Health and Wellness Archives - Page 3 of 8

Motivation tips for exercise

February 23, 2012 by admin Leave a Comment

We all know that exercise is one of the single best things you can do to lose weight, stay at a healthy weight, boost your mood, reduce stress and even sleep better. Exercise is also the best preventive medicine to ward off the life- style induced diseases that are now treated with prescription drugs…high blood pressure, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome and adult onset diabetes. This list goes on and on as to how beneficial exercise is to be healthy happy. Why do so many people resist exercise?

The first reason is that when you get out of shape, overweight, or have not exercised in a while it does not feel good when you exercise. So people resist it. The key is never to let yourself go, never to let more than two days go by without at least going for a walk.

Once people are out of shape, they tend to overdo getting back into shape and this creates negative stored memories or associations with exercise. This is also the key of how you get back in. Build positive stored memories and let that work for you and not against you. This can be done using visualization and while lying in bed.

Athletes use visualization to rehearse their movements. Research has proven that the brain doesn’t make different between an imagined event and a real one, providing that you are able to visualize things with clarity and intensity. What you have imagined or visualized in your mind can have the same value as a real experience. This why you can mentally train for any ability and even for physical changes in the body, it was demonstrated by studies at the Manchester University that people were able to have muscles growth during one week of sessions of hypnosis, during hypnosis sessions the group were asked to visualize themselves having bigger muscles.

For sports performance enhancement, an athlete will use visualization to correct his weaknesses, improve his game and increase his motivation. Dr. Murray who wrote “The Essence of Imagery in Tennis says “Imagery, also called visualization, is described as a mental technique that programs the human mind to respond as programmed, by using all the senses to recreate or create an experience. Imagery has also been described as one of four categories of cognitive skills important in athletic performance.”

So here’s how to start getting motivated to exercise. Wake up each morning and before you get out of bed imagine yourself doing some form of exercise you have chosen that you will enjoy. Focus on the immediate payoffs of not only how you will feel after exercising, but all the benefits you will receive as a result of incorporating exercise into you life on a daily basis. That is the key… doing some form of exercise every day.

To get started I recommend walking. You can download my E-Book The Key to Successful Weight Loss for a great plan to start walking every. Once you start doing it I guarantee you will feel so much better you will want to continue. The visualizations will make it easier and have been proven to have a physical effect on the body. Why not give it a try and let me know what you think? You can also download my MP3 hypnosis on motivation for exercise. Here’s to your health and well-being.

6 Tips that take off the weight and keep it off

February 9, 2012 by admin Leave a Comment

It’s really important that we strike word diet from our vocabulary unless we use it the right way. Your diet means your manner of living, how you live, not a short term fix to lose weight. It is really a disservice to look at losing weight as going on a diet. Once you are on this diet you never go off. That is why you really have to avoid quick weight loss strategies and the diet mentality.

Here are some behaviors you can change that will really help take and keep off the weight. In creating this I was inspired by the article in Bazaar: Lose the last 5 Pounds for Good. I would say the tips given in this article are not just for the last five pounds but for any pound you want to lose and keep off.

1^st tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: It really helps to understand that when you eat real food it is a natural appetite suppressant. The more you eat packaged processed foods which are foods that contain sugar, flour and other addictive ingredients, the more you will think about food and feel hungry. Salad and green vegetables are something you want to grow to love.

2nd tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: Foods that say diet or fat free usually contain artificial sweeteners that act on your body just like sugar. It is not so much about taking out the fat or looking at the calories, if you eat real food there is not a lot of fat. It is about focusing on the amount of sugar and calories the food has. This is once again mostly only a problem is you eat packaged food. Real food has the micronutrients that balance each other out and naturally suppress your appetite. Don’t be fooled by focusing on calories alone.

3rd tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: Yes it is true, by taking out or cutting back the alcohol and caffeine you will be surprised how much of a difference it makes. Now I am not saying you have to live like this but consider going on a three week cleanse. This will give your liver a rest and make you more efficient metabolically. Alcohol and caffeine can cause you to eat more, alcohol lowers your guard and contains a lot of sugar, and coffee can make you hungrier. So yes, if you stop for three weeks you may drop a few pounds but that means you have to mindful going forward when you resume.

