Balanced Nutrition and Hydration

Balanced nutrition and hydration is the second of the four physical roots of a healthy lifestyle. Again, we are intentional in choosing the word “nutrition” over “diet” or such. What our body needs is nutrition, not diet. Yes, diet is common vernacular for what we eat, but the term diet also has a lot of negative connotations, especially for those of us who have gone on diets and failed to maintain or succeed in terms of the diet goals.

We also chose “hydration”, because we may drink a lot of fluids and yet may not be functionally hydrating our body. Drinks like coffee, tea, alcohol, and soda can have a diuretic effect on your body so even though you’re drinking fluids you may not be effectively hydrating your body, in fact in some cases you may actually be dehydrating your body.

Let’s look at nutrition first. Nutrition provides fuel for our body to move and perform its countless functions. That fuel converts to energy and even though the body needs a complex mix of vitamins, minerals, protein, fat and carbohydrates, varied and healthful nutritional choices can provide those components pretty readily.

What is deemed to be healthful nutritional choices will always raise a lot of competing opinions and thoughts, but there are a couple of simple rules of thumb to help steer you in the right direction.

1. Eat low on the food chain. This is a simple way to differentiate between food and foodlike substances. Foodlike substances have been heavily processed and contain a lot of ingredients of which many are unrecognizable to the average person reading the ingredient label.

In fact, the more ingredients a food product has, the less likely it is going to be great for your body. Food in its simplest state is more likely to be good for you than food that has a lot of additives and has  gone through a lot of processing and refinement. Our bodies typically love vegetables, fruits, whole foods and foods rich in fiber. Most of us are aware of what foods are healthy and making more healthy choices over time will pay great dividends.

2. Eat a variety of foods. Diets that promote one food to lose weight are not sustainable and are unlikely to succeed. At the simplest level, your body will not get the requisite vitamins, minerals and components needed for balanced nutrition when you consume a very limited array of foods.

3.  Eat smaller portions. What we mean by this is to spread your nutritional input out and avoid big meals where possible.

We believe eating too much in a sitting, especially at night, is tough on your body so we recommend eating small meals throughout the day.

4. Try and keep your input balanced against your output. Meaning, if you exercise a lot, eat more. If you don’t do a lot of exercise, eat less. Your body will seek balance and if you listen to it, you can usually feel when you’re out of balance.

5. That leads us to our last point on nutrition. Avoid the scales. Judging your state of health or wellness by the scales is fraught with peril. We suggested in the previous point to listen to your body. Too often we ignore our body’s many signals and sometimes warnings because we don’t listen to how we feel. Those are hard things to grasp when we’ve ignored our body’s many cries and too often listened to its cravings. Simple examples of listening to your body would be if you feel energetic, that’s a good sign. If you feel lethargic, that’s probably a bad sign.

Speaking of lethargy, very often we can feel lethargic when we are dehydrated.

Hydration is critical to all bodily functions and when we are well hydrated, our sleep, cognitive function and mood can all improve.

Hydration of the body is crucial for many reasons. It helps regulate our body temperature, deliver nutrients to cells, provide joint lubrication, and allows our organs to function effectively.

All these things can help improve our energy, promote healthy weight loss, improve skin tone, remove toxins from our system, and help keep us regular.

When it comes to choosing what to drink water is the stand out. Obviously water is in many drinks, but other components in those drinks, such as sugar, caffeine and alcohol can offset the hydration benefits of the water by itself. 

There are also a lot of mixed opinions about sports drinks. When we dehydrate we also lose electrolytes, especially sodium.

Even though many sports drinks have sodium and other electrolytes added, they can also contain sugar, artificial colors, flavors and additives. Mineral water usually contains sodium and can be a refreshing drink as well as replace some of the sodium lost during activity. Pure coconut water is also a great alternative electrolyte drink that doesn’t contain any unwanted ingredients.

