Stress Reducer Tips

While appropriate stress is vital to keep us alive and thriving, excessive stress or what some term “toxic stress” can be detrimental to our health. Keeping stress under control is vital to healthy living. Here are a few tips:

1. Don’t over schedule – it is easy to get our schedule filled up as we add more and more responsibilities to our lives. Learn to say “no” to some things and try to remove things that you maybe don’t need to do off your schedule.
2. Be realistic – be careful when trying to do everything perfect or expecting everyone around you to be perfect. We have to realize we and everyone else is not perfect. Don’t put more stress on yourself or others than needed.
3. Get enough sleep – while it may seem like we can function with less sleep, which is what we often times do when we don’t follow tip #1. Parts of your brain actually shut down when you are lacking sleep. You are functioning, just not at your fullest level, which puts more stress on the parts that are functioning.
4. Treat your body well – regular appropriate exercise is a significant component to reducing stress. Be careful not to go to the opposite side of no exercise, excessive exercise can actually lead to increasing stress. Also a healthy diet is important to decrease the stress to your body trying to function. You wouldn’t expect a car to work very well if you didn’t use good gas for the engine.
5. Watch what you’re thinking – your attitude, outlook and thoughts influence biological functions of your body. People with what is called a “growth mindset” have better control of their stress as compared to “fixed mindset” people. Growth mindset people see that their abilities and situations will grow and change, like a muscle if you work on it. They also accept criticism because they know it will make them better in the long term. Know that with challenges comes some failure but failure is a necessary part of growth and change.

Evaluate your eating habits

If you have tried multiple diets and various practices to lose weight and have been unsuccessful in becoming the healthier you that you want to be, try a food diary:


• Keep a diary of the foods you eat, when you ate them, how you were feeling and what you were doing when you ate them. Review this diary after a few days or weeks to see if there are any patterns in your eating habits that may need changed to be a healthier you.

• Increased calorie intake can often time come from not realizing how much you eat throughout a day. Multiple studies show that 90% of people underestimate their calorie intake for a day. A diary will help you track and be more aware of how many calories you are taking in.

• Eating for our ancient ancestors was for survival purposes. While some people in the world and even here in the US, hunger is still an issue. But for most of us, hunger does not coincide with starvation and famine as those people experience. A diary will help you look at if you were just eating for true hunger reasons or other reasons.

• Some of those other reasons can be because eating is a social event or a psychological coping mechanism that some of us can easily fall trap too. Do you eat every time you turn the TV on? When you are upset or stressed about something do you always open a bag of chips or go for the chocolate? Every time you go to a restaurant do you order an appetizer, main course and dessert and eat it all, even if you’re full after the appetizer? A diary will help you notice if your eating habits are possibly due to these issues as compared to just needing the nutritional intake for health.

• Often times we may think we are eating healthy, only to review a diary of food intake and see 1 or 2 servings of fruits and vegetables and lots of processed foods and snacks with empty calories. A food diary will help you be more aware of the types of foods you are eating on a regular basis.

• After reviewing your eating habits pick one thing to change. It may take some time but with patience and persistence you can make a change toward a healthier you. After making the change stick, pick another habit to change. Eventually you will become the healthier you that you want to become.

Are all dieting plans created equal?

We all have a diet; it is the amount of food we consume. The problem for many of us is in dieting, the deliberate selection of food to control body weight. Should dieting be so complex that it gets over 11 million results when you type it into Google? The simple equation of how much food you take in, known as calories, minus the amount of calories you burn through your day (basal metabolic rate plus activity level) will equal your weight control. Bring in more calories then you burn and you gain weight, burn more calories then you take in and you lose weight.


Dieting plans started in the early 1900’s. Seems like you hear about new dieting plans all the time and everyone of us can name probably at least ten or more, and have tried at least a handful. It seems like they should all work based on what they try to sell us, but if they truly worked how come only about 5% of us will be successful at keeping the weight off according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention?


Which ones work and which ones fail? Well actually any dieting plans that has you take in fewer calories then you burn will work, remember the simple equation. If your dieting plan has you eating 500 calories of whatever food it is or supplemented with a pill or shot and you are burning 2,000 calories, you will lose weight. Yea dieting plan works! The reason most of these dieting plans fail eventually over time is that we don’t want to eat cabbage soup, take a pill or shot, walk around starving or some other strange idea the rest of our lives. So we eventually go back to our old eating habits: 3,000+ calories in and only 2,000 calories burned. We gain all the weight back plus more, the dieting plan fails! And for many of us it is time to pick a new dieting plan to go through the same cycle all over again.


