Tag Archive for: United States

How to Beat the Mental Fatigue Associated with Stress?

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It is harder to deal with stress the older you get as the pressures of work, personal life, friendships, relationships, and dreams, goals, benchmarks become more demanding. So, what is a guy or gal to do?

First, there are cardinal rules about taking care of yourself. You probably know them: eat well and sleep well. Alan Li writes, “The simplest method for beating fatigue is to get enough sleep each night. Build a routine. Go to bed at the same hour every day and try getting up at the same time each morning. Make sure not to distract yourself by reading or watching TV late into the night and take whatever precautions you need to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Also, begin a regular exercise routine. Being in better shape gives you more energy to burn.

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Li explains, Eating regular nutritious meals helps your body keep in tip-top shape and lets you perform better. Be sure to eat breakfast, because failing to do so can leave you sluggish for the entire day. If you can’t find the time eat a healthy breakfast, consider snacking more often between meals to make up for it. Avoid eating junk foods with high fat and sugar content. The point is to make sure your daily meals are nutritious, healthy, and with controlled portions. Make sure you are drinking lots of water, taking lots of walks, moving your body as much as possible.

The stressors of a daily job, relationships, friendships, dating, marriage, engagement, or whatever is stressful for you, are plenty to handle. So, try to give yourself time outs, a leisure time, If removing these factors is impossible or impractical, try taking some time out of each day to listen to music, take a hot bath or doing anything else that you consider relaxing. Use your leisure time for relaxing rather than mulling over problems.

Finally, know your body and mind. Get to know when you are okay and when you are under the weather. And when you are under the weather, seek help. Seek medical help. As someone with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I can tell you that I was used to living with the stress. But it does not have to be like this. You can relax. You can handle the deadlines, the fights, the pressures to perform at a high level.

Sometimes, you just need to have the right team on your side, cheering you on, supporting you, and giving you the help you need. It is not vain to need someone on your team. If anything, it gives you the courage, the confidence, the extra oomph to face daily struggles.

How Yoga Naturally Improves Work Satisfaction 

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Yoga in the work place not only lowers stress levels, but it also boosts positive work relations and reduces days lost due to illness. But did you know that participating in a yoga class during work hours also improves work satisfaction?

According to one survey, more than 53% of corporations are adding yoga classes in-house to take advantage of the many benefits yoga offers—happy employees are just good business.

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Beats Stress

Studies show that the one major reason for work dissatisfaction is highstress levels. Too much stress makes employees susceptible to illness and injury, not to mention sleep deprivation, which lowers mood and motivation. Being stressed out all the time means we make more simple mistakes and are less engaged in tasks, which is obviously part of work satisfaction. Completing a few basic yoga poses and breathing exercises daily can lower stress naturally.

Lessens Physical Ailments

Anyone who has ever worked an office job knows how staring at a screen all day while sitting at a desk negatively impacts motivation and focus in a variety of ways. Yoga gives our bodies a chance to move and stretch to keep us active and fit and keeps the tight neck and shoulders at bay, increasing our morale in the office.

Improves Focus

Daily work stress and long hours can cause us to lose our concentration and be distracted by unimportant tasks. Doing short, easy meditations and deep-breathing yoga exercises can quiet the noisy voices in your head that keep you anxious and overwhelmed. These simple techniques improve and regulate oxygen in your bloodstream, making you more alert, focused and happy.

Relieves Fatigue and Improves Energy

As our work hours grow longer, it becomes almost impossible to not succumb to fatigue and burnout. We might not even be aware how much stress and not enough downtime impact our energy levels, not to mention our zest for living. By adding a few yoga poses and quiet meditation time to our day, we can lower fatigue, raise our energy level and our mood. This means more work satisfaction and general happiness with our lot in life.

Enhances Mood and Attitude

You just can’t help but feel happier when you are less stressed, more energized and more creative—it all goes hand in hand. And yoga provides this for everyone. The practice of yoga has lasted for millennia for a reason. It provides mental, emotional and physical benefits in just minutes a day. Spending your breaks enjoying stretching and breathing exercises can do wonders for your work and personal life by improving your mood and attitude.

Shoes and Back Pain

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Did you know that wearing inappropriate shoes could cause the back to feel stressed? Shoes are cushions, foundations, and levers that we use to walk, stand, run, job, and so on. If one wears correctly, fitted shoes it will promote a healthy posture. On the other hand, if one wears unsuitable fitting shoes, look out feet and back.

