Thank You Louise Hay

Thank You Cardiff Therapy

Dalai Lama

"I feel optimistic about the future because humanity seems to be growing more mature; scientists are paying more attention to our inner values, to the study of mind and the emotions. There is a clear desire for peace and concern for the environment."

5 Natural Remedies To Beat the Bloat

By PF Louis (NaturalNews)

Unless you're a monk in a monastery or living in an ashram, the temptation to indulge more than usual may be too much to pass on all you're offered. After all, you don't want to be a spoiler among your peers as they celebrate with cakes, processed foods, and alcoholic beverages.

If you've been good with your diet while waiting for Santa, you may induce a bit of a shock to your system as you take in more than usual with foods you normally avoid.

All of this can lead to digestive issues with bloating discomfort that puts a damper on your holiday fun. The obvious symptom of bloating is a distended belly with either cramps, mild nausea, or other stomach discomforts.

This also invites flatulence and those embarrassing uncontrollable stomach rumbles and growls, possibly accompanied by constipation or diarrhea. The following suggestions are anecdotal and primarily short term solutions.

If you experience chronic bloating and indigestion, you should research a complete dietary makeover or consult a holistic practitioner for solutions.

5 Natural Remedies To Beat The Bloat

1. Pre-Tox With Probiotics

Before the holidays get into full swing, start preparing your gut's digestive capacity with probiotics. It's recommended that over the long term, fermented food is better for the proper intestinal flora of 80-85 percent good bacteria to 15-20 percent pathogenic bacteria.

If you haven't been doing this, do a crash probiotic binge with high quality supplements containing high counts of several strains of bacteria. This sort of thing should also be done temporarily during and after you've been forced into taking antibiotics. Then go long-term and find the fermented food or beverage solution that works for you.

2. Slow And Steady

Eat more slowly while talking a little less during meals. You can slow down by chewing more. Consuming liquids, plain water, beer, wine, whatever, should be done sparingly while eating. Try to avoid mixing in too many sugary items with whatever you eat. Say "no mas" before you're full.

After a bout of heavy eating, take a walk. If you need to rest, lie down on your left side. Ayurvedic doctors, whose health focus is digestion, recommend these activities.


CONTINUE AT SOURCE

What’s So Special About 45 Minutes? Exercising to Lose Weight

 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 50 years, you probably already know exercise is a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle.

There’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that exercise can help you age more gracefully, get stronger, feel more energetic, lose weight and reduce your risk for dozens of diseases and conditions. Your question probably isn’t “Should I exercise?” but rather, “What sort of exercise should I do?” and “How much of it do I need?” Vitality: Simple Steps to Your Ideal Weight™ recommends 45 minutes of exercise per day. In the paragraphs ahead, you’ll read why that is the ideal workout length and what you should do with your 45 minutes.

The Science of Exercise & Weight Loss

When your muscles contract during exercise, they release hormones that help you reduce body fat. These hormones kick off other healthy processes in your body—increasing muscle, bolstering your immune system, and even healing and protecting neurons in your brain.

Both high-intensity and moderate-intensity exercise can help you lose weight in a variety of ways. High-intensity exercise (think sprinting, resistance training, football, wrestling, etc.) burns through large amounts of calories quickly, and builds and strengthens muscle.

Moderate-intensity anaerobic or any aerobic exercise (think jogging, cycling or lap swimming) can grow the number of mitochondria (cellular power plants) in your cells, increase the volume of blood in your veins and arteries, and boost your overall cardiovascular health.

Aerobic exercise also directly taps your body’s fat-burning furnace—your aerobic metabolism—and clears sugar from your blood. An aerobic workout will start off using your body’s natural source of stored carbohydrates (called glycogen), but as you keep the workout going, you’ll increasingly use fat.

Most people’s bodies don’t surrender fat easily. A natural substance in your body called adenosine blocks your body from burning fat. But the unique blend of ingredients in the Access® Bar turns the key on adenosine, unlocking your fat stores and enabling you to use them right from the beginning of your workout.

Since the Access Bar’s introduction 20 years ago, Melaleuca customers have purchased 125 million bars and relied on them to lose weight, avoid soreness and make their workouts more enjoyable. Access Bars have also helped dozens of long-course triathletes, ultra-marathon runners, distance cyclists, and marathon swimmers to run, swim and bike thousands of miles while accessing more of their fat stores along the way. Tammy Van Wisse, for example, fueled a swim across the English Channel with Access Bars and lost 12 pounds in the process!