The level of your activity and many other factors influence the amount of water you need, but if you feel lethargic, have a headache, or dry mouth, then you should try drinking more water. Instead of defaulting to a cup of coffee when you’re feeling tired, maybe try a glass of water and see if you feel the difference.

Essentially, we should drink plenty of water each day, and that may constitute 8-10 glasses or so. 

Your body is an incredibly powerful system that will work very well, given the right ingredients.

When you’re thoughtful about your food and water intake, you’ll notice a positive difference in many aspects of your life.

Cognitive Function & Sleep

Cognitive function and sleep are the third and fourth on the list of the physical roots of a healthy lifestyle, though all the roots are of equal importance. We have chosen cognition over intellectual, or mental, or other possibly more recognizable terms. We’ve done this because we think “intellectual” is a term often used to refer to someone who has above average intelligence, and “mental” comes with its own set of connotations. 

Whereas “cognitive function” covers the processes we think we should be attributing to the proper functioning of our brain, including gaining knowledge and comprehension.

Things like thinking, knowing, memory, judgment and problem solving are critical cognitive functions. Language, creativity, perception and planning are all higher-level cognitive functions that are essential in our wellness equation.

We should be treasuring and nurturing these processes by challenging and stimulating our mind constantly.

For Grant, reading and writing are great ways for him to improve his language and in turn express his thoughts. Just as our food choices impact our bodily functions, what we read matters, too.

Ultimately, what we feed into our mental furnace will determine the quality of the output. 

Equally, when we challenge our mind with new ideas, synthesizing information and integrating this with new knowledge, our brains fire up in positive and fruitful ways. Much like our muscles, when we exercise our brain, it gets stronger.

The retention of this knowledge and learning is also critical. With memory impairment at epidemic levels, we must consciously exercise this cognitive function and give our brain the nutrients and environmental stimulation necessary to maintain optimal memory where possible, especially in our later years.

Additionally, using our senses fully to perceive information and interact with our environment are both cognitive functions.

So often, our senses become dulled and limited by lack of conscious use.

When we consider how people with an impaired sense attune their other senses to bridge the gap, we realize the potential each sense has to provide invaluable feedback about the world around us.

One cognitive function that appears to be waning at a cataclysmic rate is that of attention, or focus.

Grant has struggled on some level with ADHD his entire life. When he was a kid, he was seen as full of energy and hard to contain, or inattentive.

Knowing now that he has an attention deficit, he has worked diligently to exercise focus and improve his ability to be present.

With the onslaught of attention-grabbing bites of information swirling past us at incredible rates, it is no wonder that attention deficit has risen to epidemic proportions.

Avoiding or slowing this cacophony of tantalizing tidbits is tough and so exercising our ability to focus on a conversation, a task, or even a thought process is critical. Becoming aware of this challenge was the first step for Grant. Exercising his attention muscle remains challenging, but fulfilling when he can minimize the number of intermissions his brain takes in any given process.

One other process we feel we need to nurture for cognitive wellness is thought.

Thought is critical to decision making, creativity, problem solving, reasoning, visioning and more. Be a thought leader in your own right. Stretch your imagination, build your problem-solving prowess, engage in cerebral ruminations and welcome discussions and debates with friends, family and colleagues as intellectual pursuits that will help all involved build their cognitive wellness.

Last, but not least, we want to touch on the strongest factor in nurturing healthy cognitive function: sleep.

Quality, rhythmic sleep is critical to rejuvenate and maintain good cognitive wellness.

We have worked with people who were incredibly sleep deprived and witnessed the debilitating effects lack of sleep can have even on highly functioning individuals.

Yet, getting good sleep has become more and more elusive for many people. Given that we often spend more time sleeping than any other single activity, we need to give it due reverence.

When we sleep, we heal.

When we sleep, we rejuvenate. When we sleep, our bodies and our minds renew and rebuild. To us, good sleep is one of the non-negotiables for health and ultimate wellness. To this end, we have written a separate article on sleep, which dives deeper into this critical part of wellness and offers 15 simple tips to help you sleep better. 

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