4th tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: We’ve all heard this time again; you have to stay hydrated, get off the diet soda and other sugar laden drinks. Instead you can think about incorporating a regimen of hot water with lemon at least once a day. This works wonders for flushing out the system.

5th tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: Do something about your sleep if you have sleep issues. There is a lot of research that shows if you are sleep deprived your body produces more ghrelin the hormone that makes you feel hungry and less leptin the one that keeps you feeling sated. Getting enough sleep and dreaming helps keep us healthy, smart, and affects weight loss.

6th tip that helps you lose and keep weight off: Learn a self-motivation technique. Why not wake up every morning and before getting out of bed tell yourself how much you like to exercise and see yourself doing it. This is called autosuggestion and yes it works but you have to do it.

You can also download one of my hypnosis MP3’s and give yourself a head start. If you really get serious and want to make progress order the Nirvana Diet™ for weight loss. You will have all the structure and support you need to succeed.

On being an alpha female and eating cake everyday

February 7, 2012 by admin Leave a Comment

I found the conversation between Demi Moore and Amanda de Cadenet in Bazaar to be very enlightening. Both of these women seem very knowledgeable in terms of how to live a more enlightened life. Demi Moore speaks about having a “nobody cares, an it doesn’t matter attitude towards life and about the importance of acceptance. She describes freedom as: “letting go of the outcome, truly being in the moment, not reflecting on the past and not projecting into the future.” Demi Moore seems to be on top of her game in terms of what she knows intellectually and has obviously learned a lot by being a student of Kabbalah for the past eight years. The problem is, it does not seem to have sunk in on an unconscious level. This is what I would call the human condition… you know what to do you just can’t seem to do it. Why?

What also struck me about the Bazaar article and their dialogue is the brutal way in which they talk about their body. Andrea says how “it’s an ongoing challenge for me that I don’t think my body looks how I want it to.” Her dream is to be able to eat cake every day and remain a size 6. Demi Moore feels “her body is betraying me…struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn’t eat what I wanted to eat…or get my body to do what I wanted it to do.” Losing weight and maintaining an “ideal happy weight” should not be such a struggle.

The problem is despite what we think, we do not have control over our body or our mind. It is a misconception for us to think “we have control over only ourselves.” While this is an improvement from thinking we have control over others or life in general, we will only end up disappointed if we think we have control over ourselves. As a student of depth psychology which is the study of the unconscious, I can pretty much say the one thing that I have learned is that the only thing we can hope to have control over is how we react and respond. We are very much controlled by the culture, what we think is “perfect.” We are striving to be perfect when the only thing we have control over is how we choose to react to our life experiences.

Finally, the last thing I would imagine we want to be is what Amanda refers to as an alpha female. Thinking that this is something desirable is part of the problem. Alpha female means someone who is “on top of her dating game. She is obstinate, conceited and doesn’t make it easy for you to pick her up. She gives you a run for your money and makes you work overtime on her, so to speak. But all this only makes her more appealing to you.”

I do agree what we need to do to feel and be loveable is to be loveable to ourselves. This of course means as both Demi Moore and Amanda agree at the end of their dialogue is freedom or not letting your wounds defines you. This is our life’s work.

I have not studied Kabbalah but I know that there is a difference between understanding something and internalizing it inside. I have found the best way to do that is by developing a meditation practice which I have humorously called Smart, Sexy and Sane how to make meditation easy. To learn more about this you can go to meditation made easy. I can pretty much say the last thing I want to do is to eat cake every day. Something’s are best enjoyed when if they are special…not for every day. I do meditate every day though.

What we have to do is let go of immediate gratification. Meditation is not like taking a pill but over time it really works.

