Gratitude helps you see the positive aspects of your life, brightens your mood, and consequently reduces the need to eat to feel better.
How we feel – how happy we are, how stressed we are, even how well we sleep – may seem like it’s out of our hands, but it is actually often a choice we make. We can choose to be grateful for what we have and feel more blissful. Or we can choose to focus on what we’re lacking, who has wronged us, and what’s not going our way. And guess what? We’ll feel miserable. We may blame others, circumstances, or fate for our unhappiness. But at the end of the day, it’s often about us and the choices we make.
One of the simplest ways I find to be able to shift my mood is focusing on gratitude. Of course, sometimes that’s easier said than done.
But as a motivation to practice gratitude more often let’s see the benefits of gratitude, how you can easily integrate it into your life, and how practising gratitude helps to stop emotional eating.
Taking a deep breath to calm down may not work for you and it can make you more anxious and stressed. When it comes to breathing and anxiety, slow and steady wins the race. By focusing on extending your exhale and practising diaphragmatic breathing, you can promote feelings of relaxation and reduce stress in your body and mind.
“Taking a deep breath” to calm down is NOT what you need
As a busy, high-performing person, you often find yourself constantly on the go, with a never-ending to-do list and high expectations to meet. This can lead to feelings of overwhelm, stress, and anxiety.
To cope with these overwhelming feelings, many people turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as overeating, binge eating, or drinking. You may find yourself reaching for sugary snacks or junk food to help you cope with your emotions or turning to alcohol to unwind after a long day.
Unfortunately, these coping mechanisms only provide temporary relief and can lead to long-term health consequences.
One of the most common pieces of advice given to help calm anxiety and reduce stress is to “take a deep breath.” However, I recently learned that quickly taking a deep breath can actually worsen the symptoms of anxiety by upsetting the delicate balance of gases in our bodies.
“Why do I eat so much a week before my period starts?”
“Is it normal to be super hungry during ovulation”?
“How to control my mood swings during my period?”
“Why am I crying all the time before my period?”
Many women ask these questions and look for answers to them. If you are one of them, you don’t need to search any longer. You’ll find the answers in this post.
More now than ever, the desire to pursue a healthy lifestyle is more important than it had ever been in the past few decades. And if you want to help others find the tranquility you have, both inside and out, we have some ways to assist you.
There is a tragic misconception that a healthy lifestyle is also a boring lifestyle. That you can’t eat certain foods, partake in certain activities, and must give up all of your vices. While this is partially true, just because you choose to be healthy, doesn’t mean you can’t also find your bliss.
Do you have a healthy living old couple in your neighborhood that always look good together even at an old age? What’s the secret to achieving such a lifestyle?
One of the treasures in life that are valued the most is good health. To obtain such, you have to work on many things to ensure that you stay on track. Relationships have many distractions, from your partner wanting you to avail yourself somewhere to having to raise the children, taking extra shifts at work to provide for the family, having to stay around to ensure the kids don’t mess anything up, etc. However, are all these reasons enough to make you stay unhealthy? Thebest online dating sites certainly don’t pioneer any of that! So what should a relationship be like?
Even if you love your job, keeping a strong work-life balance is vital for avoiding burnout and maintaining your health and relationships. Some researchindicates that poor work-life balance can eventually lead to a number of health problems, including increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and depression. Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to keep yourself healthy while still enjoying your career. Here are four ways to improve your work-life balance.
Find Ways to Exercise
Healthline explains exercise is incredibly important for both physical and mental health. It can boost your energy levels, reduce your risk for disease, and even improve your outlook on life. Try aiming for approximately 30 minutes of physical activity every day, with frequent movement throughout the day to minimize extended sedentary periods.
While it can be hard to set aside extensive amounts of time for trips to the gym, even small decisions throughout the day can add up. Try going for a brief walk every hour at work, get out of the office at lunchtime, or work out longer on the weekends.
Photo by Pille Kirsi from Pexels
For extra motivation, a fitness tracker like the Apple Watch Series 4 can become your activity coach. It’ll track your steps, monitor your heart rate, help plan your routine, and automatically know when you’re working out. Another great choice is the Polar A370, which helps with both daytime and nighttime activity. It includes heart rate monitoring to gauge your workouts and sleep tracking to analyze whether you’re getting good-quality rest.
