This would be a good blog to ready standing up or walking. Because it's all about getting off your butt and moving each day. This key Primal principle; we are meant to move frequently tending to things like our ancestors did.

They spent their days gathering food, hauling water, making and moving camp, avoiding predators, and moving.

This is different than sitting all day in an office, and running to the gym for an intense workout. The intense work-outs can be good for you if they're not chronic, and if you stay within a healthy heart rate range for your body. Back to moving daily.

I've read that sitting is the new smoking in terms of how it affects your health. Sitting too long is detrimental to your health, even if you're hitting the gym regularly.

So what do we do to keep moving when our lives demand us to be sedentary. Here are several ideas:

• Park at the end of the parking lot when you go shopping and walk in
• Take the stairs as often as you can
• Use a standing desk at work and stretch at least 10 minutes every hour
• Walk to lunch, and walk around the block during your 10 minute breaks
• ​Follow your child through the play structure after work instead of sitting and watching
• Take a long walk when you're feeling physically out of whacked and stressed
• Run across the street to get out of the crosswalk as it changes
• Walk around the mall, airport, bus terminal, car lot, shopping center when you're waiting for something
• Walk and move while you're talking on the phone
• Go to the TV to change the channel instead of using the remote
• Have walking meetings with colleagues
• Initiate a 10-minute stretch break in your office with your co-workers
• Take a quick break to do qi gong, pushups, squats or planks
• Walk quickly to hold open the door for someone

It's important to be mindful about your health as you go through your day. Check in with your body and see how it's feeling and what needs tending to. Remember to breathe deeply as we can clench up and minimize breathing when we are super focused or stressed about work.

How many creative ways can you find to bring movement into your day?

If you don't give a damn about yourself, you won't be healthy. You'll make choices that don't support you. It's important to do a deep dive into your psyche and soul to really see if you're accepting all of yourself. Because only then will you truly be able to support yourself.

For most of my life, I have wanted to be a different person than I am. As a child, I had been criticized for being too sensitive, and it caused my parents a lot of anxiety and frustration.

It caused me tons of anxiety in many areas of my life. I often couldn't sleep well if I had certain foods - like caffeine, chocolate, and sugar - or had experienced intense emotional situations. When my parents argued, I would sit at the top of the stairway in our childhood home stairway listen carefully, praying that they would both be okay. I could feel the emotions of others, like when my dad drank, and I would lay awake listening to his every move downstairs as I worried about him.

These intense experiences as a highly sensitive child left me wishing that I wasn't who I was. I hated that part of myself. It just caused me sleepless nights and over-stimulated my sensitive system. 

I spent many years feeling this way. All of the therapy, anxiety management, coaching, meditations, exercise, lifestyle adjustments, and affirmations helped tremendously, but didn't heal this core issue deep inside my psyche and soul. I wasn't taking a positive approach. I would get so frustrated and discouraged at the constant challenges that I would sabotage myself by eating poorly, drinking too much, not getting enough rest, being down on myself, and taking a very negative approach.

In the last several years, I have begun to learn to take a positive approach to these highly sensitive qualities. I see that my sensitivity provides me with lots of information that others don't see. It has given me the ability to study and do personal and space energy clearing work for myself and others that has kept me balanced and enabled me to walk through my life feeling grounded and whole. 

In short, these are the key things I do to show that I value myself at my core:

• Get plenty of rest
• Mineralize my water so that I stay hydrated effectively
• Practice specific affirmations to promote self-love
• Look in the mirror when I pass one (thanks Louise Hay!) to say "I love you. I completely love you"
• Eat Paleo so I am getting plenty of vegetables, fruits and wholesome proteins, avoiding sugar, flours, and toxic oils which overstimulate my body
• Supplement myself with nutrients that my daily food doesn't adequately provide for me
• Live Primally so I'm supporting my physical body optimally through exercise, nature, sun, play, lots of daily movement, and all things Primal
• Talk to myself in positive ways by turning the limiting beliefs around
• Visit my tribes often - one set of friends who are Primal Paleo, another set of friends that practice energy work

In short, I truly give a damn about my health now on a deeper level than I ever have before. I am willing to keep learning from my own sensitivities and intuition when I make choices, and I am willing to say no to foods that don't work for my body, even if those around me are chomping away and making comments. 

I'm a Highly Sensitive person with a lot of value to offer the world, and I have the courage to support myself no matter what anyone else thinks.

​How about you? Do you give a damn about your health enough to go against the standard?

This series of blogs will be about the Primal Health principles that are working for me. This is principle number one. 

Primal Lifestyle Choice Number One for me is to eat plants and animals without pesticides or chemicals.

As with any information you receive from anyone, it is only information. Use your intuition and discernment as to if it works for you. It may not. We are all an experiment of one since we feed ourselves uniquely - the food we eat, the thoughts we think, the lifestyle habits we have, the stress that presents itself - all these thinks influence how we feel. Each of us individually can determine our road to best health.