But most exercisers aren’t swimming the English Channel or competing in the grueling Hawaii Ironman® Triathlon. If you’re like most people, you just want to lose a little weight and get healthier, not spend an entire day swimming or cycling.

Ultimately, of course, the right exercise is the one that gives you the greatest health benefit and that you enjoy enough to keep doing

Getting The Dose Right

If it’s been a while since your schedule included regular exercise, it’s a good idea to take things one step at a time. A study of 20-to-30-year-old men who started exercising from nothing found that they lost more weight starting with 30 minutes of exercise than 60 minutes all at once. If you’re like them—starting from zero—doing 45 minutes might be too much at first. And even a daily exercise habit of 20 or 30 minutes can bring tremendous health benefits.

“A daily exercise habit is the single most powerful therapy for improving both the quality and quantity of your life,” cardiologist and researcher James O’Keefe told Runner’s World. “Getting just 30 minutes daily of moderate or vigorous physical activity can cut your risk almost in half for premature death, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and heart attack.”

One study found that runners had a 19 percent lower risk of death than non-runners. But the data also indicated that running has a “sweet spot” with regard to health benefits: Those who ran between 10 and 20 miles per week and who ran at a pace of 8:35 to 10 minutes per mile had an even lower risk of death than those who ran less or more, or faster or slower.

That information is great if you’re a runner. But what if you prefer to ride a bicycle, swim, hike or cross-country ski? What’s your sweet spot for getting the greatest exercise benefits?
“The latest data from our studies and others strongly suggests that the ideal dose of daily vigorous exercise is about 30 to 60 minutes,” Dr. O’Keefe says. “If you do more than 60 minutes of strenuous exercise daily, you start to lose some of the health benefits seen with lesser amounts of physical activity.”

Exercising for 45 minutes can also increase the number of calories you burn throughout the day—through the “afterburn effect” or “excess post-exercise oxygen consumption.” One study showed that men who intensely rode stationary bicycles for 45 minutes would burn 190 more calories within the next 14 hours. Another study found that exercising for 45 minutes could significantly reduce your appetite.

One additional benefit of a daily 45-minute bout of exercise, particularly for diabetics, is that it clears sugar from your blood and lessens the amount of insulin circulating in your veins and arteries—which ultimately means you’ll store less sugar as fat.

So once you’ve built up to 45 minutes of exercise per day, the next step, instead of increasing the amount further, is to bump up the intensity.

So once you’ve built up to 45 minutes of exercise per day, the next step, instead of increasing the amount further, is to bump up the intensity.

Interval Training

Interval training combines aerobic and anaerobic training to give you a shortcut to some of the fitness you’d normally achieve through long aerobic exercise. For intervals to be most effective, they should be done at high intensity, hence the term “high intensity interval training” or “HIIT.”

As little as six 15-minute sessions of HIIT in two weeks can improve your muscles’ capacity for using oxygen and fat, boost your afterburn and increase your endurance. Your body will become more efficient at storing energy for workouts, and that will make it easier for you to do more exercise later.

Often, you’ll start out with a shorter “work” interval (say 10 seconds) balanced against a longer “rest” interval (perhaps two minutes). As your fitness improves, you can reduce the “rest” interval and increase the “work” interval.

“If intervals and strength training are so effective,” you’ll be tempted to ask, “should I do them all of the time?” The answer is that if your exercise regimen includes both intervals and resistance training, which can be very taxing on your body, you can wind up exhausted pretty quickly. Mixing in aerobic exercise, or “cardio,” with high-intensity interval training can help you avoid overtraining and the symptoms that come with it (irritability, interrupted sleep, injuries, delayed recovery, etc.).

Somewhere, you’ve probably heard the argument over whether intervals or cardio are superior. But the truth is that intervals and traditional aerobic exercise are not mutually exclusive; there’s no reason you can’t do both. If you don’t feel like doing a lung-searing, muscle-burning interval session, you can go for a jog, take a spin on a bicycle, enjoy a leisurely swim or do some other activity. To achieve the same results as the interval session, you’ll need to do more jogging, biking or swimming (closer to the top end of those 45 minutes), but a steady, nonstop workout is still an option.

Source: The Melaleuca Journal

Breathe

Thank you Food Matters.

