My Top 5 Proactive Health Tips

Patients often ask what I personally do to stay well. The answer is simple: I follow the same five proactive health tips I teach my patients. These foundational pillars support hormone balance, metabolism, sleep, mindset, and long-term vitality—helping me age gracefully and prevent chronic illness.

As an integrative family nurse practitioner, I'm often asked what I do to stay healthy. Well, I follow the same five pillars that I preach to my patients and you in order to maintain my health and well being. 

#1 - I support my hypothalamus

This is absolutely the key. All the lifestyle factors that I'm going to recommend for you build upon my foundational hypothalamus support. I've been supporting my hypothalamus with Genesis Gold® and when stressors are challenging, extra Sacred Seven®, since 2000, and it’s made a huge difference. Plus I don’t need to take a handful of pills - just one drink a day is all I need to stay healthy. And my body's ability to detoxify properly, maintain my normal high metabolism, and age gracefully. My hormones are in balance, my immune system is functioning optimally, and my brain is operating well. 

I highly recommend supporting your hypothalamus with Genesis Gold®. It has helped my patients jumpstart their healing. 

#2 - I eat a very balanced healthy diet

Nutrition is vital. Your hypothalamus is not protected by the blood-brain barrier making it amenable to nutrients which is why Genesis Gold® works so well. But You also need to fuel your body with the proper food to maintain energy and rejuvenate. As an Italian-American, I've consumed a Mediterranean diet for the majority of my life.

It's plant-based and rich in antioxidants and polyphenols. It’s very low in processed foods, mostly organic and locally grown. And it's easy to follow. In fact, studies show that the Mediterranean diet is the most effective nutritional plan to prevent chronic illness and age gracefully.

My daily nutrition looks like this: 

I wake up, take my Genesis Gold® and make a fresh pot of coffee. I drink my coffee black and savor this morning routine as I journal. About an hour later, I eat breakfast. Usually fresh fruit with either whole-fat cottage cheese or Greek yogurt, sometimes eggs, greens, whole-grain avocado toast, and sometimes whole-grain cooked cereal grains like oats, bulgar, and quinoa.

Lunch is usually the biggest meal with lots of vegetables usually cooked. Sometimes a salad and always a protein source. For my body, I do seem to require animal protein on almost a daily basis to keep my blood sugar stable. I douse my vegetables with olive oil which is a healthy monounsaturated fat that has great anti-inflammatory effects. 

Dinner is usually early and lighter than lunch. Dinner includes another protein source, more vegetables usually roasted and according to my expenditure of energy that day, I may add a starchy carbohydrate like a root vegetable or winter squash. I am not sensitive to caffeine and do not seem to need it for energy but knowing coffee and tea are good for you in moderation, I limit caffeine to just a couple servings a day. And yes, I drink alcohol. Alcohol in moderation is also good for heart health, so no more than one serving a day. Plus red wine is a fantastic source of anti-inflammatory polyphenols. My occasional cocktail is made with fresh juice and no added sugar. 

Now that doesn't mean I never eat sugar. I adore dark chocolate. And I like to bake. Plus we have fruit growing on our property. Nothing is better than a fresh fruit crumble with whole grains, coconut, and nuts. My diet is balanced out with activity.  

#3 - I am very active 

Staying active is the secret to longevity. Prior to our modern-day life, activity meant fending for yourself - taking care of livestock, gardening, doing laundry by hand, and just being much more physically active. I must say that since my last horse passed almost nine years ago, I don't have the same upper body strength that I used to have. Hauling manure is a great weight-resistance exercise. 

Being sedentary is the new smoking - it’ll shorten your life. So you need to move your body. I try not to sit down for too long during the day, taking my business calls while walking and doing a lot of my computer work standing. Also, I get aerobic exercise at least three to five times a week for at least 20 to 30 minutes. I like to hike, mountain bike, swim, and play pickleball.

And I do weight resistance exercise a couple of times a week. I prefer to use my body weight through yoga and calisthenics, but you can also use actual weights just be careful not to hurt your joints. Then I try to stretch daily. As you get older you lose flexibility before strength and cardiopulmonary efficiency.  

