30 Minute Traveler’s Workout – Minimal Equipment

 3 Minute Warm Up - Suggestions: bodyweight squats, jumping jacks, walk/run in place, high-knees.

Repeat the following circuit twice:

• 20 pushups (knees, toes or wall, depending on your level of fitness)
• 2 minutes step ups OR stairclimbs/jumprope/high knees
• 10 walking lunges (total of 20 steps)
• 2 minutes step ups OR stairclimbs/jumprope/high-knees
• 20 sit ups OR crunches
• 2 minutes step ups OR stairclimbs/jumprope/high knees
• 20 single-arm bent over row (20 each arm), use dumbbell or anything heavy (suitcase, briefcase, water container, rock….) 

3 Minute Cool Down - Suggestions: walk around room, step touch, stretch.

Are You Eating More By Eating Less Often?

WHEN WE EAT MORE OFTEN, we can eat fewer calories. Seems counter intuitive, doesn’t it? But the science is fairly simple: When our stomachs are empty, they release hormones that cause us to feel hunger pangs. If you sit down to a meal after hours of battling hunger, you’re more likely to devour your food and eat more of it.

Combine that with a world in which food is everywhere, and you aren’t just eating anymore—you’re feasting. And that’s a recipe for trouble.

 

Feasting

You’d think eating a bigger meal would leave you feeling fuller, but one of the problems with feasting is that it actually leaves you hungrier.

A study in 2007 took feasting to an extreme and had a group of respondents eat only one large meal per day. Some of them lost weight and others saw their cholesterol numbers worsen, but all of them reported the same “significant increase in hunger”!

Why is that? When your stomach empties, its cells release a hormone called “ghrelin” that causes you to feel hunger pangs. If you’re feasting and fasting, you’re probably getting that ghrelin signal often between meals.

Even if you aren’t in dire need of food, you might find yourself overeating because you’ve been fighting off a ghrelin signal for a few hours.

Complicating the matter, many of the foods we feast on don’t provide a feeling of fullness or satiety. A century ago, many of these foods, at least with their current ingredient lists, didn’t exist.

High fructose corn syrup is abundant in most soft drinks and other processed foods, but research has shown that fructose, sans fiber, doesn’t leave you feeling as satisfied as healthier foods.

Many other foods that aren’t replete with high fructose corn syrup, such as the McDonald’s® Big Mac®, contain trans fats and are laden with salt, making them difficult to set down.

When you’re eating foods that don’t leave you feeling full and you’re spacing your meals out with large, hungry intervals, it’s pretty difficult to avoid eating more than you should.

Consequently, many of us eat the caloric equivalent of a feast two or three times a day, every day.

What’s the difference between a meal and a feast? A good cutoff is around 500 calories. Consider that the aforementioned Big Mac by itself contains 550 calories^‡—and that’s without the fries or the soda!

Even if you’re eating at home, how many of your “three square meals a day” exceed 500 calories?
The question is, what is all of this constant feasting doing to us? If you aren’t using those calories right away (and if you are, you probably feel fairly bloated during your workout), your body is storing that energy as fat. When that fat never gets burned off, a whole host of health complications ensue, including heart disease, cancers, and diabetes.

 

3 Meals, 2 Snacks

 So how can you balance hunger and satiety without overeating? One key for warding off those hungry feelings is to transition your eating habits to three medium-sized meals (think 400 calories) and two smaller snacks (150 calories or less) per day. Divide your day into manageable time spaces between meals rather than fasting and then gorging.

How does that help? Studies have shown more frequent meals can reduce LDL cholesterol and insulin spikes.

Insulin, the hormone that gives your body the signal to clear sugar from the blood and store energy (in the form of fat), plays a key role in the development of type II diabetes. If your body becomes “insulin-resistant,” your cells stop responding to that persistent signal from insulin, and sugar remains in your blood instead of being absorbed or stored. Insulin also prevents your body from using fat as an energy source, making weight loss nearly impossible.

In addition to smoothing out insulin spikes, the idea behind eating more frequently is to eat fewer total calories without seeing a big increase in hunger. If you’re transitioning from eating three square meals only, you’ll need to make sure that you’re actually eating fewer calories and not just splitting those calories between five meals—or worse, eating more calories by adding more eating opportunities.

If you’re hoping to lose weight by eating more meals per day, you’ll want to start by approximating your daily caloric needs each day—eat just enough to maintain your weight and no more. Eventually, you’ll want to transition to a calorie deficit—eating fewer calories than you burn. For more detailed information on how to do this, review your copy of Vitality: Simple Steps to Your Ideal Weight™

Also, when you do eat those meals and snacks, it’s important you include foods that leave you feeling fuller. What sort of foods, you ask? Many foods can fill your stomach, but fiber and protein will leave you with a greater sense of fullness.

