Fit Exercise into EVERYDAY!

Below are fun and easy ways to get exercise into that busy lifestyle of yours:

Take the Long Way Home  Unless you live or work on the seventy-third floor, there’s no reason you can’t take the stairs instead of the elevator! You could also leave a few minutes earlier and get off the bus one stop before your destination to work out your legs. Or try parking the car farther away from the door and hoof it.

Use Lunch to Boost Your Energy Levels  Yes, food gives you energy (depending on what you eat, of course)…and so does exercise. Take some time out during your break or at lunch to reduce some stress and get your energy levels up for the rest of the day. Even a short, invigorating 10-minute walk offers tremendous health benefits.

10,000 Steps: How Far Along Are You?  Ten thousand steps averages out to about five miles per day. The average American only walks about 3,000 steps each day. But it’s easy to get more exercise doing even the most mundane things. Forget the remote control and go for the TV when you want to adjust the volume or change the channel. Putting things away at home? Make extra trips and improve your step count!

Break it Up!  There’s no need to try and find that elusive half-hour each day…break up your workouts into 10-minute segments. You might try some yoga first thing in the morning, a 10-minute walk at lunch, and then a few jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups when you get home from work. When you start adding it all together, you’ll find you’re getting that half-hour…and then some!

Shop Till You Drop  What fun! You can actually get away with shopping as exercise! Walking back and forth through the mall is better exercise than you can imagine, and no – you don’t have to buy anything. Walking is a great calorie burner. Just imagine being able to fit into that beautiful dress you saw yesterday in the mall. (Keep walking the mall and you’ll get to see it every day!)

Sweat the Small Stuff  You know those little chores we buy machines for – like washing dishes? Turn ‘em off and save some electricity. Washing dishes by hand burns calories and helps tone your arms. Another idea: put away the leaf blower and get out an old-fashioned rake.

Tone it up…Anywhere  You can do isometric exercises anywhere. Just tighten up a muscle in your body that you want to work on, and hold it for a few seconds. It’s a great way to tone up your stomach muscles, arms, chest, rear-end and thighs. Best of all, you can do them almost anywhere….and no one will notice.

Kids – the Ultimate Calorie Burners!  If you have little ones, there’s no better way to keep them healthy and get yourself some exercise than going outside to play. You can make it educational with a walk through the park, or it can be just plain fun with games like tag.

Do the Things You Like  Don’t like sit-ups, but prefer planks? Do them. Prefer walking to jogging? Perfectly fine. The idea is to get exercise, and you won’t get it if you’re sitting around thinking about how much you hate it. Walking around the track on a rainy day is pretty unappealing, but a stroll through the mall on that same rainy day is a nice way to get out of the house. Be creative!

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The Glycemic Index

Glycemic Index: What's It All About?

Good carbohydrates, bad carbohydrates. Low glycemic index, high glycemic index. A great tool to help you manage diabetes or lose weight. You might have heard all these statements associated with the glycemic index. What is this glycemic index all about? Is it worth considering as a way to help you control your blood sugar levels?

The Glycemic Index: Food’s Impact on Blood Sugar in Diabetes

Researchers have spent years debating what makes blood sugar levels too high in those with diabetes. Potential culprits have included sugar, carbohydrates in general, simple carbs, starches, and more. The glycemic index is one attempt to measure each individual food’s effect on blood sugar.

If you're trying to lose weight, calories count more than the types of food in your diet, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Tufts University study shows.  The study shows that after a year, overweight people on a low-carb low-glycemic-index diet lost just as much weight -- 8% of their original weight -- as people on a reduced-fat, high-glycemic-index diet.

"The present results suggest that a broad range of healthy diets can successfully promote weight loss," conclude Sai Krupa Das, PhD, and Susan B. Roberts, PhD, of the USDA's Human Nutrition Center on Aging at Tufts, and colleagues.

