I came across a great article today about mindfulness and health. Being in the present moment, having self awareness is crucial to weight loss success and also to live a harmonious balanced lifestyle. If you are forever running around, if time flies by before you know it and you don’t really acknowledge what you are doing whether it be driving to work or stuffing your face with food, then you will find it extremely difficult to move forward with your weight loss.

Step back, take a moment to access the situation and you will reveal to yourself things you may never have noticed if you hadn’t of stepped back and looked at your life. The only way I truly was able to get to a weight I was comfortable with (and to continue to this day to achieve the healthy lifestyle I had always wanted) was by stepping back and spending the day observing myself. It revealed to me so many things I really hadn’t consciously acknowledged before, one being how food was a comfort blanket for me, a LOT of the time.

Anyway the article I came across talks about mindfulness being a form of meditation in which you: “…disengage yourself from strong beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, and increasing feelings of relaxation and well being”.

Being truly present is just something most of us live without, to our detriment, and something I feel strongly about introducing back into people’s lives for good!

The article talks about 5 strategies you can use to improve your mindfulness and subsequently your health and wellness. They are:

1. Consider what’s right with you.

Everyday take a moment to give thanks to the things that you do like about yourself and the things that do function correctly e.g. I am thankful I can walk, I am thankful for breathing easily etc.

2. Love yourself unconditionally.

Whether you give in to a piece of chocolate cake or if you end up eating a whole pizza, you must love yourself unconditionally. Don’t hate yourself for giving in, just embrace and accept this as a hiccup in your journey to where you want to be and learn from it. Being down on yourself or negative about yourself will only lead to failure. You are essentially setting yourself up for it by being negative.  So remain positive and when you feel yourself slipping into negativity thinking, focus on being in the present moment – dart your attention around the room to specific objects if this helps prevent you from taking your negative thinking further.

3. Live in the present moment.

When you live in the present moment, everything seems to make so much more sense. Living in the moment gives you the ability to grow, to learn and change. If you are dwelling on a past binge or worrying about the future, you aren’t living in the moment and you won’t truly enjoy life and those moments where you can grasp pleasure from it. Living in the moment also allows you to look at your life from a clear perspective. In the midst of a craving or a stressful situation, if you step back and access how you feel, you will ultimately be able to give yourself the breather you need instead of bundling along in some other dimension!

4. When life gets tough don’t take it personally.

While it is important to accept responsibility for your actions, you shouldn’t dwell on it.  The best way to deal with it is to look at what you are doing differently now, now what you could have done better in the past.

5. Put the “being” back in human.

If you fill every moment with manic activity you never give yourself a chance to simply be.  Just sitting for a moment and contemplating is a great stress reliever and calms you.  I usually spend my mornings in this way.  I awake and lay for a few moments or more in thoughtfulness before getting out of bed.  It sets my day up nicely especially after my morning smoothie

To read the full article : http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well-usn/2009/03/02/5-ways-to-be-mindful-and-achieve-optimal-health.html

Previous Post: How Much Water Should I Drink?  8 Glasses A Day?

Staying hydrated is an important aspect to our overall well being. If we are even slightly dehydrated it can be detrimental to our health. It can also make us feel very tired and run down. If you are overweight, you are most likely to be dehydrated.

Fruits and most greens contain a high percentage of water and if our diet contained lots of these foods additional water needed would be kept to a minimum. Sadly however, this isn’t the case. The majority of the Western world consumes far too little water-dense whole foods and too much dehydrated refined junk foods.

By nature, we are not water drinkers, so getting most of our water needs from fruits and greens is important. There is no firm reason why we should drink 8 glasses of water a day and should only drink when thirsty. This shouldn’t arise very often if we are consuming the fruits and greens our body needs.

No hard and fast rules can be set down when it comes to the matter of water. You can faithfully drink 8 glasses a day and be getting too much water or too little, maybe. If you are wise, you will listen to your body’s requirements.

It is often said that our body needs minimum amount of water per day and we should attempt to drink this amount each time. This isn’t necessarily something I would agree with following. Unless you body is telling you you are thirsty then don’t drink water for the sake of drinking it. Drinking too much water can be damaging to your health as well as too little.

However that being said, for the majority of us, our thirst mechanism isn’t usually working so well and for some of us we can’t even make the distinction between being hungry or being thirsty. We become dehydrated without even realizing it.

