5 - 2023 - Dr Libby

The truth about ageing

July 25, 2023May 24, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

As children we typically feel excited about getting older, with milestones like reaching the double digits and dreams of what the absolute independence of adulthood will be like. Then we seem to reach a certain point along the way where all of a sudden, getting older is no longer viewed in a favourable light. In fact, for many people, ageing becomes something they fear or dread.

Ageing is a natural part of life that we will all go through. So why the fear? While there are numerous factors that can contribute, if we pull back the curtain on this it usually isn’t about getting older itself – it’s the story we tell ourselves about what getting older means. Our own personal story about what ageing means tends to be a melting pot of past experiences, interactions with others, and the information and images we are exposed to through various forms of media on a daily basis. Unless we go digging into our beliefs, it’s usually not something we’re consciously aware of – it’s just our perception.

But different people have different ideas about ageing. Ageing to one person can mean feeling wiser and more comfortable in their own skin – which inspires a radiance of its own. While, to another, ageing may represent significant degeneration of their health or how they look or feel. For some, it is the changes in appearance that occur with age that are dreaded or feared the most. We are exposed to an enormous volume of images, genuine, filtered and fake, depicting what popular culture considers ‘beautiful’ or ‘ideal’, and it can be easy to develop a perception that we need to look (or continue looking) a certain way.

Your changing lines, hair colour or body in no way detracts from who you are and the magnificence of your heart, and ageing is a natural process. In fact, it’s an enormous privilege that we get to live into our elderly years. In saying that, our lifestyle and how we take care of our body most definitely influences how well we look and feel in our later life. We don’t want the lifestyle we live now to detract from our health so that many of our later years are spent battling health challenges that impinge on our quality of life.

While change is definitely afoot, much emphasis is placed on various aspects of youthfulness as attractive, and we are bombarded with messages about needing to hide the effects of ageing. Hardly anyone actually talks about the natural and inevitable processes of ageing. Yet, the more we know about these processes the more we can do to ensure we take such good care of ourselves and reduce the likelihood of premature ageing or our ageing being rapid and debilitating.

So, let’s take a look at what ageing is really all about. The three biochemical processes through which we age are oxidation, inflammation and glycation. The good news is, great nutrition goes a long way to providing our body with the substances it needs to ensure these processes happen slowly rather than rapidly.

Oxidation

Oxidative damage is caused by free radicals. Imagine these are single oxygen units that can damage the tissues of the body. Free radicals are produced by normal processes like breathing and exercising, but our body will produce more of them if we are exposed to cigarette smoke and environmental pollutants or when we experience chronic stress or inflammatory reactions. A small number of them assist the body with some vital processes, such as helping us get over an infection. However, when they are in excessive numbers for too long, degeneration occurs.

To help protect ourselves from the damage that free radicals have the potential to cause, we need to consume antioxidant-rich foods as these quench the free radicals. Some of our micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) act as antioxidants, such as vitamin C and vitamin E, but there are also many, many phytochemicals (beneficial plant-based substances) that have antioxidant actions. We simply cannot disregard the benefits of eating of whole, real plant foods, especially plenty of colourful vegetables.

Inflammation

Inflammation is another major way in which we age. Simply put, inflammation is one of the ways your immune system responds to a substance it deems problematic entering your body. How do things enter? You can ingest them, breathe them, or you can absorb them through your skin. When your immune system perceives that a threatening substance has entered, it mounts a powerful and multi-pronged attack on the ‘invader’. Part of that response is to create inflammation, which occurs wherever the immune system is engaged in a battle – in the tissues of your face, in your blood vessels, and/or in your vital organs, for example. The red, hot, painful inflammation that your body lets you know about tends to be an acute localised response, however chronic low-grade inflammation is usually silent, and can happen when a person isn’t taking good care of themselves.

Inflammation is essential to keeping us alive, but in excess it can be detrimental to our health. For example, chronic inflammation can contribute to many health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Because these conditions develop over time, they do become more prevalent with increasing age. In saying that, we are seeing an increase in younger people developing some of these conditions, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, largely due to the amount of processed food and drinks consumed. It’s deeply concerning.

