I have a few New Year’ s Resolutions. Of course, I’ve already broken a few of them, but one of them was to detoxify my system from eating all the crap I stuffed down my gullet over the holidays, and revitalizing my sense of health and well being by getting the fats and chemicals out of my system from my holiday indulgences. New year, new colon I suppose, right!?

There are a couple different ways to detox your system actually. First, you can go on a cleansing diet like the Master Cleanse, which I tried and didn’t care for personally. There’s something unnatural about consuming only liquids for at least ten days straight. I know a few people who have done it and dropped weight that way, but it always comes right back on and some critics of it think that it actually may hurt your metabolism.

You can also take supplements which are designed to rid your body of excess waste (ie make you go to the bathroom a lot), and also to replenish certain flora that are lost in the process, or that you may be lacking in the first place.  The Dual Action Cleanse detox system does that, which is why so many people love to use it when they’re feeling weighed down and toxic.

It’s important if you are doing a colon cleansing, that you consider replenishing your healthy bacteria – the little peacekeepers of the colon, otherwise known as lactobacillus, or probiotics. These are commonly found in yogurt with active cultures, so you can either eat a lot of yogurt when you’re doing a colon cleanse, or you can make sure you are taking a supplement that has probiotics in it to help balance out the healthy bacteria again.

My favorite yogurt for this purpose, and it also happens to taste yummy too, is the Activia line of yogurt.  It helps keep you regular too, so it’s great for people who suffer constipation or irregular bowel movements.

I became a little bit concerned when I started to experience something at first that I thought might be panic attacks, but then I realized I might actually have somewhat of an arrhythmia of the heart. I’m going to go see a doctor to confirm it is nothing serious, but decided I would also look online to see what natural ways might be an alternative to any sort of undoubtedly expensive and potentially dangerous or side effect laden drugs I might be put on, if anything. I found a few interesting ideas, but one of them that was consistently referred to was a supplement called magnesium citrate.

Magnesium citrate is just a very processable form of the mineral magnesium. It is thought to be great for nerve health, but more importantly, is thought to help improve conditions where the heart beats out of control or has a rapid or uneven beat. It may be that this supplement helps to regulate the heart rhythm by improving the electromagnetic pulses that are responsible for the correct, timely beating of the heart. Now, I’m no expert, so please go out online and do your own research on this, and it certainly should not be used in place of a doctor’s consultation if you think you may have a problem.

This of course came to the forefront after the talented actress Brittany Murphy’s death, of what they said was a full on cardiac arrest – at the age of 32 years old, which is obviously a very young age to have a major cardiac accident that leads to death. She may have had a pre existing condition of course, but one can’t help wonder if she was on some sort of natural remedy or even medication to help her heart beat be more regular, if her death could have been prevented.

There were reports that she had been diagnosed with a slightly irregular heartbeat, but the doctors did not think it was significant enough to be life threatening or to put her on medication for. Of course, there is also speculation that she may have had an eating disorder that may have spurred an already existing condition to become disastrous, or that she had taken some sort of drug that spurred it, but that is all speculation at this point.

This made me think more about my little episodes, which I by and large used to ignore because I thought they were just a fluke. They rarely happened, but I did notice one happened the other day for no reason at all where it felt like my heart was beating out of rhythm and too fast, so it has become a concern for me. I did buy a magnesium citrate supplement to start in the meantime, and I can let you know how that affects me soon.

Antibiotics have garnered quite a bit of attention over the past several years, due to the fact that many strains of virus are developing resistance to the most commonly prescribed antibiotics, and because the medical community is having to come up with stronger and stronger strains of antibiotics to over come adapted strains of viruses.

The fear is that eventually our viruses will out-evolve our antibiotic technology, and we will have a basically incurable disease on our hands that otherwise could have easily been cured through antibiotic use just years prior. While that disastrous picture hasn’t occurred, it’s still on medicine’s radar as a potential occurrence, and doctors are becoming more discriminating in prescribing antibiotics so that they are not overused, and new viruses don’t have as many opportunities to find ways to beat the latest antibiotics.

Not only that, but we have recently learned that the use of antibiotics, especially long term use, actually kills the healthy flora in our intestines, and it can not only lead to diarrhea while on powerful antibiotics, but it can also lead to various issues with the digestive system and waste elimination, and what is called a candida, or yeast imbalance in the body.

