Health and Fitness Notes for a New Year!

Fitness starting points: 1. Gain muscle. 2. Lose body fat. 3. Increase endurance. 4. Fight disease by empowering your own immune system, (it produces its own drugs when we do that).

Detox for prevention energy and fitness: Keeping our body toxin free, helps us to not only unleash the power of the immune system, but happens to slenderize the waist as well! Oft times a good detox can get rid of 7–12 pounds of waste!

Too much exercise can clog up your drainpipes: over doing it can cause too much protein breakdown and overwhelm the kidneys. Steady wins the race!

To attempt to live longer is Nuts! research has shown that death from the leading causes of death (heart disease, cancer and respiratory), were lower in ones with higher nut consumption. Use local grown nuts replace unhealthy snacks.

You are Trillions: your body is made up of trillions of cells, (most of which regenerates at least once a year). Your habits can rejuvenate or age your cells.

Hormone imbalance: keeping a good diet, plenty of water, active lifestyle, deep rest and getting rid of stress helps to go a long way in keeping our hormones balances.

Heart health is important: our heart pumps around 20 quarts of blood per minute (at rest) and will pump a total of around 1.5 million gallons of blood (into a network of approximately 50,000 miles of blood vessels) every year for us!

The basics for heart health are: fresh clean air, heart healthy balanced diet, sunshine, staying hydrated with clean water, exercise, deep rest, sleep, stress release, fun, and quality time spent with the ones you care about!

Restoring old fat (cellulite): cellulite is blood and oxygen starved fat. We can help smooth and repair this fat by building a better blood flow to this area, building muscle in this area, and increase blood flow into these areas by applying heat and skin brushing.

Functional training for real life function: exercising your muscles in the manner you use them in real life will strengthen and empower movement. This trains you like an athlete instead of a bodybuilder, ever notice how stiff bodybuilders move?

Holding your breath: temporarily holding your breath can give a slight surge in strength and help protect your back.

Cramps? Try pickle juice: pickle juice relieves cramps fast.

Burning fat by controlling blood sugar: lowering blood sugar is one of the simplest strategies to trigger the fat burning process. Lowering our blood sugar simply helps our body recognize the need for another source of fuel, thus triggering the release of energy substance from our fat cells.

Burning fat with apple cider vinegar: excess blood glucose is stored as fat and research has shown that consuming 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in 8 oz. of water prior to mealtime, reduced fasting blood glucose concentrations in healthy adults at risk for type 2 diabetes.

The fat burning effect of food: surround yourself with foods that take longer to digest (such as raw vegetables, nuts and other unprocessed foods). These foods trigger what is known as the thermic effect of food and will burn more calories throughout digestion vs. fast absorbing foods.

Fat burning tool chest for your kitchen: oatmeal, eggs, apples, grapefruit, strawberries, eggs, nuts, berries, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, tomato, beans, quinoa, tuna (grilled fish), grilled chicken.

Burning fat through brain power: our body is one of the most powerful producers of personal designer drugs that we can ever hope for, and with the power our brain has, with its signaling system of hormones and nerves throughout the body, it has the capability to increase metabolism, burn more fat and increase muscle gains, when we get a more vivid picture in our mind of what it is we are trying to do, while we’re doing it.

The fat burning effect of compound exercises: if you want to increase the cardio and fat burning potential of your workout, do a lot of compound movements in the beginning of your routine and keep any of your individual muscle exercises at the end of your routine. This includes things such as biceps curl; triceps push downs, calf exercises, and leg extensions.

Pumping up the flab: fat with muscle pumped up under it actually can give a person a very healthy look and is one of the best short cuts for getting shaped up quickly! Rapid weight loss in the final weeks and days prior to an event will leave you looking saggy and unhealthy.

Tummy Flattening Effect of Fiber: a fast way to flatten our abdominal area is to eat a fiber rich diet, and I’m not referring to a cereal loaded diet, (most cereals spike blood sugar) but rather a diet that has lots of raw vegetables, beans, oatmeal, nuts and fruit in it. A diet rich in fiber helps prevent a buildup of waste in our waist!

Active lifestyle: your activities today are tomorrow’s physical capability insurance! Whenever we have the opportunity at home, (or at work) to do physical activity or manual labor, we should look at it as a muscle and fitness building opportunity. These are the real-life exercises that help prevent injury when we attempt to do it tomorrow, next week and next year!

Sun: EVERYTHING on this planet would die without the sun. Getting too much exercise can be unhealthy; it’s the same with the sun. Just like muscle, our skin conditions itself gradually to exposure.

Negatives and injuries strengthen us: the positive things in life (and in exercise) look and feel great, but how we handle the negatives and recover from our injuries, plays a big part in building true strength, endurance and character!!