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Navigating Healthy Healing: Crafting Positive Goals While Grieving

by with No Comment healthThrive

Grieving is a complex journey that requires deliberate steps toward healing. Amidst the pain, setting healthy goals can provide structure and aid in the healing process. In this article, you’ll discover simple and practical strategies to create healthy goals while navigating grief.

Create a Daily Routine

In times of grief, the structure becomes an anchor, offering solace amidst emotional turmoil. Designing a daily routine that encompasses vital activities such as sufficient sleep, regular exercise, and balanced meals serves as a stabilizing force. 

For example, walking can be a great way to ground yourself with the outdoors; use a walk score map to plan your routes in pedestrian-friendly areas. This routine not only nurtures physical well-being but also instills a sense of purpose, guiding one step by step toward healing and progress with each passing day.

Step Away from Social Media and News

Constant exposure to social media and news has the potential to magnify the intensity of grief, inundating individuals with overwhelming emotions. To prevent emotional overload, it’s crucial to take deliberate breaks from these platforms. By prioritizing genuine connections and engaging in activities that foster positivity and healing, one can create a healthier emotional space, allowing for a more balanced and manageable experience of grief.

Use Gardening to Focus Your Mind

Embarking on a gardening hobby can significantly improve your mental health by offering a unique blend of physical activity, creativity, and mindfulness. The therapeutic benefits of nurturing plants and watching them thrive include reduced stress levels, enhanced mood, and a heightened sense of accomplishment and purpose. 

You may even wish to expand this experience by practicing sustainable, nature-based pest control methods, such as companion plantings. Time-tested and traditional, installing flowering plants such as marigolds to ward off Japanese beetles is a beautiful way to keep unwanted insects away from your garden without damaging our planet, thus exercising responsibility and extending a kindness to generations to come.

Embracing a Fulfilling Career Path

The experience of grief frequently highlights the fleeting nature of life. Harness this insight to guide your career towards more enriching endeavors. 

If you aren’t sure where to begin, revamp your resume and convert it into a cohesive format with the assistance of online tools. This proactive step can provide insights into opportunities, and readies you for a transformative path toward a professionally gratifying and purpose-driven life.

Pay Attention to Your Diet

Grief can significantly influence eating patterns, often leading to poor nutritional choices that may exacerbate negative emotions. Consuming high amounts of sugar and processed foods can increase inflammation and lead to mood swings, which might intensify feelings of sadness and anxiety. In contrast, nutrient-dense foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can help stabilize mood and provide essential vitamins and minerals that support emotional well-being.

During the grieving process, it’s common to experience changes in appetite, either overeating or loss of interest in food. It’s crucial to recognize these patterns and consciously choose healthier options rather than turning to comfort foods like ice cream, which offer temporary solace but can lead to long-term health issues. By incorporating balanced meals and mindful eating practices, individuals can support their physical health and potentially ease the emotional burden of grief.

Don’t Rely on Destructive Coping Mechanisms

Although the allure may be strong, resorting to drugs or alcohol only extends the journey of healing. Instead, it’s essential to directly confront your emotions. Reach out for assistance from friends, family, or professionals who possess the expertise to lead you toward constructive coping mechanisms, ensuring a more effective and lasting recovery.

Chase Entrepreneurial Dreams

Pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams can be a transformative way to move beyond grief, providing a positive focus and new sense of purpose. Starting a home-based business allows you to channel your passion and energy into building something meaningful from the comfort of your own space. For instance, you could launch an online craft store, transforming a creative hobby into a profitable venture by selling handmade items. 

Alternatively, you might offer virtual consulting services, leveraging your expertise to assist others while enjoying the flexibility of working from home. To get started, research how to start your own business from home to find valuable resources and guidance on setting up your new enterprise, turning your vision into reality and finding renewed hope and direction.

Plan Special Activities

In order to counterbalance sorrow, consider planning special activities that you can eagerly anticipate. These occasions infuse moments of happiness into your path of healing, serving as reminders that amidst grief, life still harbors moments of joy worth embracing. By creating such positive anticipations, you cultivate a sense of hope and purpose that can help navigate grief.

Explore Your Creativity

Do something creative. Even if you can’t carry a tune or draw a stick figure, find a way to express yourself, perhaps using electronics. AI and drag-and-drop tools make this easier than ever to shape ideas with words or images. You can even create free videos to share with friends and family members or just keep to yourself as a form of journaling.

