Never eat junk food again
Good morning everyone! Here are your Simple Healthy Tip for the day.
Meet Jocko Willink, retired United States Navy Seal who can help you find your motivation to get up and get that early morning work out in or say no to that piece of birthday cake. Take a moment to let Jocko coach you on the power of discipline:
Have an inspiring video to share, please do so in the comments below.
Have a great day,
Beth
“Discipline is the root of all good qualities.” Jocko Willink
Watch out for crazy posts like the one above. Vegetables DON’T cause weight gain. That’s the this stupidest thing I’ve seen on the internet in a while and it directly contradicts one of the 5 things that we know you can do to improve your overall health, eat more vegetables. Are some vegetables better than others? Sure, but no vegetable is bad for you and to suggest that people are getting fat because they are eating the wrong vegetables is ridiculous.
This is when a little common sense and years of peer reviewed research come in handy. So, here are 5 simple things you can do, based on mountains of peer reviewed research that will definitely improve your overall health, help protect you from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, and make you feel better too!
This includes sodas, juices, sports drinks, and sweetened tea. Giving up your favorite drink isn’t easy, so take it slow if you need to. Order 2/3 sweet tea and 1/3 unsweetened for a while and see how your body adjusts. Then go back to the 100% sweet tea and notice how overpowering the sweetness is to you. That going back for a second is a wonderful way to prove to yourself that your body adjusts to what you are used to. Then move to 1/2 sweet and 1/2 unsweetened and try that for a while.
It’s always a good idea to drink more water. So buy yourself a Brita water filter and filter your water so it tastes good to you. Unsweetened iced tea is great, especially green tea. For green tea I recommend you find a high quality one with a strong green tea flavor, that’s where all the antioxidants are found. Choice tea is my favorite, you can just taste the phytonutrients and antioxidants with each sip and their packaging is environmentally friendly. I also love the little mini San Pelegrino glass bottles. It took me a while to warm up to them but now I drink them anytime I’m having a soda craving. If you are having trouble kicking the soda habit, try a homemade versions of Radar O’Riley’s grape soda!
Intermittent fasting is simply giving your body a break from eating. Research suggests this is one of the most important things you can do to reduce your risk of all types of diseases because it gives your body a much needed break to focus on healing and repairing cell damage. If you eat a whole foods diet, fasting becomes much easier, eating a lot of processed foods means you will have unnatural spikes in your blood sugar levels that make fasting more of a challenge. The research suggests having a window of about 9-12 hours where you eat each day, then giving your body a rest, will help you lose weight, improve your glucose levels, and reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. The good news is you can even take the weekends off from fasting and still maintain the health results. Check out Joe Rogan and Dr. Rhonda’s program on intermittent fasting.
Any chance you get, eat more vegetables. I once had a client say to me that putting cheese sauce on your broccoli defeats the purpose. That’s crazy talk. If you’re going to eat more vegetables they need to taste good to you so if cheese sauce is what it takes go for it. The idea that healthy food can’t taste good is a myth. Would it be better to eat the broccoli with out the cheese sauce? Yes. But it would be worse to not eat the broccoli. For a salty crunchy treat bursting with good stuff try my Simple Crispy Kale Chips recipe.
Here are some of my favorite tips for getting more vegetables into your diet:
Start filling you plate with vegetables:
Have your vitamin levels checked, especially your vitamin D. If there is something wrong with you, this should ALWAYS be the first thing you do. Don’t let your doctor start prescribing a bunch of pharmaceutical pills until you’ve looked into what might be causing the problem in the first place. Seventy percent of Americans are low in vitamin D due to the over use of sun screen and staying inside all day. A deficiency in vitamin D is associated with all kinds of health problems including greater susceptibility to infection, reduced brain function, lower exercise performance. Dr. Rhonda Patrick recommends 40-60ng/ml level to achieve the best results.
The more you move, the healthier you are, period. So look for all kinds of ways to move your body.
