If you’re like me, you don’t want to live a suboptimal life.
Why be content with minor health issues when we can experience exceptional health like we were meant to have?

As they say, prevention is better than cure. Little health problems become big health problems when we don’t take care of them soon enough and then it’s a whole lot harder to reverse.

Here are the top 4 most important things that I think are vital for optimizing health, androgens, energy and longevity. We can dive a lot more in depth in each one of these categories, but for the sake of this article, I’ve done my best to keep it short and simple just to give a good idea of each one’s importance.

#1 Keep stress at bay

Most of us are under constant stress these days. Whether it be the commute, the kids, shopping, the job, finances, or other things that you can’t avoid such as pollution, EMF and so on, we need to make ourselves more stress resilient so that we don’t sacrifice our health, androgens and longevity.

Stress has increased dramatically over the last few decades and chronic stress is one of the top causes of disease and death.

So how do we keep stress at bay even if it seems like such an unavoidable thing?

There are a few tips and tricks to make this possible. Here are 6 Tips to lower stress (taken from my free eBook: Reclaiming your Alpha Status on the Top 10 Factors to maximize energy and androgens (P.S. free download, no email required)):

• Planning
  Having a schedule for the day, week, month or even a year can greatly help to reduce stress. A pro-tip: don’t try to fit as many things in your schedule as possible. Pick one to two most important things per day that will have the greatest impact on your progress of what you want to achieve.
• Meditation
  This doesn’t just have to be sitting with your eyes closed and humming, but can also be listening to music, walking in nature, going for a swim in the ocean, etc. The focus is to relax, focus on the moment and clear the mind of any stressful and cluttered thoughts.
• Be early
  Meaning, if you have a meeting or want to do something at a certain time, start early. Plan everything as if its rush hour; and by that I mean, if you get there early or start sooner then it’s a bonus and it’s much better than being late, rushed, and doing something suboptimally.
• Have a meal plan
  Not knowing what to eat the day can be a stressor in itself and can make you wander around thinking about what you want to eat, then running out of time can make you buy something less or even non-nutritious which then easily leads to stress eating which then leads to gut distress (bloating, indigestion, gas, pains etc.).
• Invest in yourself
  If your finances, suburb, living conditions, etc., are giving you problems, the best thing you can do is to keep on studying and growing so that you can’t help but get a promotion, a better job, etc. There are many great business and self-development books and courses out there that will help you improve in this area. I encourage everyone to do self-growth and development as it is a fundamental key to success and a stress-less life.
• Supplements
  Adaptogens such as Rhodiola Rosea, Ashwagandha, Magnolia, Adamantane, gelatin, Relora, pregnenolone, etc., are all great to help cope with stress and increase stress resilience.

#2 Keep inflammation low

Inflamm-aging is actually a term they use in scientific research which describes that inflammation is one of the main major drivers of aging. And not just aging, but also all the problems that come with it, such as degeneration, low testosterone, reduced mental function, cardio vascular disease, etc.

It’s not the “out of control inflammation”, that’s the biggest problem here, but the low grade chronic inflammation that you hardly notice which has the biggest negative impact on the body.

There are many things that can promote inflammation; this is a deep rabbit hole that we can go down some other time, but for this article I just want to mention a few of the most potent inflammation promoters.

1) Polyunsaturated fat

Polyunsaturated fat is a highly unstable type of fat present in high amounts in seeds, nuts and vegetable fats/oils. Animal fats also contain some, but is far less and is balanced with a good amount of saturated fat which makes it safe to consume.

Polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) accumulate with age and is a potent promoter of inflamm-aging. Even if you eat tons of anti-oxidants to protect the PUFAs from damage, you can’t stop all the damage from occurring. Stressors such as EMF, pollution, heavy metals, psychological  and emotional stress, etc., all trigger the inflammatory cascade.

This is why it’s best to limit PUFA intake to less than 10g per day and if you want to avoid it more seriously for extra benefit you can limit it to less than 4g per day.

2) Excess phosphorus

Phosphate is a micro-nutrient necessary for survival, but an excess thereof, in the presence of low calcium intake, promotes inflammation, calcification, bone loss, etc.

3) Pollution

Pollution, such as air, water and soil pollution might be unavoidable, but it does mess with the body and promote inflammation. Aspirin greatly protects the lungs against the harm of air pollution, so if you can’t avoid the pollution, aspirin is a great supplement to take to help protect you against the damage it causes in the body.

