HIZI NDIZO NJIA 11 ZA KUUJALI UBONGO WAKO

Many of these relate to food because it is so very important.  Remember you are drugging your brain when you eat so try to take the good drugs.  This list could go on and on, but I don’t want to preach you to death.  Do these eleven things and you will get most of the benefit.  Future articles on this topic will cover much more.

1. Avoid Stress Like It Is Brain Poison -  Because stress IS brain poison.  Stress shrinks areas of the brain including your hippocampus.  Your hippocampus is the key to your memory.  Stress releases all kinds of neurotransmitters and burns out the generators.  Stress kills your brain and body.  STOP IT.  Do whatever it takes and whatever you like to reduce stress.  Meditate, be positive, practice yoga, lead a balanced life, slow down, exercise, or whatever, but do anything and everything you can do to reduce stress.  This is critical to caring for your brain.  I’m getting stressed just thinking about it.
2. Exercise, Exercise, Exercise – Did you know that healthy blood flow in your brain strengthens and maintains your neuronal connections?  So even if you don’t use a particular neural pathway, blood flow will help keep you from losing it.  WOW!  Do you need any better reason to increase cardiovascular fitness???  Do you want to forget and get stupid?  Then just sit on your ass and watch TV.
3. Control Your Thoughts – Much more on this later, but in the meantime check out this article on flourishing: Positivity Leads to a Flourishing Life
4. Use It Or Lose It – Exercise your mental abilities to keep them strong.  For example, if you think creatively, you will strengthen the connections that you draw upon for creative thought.  If you don’t think creatively, then you will eventually lose your ability to be creative.  Studies show that by the time we are in are forties, we have lost almost all of our creative abilities.  It’s disappearing a little more every day you fail to exercise it.  It’s easier to keep your connections than to try and recreate them.  It’s easier by far.
5. Eat A Rainbow Diet – Eat colorful foods; orange, red, blue, purple, and green foods.  These are loaded with phytonutrients and antioxidants.  The nutrients are important brain food and the antioxidants are critical for your cell protection.  When you burn energy you produce free radicals and you need antioxidants to gobble them up before they damage your cells.
6. Eat Complex Carbohydrates – Eat 80% fruits and vegetables.  The more fiber they contain the better.  Pretend you will die if you don’t eat cruciferous vegetables.  Well actually don’t pretend because you will.  Avoid the white death foods – refined carbohydrates and white grains.
7. Don’t Eat Trans-Fats.  They harden your cell membranes and make your brain slow.
8. Eat Fish, Chicken, Turkey, and Beans For Protein – These are loaded with the amino acids required for your brain to make and maintain a balanced set of neurotransmitters.  Avoid large fish that accumulate mercury like tuna (I know  ).  Avoid sushi.  Eat small fatty fish like sardines, herring, and wild salmon.  You need the fish for Omega 3 fatty acids.  Heavy metals in large fish are bad, bad bad. Take a safe molecularly distilled fish oil supplement if you can’t stand eating the other kind of fish.  These fats are critical to your brain.
9. Eat Seeds and Nuts for Fat and Protein – Almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts, and pecans are excellent as are pumpkin, sunflower, flax and other seeds.  These kinds of fat do not make you fat.  Essential fatty acids are essential because your body can’t make them.  Your brain is full of fat and you need the fatty acids for a healthy brain.
10. Control Your Blood Sugar – Too much glucose will kill your brain and too little will starve it.  Your body has a complex glucose-insulin regulation system to control blood glucose levels, but you have to help maintain it.  You can destroy it and most Americans do.  Too much sugar, whole or refined, is a brain killer.  Eat lots of fibers and get your carbohydrates from complex carbohydrates like fruits and vegetables.  These will release into your bloodstream slowly and help keep a more constant level of glucose supplied to your brain.  Cruciferous vegetables are ideal.  Vegetables are better than fruit.  Fruit juice is concentrated sugar without the fiber to slow down it’s absorption.  Avoid it.  You need to eat protein because your liver will convert protein into glycogen and then when your blood needs more glucose it will get it from your glycogen stores.
11. Control Your Weight – Excess fat mucks up everything.  It plays havoc with your blood sugar.  This shouldn’t be controversial. There is almost nothing better you can do for you health – brain and body.