Here are some possible signs that you could be dehydrated:

Lack of energy & fatigue
Migraine headaches
Dandruff

Apathy
Salty sweat
Irritability and mild depression
Low back pain
Dry mouth
Dry and flaky skin
Weakness
Excessive sleepiness
Constipation

Chronic Dehydration

Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries For Water, claims that many of our health problems are a result of dehydration. He claims that chronic dehydration can cause many conditions including asthma, allergies, arthritis, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression etc.

I must say, having suffered from asthma and allergies once upon a time, I can see how being dehydrated may have affected those things in me. Since I upped my intake of fruits and greens (water-dense foods) my asthma and allergies have COMPLETELY disappeared. Water, or lack of, could have potentially be an irritant to my asthma/allergies.

Drinking more water will most likely not hurt you if you aren’t someone very familiar with your thirst signals and who doesn’t eat a lot of water dense fruits. In fact it can only help you. Whether you need 8 glasses is largely debateable on the premise of individual differences, so don’t worry if you aren’t consuming that many.

The best things you can to increase your water intake is:

Cut out other drinks.

Soda, Alcohol, Coffee are all dehydrating and should not be included in your add up of how much water you have consumed. Instead of drinking these, make an effort to only consume water as a drink through out the day. If you have any of the other drinks, drink twice as much water to make up for it.

Up your intake of fruits and greens.

This is one of the best things you can do. By getting a lot of water from the foods you eat means you have to worry less about how much water you are drinking.

What do you do to stay hydrated?

Previous Post: Superfoods Diet: Gree Superfood Supplements Not So Super

Superfoods are a hot topic in the world of health and are increasing touted as being among the healthiest food sources available. The term superfood is usually used to describe any food with a high concentration of phytonutrients. Phytonnutrients are celebrated for their health promoting benefits by many health food companies and researchers.

Superfoods include berries, leafy greens, sprouts, bee pollen, aloe vera, raw cacao (if you can call it “raw”), gogji berries, flax seeds and many others.

I don’t have a problem really with berries or leafy greens. In fact I really feel that we all need to be consuming lots of leafy greens in our diet and plenty of fruits. So if you desire berries, go for it and eat lots of them (I currently have a major love for blueberries!). When we take those superfoods and ground them down into a powder or a pill form, that’s when I have an issue.

Green superfoods or green powders have received a lot of attention in the past few decades; specifically green superfoods such as spirulina, blue green algae and chlorella. I was even suckered into buying some green blue algae at one point in my life, believing it would was beneficial and necessary for health. I am not saying they can’t be beneficial but I do not think they are necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

Superfoods, along with vitamin supplements (more on this in another post), are recommended regardless of what diet we are on, to make up for nutritional inadequacies but claims for superfoods are ridiculous and scientifically false.

If you are eating a diet with an abundance of fresh whole fruits, vegetables and leafy greens, getting plenty of exercise, plenty of sleep, sunshine and fresh air and leading a healthy lifestyle, you do not need to supplement with anything, including superfoods.

If you do not live this way, simply supplementing or eating “superfoods” isn’t the answer and isn’t going to be helpful in the long run.

Any food that has had its water removed, its fiber removed and vital components stripped out is not a whole food let alone a health food. Concentrated vitamins out of the ratio that nature intended in whole fruits and vegetables aren’t healthy either. Not to mention when one removes the water from food, the oxidation process destroys many of the remaining nutrients, making them far less nutritious than they were in a whole state.

We do not need them and we are the only creatures on the earth to grind things into dried powders and pills and think we will benefit from them and even call them superfoods. On top of this supplementation really is only necessary under some circumstances.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman (a nutrition expert and practising physician) recommends supplements in some circumstances, but agrees that they can be dangerous. He states in his book Eat to Live:

“A high intake of just one nutrient when nature has combined it with many others may make things worse, not better. We humans, especially physicians, are notorious for interfering with nature, thinking we know better. Sometimes we do- all too often we don’t.

Only later, when it is often too late, do we realize that in fact we have made things worse. While it still may take decades longer to understand how whole foods promote health, we must accept the fact that the foods found in nature are ideally suited to the biological needs of the species.“

Dr Doug Graham (author of the 80/10/10 diet and Grain Damage) also believes supplementation may be necessary in some cases during the initial stages of lifestyle change and “would be done solely to allow time for the benefits of correct living to accrue or for extenuating circumstances to pass”.

