Fitness & Wellness

Working Out Alleviates Anxiety

Working Out Alleviates Anxiety

Published by on April 22, 2019 | Leave a response

There are a lot of different levels of anxiety. Some require professional help, while others are more mundane, like fretting about things that might occur, but seldom do. No matter what type of anxiety your have, working out alleviates anxiety and can help tremendously. It doesn't replace professional help for an anxiety disorder, but it can be a complementary treatment.

What starts anxiety?

Your reaction to stress and the fight or flight response might be the cause. When the body responds to danger it prepares to run or fight. It's a primitive response that isn't always appropriate in today's world. It boosts catecholamines, which are hormones from the adrenal gland like adrenaline. Once they're in your bloodstream, they increase your heart rate, blood pressure and rate of breathing to get you ready for either fighting or running. The hormones send more blood to the extremities and less to the stomach, which leaves you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Your muscles tense, you may tremble and your pupils dilate. It all sounds a lot like how you feel when you're anxious, doesn't it?

The danger doesn't even have to be real!

Your brain doesn't differentiate between reality and imagination in many cases. While you may have had a vivid memory, dream or even lived vicariously through someone else's harrowing tale or a movie, it can set off the same response. To make it even worse, once you have an anxiety attack, fear of the next attack causes anxiety! You have to reverse the process created by the hormones from stress and there's one way to do it, burn them off and replace them with other hormones.

There's probably a good reason people pace.

Pacing keeps your body moving and is almost like exercise, but not as demanding. Exercise burns off the hormones of stress and replaces them with hormones that make you feel good, like endorphins. If you're feeling anxious and can do something super active, like run up and down stairs, do it. Make sure you get enough exercise to make you breathe hard and sweat a little. Keep doing it until you no longer have that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

  • When working out or getting exercise is almost impossible, other techniques can help, such as focused breathing. Find a relaxation technique and learn it well enough to do it anywhere, even in a crowd.
  • Prepare for stressful situations by having an action plan that you do before you are in stress. It can be anything from working out before you go, to meditation. Working out will also provide hormones that make you feel at ease.
  • Serious, debilitating anxiety needs professional help, but you can use techniques like exercise to help lower your symptoms and decrease anxiety attacks.
  • When you workout regularly, you'll notice symptoms of anxiety decrease dramatically. Often focusing more on the workout than on the anxiety will help you overcome mild anxiety.
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Lower Your Risk Of Diabetes

Lower Your Risk Of Diabetes

Published by on April 8, 2019 | Leave a response

If you recently got bad news from the doctor that you're prediabetic with insulin resistance or have family members that have suffered from diabetes for years, you can lower your risk of diabetes by adopting a healthy lifestyle. I've watched many clients in Winter Haven and Lakeland, Florida, FL change their health by changing their lifestyle. Both a healthy diet and regular exercise can help and boost your health in other areas at the same time.

You need to fight insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance occurs when the cells reduce their receptivity to insulin. Insulin is a hormone that helps the cells use the glucose in the blood for energy. When the sensitivity decreases, it allows more sugar in the blood, so the body creates more insulin. It becomes a terrible cycle that snowballs into diabetes. Excess weight, pregnancy, stress and lack of activity can cause it. Exercise helps with several of those things and burns the glycogen store in the muscles, so the body uses the glucose in the blood stream. It lowers the danger of diabetes dramatically.

You need more than exercise if you want to remove the risk of diabetes.

While there's always some risk, that's just life, many of the diabetes risks are controllable. Exercise is one way to lower that potential and healthy eating is another. What you eat dramatically affects diabetes. If you eat junk food, high amounts of sugary treats and little whole foods, you'll boost the potential for weight gain and diabetes. Cutting out sugar is a big step toward lowering the risk, just as losing weight is.

There's a big difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but many of the rules to control it are the same.

