Natural Living – Page 9

Cross-Quarter Greetings!

August 6, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the cross-quarter!

In the natural year, we are halfway between the extremes of light and night that are the solstices and the balancing light and darkness of the equinoxes.

Now is a great time to make extra progress on your Natural Life Plan, so you are well-positioned for the equinox, when we encourage HumanaNatura practitioners to review and update their plans amidst the natural balance of this time.

If you have not yet created a Natural Life Plan – guiding your use and expression of the third HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living – the links provided here will take you to our planning worksheets and get you started on our seven-step planning process. We hope these important HumanaNatura resources will help you begin more intentionally health-centered and naturally progressive life in the days and weeks ahead.

Our newest community newsletter was released today as well, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with the natural year. To receive future HumanaNatura newsletters and learn about the benefits of membership in our global practitioner-advocate network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

In the meantime, as we mark the cross-quarter, we wish you new health and happiness!

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura…promote new life and health!

Exercise Naturally Creates Time!

July 27, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

By Mark Lundegren

We often think that exercise takes time. In practice, however, this common assumption proves self-reinforcing but untrue. As people who exercise regularly know, physical conditioning is essential for vibrant and engaged life. For this reason, exercise actually or naturally makes time in our lives.

Walking Naturally Gives Us Health in Body, Mind, and Spirit

The persistence of the idea that exercise is time-consuming owes in part to the fact that we often see exercise as activity apart from the rest of our modern lives. Notably, this perspective is born from life that often unnaturally involves long periods of inactivity and sitting each day – in cars, trains, offices, homes, restaurants, and theaters.

Related to this is a modern outlook that fails to see physical activity in general as exercise, as a ready means to ensure natural conditioning – an essential natural health enabler and key HumanaNatura goal. So we sit and think about the modern challenge of exercise, instead of walking and naturally having this exercise as a daily part of our lives.

As a consequence of both outlooks – and the reduced natural health and functioning that inactivity inevitably causes in us – many of us are unnaturally inactive for many hours each day. In this compounding process, our reduced natural activity lowers our capacity for and interest in physical activity, creating an ever-widening gulf between our lives and our potential for vibrant natural health and fitness.

In this now common pattern of life, we fail to see our many opportunities for and the urgent benefits of a more naturally active and energetic life, instead lamenting our seeming lack of time, opportunity, and energy for exercise and naturally active living.

Continue reading “Exercise Naturally Creates Time!”

Healthy Solstice Greetings!

June 20, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the solstice! Across our earth, we are now at the extremes of light and darkness in the natural year. For the southern hemisphere, this is the shortest and naturally most constrained day of the year, but the beginning of longer days and lengthening light too. In the north, it is the height of the year and a jubilant time of sweeping light, especially in the north’s higher latitudes, marking the transition of spring into summer.

In both cases, we are halfway between the relative balance and calm of the spring and fall equinoxes, when HumanaNatura encourages examination and renewal of our Natural Life Plan. At the solstice, however, HumanaNatura instead recommends life and health-affirming celebration and time with others, rather than reflection and planning, in an ancient human rhythm that has its roots before recorded history.

If you have not yet created a Natural Life Plan – guiding your use and expression of the third HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living – the links we have provided will take you to our planning worksheets and seven-step planning process. Together, these resources will help you begin more intentionally health-centered and progressive life in the days and weeks ahead.

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura…promote new life and health!

Healthy Body, Healthy Brain

June 15, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

By Mark Lundegren

We all understand that healthy living leads to healthy bodies, to increased longevity, and to reduced chronic health risks…even as many of us do not adequately, or optimally, act on these essential facts of life.

On the other hand, a great many of us have not yet come to terms with the reality that this same natural relationship between lifestyle and physical health applies to brain health as well – and to all of our brain’s critical functions, including memory, cognition, creativity, and emotion.

Sections of a Healthy Brain, Left, and One With Advanced Degeneration

Often, we treat our brains – that is, ourselves – as relatively unchanging and largely unaffected by reduced physical health, even as this widespread intuition is measurably untrue.

In fact, reduced physical health is almost always accompanied by lowered cognitive and emotional functioning, circularly restraining our self-awareness and motivation and keeping us at reduced overall states of health. The practical effect of this health-limiting cycle is to prevent us from seeing our life in more vital and expansive terms, and thus from intentionally pursuing new growth and progressive life.

Recent Brain Health Research

A trio of recent research studies highlight the importance of making the crucial link between our lifestyle and metal health, and underscore our need to take deliberate steps to promote a healthy body and brain throughout our modern lives.

Continue reading “Healthy Body, Healthy Brain”

Healthy Cross-Quarter Greetings!

May 4, 2012

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the cross-quarter! In the natural year, we are halfway between the relative calm and balance of the last equinox and the more extended and evocative time that is the coming solstice.

Right now, it is a great time to make added progress on your Natural Life Plan, so that you can celebrate your life and health successes as fully as possible when the solstice arrives.

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura…promote new life and health!

Stress, DNA Health & Aging

April 30, 2012

By Mark Lundegren

It is well-understood that chronic stress is associated with premature aging.

We can observe this phenomenon for ourselves and scientists now understand some, though not all, of the mechanisms by which physical, physiological, and psychological stressors accelerate the cellular and tissue degeneration that accompanies all forms of aging. Perhaps best understood of these mechanisms are the effects of stress-response hormones such as adrenaline, which have been shown to alter and impair physiological functioning and anatomical integrity when they chronically (and thus unnaturally) circulate at high levels.