The feet are the number one target the starts normal back pain. In short, the first thing that hits the ground when you start to stand or walk is the ball of your foot, i.e. the heel. Once the heel hits the surface, the remaining sections of the foot start to follow, which promotes weight and stress throughout areas of the body. Feet problems alone can lead to back pain. Poor posture causes back pain, yet the condition is often characterized by inappropriate actions we take.

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Fact: Wearing high-heels will slowly pull the weight of the entire body forward, thus corrupting the posture and arches of the back. Hold your weapons down women, because in time you will feel pain. High-heels are the leading cause of “Spondylolisthesis. In short, terms, spondylolisthesis is a condition that is caused from slipping frontward on the lower back. (Lumbar)

The toes are designed to provide us support, yet when a person wears high-heels it causes the toes to affect the joints, since the toes will narrow, causing weight or pressure to the spine. Now, high-heels are sexy to both men and women, yet these heels are going to cost you a fortune down the road. You can look good in supported shoes that fit comfortably without damaging your ligaments, tendons, nerves, muscles, and so on.

Sorry to pop your bubbles boys and girls, but shoes that support our spine can reduce the odds of experiencing back pain.

How to choose shoes:

Orthotic shoes are recommended. Orthotic shoes will support the feet and weight-bearing joints and muscles. Orthotic shoes have proven to reduce dysfunctions that emerge from the neurological system. In addition, the supportive shoes have proven to reduce injuries and pain emerging from abnormal conditions.

If you are diagnosed with posture conditions, such as osteoporosis, or gait, you can benefit from Orthotic shoes.

Fact: Did you know that you could wear two or more insoles from Dr. Scholl, fitting the insoles into your shoes prior to flipping them over, and achieve balance, which promotes a healthy spine?

Shoes make a difference to our spine, since the feet alone when abnormal can lead to back pain. If you are not wearing, supportive shoes that provide you a comfortable fit, you may want to invest in Orthotic shoes to relieve your back pain.

In addition to shoes, you can perform stretch workouts, and practicing leaning, sitting and lifting strategies to correct your actions and reduce back pain.

Fact: If the spine is misaligned, it can lead to back pain.

Duh, you knew that. Anyway, we misalign the spine when lifting incorrectly, wearing unsuitable shoes, and leaning, or sitting in position, incorrectly. You can correct the problems by getting the ball and chain in motion, and learning about your condition, followed by taking action to relieve your pain.

Fact: Proper lifting starts at the thighs and buttocks. Millions of people lift while relying on the back to hold the weight. Back pain occurs.

When lifting heavy objects, you want to avoid lifting at a distance. At best, you want to avoid bending the knees and expending the trunk perpendicularly.

Prepare to take out your briefcase. Surely, you have around 20 pounds of weight inside the container. Otherwise, consider an object that weighs 20-pounds, unless you have been restricted to lifting.

What you are about to do is lift more than 20-pounds. By the time you get in position and use your muscles, you will have lifted up to 200 pounds. When you lift the briefcase, or other object move close to the subject. Move the trunk or torso in position by placing it over your feet. Remain in position until you have completed your lift.

How Learning From Successes Can Boost Your Self-Esteem

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Learning from successes can boost your self-esteem because you can learn more about yourself and your strengths. Virtually everyone excels in at least one area (often more than one area); this can help you to learn where your best skills lie and to do more activities that enable you to take advantage of these advanced skills more often.

When you do something well, you feel a sense of accomplishment, pride, and confidence surge in you because you were able to achieve something that either helped yourself and/or helped others. In many cases, you were the best person for the task and were more easily able to achieve it than other people would have. Therefore, other people will look up to you because you were able to complete the task and/or achieve the feat so quickly and easily as compared to others.

When you are having a difficult time or struggling with challenges, it is important to look back upon your successes and realize that you have the capability of doing great things and succeeding at whatever you are doing. Sometimes, life “throws us a curveball” that makes us uncomfortable and causes us to struggle a bit with tasks that we are not used to completing and have a hard time completing at a high level.

