We are born with miraculously integrated bodies and minds. Our lungs draw in vital oxygen, essential for producing energy. Our hearts ceaselessly pump blood through vast networks of vessels to all of our tissues and organs. Raw materials are transformed into fuel by our digestive systems. Our muscles and bones propel us through the world, allowing us first to stand, then walk, then play and work.

Each day our brains take in a barrage of new information, filtering it, selectively storing it, and adapting their way of working accordingly. At the end of each day, we recharge and reset our systems by sleeping. All of us come equipped with a self-contained set of tools that, properly used, may allow us to live 100 years, or maybe even longer.

Beginning early in our lives, though, our genes, our environment, our culture, and our own free will conspire to test this marvelous organism—sometimes to the breaking point. There are people who maintain their health and live long, fruitful lives, sustaining minimal wear and tear. But others—perhaps most of us—push our bodies to the limit. Instead of eating the way our bodies were designed to eat, we indulge in foods filled with sugars and other refined carbohydrates, trans fats, and unhealthy food additives. Instead of walking to nearby destinations, we drive our cars. We sit most of the day. Some of us smoke. Some of us drink too much. Many of us allow negative feelings and stress to rule our thoughts. Not many of us get adequate sleep. The wrong choices trap us in a lifestyle that actually endangers our lives.

The effects of these poor choices compromise every system that keeps us well, and the damage is not pretty. After years of a diet high in refined carbohydrates, arteries become narrow and clogged with plaque, raising the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attack. We find ourselves on the unhealthy path to metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and cancer. Eating too much of the wrong foods and getting too little exercise allows fat to build up around our organs and beneath our skin. Smoking fills our lungs with toxins, damaging our health in myriad ways. Not getting enough sleep worsens our memories and disrupts an important hormone cycle that prevents us from overeating. And too much stress compromises our body's natural immune system, the very tool that would help us combat much of the other damage.

Return to the Path of Good Health

Fortunately, we have the ability to choose.

That’s where our series of HealthJournals on Wellness come in. Our Wellness series will show you how to completely change your lifestyle to a healthy and sustainable one that will restore your vitality and reverse chronic medical conditions. It will provide you with innumerable health benefits. It will lessen dangerous abdominal fat, lower chronic inflammation, and reduce the threat of other chronic diseases. Your risk of getting heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases will be greatly reduced. You will be likely to live longer, too. What’s more, your systems and organs will be provided with all the nutrients they require, so that your hunger will be satisfied, and your body brought into homeostatic balance.

This wellness information is based on real science that refutes current mainstream medical notions of what we should be eating. In this series, we explain the most natural way to eat—so that fat melts away and the body’s hormonal systems rebalance themselves. In doing so, we turn popular notions of a “healthy diet” on their head. Moreover, we give you all the leading science on other aspects of wellness in your life—including how to break your bad habits, the benefits of sleep, how to de-stress, and the real benefits of exercising.

It’s rarely too late to make changes that can reverse damage to your abused organs and tissues. Even people who are sensitive to carbohydrates, and therefore genetically predisposed to putting on weight, can get back on the path to good health. By eating the right foods, exercising, modifying your negative habits, quitting smoking, sleeping well, and celebrating life, you can reverse many chronic conditions—and increase your enjoyment of life immeasurably.

We hope that you will continue to explore the miracle that is your body, knowing that the good choices you are making will enable you to enjoy a life full of activity and fulfillment. You have the power to keep your body and mind healthy, strong, and alive. You can live longer and live better.

To life!

Wellness and Stress – Reduce Chronic Stress and Embrace Joy

Learning how to relieve both short-term and long-term stress improves your mood and prevents damaging physical and mental side effects, such as weight gain, depression, and other health problems. A growing body of research shows that joy and positive emotions are connected with robust health. Chronic stress and weight gain are linked in several ways. If you let constant stress and negativity continue unchecked, you’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods, drink too much alcohol, or use other substances that harm your health.

The evidence continues to pile up: A positive outlook helps reduce the risk of disease for many people. Many variables influence longevity, but this much is certain: Taking a joyful approach to life has never been linked with any major illness!

Heart Help

Being more optimistic can be good for your heart. The Women's Health Initiative study gauged the optimism levels of 100,000 postmenopausal women. They found considerable difference in mortality and coronary heart disease rates, with the optimistic women living longer and decreasing their risk of heart disease.

Goodbye Pain

People with chronic pain are twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety as those with relatively pain-free lives. A person in constant pain has immense difficulty enjoying connections with others, loved ones, interests and hobbies, or just about anything that might otherwise bring them joy, because the pain supersedes them all.

But positive emotions can help even people in pain. In one study, subjects who watched comedy shows were found to have a higher pain threshold after having a good laugh. Whether the improvement was an effect of being distracted, or the result of brain chemicals sending positive messages, the people in pain found temporary relief through laughter.

Immune Improvement

Optimism appears to have a positive effect on the immune system. A study of 124 first-year law school students assessed their levels of optimism about law school, asking if they agreed with such statements as “I will be less successful than most of my classmates” or “It’s unlikely that I will fail.” The students were surveyed at intervals throughout their first year, and each time they were injected with a substance to summon an immune response. Two days after the injection, the students returned to have the immune response measured. When the students were feeling optimistic about their studies, they had improved immune response. When they were feeling pessimistic, their immune response faltered.

