Our body is a wonderful machine. Its characteristic is that it self-manages, providing you follow a few basic principles:

1. Eating correctly so it gets everything it needs.

Good carbohydrates, vegetable and animal proteins of good quality, green vegetables, fruits, seeds, good oils. All of these organically grown. These will provide you the nutriments, vitamins, minerals, Omega 3 and essential antioxidants you need to protect your body from everyday agressions.

2. Staying away from every kind of food that went through an industrial process.

Junk food of course, but also every kind of prepared industrial meal, sodas, sweets, and refined flour. Ban meat and eggs coming from factory farming: they can cause cancer, they put your body under stress and that’s just barbarism toward the animal race.

3. Exercising regularly.

As explains singer David Draiman (Disturbed) in the following interview, not everybody has the same metabolism. Either you are ectomorph (slim, slender, without so much muscle mass), mesomorph (larger bone structure, more muscle mass), or endomorph (tending to gain fat quite easily), you won’t have the same needs regarding nutrition and excercising. Then some kind of regular physical activity, whatever should it be, is necessary to stimulate your organism and to burn superfluous calories.

4. Managing your sleep and your stress level.

Your body regains its strenght during the night. Just like food, sleep is necessary: it allows your body to empty itself from the stress and the tiredness of the day. It also triggers the secretion of growth hormones. Not enough sleep, just like bad sleep, reduces your mental and physical abilities. The sleep needed varies from a person to another, regarding their age and how they exercise. We spend a third of our life sleeping, that’s true, but we can’t do without. The best time for rest is at night, between 11pm and 7am, and during the afternoon, between 2pm and 4pm.

When you’re twenty, you don’t really care about these things. Your body’s full of hormones, your cells are young, you can take pretty much every excess. But as the years go by, you realize your body grows old. You need more time to recover, to get over a bender and so on. You start losing your hair, instead of smooth skin you get orange peel, your belly gets bigger and bigger, your hips get wider, you lose your stamina, you’re less and less resistant to viruses…

So start getting good habits as soon as possible. You won’t regret it.

Stay Hungry. Stay Metal.

Gilles LARTIGOT « The Heavy Metal Cook »