If you consider yourself healthy, you already know that you must be consistent! Healthy takes maintenance; you don’t just magically stay that way. Here are a few simple habits to form that will help you be more intentional about basic health principles. None of these are challenging or take up too much time; we need to DO it. So try these. Let it challenge you for a week, and notice if you feel any different. 

1. Wake up and drink water with lemon

We do a lot of detoxing in our sleep. Lemon is alkalizing to the body and assists the kidneys with eliminating waste from our body. Water is essential to life and helps transport nutrients and waste throughout our bodies. So we want to help our body move along everything processed at night. If you get frequent headaches, you might be chronically dehydrated. Many people are. Ideally, your water is pure or at least filtered. This is great because you will have at least started your day with water. Hopefully, this will help you gain momentum for staying hydrated through the day. 

2. Eat fruit first. 

Fruit has a high water and fiber content and essential minerals in the correct size and form to be utilized by our body. Fruit is the ideal food. Because it comes from trees (perineal plants), which have deeper root systems and can obtain more nutrients from the soil than annually planted crops. It contains nutritive sugars, which are the fuel for our muscles. We want to continue hydrating, detoxing, and eliminating that we began with the lemon water. The energy from the sugar in the fruit and the fiber helps get your intestines moving and working. You can eat something else later but eat the fruit first. Smoothies are great!

3. Probiotics every day

Eighty percent of our immune system is in our gut. It’s also where we digest our food and assimilate nutrients. Probiotics assist both digestion and immune health. They are beneficial bacteria that work with our bodies. We have been exposed to antibiotics and other gut-destroying chemicals, so it is vital to repopulate your gut with good bacteria. Good supplements exist, but as always, it’s best to get them from a food source. Food sources include fermented vegetables like naturally fermented pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, dairies like kefir or yogurt, and tea-like kombucha. Of course, you can make all of these things yourself, but most stores have options to buy probiotics in supplement form.

4. Stretch every day

This one seems silly and takes more time than the other things, but it is essential. All day we sit, walk, and stand in the same direction. We always move forward, and our hip flexors, hamstrings, and low back muscles can become too tight and cause pain. This happens because those same muscles are constantly activated and become unbalanced. We need our hips to go sideways and our backs to bend the other way. Think about sitting at a computer with your hunched shoulders and back and how they begin to hurt after a while. Doesn’t it make sense to balance them by bending the opposite way? 

5. Get enough sleep

This one is often hard, too. Any healing requires extra sleep. All of us have healing to do on some level. Illness and injury occur when the body hasn’t had enough time to repair the damage it has incurred throughout the day. We primarily use the sympathetic nervous system when awake, but the parasympathetic takes over during sleep. Just like stretching our muscles, we also need balance in our nervous system. Again, we detox while asleep, so your body needs time to do it! Much of your emotional processing occurs at night. It’s not just a figure of speech to tell someone to “sleep on it” when making a big decision. Sometimes after a good night’s sleep, you feel more ready to tackle a problem, and it’s because of this emotional processing. The hours before midnight are the most valuable for all these processes, so go to bed just a little earlier!