How to Stop Stressing and Start Living

K.C. CRAICHY is Founder & CEO of Living Fuel – The Leader in Superfood Nutrition, and the best-selling author of Super Health – 7 Golden Keys to Unlock Lifelong Vitality. He is a health advocate and expert on natural health and performance nutrition. His extensive study of leading-edge health research and collaborative work with top medical and nutritional practitioners and researchers to solve his wife’s health problems led him to the founding of Living Fuel, Inc. KC is committed to changing lives through nutritional and multi-media lifestyle education combined with leading-edge high impact superfoods. He also serves on the Clinical Nutrition Review Board (the certifying body of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutrition). KC lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife Monica and five children.

K.C. Is also one of our newest guest bloggers here at StopStressingNow.com and we couldn’t be more excited to have him. So with great pleasure I give to you…

Mr. K.C. Craichy.

Stress is all about change. It may be change at home, change at work, change at school, or change in relationships. Change is inevitable and it can be difficult on us physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.

There are essentially two kinds of stress, stress that heals and stress that kills.  There is good stress and bad stress.  The stress of competition can be invigorating while financial stress can kill - if you let it! Meditate on good things and good things will result.  Meditate on negative possibilities and negative realities tend to result.  Fear, doubt and worry are simply meditating on negative possibilities which result in stress that leads to death.  The book of Matthew declares, ‘do not worry because it won’t add an inch to your height or a day to your life.’   So think on things that are good, noble, lovely and pure.

Dr. Hans Selye, the Canadian endocrinologist considered by many to be the “father of the stress field,” wrote this about stress: “A stress-free life is an impossible goal – we need some stress to be alive. After all, we call it blood pressure. Without some pressure, we are dead.”

Okay, we get it. We need some pressure to prove we’re alive, but how much pressure can we stand? We know life has its ups and downs, but how can we get ready for those downs when life feels like its burying us under its pressure? We often feel stress so acutely because we feel powerless to do anything about it. Once we pull our thoughts and wits together, we start to climb out of the “stress hole” that surrounds us. But is there anything we can do to prepare our body and mind before stress hits us?

Absolutely! There is much we can do. We have the power to give our body everything it needs to thrive and be ready for stress. Many physicians tell us that stress and anxiety may be a contributing factor in a high percentage of illnesses. Stress can compromise our body’s immune system and make us more susceptible to colds and flu, infections and inflammation. Medical studies have found that people under chronic stress had above-normal levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), an immune-system protein that promotes inflammation and has been linked with heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, severe infections, and certain cancers.

Our body needs improved nutrition and regular exercise to be ready to deal with good and bad stress. The very stress hormones that our body release when we’re under stress can become oxidized once they’re released by our adrenal glands. That leads to a rise in damaging free radicals within the cells of our body.

Another aspect to consider is cortisol, a hormone the body recruits to regulate blood pressure and the immune system when your body experiences physical or emotional stress. Constant stress can cause your body to overproduce the hormone. That’s when cortisol can become a hindrance instead of a help. Too much cortisol can lead to sleep problems, blood sugar abnormalities, vulnerability to infection, and abdominal weight gain.

Diet and exercise can help us deal directly with the impact of stress on our body and mind. Let’s take a look specifically at how good nutrition can reinforce your body to manage and overcome stress.

Extend Life, Delay Disease, Enhance Performance, Optimize Weight, Increase Mental Clarity

Superfood Nutrition is the best method of avoiding the dire consequences of poor nutrition. The Four Corners of Superfood Nutrition is an integrated approach that combines four of the most clinically validated areas of nutrition science including; eating fewer calories while increasing nutrient density, minimizing sugar intake and high glycemic response foods, increasing antioxidants, and getting the right fats.

Here is the first half of The Four Corners:

1. CRON (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition)

Eat nutrient-dense foods. Eat the most highly nutritious and nutrient-dense foods available while eliminating sugar, processed food and junk foods. This will naturally reduce your overall calorie intake while increasing the nutrient value ingested by the body – maximizing nutrition per calorie. There are more than 2,000 research studies that suggest this approach alone extends life, delays disease, optimizes weight, improves mental clarity and enhances performance.  In addition to eating fewer calories it is critical to avoid processed food and include a daily high-quality multi-vitamin/mineral/nutrient/antioxidant formulation to obtain the optimal nutrition benefits of CRON.

2. Low-Glycemic Response

Compelling research has shown that controlling insulin response may be a primary reason that CRON (calorie restriction) works.  It is a fact that consuming less food results in lower glycemic response (this is true even if you simply eat less of the same bad foods).  The high sugar content and glycemic response in one’s diet is directly related to human disease.   Large doses of sugar provoke blood sugar and insulin spikes and hyper-inflammation leading to numerous health problems and acute energy shortages over time. Help your body manage your glycemic response by minimizing grains, breads, starches, and particularly sugar, which all quickly elevate blood sugar levels setting up the dreaded crash.  This will also minimize excessive body fat, fatigue and blood sugar imbalances.  Maintaining healthy blood sugar levels and avoiding the blood sugar and insulin rollercoaster are keys to sustained energy.

In my next post, we’ll look at the second half of The Four Corners and why it works.

Here’s to your Super Health!

K.C. Craichy

For More Information Please Visit:  http://www.livingfuel.com