Inspired Living Changes Everything: Spend each day changing your life for the better. Dr. Saman Rezaie provides the road map for lifelong health and wellness.

Every day, we have a chance to change our lives for the better. The areas that will have the biggest impact on an improved quality of life are diet, exercise and where we choose to live in our head. Diet has a huge impact on how we feel, our energy and our mental function. The first place to start might seem to be by eliminating things, but a better place is to focus on the good things that we want to incorporate into what we consume. Make it a point to get a minimum of two liters of water in per day, which should make up the majority of our fluid intake. If the day is warmer or we get some exercise, this amount will need to increase. Next, make a meal plan the night before, so that we have better focus on what to eat the next day. When we fly by the seat of our pants, it becomes easy to go for a quick fix.

The next thing to help improve our life is adding activity. The best way is to do something that we love and will not seem like work. If going to the gym and lifting weights does not seem like a good time, no problem; perhaps hiking or riding a bike is better. Find things that are fun and add them into the routine. The goal is adding movement into our day for 30 minutes, and the impact that this change will have by far will outweigh many other changes. Physical activity brings a multitude of benefits, including cardiovascular effects, neurological benefits, body composition changes, disease prevention and much more. Walking is a great place to start, do just enough that it will get the heart rate up. Once we start and begin to feel better, we will naturally increase the activity and reap the benefits.

Maybe we cannot change the address where we live, but this is not meant as the place we live physically, like an apartment or home, but the place we choose to live every day with our thoughts, words and actions. The impact of our self-talk, how we say things and the actions we choose to do will impact our habits, who we are and the people that we keep around us. Choose to live in a way and place that allows us to have positive comments to ourself. Changing this one thing will influence how we treat ourself. It seems like a small thing, but changing the way we talk with ourself will alter the way we interact with others and has the bigger impact of changing the world.

Becoming more inspired will require focus on our diet, which has an impact of our health within two to three days. Add on activity, and we will see benefits within weeks. Changing where we live in our mind will echo the most dramatic changes in all aspects of our life. Inspired living is not just how we change our life for the better, but more importantly, it’s the impact that it has on others that truly makes it inspirational.

Dr. Saman Rezaie is a licensed naturopathic physician and graduate of the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. For more information, call 480-657-0003 or visit MyIntegrativeHealth.com.