Most importantly, I have made a commitment to support myself and to eat plants and animals without pesticides or chemicals. This has been no easy choice. Yet, as a Highly Sensitive person, food affects me more deeply, just like other energy can. To take care of myself, I have made big adjustments to my lifestyle and I am living a lifestyle that seems odd to the typical American.

Here are some of the things I do to accomplish this:

1. I shop at our local farmer's market all year long, rain or shine. I have gotten to know the farmers - from the meat vendors, speciality products, to the vegetable and fruit vendors.  Here's what I do:
   1. I buy grass-fed, purely processed meat from farms that I know love and care for their animals through their lives. This includes longhorn beef (low in saturated fat), chicken, lamb, turkey, and pork. 
   2. I know what's been done to the fruits and vegetables I buy. They aren't grown in chemical fertilizers, sprayed with pesticides, or coated in wax. I chose organically certified produce 99% of the time. If I can't find it, I will ask the other non-organic vendors about how they care for their fruits and vegetables. Most often they have not paid the fee to be certified organic so they can't say they are, but they are. Or they are transitioning to organic, which is a 3 year process in California.
   3. Not only have I gotten the freshest local food possible (outside of our struggling garden!), I have made good friends (which is also part of my Primal plan.)
   4. I have learned about what an organic, free-range farmer deals with to provide us with this premium food. They are, in general, hard workers on a mission to bring good food to others. I admire their tenacity and stamina.
2. If I shop at a grocery store, it's Whole Foods. They are the best natural grocer I have found.
   1. They have a welfare rating system for their meat so I have an idea of the lifestyle of the animals.
   2. They list how local the products are.
   3. They work with local farmers and producers to bring products to the store.
   4. They have "farmed" salmon, which actually live inside netting on the edge of the ocean in a small population (compared to conventional farms.) They are with other species of fish and ocean life throughout their lives. 
   5. They do their best to make sure the food they sell is cared for and provided without harmful toxins, pesticides, and chemicals. 
3. I rarely eat grains; I get my carbs from fruits and vegetables.
   1. Grains - such as bread, pasta, oatmeal, rice, etc. - aren't an essential ingredient for our diets, and they contribute to weight gain.
   2. The standard US diet recommends 250 grams of carbs a day. This amount puts weight on people.
   3. To lose weight, stay between 50 -100 grams of carbs from our fruits and vegetables. To maintain weight - 100 - 150 grams. To put on weight, do 150 grams and above.

Next week look for Primal Lifestyle Choice Number Two - Take a Positive Approach.

Most of my life I have had a focus on health. That's why many of the people I know consider me to be a "health nut." Although that term often comes across as a negative, it's really a positive.

Since I am a highly sensitive person, food has affected me deeply my whole life. So if I ate that sugary cookie, I would have heart skips and a jittery feeling. When I drank that cup of coffee, my heart would be pounding and I couldn't sit still - for hours. 

Besides all the immediate feedback that my body gives me, I have also had insidious weight gain. It has creeped on over the years - besides the years when I had children where it came on rather quickly and was not so easy to lose afterwards. 

With all my work on health, I have not been able to figure out how to be my right-sized body and feel satiated. The Standard American Diet, or SAD as it is referred to in many health circles, does not work for me. I put on weight. Even when I found elimination diets to achieve a good weight where I felt strong and sexy, I still craved - something. So I would invariably go back to the SAD again, experiencing that insidious weight gain. 

Since I'm a life-long learner, the Universe introduced me to a Hay House health coach, the 21st Century Medicine Woman, in 2014, and I went along a journey to discover things I never knew about my health. I got my genetic testing done through 23andme, ran the reports through livewello, and worked with my coach on supporting my body with that information, as well as taking a positive approach.  I also worked with Morley Robbins to get a Hair Test Mineral Assay (HTMA) and define my personal protocol to balance my system. 

In 2017, I discovered the Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson, a healthy lifestyle based on some different principles. Actually I had purchased the book in 2009 after Brad Kearns came to talk about it to our local cycling team. I dusted it off the bookshelf and read it in 2017.

So I gave this lifestyle a whirl. And then I certified as a coach using these principles. I have served as a Mentor on the 21-day Challenge for over a year. And it has been an amazing journey towards a renewed health for me. So I've gone from a "health nut," to a "health advocate."

These are the principles I now apply to my life that have me feeling the best. 

1. Eat plants and animals without pesticides or chemicals
2. Take a positive approach to life
3. Move as much as you can each day
4. Lift heavy things a couple of times a week
5. Sprint once a week to 10 days
6. Sleep as much as you can
7. Take a playful attitude towards life
8. Sun without sunscreen for 10 minutes a day, longer if you don't burn
9. Supplement your foods with what's missing from it 
10. Use your intuition to guide your choices
11. Cultivate close friendships - your tribe
12. Practice consistent and loving self-care

When you are eating the right foods for your body, moving in ways to keep you feeling your best, and supporting yourself emotionally and spiritually, you will be at a good weight for yourself.

​I'll be talking about these principles in the next series of blogs so keep an eye out for them. Enjoy the journey!