Exercise the Mind and the Body Will Follow

by | Mar 31, 2014 | Exercise | 0 comments

Exercise If you find it hard to stick to your workout routine, or wish you enjoyed it more, it’s likely that your mind is a little… out of shape.

Sounds crazy? In fitness, it’s proven that a healthy mind is every bit as important as a healthy body. And if your mind’s not in peak condition, your body won’t be — because a workout just can’t reach its full potential with un-engaged grey matter.

Just as lifting weights strengthens our muscles, meditation teaches us to become more mindful. It takes just minutes each day to practice, but by doing so, and learning to apply mindfulness to exercise, getting fit becomes easier, more sustainable — and dare I say it — quite good fun. Exercising mindfully is even shown to cut levels of body fat, lower weight and reduce blood pressure.

So how can we use mindfulness to get motivated to exercise, and ultimately, become fitter?

Understanding your motivation
What’s driving your desire for fitness? Whatever it is, the strength of this motivation will determine your chances of successfully engaging with, and maintaining, your workout routine.

So, even before we put our trainers on, it’s important we work out why fitness is important to us. Meditation gives the mind the space and ability to see these reasons clearly and understand ourselves better, to approach exercise in a more grounded, confident and sustainable way. It’s a strong start.

Staying on track
It’s not easy to keep a fitness plan going through weeks, months and years. When we’re busy or it’s raining, it’s easy to think, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” But will we?

Learning to be mindful lets us recognize these negative thoughts as just that — thoughts. So rather than give in to them, we can acknowledge them — move on — and head out for that run. And even if it’s raining, we’ll probably enjoy it.

Focusing on the moment
Instead of planning tomorrow’s meeting or running through arrangements for the weekend, try to take a step back from busy mental chatter. Meditation teaches our minds how to be clear and free from distraction, creating the space essential for productive exercise.

Mindful exercise allows us to focus on the moment, so we can produce more confident, natural exercises — making each rep, and every mile, as effective as possible.

Exercising mindfully
And finally, as we walk, swim or run, remembering the five components of mindful exercise will always give us the maximum benefit from all that effort:

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Tax a Cola, Save the Planet

by | Mar 28, 2014 | Nutrition | 0 comments

Soda

The Soda Tax is most clearly a health issue. Science now has shown that sugary drinks kill by causing diabetes (amputations, blindness, kidney failure), heart attacksand cancer. We now know that you do not need to be overweight or obese to be at risk.

But the Soda Tax is also a social justice issue. Big Soda’s advertising targets poor and minority communities, where residents suffer both high soda consumption and high rates of type-2 diabetes.

But wait, there’s more. The Soda Tax is more than a health issue and more than a social justice issue. It is also an environmental issue of vast importance.

Ironically, the soda industry, which we turn to for quenching our thirst and restoring needed fluids, wastes shockingly huge amounts of water. It also produces unnecessary green house gases (GHGs) and requires extensive use of resources for packaging.

In California, we live in a water-stressed region suffering from the worst drought in memory. It is feared that with climate change even a 2 degree C rise will result in loss of half of the Sierra snowpack. That means loss of half of the water supply for much of the San Francisco Bay area. We are not alone. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world’s population is projected to face water scarcity by 2025.

How much water is used in the production of a bottle of soda? If we include the water used in the production of the ingredients, such as sugar or high fructose corn syrup,the amount of water actually used to produce a half-liter of soda (about 16 oz.) varies from 150 to 300 liters of water. That’s a ratio of 300-600: 1.

A typical bathtub holds about 90 liters of water. So each time you drink a 16-ounce soda, you have wasted two or three bathtubs full of fresh water in the process.

The issue of water wastage in soda production has been most acutely felt in India where farmers have been battling Coca-Cola and Pepsi for years. Indian farmers have accused the soda giants of depleting the water table and leaving local farmers without enough water for their crops. Neither company pays for the water it extracts. Well-known environmental activist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award, Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology put it this way: “Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are engaged in a water war against the people of India. Their bottling plants are daily stealing millions of litres of water, thereby denying local communities their fundamental right to water.”

How big a problem is Big Soda’s big appetite for fresh water? Consider this: Coca-Cola uses enough fresh water every day to meet the world’s drinking water requirement for10 days.

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Your Sugary Schools

by | Mar 27, 2014 | Nutrition, Sugars | 0 comments

Sweets

Dear American School Principals,

I am a pediatric registered dietitian in Laguna Beach, California, and have spent my professional life teaching parents what and how to feed their children. I am not a nutrition extremist; I believe in birthday cakes on birthdays, candy on Halloween and dessert on occasion.

The last several years have felt like a steep uphill battle because much of the good work I do to build healthy eating habits in the home is sabotaged by unhealthy food being given to children everywhere they turn. The banks offer lollipops. The grocery stores hand out cookies. And parents and coaches now bring sugary snacks to soccer and baseball games, as I reported in “Soccer Snack Insanity.”

But the most disheartening trend I have seen is in our American schools. Kids are given food for every conceivable occasion. Every week, parents from all over our country flood my inbox with concerns about their schools giving their kids sugary foods in the classroom. Foods like ice cream, candy and cookies are showing up for every birthday and holiday imaginable. Let’s do some math. If there are an average of 25 students in an American classroom, that is a lot of celebratory cupcake parties throughout the school year. And let’s face it, most of your students are having birthday parties outside of school with plenty of sugar.

And are you aware that candy is sometimes used as a teaching tool? I have heard from many parents that if students answer a question correctly, they are rewarded with gummy candy or chocolate pieces. How can schools teach and promote a nutrition and health curriculum and then turn around and use food so inappropriately? This is sending the wrong message to the exact audience at the exact age where we have an opportunity to establish a lifetime’s worth of healthy eating habits.

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Doing This Could Make You More Motivated To Exercise

by | Mar 26, 2014 | Exercise | 0 comments

Exercise Remember that time your exercise class had awesome music and fun gear — and left you feeling like you had a thorough workout?

Keeping this memory in mind could be the key to motivating you to exercise, a small new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of New Hampshire found that when study participants were asked to think about positive memories around exercise, they had higher levels of subsequent exercise compared with people who didn’t recall memories about exercise.

The study is published in the journal Memory and is based on data from about 150 students. For the study, the students were split up into three groups: One group was asked to think about something positive that happened that would increase exercise motivation, another group was asked to think about something negative that happened that would increase their motivation to exercise, and the third group was not asked to recall any memory. All the students were also asked to rate their future intentions to exercise.

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Regular Exercise Could Help Protect Your Sight

by | Mar 25, 2014 | Exercise | 0 comments

Eyes Making sure to get regular exercise could help protect your vision, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that people who exercise three or more times a week have a 58 percent decreased odds of becoming visually impaired, compared with sedentary people, after adjusting for age. Visual impairment was defined in the study as vision loss from disease or trauma that is unable to be corrected with glasses or contact lenses.

“While age is usually one of the most strongly associated factors for many eye diseases that cause visual impairment, it is a factor we cannot change,” study researcher Dr. Ronald Klein, M.D., MPH, said in a statement. “Lifestyle behaviors like smoking, drinking and physical activity, however, can be altered. So, it’s promising, in terms of possible prevention, that these behaviors are associated with developing visual impairment over the long term.”

However, because the study only showed an association between lifestyle factors and visual impairment, it’s impossible to say that the behaviors can directly cause — or prevent — visual impairment. “Further research is needed to determine whether modifying these behaviors will in fact lead to a direct reduction in vision loss,” Klein added.

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