Type 1 diabetes---juvenile diabetes---doesn't have the same origins as type 2 diabetes does. It doesn't mean that a healthy diet and regular exercise aren't important in controlling it, because they are. One big problem with maintaining good health with type 1 diabetes is controlling the drop in blood sugar levels. One study shows that doing aerobic training last, with strength training first had a smaller drop in blood sugar than if aerobic training was first.

  • Don't forget that what you drink plays a role in diabetes. If you drink soft drinks every day, just switching to water will not only help you lose weight and lower your diabetic risk.
  • Exercise can help lower blood sugar levels for as long as 24 hours after the workout.
  • Getting adequate sleep and learning to control stress also can help prevent diabetes. While working out can burn off the hormones of stress, controlled breathing and meditation can deal with it immediately.
  • Make sure you include insoluble fiber in your healthy diet to lower the risk of diabetes. Insoluble fiber is in fresh fruit, nuts and seeds.
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Nutrition For Weight Loss

Nutrition For Weight Loss

Published by on March 25, 2019 | Leave a response

A lot of clients in Winter Haven choose healthy eating in addition to exercise to lose weight. Making those lifestyle changes are important and the best way to succeed. There are some basics to for healthy eating, like eating whole foods and cutting out sugar, but also some rules for good nutrition for weight loss. It's one reason fad diets won't give you the results you want. You don't get adequate nutrients for optimal health. Certain nutrients can also boost your metabolism and make weight loss easier.

Some foods provide nutrients, while fighting fat.

Eating products from grass fed cows, peanuts, almonds, free range eggs or walnuts provide arginine. This potent fat-fighter can boost your weight loss success. A study in the Journal of Dietary Supplements showed that obese women who took L-arginine for twelve weeks lost an average of 6.5 pounds and 6.5 inches more than those that didn't. When you take it before a work out, it boosts the fat burning effects.

Food with magnesium can add to your weight loss arsenal.

Your body requires magnesium for a number of functions. Magnesium aids in burning fat and synthesizing protein. It improves muscle contractions. It lowered insulin levels and fasting glucose levels, according to a study in the Journal of Nutrition. Lower blood sugar levels, improved fat burning and improved protein synthetization reduce the amount of fat stored. Magnesium will help you boost the stored fat burning process, too. Magnesium is found in cashews, almonds, dark leafy vegetables such as spinach.

Potassium is a nutrient you also need to shed weight.

There's a good reason doctors recommend eating a banana for people with heart problems. It's the potassium in it. Potassium helps muscle recovery after a workout and aids in getting rid of sodium, while it acts like a natural diuretic flushing the fluid out of your system. One estimate shows that only about 4.7 per cent of Americans get adequate potassium in their diet. Foods that contain potassium, besides bananas include avocados and leafy greens.

  • You need healthy fat to be the most successful in weight loss. It fills you up and also provides anti-inflammatories and heart health. Foods containing healthy fat include avocado, flaxseed, grass fed beef and wild salmon.
  • Choline and B-vitamins help shut down fat storing genes and make you feel less hungry. You'll find both in eggs.
  • The sunshine vitamin, vitamin D, is epidemically low in America today. Part of the cause is sunscreen and lack of sun exposure. Vitamin D provides appetite control and can increase weight loss. It's also found in fish and eggs. It lowers the risk for dental carries, osteoporosis and lowers cancer risks.
  • Resistant starch is in raw oats, chilled potatoes, peas and lightly green bananas. It helps the friendly bacteria in your digestive system, while leaving you feel fuller and burns more fat.
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Tips To Help Achieve Your Health Goals

Tips To Help Achieve Your Health Goals

Published by on March 6, 2019 | Leave a response

I help clients in Lakeland stick with their goals with helpful tips. You can achieve your health goals too when you use them. It doesn't matter whether the goal is to lose weight, build muscle or boost your cardio performance, these tips will help. Before you even set goals, learn to use the SMART technique to create them and give yourself a better chance to achieve them.

SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

Each on of those letters and processes are important. The goal must be very specific. Setting a goal to get healthier isn't specific, but setting a goal to lose weight is. It must be measurable, so in the weight lost example, you'd include exactly how much you want to lose. The goal needs to be attainable. If you set your goal to be taller so you're the proper weight, that's definitely not attainable. Losing ten pounds a month is. A relevant goal is something that's important to you, not something a friend or lover said you should do. Finally, time-bound means you have to set a specific time to achieve the goal. Without it, most people never start and the goal becomes just a wish.

If you're goal is big, break it down to smaller goals.

If you have to lose 100 pounds or want to go from sedentary to marathon running, you need to break down that big goal to smaller ones. Huge goals are impressive, but also overwhelming. They take a long time to achieve and that can mean dwindling motivation. If you have a big goal, you need to break it down into smaller, easier to achieve goals that can be reached in a short time frame. That 100 pound goal could be broken down to a goal of losing ten pounds a month. It's easier and quicker to achieve, so you get the motivation to continue that comes from success.

Create your path to achieve those healthy goals and make it specific.

Being specific is so important when you want to achieve any goal. Rather than just saying you want to exercise and eat healthy to lose weight, create your routine, schedule your workouts for the week and plan meals and snacks that are lower in calories and high in nutrition. Make your path enjoyable. If you hate running, that's not the exercise you want to choose. It gives you an opportunity to find the best path. If you aren't getting results, you can modify the path or create an entirely new direction to reach your goals. While it's discouraging not to reach a goal, having a plan outlined helps you know what didn't work so you can change it and make it work.

  • It's not a failure to decide to change your goals. There are many reasons to change goals. Achieving a goal is one of those. If you find your weekly goal was too easy, you can change it. The same is true if it's too tough to achieve.
  • You might need to create several goals at once. For instance, if eating healthy is a goal, you might need to learn how to cook healthy or what healthy eating is. If negativity is stopping you from achieving your goal, learning to be more positive is a supplemental goal.
  • Give yourself a reward when you achieve a goal. Make it something you really want that you wouldn't do otherwise. Buy new clothes, take a trip or lounge around the house for a day. Then start on the next goal.
  • If you want to lose weight, that's find, but there are other ways to measure how healthier you are. It could be lower blood pressure, the flights of stairs you can climb before you beg for oxygen or the inches you lost.
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End Carb Cravings [Part 2]

End Carb Cravings [Part 2]

Published by on October 2, 2018 | Leave a response

If you missed our last post 7 tips to End Carb Cravings. 👈click the link and catch up 😃

Today I’d like to expand on that a little. Let’s talk about Fast Acting carbs.

Fast acting carbs are usually highly processed foods that quickly impact your blood sugar levels. Typically, the less processed the food the higher the fiber content.

Not all calories are equal.

In a recent study participants were given one of two milkshakes. Both shakes were identical in total calories and distribution in fats, proteins, and carbs.

The difference? One shake was fast acting carbs the other shake slow acting carbs.

What did they find?

Fast acting carbs not only disrupted insulin (our fat storing hormone) but they also activated craving centers in the brain.

This explains what is happening when we “fall off the wagon.”

Fast acting carbs will affect the same areas of the brain of individuals who are suffering from addiction to alcohol and cocaine.

Break the Craving ➤ Reward Cycle

The fastest way to eliminate cravings and stabilize your metabolism is to reduce fast acting carbs and increase healthy fats, protein, and fiber.

Fast Acting carbs are linked to memory loss, brain fog, and ADD symptoms.

If you are interested in this topic, check out a book written by David Ludwig called Always Hungry.

Conclusion: Fast acting carbs are highly processed and disrupt blood sugar, insulin, and metabolism. Reducing fast acting carbs is the fastest way to eliminate cravings.

Action Step: Add in healthy fats, protein, and fiber to help stabilize blood sugar.

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