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3 Weeks of No Exercise and Sleep Deprivation

Last few weeks I have to travel far frequently to take care of things in remote areas. My daily routine was totally disrupted. Cannot exercise when there was not even enough time to sleep. Now that things settled down, I learn some important effects on my health that is very useful.

First, when I finally get to do my daily exercise routine, strength in my legs is not affected much. Feels awkward for about a minute and then things just go back to normal. My guess is that I have to walk a lot over the past few weeks, my legs still got enough exercise to stay in shape.

Then problem started to show when I did my ab exercises. I was able to do what I usually do but with difficulties at the end.

Finally, pull ups and other upper body exercises became so difficult that I am not able to do half of what I did 3 weeks ago. This sucks big time.

A good lesson learned – better planning necessary to stay in shape no matter what.

And the question of striking a balance between enough sleep and exercise – if we have very limited amount of time left for both, what to do?

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Sleeping is a Skill

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My late girlfriend used to stay awake most of the nights doing all kinds of things. When she became so tired she would sleep for just couple of hours and start the next day all energized. Those who do not know her would think that she must have slept well the night before. Little did she know that not able to sleep is both potential cause and symptom of having endocrine related illnesses, cancer included. We tried so many things to help her overcome the struggle to get better sleep. She eventually learned how to sleep well (most of the time) and it was a great triumph in helping her to stay healthy for a long period of time.

Many People Unlearned How to Sleep

When we are babies, we acquired the sleeping skill naturally since we can do absolutely nothing else. Over our life time, however, many people may have unlearned the skill because of many reasons. The most common one is having a lifestyle that keeps irregular sleeping schedule. Another is stress related anxiety that keeps the brain busy hence not able to sleep well or to fall asleep. Once the original sleeping pattern we learned from childhood is disrupted, many people can no longer find a way to get to sleep well anymore.

The trouble gets worse as many people try to improve their sleep through the use of alcohol and medications.

Drinking to get oneself to sleep works in the beginning but it will escalate to heavy drinking quickly if your not one of those lucky persons who are born with extremely low alcohol tolerance. Heavy drinking cannot get one to sleep. All it does is making you black out for couple of hours and the aftershock will make you wake up yet not able to sleep again.

Using medications also “works” if you consider turning into a zombie is actually sleeping. These drugs usually just turn off your senses (in greatly simplified terms) for specific amount of time. It helps people who desperately needing some sleep. The problem, however, is that such form of sleep is not a real sleep that our bodies need. Many of these sleeping pills have so many side-effects that they are now blamed for causing all kinds of illnesses themselves. One of common side-effects is that you cannot stop taking the drug or you will have very bad withdrawal symptoms including not able to sleep at all. Another side effect is that you will have serious memory loss after prolonged usage of such drugs.

Enough Sleep is Necessary for Longevity

During sleep our bodies repair itself. This is especially important for our brain to function properly. Only certain stage of sleep where our brain can go into its daily cleansing routine. Thus, people whose work is heavily analytical (e.g. trading) would have their performance degraded badly if they do not have enough sleep. I mentioned a hack to deal with lack of sleep by inducing sleep like behaviour in our brain.

When we are sick, it often reduces our ability to sleep well due to the ailments the illness is causing. But then the lack of enough sleep would induce further weaknesses with our immune system. So, it is just way too easy to go into the spiral down effect in terms of our health once you failed to keep your sleeping quality up.

If we have to choose between enough sleep and having enough exercise, my take is that enough sleep is always more important, given that you do in general have enough exercise most of the time. Remember, it is very easy to maintain or improve your overall health by integrating exercise into your daily lives. Going to the gym is completely overrated if you do not have the luxury due to a very hectic schedule.

Just like any other life decisions, be aware of the long term implications of depriving yourself of sleep so that you can schedule sleep just like you schedule exercise into your daily activities. This approach to sleep will go a long way in improving your quality of life.

Learning How to Sleep for the First Time

For those of you who are already in trouble on getting to sleep, there are countless number of approaches out there to help you to fall asleep.