Don’t just take the stairs, when you take the stairs make it a work out, pay attention, pick up your legs a little higher, take two steps at a time.
Set up a walking club so when you walk you also benefit from being part of a community.
Set a goal of exercising 3 times a day, before you start your day do 10 sit-ups, 10 squats, and 10 push ups, go for a walk every day at lunch, and hit the gym or walk with family or friends in the evening.
Take up a hobby that gets you moving around like a dance class or give slacklining a try!
Set a timer that gets you to stand up from your desk once an hour and stretch a bit.
Your body will thank you, and most importantly, your brain will thank you with improved mood and memory function.
If you have any other cool exercise or health tips please share them in the comments below. Your idea, and credit, may be included in my next book!
The most amazing thing happened to me this morning before I ever opened my eyes. I’ve been meditating off and on for a little over a year, you can see my progress in the chart below. Overall its been beneficial in that I’m a little more patient, more self aware, and a little less stressed. I incorporated meditation into my morning routine because of all the health benefits associated with it in the medical literature. But this morning, this crazy little thing happened that demonstrated a unique awareness I’m developing concerning my surroundings. My husband, who’s insane, occasionally gets up at 4:45 to go to a yoga class. I’m usually asleep with good reason and awaken some time after he’s left. In the winter the room is very dark, so I’m not sure if he’s gone until I reach my hand across the bed and find an empty place in the darkness. This morning, before I opened my eyes and reached across the bed, I already knew he was gone. I could tell simply from a change in the air that happens after someone showers. Even though it was 7am over 2 hours later as I took in a breath I could feel the microscopic water particles in the air. What an amazing feeling to have such a highly honed sense of awareness, it was like I’d developed a super power!
My Progress Over The Past Year +
So if you’re interested in giving it a try, I highly recommend this app, Insight Timer. It makes mediating easy and tracks your progress which is extremely motivating. Don’t be afraid to start slow, even 5 minutes a day can be a great way to develop the habit. I started with 10 minutes a day, although I use the words “a day” very loosely. Sometimes I went weeks without meditating. I’m up to 30 minutes “a day” now and I’m still using that term loosely.
If you’re someone who thinks you could never meditate, give it a try anyway. There’s simply no one more important for you to get to know than you. Meditation is all about exploring who you are and how your brain operates. It demonstrates that your mind is a more powerful tool than you think, but more importantly, it teaches you that you have more control over your mind and your body than you realize. For most of my life I hated mediating, my mind is usually in…”What do I need to accomplish?” mode. Meditation has given me the ability to accomplish more of the important things in my life and that’s very rewarding.
The goal is to just rest your mind, if a thought starts to develop, don’t stress about it, just let it dissolve into nothing. If you find yourself lost in thought, don’t worry, it happens to me all the time, sometimes if feels like most of my 30 minutes of meditation is spent realizing I’ve just been sitting there thinking about something and then starting over. That’s perfectly fine. When you notice you’re lost in thought, just let it go and refocus on your breath going in and out of your body. Over time the quiet mind gets stronger and lasts a little longer. Then something amazing starts to happen. You get better at living the life you want to live and being the person you want to be.
If you have meditation stories you’d like to share, please do so in the comments, I’m sure this is a topic that will yield some fascinating stories.
Best of luck to you,
Beth
I remember a commercial I watched years ago when anti-inflammatory drugs first came on the market that went something like this…Two guys were jogging down the road and one casually said to the other, “I thought you had knee surgery this week?” As they jogged along the guy with the knee surgery said, “Yea, but I took a few of this [insert new drug] and now here I am jogging down the road.”