The key is that we must remember that even during these difficult times, we have the capability to adapt and succeed. Reflect back on those times when you’ve had successes, especially those tasks that others struggled and they called upon you to do them. Whether it was an issue with a computer or electronic device, an item at home that needed repairing, or just offering helpful advice to someone dealing with a situation you dealt with before, you were able to succeed where others couldn’t or would have a harder time succeeding.

By reflecting on your past successes and realizing you have the capability to adapt and do many tasks well, you will realize that whatever present challenge you’re facing can be overcome as well. You just have to focus on the task at hand, utilize the lessons you’ve learned from having past successes, and put the work in to overcome the present challenge. By taking time to reflect and learn from your past successes, you can keep your self-esteem during times of great difficulty and be able to overcome virtually any challenge that comes your way.

How to Lose Weight Fast and Easy

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If you’ve heard it once you’ve heard it a dozen times – fad diets don’t result in permanent weight loss. But what about when you want to lose a few pounds fast. It’s hard not to try the Cabbage Soup Diet or Lose 21 Pounds in 21 Days Diet. While these diets might work is this really safe weight loss and will it last? According to NBC’s Biggest Loser medical doctor Dr. Michael Dansinger, there’s nothing wrong with rapid weight loss.

Losing 20 pounds in a week because of an aggressive exercise and easting program that involves hours a day of exercise combined with healthy eating choices and restricted calorie intake can result in exactly this kind of weight loss. However, such a program should never be undertaken without first getting your physicians approval.

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Even without taking it to the extreme losing 3 to 5 pounds a week can easily be accomplished. Losing weight fast is really as simple as a math formula. You must burn more calories than you take in. A deficit of 500 calories seems to be the recommended and can be accomplished by reducing your calorie intake and increasing your physical activity.

If you want to lose those pounds faster than exercise more and eat less. Around 1100 calories combined with one hour of exercise a day will lead to a loss of 3 to 5 pounds in the first week. If you weigh more than 250 pounds then the amount will be more. Great news – According to Dr. Michael Dansinger, the more fat you have to lose the faster it will come off.

Did you know you can lose up to 5 pounds in fluid just by reducing starch and sodium intake. While cutting back calories has the greatest effect on weight loss it’s important to not do any drastic reduction or you’ll put your body into starvation mode and you’ll lose nothing. Dieticians recommend not going below 1,200 calories a day.

5 Tips to Quick and Effective Weight Loss:
  1. Drink plenty of water. You can reduce hunger by drinking more water.
  2. Eat plenty of low calorie fruits and vegetables. They’ll make you feel full.
  3. Eat six small meals a day rather than three large ones.
  4. Get rid of all those foods that are bad for your waist (and your health) by removing them from the house.
  5. Weigh yourself daily and track the food you take in – it will keep you focused on your weight loss.
Now that you know how to lose weight fast and easy, what are you waiting for?

The Best Way to Enjoy Quick Weight Loss

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Weight loss is a battle many of us find ourselves facing. Whether its 10 pounds or 100 pounds you can do, and you can enjoy quick weight loss too. Let’s look at some great ways to speed up your weight loss.

One way to speed up your weight loss is to speed up your metabolism. One sure fire way to increase your metabolism is to get active. When you increase your muscle mass you speed up your metabolism. Another way to boost your metabolism is eat small amounts more often.

weight loss

Rather than three meals a day, go for six small meals a day. Eating foods that are high in protein and foods that are spicy can both improve your metabolism. Give up coffee and start drinking green tea. There is all kinds of evidence that green tea speeds up the metabolism. You should set an alarm to go off every four hours to remind you to eat. Sound ridiculous? Well it’s not. This technique ensure you eat smaller meals throughout the day, an effective metabolism booster.

Finally have a sauna. Being hot can boost the metabolism by 20%. You should always talk to your physician before using a sauna. A very hot bath can help too. While it may not be as effective as a sauna, it still helps.
Losing weight is all about change. You need to change your eating habits, your exercise patterns, and your lifestyle choices.

You need to create a plan of action, motivate yourself, and then get going. Throw your body a curve ball and change things up rather than always doing the same thing. With this method you’ll see the fastest weight loss. And remember to make positive choices in your life now that you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life.

Here’s a little secret many don’t know about. Lemon juice speeds up weight loss. It contains citric acid, which slows gastric emptying time so you feel full longer, and eat less. Your diet should be high in protein, complex carbs, and fiber, while it should be low in fat and simple carbs.