One very consistently successful approach is to keep a bed time routine so that you can ease your mind into a stage that you know you have to go to sleep in certain amount of time. Many people simply wait until they seriously need to sleep as they cannot even keep their eyes open and then they go to bed. That’s exactly how one unlearn sleeping in the first place. The way we learned to sleep as a baby is that we are trained to be in an immobile position first, having the comfort on a bed or being hold onto a secure position and then we fall asleep.

So go search on youtube or whatever about sleeping routines. Many famous gurus like Tim Ferriss have videos on their sleeping routines all explained. There is no need for me to duplicate the effort here. Just watch some of them and see if you can create your own routine so that you can sleep better.

Many people who tried various strategies to get better sleep often give up when they do not see results the first few days. Somehow all these methods just seems not working for them. What they do not understand is that they are likely already unlearned how to sleep. It is like you are bed ridden for months and try to walk again. It can take days or even weeks to gain the sleeping skill back.

One great example illustrating the point is the switching of sleep schedule for those who have no problem sleeping in the first place. It takes usually 3 to 4 days to reprogram our minds to the new schedule, even if it is just 2 to 3 hours off from the original one. For those people who have trouble going to sleep in the first place, there is no real switching to a new schedule at all because they just cannot tell if there is a schedule change.

In short, it is important to have patience in training yourself to get to sleep. Do everything you have learned to improve your sleep and tough it out like you are training yourself with a rigorous exercise regime. Any improvement you get with your ability to sleep better will benefit yourself for the rest of your life. It’s worth it.

Tools to Assist Our Sleep

One recurring pattern I see with people whose health is extremely compromised is that they cannot sleep unless there is strong heat generated around them for couple of hours. For example, those people who are going through cancer treatments often feel coldness when they try to sleep. But that in turn makes it very difficult for them to sleep well as it feels so cold that they wake up from shivering. And it is not that they are not dressed properly or that they do not have blankets to keep them warm. It is the fact that they cannot generate enough heat themselves from inside their bodies.

Using regular heat fan or turning up the heat in the room does not help because they have the negative effect of drying up the air we breath in which can wake us up from dry throat.

The better solutions I found help a lot in this situation are heating equipment that target our bodies directly.

First, there are the heating blankets that cover on top of us. Those ones help but not very effective because the real coldness actually happens on the back of our bodies. In Chinese medicine point of view, when our heart lung functions are weak, the first sign is coldness radiating from our back directly behind the centre of our torso. Hence, putting the heating blankets underneath us work better. However, these heating blankets suffer the same issue as the regular heat fan for which they dry up the air nearby.

And then there is the bed warmer systems that are either water based or air based. These systems pump the warmed water or air into tubes that form a mesh, usually in the form of a mattress cover. These systems provide consistent warmth without the drawback like the blankets. I have recommended these systems to a number of people who have trouble sleeping and they did wonders for these people.

Finally, there is the biomat method which is based on something totally different from the other products mentioned above. There are a number of companies making these mats with far-infrared that help the person using them to generate heat within themselves. By far, I found these mats work the best and the improvement in sleep quality (and overall health) for many people has been amazing.

Supplements to Assist Our Sleep

Another approach to helping one sleep is the use of medications. As I explained earlier, the prescription stuff are not likely a good idea if you do not want long term side effects to get you eventually. However, there are many natural supplements out there that can help us. As long as the supplement is made with quality raw materials and no toxic fillers, you can safely use them without the side effects associated with the prescription drugs.

Remember that these supplements can assist us to get to sleep or improving the overall quality of sleep (I will explain later the difference), they cannot make you sleep. Sleeping is a function of our minds. If you have lost the skill to sleep, you have to train yourself to get it back.

One common supplement to help us sleep better is Melatonin. Many people tried using it and the results are totally mixed. After reading this article up to this point, you should know the reason. Melatonin can help only if you still know how to go into sleep. It promotes sleepiness, not knocking you out like the sleeping pills. Another aspect of using melatonin is that you cannot use too much of it. Many people buy the maximum dose ones hoping they work better. Well, it does not work that way. Too much melatonin in our system can lead to “after shock” where you are more awake several hours later if you are not asleep by then.

