Health news blog

Hand in hand with affirmations goes visualization. While affirmations are spoken instructions you give your mind, visualizations are mental pictures that allow you to see yourself as you want to be.

Set aside 10 to 20 minutes a day. Find a room or place where you will not be disturbed. Make yourself comfortable. Close your eyes. Let your mind’s eye see yourself acting, feeling, doing, having and being what you want yourself to do, feel, have and be. Picture yourself remaining calm in a tense situation. Imagine that you’re walking away from an argument. If you’re a stress phobic, visualize yourself standing up calmly for your rights. Those of you on a diet can see and feel yourself 20 pounds lighter, happily and easily refusing a proffered piece of cake.

Put the words and pictures together by combining visualizations and affirmations. Say it, see it and feel it in your mind and body. Say, see and feel yourself having and being what you deserve to have and be.

With visualizations and affirmations, any positive situation you desire can be etched into your subconscious mind and made a part of your behavior.

*146\80\8*

NOT JUST WALKING

Brisk walking, 25 minutes a day, four days a week, is enough to provide you with physical and psychological well-being. For the more eager and adventurous, there are many other great exercise activities.

Riding a bicycle is an excellent exercise, whether it be a real bicycle or an exercise bicycle. When it gets too hot or too cold to exercise outdoors, I go with my sons to a health club. While they’re lifting weights and playing basketball, I ride a stationary bicycle and watch the pretty women lifting weights, stretching and taking aerobics classes.

Swimming is another excellent, all-around exercise that gives you the health benefits of brisk walking. And because swimming takes the weight off your lower back, it’s a wonderful activity for those with problem backs.

Brisk walking, jogging, swimming, cross-country skiing, rowing, aerobics, karate—anything that keeps your heart beating in your Heartbeat Target Zone for about 25 minutes will do the trick. If you prefer more strenuous and difficult activities, fine. If not, brisk walking is all it takes to strengthen your “doctor within.” Such sports as baseball and touch football are fun, but they don’t give you the aerobic benefits of walking, because the action isn’t continuous. Your heart rate doesn’t stay in the Heartbeat Target Zone. Instead, it bounces up and down as you start and stop.

*104\80\8*

Let’s suppose you eat an abundance of Super Foods, that your diet is filled with vitamins and minerals significantly above the RDAs. Do you need to take supplements? Absolutely!

How many vitamins and minerals you consume is only one side of the equation; your nutrient requirement is the other. There are many factors that increase your need for vitamins and minerals. Alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, marijuana, refined foods and radiation, for example, lower the blood levels of one or more B vitamins. Premenstrual tension lowers the blood level of vitamin E. Physical and emotional stress increases with your need for vitamin C, the B vitamins and zinc. Air pollution increases your need for vitamin C.

Many common medicines interfere with the absorption of the vitamins and minerals you eat or prevent your body from utilizing them properly. Aspirin, mineral oil, antacids, oral contraceptives, antibiotics, diuretics, pain medications and heart medications can increase your nutrient requirements.

*61\80\8*

I was describing the “doctor within” and the immune system recently to a friend of mine. He said, “What’s the problem, Arnie? If I get sick, I go to my doctor and he’ll give me a shot to fix my immune system.”

Unfortunately, our medical system is not the answer. You see, we don’t have a health-care system in this country, we have a disease-care system. Disease is fussed over. People suffering from obscure and “glamorous” diseases are given the medical red-carpet treatment. Millions of dollars, hundreds of journals and some of the best minds in this country are devoted to disease. Medical students spend most of their time studying rare diseases and practicing crisis medicine, instead of learning to prevent disease by protecting the “doctor within.” And health? It gets lost in the shuffle.

Our medical system has been captured by the disease-loving “Band-Aid philosophers” of medicine, who pay homage to such high-tech procedures as coronary artery bypass surgery, various chemotherapies, plasma electrophoresis, PTCA (percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty), CAT scans and, lately, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans.

These surgeries and machines are exciting: it’s high-tech glamour. What doctor wouldn’t want to be in an operating room, replacing one heart with another? Isn’t the chance to play God more fun than trying to teach people to eat and think properly? Sure it is, but it doesn’t work. There is no Band-Aid that can restore good health once it’s gone.

Our medical system has been led astray. And so our medical researchers concentrate on building new hearts, not on keeping the old ones strong and healthy. Hospitals are filled with tons of amazing machinery that can do everything but give people back their health. Bigger and better machines, more surgical techniques, artificial organs; it’s a wonder that there’s any room left for patients in our medical system.

Doctors are paid large fees to perform surgery, office procedures and laboratory tests. They are paid very little for spending time listening to their patients, for carefully going over their medical and personal histories, for teaching them how to change their life-style. And they are paid nothing for preventing disease.

*17\80\8*

In the face of all these difficulties, it is reasonable to ask why anyone bothers with such studies. But they do, in the interests of establishing scientifically valid forms of diagnosis and treatment. Attempts to do this in relation to food intolerance are many and varied, and we will not try to cover them all. What matters in such studies is the care with which they are designed and the details of how they are carried out. To assess a trial properly, one must look carefully at the details and we will therefore concentrate on five trials – two dealing with rheumatoid arthritis, two dealing with irritable bowel syndrome, and one dealing with migraine. These trials are the main ones carried out in Britain within the last eight years, and they are among the most scientific attempts to evaluate the food-intolerance concept.

*105\180\8*