Five Creative Ways to Use a Stability Ball

The stability ball is a great tool for strengthening the core, but there are so many other exercises you can do with it. Here are five fun exercises that you can use to work the entire body using this incredibly versatile piece of equipment.

The Exercise: Rollouts

Targeted Muscles: Abs, back, chest and ats

The Movement: Bend your elbows at 90 degrees and place them on the top of a stability ball. Place your knees on the floor so that your knees, hips and shoulders are in a straight line. Engage your abs and open your shoulders, pushing the ball forward away from your body. Roll the ball out as far as you can without breaking the straight line between your knees and shoulders. Engage your abs and upper body, and then roll the ball back toward your body.

Challenge: For an added challenge, place your feet on the floor instead of your knees.

The Exercise: Bulgarian Split Squat

Targeted Muscles: Glutes and hamstrings

The Movement: Place the ball against a wall. Stand facing away, about 2 to 3 feet from the ball. Place the top of your left foot on the ball, so that you feel a slight stretch in your left hip flexor. Keep your shoulders square and chest up, and engage your core. Once balance is established, bend your right knee, keeping your right knee directly over your foot so that your shin remains vertical. Go as low as you can. Push through your right heel and stand back up. Repeat 10 to 15 times, and then switch legs.

Modification: To modify the exercise, start with a half squat, just to establish balance. You can also place the ball in a corner to prevent lateral shifting of the ball.

Challenge: If you have great balance and want an extra challenge, try this exercise without a wall behind the ball. As you lower, push the ball back with your foot, and then as you stand back up, pull it back in to starting position. You can also try holding on to dumbbells for more glute/hamstring activation.

CLICK TO CONTINUE AT SOURCE

Recovery Redefined: Post-workout Nutrition

The biggest error in the common view of nutrition is the focus on small details. This error is evidenced by questions like, “How much protein, carbs, fats should you eat?” Food is greater than the sum of its parts. Food is meant to be enjoyed and we lose much of that enjoyment when we treat it like chemistry.

It is important to eat after exercise—and it should be soon after. However, it is unimportant to focus on small details like an exact number of minutes after a workout or a precise amount of protein or carbohydrates. Encourage your clients to choose a post-workout meal that they look forward to enjoying—consider the tastes, textures and aromas of the food they want to enjoy after a workout.

When the body is consistently fed real foods, it gives you accurate signals of what it needs and when. All that is required is to listen to the intuitive signals the body sends and avoid the common mistake of over-thinking what “should” be eaten after a workout. Our bodies are smarter than any expert will ever be. If an individual is avoiding overly processed unnaturally sweet and salty foods, he or she can learn to trust the signals the body sends.

Eating on Rest Days

In general, a recovery day requires a slightly lower amount of food than a workout day. However, it is important to avoid another major error in nutrition and steer clear of the energy-balance equation. Many fitness professionals and even some people with advanced degrees who really should know better still erroneously promote this flawed concept—often with intelligent-sounding references to the First Law of Thermodynamics even though they have never studied physics.

This law has everything to do with matter and energy in chemistry and physics labs, and little to do with a sentient human with thoughts and feelings about food that powerfully affect body chemistry. The matter and energy that make up each human being is animated with consciousness not found in rocks, gasses and liquids. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail, but our thoughts, feelings and beliefs about the relative healthfulness of what we are eating directly affects the body’s response to that food.

This is another area where the wisdom of the body must be respected for true knowledge, understanding and appreciation for food to develop. Let your body tell you what it needs on recovery days and listen. A recovery day is not a day to “reward” oneself for exercise (as if exercise is a chore or tedious task for which there needs to be a reward). Exercise is its own reward—and so should be the act of eating.

If you are not exercising, your body will “ask” you for less food anyway. Attempting to quantify an exact amount of how much less is an exercise in tedium, drudgery and inaccuracy that is sure to remove any sense of enjoyment around eating and limit progress.

CLICK TO CONTINUE AT SOURCE

Inspiration

 Thank You Guillermo Alvarez Paz

Mastering Stress Free Holidays

Mastering Stress Free Holidays with Cindy Solano, B.S., T.S.C., Ricki L. McKenna, C.N., Kimberlie Chenoweth, M.A. and Gwen Garcelon, MACL. 

Saturday, December 14th
9:30 am to 2:30 pm
Third Street Center, 520 S. Third Street, Carbondale

How well do you take care of yourself during the holidays?

