Exercise Blahs? Here’s How Functional & Fun Exercise Helps!

Posted by Steph on May 4, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in exercise, fitness, health, weight loss, weight maintenance

Are you finding it hard to make time for physical activity? Are you feeling guilty about not spending more time at the gym? This post is for you!

We all have lives. And the grown-up thing to do is to take responsibility for everything in them: body, mind and heart, financial, spiritual and social health. Everybody has 24 hours in a day, and we all have the same categories we have to look after in order to maintain good, holistic health.

But we are all individuals, needing different things in different proportions to maintain our personalized balance.

This past weekend, I accompanied a friend to his cottage. I needed the rest, especially in nature, but i also needed the structure, exercise and fun. With all the acivities needed for cottage living, I realized how out of shape I was!

Yard work is great exercise, so is getting the wood for the fire, or cleaning the cottage. All of it is necessary for experiencing the benefits of living here, even for a short time.

Just as you can see laundry as a means of exercise, everything you do to maintain all the beautiful things in your life can be regarded as exercise – if you put a little awareness, effort and good posture into it all!

Functional Exercise

We all need to take care of our things. Washing dishes, doing laundry, exercise and healthy diets, yard and house work, financial (meaning paid work), phoning and visiting friends and family to see how they’re doing, etc.

Some of these things get deprioritized for others but if we were to find additional benefits to some of these activities, they’d become priority and get done. When these essentials are taking care of, we can safely (without guilt) concentrate on other things that give us pleasure.

For the last few years, I’ve learned to look at functional exercise as a means of improving my health. When I’m doing dishes, sweeping or yard work, I meditate. When I clean, I clench my core and put some real effort into every movement.

If you have to do something, why waste the energy? Make it part of your exercise routine and feel good about what you’re doing!

Fun Exercise

While at the cottage, my friend and I took a peddle boat ride around the lake to check out the neighbour’s places from a lakefront view. It was spectacular and my butt and leg muscles were slightly sore but very happy for the exercise!

That’s one way of using fun as a double benefit of physical exercise. Swimming, golfing, biking, rollerblading, walking in the park, etc., all turn into a workout for your body and mind if you allow for it.

And don’t forget about sex! it’s just as benefical physically as it is mentally, emotionally and spiritually, as circumstances call for it, of course.

Walking in nature is a big one for me. It’s helped me reinstate a healthy routine when I’ve fallen off the health wagon in the past, and it’s been a consistent, pleaurable option when life gets too hectic to think of anything else to do for my well-being.

Next time you’re feeling down on yourself for not doing enough to improve your health, ask yourself how much you’ve done in both functional and fun exercise. If you’ve come up with a few recent experiences in the past week, then you’re doing fine – pat yourself on the back!

However, functional and fun exercise will only get you so far in your fitness levels. If you’re looking to improve your physical condition, then you must put a little time into strength-training, cardio and stretching exercises (like yoga). A personal trainer can help give you the motivation, knowledge to keep it all new and exciting, and be a guide to perform the exercises properly so that you don’t hurt yourself. 

What functional and fun exercises do you love to do?

Can Losing Weight Really Be Easy?

Posted by G Force Blogger on April 27, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in exercise, fitness, weight loss

Is losing weight hard for you? What if it could be easy? For some people, it is! This post is about how you can make losing weight easy.

For many of us, we’ve struggled with our weight for most of our lives. We’ve experienced both ups and downs over the years. We’ve been a healthy weight for awhile (and it took some effort to get there!) and then we slip up in our healthy routine or end our “diets” and gain the weight back.

Because of our experience, we believe losing weight is difficult. But did you know that others find losing weight an easy feat?

“But that’s because they were born with a naturally fast metabolism,” you say. Ok, you’re right, there are some people who are prone to weight-loss, but these people usually have a hard time putting and keeping weight on their structure. And they are not necessarily healthy. Most of these people are “skinny fat,” that is, they are thin but have more fat than lean muscle mass.

Lean muscle mass is how health is determined. When we have more fat than muscle, we are susceptible to heart attacks, stroke, aneurisms, diabetes, osteoperosis, and all sorts of health issues.

People who have adopted a healthy lifestyle really believe losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight is easy. They believe this because they’ve experienced it themselves. They’ve either grown up in a family environment which advocates a healthy routine or changed their habits when they decided what they experienced growing up was not in their best interest.

