You can rely on many resources to set up your Health Plan, within your family and community, or from your healthcare providers. Gaining capacity in keeping a health plan tailored to your needs is a priority to achieve better health. Being in the driver’s seat, knowing best about your health wishes & needs, enhancing your health competencies for self-care is empowering you as your own best healthcare provider.

1. Health & Hormonal Condition: medical condition and hormonal imbalance

2. Food Energy, Quality & Quantity: quality of food intake (processed? preservatives? hormones? antibiotics? pesticides?), quantity of energy intake (calories, Glycemic Index), frequency & quantity of food (allowing resting time with intermittent fasting)

3. Physical Activity: daily regular body activity is needed to keep all its parts working seamlessly. It should include exercising balance, strength and endurance on a regular basis.

4. Lifestyle: starts with having adequate amount of rest/sleep, dealing with stress & emotions and identifying any addiction

• Identify stress sources (emotional, physical, chemical, environmental)
• Use stress management techniques: what works for you?
• Seek professional counseling for emotional issues or addiction control

• be regular: 3 to 5 times a week, for a minimum of 30 minutes 
• last for a duration of 30 minutes minimum
• must be practising all three of the following: balance, strength & endurance!
• should be a pleasant and fun time for yourself, no need to go beyond your capacities (listen to your body, he is your guide)
• bring a state of calm & happiness thanks to all the endorphines secreted during exercising!

Practicing exercise helps burning calories intake, ensure effective blood circulation (facilitating nutrients & hormones reach organs and perform their dedicated task), makes water circulate through the body thus avoiding water retention (reducing weight, keeping kidneys healthy).

Regular exercise is key for healthy weight management. Weight loss will be initiated with implementation of program alternating Hight Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and strength training.

• HIIT: high intensity workout for a very short time period, alternating with short rest period. Energy is used up to 48h after training, whereas with cardio training, energy expenditure is temporary. This helps the body to manage stress.

• Strength training: helps building muscle mass that will consume energy through out the day due to increased metabolism.

Food & Physical Activity

Daily eating habits and food choices will  not only impact on body weight but will bring chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics inside organism along with vitamins and nutrients. Those might have an impact on healthy body functioning. Choosing food ingested and allowing body to exercise regularly constitutes the first step of healthy lifestyle.

Rest/Sleep

Body resting time represents one third to one fourth of a whole day. This time is actually very active as it give opportunity to organism to regenerate and reenergize. It allows switching off some functions such as thinking and active moving and activate others like hormones producing. Amount of rest needed is different from one person to another. Few tips to use your full energy potential:

• Identify your individual sleep time needed for feeling rested
• Allow yourself adequate amount of sleep most days of the week
• Organize short & efficient resting periods during the day (using power naps, self-hypnosis techniques)

Stress & Emotions

Stress is a state of mental or emotional tension resulting from demanding circumstances. This can be difficult for the body to cope on long term and ways to reduce stressful situations must be found. Stress is tightly linked with weight gain through various mechanisms. It releases stress hormone, Cortisol, as well as Insulin, leading to insulin resistance and thus fat storage in the body. Stress induces emotional eating as well. Stress can be of different sources: emotional (in link with people in your surroundings), physical (body is suffering from daily constraints and actions), chemical (pesticides/hormones/medicines in food, lotions, soaps & perfumes on your body, etc), and environmental (air pollution, absence of green areas in neighbourhood, etc).

Few tips to tackle stress:

• • Identify stress sources (emotional, physical, chemical, environmental)
  • Use stress management techniques: what works for you?? (sports, music, dance, laughter yoga, arts & crafts, sing, hike in nature, knitting, boxing … and so many more!)
  • Seek professional counseling for emotional issues
  • Emotional Eating: very important to tackle!

Toxic Load

Modern way of living involves the use of many industry derived products on daily basis. Shampoos on hair, lotions, perfumes and deodorants on skin, processed (or ultra-processed) food, plastic/silicon/Teflon-like materials for kitchen use. To please our confort need, these products contain chemicals helping achieving the desired effect: silicon to make hair softer, aluminium to stop sweating process or preservatives to make food last longer. If the afore mentioned products are self-chosen, actions to reduce toxins encountered in immediate surrounding environment will be limited. Toxin load from air pollution, chemicals in mattress numerous layers, paints used on walls, materials used for buildings and furniture is difficult to control.

Avoidable toxin load is the one self-imposed on regular basis up to the stage of developing addiction. Use of tobacco derived products, alcohol, drugs or medicines daily will interfere with body normal functions.

Those chemicals interact with our body through ingestion, breathing and physical skin contact, and have a direct impact on our metabolism. Our fantastic body detox unit is mainly the liver, that will deal with toxic load by binding it with other molecules (like a hand holding the toxins) and either putting it out through excretion (stools, urine, sweat) or by hiding it in fat storage (hips & tummy).

If toxic load overcomes liver detoxifying capacity, those toxins will be freely circulating in our body impacting its normal physiological functions. Toxins have an effect on our hormonal balance as they mimic endogenous hormones, thus they are call hormonal modulators. They might also have a direct effect on cell DNA with risk of developing cancer.

Few tips to reduce body toxin load:

• Identify elements that might have toxic effect in your daily life
• Reduce toxic load in your environment
• Seek professional help to quit smoking (or other substance use, i.e. alcohol
• Choose food with least pesticides, hormones, antibiotics
• Read products labels to avoid paraben, and other health threatening chemical