Caring for your Joints

Too often I hear of people needing hip or joint replacements. Where once this was a condition shared only by a generation of 80 year olds, now people as young as thirty or forty are facing these concerns. What’s up?

Well, my thoughts always come back to the food we are eating and how we are caring for our bodies. Wheat, GMO foods, dairy, and gluten are known factors that can negatively affect our joints. These foods can cause inflammation. In addition, although exercise is great for the body, too much or too strenuous of a workout can be hard on the joints and can also be a culprit, damaging and wearing out our joints.

Because we all want to have the use of our joints throughout our life and be pain free, it is important that we start to appropriately care for them now.You can think of your joint health the same as you would think of your car care. You would never take off in your car without letting it warm up, ensuring the oil and other lubricants have spread out where needed. Well, the same should be true for your body. As you sleep, your joints become dry and their lubrication can settle. You need to warm them up and spread their lubrication out, prior to jumping out of bed and moving around. This can easily be done before you get your busy day started. Your body will thank you for years to come.

Here are some morning joint warm up exercises

Wrists and fingers: Open and close your hands several times spreading your fingers wide. Then place your hands together in a prayer position, lift your elbows up, ensuring your fingers stay connected. You should feel a nice stretch in your fingers. Shake your hands out vigorously, as if trying to shake off some water.

Ankles and toes: rotate both feet in both direction, then up and down and back and forth. Spread your toes wide.

Ankles, knees, & toes: Step out of bed. With both feet on the ground, create small circles with your knees. do this in both direction. Go up onto your tip toes, then squat down into a chair position.

Here are some more easy tips to help keep your joints lubricated and healthy.

1. Drink lots of clean water. Our joints need moisture to keep them gliding smoothly.
2. Eat healthy fats. Healthy fats also help to keep our bodies well oiled. Eats foods like- avocado, fish oil, nuts like Brazil and macadamia.
3. Take turmeric and black pepper. Turmeric is an anti-inflammatory and pepper helps your body utilize turmerics powers.You can take this in capsule form or you can make a golden milk tea using a nut milk. (Stay away from dairy)
4. Drink horsetail tea- Horse tail has constituents which helps to heal connecting tissue and improves elasticity. It can remedy rheumatic and arthritic pain. A horsetail bath can speed the healing of sprains and fractures. This plant can be found growing wild along river beds and lakes. Let it dry out and crumple it up, to place it into tea bags.
5. Before you go to bed, rub a little bit of an oil such as unrefined sesame seed oil into your joints.
6. If you do work out or your work entails physical stress, take a warm bath in some Epsom salts to help relax your muscles, relieve tension, and add some magnesium to your system.