Tag: Sleep

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Weight Loss Exercise

5 Healthy Habits

It is time to talk about healthy habits.When you vow to improve your health you don’t have to instantly become a gym-addict or stop eating everything you love. It really comes down to incorporating healthy habits into your daily routine. Here are five habits that will set you off on a new healthy path.

5 Healthy Habits

Health Habit 1 –Drink More Water – Drinking water is the first great healthy habit, will improve your health for so many reasons! For one, if you’re trying to lose weight then it’s a lot easier if you drink water: (a) because it’ll stop you drinking sugary, calorie-laden drinks and (b) because we often mistake dehydration for hunger, causing us to overeat.

5 Healthy Habits

Healthy Habits

Experts recommend that you should be drinking eight glasses of water a day. This may sound difficult, but it really isn’t. Start by getting into the habit of drinking a full glass of water as soon as you wake up in the morning. It’ll help you feel more awake and more hydrated after the long night’s sleep. And it’ll get you off on the right foot for drinking enough water throughout the day.

Health Habit 2 –Get Enough Sleep – These days, very few of us actually get the sleep we need. When you don’t get enough sleep, you’re more prone to stress, unhealthy snacking, and turning to caffeine to keep you alert! This really isn’t good for your health.

We’re all different when it comes to how many hours of sleep we need each night. Adults need less and less sleep the older they get. The magic number for you probably lies somewhere in between seven and ten hours a night. Experts also agree that having a routine is crucial when it comes to getting enough sleep. Try to go to bed at the same time every night. Then, if it only happens every now and again, you won’t feel so many negative effects of a late night. This healthy habit will make you a lot more effective all the time.

Health Habit 3 –Walk More – If you really want to improve your health then start walking every day. A walk doesn’t just help you get more exercise, it’s also good for the soul. When you walk you’re getting fresh air and spending time away from the usual stresses of everyday life. The healthy habit of walking gives you time to think, and time to clear your head of anything that’s bothering you.

There are a few ways to get more walks into your daily routine. One idea is to go for a 30 minute walk on your lunch break each day. Or you could start walking short distances (under 2 miles) where you’d normally drive. You could even start taking stairs instead of elevators. Anything that boosts the physical activity you’re doing each day will help!

Health Habit 4 -Stretch – Try starting each day with a real stretching session. Stretching feels good, and is an excellent way to wake yourself up in the morning by getting your blood flowing. The Mayo Clinic states that stretching can also help to improve your athletic ability and reduce the risk of injury when you exercise. You could take this one step further and incorporate yoga stretches into your routine. You’ll find that your posture improves, you feel more healthy, and focusing becomes easier.

Health Habit 5 –Relax – No matter how much you exercise or watch your diet, you won’t truly improve your health until you learn how to relax! Getting stressed, anxious and angry about things only lowers your immune system and makes you more vulnerable to a whole range of health complications (both physical and mental). Learn to take some time for you. Try getting regular massages, attending a yoga class, learning how to meditate, or unwinding with regular relaxing baths.

Building Healthy Habits into your life

We all have habits and ways of living a good and effective life as well as habits that will hold us back. It is important to always look at our exercise, lifestyle, eating, drinking, resting, and even the people that we do things with to decide what we should be doing or not. Start by incorporating these healthy habits and then find more.

5 Healthy Habits

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General Weight Loss Tips

Trimming the Fat

I’ve been reading so many books lately that are rocking my world and changing my perspective. I would like to consider myself someone who is open (yet reluctant at times) to evolving my opinion and changing what I’m doing. Sometimes I worry that people see it as flighty and at times it can be, but I like to be aware of what behaviors are and are not working for me. If something doesn’t feel right I either try to change it, or change the way I look at it.

What book am I speaking of?

If you read nothing else this summer, please read this one. Oh my. Oh my. Oh my. I’m only a few pages in and I’m seeing the changes ahead of me. At first glance I thought this book was going to be about living on less, buying less and being a better consumer. And while it does touch on those subjects, Leo talks a lot about doing less. I could not have read this at a better time.

Lately (as you will notice from my lack of blog posting) that I’ve been a wee bit busy. We’re all busy right? Well, I’ve been piling things on. Saying yes when I should say no, getting less sleep, constantly trying to catch-up with my work and just trying to stay above water. All the while hoping that it would all take me to a place of productivity, more money and more freedom. I was wrong. I goodness I was wrong.

You remember my cough from a few weeks ago? I’m still coughing. I feel better, and the cough is less, but I’m still coughing. And the work that I am getting done feels rushed- a feeling that I’m truly not comfortable with.

In The Power of Less Leo compares two journalists. One who writes thirty articles a week compared to the one who writes only one a week. The first journalist gets praise from his editor for his productivity which boosts him up to keep going, yet his articles are not well researched. The second journalist who spends more time researching, writing and re-writing isn’t praised immediately, but respected. His article wins awards and propels his career. For a long time now I’ve the first journalist. And I really want to be the second one.

Leo talks about setting yearly goals; one or two instead of the typical 10-20 some of us (me!) set every year. He talks about trimming out excess tasks that aren’t getting you closer to your goals.

How is this related to weight loss?

My goal is better health through weight loss (or weight loss through better health!. It comes in different forms, has been mildly achieved, but still out there waiting for me to arrive. My banner begs to be changed to The Former Token Fat Girl. It’s the line blinking, waiting for me to type.

