Brando's Blog

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century - Part VI

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century - Part V

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century - Part IV

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century - Part III

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century - Part II

A New Health Paradigm for The 21st Century

Are Your Forces in Balance? Part 2

In the first part of this blog, I explained how it is important to keep our yin and yang forces in balance and how our body's autonomic nervous system can easy be knocked out of balance with a yang excess and a yin deficiency. In this final part, i will explain how you can re-balance your yin/yang forces.

From the Six Foundational Factors of Health, three are yin and three are yang:

 

• Yin: - Hydration, Nutrition, Sleep
• Yang – Thoughts, Breathing, Movement.

 

So to improve your health, the yin activities need to be increased and/or improved and the yang activities need to be improved and/or reduced.

 

Improving/Increasing Yin Activity:

 

Hydration:

• Ensure you drink a minimum of 0.033 litres of good quality water per day
• Eliminate (minimise) caffeinated drinks, fizzy drinks, diet drinks, sports drinks and fruit juices
• Eliminate (minimise) alcoholic beverages
• If you are fully hydrated, you should never feel thirsty

 

Nutrition:

• Eat right for your metabolic type®
• Eat organic, free-range meats, eggs, vegetables and fruits
• Eat wild fish
• Avoid processed, packaged, heavily marketed, microwaved and GMO foods
• Respect yourself enough to insist good quality nutrition

 

Sleep:

• Sleep around 10-10.30pm for at least 8 hours per night
• Sleep in a totally dark room. Use black-out curtains if needed.
• Get into a rhythm of going to sleep and waking at the same time each day

 

Improving/Reducing Yang Activity:

 

Thoughts:

• Be clear on what makes you happy
• Be clear on your ‘core values’ and live your life by those values. Don’t prostitute yourself.
• Have clearly defined goals and review them regularly
• Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Focus on what you want, not what you have right now (unless you have what you want). Remember, thoughts become things!

 

Breathing:

• Take time out each day to focus on your breathing in a totally silent environment. Breathe in and out of your nose.
• As you inhale, your belly should move out. As you exhale your belly should move inwards.
• A great way to focus on your breath is to meditate. Meditating before bed can also aid a great night’s sleep.

 

Movement:

• Make sure you are getting movement into your body each day, even if it’s walking for 15 minutes. A walking meditation can be great too.
• Ensure you are not over-training. If you feel drained after exercise, you are overdoing it. You may need to shorten your workouts , reduce the intensity or do less of them.
• Try ‘working-in’ exercises like yoga, tai chi or qi gong. These exercises give you energy unlike when ‘working out’ which uses energy.

 

As a practitioner, I am regularly required to help people with health challenges to see that they have a yang excess and are yin deficient. If you feel you have a yin deficiency, try some of the tips above. If you need more information, please feel free to email me.

 

Until next time!

Are Your Forces in Balance?

In life today, many people are rushing around all the time, struggling to fit in all their activities of their day into 24 hours.

 

In order to be healthy, we need to ensure our body stays in balance. Whilst we require stresses to stay alive, like the sun, gravity and mental challenges, many people are unable to handle the volume of stress in their life.

 

As Paul Chek states in his book, The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need, “There are physical stressors, emotional stressors, mental stressors and spiritual stressors. They are an unavoidable reality in our experience of life, and successfully managing them is how we grow. We need them”.

 

Often times, people who become unwell are merely unable to manage their stress effectively and require education on how to do that. This is where I come in.

 

Everything in our universe has polarity. For instance, the earth has a North and South Pole. We have left and right and up and down. With regards to our health and the ability to manage our stresses, we have the autonomic nervous system.

 

The autonomic nervous system also has two poles, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.

 

In Chinese philosophy, it is known as yin (female) and yang (male).  Below, is the yin/yang symbol that depicts the balance between yin and yang and shows that there is yin within the yang and yang within the yin.

 

The sympathetic nervous system is yang. It comes to life when your body is in danger (stressed). It releases stress hormones, such as Cortisol, epinephrine and nor-epinephrine to raise your heart rate, respiration rate, perspiration rate, direct blood flow to the working muscles of the limbs, and the hind brain (and away from the vital organs) so you can ‘fight or flight’ the danger (stress).

 

The parasympathetic nervous is yin. It is supposed to be the dominant system which works most of the time when the body is relaxed. It stimulates the release of anabolic hormones like the sex hormones, human growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factors to help aid repair and regeneration of muscle tissue, tendons, ligaments, joints, the brain and other internal organs.

 

The parasympathetic nervous system directs blood flow to the vital organs and the fore-brain to stimulate the immune system and systems of digestion, detoxification and elimination and to aid repair and allow conscious thought and planning.

 

What is crucial if you are to maintain good health is that you maintain a good balance of your yin and yang forces. After all, if your blood is constantly being shunted away from your vital organs, you won’t be able to digest food properly and your immune system will be shut down. This means your body will not receive nourishment (malnourishment) and your body’s defenses will be down and more susceptible to harmful infections. You will also not be able to think clearly and rationally and this may lead to poor decision making.

 

If you are feeling burnt-out, mentally stressed, always rushing, have aches and pains, have a low sex drive, find it hard to shake off colds and flu’s, can’t lose weight, physically or mentally tired, recover slowly from exercise or feel anxious, chances are you are too yang and have a yin deficiency.

 

It is fair to say that today, most people are too yang and therefore, have a yin deficiency.

Stay tuned for part two of "Are Your Forces in Balance?" when I'll describe what you can do to balance your yin and yang to achieve optimal health and performance.

What Motivates Leigh Brandon?

Public or Private Healthcare?

I recently received a leaflet from my local Member of Parliament warning us all not to vote Conservative as they are going to cut funding to the NHS and introduce an American style medical insurance scheme.

Indeed she quotes two Conservative MPs as saying, "I wouldn't wish the NHS on anyone" and "The NHS has been a 60 year mistake". But I couldn't agree more with these statements. Now, I do not have any allegiance to any major political party. However, when you step back and review the success of the NHS, how successful has it been?

Well, one success has been the fact that it has been the biggest employer in the UK. It provides jobs for people. However, its prime purpose was to provide healthcare. How well has it done in this sense? How much more healthy are we than at the end of the second world war? The rate of infant mortality seems to have reduced as has the level of death from infectious disease. But is this due to better health care or just improved hygiene levels? The level of emergency medical care, for instance, road traffic accident victims has improved greatly.

The truth is that heart disease is now in epidemic levels, as is cancer, diabetes, obesity and on and on and on. We have become a much more sick nation. So has the NHS been a success? Absolutely not!!!

Now, I'm not suggesting that a private medical system would be any better either.

What I am suggesting is that if you wish to become healthy, you need to follow a model of health, not a model of disease. The medical industry (it is an industry more than it is a service) is obsessed with disease. If you focus on disease, guess what you are going to create? Yes, more disease.

If you wish to achieve optimal health and vitality, you cannot expect someone else to heal you. Every cell in your body already knows what perfect health is. All you need to do is give your cells the right environment in which they have the opportunity to be healthy.

By choosing to give your body what it needs physically, mentally and emotionally you can achieve optimal health. It is not imperative that you pay huge taxes or medical insurance to live a healthy, vibrant and happy life. It's all down to the choices you make in life. What you choose to do today will make who you become tomorrow.