Journey to Wellness Part 1

Reversing Metabolic Syndrome: Because of all the media reports lately, it’s likely that you have heard of “Metabolic Syndrome”. Perhaps you even know someone who is diabetic, has high cholesterol, is overweight, or has high blood pressure. Maybe you or someone you know has all four conditions. Metabolic Syndrome is a clustering of these four conditions, and they are a prelude to much more serious life-threatening events such as strokes and heart attacks later on. Most physicians of course are convinced that hypertension and diabetes cannot be reversed. That’s true if you do nothing but take medications. But for 80-90% of Americans, their conditions are reversible if certain simple lifestyle changes are made. The changes that actually reverse Metabolic Syndrome are very simple, but profoundly important to health and longevity. Here are three simple steps that you can take to reverse hypertension Diabetes, high cholesterol and an overweight condition:

Step One: Start walking….briskly, for 30 minutes twice a day. Walking briskly twice a day for 30 minutes is the single most important thing that you can do to improve your health. Walking brings down blood pressure, reduces insulin resistance (and high blood sugar), increases HDL (“good”) cholesterol, and causes weight loss of about 1-2 pounds of fat weight per week. Do you know of any drug that can accomplish that? Yet something as simple as walking twice a day briskly for 30 minutes can go a long way toward reversing these dangerous conditions. Walking also increases your endurance, makes you less prone to heart disease and strokes, reduces tension, and helps you to handle stress better. Walking works as well as it does because it does one thing extremely well….it improves circulation all over the body. It serves as a tonic for every organ of the body, including the two most critical organs, the brain and heart. This improvement of circulation does two very important things: it increases the delivery of oxygen and the delivery of nutrients to every cell of the body. It’s the best way to stay young, and keep you’re your brain function as you age.

So why don’t more people walk regularly every day? In a word, television. Television has become the promoter of disease and disability. It encourages people to be inactive, and do nothing, except stare straight ahead, as if in a trance. This trance-like state does exactly the opposite of what exercise does: it causes a decrease in circulation, and poor circulation contributes to disease by reducing nutrient and oxygen delivery.