In Chinese medicine, there are at least 5 to 6 types of herbal medicine that promotes better sleep. There are also 3 to 4 types of herbs that putting us at ease to get us to sleep. All of them has to be used in moderation and has to have breaks if they are used for prolong period of time. For example, many of these herbs should be used at most for 2 weeks time and then one has to stop taking them for a week. Or, you can go with taking them 5 days a week and stop using them during weekends. It is not because of toxicity of the herbs that you need to take these “medicine holidays” like those chemo drugs. The need to take breaks is because of the build up of natural resistance of these substance. Continuous usage will lead to your body no longer reacting to the supplements with the desired effects.

So, it is alright to try out various herbal supplements to see which one works for you. Just remember that you should take breaks from using them so that their effectiveness on you can be maintained.

Falling Asleep is a Skill, Staying Asleep is Something Else

Out of the many sleeping issues, from Chinese medicine point of view, the one that actually stop people from having a good night of sleep is actually the ability to stay asleep. Yep, failing asleep can be trained but if you wake up some 5 minutes later because of your body is telling you that you must wake up you will be stuck with another night of no sleep until the sun rise.

To help us staying asleep, the environment plays an important role. Usually, people who are too deprived from sleep would crash to sleep for many hours from time to time. But that is not enough to repair the damage that has been done to their bodies. When they feel better after these black out type of sleep, they would return to the same problem of not able to stay asleep. That can often be resolved by making the sleeping environment more sleep friendly.

One very common practice nowadays is putting a TV in the bedroom facing the bed. And for some others, the dresser with a huge mirror facing the bed again. These objects, together with many shiny items, are your worst enemies in keeping you in sleep. In Chinese astrology, there are other bad implications with the arrangement but the most basic issue of not having a good night of sleep is now confirmed by Western research that we human indeed detect the reflections from these objects and react to them while we are sleeping. Hence, the disruption of our sleep by these objects in the night is a reality.

It is easy to resolve this problem. Just cover them with dark non-reflecting cloth materials when we are getting ready to go to sleep. If possible keep the room in absolute darkness. Using very deem night light only if it is necessary. Since everyone has a different tolerance level of light reflection while sleeping, it takes experiment to figure out your comfort level. Personally I can sleep in broad day light with no problem at all while I know some friends who need total darkness in a room to stay in sleep.

There are many factors affecting our sleeping environment like the room temperature, humidity, sound and smell. By controlling these four factors, one can create a “sleep mode” where one feel safe to sleep just like they are experiencing the comfort feeling when they are babies. I know someone who must use certain kind of aromatic smell at night to get to sleep and stay in sleep as well. There are many others who need certain kind of sound as a background noise to keep them sleeping because of their sensitivity in hearing other sound.

There are several Chinese herbs that are prescribed to patients to reduce the sensitivity of their senses while asleep which in turn improve the sleep quality a lot. I have not seen supplements made from these herbal ingredients yet. If I see that being offered in the supplement market, I will mention that in future post.

Better Mood, Better Health, Better Life

Take your time to figure out what you need to get yourself to sleep and keep yourself sleeping. Make this a project, a goal, for yourself. If there is something rewarding that is very much achievable, I guess sleeping is one of them.

I don’t think I need to talk about the many benefits of better sleep. After all, you are reading this article all the way up to this point. What I like to say is that better sleep leads to better mood and better health. And that goes a long way in improving your life and likely the ones around you.

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Better Time Management, Back to Content Curation and the Big Secret Projects

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Over the past several weeks, I have reorganized many things that I do into tasks delegated to either my team or contracted outside companies. The goal is to further reduce the amount of time I spend on managing the websites and day to day responsibilities in running these sites and services. I think I have achieve the milestone of taking back my time finally where I can focus more on what I deem most important going forward.

