation practice. Too often, attempts to change habits fail. Repeated failures can create the unintended pattern of failing, which leads to losing hope and believing we're incapable of change. So, the first consideration in changing habits is to establish the habit of success! How can you get started? Treat Willpower Like a Muscle The will is like a muscle that needs training to be strengthened. Imagine if you began weightlifting by trying to press 200 pounds! You would certainly fail. But most people set self-improvement goals that are similarly much too…

"What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe and the personality that you portray." - James Clear, author of the New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits You find yourself falling into certain patterns day in and day out. These are your habits, whether you realize them or not. Some support you toward your goals, while others, it seems, get you bogged down in less-beneficial behaviors. Our habits define us, but what exactly are habits? Defining "Habit" A habit is formed when we perform a certain behavior repeatedly over time because it rewards us in some way. This continual repetition literally etches neural pathways in our brains, so that eventually we respond to a given trigger automatically and mostly unconsciously with that behavior. For example, triggered by a feeling of thirst, we seek out water or some other beverage to drink. Triggered by entering a dark room, we swi…

Life tends to feel like you're always on the go: You're reaching for a new goal at work, attempting to squeeze in more time for your family or hobbies, and then you address your health by going to the gym or another form of physical activity. Even if you do it all, the hectic pace catches up to you, and you notice how exhausted you feel over time. But why should it be either-or? Rather than pull back or surge forward while ignoring your health, understand how to effectively balance rest and activity. This year, Beyond Health is focusing on maximizing energy in order to do all the wonderful and amazing things you want to do with your life. But to maximize energy, you first need to balance activity with deep rest and relaxation, to give your body a chance to settle and become quieter, and to heal and regenerate.Understanding Balance in the BodyIn Chinese medicine, there are two principles that govern all life, yang and yin. Yang is dynamic, active, hard, brilliant, quick, courageous and…

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological condition. Although it may start out with something as simple as a tremor in a single finger, it can progress over the years to complete disability. Its hallmark is the dying off of brain cells that make the neurotransmitter dopamine. Without sufficient dopamine, movement becomes increasingly difficult and finally almost impossible. PD's non-motor symptoms include anxiety, depression, fatigue, insomnia and other sleep disorders, hallucinations, cognitive impairment and dementia. Although dopamine replacement and enhancement drugs can control motor symptoms for a while, they don't reverse or stop the underlying disease process. When these medications lose their effectiveness, a surgery may be done to control symptoms. But again, because the surgery doesn't address the underlying disease process, it too becomes less effective with time.However, a novel therapy addresses both symptoms and the disease process. Using Thiamine (…