The Book of Health Hacks: Applying Simple Daily Habits To Feel Less Blah and More Hurrah!

By Kerry Sanson

Are you looking for simple ways to improve your mental and physical health and well-being, and bring back the hurray to your day?



The Book of Health Hacks is a compendium of easy strategies and practices for you to add to your daily routine. They don't take too much time to do, and most won't cost a penny! Plus, each health hack has been tried and tested, some of them for thousands of years, and many are backed by science.



Kerry Sanson is a movement and massage therapist, a personal trainer, and a student of Eastern philosophies including Yoga and Oigong. She has helped many clients to make simple improvements to their fitness, nutrition and lifestyle, producing successful and long-lasting benefits. You can choose to add one or several health hacks to your day - perhaps you'll practice Face Yoga every morning, or drink Yin Yang water with lunch, or add Torso Bouncing to your breaktime.



These hacks can help you be more mindful and give you more energy to win your day, one hack at a time! There are 40 health hacks to choose from, you can mix them up or create a daily routine. Each hack is described in step-by-step guide or linked by OR code to a YouTube demonstration video.



The Book of Health Hacks can help you change your lifestyle in simple ways that suit you.



"I have worked with Kerry over a number of disciplines for 5 years now, and her impact on me has been huge. She really has collected some effective and beautiful practices from her deep delves into all things health and wellbeing.

Her thirst for learning is boundless and we get to reap the rewards of her diligent curiosity This book is practical and powerful, a perfect gift for those looking for gentle self-work in a brash and busy world." Charlotte Church

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839525759

Book preview

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WHAT I HOPE YOU WILL GET OUT OF THIS BOOK

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

James Clear

I’m a big believer that nothing great was created overnight but formed by patiently working one step at a time. Even the most beautiful palace was once a pile of bricks, but vision, consistency, and a lot of work and time helped to build and create that palace.

I also believe that things don’t have to be complicated. If change seems overwhelming at first, trust me: breaking down activities into easy-to-follow steps can tremendously improve your health and wellbeing.

That’s why I wanted to put this book together. Having seen these techniques, small changes, and health-orientated everyday exercises and actions improve my clients’ well-being over the years, I wanted to show you how easy it can be to introduce and include beneficial new habits into your lifestyle.

The Book of Health Hacks contains so many great hacks that you can easily apply to your everyday life. These hacks do work – they’ve been tried and applied by many people.

MY JOURNEY INTO THE FITNESS AND WELL-BEING PROFESSION

The best teacher I’ve ever seen is pain.

Dr Perry Nickelston.

My path into fitness and health came from dealing with my own ill health and pain management which started in my teens. The reason I’m speaking of these conditions now is not for a ‘oh woe is she’ response from you, but to highlight why my focus was on health from an early age.

Many health and fitness professionals come to the job because of their passion for health and fitness and that’s wonderful and a very honourable starting point. My motivation was that I wanted answers as to why I was in pain. I wanted to find out what I could do to help myself feel better. It was only later that I began to learn that I was not alone. Many people are told, by their doctors and other professionals, that the conditions which are causing them pain and affecting their day-to-day lives, are something that they will have to learn to live with.

I didn’t want to accept that verdict for myself.

I should say here, right from the start that I don’t want to seem disrespectful to modern medicine. Its advancements in recent years have been truly staggering and there are more ways to help with illness now than ever before – and if I sever my finger in an accident, please don’t take me to an aromatherapist, take me to a surgeon! But for the chronic ailments that I speak of, which began when I was a youth and continue to the present day, there was very little doctors could do given their time and resources, and I appreciate that.

Back to my story. As a teen I was constantly in a state of pain and discomfort. I was plagued by several ailments such as mid-back pain, ‘water on the knee’ and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). From the age of 13 years old, I went through years of diagnosed illnesses with no treatment plan. I know that treatments have improved, and I hope that attitudes have changed, but at the time, in a Northern England town, in the 1980s, the cultural attitude was a bit: stop moaning and get on with it.

I can remember that the doctor who diagnosed my mid-back pain as muscular rheumatism (now more likely to be called fibrositis), offered no treatment or help other than an instruction to ‘sit up straight!’ How many times do teenagers hear that? How many parents know the futility of repeating this mantra? I mean, it’s good general advice, but as a treatment plan, it’s a bit lazy.

Similarly, with the water on the knee (otherwise known as knee effusion), the treatment plan recommended was more of a: oh well you’ll grow out of it with an added threat - just don’t jump on it or you might need to use a wheelchair. I kid you not, that’s what I was told!

The IBS, which used to cause crippling bouts of bloating and constipation, was investigated a little further, but as with the nature of IBS, once they’ve ruled out any more sinister underlying issues, the advice was to eat differently and figure out which foods to avoid.

As I headed into my twenties the mid-back pain migrated to the lower back too, leading to periods of sciatic pain where I was laid up on painkillers, unable to function for days at a time. The continuing food intolerances and constipation and IBS did not subside either. The doctors would only prescribe drugs for the pain and fibre sachets for the bowels, but no real therapeutic answer was forthcoming.

With great frustration I knew that the help I needed was not going to come from the doctors or the system they worked within. More than anything I needed to find a way to deal with these agonising and debilitating issues. So that’s when I turned to alternative holistic therapies, Eastern medicine and natural herbalism.

Over the following years I tried everything: sports massage, physiotherapists, aromatherapy, chiropractors, osteopaths, acupuncture, energy medicine, colour healing, reflexology, herbs, singing workshops, fasting, yoga, meditation. Literally, I tried anything that I thought might help me. Some therapies did help and others didn’t suit me so much. I started to apply the methods that did help to my lifestyle and in this way, slowly I began to understand my body better, identifying what helped it to function and move better and what didn’t. It took a good 10 years to figure out my food triggers and intolerances.

I was starting to listen to my body more and learning how to tune in to it. I was figuring out what foods caused me to bloat and aggravate the IBS and what types of movement helped with my back pain. I began to slowly build a stronger body and healthier lifestyle. When I was 15 I started practising yoga and have always kept it up. I found that if I didn’t do some sort of yoga practice I would seize up! I also introduced more exercises such as jogging, cycling and going to the gym.

Seizing up is not something that you expect to be thinking about in your 20s, but this provided me with a valuable lesson about fitness and mobility. It’s not how old you are, it’s how much you can and do move. I no longer listen to stereotypes around ageing. It’s not ageing that causes you to not move around as well as you did in your youth, it’s the lack of diverse movement that leads to reduced mobility. As Pete Egoscue says, The less we move, the less we are capable of moving.

HEALTH IS A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION

I discovered Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in