Releasing Guilt, Embracing Forgiveness

Guilt and regret possess the potential to hinder the healing process. Cultivating self-forgiveness, directed toward both oneself and others, is essential. Releasing the weight of past grievances enables the liberation of emotional capacity, paving the way for personal growth.

Crafting healthy goals while grieving is a powerful strategy for nurturing healing. Establishing a routine, exploring new hobbies, pursuing dreams, disconnecting from negativity, and fostering personal growth are pivotal steps. By adhering to these strategies, you can navigate grief with a renewed sense of purpose and emerge stronger on the other side.

Featured image for Client Success Story: Alex Fayn Feels 15 Years Younger After Doing This For Only 5 Months…

15 Years Younger After Doing This For Only 5 Months…

by with No Comment healthNutritionThrive

Alex Fayn is a 45-year-old, father of three, and a busy CEO who just went through a quantified and data-backed transformation that floored the both of us. 

The best part is that it only took him five months to make these changes—and because he took lab tests, we have proof that taking steps towards improving your health adds back years to your life, and life to those years. 

Some of his highlights from this five-month health journey include: 

  • Feeling 15 years younger than he did five months ago 
  • Adding 4 actual years to his lifespan (according to the Telomere predicted age test) 
  • Slowing down his aging from 1.2x per year down to 0.9x per year (that means he ages slower biologically per year than he does chronologically—something that adds up as he continues on his health journey) 
  • Having more energy—and happiness—today than he’s felt in the past several years (this directly helps him in his business) 
  • Lost 40 pounds (and counting!) and reversed his prediabetes
  • No longer relies on alcohol to relax and feel good.  

I wanted to give you the highlights from his health journey before diving into his story, which may be more impressive than his results in bullet point style.

How a Health Scare changed Alex’s Life

As I’ve stated, Alex is 45 years old. He’s a father of three. And he’s a busy CEO.

As you can imagine, running a business and leading a family leaves Alex with not much free time. By his own account, he wasn’t taking good care of himself.

His diet was hectic. His eating schedule was in disarray. His stress levels were high and his health was deteriorating. Before we started working together, he had been diagnosed with prediabetes and he was obese.

But then, Alex had a health scare that forever changed his life:

A few months before Alex booked his initial consultation with me, he went to his doctor for a routine checkup, and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare type of cancer that develops in fatty tissue. He was shocked—and knew instantly that his health needed to take priority, especially as a father and business owner.

There is some connective tissue between obesity and liposarcoma, but the relationship is not entirely clear. Obesity on its own isn’t considered a direct risk factor for liposarcoma, but there are some reasons that suggest a potential risk.

For example, liposarcoma arises from fat cells. Obesity also often means chronic inflammation, which can heighten (and progress) cancer development. Inflammatory processes within fat cells may also contribute to the development or growth of liposarcoma tumors. Genetic factors may also play a role. Lifestyle factors such as a poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, hormonal imbalances and even negative thinking may also contribute to its development and growth.

Alex’s tumor was removed surgically but afterwards, he wanted to do his best to prevent it from happening again—and he spared no expense in addressing all the possible risk factors to help him best prevent it.

That’s when he booked his initial consultation with me, and the rest is history…

The Exact Steps Alex Took To Transform His Health

Alex booked a consultation, and told me he was interested in my Concierge Program, the most comprehensive health package I offer designed for someone who wants to intently focus on their health and longevity.

He was interested in the Concierge Program for a few reasons:

  1. As a business owner, he finds data appealing and compelling, which attracted him to the various lab tests he’d take through this program, including before and after lab tests to show him exactly how much his health has improved over 5-6 months.
  2. Since he had prediabetes, he also was eager to use the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) device (If you’d like to read more about using a CGM device, read this article.)
  3. He also understood that his health is an investment—no different than investing in a stock or in marketing to grow his business.

The Concierge Program is an expensive investment, including weekly 1:1 meetings, advanced tests (which I do not make money on), planning, goal setting, meal planning, mindset coaching, and accountability.

So, what tests are included in the Concierge Program?

Every test I offer is included in the Concierge Program, but which tests I give a certain client depends on them and their unique situation.

The tests I gave to Alex included:

  1. A stool microbiome test: To understand his overall gut and digestive health (one of the most important markers to your overall health)
  2. A Nutrigenomics test: The integrative study of the interaction of nutrition and genes, especially about the prevention or treatment of disease. (If you’d like to read more about Nutrigenomics, check out this article and this article.)
  3. A food sensitivities test: To help him understand which foods fueled his body and which foods hurt his body.
  4. TruDiagnostic’s TruAge Complete: An at-home epigenetic test tells you how old you really are from a biological standpoint, on a cellular level. TruAge Complete gives you the most comprehensive and in-depth look at 75+ biomarkers of aging. And it breaks down your age-related risk of developing various diseases (and even death).

