Effortless Healing

There are 9 key Healing Principles. We’ll go through them quickly in a moment.

For now, let’s remind ourselves to approach this whole process of optimizing with a sense of ADVENTURE and CURIOSITY and EXPERIMENTATION. It’s all one big game and every step we take (forward or backward!) is just a little more data to help us get a little better.

Let’s focus on what we WANT rather than on what we’re trying to avoid. On that note, what do you want health-wise?

What’s your ideal outcome? If you integrate these and other principles you believe to be true, what will your life be like? How will you feel?

Get clear on that. Get fired up about it. And then, in moments of doubt, remind yourself of that vision and ask yourself if you’d like to take a step forward toward that goal or back—if you’d like to regenerate or degenerate!

And now for the 9 Healing Principles:

• Healing Principle 1: Drink Pure Water. “Drink pure water” is our #1 Healing Principle? THE most important thing we can do? Yep. We’ll talk about it more in a moment. For now, know that Dr. Mercola says no longer drinking your sodas (diet or regular), sports drinks and other sugary water is the top thing you can do to effortlessly boost your health.
• Healing Principle 2: Eat Your Veggies. Dr. Mercola gives us four effortless ways to eat more veggies: Eating raw + juicing + fermenting + sprouting. (More on this in a moment as well. Reading this chapter got me all into juicing!)
• Healing Principle 3: Burn Fat for Fuel. Our bodies’ preferred source of fuel is fat, not glucose. Making this shift is huge. We need to remember that a calorie is *not* a calorie as we eliminate processed carbs and get our healthy fats on. More on this in a moment.
• Healing Principle 4: Exercise Less and Gain More Benefits. Exercise less? Yes. At a much higher intensity. Mercola walks us through his workout (I did it yesterday rowing). 21 minutes total. 3-min warmup. 30-seconds MAX intensity; 90-second rest; 2-min cool down; 4 minutes of max, high intensity effort = magic. He also talks about Joan Vernikos and Eric Goodman—reminding us we need to move often throughout the day and practice good posture. Check out our Notes on Sitting Kills, Moving Heals and True to Form plus Movement 101 for more on this.
• Healing Principle 5: Enjoy the Sun and Get Your Vitamin D. Nearly 3,000 genes are influenced by Vitamin D levels. “Truly, the health benefits of vitamin D are so astounding that I strongly believe optimizing its levels may be one of the most important things you can do to improve and maintain your health.” Do you know your levels? Optimal range = 5o to 70 ng/ml. Sensible sun exposure is the best way to get our levels up! (Mercola walks us through how a *lack of* sun exposure is correlated with melanoma.)
• Healing Principle 6: Let Your Gut Flourish. Your microbiome is remarkable. Remember: As we discuss in Nutrition 101, your gut is your second brain—you have more neurons in your gut than your head and your gut produces more serotonin than your brain. So optimize it! (We also talk about this more in Dr. Junger’s Clean Gut + Dr. Perlmutter’s Brain Maker. (Dr. P wrote the foreword to this book!) Quick tip: Eat some fermented foods! (I eat sauerkraut daily!))
• Healing Principle 7: Clean Your Brain with Sleep. Sleep! As we know, it’s huge. (It remains my #1 self-care habit.) Check out Sleep 101 for more goodness on this. Mercola basically walks us through the top Ideas we cover—ranging from creating your consistent night-time routine to limiting light exposure at night and getting your room cool + dark.
• Healing Principle 8: Go Barefoot—and Other Ways to Stay Grounded. Short story: Our bodies are electric. So is the earth. Connecting with it is a good thing. Simply walking barefoot is huge. (Note to self: Do this more.) Other tips in this section: physical touch via hugging, kissing, etc. (Note to self: Do this more as well.)
• Healing Principle 9: Avoid These Six ‘Health Foods.’ The six “health foods” we want to avoid: 1. Whole grains like brown rice (Mercola’s #1 thing to optimize is our insulin levels; fact is, most of us in modern society have sub-optimal levels and can’t tolerate the high carb load well) + 2. Natural sweeteners such as agave + 3. Unfermented soy products, including tofu and soymilk + 4. Vegetable oil (remember our Omega-6 discussions!) + 5. Most types of fish (wild caught + smaller the better!) + 6. Conventional yogurt (way too much sugar).

With that quick look, let’s dive in to a few of my favorites and see if we can find an Idea that changes your life. :)

Water. Somewhat surprisingly, this is the #1 Principle of effortless healing.

Did you know that the average American drinks FIFTY-SEVEN GALLONS (!!!) of soda every year?

Yes. CRAZY. Which is why Mercola tells us: “In my experience, the single most important health step the average person can take is to stop drinking any type of soda or sports drink and switch to pure water.”

