As an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, and more meaningfully (in my opinion), as a girl who’s struggled with my own health issues; done extensive research, testing, and experimentation with different health approaches; and worked with various practitioners, there’s many things I’ve learned about how to improve and optimize health. I know first-hand how overwhelming it can be when starting your journey to improve your health. While it’s amazing that we have the most information available to us than we’ve ever had, it makes it difficult to discern what truly matters and know what we should prioritize to sustain our health.

Maybe you’re experiencing unwanted symptoms and you want to know ways to support your body naturally to get rid of them. Maybe you were just diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and you want to start prioritizing your health for the first time after years of not thinking twice about it. Whatever it is, I want to empower you to take control of your health through making simple, daily decisions. They may not be easy, but they are simple. These are the four health practices I would focus on if I were looking to improve my health— and the same four practices I always come back to whenever I feel my health starting to slip.

1. Eat High Quality, Whole Foods

Get back to the basics of eating whole foods. When I say whole foods, this refers to foods in their natural state—usually those that have one ingredient. Aim to incorporate high-quality, nutrient-dense foods such as: high-quality proteins, organic fruits and vegetables, and healthy fats. See my free grocery guide resource on my website that lists my go-to whole foods that I like to fuel with, along with the C.R.A.P. I try to avoid (foods with Chemicals, Refined sugars and flours, Artificial flavors and sweeteners, and Preservatives).

Incorporate the “crowding out” technique. Crowding out is a technique focused on ADDING more whole, nutrient-dense foods, rather than focusing on eliminating the unhealthy foods in your diet. Oftentimes, as a result of adding in whole foods, this ends up reducing your food cravings for the processed junk (hence, “crowding out” the unhealthy foods). I find that by prioritizing adding food instead of taking out, this removes a lot of pressure. We adopt more of an abundance mindset, rather than a mindset of restriction and lack.

Finally, remember that we are all bio-individual and have different needs. A food that is considered healthy may not be healthy for YOU, so pay attention to what foods make you feel good and what foods don’t. Listen to your body and act accordingly.

2. Take Sleep Seriously

You may roll your eyes at this one since you probably hear it all the time, but sleep hygiene is critical for the harmony of our health. Not only is a lack of sleep, particularly on a regular basis, associated with long-term health consequences such as chronic health conditions, but a lack of quality sleep can have immediate consequences, such as brain fog, mood changes, cravings, and hormonal disruption. Optimizing sleep quality and circadian rhythm is imperative for our bodies to recover and restore. Here are my top actionable tips to improve your sleep:

Along with this, minimize blue blight at night (aka put your phone and laptop away once the sun goes down, or program your tablets to have a red screen option if you’re going to use them). LED and overhead lighting are disruptive as well, so rather than having lights on in rooms after the sun goes down, try opting for candles or using incandescent lights, which produce warm, dimmable lighting that mimics that of a sunset and do not suppress melatonin production as significantly.

Try your best to go to bed and wake up at the same time or within an hour of that window each day. The more regular your sleep and wake times, the more it strengthens your circadian rhythm—the innate sense of when you get tired and when it’s time to get up. 

While supplementation is absolutely bio-individual and each person should get testing done to know what specific support their body might need, magnesium deficiency is extremely common and one that significantly impacts sleep due to its effect on relaxation. “… because of chronic disease, medications, decreases in food crop magnesium contents, and the availability of refined and processed foods, the vast majority of people in modern societies are at risk for magnesium deficiency” [PMID: 29387426]. Magnesium glycinate specifically has been a game-changer supplement for the quality of my sleep. I recommend getting your minerals tested via an HTMA (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis) test if possible, to understand which of your minerals you may need extra support with.

3. Move Daily

In a world where sitting has been claimed as the new smoking, it’s evident that we’re no longer getting close to the amount of daily movement that our hunter-gatherer ancestors once were. In fact, one article detailing the evolution of human step counts, detailed that our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked an average “daily travel distances of 12 km/day and step counts of ∼10,000–18,000 steps/day… [but] Because of recent technological innovations, daily step counts along with travel distances in nations like the US have declined in an evolutionary blink of an eye by 3–4-fold to ape-like levels of approximately 3–5 km/day and 5,000 steps/day.” For reasons such as convenience, proximity, and learned laziness, humans are unfortunately moving less and less, and the effects are indisputably harmful.

