TRILOGY HEALTH Bodywork & Healing Arts

We are all familiar with cutting ourselves and how the area around the wound becomes very red for a few days or how red our throats are when we have a sore one. These are normal and appropriate physical reactions.

If your immune system and its ability to quell inflammation in your body are impaired, watch out. You are headed toward illness and premature aging.

Fortunately, addressing the causes of inflammation and learning how to live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle can dramatically improve your health.

The trouble occurs when that defense system runs out of control, like a rebel army bent on destroying its own country.

Many of us are familiar with an overactive immune response and too much inflammation. It results in common conditions like allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease, and asthma. This is bad inflammation, and if it is left unchecked it can become downright ugly.

What few people understand is that hidden inflammation run amok is at the root of all chronic illness we experience -- conditions like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, dementia, depression, cancer, and even autism.

How to Locate the Causes of Hidden Inflammation

So if inflammation and immune imbalances are at the root of most of modern disease, how do we find the causes and get the body back in balance?

First, we need to identify the triggers and causes of inflammation. Then we need to help reset the body's natural immune balance by providing the right conditions for it to thrive

We need to find those inflammatory factors unique to each person and to see how various lifestyle, environmental, or infectious factors spin the immune system out of control, leading to a host of chronic illnesses.

Thankfully, the list of things that cause inflammation is relatively short:

• Poor diet--mostly sugar, refined flours, processed foods, and inflammatory fats such as trans and saturated fats

• Lack of exercise

• Stress

• Hidden or chronic infections with viruses, bacteria, yeasts, or parasites

• Hidden allergens from food or the environment

• Toxins such as mercury and pesticides

• Mold toxins and allergens

7 Steps to Living an Anti-inflammatory Life

So once you have figured out the causes of inflammation in your life, gotten rid of them, the next step is to keep living an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. But how do you do that?

It's a disarmingly simple but extraordinarily effective way to achieve UltraWellness:

1. Whole Foods -- Eat a whole foods, high-fiber, plant-based diet, which is inherently anti-inflammatory. That means choosing unprocessed, unrefined, whole, fresh, real foods, not those full of sugar and trans fats and low in powerful anti-inflammatory plant chemicals called phytonutrients.

2. Healthy Fats -- Give yourself an oil change by eating healthy monounsaturated fats in olive oil, nuts and avocadoes, and getting more omega-3 fats from small fish like sardines, herring, sable, and wild salmon.

3. Regular Exercise -- Mounting evidence tells us that regular exercise reduces inflammation. It also improves immune function, strengthens your cardiovascular systems, corrects and prevents insulin resistance, and is key for improving your mood and erasing the effects of stress. In fact, regular exercise is one among a small handful of lifestyle changes that correlates with improved health in virtually ALL of the scientific literature. So get moving already!

4. Relax -- Learn how to engage your vagus nerve by actively relaxing. This powerful nerve relaxes your whole body and lowers inflammation when you practice yoga or meditation, breathe deeply, or even take a hot bath.

5. Avoid Allergens -- If you have food allergies, find out what you're allergic to and get stop eating those foods--gluten and dairy are two common culprits.

6. Heal Your Gut -- Take probiotics to help your digestion and improve the balance of healthy bacteria in your gut, which reduces inflammation.

7. Supplement -- Take a multivitamin/multimineral supplement, fish oil, and vitamin D, all of which help reduce inflammation.