This article serves as another example of how exercise is incredibly beneficial to your health. In addition to using exercise to treat RA, there are a number of other NATURAL tools I highly recommend adopting.

Most of the patients I see suffer from “ED.” That is not short for Erectile Dysfunction, but my term for Exercise Deficiency or Exercise Debt. Most of the two-thirds of the country who are overweight and tens of millions of others with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, desperately need more exercise to control their underlying condition. There simply is not much of a stronger tool to drop your insulin levels than exercise and elevated insulin levels are one of the primary drivers for these types of illnesses.

Exercise really needs to be viewed as a drug and very few clinicians or patients understand this. I believe it is one of the most powerful "drugs" that we have in the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Unlike typical commercial drugs, exercise can actually cause one to go into permanent remission for diabetes.

Most of the patients I see have a serious exercise debt and if they only walk for 30 minutes a few times a week they will never repay the principal on their debt. If they wish to optimize their health they need to do move towards about 90 minutes of cardiovascular exercise every day. This amount of exercise is only required in the treatment phase though and they can cut back to 45 minutes three times a week once they become healthy.

My personal form of exercise is running and earlier this week I wrote a post on why I enjoy running.

Also, it is important to seek to include some strength training exercise in your program in addition to the cardiovascular or aerobic type training. This will complement your fitness and help provide a well rounded structural frame that will improve your overall health. I believe that aerobic fitness is a higher priority than strength training, so if you only have time for one then do the cardio exercises, as that will impact your insulin levels the most. But it is important to squeeze in twice weekly strength training sessions if at all possible.

Additionally, most people are clueless about the exercise intensity and just don't understand that walking for 90 minutes isn't a sufficiently intense exercise. I explain to my patients that they need to go hard enough so that they are having a difficult time talking to someone and then drop back half a notch. If one can easily carry on a conversation with someone next to them they are clearly going to slow to generate the aerobic benefits that exercise is capable of doing.

One of the key principles I teach though is to listen to your body. If your body will not allow you to exercise either due to pain or worsening of your underlying condition then you have no practical option but to honor your body’s signals and not exercise. Even though your body desperately needs the exercise to improve, you will only get worse if you violate your current limitations. So you may have to start with as little as one or two minutes a day. Apply the Total Health Program and as your body gradually improves so will your tolerance to exercise tolerance, so continue to push yourself until you reach the daily 90 minute level.

Once at 90 minutes a day you will need to push the intensity so you are going hard enough so that it is difficult to carry on a conversation with someone standing next to you. If you can easily talk to someone you simply are not going hard enough to give your body the benefits it needs. You do not need to monitor your heart rate to measure this intensity and that makes it much easier to do.

I find the energy psychology tool Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, an enormously powerful tool in helping people exercise. EFT is a form of psychological acupuncture treatment I recommend in order to optimize your emotional health. It can help you remove the blocks that prevent you from successfully implementing your program. You can learn the technique with my free manual and discover more about the connection between your emotional well-being and your overall health.

EFT is also one of the most powerful tools I know of to help people repair the bioelectrical short circuiting that impairs a person’s immune system and makes them susceptible to developing rheumatoid arthritis, or for that matter any other autoimmune disease. I find it an essential tool in helping our patients recover from these diseases.

Also, seek assistance in learning the concepts of EFT through my EFT Series on DVD or VHS.

Another great tool in treating RA is to become familiar with your metabolic type. Individualizing your diet with metabolic typing principles is an absolutely amazing way to improve the results of treating RA, as it is an autoimmune disease, which means it is thought to occur when the body's immune system turns against itself.

That is why it is extremely important to take care of your body and make sure you are eating the right foods according to my plan. You can learn your specific type now by taking my free on-line metabolic type test.

Last, and certainly NOT least, is to treat RA by incorporating an optimized nutrition plan into your life. This not only involves the restriction of foods that impair the immune system (like sugar and grains), but also adding high levels of omega-3 fats into your diet. These fats, like DHA and EPA can be found in fish and cod liver oil.

Compared to natural methods, the treatment of RA with drugs, surgery or both are clearly inferior options.

Folks, if you or someone you know has this potentially devastating disease, please seek a form of treatment that addresses the underlying cause. Failure to treat the disease could condemn a person to a lifetime of misery, as much of the damage of RA is irreversible once it has occurred. Once the joints are destroyed there is no way to bring them back.

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