Our lifestyle choices – including our food and beverage choices, the cosmetics and household products we choose, how hard we push our body and how much rest we get, as well as our perceptions of pressure and urgency – can all either drive or reduce inflammatory responses in the body.

One simple way to reduce inflammation is to limit the amount of problematic substances that enter the body. This could mean reducing your alcohol intake, quitting smoking and avoiding ultra-processed foods. There are also a number of foods that have natural anti-inflammatory properties and increasing our consumption of these can also be beneficial. Some examples of anti-inflammatory foods include oily fish (which are a source of the anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats), turmeric and ginger.

Glycation

Another factor that contributes to ageing is glycation. This occurs when glucose, fructose or galactose (sugars) bind to some of our DNA, proteins and lipids (fats), leaving them unable to do their jobs in the body. The by-product of this is what are known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs). If we have a diet high in refined and processed foods, the problem becomes worse as we get older, since the cumulative sugar intake for most just keeps growing. This can cause cells and tissues to not work properly, resulting in ageing or, in some cases, disease.

I care very much about doing all we can to prevent degenerative diseases and live an energised, healthy, full life. There is so much we can do to reduce our risk of developing chronic diseases over time, yet many people still operate under the faulty belief that just because their mother or father had a chronic disease, such as cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes, they are destined to develop it too. And while it is true that our genetics can play a role in our susceptibility to a number of health conditions, epigenetics teaches us that it is what we do with our genes that matters. According to epigenetics you have the ability to control the expression of your genes, meaning you have the ability to impact to what extent you “inherit” certain health conditions. Let that empower you. I recall a professor of medicine speaking at a conference I attended who said: “ we all have lousy genes; it’s what we do with them that matters.”

The changes you make now can have a significant bearing on your health in the future and what your experience of ageing will be. While it is truly wonderful that we have access to modern medicine which allows us to live longer, we don’t often stop to consider the quality of that life – the life in those years. We don’t often pause to think about what it would be like if we lost the strength or flexibility of our body and as a result, lost some of our independence. So, a question I like to pose is “Are we living too short and dying too long?” For it is the quality of your life that I care about so sincerely.

The changing face of 40ish

May 25, 2023May 24, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

I could have picked any age really: 30, 40 or 50 and beyond. We notice changes at all ages, but it is often the zero years that have us honing in on what is different from years gone by. So, what happens around the age of 40 and what steps can we take to counteract some of what could unfold?

Here are some of them.

The collagen and elastic fibres that keep skin smooth and youthful in appearance start to regenerate at a slower rate. This means more visible signs of ageing start to appear on the surface. This is partly due to the cumulative impact of damage done by free radicals. Imagine them as single oxygen units that can damage tissues. It is also due to the repetition of facial expressions—you can see in the lines on people’s faces if they have had decades of struggle and hardship or a more peaceful life. Regardless of which patterns dominate for you, seeing those lines as even more evidence of the extraordinary human you are helps you to accept them. In those lines you might see resilience, courage, resourcefulness, wisdom or happiness—or a whole plethora of other character traits.

Or it might be stretch marks. You may have had a child or children and now have stretch marks as a result of your miraculous body being able to grow and birth a child. In other words, your stretch marks are a visible sign of the miracle you are and that your baby is. Or you may have once had a bigger body size than you do now and stretch marks are evidence of a time gone by. Or a desire to overeat that you still find challenging. So, you see your stretch marks as a sign of your strength and determination and ongoing self-care.

Nothing has meaning in this world unless we give it meaning. The more uplifting meanings you attribute to these things, the more peace you will have and the more fuel you will have to take care of yourself, those you love and also to be able to share your gifts with the world.

Your forties can also be a time in your life when your menstrual cycle starts to change. The menstrual blood may become heavier, contain more clots and you may notice your mood becomes darker or harder to handle in the lead-up to your period. Perhaps your cycle shortens and where it was once 28 days, it’s now more like 21. For others, their period becomes scarcer or scanty, less regular, the bleeding more infrequent. Perhaps you are starting to overheat easily or notice that your sleep has become more erratic and not as refreshing.

