The Sports And Spinal Group believes in empowering our clients to take control of their health in a holistic manner. This includes movement, sleep, nutrition and stress management. Controlling inflammation is the key to managing and improving our overall well being in both the short and long term.
What Is Inflammation?
Inflammation is the immune system’s response to a stimulus that is viewed as foreign or toxic to your body.
Your immune system constantly monitors for anything that appears as a foreign intruder that shouldn’t be in the body and is always at the ready to signal it’s troops of cells to attack and fight against the foreign material.
It is an essential part of healing in acute conditions, however, when your immune system is disrupted, it puts itself unnecessarily on constant defense, sending inflammation continually rippling throughout your body. This time, the body is working against you, instead of for you, by attacking your own cells, tissues and harmless tissues. Chronic inflammation can appear as:
- Joint and Muscle pain
- Fatigue
- Depression
- Digestive upset
- Skin Problems
- Food sensitivities
- Resistant weight loss
- Immune conditions (Including some forms of arthritis)
A holistic approach to taming chronic inflammation
Moving toward an anti-inflammatory lifestyle includes altering the foods we eat and the products we put in, on, and around our bodies, as well as lowering stress. Three key strategies we can employ to reduce inflammation inside our body include:
- Build a healthy gut
Chronic inflammation causes a gut that is too permeable (leaky gut), allowing undigested nutrients into the bloodstream, which can trigger inflammation.
- Maintain proper hormone levels
Insulin (triggered by refined carbohydrate intake) and Cortisol (triggered by stress) are inflammatory to your system. Hormone disruptions such as these can suppress your metabolism and affect gut health significantly.
- Correct any nutritional deficiencies
Nutrients allow your body to make energy, build tissues and regulate bodily processes including inflammation.
In our next post, we are going to look at 10 practical strategies to take action against inflammation
