Happy New Year to a Healthy New You!

Welcome to a new year, seen by many as a chance to begin anew and with a fresh start to establishing healthier habits. It is important to realize that when it comes to experiencing true health and wellness, there is no pill or any other quick fix that will effectively help you reach your goals. Instead, achieving and maintaining health is a journey, full of ups and downs and twists and turns, and it involves a willingness to embrace physical, emotional, mental and spiritual challenges. Traditionally, one of the most common New Year's health resolutions is to reach a healthy weight.

Deceived by the food and pharmaceutical industries, steps toward accomplishing this goal have been shrouded by misconceptions that have confused the issue. For example, drugs like Wegovy and Ozembic are flooding the public eye with advertisements claiming to balance blood sugar and enhance weight loss. Portrayed as creating joy and boundless energy, these drugs actually cause further illness.While it may be easy to fall for deceptive advertising that a quick fix is possible, the path to achieving a healthy weight is remarkably similar to the path for optimizing health in general. The plan is simple:* Eat real foods that are from the earth, meaning foods that come from nature and are not processed. It's a deception that these foods do not taste good, are hard to make, and are expensive. 

• Move your body. Exercising feels great and provides the body with cardiovascular and pulmonary endurance, boosts mood, increases energy and improves sleep. 

• Challenge your mind by learning new hobbies, reading books, playing trivia games, and more. 

• Explore your spiritual beliefs and practice developing a sense of community with like-minded people and Mother Nature. 

• Calm your nervous system. Healing best occurs within a state of relaxation.

• Establish restorative sleep habits by sleeping away from all electronic devices, eating 3-4 hours before bedtime, and relaxing your mind with prayer, meditation, or reading. 

• Live with purpose by spending your time delivering your gifts and passions to others in your community. 

• Live in accordance with your own value system. 

I said the plan is simple. I did not say it was easy. As challenging as the above may seem, it actually is much easier than relying on pharmaceutical drugs. By relying on a pharmaceutical medication, not only will you not resolve the root of the problem, you will likely suffer from side effects caused by the drug. For example, taken directly off of the Ozembic website, side effects include thyroid cancer, gastroparesis (stomach paralysis), nausea, constipation, pancreatitis, blurred vision, gallstones and many more. This means if you lose weight, you lose weight because you are sick.By the time one may be considering a weight loss drug, it is likely the person already has high cholesterol, plaque on the arteries, hypertension, depression, anxiety, insomnia and maybe even an autoimmune disease or worse. Following the current logic of our healthcare system, the answer would include taking drugs like statins, high blood pressure medications, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications and a sleeping pill. If you have an autoimmune disease, you may even be on drugs to suppress your immune system, rendering you highly susceptible to other disease processes.

When we feel empowered to take our health into our own hands, we tend to make healthier choices for ourselves. This leads to our metabolism responding accordingly and thereby accomplishing a more steady blood sugar, increased energy, and more balanced-hormones. In this way, establishing a healthy weight is completely achievable. 

You are a powerful human being with the ability to make self-loving decisions to reach your health goals. It is simply a matter of you realizing you are worth living life to its fullest and believing in yourself enough to know you can do it. Happy New Year to Healthy New You!