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01-24-12

Simple Rules for Eating Healthy in 2012

It’s a new year, and for many of you, you’re try­ing for the umpteenth time to exer­cise and eat healthy. I’m one of those peo­ple, and this year I’m com­mit­ting to a non-​​traditional diet that has very sim­ple rules. In my expe­ri­ence, you can loose weight and nour­ish your body with­out hav­ing to count calo­ries, fat, carbs, etc. I’ve already lost 10lb this year.

In my new healthy eat­ing lifestyle, it’s not so much a num­bers game as it objec­tive based eat­ing. Read on and see what I mean.

Dos:

1. Drink 2 liters of water a day (3 liters in hot­ter weather). This helps with the diges­tion process so food doesn’t sit and accu­mu­late. It also flushes out tox­ins and is good for your heart and vas­cu­lar system.
2. Eat more greens. The more raw the bet­ter. If you want an easy way to get your veg­gies, you can either drink a cup of Green Machine a day or look into Juice Pluse.
3. Eat slower. Eat­ing fast has proven to cause weight gain and it’s harder on your diges­tive sys­tem when you don’t allow the enzymes in your saliva to do their part in digest­ing the food. Try chew­ing your food until it’s a pulp. Eat­ing slower also will help you eat less. Your brain doesn’t rec­og­nize how full your stom­ach is until about 20min after you start eat­ing. Try tak­ing a smaller por­tion than nor­mal, eat­ing slower, and you may find that smaller por­tion quite satisfying.
4. Sup­ple­ment with vit­a­mins. The 3 big ones are fish oil, multi-​​vitamin, and B vitamins.

Don’ts:

1. Stop drink­ing soda (pop, coke, what­ever you call it). When I stopped drink­ing car­bon­ated drink years ago, it was amaz­ing how the dif­fer­ence one choice like that made.
2. Cut out red meat. Not say­ing you can’t have it occa­sion­ally, but if you’re really ana­lyt­i­cal and need me to break it down for you, I’d say only allow one serv­ing of red meat a week. Alter­na­tively you should be eat­ing white meats like chicken, turkey, and fish.
3. Don’t bring junk food into your home. It should be an auto­matic given that when you do your gro­cery shop­ping, ice cream, chips, and candy (or any other food in those aisles) don’t go in your shop­ping cart (the excep­tion would be for a party or holidays).
4. Stop eat­ing fast food! There’s noth­ing more to be said about that.
5. Watch out for cheese. If it’s an option to put on your sandwich…opt out. If there’s a meal with sub­stan­tial amounts of cheese in it, def­i­nitely stay away. There’s a lot of fat in that stuff.

The last rule is that if you’re going to choose to eat healthy, you need to choose to live healthy all around. The real­ity is, eat­ing is only part of it. You need to com­mit to mak­ing healthy choices through­out the day. Cut down on tv watching, exercise daily, have hob­bies, get out and socialize.

Don’t fol­low this list to loose weight, do it to pre­vent or help your already exist­ing high blood pres­sure, dia­betes, con­ges­tive heart fail­ure, etc.

05-09-11

Simple Shopping for Singles

Sin­gle­ness offers offers a lot of free­dom and flex­i­bil­ity. That includes when and how you eat. Instead of meal plans like most diets, try por­tion plans. Assum­ing you’re want­ing to eat healthy, here’s a few tips to help along the way.

• Cal­cu­late you caloric intake
• Deter­mine your daily food intake
• Once you know your daily food intake, mul­ti­ply that by 1-​​2wk (depend­ing how often you go shopping)
• Now go out and do your shopping
• Assum­ing you’ve cleared out all the junk food out of your house, you can eat any­thing in your cab­i­nets as much or lit­tle as you want within those 1-​​2wk.

We all are hun­grier on some days than oth­ers, so why bother stick­ing to spe­cific meals that are allot­ted per day​.As long as your calo­rie intake is less or equal (depend­ing on your goals) than your calo­rie expen­di­ture, then you’ll be ok.

11-11-10

The Ultimate Trick to Waking Up Early

Go to bed early!