#4 - I get 9 hours of sleep every night

Supporting my hypothalamus actually changed my sleep patterns. Before Genesis Gold®, I never got more than five hours of sleep and spent a third of it sleepwalking. I’ve always been sensitive to light, so I need a very dark room to sleep in, no digital lights blinking, no street lights. The full moon wakes me up.

I make sure that my room temperature is a cool 60 to 70 degrees. It's very difficult to make enough melatonin when your room temperature is too warm. 

I fall asleep easily - probably because I’m so active during the day and I try not to use screens after dusk, but since being menopausal, I may wake up between 1-3 am to urinate. If I have trouble falling back to sleep it’s usually because I ate too late or had a second glass of wine. Sometimes it’s stress-related worry. So I do a whole-body contraction-relaxation exercise to wear off the adrenaline and get my GABA up so I can fall back to sleep.

#5 - I nurture my healing mindset 

What you believe becomes. Your mindset affects your ability to heal. Most of my patients come to me unconsciously sabotaging their own healing by beliefs they’ve adopted. Supporting their hypothalamus helps them to be more aware of their mindset so we can work on uncovering what’s getting in the way of their healing.

I truly believe I can heal anything in my body, that my body has the ability to heal, and that my DNA is programmed for optimal health. I realize there are people who have genes that do not favor optimal health. But I also know that your DNA has unexpressed genes that could be potentially healing. I have seen in my patients who have genetic profiles with SNPs that inhibit their detoxification or their metabolism actually change clinically by supporting their hypothalamus with Genesis Gold®. They no longer express those faulty genes. It doesn’t happen overnight; x and then have their hypothalamus orchestrate healthy communication with their DNA. 

It's our lifestyles that turn the genes on or off, so following the other protocols - supporting your hypothalamus, eating well, being active, and getting enough sleep - will help enable your genetic potential. But to live your highest genetic potential, you need a healthy mindset. 

If you don't believe you can heal, no matter how much other good stuff you're doing, healing is limited.

People who do not believe they can heal or who have subconscious beliefs that sabotage their healing may not notice the benefits of supporting their hypothalamus immediately or even after the prescribed 90 days of taking Genesis Gold®. Yet when these same people do their deeper work, they start to experience healing. By deeper work, I mean psycho-spiritual exploration to uncover what beliefs contributed to them getting sick in the first place. 

For instance, if everybody in your family dies of strokes and heart attacks and you believe you will too then you probably will. Even if you don't smoke and you eat well and exercise but you still believe that's the way you're going to die, then your mindset can overrule your healthy lifestyle. You must believe in your ability to heal. So whatever is making you stuck, that’s what you've got to work on. You may need help from a therapist, We all have soul issues. 

I was once hormonally challenged and I didn't have periods on my own.

I was kind of manic in the sense that I was obsessive about exercise and dieting. Also, I couldn’t sleep and wasn't emotionally well until I started supporting my hypothalamus. After a few months of taking Genesis Gold® and Sacred Seven®, my mindset shifted. I started looking at myself with different eyes. I started seeing what was working instead of what wasn't working and I stopped seeing fat and started seeing fit. Although I've never been overweight, I had an eating disorder from the time I was 14 so my body image was distorted and that affected my mindset. 

Fixing those distortions in your thoughts and beliefs helps you to heal. Part of your proactive health is healing whatever is in your past that's keeping you sick, that’s preventing you from being optimally well - mentally, emotionally, or physically. And that work is probably the hardest. 

Which is why, besides creating Genesis Gold® and Sacred Seven® to support your hypothalamus, I also created my Hormone Healing Circle.

The online educational program is available to both men and women. Yet the virtual healing circle is only for women. I believe that when you heal a woman, she becomes empowered to help heal those around her - her family, her children, her spouse, her community. In my Hormone Healing Circle I meet with the women so they get my personal attention to help them through their healing process. 

If you have any questions about these health tips, please join me in our Hormone Support Group, which you can access by signing up for my free Hormone Reboot Training.

Negative and Positive Beliefs Related to Mood and Health; Raymond L. Ownby, MD, PhD, Amarilis Acevedo, PhD, [...], and Drenna Waldrop-Valverde, PhD; American Journal of Health Behavior; July 2017

Social Networks, Health Beliefs, and Preventive Health Behavior; Jean K. Langlie; Journal of Health and Social Behavior; Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 244-260