Health and Fitness

How do you judge your wellness? Do you adopt a ‘feel’ approach? I feel well, therefore I am well. I guess it would surprise you then to learn that many people that feel well, and look well, have life terminating diseases like cancer already ravaging their bodies. And many do not even know it.

Now I am not into scaremongering, but I am into being real. With such fast paced lifestyles, it is not uncommon to feel tired or a little run down. We accept this as part of daily life. It is difficult therefore to use feeling as a defining signal as to the state of our health. So how can we judge our wellness?

The first part of measuring wellness is defining a benchmark – that defining envelope that defines that one person is well, where another is not. So accepting that feeling well is not an adequate benchmark, we search for defining parameters.

This generally includes three elements:

1. Mental Ability – your ability to concentrate and perform a range of mental tasks

2. Physical Ability – test your cardiac fitness, body strength and flexibility

3. Cellular Health – measure of your body toxic levels and how well the cells are replicating.

Most of you will be familiar with the first two, and there are many tests to help you with these, including those found on antiaging-wellness.com. But cellular health is a new element for many.

With mental and physical fitness, we all have a reasonable understanding of what is acceptable to function in a healthy way. To be able to concentrate sufficiently to get through a days work, to remember normal day to day tasks [well, most of them anyway!] and to be able to move freely, completing normal daily tasks without pain. But understanding cellular health may mean a little bit of learning for many.

Knowing how cells in your body work is no longer just a theoretical element of biology studies skimped through at high school. By understanding your body, you are in a better position to manage your own health at optimal levels.

Did you know that your life span [that number of years your body can realistically continue to operate, your biological limit] has remained the same over the past 50 years; but your life expectancy [ the number of years you can expect to survive ] has not. It has reduced by 20 years! Why is this?

The answer is simple – lifestyle. Our life today is not just faster, it is also more toxic. So whilst improved health and medical science has maintained our life span, we are killing ourselves well before our biological limit. These extrinsic aging factors are overriding our intrinsic [inherited] aging factors to reduce our life expectancy at an alarming rate.

The cells of the human body are constantly replicating and dying. Different types of cells have significantly different life spans. The red and white blood cells only survive a few weeks to months. Cells with long life spans [years to decades] include nerves, muscles, heart cells, and reproductive cells. The body’s ability at replication and removal of dead cells naturally declines with age. With decline, cell signals start going a little screwy, so that some slow in replication, causing progressive aging in those tissues. This accounts for the variances in aging between individuals.

Common aging signs include greying or loss of hair, loss of skin tone, loss of muscle tone, joint pain and reduced mobility. Hence you may have one 80 year old with a full head of lovely white hair that still moves with pain-free fluidity; whilst another is bald and moves stiffly, with pain.

Inhibiting our body’s cells to replicate in a healthy manner is influencing our aging more than any natural progression. The body is an incredibly well designed organism. It is a complex system of harnessing nutrition from the food we eat and transporting vitamin and hormones around the body to stimulate healthy cell function and replication. It also works just as well on the other side of the cell, transporting waste from the cell and removing it from the body.

Unfortunately though, our living environment and habits are causing an overload of toxins entering the body; far more than the cells can rid from the body. This causes a build up of toxins at cell level, interfering with the precision processes of the cell, resulting in loss of normal function and mutations during cell replication. This results in disease, and cancer. This abnormal behaviour can be happening without any perception by the individual, until it gets to such an advanced stage that it manifests itself as a known symptom.

Fortunately, just as the answer to why our age expectancy has reduced is simple, so is the remedy. Ingest fewer toxins and boost the body’s natural ability to rid itself of toxins. Think of it as an aging bank account. If you keep the toxins low, and the support high; your contributions to your health will outbalance the toxic withdrawals, keeping your aging in credit.

Because toxins and cell replication are contributing more to the aging process than normal intrinsic factors, it makes sense to adopt antiaging as our wellness benchmark. It not only provides for being well in the present, but ensures we stay well longer, and thus live longer.

Medical science has proven it; we are killing ourselves. Let’s not let that happen, and fight the aging forces of todays lifestyle.
You can still drink wine, eat chocolate and incorporate all the activities you want to indulge in. It’s more about becoming aware of what elements of your lifestyle are toxic, and doing whatever you can to reduce them to a minimum. In addition, you can support optimal cell functioning with glyconutrients and help your body eliminate harmful toxins using antioxidants.

Over the coming weeks, we will look closer at these age robbing factors and help you balance your aging account to stay well longer and age slower.