Healthy Garden, Healthy Living

Healthy living doesn`t just mean spending a few hours at the gym every week and watching what you eat. Living a healthy lifestyle is about incorporating healthy behaviors into every aspect of your life and building and strengthening good habits. The point of a healthy lifestyle is to reduce your risk of disease and increase both your length of life and your quality of life. The basic foundation of a healthy self is: proper nutrition, adequate exercise, and quality sleep, but as we all know, there is more to life than these three aspects. Being well rounded in all areas of wellness is what makes your lifestyle truly healthy. Here are some benefits of growing own food -

You`ll Get More Nutrients

Plants that are allowed to ripen in our own gardens provide us with more nutrients because they were not picked before they were finished growing; which means that they had more time to mature and soak up the nutrients of the soils than prematurely picked grocery store variety vegetables. Since the fruits and vegetables that you buy at the grocery store have to be picked early so that they do not go bad by the time you buy them, they do not provide you with the maximum nutrition available.

You`ll Eat More Fresh Fruits and Vegetables

Some people go to the grocery store every day, or every other day, so that they can pick out the freshest ingredients for their meals; however, the majority of people go about two to four times per month and stock up on the essentials so that they don’t have to spend more time or money at the grocery store than absolutely necessary.

A Moderate to High Intensity Workout

Did you know that gardening is considered a moderate to high intensity workout? Between digging, mulching, raking, weeding, hoeing, sowing, and harvesting, there’s enough physical labor involved in maintaining your own garden to help you slim down, before you even take a bite of a freshly grown fruit or vegetable. The highest intensity activity in the garden is digging, which is succeeded by raking, weeding, mulching, hoeing, sowing, and harvesting. Therefore, to get the biggest physical benefit out of your garden, it`s a good idea to plant items with short crop cycles that will force you to be more active every day.

Heart Healthy

As we’ve learned, gardening is a moderate to high intensity workout, and thus, as with any other workout, it encourages the release of endorphins. The release of endorphins into the brain while gardening helps to reduce the amount of stress a person feels emotionally, which in turn relaxes them psychologically and physically. This promotion of relaxation in the mind can be linked to a positive relationship between a person’s blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Studies have shown that while these numbers drop, so does your individual risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Stronger Body

Many of the movements involved with gardening are particularly beneficial to the mobility of your joints and the strengthening of your muscles. These two assets work together to increase both the flexibility and stability of your body, which will not only benefit your current life, but will significantly improve the quality of your life in your later years. As we age the body slowly begins to break down, but if we have a strong body foundation, and continue to work on improving it, the degeneration that we’ll encounter will be much less than someone who spends little to no time on physical prospects.