Part of this saved time will allow me to restart the content curation for Essence of Trading. Many of you enjoy the videos and product reviews I did in the past. They are precious resources of all traders and especially true for beginner traders. Now that I have some time on hand, I will be able to add new content and finding ways to better organize the site for future expansion. I am doing this also because of its practical purpose. Seriously, I don’t think I can ever write enough on the subject of trading and managing one’s trading business. Having the site dedicated to providing useful information for traders makes it much easier for me to point the aspiring traders to a centralized resource.

Here is the first new video for a long time.

This gets me thinking. Maybe the academia links I used to provide in the Daytradingbias user forum should be moved here too. After all, those are very valuable trading related research too. Will see what I am going to do with this soon.

Many readers and friends have been asking why there has been nearly no new posts on DaytradingBias but mainly the monthly newsletter and special updates. Well, I am not lazy and let the site goes autonomous. What happened is something quite interesting that has taken a life on its own.

I was writing a whole set of articles on trading Emini / SPY and forex some two years ago. And things were going very well. They were written with focus around two main themes – fully mechanical trading models based on a framework and long term consistency in trading performance. One way or another, as the work keep expanding, the articles turned into two organized projects that is way beyond just articles to be published on the site.

Part of this project is now in experiment for live trading which formed the foundation of my re-organized trading service for my clients. This firm focuses on providing long term stable return that is built on short term consistency in trading performance. I am very excited with the potential.

These two projects are still under development. Most likely I will release them in some form of training course or webinar. Lots of work still before I can release them but I know they will change the landscape in trading training forever.

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Soy Sauce: It Can Be the Reason You are Bloated

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Many people use soy sauce in their cooking and at the dining table without thinking much about it. It is so common in Asian cuisines that it is assumed to be safe for everything. Well, it is not.

Soy sauce is a fermented product. We know very well from Chinese medical point of view that a person with any form of injury or internal inflammation should avoid fermented food at least until after the wound is closed up or that the inflammation is gone. However, many people would not notice that they are eating fermented food when they prepare their food with soy sauce. That’s one of the reasons why it takes so long for some people to recover from a simple shoulder injury (or post exercise stiffness) even if they cautiously avoiding food that is known to keep the inflammation staying longer. The most common form of reactions to soy sauce due to internal inflammation is bloating.

There is also this growing issue of soy sauce allergy. There are more and more cases of allergy reactions to soy sauce that were unnoticed before. Only until after some people actually go for allergy testing due to allergy reactions to other allergens like gluten that they discover that they are allergy to soy sauce as well. If you do have such problems, try switching to organic non-GMO soy sauce to see if the problem goes away. Many people I talked to actually have no allergy reactions since they switched.

Dining out at a non-Asian restaurant no longer guarantee that you are safe from soy sauce. Many Western restaurants prepare their food with a hint of soy sauce to improve the favour. So telling your server at the restaurant that you don’t want your food prepared with soy sauce can often help. One classic way to reduce the soy influence on our bodies is drinking green tea. If you find you are very bloated several hours after dining out at a Chinese restaurant, and that drinking green tea right after can bring you back to normal, you know you need to avoid or reduce soy sauce in your diet.

Finally, just try using simple sea salt or going fancy with Himalayan pink salt instead of using soy sauce for favouring. If you have never tried that, you will discover a whole new dimension of taste from the original ingredients that were masked out by soy sauce.

Seriously, putting soy sauce on everything is kind of boring, isn’t it?

Picture Source: Wikimedia.org

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Server Maintenance This Weekend Aug 12

Last week this site was down due to hosting company had a problem with their data centre in the East Coast. I could not even post onto the site. I still find the access to the site not stable but it is in the hands of the hosting company so all I can do is hope for the best that they will resolve the problem completely soon.

We are going to conduct server maintenance on DaytradingBias.com backend servers. It should not affect the website access. If anything, it will be slow down on weekend updates.

Lots of things going on in the background and I will be able to show something interesting soon if all goes well.

Have a nice weekend all!

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Post Birthday Thoughts

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Last week was my birthday. I received quite a number of messages wishing me well. One of them stands out, however, because it is not one of those at all. It stands out also because of who wrote it – my mother. Sharing it here because it is a classic example of the fusion of traditional thoughts and mythologies. It is kind of funny.