Visible stress effects after 2.5 years as U.S. President

A new study published in Molecular Psychiatry by Duke University scientists sheds added light on what may prove to be an equally important mechanism for turning chronic stress into unnatural degeneration and aging – a reduction in DNA integrity, resulting in an inability of cells throughout the body to reproduce properly over time.

Continue reading “Stress, DNA Health & Aging”

Healthy Equinox Greetings!

March 20, 2012

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the equinox! In the natural year, we are at the halfway point between the extremes of darkness and light of the winter and summer solstices. Everywhere on earth, there is the greater relative balance and calm that naturally comes to our world twice each year with the equinox.

In the HumanaNatura natural health system, we recommend that practitioners use the opportunity of the equinox to review and update our Natural Life Plan, making changes as needed and renewing and revitalizing our commitment to progressive natural health and quality of life.

If you do not have a Natural Life Plan – guiding your use and personal expression of Natural Living, the third HumanaNatura technique in our natural health system – the link above will take you to our planning worksheets and help you to begin more intentional, health-centered, and progressive life in the days and weeks ahead.

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura…promote modern natural life!

Competition’s Natural Limits

March 16, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

By Mark Lundegren

Recent reports of a National Football League (NFL) bounty program in the United States, paying and encouraging players to injure their opponents, are a stark reminder that competition has important natural or rational limits.

In citing this example, however, we must immediately add that sports like professional football, in both its American and International varieties, is a modern preoccupation that already functions far beyond desirable natural limits for social competition – when judged from the standpoint of its net effect on the health and quality of life of its participants and fans.

After all, consider the influences of this most popular competitive sport of our times on the lives and health of those who participate in the sport or follow it avidly. In the case of NFL players, there is perhaps a five times higher risk of chronic cognitive health impairment and comparable risks of premature physical disability and degeneration. International football players fare somewhat better, but still are subject to greatly elevated risks of injury and long-term physical disability. We would add that in both of these and many other competitive sports, drug use is a widespread phenomenon – to enhance performance, to treat pain, and for escape from the unnatural stress and pressure of sports-related competition.

As for professional football fans, anyone who has been to a game in any professional-level league (and many below this level) knows firsthand the widely health-indifferent cultures that this sport and many other supernormally competitive pastimes reliably attract and foster. Such fan cultures are regularly and often strongly marked by patently unhealthy eating, excessive alcohol consumption, increased aggression and violence, elevated stress, obsessive and risk-seeking behaviors, and decreased enjoyment of essential but less stimulating life activities, to begin a list.

Continue reading “Competition’s Natural Limits”

Your New Week’s Resolutions?

February 26, 2012

We all know about New Year’s resolutions, and how they often do not produce their intended results. Part of the problem with annual commitments to change is that they do not happen often enough. If we truly want to change the way we live and who we are, it’s a daily and even momentary practice of committing, acting, observing, learning, and committing again.

For this reason, we need to make resolutions often, far more often than we may realize, and also regularly assess our thinking and actions amidst this new resolve. When we reach this stage of sustained personal commitment, we often encounter a second issue – not knowing how, as much as what, to change. Questions of both what and how to change are a big part of HumanaNatura’s natural health system and our crucial practice of guiding our lives with a Natural Life Plan.

If you really want to change – making your life better, healthier, and more naturally fulfilling – HumanaNatura can help. Even before you explore our four natural health techniques, a great first step is to begin to make New Week’s resolutions, instead of annual ones. This creative step forward can reinforce your desire for change and increase your motivation to explore the principles and practice of healthy personal development.

While you inspire yourself in this new way, you can also begin to eat more naturally and enjoyably right away too. Changing your life at mealtime can improve your physical health, while infusing your new growth orientation with the idea that healthier and higher quality life is not just a more focused state, but a happier one too, every day of the year.

OurPlate Score: 10

Perhaps this terrific HumanaNatura salad meal will inspire you to begin the week with a fresh start and new commitment to healthier and fuller life. First meals of the week like this are easy to prepare, motivating, and 100% in keeping with HumanaNatura’s extra-healthy OurPlate meal guidelines. It features sautéed shrimp, scallops, calamari, and red onion seasoned with curry, ginger, and a bit of red pepper. This creates a naturally lean, delicious, and satisfying protein serving, which is then paired with a generous half-plate of greens, julienne cucumber and mango, sliced avocado, and diced tomato. It’s all garnished with a few pistachios and finished with parsley, paprika, coriander, anise seeds, and a bit of black pepper. A great way to start a new and healthier week, and life!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple healthy eating and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and completely natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will resolve to explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness, available at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Tell your friends about HumanaNatura… encourage new life & health!

Living Without Unhealthy Stress

February 15, 2012

Visit HumanaNatura Like Us on Facebook

By Mark Lundegren

Stress matters. Though it can seem purely psychological and abstract, stress is more deeply a physical phenomenon that tangibly affects our health, well-being, and even longevity.

A new study, published jointly by medical researchers at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia, underscores this critical point and the importance of managing both intense and chronic stress for a long, happy, and healthy life.

In the new study, published in Circulation and summarized in the medical press, the research team found that people subject to extreme stress, in the form of the death of a loved one, were 21 times more likely to have a heart attack in the first 24 hours after the death and six times more likely in the first week. Both differences in heart attack rates are of course well above the threshold for medical significance.

Our Need to Focus on Chronic Stress

As important and perhaps surprising as these findings are, it is essential to add that the principal problem with stress today is its chronic or ongoing forms rather than its intense or acute varieties. Protracted conditions of stress in us reliably lead to significant biochemical and immunological disruptions in our bodies and then progressive reductions in our health and natural functioning across our lives. A list of important consequences from unaddressed chronic stress is available at The Effects Of Chronic Stress.

Continue reading “Living Without Unhealthy Stress”