Memory Boost

Meditation not only relieves stress and keeps you focused, it appears to improve some kinds of memory loss. Subjects in a study conducted by researchers at the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation all had some degree of age-related memory loss. They meditated for 12 minutes daily for 8 weeks, using a form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya, derived from Kundalini yoga. At the end of 8 weeks, they were found to have increased blood circulation to the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, where memories are stored. They also had improved performance on cognitive tests, including one in which they named as many animals as possible in one minute. A control group, which listened to music rather than meditate, showed none of these improvements. Please note however, meditation did not reverse the Alzheimer’s disease process.

Age Better

Your telomeres play an important role in the division and aging of your cells. Telomeres are a zone found at the very ends of each of your chromosomes. They’re often likened to the tip of a shoelace because they keep the end material of the chromosome from unraveling. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter. When telomeres get too short, the cell can no longer keep dividing and it dies. An enzyme called telomerase helps repair and maintain battered telomeres. In recent years, researchers have found that people under extraordinary stress tend to have shortened telomeres, a sign that stress prematurely ages our cells. Studies also show that stress can interfere with telomerase, blocking its ability to heal and repair.

IMAGE: Telomeres are found at the ends of each chromosome. They are protective caps of repeating DNA sequences that can get shorter each time a cell divides.

Longer Life

Does pessimism shorten your life? A study that followed nearly 5,000 university students for more than 40 years found that those who were most pessimistic as students tended to die younger than their peers. An even longer-term study that followed 180 Catholic nuns from early adulthood to old age found that those who wrote positive autobiographies in their early 20s tended to outlive those who wrote more negative accounts.

Could it be that the more optimistic among us hang on longer to experience even more joy in life? We don’t yet have a definitive answer to this question. But no matter how long you live, each moment that you spend connecting with your friends and loved ones and focusing on your joy improves the quality of your life on this planet.

Humans have evolved to be highly social creatures. Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, Interpersonal Neurobiologist of the UCLA School of Medicine and Mindsight Institute, explains that relationships are the foundation of the most important aspects of our lives—longevity, health, wisdom, and happiness. Healthy relationships are too frequently seen as an “extra” in the modern drive to achieve. But new scientific findings are proving that close, nurturing relationships are not an extra when it comes to our health.

Despite the divorce rate, marital happiness abounds: Three out of four married Americans say that their husband or wife is their best friend, and four out of five say they would marry the same person again.

When couples have settled into a lifelong bond, the nature of their affection evolves. A 2011 study showed physical evidence of the way love changes over time. Couples who had been married for a long time still showed pronounced activity in reward areas of the brain, associated with pleasure and pain relief. They also demonstrated less anxiety, longing, and other negative complex emotions than newly in love couples.

This doesn’t mean that newly in love couples are at a disadvantage. The thrill of new romance can most certainly rev up your brain! When you are newly in love, even seeing a photo of your partner induces an excited, giddy response. Your brain activity reflects this, of course. In a study of romantic couples, researchers found that seeing the beloved in a photo activated neurons in two regions of the brain involved in motivating you to pursue pleasure or reward.

Here’s one for both newly in love couples and lifelong partners: Having sex boosts your health in significant ways! Being intimate with a partner can improve your mood, immunity, blood pressure, and more.

Scientists at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, tested college students for a specific immune factor called immunoglobulin A. Immunoglobulin A is found in high concentrations in your respiratory passages and digestive tract, as well as in your saliva and tears. It is extremely important for mounting a defense against ingested antigens like bacteria and viruses. The researchers found that students who reported having sex more frequently had more of this factor than students who had sex less frequently or not at all.

A Scottish study also found that sexually active participants reported coping better in stressful situations than their less sexually active or abstinent counterparts. The more sexually active folks also had lower blood pressure, even during the stressful situations.

You’ll be glad to hear that the anecdotal tales you often hear of people dying of heart attacks during sex are not statistically significant. In fact, in a British study, men who had sex twice or more per week had a 50% lower risk of heart attack than those who had sex once or twice a month.

The hormone oxytocin surges during orgasm. Oxytocin, the “love” hormone, also raises a person's pain threshold by stimulating the release of feel-good endorphins. It also promotes better sleep.

Finally, it has been found that men have a lower risk of prostate cancer when they ejaculate five or more times weekly, compared with those men who ejaculate only once or twice a week. Multiple studies, across many age groups, have found similar risk reduction among more sexually active men. This is good news, especially for older men who are more at risk for prostate cancer.

Great news, isn’t it? You can have lots of sex and receive massive health benefits. But what if you don’t have a partner? As it turns out, you don’t need to be in a sexual relationship to boost your happiness.

Connecting with and helping others can boost your happiness. People who volunteer and make donations to others in the community report feeling happier.

Their brains show evidence of why this is so. The same parts of the brain that are more active when we receive a reward (such as money) also show an increase in activity when we give our time or material goods to someone else. In fact, nearly 9 out of 10 volunteers report getting an emotional boost from helping their community.

If possible, find friends who are already happy! Two researchers from Harvard University examined friendships among participants in the giant Framingham Heart Study, which has been tracking the health of thousands of people in Massachusetts for decades. The research team recreated the family and social networks of 4,739 of the participants and reviewed the measurements of their happiness, which had been recorded from 1983 to 2003.

The data indicated that having a happy friend increased an individual's chances of being happy by 15%. The subjects who had more friends were also rated higher on the happiness scale, but those whose friends were happy saw a much bigger increase in their chances of being happy, too.

When people have a clear purpose and take pleasure in life’s many joys, they tend to live longer. Positive engagement in life is your reason to get up in the morning and to persevere through obstacles and occasional misfortune. Joyful people know that the positive aspects of life are worth the struggle. When you learn to embrace joy, alleviate stress, and get the most out of life, even through the hard times, each day that you live can be the best day of your life.