I never thought I’d be writing a post with lifestyle tips for cancer prevention, yet here I am. Last January I had a little bit of a health scare. At my yearly women’s well-check, the doctor thought she felt a lump in my left breast. So she told me to schedule a mammogram. At that appointment, they thought they saw a mass and also needed to do an ultrasound. As I lay there waiting for them to analyze the results I started thinking…am I truly doing everything in my control to prevent cancer? Because we either create an environment for cancer cells to thrive or to die. They came back in the room and said they think it is a fibroadenoma (non-cancerous breast lump) and told me to come back in six months to see if it had any growth.
Following that experience, I went home and started researching and I put together a simplified list of lifestyle tips for cancer prevention and slowly started implementing them. Thankfully, when I went back in six months later, it was gone and they couldn’t find anything.
Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in what may appear to be a healthy lifestyle but isn’t necessarily all that healthy. For example, exclusively striving for weight loss or a perfect body with a six-pack rather than a healthy lifestyle. It’s so easy to become blinded of what a truly healthy lifestyle looks like because of all the distractions and theories out there. Not to mention, it’s so overwhelming. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Perfection is not the goal here, either. We have to do the best we can and continue to keep ourselves in check. Progress over perfection.
- Try to get 8 hours of sleep each night
- Drink lemon water every morning
Click here to read my post on lemon water
- Limit grains & sugar
- Try to remove processed foods from your diet and eat whole foods.
- Sunshine (20 min/day without sunscreen)
- Lessen Caffeine Intake
- Remove environmental toxins to the best of your ability
Click here to read my post on Non-toxic Household Cleaning Products here.
Click here to read my post on Safe Skincare and Cosmetics here.
– Cook with stainless steel, cast iron or green non-stick cookware rather than traditional non-stick pans that are coated in Teflon.
– Choose glass or stainless steel water bottles rather than plastic
– Shoes off in the house
– Drink filtered water
- Consider intermittent fasting a couple days a week as it reduces inflammation.
(Not for women that are pregnant, nursing or trying to conceive).
Click here to read my post on Intermittent Fasting
- Exercise/Be active 4-5 days/week.
- More Yoga/Less Stress
- Simplify life/less stress (Easier said than done, right?)
- Increase fruits & vegetables
- Minimize Dairy (Only raw, kefir, yogurt)
- Minimize meat from animals (not remove, minimize)
- Eat only organic meat
- Eat more seaweed, garlic, onion
- Eat more blueberries & dark grapes
- Eat more flaxseeds
- Drink more green tea/matcha
- Eat leafy greens & cruciferous veggies
- Eat more walnuts
- Eat more cinnamon
- Conduct monthly breast exams and stay up to date with yearly exams with your physician. Check out the American Cancer Society Guidelines for the Early Detection of Cancer.