Fiber has the additional benefit of slowing your absorption of fructose, which allows your body to tap into fructose as a source of ready-to-use energy rather than storing it as fat.
Melaleuca has many products that can help you get your daily requirement of fiber and protein.

 

Fiber: one key to fullness

Dietary fiber is nothing more than plant pieces your body can’t digest. Soluble fiber, such as that found in FiberWise® products, can slow the movement of food through your digestive system, keeping your stomach full longer. Insoluble fiber can speed up the flow of food through your digestive system.

While FiberWise can help you enjoy a healthier lifestyle at any time of day, drinking a glass of FiberWise just before dinner can provide benefits that will help you power your weight-loss efforts. It can help you manage the glycemic load from your meal, leaving you more energetic and helping you avoid late-night snacking. Its exclusive formula can also aid in proper digestion and sweep away fat, cholesterol and toxins.*

 

Breakfast: Kick Your Day Off Right

A number of research studies have correlated skipping breakfast with being overweight, and 78% of the registrants at the National Weight Control Registry (who’ve lost at least 60 pounds and kept it off for years) report being breakfast eaters. Nonetheless, other studies have shown that eating sugary cereals often results in consuming more calories during the day. So what sort of breakfast can get you off to a good start?

Aim for a high-fiber, high-protein breakfast each day. An Attain® GC Control™  shake, for example, provides 9 grams of soluble fiber and 10 grams of protein per serving, and a bowl of Simply Fit™ Whole Oats and Flax Hot Cereal provides 5 grams of fiber and 5 grams of protein. General Mills’ Golden Grahams®, by contrast, gives only 2 grams of fiber and 2 grams of protein as well as 10 grams of sugar.^†

Remember: Eating smaller meals and enjoying healthy snacks throughout the day is an effective way to lose weight.

 SOURCE: The Melaleuca Journal

Benefits of Meditation

 

Thank You Wake Up! Reiki

Sunsense Solar Party

 

Visit Sunsense and Sunsense Facebook for more information.

Community Presentation - Hip & Knee Solutions

 

Click for more information with Karen Church

Positive Frog (Froda?)

thank you Assist Social Media

The Power of Stories

Take this story and call me in the morning

by Frank Forencich on March 3, 2013

Are you a machine?
Is your body like a very intricate watch, a complex system of mechanisms and feedback loops? Are you just a flesh and blood cyborg?

Sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it? And yet, that’s precisely how many people think about the human body. In fact, if you ever go to a serious conference where serious people give serious presentations about serious body-related research, you might very well come away with the impression that everything that happens inside your skin is simply the product of measureable, predictable and mindless forces.

ell, take heart. Your body is far more than just a collection of molecular gears and levers. There’s a powerful monkeywrench in that idea, one that undermines the mechanistic, cause-and-effect explanation of our bodies and our lives. That monkeywrench is story.

Story is everywhere in our lives, but we see its power most vividly in the placebo effect. A sneaky researcher gives us an sugar pill or procedure that may or may not include an active ingredient–if we believe we’ve received something of value, the body tricks itself into getting better and our health and performance actually improves. Likewise, if we believe that the “sugar cube” contains a toxin of some sort, we’ll respond by becoming ill and weak. This is the nocebo effect.

Placebo and nocebo effects are often described as great medical mysteries, but when we get right down to it, we begin to realize that they are nothing more than stories. A placebo delivers a promise and an expectation that powers our belief and in turn, our bodies, our physiology, and our ideas. Stories can change the trajectory of everything we do and everything we can become.

There are hundreds of examples in which stories influence our health and performance, but a few are particularly vivid. In one famous case, psychologist Carol Dweck primed groups of students with two simple stories. She told one group that intelligence is a fixed, unalterable quality; you’ve either got it or you don’t. In another, students were told that intelligence is plastic; it’s something that we can develop through effort, concentration and practice. The results were clear: students who heard the story of static intelligence were more likely to become frustrated, give up prematurely and perform at a lower level. Students who heard the story of plastic intelligence were more persistent and resilient in the face of challenge.

At Harvard, undergraduates who were studying for the graduate record exam (GRE), were given a practice test. Prior to the test, they were told that the study’s purpose was to examine the effects of stress on cognition. Half the students were told that “research suggests that people who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. If you feel anxious during the practice test, you shouldn’t feel concerned. . . simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” The other half of the group was simply allowed to experience their stress without additional instruction.

As it turned out, simply hearing the story about the potential benefits of stress significantly improved students’ performance. These students scored 50 points higher in the quantitative section (out of a possible 800) than the control group. A couple of months later, the students turned in their real GRE scores; the group that was primed to see anxiety as beneficial scored 65 points higher than the controls.