As hormone levels change, it can also be a time when you notice changes in your body fat that can’t be explained through how you eat and move, and perhaps this frustrates you. Some (not all) women notice a thickening of the torso around this time and there are a number of hormonal mechanisms behind this. It can be cortisol-related or due to estrogen levels dropping. As the ovaries cease to make progesterone each month as ovulation becomes irregular, and ovarian estrogen production become about 10 percent of what it was across the menstruation years once you reach menopause, the adrenal glands can offer additional support with sex hormone production, making a small amount of them.

When they do and when your liver function has not been interfered with by too much fat accumulation (as occurs with Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: NAFLD), you tend to suffer much less through the menopausal transition. But for many women, their adrenals haven’t made supportive amounts of sex hormones for years or decades due to the constant, relentless output of stress hormones (refer to here). Body fat also makes estrogen so to compensate for poor adrenal health, the body responds (remembering your body always has your back!) by increasing your body fat so you can have some more estrogen. There are two body systems in particular that typically need support in these scenarios: the liver and the adrenals, remembering that behind that is the ‘am I safe?’ scenario with the pituitary and the hypothalamus (refer to here).

At any age, a big life change can occur that we relish or find challenging. The longer you live, the more likely you are to have experienced these and suffered (though hopefully also grown) as a result. It might be the passing of someone close to you. A parent perhaps, or a dear friend. It might be the end of a major relationship or a pile of things all happening at once such as moving house, a sick child, too much work on your plate and an unrelenting sense of being overwhelmed because you feel like you have to deal with everything by yourself.

Your mantra may have become ‘if I don’t do it, it won’t get done’. And if we tune in to how our body feels when we recite this, it typically hardens us, right when we need more softness and fluidity for the health of our body, mind and soul. This can also be a time when we feel a heavy burden of responsibility in many areas of life and we start to wonder: ‘When is it going to be my turn? When will I get to do more of what I want to do?’ Feeling like this is a guide for you to start to identify what those things are and to begin to work out ways to bring more of them into your life.

Regardless of your current age, here are some suggestions that can help to address some of the things discussed above and help you to transition through the years with ease and grace.

Changes to your skin

To address lines in your skin and reduce the appearance of stretch marks, minimise free radical damage by consuming a diet rich in coloured vegetables and fruits which are high in antioxidants. You may like to take additional vitamin C. Don’t smoke and do what you can to avoid exposure to pollutants and other problematic substances. Support your body to eliminate the pollutants that you do ingest via what you eat, drink, inhale or put on your skin. Reframe how you see the lines on your face or the stretch marks on your tummy and hips to view them in a more favourable light. See the gifts in them! You may also like to try an antioxidant-rich oil to nourish your skin. Grapeseed extract has been shown to help boost collagen regeneration.

Cycle changes

Apply what you’ve learned to support the liver – fewer liver loaders going in, plenty of vegetables being consumed as well as additional liver support in the form of herbal medicine. If you are starting to overheat, taking a break from alcohol will likely prove highly beneficial. Support the adrenals by consuming less or no caffeine, explore your perceptions of pressure and urgency, and embrace a breath-focused practice. Also examine your requirements for ‘safety’ to help your endocrine and nervous systems to receive the message that you are safe. Additional medicinal herbs that can be highly beneficial across the peri-menopause and menopause years include rhodiola, saffron, skullcap and shatavari.

What can you delegate?

I know when I first started to ask this question, my brain gave me an emphatic ‘nothing!’. Yet when you dig a little deeper, the tasks to delegate and the people to support you are there. Consider that when you say you don’t have time for something, what you are really staying is: that is just not a priority for me at the moment. Try it on for size and see if you are comfortable with that. The truth of this statement can help you let some things go that are less important to you, so you can embrace more of what is truly important to you. Also remember that the opposite of stress is trust (refer to here) and this alone helps us all to experience less tension, to relax and soften.

