7 Pillars of Health: Simple Tips for Vitality

Health, for me, is not merely the absence of disease. Health is physical, mental, emotional, social, and functional well-being. Any time is the perfect time to make changes to improve your health.

The 7 Pillars of Health that I follow are:

EAT
Food is information for your DNA and for that of your microbiome. Eat 1 lb of vegetables a day, 20-30 species a week. WHEN you eat is as important. Our genome evolved eating during limited daylight hours followed by metabolic rest. An 8-hour eating window followed by 16-hour overnight fast (16:8) is best.

MOVE
The muscle fibers that you lose first as you get older are the type IIB. They are responsible for the explosive effort needed for actions like box-jumping and burpees. Cultivate IIB today.

SLEEP
We need 7-8.5 hours of sleep a night. Track your deep sleep. Aim for a minimum of 90 min deep sleep each night. Good sleep is essential to keeping your telomeres long and lovely. Telomeres are our biological aging markers.

THINK
Gut-brain axis and its integrity is essential to your health. The way we rise above stress is one of the ways to interfere with the thought process. Those with high perceived stress are at greatest risk. It shrinks your telomeres, it shrinks your brain, it pokes holes in your gut lining. This can disrupt your ability to think.

SOOTHE
What can you do to reduce your perceived stress? To buffer the matrix of your body from high cortisol? Exercise is one of the best ways to buffer stress. As is yoga.

CONNECT
The new area of social genomics is very important to health. We are anciently wired to scan our environment for 3 things: social conflict, rejection and social isolation. When you experience any of these 3 things, it triggers your immune system to go into high alert. It triggers an inflammatory cascade and is probably at the root of the epidemic of autoimmune disease.

DETOX
I was taught that detoxification takes place naturally in the body. That is not my experience over 25 years working with patients. I have found my patients are commonly toxic. From drinking too much alcohol, or from being exposed to pesticides. We have to ACTIVELY detoxify.

My latest book Brain Body Diet, teaches you how to become a lean, calm, energized, happy version of yourself, in just 40 days.