04-23-10

12 Steps to Sleeping Better

In the past, my sleep has suf­fered greatly.  I kept wak­ing up all through­out the night, I’d wake up super tired no mat­ter how much sleep I got, and I con­tin­u­ally would have split­ting headaches from the time I got up that would last all day.  Finally, I was tired of this, so I did some research on how to sleep bet­ter.  What I found has rev­o­lu­tion­ized my sleep since I started imple­ment­ing these new sleep meth­ods.  It may come as a sur­prise to some of you, but the amount of sleep you get is one of the small­est fac­tors.  If you’re hav­ing trou­ble sleep­ing, I hope this is a help to you.

1. Shut off your com­puter and TV an hour before bed.  The type of images that those dis­plays put off make it dif­fi­cult for your brain to shut down.
2. Med­i­tate.  Med­i­ta­tion helps cool down the engines of your brain.  So, doing some light plea­sure read­ing or pray­ing for 15-​​20min works.
3. Take a hot shower. Tak­ing a hot shower imme­di­ately before bed helps loosen up tense mus­cles.  It also raises the body tem­per­a­ture so that when it drops back down, it actu­ally causes your body to relax and fall asleep easier.
4. Keep elec­tronic devices 3 feet away from the bed. Elec­tronic devices, includ­ing cell phones and alarm clocks, send out elec­tronic impulses which affect your brain waves in turn dis­turb­ing your sleep.
5. Wear socks to bed. I know the major­ity of you are going to hate this one, but it all depends on how well you want to sleep.  Your feet have the poor­est cir­cu­la­tion of blood which causes them to be the cold­est part of your body.  It’s impor­tant to have an evenly reg­u­lated body tem­per­a­ture in order to sleep more soundly.  Hence, you need to wear those socks.  Don’t worry, you’ll get use to it.
6. Be con­sis­tent. Try to go to bed and get up at the same time every­day.  Being con­sis­tent in what time you wake up is more impor­tant than what time you go to bed.
7. Visu­al­ize your morn­ing. It actu­ally helps to have pos­i­tive thoughts about wak­ing up the next morn­ing.  Try to pic­ture your alarm going off, imag­ine feel­ing rested when you wake up, and think about some excit­ing things you’re going to do the next day.
8. Don’t look at the light.  Once you go to bed, keep the room as dark as pos­si­ble.  Even the small­est sliver of light will dis­turb your sleep.  That means try to use the bath­room before bed so you don’t have to go in the mid­dle of the night.  If you end up going at 2am any­way, try not to turn on the light.
9. Find your sleep­ing cycle. Our bod­ies sleep in cycles.  There are mul­ti­ple times dur­ing the night where you’re sleep­ing deeper and other times when you’re sleep­ing lighter.  The key is to wake up on your light sleep­ing cycle.  So, you may be able to wake up eas­ier at 4:30am and feel more rested than you would if you woke up at 6am.  That’s some­thing you’d have to exper­i­ment with.  I rec­om­mend try­ing dif­fer­ent times in incre­ments of 30min and you should be able to find your cycle some­where in a 2hr block of time.
10. Cre­ate arti­fi­cial light. If you wake up before the sun comes up, try to set up some­thing that will auto­mat­i­cally turn on light to help recre­ate the nat­u­rally awak­en­ing process.  I use my com­puter which auto­mat­i­cally turns on at 5:30am.  There are alarm clocks out there with lights on them made specif­i­cally for this purpose.
11. Use more sooth­ing alarms. The more sooth­ing your alarm, the bet­ter.  It’s key to have a pleas­ant wake up.
12. Don’t wake up fast. Jump­ing out of bed like you’re in boot camp can seri­ously jog your brain and leave you feel­ing tired and pos­si­bly with a headache the rest of the day.

That’s all I’ve got for you.  Say­ing it’s worked well for me is an under­state­ment.  Let me know what your thoughts are if you try this.  I only ask that if you are going to try it, please don’t leave crit­i­cal feed­back unless you tried doing all the steps.  I’d also like to know what your meth­ods for sleep­ing bet­ter are if you have any.

Related Posts:

• 4 Ways to Sleep Better
• 55 Ways to Get More Energy

03-24-10

How to Master the Art of Mindful Eating

Link: How to Mas­ter the Art of Mind­ful Eating

Edi­tors note: This is a guest post by Jules Clancy from stone­soup.

When I quit my job in Jan­u­ary to focus on blog­ging full time, there were many changes I was excited about imple­ment­ing in my…