D.R.E.S.S. for improved health

I first became aware of the acronym D.R.E.S.S. during my FDN Practitioner Certification Course.  Reed Davis, founder of FDN, came up with this term to help outline the path to optimal health. In a nutshell, D.R.E.S.S. stands for:

Diet
Rest/Recovery
Exercise
Supplements
Stress Reduction

Diet - Diet is the biggest contributor to optimal health.  None of the other lifestyle elements will work completely unless you fix your diet.

For instance, I see a lot of endurance athletes who eat horrid diets (the Standard American Diet, aka Food Pyramid). This group typically will not pay attention to diet as they feel they are at the top of their game, setting Personal Records (PRs) at races. These same people experience frequent digestion issues and/or are chronically injured.

Your diet controls your physiology.  Your cells need a well balanced nutritional profile (micronutrients) to fuel your daily activities and recovery.  Your health will degrade over time without optimal nutrition.

I highly recommend logging your food using applications such as MyFitnessPal or Lose It.  This will help you appreciate the quality of your daily nutrition and how best to modify it.

Rest/Recovery - This is one of the more overlooked lifestyle elements.  Society is full of walking zombies who either have too few hours or low quality sleep.

Most adults need between seven and eight hours of quality sleep.  You can get a general sense of how long you sleep and how deeply by using one of the various activity trackers such as the Withings Pulse O2 or various FitBit trackers.

There are also under the mattress sleep tracking systems such as the Beddit, Luna,  Hello Sense, and the Withings Aura. Each of these products will track your sleep and other environmental factors, but vary in their implementation. Also, Luna and Hello Sense will be constantly kicking out EMF in the form of WiFi. In comparison, the Beddit system uses low-energy Bluetooth to transmit data to the phone app.  Similarly, the Aura base is hard wired to the mattress sensor and disables WiFi when you plug your phone into the USB port on the base (charge phone over night).

A couple other suggestions include, avoid eating too close to bed time, drink something like Natural Calm just prior to bed and avoid watching TV or using a computer within an hour or two of bed time.  See Dave Asprey's article, "How to Hack Your Sleep: The Art and Science of Sleeping" for additional suggestions and 'sleep hacks'.

Finally, you can hack your sleep quality by using a product such as the EarthPulse Sleep on Command System.  I have been using the EarthPulse for over a year with fantastic results.

Exercise - Exercise is a double edged sword.  Exercise is an extremely important driver for optimal health, but like a drug, you need to determine the optimal dose. Exercise can become addictive and many endurance junkies end up with reoccurring injuries or worse, experience a complete crash of their nervous system, otherwise known as adrenal fatigue or dysregulation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis.

It is critically important to closely monitor your recovery level to ensure you are not overreaching.  SweetWater Health has two applications which can help you determine the state of your recovery.  These applications are SweetBeat and SweetBeatLife.

There are other services which use more comprehensive analytics to determine your recovery, such as RestWise.  Several other companies will be entering this space, so stay tuned.

Supplements - It is well established that you cannot rely solely on your diet to meet your micronutrient needs.  You might also need supplements to address particular health issues.  It is best to work with a health care professional to determine your unique requirements.

Stress - As the saying goes, stress kills.  Stress can come from many sources, including work/family, exposure to toxins, and exercise.  Optimal health requires you develop resiliency to stress and remove as many stressors from your life as you can.

A couple of tools you can use include, the above SweetWater Health applications, which allow you to monitor your stress, and HeartMath's Inner Balance application, which helps build up the resiliency of your nervous system (think of it as a gym for your nervous system).

Cheers!