Muscle mass

From the age of 30 onwards, you lose muscle mass unless you actively do something to prevent this. The less muscle mass we have the slower our metabolic rate. The lower your muscle mass, the less storage capacity you have for glycogen, the storage form of glucose, so the more likely you are to store excess carbohydrates as body fat. “Or the more likely you are to experience blood glucose highs and lows and the sugar cravings that go with that. Prioritise building muscle mass across your whole life. This means resistance training, yoga, Pilates, carrying your luggage instead of wheeling it (as was the case up until relatively recently), carrying your groceries and children. Garden, do farm work. Use your body. Don’t avoid movement.

This article is based on a section from Dr Libby’s book The Beauty Guide.

How food can affect your mood (and what you can do about it)

May 12, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

Research tells us that the relationship between food and our mood is bidirectional – meaning that our mood affects what we eat, and what we eat affects our mood. However, for many years, the link between mood and nutrition was debated. From the common sense corner, we have always known the food we eat affects us – you only have to recall a child’s birthday party to see just how powerfully the food we eat can impact our mood and behaviour.

What we eat literally becomes part of us; the amino acids we ingest help to form the proteins that become part of our immune system, our muscles and neurotransmitters. However, many of us have become disconnected from this relationship – we can be left thinking it’s ‘normal’ to feel terrible at 3pm, snap before dinner or to constantly feel bloated after eating.

Our relationship with food is complex and often has a strong emotional component. Take for example a stressful day –we’re generally drawn to chocolate, alcohol, or takeaways, not a health-promoting bowl of broccoli! If we’re feeling tired and sluggish, we tend to reach for caffeine and sugary foods –anything we think will give us a quick surge of energy. When we reach for these, the quick energy boost we might experience is ultimately followed by a crash, and this can wreak havoc on our mood. So what can we do about it?

Get off the sugar rollercoaster

Well regulated blood glucose levels are critical to an even mood. That means including proteins, fats and/or fibre with meals and snacks to ensure glucose from carbohydrate-rich foods –whether they are sugary or starchy -is released slowly into the blood. Most importantly though, don’t rely on fats, proteins and fibre to do this –don’t over-consume sugars and starches in the first place. While a sugary snack can boost your energy and lift a lousy mood almost instantly, this effect is very short lived -in fact one study found that the mood enhancing effect lasted only three minutes – not worth it! Complex carbohydrates such as brown rice, quinoa and sweet potato are more nourishing options that will provide you with longer-lasting energy.

Prioritise your gut health

We tend to link our mood to our brain, yet research shows that our gut plays a major role. The gut has its very own nervous system (the enteric nervous system), which is often referred to as our “second brain”. This allows signals to be transmitted between the gut and the brain, in both directions. Research suggests that our gut bacteria may be able to influence the messages that our gut sends to the brain, and certain bacteria that live in the gut have also been shown to produce GABA, a ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that transmit messages in our brain, and many of these are actually made in the gut. In fact, around 80 percent of the body’s serotonin –a happy, calm, content hormone – is made in the gut. Try these daily suggestions for keeping your gut healthy.

Add in an extra serve of vegetables with your meals

Eating more vegetables can literally help to make sure you get up on the right side of bed tomorrow! Incorporate more vegetables by changing the way you plate your meals. Build the meal around the vegetables as opposed to the carbohydrate or protein options. Aim for around half your plate to be filled up with vegetable content. If this makes you panic, start by aiming for a quarter of the plate. Options like a simple herby slaw as a side as well as steamed or stir-fried vegetables are a great way to boost the vegetable content of your meal. Leafy greens tend to be bitter, which can help to reduce cravings for sugar. Amping up your intake of vegetables like spinach, kale and silverbeet can therefore help you get off the sugar rollercoaster – think steadier energy levels throughout the day.

Go for the dish with oily fish

Oily fish, such as sardines, are rich in EPA and DHA, which are omega 3 fatty acids. These essential fats may help to treat and prevent anxiety and a depressed mood and are important for brain health. Try to include oily fish at least a couple of times a week. If this is not feasible for you, you may like to supplement with good quality fish oil capsules or a spoonful of cod liver oil.