Side note from Rita May: Use the Floral Coloring Plannerto track your new habits and your mood, plan your days and weeks, and color the beautiful floral patterns to relax. You can get it for the price of a coffee.
Prioritize Sleep
When you’re busy with work, sleep is often one of the first things to be sacrificed. It’s easy to feel as though you can get by on just a few hours of sleep per night — but Johns Hopkins Medicine explains that this can be incredibly detrimentalto your health, increasing your risk for issues like dementia and certain cancers.
Instead of deciding to “catch up” on sleep over the weekend, try to consistently get 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night during the week. Make changes to your sleep environment to promote better slumber as needed. For instance, if light is peeking through your curtains, add blackout shades. Sometimes a seemingly subtle adjustment can make a huge difference.
Set Clear Boundaries
With the prevalence of technology, sometimes it can feel impossible to disconnect from work. You may feel like you always need to be reachable, making it so that you can never relax even when you’re at home. PsychCentral notes setting clear boundaries, both for yourself and your employer, can help you ensure that you actually enjoy your time off.
Make sure that you clearly and professionally communicate your boundaries to the people you work with. It is completely acceptable — and healthy — to have time to yourself outside of work. You can also set boundaries for yourself; for example, decide that you will check your work email from home before dinner, but then put your devices away for the rest of the evening.
Side note from Rita May: if stress at work drives you to use food as a tool to release stress or as the main source of pleasure, check out my How to Stop Eating Your Feelings Workbook to discover what you are REALLY hungry for and finally break free from emotional and stress eating.
Whether this means your significant other, your friends, or your family, spending time with loved ones is vital for a healthy work-life balance. Connecting with others can reduce your risk for depression and strengthen your immune system. It also helps you maintain perspective, rather than getting completely overwhelmed with your professional life.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
If you can, try setting up regular dates to do something with your friends or family. This doesn’t need to be a huge time commitment — invite someone over for pizza and a movie, go grab a coffee on Saturday morning, or simply talk on the phone. Fostering relationships and setting down your professional responsibilities for a while will help you maintain a healthy outlook on life, and will enable you to return to work fresh.
Taking time to step away from work and prioritize your own well-being is incredibly important. Not only will it help you stay healthy throughout your life — it will help ensure that you can be fully present, creative, and productive in both your personal and professional life.
George Mears is a brain fitness expert, educator, and counselor. He is passionate about sharing his thoughts and research through his articles.
Vegan meal plans and cookbooks for different diets
In this post, I show you vegan meal plans and cookbooks for all sorts of vegan diets, such as high-carb, raw, low-carb, high protein, and keto.
In my previous post, I talked about my personal experience with these different vegan diets. If you haven’t read it yet you can here.
Do you want to also experiment a bit and find a way of eating that works for you? I show you a few sample meal plans for different vegan diets to see the delicious plant-based foods you can eat whichever lifestyle you choose. I like plant-based foods so much more than animal-based foods and I hope you will try a few recipes too.
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My personal experience with various vegan diets – Low-carb or low-fat?
Here I share with you my personal experience with various vegan diets. Please read my conclusions at the end of the post too.
OK, let’s see my few years-long experiments with testing various popular vegan diets.
I am a researcher by training, I like to do experiments, even on myself. So I tried some approaches to see how my body reacts to certain changes in my diet.
What I found after these experiments is that it’s better to simply listen to my body than to follow diets. Our bodies know what is best for them and it can be completely different for you and me. Also, don’t be surprised if you find your food preferences change as you age or go through different life stages (puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause).
Important note:
These weight gains and losses are 2-3 kilos, not much really. The time frame of the described personal experience with these vegan diets is about 15 years, so I don’t often change my diet significantly. The aim was just to experiment and find a way of eating I enjoy the most and can sustain in the long term, while I’m healthy, happy, slim, have enough energy and my skin looks good. I know, I have a “few” requests 🙂