So, are there any herbal alternatives to traditional antibiotics? Well, there supposedly are, but of course these cannot be construed as any type of replacement for the real medical deal if you are dealing with a serious virus that needs to be addressed by antibiotic intercession. Apparently, there are some herbs that help to get rid of viruses and cleanse the immune system, or boost it against these pesky invaders. One of them is to be expected, since it is already known as an immunity booster, and you’ve undoubtedly heard of it unless you’ve lived under a rock or only recently became interested in alternative medicine or herbal supplements, that is echinacea.

Echinacea is of course a purple flowering herb that has been used to boost one’s immune system around the flu season. Many people swear by it, and it may be because it kills invaders before they even hit, and that is why it is known to fend off colds and other sicknesses like the flu. Another is Goldenseal, whics is interestingly also used by many a college student to help them take clean drug tests. Another one is garlic, which I love to consume in foods, so it’s a wonder that I ever get sick of all. They’re worth a look into if you want to help boost your immune system and get rid of bugs before they invade totally.

I have a confession to make.  I’m not an advocate of going to tanning booths.  Usually. I’m getting married in Las Vegas though, and my vanity has overcome my common sense that I’ve  had for so many years after my younger years of baking myself in the sun and the tanning booths, seeing the damage that the sun exposure did to my skin, and also not having the best of luck in our family with skin cancer, it really was the right choice for  me to forego the majority of sun exposure, except a little healthy vitamin D exposure here and there.

In my quest to get a healthier tan for my wedding, and to not burn, and help ensure that my body was fully prepped to actually tan instead of burn, I started to look online to see if there was a such thing as supplements that I could take that would help prep my skin for tanning instead of activating burning, which is known as being a primary cause behind many of the most serious forms of skin cancer.

So, I found a supplement called Tan-Aid. It’s a supplement that includes several key ingredients, which the company claims, and many other sites have claimed, may help your body manufacture more melanocytes, which are the underlying organisms which form melanin, the substance in your skin’s outer layers that are responsible for how dark you can get from UV exposure.  The more melanin you have, the darker your skin color will be.

For example, the reason that skin cancer is much less common in dark skinned people like african americans and those of latin descent, is because they have more melanin (pigment) in their skin, which helps them to not only tan darker with sun exposure, but which also helps to protect them from burning and protect them from the sun’s burning rays. 

The ingredients in Tan-Aid that they say help you to make more melanin essentially, and help to protect your skin against burning are : Tyrosine, which is effectively an amino acid that is supposedly one of the precursors to melanin production.  Vitamin E is another one, and this one helps in the production of melanocytes and it also helps to maintain suppleness and moisture, so it helps your skin to stay smooth and healthy when tanning.  You know how tanning can really drain your skin of moisture….

Copper, which is a precursor to collagen and melanin is also included, and then there are a few other ingredients as well, but these are the main, most active ones that are going to allow you to achieve a tan.  I bought three bottles at a pretty reasonable price, and I think there really is something to it. Not only am I getting darker than I normally do, but I’m not as prone to burning, which has been great.

High blood pressure can have disastrous consequences on our health.  Often, high blood pressure occurs in overweight people who smoke and are sedentary and that combination puts them at risk for a host of serious complications health wise.  The causes of high blood pressure are complex, but addressing the underlying reasons is easy, as long as you know what the lifestyle changes are that you need to make to head in the right direction for addressing your hypertension.

After all, it is one of the biggest increasing risk factors in a number of health issues that can potentially end you life and severely debilitate you, like strokes and heart disease.  Hypertension can be genetically inherited which puts you at risk from birth.  It also can result from dietary components or other factors such as excess weight or habits like smoking.  Reduction of salt intake is important to people with hypertension.

Our entire pattern of Western eating is conducive to the development of high blood pressure.   Our diets consist of heavy meat consumption and a high use of processed foods with a high proportion of salt and sugar.  Use of salt, sugar, smoking and coffee drinking have a significant association with elevated blood pressure.  Eliminating or curbing these habits in your lifestyle will have a positive effect on your blood pressure readings.

Decreasing the amount of meat and high fat dairy products in your diet should help to reduce your risk of elevated blood pressure.  Increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet should help to avoid a problem with hypertension.  Not only can decreasing meat and dairy (high fat dairy, low fat is actually healthy for you) help your hypertension, but it can also help with preventing different types of cancers and digestive health issues like IBS and slow digestion.

If you already have hypertension, certainly you need to be under the care of a physician.  There are many different medications to control your blood pressure.  You should still address the hypertension from a dietary and lifestyle approach in addition to your medications.  If you don’t know your blood pressure, you should have it checked as it is often without symptoms until something disastrous happens to your health.  Dropping unwanted pounds and increasing your physical activity level will help to keep your blood pressure controlled.  Relaxation techniques and meditation can help to lower blood pressure readings also.