High Glycemic Index Foods Are Linked to Health Problems

What researchers have learned is that high glycemic index foods generally make blood sugar levels higher. In addition, people who eat a lot of high glycemic index foods tend to have greater levels of body fat, as measured by the body mass index (BMI). High BMIs are linked to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.  High GI foods include many carbs such as:

· White bread

· Pasta

· Rice

· Low-fiber cereals

· Baked goods

Low Glycemic Index Foods Are Healthier Choices

Low glycemic index foods generally have less of an impact on blood sugar levels. People who eat a lot of low glycemic index foods tend to have lower total body fat levels.  Low glycemic index foods include:

· Fruits

· Vegetables

· Whole and minimally processed grains

· Legumes

You may want to work with a dietitian to learn more about combining and preparing foods to achieve the lowest glycemic index levels in your diet plan. It is recommended that about 40% of total caloric intake be from carbohydrates.—WebMD

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Journaling - Revisited

Bar none...Journaling is the MOST effective tool to help you attain your wellness goals!  Keeping a food diary will help you confront the truth about how much, when and why you eat. Then, you can start making the required changes. In addition, journaling can help to:

Control binge eating. You are less likely to go for that second helping if you know you have to write it down.

Track progress. A food diary can serve as evidence of how far you have come in your journey. It also feels great to look back and see you are eating better today than you did weeks or months ago.

Encourage conscious eating. Unconscious eating occurs when we eat without paying attention. You are more likely to avoid eating for unconscious reasons if you are writing it down.

Connect eating to emotions. Many people include a column for "observations" or "emotions" in their diaries. In this way, journals can be used to examine certain feelings that may trigger overeating. Only once you identify the causes can you start to do something about them.

Point out nutrition imbalances. As you jot down your meals and snacks, you may notice you lack fruits and vegetables on most days, or that you never eat a protein source until dinner. A food diary can give you clues, in black and white, as to what foods you have been neglecting and need to include in your diet.

Monitor eating patterns. Until you keep a food journal, you may not realize that you have a seven-hour gap between your 11:30 lunch and your 6:30 dinner. Perhaps this is why you're at the vending machine every afternoon at 3 p.m., downing a bag or two of chips or cookies. Solution? Plan to bring or store a healthy snack for the mid-afternoon to ward off poor eating choices.

Monitor calories. Journaling usually requires you to track your calorie intake - which can be eye-opening. Perhaps you were not aware your afternoon soda had 150 calories, or your "innocent" morning latte had 250. By forcing yourself to track portions and calories, you can begin to make adjustments.

Show commitment. The effort and time it takes to keep a food journal is proof that you are committed to your health, and have a desire to take a proactive role in your weight loss.

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If you bite it; write it!!!

Portion Distortion

Call it the supersizing of Americans. As portions have grown larger over the past 40 years, so have people in the USA, says Lisa Young, a nutrition researcher at New York University who has studied the trend she calls "portion creep."  Studies show that the more food put in front of people, the more they eat. And since the 1960s, the serving sizes of foods sold in stores and restaurants — from candy bars to burgers and sodas — have become much bigger, Young says.  This means that when given a cookie the size of a Frisbee or a bagel as big as a flotation device, people ramp up their calorie intake. "Americans have grown proportionally to increased portion sizes," Young says.

About 65% of Americans are overweight or obese today, compared with 47% in the early 1970s and 45% in the early 1960s. Some of Young's examples of the perils of portion size:

• One cup of pasta has almost 200 calories, which used to be a typical restaurant serving. Now some restaurants serve three cups of pasta for an entree, racking up nearly 600 calories without sauce, she says.

• Bagels used to be 2 to 3 ounces, or about 200 calories. Today they're 5 to 6 ounces, which is more than 400 calories, depending on the type. "People have no idea that a 5-ounce bagel is equal to five pieces of bread or 15 cups of popcorn," Young says. For people who consume about 1,600 calories a day, a 5-ounce bagel would be the five servings of breads/grains that they should eat for the entire day, she says.

