HOW TO HEAL NATURALLY: Reduce Your Medical Expenses, Be Fit and Energetic

By Andreja Stušek, MD and Raymond Aaron

The book How to Heal Naturally will help you understand how you can achieve your optimal health without paying expensive medical bills. Following the advice in this book will help you become aware of your life habits and their consequences. You will learn to find balance in your life, which leads to better health. Take command of your life and live it to the fullest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772775112

Book preview

Part I – Optimal Health

"The art of healing comes from nature,

not from the physician. Therefore, the physician

must start from nature, with an open mind."

Paracelsus

Chapter 1

Physical Health

Physical Activity

Physical activity is one part of your physical health that needs to be addressed if you want to feel good in your body. Exercising can improve your life, boost your mood and make you feel energetic. With regular exercise, you can control your weight. And the magic is that you don’t have to exercise insanely to be fit. It is enough to try to be more active throughout the day, a little bit more active than you usually are, but there is no need to exaggerate. The key is consistency, to make any kind of physical activity your daily habit.

Exercising regularly reduces your blood sugar level and lowers your risk for developing type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome. And it doesn’t stop there. Regular exercising can lower your blood pressure and your risk of heart disease by lowering your triglyceride levels. During exercise, your blood circulation improves and your heart muscle strengthens. With regular exercise, you build your bones and muscles. Physically active elderly people slowed their loss of bone density from aging, and reduced their risk of falls. Other health problems you can manage with regular exercise are arthritis, stroke, depression, anxiety and the many types of cancer, such as colon, breast, uterine and lung cancer.

Additionally, exercising has a beneficial effect on your mood and your mental health. It makes you feel more relaxed and helps you deal with stress. With exercise, you can even tame your cravings, whether food cravings or the desire to smoke. It can also stimulate your thinking. You may notice that after exercise, your judgment is more precise and you can learn faster. It can even help you boost your sleep habits. With enough exercise during the day, your body feels tired in the evening, so you can fall asleep faster and sleep deeper. Besides, regular exercise helps improve your sexual health: it helps lower the risk of erectile dysfunction in men, and increases sexual arousal in women.

So how do you start making exercise your daily routine? Well, for a beginning, start with small steps. And I mean it literally. Start using stairs instead of the elevator, especially if you don’t plan to go to the gym that day. Park your car at the end of the parking lot and then walk the rest of the way. Even a small increase in your daily physical activity works wonders in the long term.

When you plan longer workout sessions, find a workout partner. This will help you make exercise more fun, and you will be more likely to work out regularly. It also helps if you listen to music or even work out in front of the TV. In fact, I encourage that you be physically active every time you watch TV. Even if you only stretch, you can achieve significant improvement in your flexibility. Stretching in front of the TV has one additional benefit. You can do it even when the weather is bad.

I suggest you keep track of your progress since this can motivate you to continue exercising. There are many free apps that help you set goals. Try to address all aspects of your physical health: strength, flexibility and endurance. When you gather strength and endurance from your regular excercise, you will be naturally motivated to give yourself more physical challenges. By tracking your results, you will start to observe how you unlock your full body potential.

The most important thing is to start being physically active today. The next step is to continue to make small progress every day. If you can fit 30 minutes of walking, five times a week, into your routine, you will reap massive benefits for your health. And those 30 minutes don’t even have to be walked all at once. You get the same benefit if you divide your walk into shorter periods, like 10 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes after lunch and five minutes in the evening. And that already sounds more managable to fit in your daily routine, doesn’t it?

Nutrition and Diet

Ever felt sluggish? Usually the cause of low energy lies in improper diet, like indulging in processed food or desserts, and drinking too much alchohol or soda. Those are usually the most common reasons to feel sluggish.

You can prevent feeling constantly tired by simply excluding those foods out of your everyday diet. Sounds simple? It is. And yet at the same time, it’s quite difficult to practice this advice when cravings kick in. The secret of success (or failure) lies in our habits. We lack time to prepare ourselves a healthy meal when we are in a hurry. We just can’t resist that delicious piece of chocolate cake in the refrigerator. We didn’t eat during the whole day, but now, in the evening, we are starving for any kind of food. Or we snacked all day in between many chores and we didn’t notice how many calories we ingested during the day.

Finding the most appropriate diet for yourself usually means a lot of experimenting. You might consider a low carb and high fat diet in the first week, and then switch to a high carb and low fat diet the next week. Perhaps you even considered to go vegan. Which one would give you the most benefit and make your day energized? Remember that the right answer lies in your habits. That means that the right diet for you is the one you can fit into your lifestyle, the one you adopt for good and achieve long-term results.

A low carb and high fat diet might not make you hungry, but it can cover your face with pimples. Switching to a high carb and low fat diet might make you feel bloated, but at least you would be pimple-free. Perhaps a vegan lifestyle would not be supported by your family. Learn from your mistakes and choose a diet you can sustain.

Note which food makes you bloated and which one makes you full for longer periods of time. Take the best of all diets you already tried. Cherry pick what worked best for you and customize your diet to fit exclusively to your body—a customized diet that can be done cheap and in the privacy of your home. No need to necessarily consult a nutritionist. All you need is a glucometer and a notepad. The procedure is to take note of food that you have eaten during the last meal. After the meal, you measure your blood sugar with the glucometer. If you are interested in more detailed instructions on how to pull this off, visit my website at www.howtohealnaturally.com.

Every food that spikes your blood sugar too high should be seldom eaten or even eliminated. And every food that keeps your blood sugar at moderate levels for a long time is definitely the food that is good for your well-being. That way, you can make a list of foods that benefit you and make you feel energized during the whole day. Some foods may even surprise you. For example, for some lucky individuals, ice cream doesn’t spike their blood sugar at all, while for the majority of people, ice cream can wreak havoc on their blood sugar. The same foods don’t equally benefit all individuals. We are not all alike. We have different bodies, different immune systems and different needs. We react differently to the same foods. So why not customize your daily menu?

If you can’t afford a glucometer or you don’t want to collect a tiny sample of your blood, there is a way to make a customized food list without a glucometer. In that case, you need to observe yourself carefully after each meal. How do you feel? Do you feel energized? Or do you feel sluggish? Are you quickly hungry again? Or did you feel full for hours? You still need to keep a diary of all the food ingested, with notes on how you felt after meals.

And don’t forget to observe your blood sugar after drinks. You will notice that sugary drinks abruptly spike your blood sugar. Try to replace them with plain water or tea without sugar. Alcohol and coffee have a diuretic effect, so drink them in moderate amounts or avoid them altogether. Replenish the water loss after frequent urinating caused by drinking coffee or alcohol.

Well, the final path of the ingested food is through your intestines. Let your stool be your guide about how successful your diet is. Are you constipated? Try to add more fiber and water in your diet. Do you feel that your stool is too soft, or perhaps even watery? In that case, you need extra help from probiotics. You can find natural probiotics in foods like kimchi, yogurt, kefir, miso, pickled cucumber, tempeh, kombucha and sauerkraut.

I strongly recommend that you cook your own food. You don’t need to take it to the master chef level; it’s enough to learn how to cook your favorite meals. When you prepare your food from scratch, you get to control what you ingest. Usually, the pre-prepared food and meals in restaurants contain larger amounts of fat and salt compared to the same food cooked at home.

Smoking, Alcohol and Drug Use

There are some habits that cause direct damage to our health. The most common of them are smoking, alcohol dependency, drug abuse and even high sugar intake. All of those substances damage