HealthyCoderz

The food you eat probably has the greatest impact on your health, mental/brain health than anything else. The body requires vitamins and minerals in order to function properly. The majority of these nutrients come from food. If you feed your body sugar and processed foods full of chemicals you can't even pronounce, your body and brain will function far below what it is capable of. I know this because I've done it myself. My diet isn't perfect. I like to bake and eat chips and dip and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but now I do it sparingly with portion control. In my 20's I had a terrible diet. I had brain fog. I was always tired. I had mono. I constantly had white spots on my tonsils. Breakfast was a bowl of cheerios and milk. Cheerios have a glycemic index of 74, not a good idea for someone on their way to having gestational and prediabetes. Not to mention the glyphosate they contain. The food you eat affects how you feel. It also affects your mood. It probably cont...

Drinking water throughout the day is another easy and important activity to improve brain health. The body is over 60% water. The brain is over 73% water. Dehydration can cause mood swings, fatigue, headaches, brain fog, trouble concentrating, memory loss and irritability. I read a book years ago called Water: For Health, for Healing, for Life: You're Not Sick, You're Thirsty! by F. Batmanghelidj MD that talks about how not getting enough water can contribute to many illnesses including asthma and allergies. Drinking enough water helps you sleep better. Better sleep leads to a better performing brain. Drinking water helps with weight loss as it fills you up without adding extra calories. Drinking water helps the kidneys and liver flush out toxins. Being dehydrated can lead to kidney stones. Removing toxins is always beneficial to the brain. Drinking water is also good for the muscles and healthy skin. Muscles pull glucose from the blood, so better working muscles will improve ...

Sleep is one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain health. As a software developer, if I can't sleep or get fewer hours of sleep than normal, I have a harder time focusing, getting in the flow and coming up with good solutions to whatever task I might be working on. It's just a lot harder to get through the day. As you sleep, cerebrospinal fluid flows through the brain and cleans it of toxins. It removes amyloid beta and tau proteins. These are plaques that can build up over time and are associated with Alzheimer's and dementia. Lack of sleep is associated with increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol, increased insulin production and increased cravings for junk/sugary foods. Lack of sleep is also associated with weight gain. The average amount of sleep to aim for is between 7 and 8 hours per night. I usually shoot for between 7 and 7 1/2hours. Less than that leads to headaches. More than that, I have a hard time fitting into my schedule. In o...

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The next step in making a significant improvement in how you feel is to get up, get moving, build muscle. Muscle helps regulate blood sugar by absorbing glucose from the blood. This results in lower amounts of insulin needed to remove glucose from the blood. I never quite got why exercise was always suggested to help lower blood sugar until one day I read how building muscle helps remove sugar from the blood. That was definitely a light bulb moment. The more muscle you have, the less glucose floating through the blood causing damage to the body and the less insulin that needs to be produced to remove the glucose. Exercise releases feel good chemicals like serotonin in the brain which improves mood. Exercise increases heart rate which improves blood flow to the brain, increasing oxygen to the brain which improves memory and helps reduce inflammation. Muscle burns more calories than fat. Muscle also burns calories long after you are done exercising. Exercise also helps improve sleep whic...

I spent a large part of my childhood sitting in the waiting room of my doctor's office. I was sick all the time due to a kidney disease called nephrosis whose treatment was cortisone. Luckily around 16, I outgrew it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a clue about nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle, so I went down the path of health destruction with tobacco and alcohol in my late teens and 20's. Lots of fun, but a lot of not feeling the greatest. Fortunately, I gave all of that up. Gestational diabetes and injecting insulin was my introduction to nutrition. A concussion that wouldn't go away was the turning point that pushed me further into self care. A doctor's appointment resulted in a full blood work up that lead to finding out I was falling apart with an extremely high triglyceride level of 758, high glucose and a1c numbers. Sticking to a low glycemic, Mediterranean diet recommended by my doctor brought all of those numbers under control. That was in 2009 and I...