The Fusion of Astrology and Traditional Customs

My mother warned me that this year my birth year offends the year spirit (in Chinese 犯太歲) so I may have troubles and dangers ahead. Obviously, she is kind of concerned because of the Chinese practice of reading those yearly astrology books I mentioned before. She worries about me for a good reason as I jokingly told her I got into some sort of trouble thanks to one of my clients. She was thinking that I should perform the classic rituals to claim truce with the year spirit.

Classic Chinese astrology places a lot of emphasis on the birth year. This astrology based birth year has the same length as the Roman calendar at 365.24 days. The main difference is that the traditional Chinese astrology year starts when the sun reaches the celestial longitude 315 degree. It is called Lichun (in Chinese 立春). That usually falls on February 3-6 every year.

The concept of offending the year spirit is ancient concept that can be simplified into cycle study. Based on Chinese astrology, the day you were born is 1 year old. There was no zero in the Chinese numeric system back then. By the 7th birthday, that year is the year you offend the year spirit. In other words, the timing is half the 12-year cycle I mentioned in a previous article. This recurs every 12 years.

For example, if you were born between year 1990 February 4th to year 1991 February 3rd, the first time you offend the year spirit would be 1996. From there onward, every 12 years, you would offend the year spirit again in 2008, 2020, 2032, etc.

Ancient System vs. Modern Interpretation

The classic Chinese astrology was actually abandoned many years ago in favour of the modern Chinese astrology about 500-800 years ago. Yes, it took that long for the struggle to end, mainly due to the older practitioners died from old age in the process. The old system emphasizes a lot on the birth year while the new system (not so new by now) emphasizes on the exact birth date and time which is much closer to modern western astrology system.

The concept is still valid in the sense that many people do experience major changes in their lives at the half cycle and full cycle years like changing their jobs, moving into a new home, making major purchase commitment, etc. You can actually look back into your past to see if this happens to you too. The older you are, the more interesting it gets as you will find out that the recurrences can be quite consistent.

Such displacement events, when happening in ancient times, were most likely very unpleasant or even disastrous. As majority of people were living in very simple villages in the past, major changes were likely bad ones. For example, it could be the lost of your land (that’s why you had to move), or it could be your master in your craft giving you up (that’s why you had to change career). After generations of similar experiences, people developed the deep rooted beliefs that it is important to be careful when one is dealing with the half cycle years. But ever since the rise of modern life from 1900, such events no longer map to bad consequences only.

So, in my case, my birth year is not even offending the year spirit per se. I am actually experiencing the completion of the full cycle of 12 years and is now going into a new one. I told my mom that she does not need to worry – whatever it is, as long as I am prepared, things will be fine.

Awareness Matters as Usual

The so called displacement changes are just things that meant to happen. I am not saying in those mythical terms of fate or destiny. Whatever these events that are happening to you, they are the results of the accumulated effects of whatever you have done, based on your own decisions. In other words, it is very much your own doing that push you to these expected outcomes. You are playing a much bigger role in what is happening to you than you are willing to admit. Just that many of the decisions we made, we do not know the unintended consequences and the ripple effects from these decisions.

The problem of believing in the power of the year spirit and that offending it would cause you trouble is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you fear about bad things that are going to happen to you, the more likely you will fail to handle things objectively. First and foremost, your decisions will no longer focus on handling matters in a way to get the best possible outcome. Your thoughts would be tainted by your fear and approaches things defensively with no justification. The aggregation of such decisions can only result in, at best, not doing better, and at worst, every possible bad thing that you are not prepared to handle.

In traders’ speak, this is exactly doing the opposite of cutting your losses fast and letting your profits run.

What can change these displacement events from being disastrous incidents into opportunities for a better future, is that well before dealing with the events themselves, you have paved your way years ahead with the right mindset and decisions based on higher awareness of where you are and what you are. As a start, try owning the responsibility of your future as oppose to blaming fate or whatever causing your miseries. With the right mindset and discipline, you can be sure that these “offend the year spirit” stuff will be taken care of in the best possible way without you even knowing that they happened.