Just like a job that you show up for every day, a project with deadlines, or paying off debt- weight loss is a goal, a responsibility to myself to show up every day for, same as it were an item on my to-do list. I am just as important as the jewelry I make, the designs that are filed away on my computer and all the future interests I may have. I am more important.

My daily to-do lists make my head spin. They are paralyzing at times. They are unobtainable tasks mocking me from afar. The thing about my life is that I am my work. What I do to make a living is every bit apart of who I am. The ideas never stop. I don’t go home and settle down for the evening and turn off my creativity. When someone asks me to design a logo, if I’m lucky I will start to see how it’s going to look as a flash in my head. Sometimes I wake up with the design ideas in my head waiting for me to execute them. Often it feels like creativity is something I receive from an unknowing source. It just is.

But what I do have control over is how I spend my time and what is worth focusing on. I feel lucky that, for me, it is all intertwined. Being healthy, blogging, creating jewelry, designing…it’s all the same for me. It’s all creative, captivating and interesting. However, I’m at the point where I can’t carry so many torches. No matter how much I’d love to be a caterer, personal chef, interior designer, blogger, fitness guru, graphic design, metal smith, painter, illustrator, florist- all at the same time- I can’t. I have to let go. I have to focus.

I don’t want to mass produce jewelry, cramming in all I can the day before a show. If I only create a couple of pieces a month- pieces that are thought out, well executed and the best craftsmanship that I can produce- I will be happy, if not happier with my production. And with that I have decided to stop selling at markets and shows. I want fewer, high-quality items to represent me. Trimming the fat.

Next, there will be a major overhaul with my stuff. Getting rid of the excess, the unnecessary and unloved. The clutter that prevents the organization—the sanity.

I’m going to focus on less, fewer big goals with lots of small goals contributing to the big ones.

My big goals are:

1) Be healthy/lose weight and document the process here. To make myself a priority.

2) To create fewer, higher-quality pieces of jewelry a year.

3) To grow as a graphic designer.

Of course, I will still dabble for fun, but I’m going to stop trying to turn every interest into a career. I may change course next year and decide that I want to make handbags, or jars of salsa but that’s for me to decide next year.

Phew.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Sleep, Rest and Relaxation and health | sleep and rest



Sleep, rest and relaxation are a very important part of your daily ritual. I know that in the past I have gotten reved up with many projects and before long something has to be let go and it is usually the sleep that I need for a while. Don’t do it! As your sleep and rest start dropping you lose focus and can be lured into bad habits, sugar, coffee, and bad food. The worst thing about a lack of rest is that your body will not have a chance to heal from your earlier workouts, this can be very bad as you not only will feel sore longer but it will also suck your optimism for your new lifestyle.

How Much Sleep to Get

How much rest is enough? You probably already know this. I myself do not wake up with an alarm clock or clock radio anymore. I am fortunate to have a flexible start time and know that I will not sleep in past 8:00 in the morning. Try going to be earlier in the evening for a few nights and see when you wake up. In the fall and winter I always tape the TV shows that I watch so that I can get a chance to watch them when it is convenient to me not when it is convenient for the TV networks.

Another thing that pro bodybuilders do is have a nap in the afternoon, a nap can be great in cleansing your mind and letting you learn to relax better but you will probably find as I do that it si almost impossible to do except maybe on the weekends.

You can probably see from the tone of this information that I am delivering here that you must stop treating sleep and rest as something that takes away from something and instead learn to treat it as your own personal time, something a little more sacred than just something unavoidable that has to be done.

The Effects of Sleep

According to leading sleep researchers, there are techniques to combat common sleep problems:

  • Keep a regular sleep/wake schedule
  • Don’t drink or eat caffeine four to six hours before bed and minimize daytime use
  • Don’t smoke, especially near bedtime or if you awake in the night
  • Avoid alcohol and heavy meals before sleep
  • Get regular exercise
  • Minimize noise, light and excessive hot and cold temperatures where you sleep
  • Develop a regular bed time and go to bed at the same time each night
  • Try and wake up without an alarm clock
  • Attempt to go to bed earlier every night for certain period; this will ensure that you’re getting enough sleep

According to sleep researchers, a night’s sleep is divided into five continually shifting stages, defined by types of brain waves that reflect either lighter or deeper sleep. Toward morning, there is an increase in rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, when the muscles are relaxed and dreaming occurs, and recent memories may be consolidated in the brain.

No Hitting the Snooze Button

The experts say that hitting a snooze alarm over and over again to wake up is not the best way to feel rested. ‘The restorative value of rest is diminished, especially when the increments are short,’ said psychologist Edward Stepanski, PhD who has studied sleep fragmentation at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. This on and off again effect of dozing and waking causes shifts in the brain-wave patterns. Sleep-deprived snooze-button addicts are likely to shorten their quota of REM sleep, impairing their mental functioning during the day. (New York Times, October 12, 2004)

Certain therapies, like cognitive behavioral therapy teach people how to recognize and change patterns of thought and behavior to solve their problems. Recently this type of therapy has been shown to be very effective in getting people to fall asleep and conquer insomnia.

According to a study published in the October 2004 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine, cognitive behavior therapy is more effec