Are you present and mindful as you go through your day?

May 12, 2023May 10, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

Do you notice the rise of the sun on the horizon in the morning or the way the leaves dance as the breeze picks them up? If you go for a walk, are you present to the world around you — noticing the warmth of the sun on your skin and the birds skipping through the trees? Do you sit at a table to have your meals, without your phone or social media — without a book or television, without your thoughts racing ahead to what else you have to do for the day?

Or are you constantly one step ahead or behind yourself at any given moment, always feeling a bit frantic, thoughts racing and jumping from task to task?

The pace of the modern world can lead us to feel that we need to move at a million miles an hour from the moment we crack our eyes open in the morning to the moment we sigh into our pillow at the end of our long day. Many women share with me that they don’t feel as though they have the time to catch their breath let alone pay attention to what’s going on around or within them. The general consensus is something along the lines of “I have so much to do and there’s just not enough time in the day.”

But what are we missing out on by not bringing more presence to our day-to-day life?

It’s undeniable that our lives are faster than ever before. If we look at what life was like even just fifty years ago, we can see the radical change that has taken place for the vast majority of us. It wasn’t that long ago that when we left the house no one could get hold of us. Email and social media didn’t exist. Written communication required writing a letter. Food was slower, too.

Today, many families don’t have any other option but for both parents to be earning an income. The cost of homes and living has skyrocketed and the increasing financial pressures have resulted in what, for many women, is a frantic double shift of work day and night, a paid job during the daylight hours and taking care of their families and homes at night.

For too many women, this pace — their unrelenting to-do lists and their perception of pressure and urgency — is driving troubling biochemical processes in their bodies. They’re tired yet wired, experiencing PMS and debilitating menopausal symptoms, IBS, headaches, anxiety, poor quality sleep, regular colds and flus and many other symptoms they just accept as “normal”.

Is great health and a degree of our happiness the true expense of our incessant rush? And does all of this really mean that there is no space in our lives for presence? Are we honestly too busy to pause and admire the sunset or have we just forgotten the importance of pushing pause every so often and coming up for air?

In my heart of hearts I believe that for most of us, we have simply lost touch with the precious beauty of life. We’ve been swept up in the hurricane of modern living — seeking, striving, reaching to fit more in to our bulging schedules — without really giving pause to consider our priorities and whether our way of living is aligning with them.

And along the way we can too easily forget to appreciate what we already have and what a blessing it all is. Even when it’s also hard – beauty and pain co-exist, it’s just that we tend to focus on one or the other in any given moment.

Are we really happy to give up our health for our lifestyle? To be so caught up in getting everyone out the door on time that we miss our child’s pure delight from playing with the dog?

I once witnessed a friend throw away an opportunity to be present when I commented on how precious her three children’s clothes looked hanging on the staircase railing, all pressed and tiny and ready for school the next day — with all their little shoes lined up beneath each outfit. When I commented to my friend, the children’s mother, on what a sweet sight it was, she (bless her in her exhaustion) rolled her eyes and said it is Groundhog Day to her.

In an instant she saw what she had done. She saw how she had washed over a moment in time, missed soaking up the soul-nourishing sight at the bottom of the stairs, and instead jumped ahead with her mind to her perception of what tomorrow would be—another morning of feeling beyond exhausted and of chaos and demands on her time and energy.

Yet the beauty of life, and the beauties expelled by the lives we helped create, is there to behold if we can be in the moment, rather than always being ahead of it.

Yes we have to plan and organise, of course we do. But my goodness the feelings of stress are so much less when we have moments of noticing and soaking up the immense beauty around us. And the stress is so much less if we invest in ourselves and our health—whatever that looks like for you.

Going to your local café and reading a magazine, sitting outside where you live and letting the sun warm your back with only the birds to keep you company, starting the day with qi gong and a walk. I encourage you to shift the perception that there is never enough time, and part of this is creating spaciousness in your life. That looks different for everyone, and we all have varying capacities for creating space—but space in some form we do have. It’s usually a sense of mental spaciousness we’re seeking because what we do in a day can’t/won’t necessarily be able to change.