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Trading Product Reviews Have a New Home

The moving of the trading product reviews from DaytradingBias.com to EssenceofTrading.com is now completed. It took a while because the rating system has to be replaced and the formatting of the posts have to be manually revised. Anyway it is now done so we are going to proceed with the next step of the revision process.

Major changes to the front page will be next as we remove all the sections there that are retired from the site. The clean up has been a slow and painful process since the site was built some 10 years ago and has been evolving on the same older platform since. Upgrading the site into something more mobile friend should improve the overall usability going forward.

For more advanced searching options on the trading product reviews, they will be addressed separately.

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Completion of Moving Content

I expect that by the end of next week all contents unrelated to the core businesses of DaytradingBias.com will be moved to the proper websites. The slowest part are the reviews as the ratings have to be reconstructed manually and we do have a lot of reviews done. Once the moving is completed, I plan to write more reviews too so getting this migration done correct is very important for me.

The news section will be dropped as social media like tweeter is doing a better job from actual experience.

Front page and main menu will be revised soon to reflect the all these changes.

I am still waiting for the overall theme redesign to be done so that DaytradingBias finally becoming mobile friendly.

Things are progressing slowly but definitely getting close to what I envisioned two years ago.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

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Feeling Stupid

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We were working on a computer with Multicharts to test our trading models on a live trading account this morning. But we were stuck at the very first step. We just couldn’t get the damn thing to connect to CQG for some mysterious reason. My team freaked out as that computer was completely clean installed for just this purpose. And it was working perfectly several months ago. Once we have it working we never look at it again until now.

So WTF gone wrong?

I was told that it was not working earlier in the morning so I simply asked my team to figure it out. I thought it must be something trivial and told them so.

The first thing they tried was looking for help. My team talked to technical support with the brokerage. They recommended us to turn off the firewall, opening ports with our routers and even turning off our anti-virus program. All things were done. Nothing helped.

My team were so desperate that they literally tweaked everything they could before talking to me again that they could not fix the problem.

I then joined them walking through everything they had done so far.

Something did not feel right though … and I popped the question,

“Is everything up-to-date?”

Shockingly, that damn Multicharts installed on the computer was on version 9.1 BETA.

I asked my team to check with the brokerage again to make sure that version still works. Of course, it is not and the currently supported version is version 10. My team waited anxiously over the next few moments for the download to complete and rushed to do the installation.

Voila! Problem solved.

What a reminder of overthinking and missing the most basic things by a group of accomplished programmers and engineers. Not just them, same goes for the support with the brokerage.

If I were the first person handling the situation, I would probably do the same whole routines of messing with the computer and the network. Lucky me that I was the one who sit out of the diagnosis process and got to join them later with a fresh look. Otherwise we would still be struggling at this point.

At the end, everyone has a laugh though.

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Taking Supplement or Not

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It is very interesting how divided people are in terms of taking health related supplements. Many older people hold the belief that these supplements are just snake oil that the big companies created to grab more money from gullible people. Some other people, especially those whose health are compromised, keep on seeking for better supplements to relief their pains, insomnia and other ailments. The big question boils down to one thing though – are you knowledgeable enough to make the right decision for yourself whether you need supplement or not.

Many Supplements Actually Work

Many classic supplements, especially the ones made with natural ingredients, work. And most of us actually eat them in one form or another. The very flavourful soup you drank when you were young, the traditional fermented food from your home country and those special cocktail of stuff in your herbal tea for treating your cold are all functional supplements, in a way. The old ways in making these digestible stuff to augment our health still work but it takes time and lots of effort to prepare them. Technology and medical science has taken on these tasks, resulting in readily available forms of these supplements.

However, we have a new issue to deal with as it gets much easier to access to these health supplements. Namely, there are so many kinds of supplements and so many brands to choose from. It is very difficult to figure out which one to take and what is actually suitable for your situation.

