Macrobiotic Health Care Essentials

Macrobiotic Health Care

Macrobiotic health care is based on the founder, George Ohsawa’s idea that humans need to take care of the basics of life. This includes eating, sleeping, activity, thinking, rest and being social. Macrobiotic health focusses on;

Nutrition
Exercise
Good sleep
Meditation and mindfulness
Positive thinking

Macrobiotic health care creates a very holistic approach to health and healing.

Nutrition

The macrobiotic diet is based on eating vegetables, whole grains, beans, fruits, nuts, seeds and sea vegetables. In addition some people may include fish and or eggs. The macrobiotic diet can easily be adjusted to be vegan and gluten free. It contains an excellent range of nutrients for anyone choosing to enjoy a vegan lifestyle.

Exercise

We can use a mixture of aerobic and resistance exercise to keep our bodies healthy. Aerobic exercise includes walking, jogging, relaxed running, skiing and many lights sports. This kind of exercise is helpful for general fitness, the heart, circulation, moderating blood sugar levels, weight loss and blood quality.

Resistance exercise consists of lifting weights, squats, push ups, the plank, strenuous yoga poses and walking up stairs or a steep mountain. These help build or maintain muscle mass. Creating a good balance between muscle mass and total body weight helps our metabolism and increases our ability to burn off calories.

Some people favour short bursts of anaerobic exercise where the demands on the muscles are so high that we go into a fight or flight mode and provide extra calories. Examples of this would be fast burpees, running up a steep hill or stairs, intense cycling up a hill. This style of exercise is not recommended for anyone with high blood pressure or who is at risk of heart attacks or strokes.

Sleep

Good sleep is essential for regeneration, healing and good health. Here are some suggestions for enjoying a deep sleep and feeling refreshed in the morning.

Exercise and be active in the day so you are physically tired when going to bed
Avoid blue screens from phones, computers and TV before bed
Reduce your exposure to bring lights in the evening
Try some short meditations in the evening to prepare for sleep
If you have any worries or concerns write them down before sleep so you can forget them
Make sure your bedroom is dark. You may need to use black out blinds
Keep any electrical equipment at least 1 metre or 1 yard from your body
Set your phone to airplane mode to avoid electrical signals
Choose a bed, mattress and bedding that is comfortable and keeps your body at the right temperature over night
Adjust your drinking during the evening so you do not have to get up in the night to urinate

Macrobiotics Online Bedroom for Good Sleep

Meditation and Mindfulness

Our body finds it hard to detect the difference between stress created by thinking about challenges and real and immediate danger. If you were to be reading this in Africa and saw a pride of lions running towards you, you would become stressed. Typical reactions are;

The body goes into survival mode and focusses on reactions and muscle strength
Increase pulse, blood pressure and blood glucose (One reason why stress increases the risk of diabetes and makes it harder to manage diabetes.)
Greatly reduce energy for unnecessary functions such as healing, digestion, the immune system, positive thinking…

In modern life it is possible to feel stressed often in a typical day. This might be due to work, relationships, money or events such as bereavement, divorce, bankruptcy, moving house and redundancy.

Therefore long term stress can lead to:

Diabetes
Digestive issues
Skin rashes
Various types of cancer
Heart disease and strokes
Depression and emotional disorders

To Reduce Stress

We can use regular short meditative or mindful moments throughout the day. This means being very focussed on our senses for short periods. As we put our attention on our senses it gives the parts of our brain that contribute to stress time to rest and reset themselves. Typical ways to achieve this are:

Feeling every breath for a minute
Slowly counting
Scanning your body by feeling every part from toe to head
Listening to guided meditation
Listening to music and focussing on every note
Going for a walk and feeling every step
Tea meditation

Tea meditation uses all 5 senses by listening to the sound of pouring the tea, looking at the colour of the tea, feeling the warmth of the cup, smelling the tea and tasting the tea. The idea is to practice being descriptive at every stage and not judge the tea.

Positive Thinking

Current theory is that our mind works by chemical reactions and connections made through neural pathways. Before we could swim or ride a bicycle we did not have the pathways. By repeatedly trying we develop the pathways and when we have enough we can swim or ride our bicycle. The more we practice the more pathways we establish and the better we get.

We can apply this principle to anything we want to do with our minds. If we want to improve our self esteem we need to practice thinking positively about ourselves until we establish enough pathways to make that a natural state. To do this we need to engage in the process of being positive through talking, writing, and reading about our strengths. It can be helpful to keep writing a daily page about all our best qualities, keep images to remind us of our successes and have the characteristics we are most proud of clearly in our mind. This is part of the, I am, strategy where we can confidently start sentences with, I am… and continue to state who we are and want we want to do.

The aim is to have healthy self esteem, be solution orientated, develop a constructive mind, and find ways to add to a situation. It can be easier if we are constantly exercising our mind through education and a life long study of new subjects.