This may not seem like a big deal, but if you drink soda (diet or regular) or sports drinks, know that “THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT HEALTH STEP” you can make is to quit drinking those sodas, sports drinks (“a nutritional disaster”) or artificially flavored and sweetened waters.

That’s a super simple, super high-impact way to heal. Effortless.

One more quick tip: Get a filter for your water—including your shower. Your skin is your largest organ and absorbs the contaminants in your tap water that you *don’t* want in your body.

Healing Principle #2: Eat Your Veggies.

Dr. Mercola has his own version of the food pyramid. Check it out here. What you’ll find at the base is “Healthy Fats and Veggies.” Lots of raw, organic vegetables plus healthy fats including coconuts, avocados, olive oil, butter, and raw nuts.

As Mercola says, “You’ll notice what’s missing from this plan—most of the mainstays of the American diet, which consists of sugar, grains, and starchy carbs such as bread, pasta, potatoes, corn, and rice.”

We’re going to talk more about WHY his pyramid looks like that in the next Idea. For now, how’s your veggie intake? Eating a variety of leafy greens (aka huge salads) + non-starchy veggies? (Nice!) How can you dial that in a little more today?!

Two quick tips: First, Dr. M suggests we eat 50-75% of our greens/veggies raw which a) makes it easy to prepare—wash and cut and eat! and b) provides us with tons of micronutrients.

And, he’s also ALL about green juices. He drinks 16 to 32 ounces of green juice every day. This is probably the #1 Idea I got from the book that will most change my habits and life. Alexandra’s always been into juicing but I’ve never really been into it. I’m ALL IN now. 32 ounces yesterday and another 32 today. (Note: Keep it green. Limit/eliminate the apple + carrot!)

We have a choice: We can burn SUGAR as our primary source of fuel or we can burn FAT as our primary source of fuel. As Healing Principle 3 makes clear, we want to “Burn Fat for Fuel.”

It pains me these days to read books that say, “As we all know, if you want to lose weight, you just need to consume less calories than you burn.”

That’s the calories in, calories out “energy balance” hypothesis we talk about in Nutrition 101 plus in our Notes on a bunch of books including It Starts with Food, Always Hungry?, Why We Get Fat, The Bulletproof Diet and Eat Fat, Get Thin.

It’s just plain wrong. Yet, it’s the accepted “truth” of the majority of “experts” out there.

Just the other day I glanced at the front page of the New York Times to see a story about a woman who weighed so much that her doctor’s scales couldn’t accurately tell her precisely how much she weighed. Although the article focused on the undeniable horror of her having to go to a junk yard to find a scale that could accurately weigh her so she could track her weight loss, what I found most horrifying was the fact that the doctor recommended she reduce her calories to 1,200/day to lose weight.

The article shared that piece of data as if it was just what you do to lose weight. But that’s just plain WRONG. The woman’s primary issue is not a caloric imbalance per se, she has a HORMONAL imbalance.

And the primary hormone we need to get optimized is insulin—which is responsible for making sure we don’t have too much sugar in our blood. Fact is, most of us growing up in modern civilization have an insulin issue. The only way to effectively deal with it is to reduce the amount of sugar and carbs we consume.

Hence, the base of Mercola’s food pyramid is VEGGIES + FATS. While the peak of his pyramid is “Grains and Sugars” —> “minimal to no consumption.”

If you’re already sold on the fat as fuel model, awesome. Bring even more veggies into your diet! If you’re not yet sold, check out the book + Notes + Nutrition 101 class for more on this. (I’m going to keep coming back to it because I think it’s an essential aspect of optimizing!)

P.S. Freaked out that you’ll be missing out on key nutrients if you skip your grains? Well, keep this wisdom in mind from It Starts with Food: “There is not a single health-promoting substance present in grains that you can’t also get from vegetables and fruit.”

Earlier we chatted about the fact that we can live for weeks without food but only days without water. Of course, there’s an even more fundamental component to staying alive: OXYGEN.

It’s funny because I read this book right after reading another book all about this called The Oxygen Advantage. As it turns out, Dr. Mercola wrote the foreword to that book. :)

Check out those Notes for a deep dive into the power of our breath. For now, know this: The #1 thing you can do to optimize your breathing is to breath EXCLUSIVELY through your nose.

That’s from “A Final Pep Talk” at the end of the book. With all of the Ideas we’ve been studying in each of these Notes and Optimal Living classes, we have a pretty good road map for where we’d like to head, eh?

Let’s take the time to identify (and write down!) our #1 health goal. … What’s yours?

And, let’s identify the one new habit we can create that will give us a nice little +1% incremental optimization. What’s yours?

And, as we have fun (!) optimizing, let’s remember to ask ourselves: “Do I want to degenerate or regenerate?”