A healthy body is essential to life; but too often, we ignore our bodies until they begin sagging and rolling in the tide. In order to maintain your body, you need to be aware of three things, exercise, nutrition and stress management.

Let’s look at exercise first. Your best forms of exercise will always be the activities you actually enjoy. After all, if you don’t enjoy your exercise, you’ll probably keep putting it off. Besides, when you enjoy what you’re doing, your spirit and emotions get exercised along with your body. In other words, you don’t need to join a gym to be healthy. You can hike with a friend, walk your dog, skate in the park, jog to the store, play with your kids, or dance around your living room. But do try to keep three things in mind: endurance, flexibility, and strength.

Endurance is anything aerobic in which your heart gets a workout. Examples include dancing, running, walking, skiing, climbing, swimming, skating, cycling, playing tag, or any other keep-away sport. You should do something aerobic for twenty minutes at least three times a week.

Flexibility means stretching and bending. Flexibility protects you from muscles strain, improves your balance and helps you to maintain high muscle density as you grow older. Yoga is a wonderful flexibility discipline because it incorporates stretching with strength, mental and spiritual fitness. But whatever flexibility regime you follow, just remember that the only way you’ll be able to touch your toes tomorrow is if you take the time to touch your toes today. If you gently stretch the limits of your flexibility daily, you’ll be able to touch your toes forever.

Finally, strength training. You must actually build your muscles if you wish them to remain strong. Strength-building exercises include weight lifting, yoga, push-ups, isometrics, gymnastics, swimming, carrying kids, taking in the groceries and helping your friends to move. Whatever strength regime you pursue, just be sure that you take the time to build your muscles a few times a week, or you will lose your strength to entropy.

What about nutrition? The old saying about what you eat is true. You literally are what you eat.

So, if you want to be a potato chip then go ahead and eat potato chips.

Your body actually uses the food that you eat to rebuild itself daily; therefore, you ought to give a little thought into what you put inside your mouth. The link between heath and diet is increasingly evident. If all you eat is junk food, then you can eat all day and still not intake the vital nutrients that your body needs to maintain itself.

You need lots of water, lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, a variety of grains, a little protein, a little calcium, some omega fatty acids, some healthy oils, and a whole lot less of everything else.

Studies on aging actually hint at a connection between calorie intake and the build-up of free radicals in our bodies. Free radicals are believed to cause cancer, as well as the break down of tissue associated with old age. In one study, rats were given a diet with an extremely high nutritional content, coupled with an extraordinarily low calorie count. The rats in the study lived twice as long as rats normally do. Imagine, aging might actually be caused by poor nutrition coupled with over-eating.

Now don’t go changing your life because of one study. Studies about diets are being published all the time, and the evidence often seems contradictory. So until all the evidence is in, try to avoid fads and practice balance instead. Remember that your body uses what you put in your mouth to create your cells and muscles. Therefore, avoid the stuff that you know your body doesn’t need and surrounded yourself with the foods that your body thrives on.

Unfortunately, many people eat, not because they’re hungry, but because they don’t want to feel. They use food to ease their pain, their discomfort, their boredom, or their low self-esteem. Still other people become addicted to sugar, caffeine, alcohol, or complex carbohydrates because of the chemical reactions that their bodies have to those substances. If you have any of these problems, you’ll need more than a diet to fix your health. You may need to learn how to feed your spirit, instead of your stomach. That’s a hard journey, and you shouldn’t take it alone.

Before leaving the topic of nutrition, I want to mention that more and more of the foods that we buy at grocery stores contain the toxins and chemicals used to grow them. According to the research of Doctor Andrew Weil, “Apples top the list of contaminated fruits, followed by peaches, grapes (along with the raisins and wines made from them), oranges and strawberries. The most heavily-contaminated vegetable crops include potatoes, carrots, lettuce, green beans, peanuts, wheat, and any product made from wheat flour.”[1] When you know which foods are most likely chemical-ridden, you can try to seek out the certified organic producers of these foods and buy from them.

Finally, let’s consider stress management. Did you know that more people die from stress-related illnesses in America than from all other illnesses combined? Doctor Deepak Chopra, in his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, mentions an interesting statistic about stress and health. He points out that more people die from illnesses related to hypertension on Mondays at 8:00 a.m., than at any other time in the week. It seems that people are actually having heart attacks at the very thought of facing another week’s stress. You must learn how to manage your stress if you want your body to be healthy.

Meditation, visualization, belly breathing and focused relaxation are all wonderful tools for managing stress. They also have the added benefit of strengthening your ability to focus. Exercise, simply walking, is known to reduce stress. And did you know that laughter can actually lower blood pressure? So treat yourself to laughter every day. Make laughter as important to your diet as water. And finally, rest. Rest often. Take a quiet ten minutes in the middle of your day to shut-up, close your eyes and breathe some oxygen into your system. Also make sure that you get your required hours of sleep each night. When you don’t get enough sleep, you’re not able to function the next day, so stop making excuses. You need to figure out what’s causing you to not get enough sleep, and then develop a strategy to manage those causes effectively.

Remember to maintain your body with exercise, nutrition, and stress management. If you take care of your body, it will take care of you. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll get to it later. Look at your priorities and budget accordingly. Do you really have time to let your body fall apart?