In another classic study at Harvard, psychologist Ellen Langer assembled a group of 84 hotel housekeepers and told half of the group that “the work you do is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle.” Examples of how their work was exercise were provided; the control group received no instruction. Four weeks later, Langer returned to take measurements: the control group hadn’t changed physically, but the test group showed decreases in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. In other words, the story contributed to their physical transformation.

The implications of these examples penetrate deep into the very fabric of our daily lives. As the research shows, stories have the power to modify our intelligence, our performance under stress and our very physiology. In common conversation, we rarely give much thought to the stories that we tell or to their downstream effects on our bodies, our health and our culture, but stories are not neutral.

Stories matter. They affect our brains and bodies, ever minute of every day. Stories lead our attention and in turn, our physiology, our emotional experience, our world view and our behavior. And so it’s vital that we listen to our narratives and it’s particularly crucial that we pay attention to “nocebo stories” that paint our world as a dangerous, hostile and hopeless place.

Many of these stories circulate through modern culture:

“We live in a toxic, alien environment that is crushing the human body, mind and spirit.”

“Our food supply is being poisoned by large corporate interests who are intent on making us addicted to sugar, salt and fat.”

“Our political system is hopelessly dysfunctional and deadlocked, corrupted by money and naked greed.”

These stories may well be true, but they are not the only truths. Other stories are equally true:

“Human ingenuity and creativity is astonishing in its breadth and scope.”

“The human brain is incredibly plastic and neuro-optimism is the way of the future. We know the formula for learning and transformation: high-quality repetitions with attentional engagement; if we follow this formula, there is no limit to what we can become.”

“We know the formula for health: vigorous movement, real food, stress education and positive social experience.”

“By far, most people want the best for one another and for the future.”

Obviously, we live in a physical and biological world, one in which certain laws apply. Facts are facts. Reality must not be ignored. But when it comes to creating our bodies and our future, the world is what we make of it. We have a choice of the stories that we tell and in turn, our effect upon the world.

So next time you tell a story, think again. The tone of your narrative will change the body and life of your listeners.

And that, in turn, will be contagious.

kim: Health Care Reform - Medical Perspective

kim: Health Care Reform - Medical Perspective: In this journey into Health Care Reform, I'd like to present as many perspectives as possible.  This bill presents changes for individuals, insurance companies, employers, wellness providers and medical service providers.

Jim Coombs, CEO Grand River Health

I was pleasantly surprised to run across an interview with Jim Coombs, the CEO of Grand River Health (Rifle, CO) which aired on KMTS-FM (Glenwood Springs, CO.)  on Friday, 3/8/13. The interview was conducted by my colleague at KMTS, News Director Ron Milhorn. 

Mr. Coombs talks about what he refers to as "Health Pay Reform" and the fact that 40% of disease factors are attributed to our behavior, choices WE make.  This is larger than genetic or any other factor.

Link to Jim Coombs interview on KMTS - CLICK HERE

Link to Powerpoint presentation- State of the Community - CLICK HERE


I found the interview informative and with different information than I had expected to be presented.  We have to realize this reform bill affects health care in many different ways and to be informed will help us navigate the new system with as much ease and grace as possible, contributing to lower stress levels and overall wellness.  I hope you find it helpful, as I did.


Thank you to KMTS-FM and Grand River Health for access to and permission to share these resources.

SOURCE: Balanced Ideas For Real Living

Expo Volunteers!

Call for Volunteers!

We are seeking volunteers to help at the 2nd Annual Health and Wellness Expo on Saturday, April 27th at the Ramada Inn in Glenwood Springs. We are planning on 4-hour shifts, either morning or afternoon. Volunteers will receive a free breakfast or lunch, depending on shift and have up close and personal access to the event happenings. If you would like to know more or are ready to volunteer, please contact Bandy at bandy@sopris.net or call 970-366-6224. For more information about the Health & Wellness Expo, please visit www.HealthandWellnessExpoGWS.com .

Fitness Blender

As a fitness professional, I do a lot of homework to keep my teaching fresh and to spice up my own workouts.  I was so pleased to see the work of the folks at Fitness Blender.  Their approach is simple, based on a good foundation of fitness and wellness, rather than hype.  And their workouts are effective.

If you are looking for good at-home workout options or simply a fresh challenge, I encourage you to check them out. They have a plethora of free workout videos - here's the next one on my list.

By Kimberly Henrie

SOURCE: Balanced Ideas For Real Living

Exercises To Target and Tighten Your Abs

YOU’RE EATING SMART and getting your heart rate up through daily cardio. Now, use the exercises shown here to target all your abdominal muscles. With a little training, they will cinch you in like a natural corset for a slimmer waistline. Feel better and look better with these suggestions from Melaleuca, The Wellness Company.



