Jean’s Word of the Week: CARE

Your Food, Drink, Thoughts, Exercise, and Environment Are All Vital To Good Self-Care

Jean Edelman: Hello. Great to be with you this week. This week, I want to continue our conversation about taking care of our body. There's a very funny movie with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep, Death Becomes Her. They have been given the fountain of youth. They've been told to take care of their body. But do they? No. They think that they're just immortal and they can do anything they want.

Well, you know what? Life is not a movie. Life is about good self-care. We need to connect the dots with what we eat. Our movement, our environment, our thoughts with our health. It's all connected. So we're going to start with three small areas.

The first is hydration. We really need to drink water. When we're dehydrated, our systems kind of get sluggish. We feel sluggish. It's so important. When we don't drink water, we crave sweets. It's a miracle...drink water. You'd be surprised how much better you feel. My trick is that each day I fill a pitcher and my goal is to drink that throughout the day. I usually stop by a certain time during the day so I can sleep through the night, but drink water. Hydration is a number one key to good health.

Improving Our Nighttime Sleeping Routines

The second is our sleep habits. I want to talk about waking up in the morning and then our nighttime habits. How many of us when the alarm clock goes off and we jump out of bed? Like we haven't even collected our thoughts, our mind and our body have not connected. We're lightheaded. We can't even think. We don't even know where we're going or what we're doing. I want us to start a better morning routine. As soon as we start to kind of wake up, let's do some deep breathing. Let's do some little stretches. See how our back feels. Stretch our feet down to the end of the bed. Take some deep breaths. You've just been sleeping. You've been unconscious for however many hours you sleep at night; you've got to give your body a chance to connect so that you can move into the day together, mind and body.

So in the morning add some nice deep breaths and some light stretches. Maybe if you like yoga, you could add a yoga stretch and then go brush your teeth and jump into whatever it is that you do in the morning. But give yourself, love yourself, care for yourself enough to slow it down in the morning. So you have your thoughts about you. You can think about your day. Well, maybe there's some areas that you could delegate. Maybe there's some things you don't have to do. If we give ourselves some time in the morning, we can figure it out.

Here's another piece is our nighttime routine - very, very important. Our sleep area should be cool. It should be uncluttered. It shouldn't have a lot of electronics. You shouldn't be watching TV before bed. It should be dark. You should do some light stretches before bed, maybe take a shower to wash the day off, maybe rub your feet with some nice lotion to relax. We want to relax. We want to let the day kind of come off of us so that we go into our sleep time. We're ready for it.

Because you know what? During sleep our body is restoring itself. When we shut down at night, well, that's when our body is doing its biggest work. Our liver is detoxifying, our kidneys kind of rest, and then they kick back in. This is a time for our body to do its work so that we can stay in good health and be in balance. And so I want you have a nicer, easier morning routine and a nice evening routine. And these are routines that nobody gets to deviate. You don't get to deviate.

This is my routine. I need this for me. So whatever you need to do, you do it. But for me, you know, I've already walked the dog. The dishes are done, you know, everything's put away. I can start winding down for the day. And so this is important for ourselves. This is important for our self-care. And also do some light positive reading, some inspirational reading before we go to bed.

Exercise and Movement To Keep Us Balanced and Feeling Good

The third piece of our good health and our self-care is movement. Are we moving during the day? I know with COVID we were doing a lot of zooms and now we're kind of in a hybrid. But hopefully we have kept our movement practice. Are we getting outside? Have we started a yoga class or tai chi? Are we just getting up and walking around outside or inside, wherever we can? Maybe after each meeting, if we're doing zoom, get up, swing your arms, walk around the desk, get some water, have a little snack so that you're restoring yourself and you're ready for whatever is about to come next. Don't just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, meetings all day. Not good, not healthy, not even nice for the people in your life because then you're so tired and so done. At the end of the day, you have nothing left to give them. So let's pace ourselves. Let's put movement in our day to keep us balanced and feeling good. So we're going to put on our website just a little flyer of some nice yoga poses so you can go to TheTruthAYF.com. Check out the flyer.

So just to recap, we want to drink water. We want to add a nicer morning wake up routine. We want to enhance our nighttime routine, and we want to make sure we've got some good, healthy movement every day.

And so my word of the week is CARE.

C is for create.

Create your personal image of what good health is and have the confidence that you can make these changes. Small little changes every day add up to good balanced health.

A is for aspire.

Aspire for more, better health is possible. Be patient with ourselves but be consistent.

The R is for radiant.

We will glow with good health when we're hydrated, when we're rested and more flexible. When we put clean, healthy, whole plant-based food into the equation. There's no stopping us.

And E is for educate.

Educate and empower. Empower ourselves. Read, do some research, do and find what we need to do every day to feel great. It's the pebble in the pond, the pebble in the pond of self-care, of balance, of a good, happy life.

That's what we want to put out there. So connect the dots. Connect the dots to our mind and our body. We only get one of these, so let's make it the best we can. Have a great week, everyone.