Could stress make you stronger?

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Hormetic stress is one of the body’s most important mechanisms to improve your health and wellness, and it can even make you live longer.

Hormetic stress = Being slightly uncomfortable to build resilience at cellular level.

From an evolutionary standpoint, when your body is under some form of stress it adapts to the situation. These environmental challenges enhance the functionality and resilience of cells and organs. The resultant stimulation and up regulation of molecular signalling and metabolic pathways improve in turn the body’s capacity to withstand further stress. Your tissue repairs quicker, your brain becomes sharper, your immune system functions better and you live healthier longer.

Your health enhances when your flexibility to respond to your environment increases.
This flexibility is improved under hormetic stress.

Get out of the Stress Storm ……

Finding balance, flexibility and amplitude in your food habits is key for optimum vitality and wellness. Unfortunately, as modern life is based on convenience and comfort, you may well loose your inner capability to optimize your health.

1- You buy processed / packaged food that are quick to prepare and last long on the shelf. These products promotes consumerism but alter your health. As fruits & vegetable selections are imposed by the food industry, the variety in your plate decreases while the chemical compounds increase. Your gut microbiome suffers and your genes lack the diversity of signalling molecules to function in equilibrium = your health decline.

2- You want more palatable food and as you get more, you crave for it. Focused on sweet and salt, your forget to train your taste buds to sourness and bitterness. Sour and bitter food and beverages contain “hormetic phytochemicals”. These active compounds in plants activate your adaptive cellular response that protect your cells against injury and disease. By missing on these tastes, you overlook some core therapeutic action of food.

3- You forget to be hungry. As food is available 24/7, your digestion can’t rest, and your appetite hormones are on fire. You also miss on the natural shift from using glycogen stores to the mobilization of fatty acids, a natural adaptation to temporary food deprivation. This adaptive process is a potent disease prevention mechanism. Food is not only calories for energy. It is the main source of information your body gets from environment.

….. Choose stress for health

As your body contains more than 1 trillion cells and your brain more than 86 billion neurons, it is time to bring back some of your innate ability to enhance your cellular function for optimum wellness and vitality. Dietary challenges and a “hormesis-based” lifestyle is a sure way to get out of imbalance by improving your resilience and enhancing your body’s capability to respond to your environment.

1- Wash, Peel, Cut & Cook
Food is alive, it comes mainly from garden, not from boxes. Check your cupboard and ensure you’ve got mostly wholefood instead of “edible food like substances”. Adopt a plant based mentality for health and wellness.

2- Your Sense Of Taste Shapes Who You Are
Check you experience all five tastes everyday (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory) so you don’t miss on the therapeutic value of food. Bring back your primal instinct and choose the healing alliance with plants. Remember that the human brain can learn to like almost anything under the right circumstances.

3- Get hungry
The balance between feast and fast may be the way to look at chronic disease prevention and healthy ageing. Periodic voluntary food deprivation have multiple beneficial effects on cells that can counteract disease processes. Ask your health care practitioner about the
most adapted balance between food and fast.

SWITCH THE PICTURE FROM LIVING OLD TO ENJOYING LIFE LONGER