Bicycle Crunches

Bicycle Crunches streamline your torso by targeting all major abdominal groups. Lie flat on the floor with your hands behind your head. Pull up into a crunch. Bring one knee to your chest while straightening the other leg. Bring the opposite elbow toward your bent knee. Repeat the motion and switch legs and elbows, as if you are pedaling a bicycle. Do 3 sets of 15 reps.




Donkey Kicks

Donkey Kicks sculpt your rear end and legs while tightening your tummy. Get down on your hands and knees. Kick back your left leg and stretch it out behind you. Keeping your leg straight, press it upward in small, controlled movements 10 times. Switch legs and repeat. Do 10 reps for each leg.




Leg Lifts

Leg Lifts focus on the middle and lower abdominals to banish the dreaded stomach pooch. Lie flat on your back with your arms at your sides and your legs flat on the floor. Lift your heels 6 inches off the ground, keeping your legs straight. Hold for 30 seconds. Slowly lower legs and repeat 3 times.




Reverse Curl

The Reverse Curl engages your abs like a true crunch but saves your back from strain. Lie on the floor with your hands by your sides. Lift your bottom off the floor using just your stomach muscles (resist the urge to push with your legs and feet). Keep your arms and shoulders on the floor. Hold for a few seconds, then slowly lower yourself down. Repeat 15–20 times.




Vertical Leg Crunch

The Vertical Leg Crunch targets six-pack muscles and obliques for an all-around trimmer waistline. Lie on the floor with your hands behind your head and extend your legs straight up with your knees slightly bent. Cross your ankles. Do 15 crunches, making sure your shoulders are off the ground. Recross your ankles to engage your other side of oblique muscles and do 15 more.




Plank

The Plank strengthens your core while sculpting your abs. Lie face down with your elbows close to your sides and directly under your shoulders, palms down with fingers facing forward. Slowly lift your torso and thighs off the floor, raising onto your toes and forearms. Maintain a straight, rigid line from head to heels. Breathe deeply and hold the position for 10–20 seconds. Keep your form rigid as you slowly lower your body back down. Repeat 3–5 times.

SOURCE: The Melaleuca Journal

Save The Date! Health & Wellness Expo

Energy Psychology – How Important Is Your Overall Health?

By Stephanie Stanfield, PhD.

Energy psychology uses tools and techniques for self-care that you can easily to learn and use regularly.

Energy psychology (EP) is based on an integration of quantum physics, psychology, (mind), eastern

medicine and conventional medicine that proposes that many mental, emotional and physical

disturbances are really imbalances in disrupted bioenergetics patterns.

Stress is a major cause of illness and disease. Learning about stress, your triggers for stress, and

emotional imbalance is key to creating the health and wellness that is possible at any time in your

life. Negative reactions to trauma, feared situations and many addictive behaviors are replaced with

positive, loving feeling of calmness and being more centered. You can learn to balance energy pathways quickly to diminish or even eliminate disturbances in thoughts and emotions.

This is such an effective approach because you learn what you can do immediately to change your

perceptions so that your reaction shifts into response. You don’t have to relive a trauma or stress over

and over again to heal it. EP changes your dynamics quickly and easily.

When using EP, clients have:

• Reduced stress
• Improved business performance
• Enhanced sports performance
• Strengthened academic performance
• Healing of any kind of trauma
• Improved sleep experience
• Eliminated fears
• And many, many more issues and concerns that come with living in our fast paced society.

Who uses EP methods? Anyone! They are becoming more accepted, used and studied, even by doctors, psychologists, nurses, as well as energy practitioners.

Find a qualified and certified EP practitioner and watch your life change for the better. No drugs, no

negative side effects, no pain. Start using these simple techniques to shift you from chronic pain and

stress into ease and joy as yours for the asking.

Imagine the wonderful possibilities. They can become your reality.

SOURCE: Stephanie Stanfield, PhD.

kim: Beginning to Understand Health Care Reform

kim: Beginning to Understand Health Care Reform: It has been in the back of my mind for awhile now and with new parts of the plan rolling out in this first quarter of 2013, it is time to understand just what Health Care Reform means for me and for each of us.  This morning I found a very helpful article at CNN.com as a first step to fully understanding the changes, pros and cons.

I'd like to begin a dialogue here so that we all may understand the changes and how best to prepare ourselves for wellness- financial and physical.

So here are the things that stand out for me at this point:

1) Supreme Court called this a tax while passing the bill. Justices state that the US Government cannot require citizens to purchase insurance, however, they can assess a tax on those who do not.  This comes in the form of a penalty, which begins in 2014 and increases in 2015 and again in 2016.  I have calculated that for my husband and I ( and I suspect most people) the penalties are significantly less than what we currently pay for health insurance, so I am not sure it's an adequate incentive to purchase health insurance.

CONTINUE: