Keep Your Health Tips

We are bombarded with advertisements pushing delicious looking, fat filled, and obesity producing food in our faces every single day. We hear it on the radio; see it on TV and on billboards and even in newspapers. We go on a diet and try to totally turn our eating habits around. We go from eating hamburgers, French fries, pizza, hot dogs, and other junk to eating lettuce and drinking water. If we are really disciplined we make it a week or so. But like most people, we are back to our old habits within days. The change is just too drastic and makes it next to impossible for us to stick to our diets.

I have slowly improved my eating habits over the years. I have done this in a way that has been painless to me and has replaced bad diet choices with good eating habits. Of course, before any diet changes you should consult your physician. I was not in any immediate health danger and therefore did not need to immediately change my habits. What follows is not a “how to” article but more of an article on how I changed my eating habits over time.

There was a time in my life when I received my daily intake from fast food restaurants. I was in a sales position and on the road most of the time. I would have the burger, fries and coke combo from a different fast food joint every day. I was much younger then and blessed with a decent metabolism so I did not see much negative effect from all of the unhealthy eating. It was upon my taking a physical for another job that I discovered my cholesterol was not in a good range. I was way too young for something like this to happen and I knew that I must change my ways. I attempted to totally overhaul my eating habits in one day. I would do well for awhile and then go back to my old ways. I had made improvements but they were not ingrained good habits like I was hoping for.

Upon much reflection I decided to go a little easier on myself. I decided to start substituting food choices one by one until they became habit. My first substitution was with my beverage choice. Instead of having the cola I would order water. It was kind of a mental reward system for me. I would eat the burger and fries guilt free as long as I drank water instead of cola. I know that you are probably thinking “how can you eat a burger and fries guilt free?”. I could do this guilt free because I knew that it was just a stage in my long term diet plan. I chose water as my first diet choice because it came easy for me. It required very little discipline on my part. After a month or so drinking water with a meal became second nature to me. It was no longer a sacrifice; it was a habit.

After that came the French fries. I substituted the French fries with a plain baked potato. Burger diet now consisted of a burger, plain baked potato and water. I actually started enjoying the baked potato rather quickly. They are much tastier than grease drowned fries. You can see where I am going with this. If you have been trying to lose weight for any time now, you know what a good food is and what a bad food is. You will know where and what to substitute. I continued these substitutions and still do to this day.

Now I am more aware of an unhealthy habit starting. I am very conscious of what I eat. Some of the great things about these diet choices are that they became habits; the desire for the unhealthy foods was replaced with a desire for healthy foods. Nowadays I rarely eat out. I have lost my taste for such foods.

Some of my diet substitutions:

Water for Cola, Baked potato for Fries, Whole Wheat for white bread, Soy Milk for cow’s milk, pretzels for chips, salads for desserts, Meal replacement shake for cereal, and the list goes on and on.

Habits are built by doing something over and over. I have read it takes around 30 days to establish a habit. Do not stop your substitutions with the foods you eat.carry it over to other parts of your life. For example, substitute the elevator with the stairs, substitute the car with a bicycle, give up the evening news and replace it with a walk.

Yours in health,

Bill Herren

Discouragement comes when we feel overwhelmed and want results yesterday. Take your time, develop habits, and enjoy a leaner healthier body!

Bill Herren is the webmaster for http://www.weightloss-articles.com.

Everything weight loss related! Weight loss success stories, product reviews, exercise articles, weight loss recipes, and diet articles. All free and all designed to help you lose weight!

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Ok… If you are reading this is because you do want to hear the “why breakfast is good for you” sermon.

Well, you may have read it in the paper, or maybe you’ve heard it on the radio on your way to work. It’s almost a cliche! Almost everybody knows that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”.

If it’s so good… how come many people skip breakfast?

People do. There are lots of excuses for not having breakfast, including (but not limited to):

Lack of time

not being a morning person

trying to lose weight

Not finding anything good for breakfast, and

having forgotten to have it

A while ago I used to skip breakfast too.

Later on I would have “whatever”, and then a very heavy lunch (depending on how hungry I would be by lunch time).

But when I started paying attention to what I ate (and how and how much), I realised the damage I was causing to my body by skipping the most important meal of the day.

What happens to our bodies when we skip breakfast?

Understanding this question will help you realise “why breakfast is good for you”, and hopefully, you’ll reconsider making breakfast a must in your everyday life.

For starters, if you skip breakfast you’re making it harder for your body to lose weight, and your energy levels will tend to be lower than those of a person who looks after herself.

Why?

Think about it. By the time breakfast is due, your body has not received any food for about 8 hours (a third of your day). Compare this with your “day” hours, when you have 3 (if not more) meals.

It is amazing how, if you are used to skipping breakfast, you condition yourself to feel “ok”, but a close examination of your “fasting” mood would reveal that your levels of energy are low. What happens is that your body is rested at the end of a good sleep, but you still need the energy after you wake up.

Your body does not stop just because you go to sleep. It goes on breathing, digesting, pumping up blood everywhere in your body, and moving (amongst many other physiological processes).

It constantly needs fuel (ie food), and even if you’re not hungry early in the morning, your body will still need the extra energy contained in a breakfast meal. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

But breakfast is more than an energy source. Breakfast is good for you because it:

provides glucose to your brain, making you mentally efficient and alert. You get “the edge” by having breakie (Australian for “breakfast”); reduces your cholesterol levels (depending on what you eat for breakie, of course!);

gives you vital nutrients and vitamins;

makes you slimmer, by jump-starting your metabolism (how quickly your body burns energy), which is slow after relative inactivity at night.
makes you “Mr or Ms Happy”. An energized and balanced meal may alter your mode and make you feel better during the day.

What to have for breakfast?

The opposite of skipping breakfast is having the wrong things for breakfast (and possibly too much of it too!).

Every meal is capable of giving you energy. The question is “how long will that energy last for?”. This is important to know because that will determine whether you still feel “charged up” till lunch time, or whether you’re starving by 10 AM.

Avoid things like chocolate chip muffins and other high sugar meals. The energy levels are high (and they taste deliciuos, I know!) but short-lived, and the residual makes you bigger and heavier. So, these foods are a no-no.

Fresh fruits and cereals, are a healthier choice, but you have to be mindful of the sugar contained in cereals. Some of them can have enough sugar a whole family in one single serving!

But what if you’re not “a breakfast person?”

There is no such a thing as a “breakfast person”.

If you need to do something for your health, you do it, and you can condition yourself to make having breakfast part of your life and take pleasure on it.

But I’ve got a couple of tips that can help you in your transition to having breakfast:

Know “why” breakfast is important. Reading this article was a good start;

Buy fruits and cereal (but mind the amount of sugar that some cereals contain);

Check out my (ahem… )delicious low fat breakfast recipes and try some (you’ll like them, I promise);

plan your meals. Planning ahead to have interesting and tasty meals for breakfast will help you enjoy it;

If you don’t have the time to prepare breakie (you don’t have 5 minutes for yourself!?), you may choose a good low fat fast food outlet and be good and have a low-fat-low-sugar-meal.

But whatever you do… do have breakfast!

… it’s good for you!

Have a great day!

Jeff Rosales is “The Skinny Chef”, the editor of http://www.Delicious-Low-Fat-Recipes.Com: a growing collection of delicious low fat recipes, weight loss and healthy eating articles, interviews and product reviews. Jeff’s recipes are so delicious… you won’t believe they’re good for you!

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Emotion: a moving of the feelings: agitation of the mind: one of the three groups of the phenomena of the mind - feeling, distinguished from cognition and will.

Food: what one feeds on: that which, being digested, nourishes the body: whatever sustains or promotes growth.

No obvious connection there, is there?

My dictionary doesn’t make a distinction between emotions and feelings, but some psychologists do, so I’ll be more clear about the sort of thing I’m writing about here: hurt, upset, sadness, anger, grief, and maybe even boredom if it is accompanied by an irritation about the boredom. There are positive emotions, but they generally don’t cause problems - unless maybe you’re on a permanent high and can’t get down.

Let’s think about lions for a moment. They lounge around in the sun most of the time. When they get hungry, they go and kill something and eat it until they are full. Then they lounge around until they are hungry again and amuse themselves by fighting among themselves or driving off other lions. They don’t go out and kill something for something to do because they are bored. They don’t go out and kill something because they are angry, or sad. They eat when they need to eat, and they don’t even need to eat every day. Can you imagine a lioness going out and killing and eating every time her partner growled at her? Can you imagine a lioness going out and killing and eating every time her cubs became a little boisterous?