Rather than cutting carbs, fats or proteins, Young says Americans should "smartsize" their portions. She recommends using visual images to become aware of how much you're eating. For instance, a 3-ounce serving of meat is the size of your palm or a deck of cards.  Young says that once you get into the habit of monitoring your portions, it becomes second nature.  "Don't buy into the (idea) that what the restaurant is serving you is an appropriate amount of food to eat," Young says. It's possible that you're getting three to four servings of meat at one meal, she adds.

But there is no need to go hungry. You can increase the portions of some food, such as produce.  You can eat lots of broccoli, green beans, deep-green lettuce, peppers, carrots, apple slices and strawberries without eating too many calories. Most people do not eat enough fruits and vegetables to meet the dietary guidelines.—USA Today

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Mindless Snacking

It's 10:15pm. You're not hungry, but you have an overwhelming urge to eat. You start with just a few potato chips, which quickly turns into half a bag. You may as well dig into the ice cream now, you figure. Sound familiar? The mindless-eating monster can rear its ugly head when you're stressed, tired, bored or just plain ravenous. Cornell Professor Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and president elect of the Society for Nutrition Education, offers up five tested ways to break your snacking habits:

1. DRINK WATER

"It's very easy for us to confuse dehydration with hunger," says Wansink. "We know our body's craving something and we just assume it's food, but frequently it ends up being liquids, especially in active people. I would guess seven times out of 10 what they think of as hunger is really just a slight dehydration." You don't necessarily have to drink pure water, but make sure the beverage is low in caffeine and sodium. "Caffeine and sodium dehydrate you even more, giving your mouth a feeling of thirst, which can lead you to snack," warns Wansink.

2.  DON'T MAKE IT EASY

Mindless munching is often a result of easy snack-access. To slow yourself down, Wansink suggests making snacking a challenge. "Put in some interruption that can make you think twice about how much you want to snack. If there's a bowl of candy sitting at your desk, you don't think twice, it's there. But if you put barriers in your way, it'll really test how much you want this." There's proof in the pudding. In a study Wansink did with a candy dish, office workers ate 125 calories less when the dish was just 6 feet away from them than when the dish was at arm's distance. Those seemingly trivial 125 extra cals can add up to a whopping 11 lbs in just one year.

3.  MAKE TRADEOFFS

A great way to reduce careless snacking is to make up some sort of condition every time you have cravings. "For example, you can have anything you want from the vending machine if you are going to work out that day, or if you have a light dinner, something where there's some sort of trade off that you have to make," suggests Wansink. "If you regularly stop by 7-11 on the way home and buy a Slurpee, start taking an alternative way home to reduce that temptation. Or say 'I can get that only if I run an important errand on the way home.' That way, you break that habit, or diminish it so that you're at least getting something done when you snack."

4.  DON'T BURY THE EVIDENCE

Some guys like to stuff their empty bags of chips and candy wrappers into the very bottom of the trash in an attempt to forget that they ate them at all. Don't hide the wrappers! Leaving the candy wrappers on your desk at work or the chicken bones on your plate during the football game is a good way to remind yourself to slow down. Wansink also suggests staying mindful of this when you drink: "When you're partying with other guys and you're having fun, it's often easy to forget how much a person's drank, whether it's beer or soda. An easy way to keep track of things is to put the bottle-top in your pocket. That way, once you feel them, it'll remind you how many you've had that night. It's an easy way to keep track of something that it's easy to lose track of."

5.  HAVE YOUR CAKE, BUT SKIP THE BREAD

Eating out at restaurants can easily throw off your weight loss goals. Thankfully, there are easy tips we can follow to eat well and still enjoy ourselves. "First, we are horrendous bread eaters, so don't let the waiter bring the bread basket," advises Wansink. "The second thing is, order something that you really want. Eat all the meat and veggies, and don't have the carbs if you don't want them. But don't skimp on an entree by trying to get something you think is healthy because it's just going to backfire in the long run. Finally, remember this rule of thumb when eating out at a restaurant: limit yourself to the entree and just two other things—it can be two drinks, a dessert and a roll, or it could be 2 rolls—it just can't be all of the above."

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