The amount of nutrients we require are far less than medical advice allows us to believe. High fat and low raw food diets mean we absorb very small amounts of nutrients from the food we eat, making it seem as though we need more of them, when really we need to change the way we eat to a low fat, high raw diet.

Correcting one’s lifestyle, consuming lots of fruits and vegetables and cutting down our fat intake is key to improving absorption and utilization of nutrients and health.

Save Your Money for Fruit and Greens: Avoid Superfood Supplements!

Anyone endorsing superfoods, trying to sell to you the latest scientific breakthrough, is only after your money and isn’t concerned about your health.

Superfoods are an expensive waste of time and money. Do yourself a favor and use the money you would have spent on superfoods and use it to buy some fruit and vegetables – you will be MUCH better off.

I just came across an article on nytimes.com which I agree with quite a bit.

It’s general underlying statement is really that we shouldn’t be so hung up on the organic thing, we should first be making sure we are eating better.  I couldn’t agree more, especially when the article says “we get 7% of our calories from soft drinks, more than we do from vegetables“.

Although it would be great if everyone was eating organic, growing our own vegetables and thinking about our impact on the earth, some of us aren’t in a position to do any of those things and even if we were, the first focus of a healthy eating and living lifestyle should be to make sure we are eating fruits and vegetables, regardless of whether they are organic or not. 

When we are at a point of being able to say to ourselves we have a balanced, nutritious diet full of fruits and vegetables, then we can start addressing the issue of organic or homegrown produce.

If non-organic is all we can afford while we make a transition to a higher fruit/vegetable diet than we shouldn’t worry too much about pesticides and airmiles (until we are in a more stable position with our eating habits to take it on) because it is a MUCH better improvement than the hormones and toxins that are in the meat we eat.  Cutting down on meat and consuming more fruits and vegetables is a great start but we can overcomplicate it at first if we focus on the wrongs things.

Our health should come first, then the environment.  Once we are able to take care of ourselves and nourish our bodies, we can then take care of the environment and make better choices for the world we live.

So if you aren’t a big fruit or vegetable eater work on that first.  Then work on whether you want to switch to organic or homegrown food.

Full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22bittman.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Health Quote of the Day

This is one of my favorite quotes and always brings me back to the present moment.  Enjoy!

Keep my word positive. Words become my behaviors. Keep my behaviors positive. Behaviors become my habits. Keep my habits positive. Habits become my values. Keep my values positive. Values become my destiny.

Mahatma Gandhi

Top 5 Nutrition Myths

I can’t seem to lose the weight despite continuous efforts to do so; I just keep craving and bingeing…

Food cravings are one of the subtle, cultured forms of addiction and compulsive behavior that are very difficult to discern.  It is acceptable to have an addiction when it comes to food, or so it seems.  We all have them and we all treat people with this particular addiction (addiction to food) entirely different to someone who is addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

Where as someone who craves alcohol would be encouraged to seek help, those of us who crave sugary snacks are often – if not all the time – encouraged to indulge in our addictions.  And if we don’t indulge we will often hear the retort:

“Why are you depriving yourself?”

“A little isn’t going to hurt!”

Can you honestly say that the foods you crave are not addictions?

Most foods that are craved have no nutritional benefit to you and can cause and contribute to a number of different health conditions including excess fat, diabetes, heart disease etc.

Why would you want to eat these foods other than for comfort and pleasure?  You wouldn’t.  It is your addiction to them that makes you eat them.

Food has the power to control you in this way.  Sugar, salt and foods laced with fat are emotionally and physically addictive.  In order to rid yourself of these substances from your life, the first step is to admit there is a problem.  This is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you think you are eating that sandwich out of hunger.

But cravings are a bent form of hunger and it is quite possible that you may have never felt what true hunger feels like.  You are probably used to the unger that gets your stomach growling, that makes you feel agitated and that resultings in your needing food right then and there.

This is not hunger – it is addiction.

Addiction is anything that has become stronger than your willpower to change.

Bread, sweets, coffee, meat and salt among a million other foods, provide you with false needs and behavior patterns that are destructive to your well being and can have a greater authority in behavior than the natural desire to eat and drinnk.  The salt, fat and crunch of junk food offer emotionsl of fulfillment that are lacking because of a spritiual vacuum – a feeling deep down inside that something is missing.

Emotional emptiness is the source of addiction in most cases – dependency on pleasure to temporarily numb our feelings of hopelessness is usually the root issue.

