Healthy Lifestyle – Pagina 8

Why Don’t you STUFF?

STUFF (acronym for Stand-up for Fitness) for someone like me, who has been suffering from Restless legs syndrome (RLS) for almost one year, is very helpful.

Did you know that sitting for too long may be considered as smoking for what concerns the risk of chronic health problems? Too much sitting could be the cause of heart diseases, diabetes and some cancers, and also mental health troubles.

For RLS people like me, sitting for too long is just impossible. Generally speaking, I cannot sit longer than one hour! My legs feel the need to move. Therefore, I work standing all day long and I walk long distances every day. It helps me sleeping, even though sometimes is not enough and I spend sleepless nights (but in such cases I think the cause might also be anxiety or stress).

But also if you don’t suffer from RLS interrupting long sitting periods by short breaks, for instance, interrupting sitting every 30-45 min by standing for at least 10-15 minutes, is very healthy.

Even if you are an active person, more than 6 hours sitting per day has negative effects you cannot compensate for. Have a look at this video, read some fact and practise STUFF by, for instance:

have walking meetings,
go for a stroll over lunch,
get a sit-standing desk.

Remember: Don’t just sit there!

Being active is not as hard as you think. There are lots of simple ways to include some physical activity in your day.

So, are you ready to STUFF?

The Best Time to Practise Physical Activity

Have you ever wondered when is the best time to exercise? If it is better to eat before or after?

Recent studies state the importance of practicing moderate physical activity on an empty stomach.

Practicing physical activity in the morning on an empty stomach would favour a better response to insulin, better use of glucose by the muscles, better regulation of blood glucose and twice as effective fat disposal.

Ideally starting your day with 30 minutes of gentle exercises combined with endurance exercises would be really beneficial. Considering that it is not essential to eat shortly after waking up, prolonging the night fasting would also allow us to detoxify our intestines.

When can we eat then? The ideal would be eating after half an hour, or even better an hour after this short physical activity. Breakfast should be rich in animal and vegetable proteins to promote muscle recovery and anabolism, and also contain complex carbohydrates to obtain the energy needed to face the day. An example: low-fat yoghurt with muesli made with nuts and seeds.

What do you think about it? Would you be able to start your day like this? Honestly, my morning routine is different: I wake up, practise 10 minutes meditation, have breakfast, take a shower, make up, get dressed and finally I can go out. Total: one hour and 15 minutes. If I had to add another half hour at what time should I get up? Too early! But I was wondering whether I could start this morning practice during this confinement period, considering that I manage my time thanks to telework and I am not stressed by having to take public transport to go to the office.

9 Tips to Live a Better Life

Good habits and good mood have a close connection with good health and well-being.

Here are 9 tips that will help you find a bit of tranquility, improve your balance and get closer to the idea of happiness that best suits you.

Keep moving. Physical activity is one of the tools that most benefits our body. It can significantly reduce stress, control cholesterol levels, help you lose weight, oxygenate body tissues and eliminate toxins through sweating. In addition, it allows the development of endorphins that produce brain pleasure and decrease joint pain. If you can, don’t take the elevator but take the stairs, walk to work, or ride a bicycle. These are all activities you can do without necessarily going to the gym. Not only will your body benefit, but the environment will also be thankful.
Improve nutrition. Pay attention to what you consume daily. Take time for each meal and choose healthy menus. Eat balanced and add fruit, vegetables and legumes to your diet. Try new recipes and prepare differently flavoured meals to discover new things. Avoid eating junk food, because it contains simple sugars and carbohydrates, which contribute to the slowdown of metabolism and obstruct the arteries. Also avoid fatty meals too.
Drink plenty of water. The consumption of water, tea and juice allows you to eliminate free radicals. In addition, hydration is good for the skin, which will thus remain beautiful and healthy.
Do something you enjoy. Take time to do an activity that you like during the day, which makes you relax, such as doing manual work, cooking, reading or learning to play a musical instrument.
Disconnect yourself for a full day. Make an effort, put social media and cell phone aside for a day. It’s good to focus on yourself every now and then.
Spend time outdoors. Walking in the forest, having a picnic, spending time outdoors are activities that make you reconnect with nature as well as being an opportunity to breathe some fresh air.
Volunteering. Solidarity is one of the paths most used by people who seek tranquility and who want to be at peace with themselves. Good deeds will affect your life in a positive way.
Stay positive. Look at things with pleasure, optimism and positive energy. Frustration brings negative consequences in life.
Share moments with friends. Having a coffee with friends, talking about nothing, will help you feel much better.

What do you think? will you adopt one of these new habits?

Work-Life Balance

Our well-being should be our priority. But nowadays the society we live in often puts pressure on us so that we reverse priorities in a way that can seriously compromise our quality of life and our physical, mental and emotional health.