Whatever you believe is true. And you make it so through your experience. But what if you had new information to go on, try the changes out for yourself and the results prove to you that these changes net you an outcome that is most favourable to you?

Read more here

Ready, Set… Blend!

Posted by Steph on April 20, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in food, nutrition, weight loss

Spring is here, summer is coming… is your body ready for the changing weather? Here’s a post about cleaning up your diet, healing your digestive tract and reducing calories with the help of blended meals!

As we talked about in Spring Cleaning Your Body, it’s conduscive to your health to change our habits to work with the seasons. Our bodies respond better when we’re giving it the fuel needed to accommodate our environment. The colder weather requires us to eat more warming, congesting foods while warm weather requires lighter, more cleansing foods.

Most people automatically think of salads when summer and losing weight comes up in conversation; and the reason for this is because it’s true. Salads are cooling and cleansing, extremely versatile, packed full of nutrients, low in calories and fat, and super high in fiber.

But salads require a time committment. The best in quality are prepared fresh; which means ingredients must be bought fresh, washed and cut, chopped, shredded, diced, etc., then there’s the clean up factor while finding the time to sit down and actually enjoy it is very challenging for most of us in today’s hectic world.

Read more here

Finding Balance (& Health) Within

Posted by G Force Blogger on April 13, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in health, nutrition

How do you achieve health and balance on a molecular level? Today’s post is about the importance of aiming for the right amount of nutrients and free radicals, and how to do it.

You may have heard of those scary little demons living inside of us all, free radicals, that can cause cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune diseases. Funny thing, though, we need some free radicals to maintain our health – it’s excess levels that cause damage.

For those of you who aren’t aware, free radicals are naturally produced by our bodies when they break down nutrients. They are the left over molecules (or cellular waste) that results after a chemical reaction has taken place.

Antioxidants are free radicals’ kryptonite, or friends, depending on how you wish to look at it. Antioxidants bind to free radicals through a chemical attraction and together they exit the body through our various waste disposal means.

Author Bryce Wylde, an Ontario homeopathic doctor and director of natural medicine at the Vaughan Medical Centre, says:

“When there is a balance between antioxidants and free radicals internally, you achieve beauty. If that balance is off, you’re aging faster and trending toward disease faster.”

How do you achieve this balance? Dr. Wylde suggests cutting out as many environmental toxins as possible (such as plastic wrap in the microwave) and avoiding things in excess (such as too much sun, junk food, booze, unnecessary prescription medicine and even exercise!).

Read more here

Are You Mistaking Hunger for Thirst?

Posted by G Force Blogger on April 6, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in food, health, nutrition, weight loss

Next time you’ve got a hunger on, drink a glass of water and wait 7 minutes before grabbing a bite to eat. Read on to find out why this tip can help you maintain a healthy mind and body – and help you lose weight! 

Researchers have made an interesting observation: the sensations of hunger and thirst are triggered simultaneously in our brains. Over time, we lose the ability to differentiate between the two signals and we confuse thirst for hunger.

For this reason, many of us will reach for food instead of a drink. And did you know that the body is so dependent on water for all its processes, even the slightest bit of dehydration can have serious effects?

Studies show that a 2% decrease in the water surrounding our cells may lead to a 20% drop in energy levels!

Insufficient levels of water may cause a reduction in blood volume, meaning less oxygen reaches the muscles. As we become more dehydrated, the blood becomes concentrated with salt and waste products. These solutes take water from the salivary glands creating a sensation of thirst.

But guess what? Thirst is not an indication of dehydration! It’s believed that by the time you become thirsty, you’re probably already dehydrated. Read more here

6 Exercises to Get You Out of Bed

Posted by G Force Blogger on March 29, 2012 | Comment Now
Posted in exercise

If you find yourself dragging your butt in the morning, this post is for you! Here are a few simple exercises to get your blood pumpin’ and your muscles (and mind!) ready to start the day. 

Isometric exercises are activities that exert force on a muscle (resistance) and where there is no visible change in muscle length (that is, there is no motion). An example of an isometric activity is carrying a bag of groceries or pushing against a wall.

These exercises are extremely handy, as many of them use only your body weight to create resistance. They also take only 10 seconds each so anyone can fit them into a busy schedule.

If you’re already fit, don’t expect too much from isometric exercises. But if you’re a beginner or in recovery from an injury, these types of exercises will help you become stronger and are often a springboard to a more advanced level of routine. Read more here