Most of us have trigger foods we just can’t put down once we start eating them. Storing these foods in the freezer makes it harder to carry out that behavior thereby breaking the cycle.

Finally, you need to incorporate exercise into your weight loss program. Cardio exercises combined with weight training will optimize and tone your muscles while burning the unwanted fat. You can easily lose 3 to 5 pounds a week and those numbers can be much higher if you are truly committed.

The Standard American Diet Dos and Don’ts

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In America today, the typical diet that most Americans consume daily is very unhealthy. The rest of the world has a nickname for it, which is the SAD diet. This stands for the standard American diet, and the standard American diet is one of the most dangerous lifestyle choices that a person can make.

First of all, it is chock full of red meat and dairy, which are absolutely fabulous when it comes to clogging your arteries and causing hypertension in the body. This might not be so bad if the red meat was grass fed, but unfortunately, many of the cows that are ingested in North America are treated with growth hormones and other chemicals that can leach into the meat and cause major problems in the human body.

american diet

The meat is contaminated by carcinogenic chemicals that are distributed to the cows to try to keep them growing at an accelerated rate, as well as to keep them free from diseases that could spread among the other cattle.

Another issue with the standard American diet is processed foods. Processed foods are highly available in North America, and often considered a staple food for the daily diet. The issue with this is that these foods lack fiber and have a tendency to be excessively high in saturated fats and sugars. Not to mention, the highly dangerous salt content. The standard American diet consists of foods that make it difficult to lose weight, especially those processed foods which contain high fructose corn syrup.

High fructose corn syrup is something that should be avoided at all costs. It sticks in the body and makes it nearly impossible to lose weight. Not only that, but it is basically pure sugar and it packs on the pounds like nothing else.

If you want to indulge in a standard American diet, there are some decent things that you could do. Try to eat fruits and vegetables with every meal. Don’t allow yourself to skip a meal that doesn’t have something green or another color of the natural food rainbow in it. If you need to have your meat, unit lean, and try to find grass fed beef to consume. Instead of eating white flour buns, look for whole flour alternatives. Whole-wheat has far more fiber and is much more nourishing for the body.

You want to be able to consume foods that are high in fiber, because not only do they help you feel full and digest things better so that you can eliminate the toxins from your body that cause you issues, but it also helps you to lose weight. Without fiber in your diet, you become fatter much faster, and it can become a very difficult trend to break out of.

As a rule, avoid the standard American diet if possible, but if you can’t, make sure that you are implementing changes that make it work for you. You’ll be glad you did, if not now, then in the future when you are not suffering from the same issues that other people who have lived off the standard American diet are dealing with.

How Learning From Failures Can Boost Your Self-Esteem

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Learning from failures can boost your self-esteem because you realize that you can rebound from tough challenges, plus learn valuable skills that can aid you in overcoming future tough challenges more easily.

Virtually everyone faces challenges in life; no one has it easy all the time, which means there will be things in your life that will not go as planned. At times, it will seem that the whole world is against you and nothing goes in your favor, nothing turns out as planned.

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Times like these are bound to bring down your self-esteem and make you question whether you are able to do high-quality work, achieve your goals, etc. It is at times like these that you need to reflect back upon past failures so that you recognize that you have gone through challenging periods before and have the capability and skill set needed to go through them again and be able to come out stronger than ever before.

That is the other key element you must learn when reflecting on your past failures: Learning from them so that you don’t make the same or similar mistakes in the future. When you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world; on the contrary, you have a learning opportunity to learn what you did wrong or not as well as you could have, then learn how to do the situation better if the same or similar situation arises again.

Learning from your past mistakes can show weaknesses in your skill set that you can strengthen over time through learning from the experience and gaining insight into what you can do better. By learning what you can do better, you can feel more confident in handling the same or similar situations in the future, which can boost your self-esteem.

Therefore, you should not look upon making a mistake as the end of the world, and you should not allow it to bring down your self-esteem either. Everyone makes mistakes; the key is learning from those mistakes so that you don’t make the same or similar ones in the future, plus you improve your skill set so that you can handle the same or similar situations with more confidence and ability in the future.

This will allow yourself to gain more self-esteem through analyzing and learning from your past mistakes so that you make fewer mistakes and achieve more in the future.