I remember thinking, I’m not sure jogging down the road a few days after knee surgery is such a good idea. But here we are, drugs that cover up our symptoms are flooding the market, which is great if you’re in pain and need relief, but what if that pain is the only way our bodies have of communicating with us? If we cover up our headaches, digestive issues, joint pain, anxiety, depression, unexplained weight gain etc.., what are the long term health consequences? My guess is long term serious illness.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had migraines my whole life, debilitating migraines and I’m infinitely thankful for both the over the counter and prescription medications I’ve taken over the years. But recently I wound up at the office of an integrated medicine specialist because of some lingering and worsening digestive issues that my traditional doctor was unable to figure out. Surprisingly, she spent over an hour with me on my first visit, analyzed my blood levels for vitamins and mineral deficiencies, food sensitivities, talked with me about my lifestyle and prescribed a whole slew of changes to my diet, daily habits as well as some very specific supplements (I was quite low on vitamin D). What shocked me was that along with significant improvements with my digestive issues, my migraines went away, my hot flashes went away, I started sleeping significantly better. It was like all the problems were related and I’d finally found a doctor who could help me translate the messages my body was sending.
This solution isn’t perfect, I find it a challenge to stay on the diet all the time, so for now I stay on it until I’m out to lunch with a new client who knows the Chef of an amazing restaurant specializing in local food and the Chef walks up to the table and offers to cook us a private selection of some of his most special dishes (this actually happened and it was on my bucket list) so my diet went out the window and I sipped Prosecco, laughed, talked and ate amazing food all afternoon. My symptoms came back, but I’m seeing the healing process as a long term thing. I try to stick to my prescribed path back to health most of the time and I feel great most of the time. That’s a huge breakthrough.
So what does this all mean for you? Well, if you have some lingering health issues don’t suffer with them or ignore them, find someone who will help you interpret them so you can give your body the help it needs to heal and thrive.
Your health is the most important thing in your life. When you’re healthy you’re a better parent, employee, business owner, spouse. You’re more productive, more creative, and happier and you can feel confident you’re not headed down the path toward some serious illness. Be a good listener, your body needs that.
Baby Carrots are a big hit across the county, they’re cute, need no preparation, are easy to throw in a stew or snack bag, but they have a dark side. It’s not that you shouldn’t eat them, if you are eating them at the office or on a road trip instead of a candy bar you’re in great shape. However, if you’ve stopped using whole carrots because baby carrots are easier, you’ve dropped the phytonutrients you are getting by 1/3rd.
That’s because plants store the majority of those nutrients right at or just below the skin level as their first line of defense against insects, fungus and disease. So if you want to get all the nutrients and all the value from your carrots get yourself a little scrub brush and use that instead of the peeler. It’s faster than the peeler and you’ll be giving yourself a significant nutrient boost!
Meditation made me crazy. Sitting and doing nothing was was painful for me. My mind works constantly solving problems, contemplating my latest start up idea, or just what Mom, Wife, Consultant, Business Owner things I have to get done today. However, the cascading number of research articles, books, documentaries etc. about the health benefits of meditation, slowly chipped away at my resistance and I decided to give it a try. When I mentioned my intentions to my husband, it prompted him to plant an app on my iphone called Insight Timer. I say planted because it was like a little seed that grew and grew and now it’s a real growing thing in my life.
My adventure started in March of 2016 and you can see my progress over the past 10 months. I started out meditating 10 minutes a day and kept to that 9 of the 10 months. 10 minutes a day (on the days when I actually made it happen) may not seem like a lot, but it was all I could manage. It worked pretty well because 10 minutes is easy enough to fit into your morning routine, but yesterday my husband said he’d heard a quote from Tim Ferris that when you’re meditating “it take about 15 minutes for the mud to settle and the water to clear.” That was the little push I needed to jump from 10 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day…yesterday.
I honesty had my doubts about my ability to hold on that long, but I changed my timer on Insight Timer from 10 minutes to 30 minutes and gave it a try. Here’s what happened….
I immediately felt different, more relaxed, the time went by really fast, in some ways faster than some of my 10 minute meditations.
Instead of my thoughts constantly interrupting my meditation, I noticed something amazing, 2-3 times my meditative state interrupted my thinking.
So if you’re thinking about meditation give this cool app a try!