Ok. Lions probably don’t experience emotions and they are much more focused in the now, but they probably don’t get overweight and suffer heart and circulation problems either.

So why do people do those things?

Why do people head for the fridge when someone has done something they didn’t like? Why do people head for the fridge when they feel lonely?
Why do people head for the fridge when the commercial break starts or the clock says ’supper time’?

Why do they do those things regardless of whether or not they feel hungry. And it’s difficult to imagine how someone could feel hungry after eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner - isn’t it?

They do it because they don’t want to feel.
They do it because they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t.
They do it because it distracts them from being fully present with themselves.

And they do that because they don’t really like themselves, and they certainly don’t love themselves.

No one who loves themselves would mistreat their body in any way, because love doesn’t mistreat. Love and health are synonymous.

As children we naturally express how we feel from moment to moment. I feel sick, I don’t like that, I’ve got a headache, my tummy hurts, I’m bored and when we feel angry we shout and stamp our feet and walk away. But as we grow we are taught that good children don’t do those things. It’s not polite to tell aunty you don’t like her cakes when she’s spent all afternoon making them ’specially for you. If you shout at me I’ll give you a smack. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. So we are taught to lie about how we feel, to not express when we are deeply unhappy, that anger is unacceptable, and that sitting contentedly, happy in our own mental world of fascination and creativity, is unacceptable.

And then after getting screwed up like that (because our parents feel pressure to socialise us and make us acceptable to others - because they understand loneliness and don’t want you to develop any traits that would cause you to be rejected by others) they feed you when you are no longer obviously expressing your unhappiness. They know something is wrong by your change of mood, and they don’t like seeing you unhappy so they feed you. Chocolate, sweets, ice cream, cream cakes are all foods that are used to entice you into a better mood state. Notice that apples, pears, oranges, nuts, tomatoes and such are never used to entice you to change your mood state.

When you are ill, you get treats, all the same foods filled with fat and sugar.

Now when we are little our parents and close relatives are Gods. They are all-wise. They can read our minds. They can work magic. And so what they teach us is stored deep within our minds and we call on it in times of trouble.

Times of trouble are usually when we feel low, or bored.

We have been taught that eating fat and sweet takes the pain away. At least that’s what we act as if we’ve been taught. But there was a processing error in our young minds. What we really got, and really wanted was love and attention and appreciation. The treat was just the medium that transported and expressed that feeling of being loved and cared for. But we mistook it.

The reason we go to the fridge is because it reminds us of being loved and cared for. It reminds us of loving arms around us; being tucked up in bed; having someone come up with ideas of how to have some fun together with them; having someone stroke your hair; and those are wonderful things to have experienced as a child. To know and to feel loved at any time during life is a wonderful experience.

You can change the pattern if you want to.

You just need to experience the emotion that has been buried. You need to let it out and let it go.

Writing is a wonderful medium for releasing emotion. Make a pact with yourself that every time you head for the fridge and you have no feelings of hunger that you will sit down for just five minutes and write. What you write is what you feel. Start off with ‘I feel right now’ and insert whatever you are feeling - bored, lonely, unloved, fed-up and so on. And then write ‘this feels like the time when’ and allow your mind to drift back into the past and write out whatever comes up. Write down who did what when and why. Write down who you’re angry at. Write down what you’d like to say now or what you should have said then and keep going until you get tears. Until you touch the emotional hot spot that causes tears to flow you will not bring about any significant change. Once the tears flow you can stop writing and rip up the paper. Language and grammar are unimportant; no one will read your words.

Make eating a conscious activity.

It’s ok to feel however you feel. No one has the right to deny you the full and natural expression of your emotions. But you do need to take responsibility for you. Expressing your emotions isn’t hitting, hurting, or seeking revenge on another. It is giving yourself permission to feel however you are feeling and giving yourself permission to express how you are feeling to anyone that you feel it’s important to express those feelings to. It is not an excuse to blame someone else for how you feel. Your feelings are yours, and why you are feeling them is your stuff. Others only fire off emotions so that you can identify a problem and heal it. They are not to blame for how you feel - and neither are you.

Michael J. Hadfield MBSCH is a registered clinical hypnotherapist. You can experience his unique style on a popular range of hypnosis CD’s and tapes at http://www.hypnosisiseasy.com Here you can also obtain treatment for a variety of problems and explore his approach to health, healing, and hypnosis.

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