The sensations of hunger and thirst are homeostatic mechanisms which help the body maintain optimum levels of energy, nutrients and water.  When addictive foods are eaten repeatedly, the body adjusts homeostasis to be balanced with the food in the system.  Over time the body will become dependent on that substance for homeostatic balance and its removal will cause withdrawal.  The body cries out for the missing substance as just intense hunger cries for food.

Control has been established on the inside of you.  Even if there is an intense desire to lose weight there is often failure and discouragement.

But how did it all come about?

The potential and most likely start of food addiction is from the moment you were born.  Living in a society that deems food as a social function and emotional poise it can be hard not to associate food with emotion/feelings (whether they are good or bad).

This would seem to suggest that we are all addicted to food and I would say we are to some extent. However, not everyone has a problem with food.

Some people overuse this method of consuming food at an emotional/social event, pushing it into every aspect of their lives. It may have started with an upset in childhood, where your mother gave you some cookies or cake to make you feel better, and as you grew you began to use this comfort as a way of easing your pain whenever pain arose. You went through your teens with the usual social awkwardness and pubescent pains and food was your way to make it easier. You then went onto college and a stressful job and the only comfort you had was food. Your days revolved around you coming home from work and comforting yourself with a takeaway or something else. It was your little treat.

Unfortunately this is an all too common scenario for people and a lot of people do not recognize they have an issue and if they do have some awareness, they do not take it seriously because the world doesn’t take it seriously. The world does not recognize it as an addiction.

Overeating is a powerful way to change the state of your mind. Eating is a way to silence the mind.

The compulsion to eat sets up a very painful process. It makes one feel weak and out of control. It prevents many from successfully losing weight and eating a healthy diet, because the endless slip ups and indulgences into junk food for comfort can leave one in a very low insecure place.

Emotional eaters have a dependency on food to get through life – to survive challenges. Many of us are emotional eaters. We avoid emotion, we avoid allowing emotion to flow through us and instead we void it by numbing it. This doesn’t work though, because that pain is still there, we have just put it off.

Emotional eating is instant gratification and short lived, but it is a very hard thing to break free from. However, to be able to control our eating, to lose weight and to live a fulfilling satisfying life, it is crucial that emotional eating is addressed.

Emotions aren’t something one should fear, we should embrace every one that we feel and experience and that’s just it: we should allow ourselves to feel and experience them. The more we do so, the better we are able to manage them and more able e are to cope in stressful situations in the world. The world will also be a much more interesting place and wonderful place.

We need to make peace with our food and we need to allow ourselves to be happy. You can beat your addictions, you can break your reliance on food and the first step to do so is to be aware of your reliance.

Some questions to think about concerning your own emotional eating:

(Being aware of the following questions throughout the course of a day can help you better answer them)

1. Emotional eating is one aspect of food addiction. What other aspects of food addiction are present in your life? For example, being overweight is a sign of food addiction just like emotional eating. Can you pinpoint any others?
2. Have you been on diets before and if so what has made you break them? How did you feel before and after breaking your diet? Did breaking your diet give you relief? Was it stressful to be on a diet that prevented you from using food as a comfort?

For more information on how to overcome cravings click here

The Social & Emotional Aspects of Eating Video

Part One: Introduction to Emotional Eating

Part Two: What Fuels Emotional Eating

This is a video of a talk by Professor Rozalind Gruben/Graham on the social and emotional aspects of eating.  It is a great introduction to the social and emotional aspects and I wholeheartedly recommend you watch it (along with the other parts to it). 

Here is part one:

Positive Affirmations: A Great Way to Start Your Day

I thought I would share this video of positive affirmations.  Waking up and watching this video is a great way to start your day and gets you in a good positive mood.  Enjoy

Health Quote of the Day

“How is a man who is already sick to be made less so by swallowing a substance that would sicken – even kill -him if he were to take it in a state of health?  The theory that a serious disease can be removed by creating a temporary and less serious one must have been invented in a madhouse!”

Dr Herbert Shelton

 Health Quote of the Day 12th March 09

The Health Quote for today is:

“The fact is, we are always kidding ourselves into believing that the things we are in the habit of doing are the very things we should do; that the things we have learned to like are the things that are best for us.  And consciously or unconsciously resist any proposed change, even if there are plenty of evidences that the change would be for the better!”

Dr Herbert Shelton

Health Quote of the Day 11th March 09