Consider this: we’re only busy with what we say yes to. Being busy can lead us to use the language “I don’t have time.” Instead, try saying, “That’s just not a priority for me at the moment” and see how that feels. Conversely, it may help to consider the things you spend most of your time doing and try saying, “This is a high priority for me at the moment.” This can help you to decipher what you really want to say yes to, what your priorities are, and for many people, this alone helps them to experience a greater sense of spaciousness and inner peace, to cultivate better personal energy and experience a greater level of wellness.

Stay in touch with how privileged your life is; all of your basic needs are met when that is not the case for too many people in this world. Science has shown that the human nervous system, a body system inextricably linked to our stress response, cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. So when you’re feeling grateful, you cannot be stressed.

Stay connected to wonder—that wonder you see plainly on children’s faces when they experience something incredible for the first time. Stay in touch with the wonder and the gift of life, with all of its messiness and chaos and unpredictability. Do your best to embrace uncertainty, for some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later.

And let yourself have what you already have. I have read that when people who are dying are asked what they will miss the most, they say, “The ordinary things. The smell in the air just before the rain. The feeling of my dog’s fur under my hands. My partner’s face. A freshly cut lemon. The night sky.”

We have those things now. Don’t let them pass you by.

How to prioritise your nourishment when travelling

May 2, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

Travelling often means that your ability to prepare your own meals becomes compromised. When this happens, it’s easy to just think ‘oh it’s too hard’. Yet if nourishing yourself remains a priority you will almost always find a way. An all or nothing mentality isn’t usually helpful, and this is particularly true when it comes to how you eat while travelling.

Of course, if you’re someone who only goes away two weeks in a year, it may feel good for you to adjust your priorities during your break. Eating in an out-of-character way for two weeks will have little impact compared with what you do for the other 50 weeks of the year – it’s what you do most of the time, not what you do occasionally that shows up in your wellness. On the other hand, if you’re someone who goes away more regularly or who travels for work, you may be looking for ways to continue prioritising your nourishment while you’re away from home. Here are some suggestions to help you do so.

Research local eating spots.

Most restaurants and cafes have their menus available online and a quick search of your destination will likely uncover any local establishments that offer more nourishing options. If you can’t find a nourishing option, you can always ask about adding a side of vegetables or a salad. Even when they’re not on the menu, most places will be happy to deliver such options upon request.

Book accommodation with a kitchen or kitchenette.

If you are travelling for work, you may not have time to prepare all your meals, but you may be able prepare simpler meals such as breakfast. If you’re travelling for pleasure, you may relish the break from preparing all of your meals yourself. Yet, having the space to cook or prepare fresh meals does give you a fall-back plan should there not be sufficient options available around you.

Make the best choices from what you have available.

Do what you can. If it’s just impossible to get something that you would ordinarily choose and you’re really hungry, then judging yourself or worrying about that one meal that might not be that nourishing can be more detrimental to your health than the less-nourishing meal itself –it’s just one meal. And it is when we judge ourselves that our thinking tends to spiral into “I’ve ruined it, I may as well just finish the packet of biscuits” or “I may as well just have another glass (or two or three!) of wine”.

Pack your snacks or some supplies.

Depending on the space you have in your suitcase and the restrictions on what you can carry with you to your travel destination, you may like to pack some snacks. A packet of nuts, home-made bliss balls, some brown rice crackers, a loaf of good quality bread, an avocado, a few carrots, a couple of cans of tuna or sardines – providing you have a fridge in your accommodation, there’s not much you can’t take with you that couldn’t handle a little travel time. If you’d rather not fill your suitcase with food (or that’s not an option for you), swing by a local market when you arrive.

Take a greens drink.

I always travel with a ‘greens drink’ – basically just ground up vegetables in a powder – just to boost my intake of greens while I’m away. I formulated Bio Blends Organic Daily Greens . It’s a really easy thing to pack into carry-on luggage and a great way to amp up your vegetable intake. Look for one that has fewer ingredients as you will get more concentrated doses of the nutrients these contain.