• Do you get stressed out with too much to do?
• Do you overindulge in things that do not serve you?
• Do you have trepidations about family gatherings?

Solutions are HERE in Four Transformational Mini-workshops!

CLICK FOR THE FULL SCOOP!

What is Really in Your Home?

Thank you Megan Henrie

Inspiration

Thank you Debbie Hanley

Dangers of Chlorine Bleach

You clean your home to make it a safer, more enjoyable place to be. But what if the very products you use to clean your home are actually making it more dangerous and more uncomfortable for your family? For decades, customers have mistakenly equated chlorine bleach with words like “clean” and “safe”. But the reality is frighteningly far from it. That bottle of chlorine bleach in your laundry room, those cleaning products that proudly tout “with chlorine bleach” on their labels—they contain something far more sinister than a simple germ killer.

Coming Clean: The Deception of Chlorine Bleach

The killer in your cupboard.
Did you know that chlorine was one of the first ingredients used to create chemical weapons in World War I? During the Second Battle of Ypres, on April 22, 1915, the Germans released chlorine gas on their enemies—marking the first full-scale deployment of deadly chemical weapons in WWI.¹ The lethal chemical is still used in warfare today, with insurgents of the Iraq war making bombs out of giant tanks of chlorine.²

Unfortunately, this lethal gas can also be created by accident when you unwittingly mix chlorine-based cleaning products with other common cleaning agents. And it isn’t always mixing two cleaners, together, sometimes it’s simply residue from a past cleaner that reacts with the chlorine-based product. In 2011, 152 workers were hospitalized due to exposure from chlorine gas after someone poured chlorine bleach into a container previously used with another cleaning solution.³


The dangers of chlorine bleach don’t stop there.
This chemical is caustic and deadly even before it is mixed with other products. Of all injuries to young children cause by cleaning products, exposure to chlorine bleach is the most common. The most common types of injury from chlorine bleach are poisoning (68%), chemical burns (15.9%) and skin/eye irritation (10.4%).⁴ According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, chlorine bleach is responsible for more than 38,000 reported poisonings per year.⁵ As many people die from chlorine bleach poisoning as from rattlesnake and spider bites combined.⁶

Recent medical studies have also revealed another disturbing trend. Chlorine bleach specifically aggravates the membranes in the lower respiratory system, causing shortness of breath and wheezing.

Studies show that a person with asthma who cleans in their home with chlorine bleach once a day will have a 5% increase in asthma attacks in a year. A person who cleans in their home with chlorine bleach twice a day more than quadruples this figure—they’ll experience 28% more asthma attacks.

So the next time you decide to clean with chlorine bleach, it might be good to add a ventilator in addition to the goggles rubber gloves and protective clothing most chlorine-based products recommend you use.

The cleaner that doesn’t actually clean.
If the dangers of chlorine bleach weren’t discouraging enough, here’s another sad truth many consumers don’t realize—chlorine bleach is not a cleaner.

It doesn’t get rid of grime, dirt or stains. What it can do is make color invisible to the naked eye, making us think it’s getting rid of stains.

Chlorine bleach is a highly reactive substance. It changes everything it comes into contact with, destroying it on a molecular level.

We see colors based on light absorption and reflection. When we see a red apple, it’s because the red color wavelength is reflected to us. When chlorine bleach comes into contact with stains, it destroys the molecules’ ability to reflect light. Chlorine bleach doesn’t get rid of dirt—it only turns it white. We may not be able to see the dirt and grime, but the truth is, the stain is still there.

To get your home truly clean you don’t need chlorine bleach. You need products that can safely remove hard water deposits, grime, and other stains and buildup. That’s something chlorine bleach just can’t do, and is just one of the many reasons why all EcoSense^® products are chlorine bleach-free.

Sources:

1. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/second-battle-of-ypres-begins
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
3. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6028a3.htm?s_cid=mm6028a3_w
4. Household Cleaning Product-Related Injuries,Pediatrics, September 2010
5. 2008 Annual Report of the American Association of PoisonControl Centers
6. As reported to Poison Control Centers over the last 10 years

SOURCE: The Melaleuca Journal

Thyroid Dysfuntion Infographic

Good to know for more people than we might otherwise think.
Thank you Health As We Age LLC

Food Democracy

Thank you Food Democracy Now!

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys." Watch Ron here: http://youtu.be/EzZzZ_qpZ4w #UrbanGardening #Gardening #FastFood