I want to focus on the last test here because Alex has given me the okay to share his lab results with you, so you can see how truly transformative this approach to health can be. After running the various tests on him, I realized he had the most to gain with the TruAge Complete test.

Before we move onto his incredible results, I want to mention something that may appear obvious, but bears mentioning:

Alex did not simply complete his lab tests, do nothing else for five months, and then retest himself. There was a ton of work on his end including:

  • He (mostly) followed my dietary recommendations
  • He followed an intermittent fasting eating schedule, thanks to his CGM, which made him realize that late night eating was the worst thing for his blood sugar as it would stay high all night long. Plus, this data helped him take action—he wasn’t following my advice to finish his last meal early until he could see the impact on his body with the CGM data. Then, everything “clicked.”
  • He cut sugar, flour, alcohol, and refined carbs from his diet
  • He started exercising consistently
  • He started practicing polar plunges (a great way to lower your stress levels)
  • And he even introduced some occasional 36-48 hour fasts

And he did many other “health hacks” that we discussed in our weekly 1:1 meetings. This probably sounds obvious, but I don’t want you to think that simply doing the lab tests (and nothing else to actually improve your health) is the key.

The key is in the marriage between the data you receive from the tests and the work you put in, based on the data, to improve your health.

There are three specific reports I want to focus on in Alex’s case because they’re the best examples to show you how radically his health has improved in the last five months.

The first one is the DunedinPace Report, which shows you his speed of aging.

The second one is an Inflammation Report, showing how his inflammatory markers—perhaps the root cause of all disease—decreased.

Then, the last one is the Telomere Length Report, which uncovers insights into his predicted age.

Before we dive into it, let me end this section with a direct quote from Alex to show you how simple better health can be:

“I was just going to give you my permission to show these results to everybody and I’m happy, excited, stoked. These are amazing results and I want to be an example for other people. Just eat right, exercise, don’t eat sugar, listen to Kristina (and I don’t always listen to Kristina actually… Sometimes I do, but most of the time I just feel what my body needs right now and that’s all.) And I feel the change. I feel literally, probably 15 years younger, like I’m back in my 30s. I have so much energy and happiness and everything in general [has improved].” — Alex

Best part?

He gave me this quote just five months into this journey—and his health will improve to an even more significant degree over the next six months, and especially over the next six years.

Report #1: How Alex Slowed His Aging from 1.2x per year to 0.9x per year (The DunedinPACE Report)

The DunedinPace Report shows you how many biological years you age at the precise moment. But it does this in the most actionable way because it separates what you’re doing now from markers you’ve accumulated from your past or inherited from your ancestry.

The general rule of thumb for this report is you want your rate of aging to be below 1. The average person ages at a ratio of 1:1 in terms of biological age to chronological age. Being below 1 means you’re aging slower biologically than you are chronologically.

Since aging is the #1 risk factor for chronic disease, I cannot overstate the value of this report. But traditional ways to measure age (counting the years since your birth) aren’t always the most accurate. This is why some 70 year olds feel 50, while others feel 90.

Measuring your biological age, instead of just your chronological age, is like having a speedometer for your age.

The slower you age, according to this report, the longer you’ll live. That’s because it’s associated with chronic disease morbidity and mortality. In fact, researchers found that within 7 years from testing those with a faster pace of aging are at a 56% increased risk of death and a
54% increased risk for diagnosis of a chronic disease.

And as I stated, Alex’s DunedinPACE report fell from 1.2x per year to 0.9x per year:

DunedInPACE report from November 2023
From November of 2023, before Alex started making the various health changes explained in this article.
DunedInPACE report from April 2024
From April of 2024, after five months of the health changes Alex made.

Not only is this an incredible transformation in just five months, but by sticking with it, Alex may even be able to lower his speed of aging even more. (The slowest rate of aging reported by a DunedinPACE report is 0.6x per year.)

Report #2: How Alex Decreased Inflammation in His Body (Inflammation Report)

As the field of health, nutrition, and longevity advances, it’s becoming more and more evident that inflammation is at the root of all disease, and may even be the primary cause in many cases. The second point requires more research, but inflammation is intimately linked with a broad range of non-infectious diseases, and perhaps it’s involved in all of them.

This exemplifies why Inflammation is a crucial marker for your longevity. It’s particularly important in cognitive health because it has been linked to beginning stages of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.

Now, not all inflammation is bad. In fact, acute inflammation is an important part of the healing process. The trouble with inflammation is when it becomes prolonged and chronic. When chronic and elevated levels of inflammation happen in your body, they can mark the development of age-related diseases like cancer, atherosclerosis, and Alzheimer’s.

TruAge’s Inflammation report looks at two distinct markers for measuring the amount of elevated and chronic inflammation: DNAm CRP & IL-6.

The first, CRP, is a special protein your liver produces in response to acute inflammation. Elevated CRP levels are associated with low initial memory and verbal fluency scores. The second, IL-6, is a proinflammatory cytokine that stimulates various acute-phase inflammatory proteins, like CRP. It’s a widely used marker of inflammation that increases with age and is associated with cognitive decline. IL-6 measures have associations with sex, BMI, social
deprivation, alcohol intake, and smoking status. And men tend to have a higher IL-6, on average, than women.

Now let’s see Alex’s CRP levels, which decreased by 24%, and his IL-6 levels, which decreased by 15%, in only five months!

Inflammation report from November 2023
In November of 2023, Alex had a higher CRP level than 89.61% of his peers of the same calendar age and sex. His IL-6 levels were 81.51% higher than his peers of the same calendar age and sex.
Inflammation report from April 2024
In April of 2024, Alex had a higher CRP level than 65.49%—that’s a reduction of 24%—of his peers of the same calendar age and sex. His IL-6 levels were 60.61% higher than his peers of the same calendar age and sex, a decrease by 15%.

Moving on to the final report…

Report #3: How Alex Added Four Years to His Expected Life (Telomere Length Report)

So, what are telomeres and why is their length important for longevity?

Telomeres are designed to prevent unpredictable changes in the DNA strand, keeping the genome stable. Think of them like the plastic tips on shoelaces: Their primary function is to prevent the fraying of chromosomes, keeping the “lace” intact. As a cell ages, its telomere length becomes shorter, just like the plastic tip of shoelaces wears down (and even breaks) over time. When telomere length becomes too short, a cell cannot divide, which causes the cell to become inactive, slowly accumulating damage that it can’t repair, or it dies.

As for why telomere length is important…

Shorter telomeres are associated with both age and disease, including cancers, cardiovascular disease, and age-related disorders.

Shorter telomere length and low telomerase activity are associated with a handful of chronic, preventable diseases including…

  • Hypertension
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Insulin resistance
    Type 2 diabetes
  • Depression
  • Osteoporosis
  • And obesity

Plus, short telomeres have been implicated in genomic instability and oncogenesis. Older people with shorter telomeres have three times increased risk to die from heart diseases, and eight times increased risk to die from infection diseases.

That said, the rate of telomere shortening and telomere length is critical to your health and pace of aging.

So, how did Alex stack up here in his before and after reports?

Telomere Length Report from November 2023
In November of 2023, Alex’s Average Telomere Length was 6.81 kilobases (Kb), and his estimated telomere age was 69.75.
Telomere Length Report from April 2024
In April of 2024, Alex’s Average Telomere Length was 6.89 kilobases (Kb), and his estimated telomere age was 65.27—a reduction in his estimated telomere age by 4.48 years in just five months!

Ready To Radically Improve Your Health & Longevity in Months, Not Years, Too?

Whenever I talk about longevity, I’m reminded of a quote from The Godfather Part II from Hyman Roth:

“Good health is the most important thing. More than success, more than money, more than power.”

Nothing else matters when you don’t have good health, and I won’t hide the fact that my Concierge Program is an expensive investment. But it could just be the most important investment you ever make in your health, especially if, like Alex, you’re a data-minded person.

That’s what Alex realized, and that’s what you may realize too.

The TruAge Complete Report itself (where the DunedinPACE, Inflammation, and Telomere Length Reports originate from) costs $500 on their own. The CGM that also played an instrumental role in helping things “click” in Alex’s brain is another hefty investment.

But as Alex proves, it’s not only possible to make wild improvements in your health and longevity, but through my Concierge Program, you can make these improvements much faster than you think.

If you’re interested in my Concierge Program, or would like to set up initial consultation to learn the others way I can help you improve your health and longevity, you can see all the services I offer and schedule your initial consultation with me below: 

>> Book Your Initial Consultation Here <<