How hypnosis can help you break unwanted habits

January 31, 2012 by admin Leave a Comment

Hypnosis is oftentimes misunderstood, but more and more people are coming to now understand how hypnosis works and how hypnosis can help to break unwanted habits. Joyce Frye, an assistant professor at University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine explains how hypnosis helps: “ a hypnotherapist can help guide a person therapeutically by making suggestions such as how great it would be to smoke-free and breathing easily.” Suggestions however are just suggestions. A hypnotist cannot get you to do anything you do not want to do, but it can help to grease the wheels, or add some oomph to your willpower. Ultimately you still have to consciously choose not to smoke, overeat and break the unwanted habit.

To learn more about how hypnosis works , you should down-load my E-Book, The Key to Successful Weight Loss .

Lynne Harris wrote about her experience an article for Glamour magazine about with how hypnosis helped her to stop biting her nails. She said: “Hypnosis appears to circumvent the part of the brain that says, there’s no way this will help. If someone said to you right now, ‘The next time you see a cheesecake, you’ll want a carrot instead,’ you’d laugh (and dig in). But if someone makes that kind of suggestion when you’re under hypnosis, it sneaks past your rational mind and into the part of your brain that influences action.”

It has been my experience, especially when we are dealing with deeply rooted behaviors that are almost unconscious, such as nail-biting, or with habits that deal with addictive substances from sugar to nicotine, we change when we are finally fed up enough with it. There has to be a strong desire to stop. You have to really be on board with the awareness that the negatives are outweighing the positives. Once you stop doing the behavior for a week, it gets easier because you begin to see that you can do without it. When you doing the behavior regularly you are battling the cravings that are real. Hypnosis can help to make this process easier. I have also found that if you take up exercise and can get the exercise up to a level where it is creating a positive effect on your brain chemistry, this can also help to make you feel stronger which can strengthen your resolve to break unhealthy habits.

If you are curious you can download a hypnosis MP3. This will give you a good idea of how hypnosis works and if it is for you.

How to be healthier, happier and overcome stress naturally

January 30, 2012 by admin 2 Comments

Can you imagine being asked when was the last time you had some play time? How can playing help you to be happier and healthier? I remember when I had young children how natural it came to them to play. Play time was essential to their being nurtured and also how they learned. The difference between an adult and a child is that play comes naturally to a child. A child knows how to be in the imaginal world and how to use imagination and play as a way of life.

So how can you begin to include more play in your life? For adults this can be a hobby such as playing tennis, cards or even a musical instrument.

How you might also ask could play help you in your work life by embodying a spirit of playfulness while doing your job? The key thing to begin to shift, if you want to bring more play into your life is to lose the negative inner critic voice and the sense of a grim determination to succeed, change, excel, get what you think you want. You need to become more playful about thing.s and allow things to just “be.”

What do I mean by being more playful? Play is: “liking play; being prone to play, like a child or kitten; experimental; frolicsome,” says the dictionary. It is also being “lighthearted, in the now, letting go of judgment, gently poking fun at oneself.”

Experts agree that playfulness reduces stress and makes us feel happier:

It is a sign of health among animals. Scientists say the healthier and safer the herd feels, the more they play.
Playfulness is one of the signs of a marriage that is likely to last, according to relationship researcher Dr. John Gottman. It can ease tension during times of stress.
“Playfulness motivates people to learn mathematics and makes them more likely to own what they learn,” says the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics.
People who practice “laughter yoga” reduce their blood pressure as well as the stress they feel.
Finally, playfulness made the short list of the 24 most important human strengths identified by researchers in the Positive Psychology movement.

Learning to incorporate play in your life is your first step towards raising your happiness set point.

Happiness is a function of your personality. To be happier you need to cultivate a happier personality or way of seeing your life and life itself. Play helps you to do this.

Play is also important for reducing stress. It’s important that you have at least one activity that you do regularly just for fun. Hobbies and reconnecting with art and creativity is another way to play. When you play or get involved in a hobby you tend to get really engrossed in the activity you enjoy. You can even begin to experience a state of being know as flow, in which your brain is in a near-meditative state. This can have enormous benefits just like meditation does.

Some people are even able to turn their hobbies into careers at some point, and end up with a lifestyle where their work is their play. This is I believe what really creates lasting happiness. Here is a great resource to begin to spark your interest in playing more.