Do you have tight hips? – part 1

Following on from last week’s entry on building resilience, it is important to state that resilience don’t just help you manage stress but it fosters inner strength to help you meet goals, life challenges and achieve success. Most of my clients hold more or less physical tension which I would like you to think of as a bad habit that relaxation will help you break.  Relaxation is like changing the idling speed on a car.  When a car turns over too quickly, wasting expensive fuel and putting a strain on the engine, the mechanic can reset the idling speed to a much lower level.  Similarly when busyness, concerns, time pressure have speeded us up too much, making us tense and irritable, we can learn how to let go and attain a much calmer state of being.  So taking the time to learn what relaxes you! It is worth re-emphasising the point that it is possible to make an enormous difference to your state of mind through yoga, tai chi, relaxation and meditation and all other sorts of physical exercise. While most of celebrate our wins, it is also important to celebrate when we do good for others, as often other’s don’t notice.  We all know life has its ups and downs, when your life is in turmoil, you may not do things "perfectly".  Rather than worrying or simply surviving turmoil, why not ask what you can learn from the situation.  But don’t beat yourself up, remember you always do your best, when you know better, you do better! One habit that I try to cultivate to help put a smile on my face especially when I am feeling down is to cultivate a gratitude attitude.  However bad my day goes, before I got to sleep I try to think of three things that I am grateful for.   These don’t need to be big things; it can be as simple as “I am grateful that the transport system ran on time” as I had a busy day.  A gratitude attitude helps foster joy, fulfilment & peace of mind.

The small intestine is as wide as your thumb and around 5.5m long.  It is both a food blender and assimilator as it digests more of your food than your stomach.  Food stays in the small intestine  for 1 - 4 hours before moving on to the large intestine for further processing. Maintaing a healthy small intestine is all about controlling your bacteria levels and mucus build-up on your intestinal walls which can cause havoc and deplete your energy levels.  If you have bloating, gas and loose bowel movements you may have a small intestine issues such as:

• Candida
• IBS
• SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth

1. Cut out imflammatory drugs e.g. asprin, paracetamol and avoid alchol.
2. Take L-glutamine and butyric acid both of these can help heal the gut, but check with a nutritionalist first as dosage is important.
3. Drink slippery elm tea which calms inflamation of the small intestine and helps relieve IBS.
4. Up your intake of vitamins A and D - liver is an excellent sourch of these vitamins which protect the mucus membrane of the gut.
5. Eat more antibacterial foods such as garlic, honey and sauerkraut which preven the growth of Candida, fungus and yeast infections.
6. Take oregano oil (Oregnano Vulgaris) which has been shown to stop Candidan in its tracks.
7. Take probiotics daily - look for a count of 50 billion or more in each dose.
8. Take prebiotics daily - to feed the probiotics.  Or eat food prebiotic foods such as sauerkraut or kimchi.
9. Go gluten free.  Cut out gluten for an entire week and keep a food diary to check if your symptoms improve.
10. Mimosa pudica an ayurvedic herb is brilliant at wiping out parasites.
11. Eat more ant-parasitics such as garlic, thyme, chilli, tumeric and ginger.

Following on from my introduction to Hypertension (High BP), in this blog I want to discuss lifestyle strategies to prevent and assist the treatment of Hypertension (High BP). Manage your Stress I know its obvious, but I thought it was worth starting with this.  The link between hypertension and stress is well documented as are the long list of things that help you cope including exercise, counselling, massage, reflexology etc.  While we are on the subject of the obvious, I would like to remind readers that High BP is associated with high salt diets, smoking and high alcohol consumption too. Optimise your Vitamin D levels Ateria stiffness (atherosclerosis) is a driving factor for hypertension.  As your blood travels from your heart, cells in the wall of your aorta, called barorecptors, sense the pressure load, and signal your nervous system to either raise or lower the pressure.  However, the stiffer your arteries are, the more insensitive your baroreceptors become, and the less efficient they become at sending the signals.  Vitamin D deficiency is, in turn, linked to stiff arteries, which is why optimising your vitamin D levels are so important. Get enough sleep In a study presented at the American Heart Association High Blood Pressure Research 2012 Scientific Sessions, researchers found a strong link between sleep quality and a type of high blood pressure known as resistant hypertension, which does not respond to typical drug-based treatments. In fact, women who had resistant hypertension were five times as likely to also have poor sleep quality. While the average length of sleep in this study was only 6.4 hours a night (and nearly half slept fewer than six hours each night), it was sleep quality, not quantity, that appeared to influence hypertension risk. While this study only found an association with women, other studies have also linked hypertension in men to a lack of deep sleep,¹ and sleeping fewer than seven hours a night has been linked to hypertension in both men and women.² Read Part 3 References ¹ Hypertension AHA August 29, 2011 ² Sleep. 2006 Aug;29(8):1009-14.