To find a successful diet plan, eat a balanced diet that you can do the rest of your life. It needs to have the calorie intake needed based on your activity level to meet the weight you want to be. While the thought of losing 20 pounds in 2 weeks sounds great, we should all realize that gaining 20 pounds in 2 weeks would be very unhealthy, so maybe losing 20 pounds in 2 weeks isn’t so healthy either. Eating like the person you want to become will take more time to get you where you want, but it is much healthier and will allow you to be successful for life.

Strength Training 101

Strength training is a very important component of a healthy exercise program, so what are the best training methods to use for a healthy life with strength training.  Here are few basic guidelines:


Use the FITT acronym to help remember the key components of strengthening training program.

Frequency: Research shows that 2 x / week is the best frequency for a strength training program for general health. But 1 x / week is better then none.

Intensity:

• Typically do 8-15 repetitions per exercise, unless training for specific purpose.
• Maintaining good form/posture throughout the exercise.
• Go through a full range of motion throughout exercise.
• Last few repetitions should be challenging but don't lose your good form.
• Breathe out on exertion, do not hold your breath.
• Speed should match normal daily activity (higher speed may increases injury risk).
• Perform 1-2 sets of each exercise.
• Sport specific or high intensity training may require varied sets.

Type: There are lots of types of strength training exercises from body resistance, free weights, elastic bands, machine weights and others. Multi-joint exercises, an exercise that requires you to use more than one joint as you move the resistance, are typically better. You should have exercises that balance pushing and pulling motions along with balance of arm, leg and trunk/core muscle exercises.

Time:

• Only needs to take 10-30 minutes.
• During this time you should perform 8-10 exercises including all major muscle groups: legs, arms, trunk/core.
• Rest period between exercises:
• Short (30-90 seconds) Fitness Range
• Long (3-5 minutes) Strength Enhancement Range

Just a few more thoughts on why you might want to exercise and a tip to help you stick with it.

It is clear that exercise is important, yet people struggle to do it.

Aerobic exercise as an example has been shown to help with: muscle tone, stroke patients, memory, rheumatoid arthritis, inhibit gray matter loss in the brain, panic disorders, stress chemical changes, muscle function, muscle disease, brain function, decreases pain/changes pain perception, improve sleep, improve quality of life, HIV patients, cardiopulmonary fitness, osteoarthritis, aids the immune system, decrease chronic inflammation, migraines, helps heart disease, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, just as good as anti-depressants, low back pain, fibromyalgia, increase brain size, pregnancy, diabetic/insulin, nerve sensitivity, brain injured patients, cystic fibroses, chronic fatigue syndrome, oxygenates the brain, improve mood, etc.  A pretty impressive list, don't you wish you could get all of that in a pill...well you can't, unless that pill is

shaped like physical activity called exercise.

Here's a couple pretty neat studies and some interesting findings:

D. K. McGuire et al., "A Thirty Year Follow-Up of the Dallas Bed Rest and Training Study," Circulation. 104 (2001): 1350-57.

Approximately 30 years ago a very important study on exercise was conducted. The study was called the Dallas Bed Rest and Training Study. Researchers recruited 6 college students to literally spend their summer in bed.

• After just three weeks in bed, the subjects experienced deterioration in cardio-vascular fitness that was equivalent to twenty years of aging.
• Thirty years later, five of the six subjects were retested. 
• Only two had continued to exercise with any regularity, and all had gained weight and body fat. 
• Even so, the declines from thirty years of actually aging were less than those they had suffered during the original three weeks of bed rest. 
• Immediately after being tested, the five men were put on an aerobic exercise pro-gram, which included regular walking, jogging, and cycling. 
• In just six months, the declines they had suffered over the previous thirty years were completely reversed

Heiden, E., M. Testa, et al. (2009). Faster, Better, Stronger, HarperCollins

A group of students were gathered to participate in an exercise study.

• The first group of students was asked to exercise at least once for twenty minutes during the next week. All they had to do was to do a single 20 minute exercise. After the week, it was found that only 29% complied with the instruction. 
• A second group of students was given the same challenge, along with detailed information about the significant role exercise plays in reducing the risk of heart disease, an attempt to further motivate them. Following the week, it was found that 39% of them complied with the instruction. 
• A third and final group were asked to commit to exercising at a specific time, on a specific day, at a designated location. For this group, compliance more than doubled to an extraordinary 91%.

Looks like a little exercise can go a long way to make you healthy and feeling younger.  Setting up a specific time and place seems to help us stick with it.