4) Stress

Stress, like mentioned above, secretes cortisol, and although cortisol is anti-inflammatory, CRH is highly inflammatory and is elevated in mental disorders such as depression.

5) Iron

Excess iron and the dysregulation thereof in the body reacts with oxygen and PUFAs to create excess free radicals and lipid peroxides; all of which cause oxidative stress and inflammation.

Most doctors check only ferritin to see if you have low iron or not, which will not give you a good idea of your iron levels at all. You should measure ferritin, transferrin, TIBC, serum iron and hemoglobin to see where your iron levels are at.
Copper, vitamin B2 and vitamin A are important co-factors in the handling of iron.

#3 Nutritious diet

A good diet isn’t just a diet with organic whole foods, but also a diet that doesn’t cause you any negative symptoms. If you get blood sugar crashes, bloating, burping, flatulence, fatigue, swelling, irritation, nasal congestion, etc. then it’s a sure sign that your diet isn’t optimal and could be doing your health more harm than good.

Most of us live with these symptoms on a daily basis and never realize that it might be due to certain foods that we’re eating.

The fastest way to figure out what foods are causing this is to go on an elimination diet. Stick to 2-3 foods per day for a whole week. Then add in 1 extra food for the next week, then another food for the week after that and so on. If you pick foods that don’t cause you problems, you’ll notice that a lot of those negative symptoms disappear and then reappear when you eat the problematic food.

When you add a food and you find that it’s problematic, just eliminate it and replace it with another food to see how your body responds to that. If no side effects, leave it in and continue to add a new food in until you’ve identified all the problematic foods.

But it’s not only for avoidance of the symptoms that we want to eliminate problematic food but also because the offensive food promotes gut irritation which increases endotoxins and serotonin, which, when chronically elevated, contributes to almost every disease and condition known to man.

#4 Exercise

Exercise, or being active, is absolutely fundamental for health, androgen production and longevity. It aids in proper nutrient utilization and oxidation, prevents fat gain, promotes better cellular function, improves insulin sensitivity, increases testosterone, lowers stress, is preventative of a host of diseases, etc.

But not all exercise is created equal. Exercise can quickly become too stressful and exhaustive, which will have a negative effect on your health; we as humans feel that we have to push ourselves harder and harder all the time, otherwise we tend to feel like a failure and/or feel doomed to our current condition/state. We continuously want to grow and better ourselves but tend to over push ourselves when it comes to something physical like exercise.

But that is a fallacy. Overdoing exercise is negative, and few of us realize that we are overdoing it already. That’s why I want to highlight the importance of FUN, ENJOYABLE, CREATIVE and EXPLORATORY exercise/activity.

Things like:

• riding your bike along a trail vs riding a stationary bike
• hiking in nature vs walking on a treadmill
• swimming in the ocean vs swimming laps in a pool
• chopping wood vs hammering a tire
• doing parkour for fun vs routine gymnastics
• mindful jogging on a trail vs mindless jogging around the same boring blocks.

All these activities are fun, exploratory, enjoyable and most of all, auto-regulated, which means that when you get tired you take a break.

Take for instance, if you have to do 15 sprints for your exercise session, you won’t stop before it is done. But when you do parkour, you might do a sprint and a few tricks, take a break, relax, plan your next move and then do it. Using your brain to do planning, calculate distance and estimations; this keeps our dopamine high and our stress hormones low. When we get too tired we stop for the day. But when we do mindless sprints, our brains aren’t very engaged and we won’t stop ’til we’ve done our 15 sets!!

Get my point? Even though we might rest a bit more and have more fun doesn’t mean we won’t reap the benefits of exercise; we’ll still reap all the benefits while preventing the exercise from becoming boring, depressing, exhaustive and detrimental.

If you don’t like exercise then don’t do it. Do some other fun activity that you find interesting, even if it’s archery, shooting hoops, juggling, etc.

Point being, movement and activity is very important and beneficial to our health so finding and doing something that you are crazy about will do wonders for your health, energy, longevity and androgens.

As always, thanks so much for reading my article.
If you found it helpful and insightful please like and share so others can also benefit from this information and feel free to leave a comment down below if you have any questions for me.

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