5 ways to calm inflammation in the body

May 2, 2023 by Dr Libby Weaver

While not all inflammation is a concern (it’s actually essential for keeping us alive), when it is persistent and/or chronic, it becomes highly problematic. You will often hear about it in association with health conditions such as cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases as well as excess body fat and rapid ageing.

Inflammation is of course a natural, normal and necessary response to infections, damage or injury to tissues inside your body. We just don’t want it switched on all the time as this is when things can go awry. So, what is it and how does it happen? Put simply, inflammation is your immune system’s response to a stimulus. That stimulus might include problematic substances you ingest via food and drinks, absorb via your skin, or breathe in, or those that the body is directed to produce inside itself. Chronic inflammation is most commonly driven by lifestyle choices so the good news is there is plenty you can do to help reduce inflammation and minimise the collateral damage that can occur when it is always switched on. Here are five effective and natural ways to reduce inflammation.

1. Nurture your gut

The community of microbes in your gut, known as the gut microbiome, play a powerful role in modulating the immune system. Different types of gut bacteria can either increase or decrease levels of inflammation. You can support the health of your gut by incorporating as many different types of plant foods as you can into your way of eating – variety is key. Think different types of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, pulses, herbs and spices. These all contain different substances that feed your good bacteria and help them to thrive. Fermented foods such as sauerkraut, miso, kombucha, kimchi, tempeh and kefir are also excellent to include, likely due to their beneficial effect on stomach acid production and hence maintaining the vital pH gradient of gut itself. You may also like to include warm, slow cooked foods and bone broth which offer restorative, gut healing properties. How you eat is just as important as what you eat. Ensure you chew your food well, eat slowly in a calm undistracted state.

2. Love your liver

The liver is responsible for detoxifying (altering the structure of) problematic substances inside us so that they can then be eliminated. When the liver isn’t able to do this critical detoxification work efficiently, due to damage from alcohol, toxins or viruses, inflammation increases. We can support the liver by reducing our exposure to what I like to call “liver loaders”—alcohol, refined sugars and synthetic substances that are often found in processed foods, conventional cosmetics and household cleaning products. In addition to reducing your intake of liver loaders, your liver will benefit from consuming more bitter foods such as green leafy vegetables as well as iron, protein and sulphur-containing foods.

3. Amp up your intake of anti-inflammatory foods

An anti-inflammatory way of eating essentially means choosing predominantly whole foods, with a focus on plenty of plant foods. There are also a number of foods that have potent anti-inflammatory properties and increasing our consumption of these can help too. These include turmeric, ginger, flaxseeds, and oily fish, due to their long-chain omega-3 fatty acid content, as well as grass-fed meats. Some people may benefit from supplementing with curcumin (the main active constituent in turmeric) or a high-quality fish oil to help with lowering inflammation, however this is best discussed with your qualified healthcare practitioner first to determine if it is suitable for you. For most people it is.

4. Address your stress

Chronic stress can also contribute to inflammation and let’s face it, ongoing high levels of stress seem to be the norm for most people these days. The stresses of modern life aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, so it’s crucial that we have practices in place to help mitigate the effects of this on the body. Breath-focused practices are a fantastic way to help lower stress hormone production—this could involve diaphragmatic breathing, meditation, tai chi, qi gong or restorative yoga. If you are constantly stressed, worried, rushed or overwhelmed, it’s also important to consider what might be at the heart of this and how you might be able to change your perceptions of pressure and urgency in everyday life. I wrote about this in my book The Invisible Load

5. Try cold immersions

Cold water immersion or ice baths have been a popular recovery method for athletes for some time and are gaining more popularity with the general population. There is a growing body of scientific research that supports the use of cold water immersion therapy for a variety of health conditions – including reducing inflammation. It involves immersing the body in cold water for a short period of time, usually between 5 and 20 minutes. This is something you can do in the ocean (when the weather is cold enough), your shower or at a local recovery centre or bathing house. If you live or holiday on the Gold Coast, Australia, you might like to try The Bathhouse at Ground for a revitalising cold plunge experience under the giant fig tree.