The Best 3 Tips to Build Muscle and Lose Body Fat

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If you want to build muscle and lose body fat these three tips can accomplish both. After all, you want to lose weight (body fat) without sacrificing muscle. Good news – this can be done you properly tackle the challenge.

However, to gain muscle while losing weight you really have to have your nutrition and exercise program right on the money.

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You also have to understand that muscle weights more than fat. Therefore, as you build more muscle your weight may actually go up while you find your waist size going down. In the last decade, there have been significant advancements in the nutritional advances, which is why today’s bodybuilder can stay lean and muscular twelve months of the year. It’s all about your calorie intake vs. your calorie burn.

It’s about balance. You need to take in enough calories to lose weight and gain muscle but not so many calories that you gain fat. You also need to find the right workout balance. Go for a lower number of sets and reps using a heavier weight. You should train each muscle group only one every week. On top of weight training your cardio workout is important. It needs to be intense and short.

The best 3 tips to build muscle and lose body fat are:

  1. Figure out how many calories you use a day and then make sure you are not taking in more calories than that.
  2. Ensure your weight training is heavy so that it will stimulate muscle growth. If you don’t use heavy weights you won’t stimulate the growth you desire. Weight training can be accomplished with a set of free weights. Dumbbells can be purchased cheap, and you can even get creative and use cans. Squats, lunges, and sit-ups are a good weight training exercises that cost you nothing.
  3. Make sure your cardio workout is short and intense. It’s a common misconception that the longer cardio sessions do a better job of burning fat and preserving the lean muscle mass.

Losing weight and developing muscles can be done quickly and efficiently without jeopardizing your health. While there are all kinds of supplements on the market promoting fast weight loss. Far too many of these supplements are all hype and no substance. Many others are little more than vitamins. Before you spend your money, it pays to do your homework.

The Benefits of Eating Six Small Meals Each Day

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Starving yourself is not a healthy way to restrict how many calories you consume. Research now shows that eating 6 smaller meals a day can help you achieve your summer weight loss goals, as opposed to the traditional thinking that 3 complete meals a day is best. You can seriously put your health at risk if you limit your calorie consumption too drastically.

More and more people are victims of a “roller coaster diet” while trying to lose weight. Diet plans that restrict your calories decrease your body’s metabolism, and as a result your body will experience starvation. When this occurs, your body doesn’t use a lot of calories, and that leads to extreme hunger.

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To increase your body’s metabolic rate, you should eat 5 or 6 smaller meals each day. Your metabolism will increase, and thus burn more calories all day long. You can further increase your metabolism by eating foods high in protein during your 6 meals.

Eating regularly will boost your metabolism due to the thermic effect of food.

You need a lot of calories to digest and absorb food, creating the thermic effect.

Different foods have different percentages of thermic effect, ranging from 3 to 30 percent. High protein foods have a 30 percent thermic effect. Some examples are turkey, salmon, and tuna. By simply digesting, 30 percent of the calories in these foods are burned. 20 percent of the calories found in fibrous and complex carbohydrates are burned during digestion. Some examples of these foods are corn, broccoli, green beans, and spinach. Foods with a very low thermic effect include refined carbohydrates and fats. This is the reason why dietary fat is stored so easily.

Your level of hunger will diminish while your energy level rises when you eat 5-6 smaller meals each day. You will also be able to maintain balanced blood sugar levels, which will help prevent hunger.

You can develop muscle to increase your metabolism. By eating regularly, you can maintain insulin levels which produce amino acids into your muscle’s cells, thus promoting muscle growth. Eating every 3 hours will yield a steady output of insulin. This is good for muscle growth and storing glycogen. As a result of eating healthy foods regularly, your summer weight loss goals will be easier to accomplish, and your body will be able to process vitamins and minerals more effectively.

The trick is to make sure you have a constant eating schedule. It might be difficult at first, but planning your meals will be well worth it. To prevent cravings and hunger, it’s good habit to feed your body foods that are rich in nutrients. A summer weight loss plan including a diet of healthy fats, vegetables, fruit, and lean protein is the best way to go. Eating such a diet with 5-6 meals each day can accelerate your muscle growth. It can increase your energy level, increase your metabolism, and you’ll burn half of the calories by eating regularly, and store very little fat.

Combine your diet with strength training and cardiovascular exercise to make it even more effective! Using these three methods, you’ll be on the fast track to burning fat and accomplishing your summer weight loss goals.