Strong Anti-Aging Factors: Dr. Vikki’s Top 3 Picks – Video

A nutritionist’s anti-aging tips to live longer & healthier

 

Excerpt

You might think you need good genes to live longer. But for most of us, genes are only a part of the anti-aging equation.

Solid evidence still shows that the best way to boost your chances of living a long and active life is to follow the advice you likely heard from your parents: eat well, exercise regularly, get plenty of sleep, and stay away from bad habits.

As an experienced Dietician-Nutritionist, Dr. Vikki narrows down her top 3 anti-aging tips you can practice starting today. Watch the full video to know what her picks are.

Transcript

Who doesn’t want to live longer? I think we all do as long as we’re defining living longer with health span, as it’s starting to be known in the industry. Not just lifespan, but health span, meaning you’re having this great span of years, and enjoying good health.

I have three anti-aging tips that I would like to share. And certainly books have been written about longevity and we continue to learn more. And it’s a very exciting field, anti-aging and longevity, but I just want to focus on three really important factors today that are very much missing in the standard American lifestyle and diet.

Anti-aging tip#1: Get some good sleep

Number one is sleep and it’s not a luxury. You really need those eight hours of sleep. This has been very well documented in the literature and research. And, if you’re not sleeping enough, quantitatively, as well as qualitatively —which will get to in a second— if it’s not enough, and good quality, you are absolutely shortening your life.

There’s no two ways about it. You’re setting yourself up for, a long list of diseases that you don’t want to have, including obesity and Alzheimer’s and cancer, diabetes, you name it, it it’s all the diseases that are killing us. Our degenerative diseases have a strong association to “not enough sleep”.

Now, I’ve had a recent struggle —thankfully I’m past it now— that started about two years ago with fatigue. I had a chronic, viral kind of explosion, not the COVID virus, but a different one.

Basically, what I came to realize, because I had always certainly valued my sleep, I found out the quality wasn’t good.

So I would put the body to bed for that requisite eight hours, but I was up and down. I was in and out, my heart would be pounding when I’d wake up in the middle of the night with all these ideas.

So if you are that person who is feeling like their quality of sleep is not that great, then I would encourage you to get some sort of device.

I have a whoop band. That’s what I do. I tried the aura ring, I’ve tried a couple of things. This is the one that worked best for me. There’s many things on the market to show you how your quality of sleep is is affected by what you do

So it’s a really nice daily reminder of how you did. That restorative sleep is a key anti-aging factor.

Now, if over and above all of that, you’re putting to the body to bed, you understand the value of good sleep and you’re still staring at the four walls, staring at the ceiling, then there’s other reasons… Chief amongst them, gut issues and hormonal issues. We can help you with that.

Anti-aging tip #2: Manage your stress

So that was number one, sleep. Number two: stress. Both of these are tough. If you’re stressed, you’re not sleeping well, right? You’re not sleeping well, it increases your stress hormones.

But when I say stress, I’m just looking at trying to get a leg up on your stress load; because the more positive you can be on your stress load, the more steps you can take, the more grace you can give yourself to take some time.

My story is I started napping. For months, I would just lie there in bed going: “I hate this, I hate this”. But “I hate this” really didn’t really lead to the outcome that the nap was supposed to.

Then I finally embraced it. And, and now what I do is not so much nap per se, because the body doesn’t need it anymore, but I just sort of reset.

I do lie down, I do close the drapes and I check out for about half an hour, just reboot. And for me that’s really successful. Everybody’s different. I know patients over the years who have said, “I just go to my car and I take a nap and I’m like, okay”.

So to embrace that, I get really revved up. And then if I take a very leisurely walk and I’m deep breathing, and I’m appreciating nature, then I relax and it helps.

So, whether it’s deep breathing, yoga classes, certainly getting exercise helps with your stress level.

In other words, just embrace it; just look at yourself from the outside and say “where is all this stress coming from?” And you want to take some causative steps to not be so much the effect of it, but you can be more cause over it.

Those little anti-aging steps go a very long way to improving your health span and your longevity.

Anti-aging tip #3: Eat fiber

Lastly, my number three anti-aging advice is an interesting one: your fiber consumption. Believe it or not, 19 out of 20 Americans or, or a mere 5%, get enough fiber. Even that 5% is a bit of a overstatement: it’s less than 5% because the studies are done on a baseline of 20 grams of fiber.

Actually women need 25, and men 38, as a minimum. The studies are all based on 20. You can see that it’s probably a much lower percentage of us that get enough fiber.

I’m not talking about fiber pills. I’m not talking about fiber gummies. I’m not talking about a powder you stir into your drink. I’m talking about real fiber, real food: the vast array of fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes… This is where Mother Nature put the fiber.

What that fiber does is, it feeds your microbiome. You probably heard that word, all those microbes in your gut. You have the numbers constantly changing with the number of microbes, but by current estimates, you have 38 trillion microbes in your gut and only 10 trillion cells in your body.

So you are hosting almost four times as many microbes as you have cells in your body… Kind of interesting, no?

These microbes, depending on what you’re eating, you’re either creating an enemy or a friend who’s gonna be at your defense. Good, natural fiber is creating a robust anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, anti-disease producing community in your body.

But if you are eating refined food, lots of dairy products, eggs, meat… all those foods have zero fiber in them. So whether they’re stripped of their fiber —it was a whole grain and now it’s white bread or a cookie, or just a plant-based food— there’s absolutely zero fiber in that.

As a little game, list how much fiber is in them so you can just get a baseline. Do it for a week and see naturally with what you eat, how much fiber is in there.

And I think you’ll be surprised at how poor it is. Just with some mindfulness of what you’re putting in your mouth, an incredibly easy longevity and anti-aging tool is to get that fiber level to the minimum of 25 or 38 grams, (depending on female or male) start noticing how much better you feel.

If you enjoyed this video, please share it with friends. And if you need more data about aging and anti-aging, if you are struggling with your health and you really want a root cause approach of why this is happening and what can I do, we are delighted to help you. Just reach out via our website.

If you are interested in learning more or want a consultation with one of Doctors – please call 727-335-0400. Or send us a message here.

What is the mission of Root Cause Medical Clinic?

At Root Cause Medical Clinic, we uncover the underlying root cause that is creating your body’s ill health or malfunction, ending the discomfort and inconvenience of poor health.

Our main goal is to identify the stressors overwhelming your body. They may be lifestyle or diet related, or they may emanate from a malfunction of an organ or system, such as the nervous system. The facts are, these stressors are inhibiting your body’s ability to heal itself.

Our team of clinicians share the same philosophy on health, and combine their experience in functional medicine, nutrition and dietetics, physical therapy and chiropractic.

Root Cause Medical Clinic is located in Clearwater, FL. Ask our team to create a custom health program to help you return to vibrant health.

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