Everyone Needs Some Form of Supplements to Stay Healthy

Once a person has reached their prime of 30 years old, the ability to absorb nutrients declines. This belief comes straight from traditional Chinese medicine and is confirmed by Western medical science with better details. This very simple fact contributes a lot to the aging process. Think about this. When you cannot absorb the same quantity of nutrients from the same amount of food you eat, you are starving your body from what is needed to maintain it in top healthy state. Slowly, the deficiency in certain types of essential nutrients will cause sickness in you without you knowing. It is exactly like the story of boiling a frog.

One good example is vitamin D deficiency which was told to me by a nurse managing research cases on patients with long term illnesses. Tons of people living in Canada and other regions of the world where sunlight is not there for the better half of each year rarely get enough vitamin D. Worse yet, as one ages, the ability to absorb sunlight to convert that into vitamin D declines quickly. It takes an elderly much longer time under the sun to get the same benefit like a young adult. One can eat to get enough vitamin D but one has to be aware of the issue in the first place to make sure their diets taking care of that.

The surprising issue with long term mild vitamin D deficiency is feeling depressed. When someone feels down they tend to stay home which in turn further reduce their exposure to sunlight that is essential in generating vitamin D themselves through their skin. Another form of the mild depressed state is the increase in anxiety. I can keep on going of the problems one will get from this one simple issue which can take forever to write. The main point is that we can become very ill from causes we are not aware of, even though you may consider yourself having a relatively healthy lifestyle.

To help patients with long term illnesses that keep them bed ridden, vitamin D is often prescribed now to keep these patients out of mood swings and improve their recovery speed. It works wonder and the approach is adopted in many places in the world.

But if you can keep yourself healthy in the first place by taking vitamin D supplement, why not?

Know Yourself for Real

People often take supplements when they feel something is not right with their bodies. Other times, it is recommended by the family physician after regular body check up. One common recommendation by physicians is taking calcium supplement for women that are 40 years or older as a preventive measure. But can you do more to help yourself?

In fact, yes you can figure things out before it gets to the point it is affecting your health. You can ask for comprehensive checking on your blood profile on both essential nutrients and hormone levels. In Canada, such tests can be ordered by our family physician without extra costs. In many other countries, it will cost you but I think it is well worth it.

One reason why supplements are getting so many bad reps is that people are taking them based on observed symptoms. But many symptoms are common among many kinds of ailments you may be having. In other words, you are guessing what your actually underlying issue is without the proper scientific background nor the complete picture of the situation like having your blood profile on hand. Your pick of supplements will likely be whatever last pop science article or video suggested instead of well informed decision.

So, in fact you can use trial and error method until you find the supplements you need. It takes a long time to get the right combination. Just be patient and learn to study yourself by recording how you feel over time so that you can eventually figure out what you need.

Or, you can use the more scientific approach with blood profile and other biometric measures (i.e. blood pressure, oxygen concentration level, etc.) to see what you need and target those deficiencies right from the beginning.

Personal Preference

I prefer taking supplements that are basically food over the highly refined pills coming from these brand names that have very expensive price tags. It is not because I do not believe that they work. In fact, I know many of these brands work very well. The main concern is that from my background in Chinese medicine, I know these highly concentrated dose of nutrients or stimulants would overdrive the liver (not just the liver as in Western medical science, I am talking about the liver system as in Chinese medicine) over time. In other words, continuous usage of such supplements may eventually cause your liver problems years down the road as suggested by Chinese medicine theories. Again, it is just my personal opinion so if you do not agree to what I say here, move on.

I treat taking supplements similar to taking medicines for sickness with same kind of care. I make such I know what I put into my body but I am also willing to experiment with different supplements to see the effects first hand. Sometimes things just do not workout the way I expected. I certainty hope that whatever I am doing now can help me staying fit and active by the time I am at my 80s.

If you are getting to middle age or older like me, and interested in maintaining good health in years to come. It may be the right time now to educate yourself about health supplements so that you can make informed decisions yourself. In this era of chronic diseases everywhere, safe guarding our health is a challenge we should all take very seriously.