5 Things You Can Do NOW to Improve Health + Natural Beauty

By Lionel Nazario

With chronic disease, obesity, fatigue, and high stress becoming all too common, 5 Things You Can Do NOW is the fastest way to gain control of your health. No more excuses. There are many ways to diet and detox, but these five simple changes in how you live will make grueling diets and complicated detox plans unnecessary. In this book, fitness trainer and nutrition expert Lionel Nazario, teams with nurse and skincare expert Shelly Marshall to present concise information on what you can do to lay the foundation for a long and happy life—and why you should be doing it. They include tips and resources to get started right now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lionel Nazario
• Release date: Jun 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997615319

Lionel Nazario

LIONEL NAZARIO is a lifelong student of fitness, philosophy, and martial arts. He served in the U.S. Army before coming to New York, where he established a reputation leading classes at some of Manhattan’s top health clubs. Realizing that exercise alone was only part of the picture, Lionel devoted himself to learning the intricacies of lasting, vibrant health. Having his first book published and graduating from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition enabled him to fuse his skills and passions in the creation of Lionhearted Living, a wellness movement with the aim of helping more people to attain their vision of health so they can continue on to personal greatness. Lionel works privately with clients from across the nation and collaborates with the best and brightest to produce content that changes the way people think.

Book preview

1.

Drink Clean Water

WE’VE ALL HEARD it before, the bit of science that tells us the body is 70–80 percent water. Do we really understand the significance though?

Researchers estimate that over 50 percent of the people in the United States suffer from chronic dehydration, but are unaware of this, mistaking their symptoms for illness or even overlooking them altogether. So it seems that the answer is no, we do not understand or appreciate the vital role of water in a healthy lifestyle.

Why is water so important to us?

To survive, we must put things into our bodies. By weight, most of what we need enters through the mouth, after which it heads for the stomach. Water makes itself immediately useful in the formation of saliva, which not only lubricates the food we eat so it can pass down the esophagus safely, but also contains enzymes that begin the digestive process before we’ve even swallowed.

Then what? How do materials from outside end up where they need to be inside us?

Water is the transportation medium throughout the body: If the nutrients in the food we eat are going to go anywhere, it is a fluid consisting almost entirely of water that will take them there. Being dehydrated means your transportation fleet is not fully operational.

Returning to our imaginary office building, think of what would happen if the shipping and receiving department were chronically understaffed. Deliveries would come in as usual, but with no one available to take them to their intended recipients, things would begin to pile up and the people counting on getting those undelivered items would be unable to perform their own duties properly.

Burning fat and alleviating chronic fatigue can sometimes be as simple as drinking more water, because energy production at the cellular level requires water.¹

Not enough water = not enough energy.

At the other end of this process of taking in substances, we have a biological need to take things out. Waste and toxin elimination are greatly dependent on adequate hydration. No, you couldn’t even push the gunk out of your excretory equipment without an adequate supply of water to make mucus. It would be like not having enough custodians in the building to take out the trash. Things will pile up, and in your body this can have all sorts of nasty consequences, like fecal impaction. (This is when you accumulate so much dried-out poo in your colon that you start to get sick from it.)

People suffering from constipation will usually benefit from an increased water intake. This helps directly through increasing systemic hydration and also indirectly through reducing food intake.

Strange as it may sound, people often mistake thirst for hunger. A good habit to create would be to reach for a glass of water before any snack or meal. Studies have shown that those who drink a glass of water before meals feel more satisfied and eat less. Anyone interested in controlling appetite should look to water as the first step.

To draw all this together and illustrate how vital water is to optimal organ function, let’s take a close look at our largest and most public organ.

The Skin

One of the simplest ways of determining if you are adequately hydrated is by looking at your skin. While it is the largest organ by volume, it is not the first in line at our internal water tank. The first organs served by the water we ingest are the major ones that help maintain overall homeostasis, such as the heart and lungs. Next are the kidneys, which must first have their ration of fluid to create urine before allowing the intestines and colon to get their water, which they use to create and push along that big poo. After that the skin will get its turn. Our skin receives all the excess water we drink; yet water for the skin is only excess in the sense of not being critical to our immediate survival.

Adequate hydration of the skin helps to keep our dermal and epidermal layers intact (and looking beautifully full) by facilitating the creation of strong proteins and resilient collagen. If you are getting enough fluid, your skin will have a luminous quality and will look more youthful overall. The face will appear full, the legs and hands won’t be dry, the scalp won’t peel, redness and irritation will absent.

You can use all the creams and lotions on the market to hydrate the stratum corneum (the outermost layer of the skin), but the only way to truly hydrate those deeper layers for a plumper, more youthful look is to hydrate from the bottom up. This is where water becomes the star of the show.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you’re urinating every two to three hours, you are getting enough water to serve ALL of your organs. But if you’re only urinating two to three times a day, that means you may be getting just enough to make the minimum amount of urine your body needs, which means there is little to nothing left for the