In 2025, the Mayo Clinic cited that “researchers analyzed 13 studies of sitting time and activity levels among more than 1 million people. They found that people who sat for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity had a risk of dying similar to the risk posed by obesity and smoking.” An important caveat here: with no physical activity, meaning, even brief periods of movement can help reverse the harmful effects of too much sitting. A Harvard Medical School article included a study conducted on over 8,000 people where they wore an activity monitor for a week, then proceeded to follow these participants for up to 10 years afterward. “What they found is that even small amounts of movement throughout the day seemed to counteract some of the ill effects of sitting… They also estimated that people who did 30 minutes daily of moderate to vigorous activity, such as running or playing sports, had a 35% lower rate of dying during the study period.”

4. Find Your Calm

Nervous system regulation, or your body’s ability to manage stress and return to a calm, safe state after experiencing stress, is so, so important for improving health. You can be doing everything ‘right’ with your health but if you’re constantly in a sympathetic state (fight or flight), your body cannot function optimally. While being in the sympathetic state is not inherently bad, (in fact we need to have this to function), most people in the modern world are chronically stressed and in this state for too much of the day. Managing stress and attempting to spend 50% of my day in the parasympathetic (rest and digest) state has personally been one of my biggest health struggles.

Examples of activities or things that can put you in the sympathetic state include: work tasks/stressors, notifications on phone, exercise (yes—even though it’s healthy, it’s stressful on the body), doom-scrolling, watching intense tv/movies, arguing, holding fear, etc. Examples of activities that induce the parasympathetic state include: sleeping, walking, meditation, prayer, grounding (bare feet on the grass/sand), conversing with loved ones, creative outlets, breathwork, ideally eating (without distractions), etc.

My obvious tip for nervous system regulation is finding the activities you enjoy that put you into a parasympathetic state. For me, this looks like quality sleep, walks, reading the Bible, meditating with red light, and trying my best to be intentional about swapping my phone for creative activities like painting or coloring. For those who feel chronically stressed, I’d urge you to write down a normal, real day in your life and then make a list of the things that made you feel stressed and those that made you feel relaxed. If the list is not close to 50/50, it’s time to work on adjusting your inputs. For example, if your day included spending your free-time doom-scrolling, watching TV, and eating every meal while trying to get work done at the same time, it would be beneficial to reassess and change some of those inputs. Don’t worry about trying to fix everything at once; focus on progress rather than perfection when starting.

These are the top four practices I would focus on implementing if I were looking to improve my health, whether starting from scratch or just looking to reset my health after falling off my routines. While many people are enticed to ‘major in the minors’, that is, wanting to focus more on bio-hacking and finding solutions outside of themselves to improve their health, I am of the belief that true health transformation happens when we get back to the basics and practice them consistently. If you would like support or accountability in implementing these rituals or other healthy habits long term, I’d love to support you through my 3-month RESET health coaching offering!

In good health,
Maddie

Works Cited

DiNicolantonio, James J, et al. “Subclinical Magnesium Deficiency: A Principal Driver of Cardiovascular Disease and a Public Health Crisis.” Open Heart, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, p. e000668, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786912/, https://doi.org/10.1136/openhrt-2017-000668.

Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Why Sleep Matters: Consequences of Sleep Deficiency.” Sleep.hms.harvard.edu, 1 Oct. 2021, sleep.hms.harvard.edu/education-training/public-education/sleep-and-health-education-program/sleep-health-education-45.

“Even Brief Periods of Movement Can Reverse the Harmful Effects of Sitting – Harvard Health.” Harvard Health, Harvard Health Publishing Harvard Medical School, May 2019, www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/even-brief-periods-of-movement-can-reverse-the-harmful-effects-of-sitting. Accessed 3 Mar. 2026.

Laskowski, Edward. “Sitting Risks – How Harmful Is Too Much Sitting.” Mayo Clinic, 26 Mar. 2025, www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/expert-answers/sitting/faq-20058005.

Medicine, Northwestern. “Why Magnesium Matters.” Northwestern Medicine, Sept. 2023, www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/nutrition/Why-Magnesium-Matters.

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep.” National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, 5 Sept. 2024, www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/public-education/brain-basics/brain-basics-understanding-sleep.

Raichlen, David A., and Daniel E. Lieberman. “The Evolution of Human Step Counts and Its Association with the Risk of Chronic Disease.” Current Biology, vol. 32, no. 21, Nov. 2022, pp. R1206–R1214, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.030.