How To Get And Stay Healthy

Here are six tips that are guaranteed to work, if you follow them all religiously. There's no point eating well, then taking drugs and staying out late!

1. Eat Wholesome Food.

Eat plenty of fruit, fish and vegetables, drink clean water. Depending on where you live, you may need the bottled stuff, or the tap water could be OK. Avoid chlorinated water. If you're in a First World country, and the tap water looks clear, and doesn't taste of anything, it's probably OK.

Packaged food is full of additives. These are flavourings, colourings and preservatives. The more ingredients a food has, the less healthy it's likely to be. The preservatives are poisons, put into kill bacteria.

Try and get organic food, if you can. It's less likely to be tainted. A healthy diet makes for a healthy body.

2. Sleep.

Get at least eight hours a night. If you need twelve, take them! Ignore those fools who say they can manage on four hours a night; maybe they can, but if you're like a zombie at work, or you sleep longer at the weekends, you're chipping away at your health.

Lack of sleep is very ageing. You become more prone to disease. Recovery time from colds is longer, and you get more of them. If you don't get enough sleep you look haggard i.e. old. Sleep deprivation is akin to being a zombie; your IQ is less, memory poorer, and your reactions slower.

3. Avoid Drugs.

This includes cigarettes and alcohol.

A smoker is essentially in a constant state of ill-health; weaker immune system, less energy, less stamina. In time smoking can lead to serious disease. It lengthens recovery time from other diseases. Doctors tend to write-off smokers; they know their work is being wasted.

Cigarettes contain poisons like formaldehyde, ammonia, arsenic, and benzene. The reason people crave them is because they also contain nicotine, which is as addictive as heroin.

Alcohol is a poison. Drunkenness is a mild form of poisoning; hence its alternative name: intoxication. It attacks the liver, which is vital to your well being. You don't want your doctor to tell you have the body of a fifty-year-old at the age of twenty-five.

As for illegal drugs: Apart from the direct effects of the substance itself, it may be mixed with additives that end up poisoning you. The vendors have no fear of consumer watchdogs; they can put whatever they like in their products.

4. Take some exercise.

Exercise gets the circulation going, and gets more oxygen into the body. I've noticed when I sit at my PC all day, I get stiff. If I do it for days in a row, I feel colder.

When I take a long walk, I can feel my joints loosening up, and I just feel 'better' at the end of it.

We share a common ancestry with the great apes. They are very strong; a chimpanzee can kill you quite easily. This is partly because they take a lot of exercise swinging around the place and foraging for food; no sitting around for them!

5. Avoid Worrying.

Consider your problems dispassionately. Solve them in your mind, or put them aside. Continuous worry never solved anything; it just wears you down. If you have problems, resolve to deal with them, or deliberately avoid them; but decide, and then put them out of your mind. Stress and worry make you haggard, and pre-dispose you to disease. They keep you awake at night, and ruin the quality of your sleep.

Meditate. Resolve your problems before you go to sleep at night. Observe your thoughts and emotions dispassionately. You may be surprised to find how crazy most are!

Look, all you really need are clothes, food, and someplace warm to sleep at night. Everything else is a bonus. Remember, it all ends in the grave, for rich and poor alike. Today's major problem will be tomorrow's vague memory. So cheer up, and get healthy!