According to the international classification of diseases, burn-out is considered to be a work-related phenomenon but this is not the only cause.

With the increasing cost of living and the bills that accumulate, we are increasingly inclined to work harder and harder to earn a salary that allows us to live a decent life. However, this leads us to put aside other fundamental needs.

We spend many hours a day working for a company, or for ourselves, reducing the time for good meals, for resting, for spending time with our family and we do not understand the impact this can have on our life.

Certainly, many among us cannot afford to work less because they are responsible for their family and they shall provide for their needs.

However, even in such cases, a work-life balance should be found, because life is much more than our work.

The excessive time spent at work and the short time dedicated to ourselves practicing sports, walking in a forest or simply being lazy, in the long run will harm our health up to a level that it would be difficult to recover.

More and more often people suffer from post-traumatic stress, over-fatigue, nutrition problems, relationship difficulties due to exhausting and stressful days spent at work that do not leave us time to live and do activities that really make us happy.

If you think you are in this situation, you should understand one thing: no salary is worth your health, no benefit rewards you for the wear and tear you have at the end of a working day that has drained off your energy and your joy of living.

If you currently have no other choice than continuing with your present work, try to do something that is good for you every day to find your work-life balance. If everything you do daily is stressful and exhausting, the time will come when you won’t be able to go on any longer and the consequences will be more serious. It will take you longer to regain your optimal well-being.

Work is an important part of life but of course life is not just work. As you know, there is more: family, friends, health, in short, enjoying life. Don’t let work be your whole life!

Nothing is worth your being unhappy. Your work will continue even without you, while relationships and health must be taken care of, and followed up carefully.

You can find another job, but you cannot replace your family, your friends and above all your health. Remember to take care of yourself in order to live a better life.

4 Tips for Your Wellbeing

Here you go with four tips to kick off the new decade that has just started:

1. Learn to say no: to assert yourself is first of all to respect your own values and to listen to your own needs. While managing your priorities in your private and professional life you become more productive/a but also more available. The result is that there is little time left for what really matters to you.

2. Have more fun: a healthy lifestyle includes healthy eating and also trying to limit sedentary life. What if we put together the useful and the enjoyable? If you want to move, take a nice walk or go dancing!

3. Smile more often: getting angry or criticising? What a waste of time! Do you know that for every minute of anger you spend energy that you will recover in an hour? Cultivate your happiness by relativizing what happens to you and taking advantage of what life offers. Let’s try with an exercise: write on a piece of paper three positive things that happened to you or that you liked each day. Put the paper in a jar and, when you’re down, pick up one and read it again to remind yourself of pleasant memories. How do you like it?

4. Take advantage of the silence: in a very noisy world that constantly urges us to do things, it is important to disconnect by getting rid of the noisesthat surrounds us. Program some moments of digital detox to take advantage of the silence by walking in the woods, taking a a siesta during the work break or enjoying a meditation session. Everything will be all right!

Let’s Try to Love Ourselves in 2020!

Say stop to resolutions that soon turn into constraints!

To avoid bad habits coming back, don’t set objectives that are too ambitious.

Consider your resolutions as a positive challenge to make your life more enjoyable! It is useless aiming at changing all in once. Use a stop-by-step approach and set a list of priorities among your resolutions.

Start with simple things, like sorting your clothes and choose the ones you have not been using for the last two years (and give them away. This is a good practice according to the Feng shui). Then replace a bad habit with a good one, like drinking more green tea instead of coffee.

Be kind to yourself and indulge yourself from time to time. The goal is not to become more stressed but to love yourself.

Happy 2020!

Seven tips for Winter Time

With the arrival of the winter season, we change our clothes and also our habits would need to change.

These tips are easy to follow and will help you to cope with the coming winter.

Our daily habits contribute to our happiness, well-being and health. That is why it is important to adapt to the season ahead, as it has an impact on our body and our spirit.

Scientific studies have shown that seasonal fluctuations such as daylight, temperature and weather have a significant impact on us. Our mood, our metabolism, our balance and our biological clock change with the changing of the seasons.

Therefore, it is important to changes our habits so to restore the harmony between our body and the environment that surrounds us.

It is not as difficult as it seems. Here are some tips that you may want to follow for your health and well-being this winter.

Walk more, drive less

There is nothing as good as an outdoors walk. Replacing journeys by car with a walk is ideal for taking your dose of fresh air, natural light and exercise. It also saves you from stress caused by the traffic. To benefit from the best of the walk, you could also listen to a guided walking meditation.

2. Take hot baths

Preparing a bath with hot water and jumping into it is the best way to relax during the cold weather. Create an ideal environment, putting bath oils in the water and some of your favourite music.

3. Adopt an evening routine

The winter season corresponds to a natural resting period. As the days get shorter and the exposure to natural light decreases, we feel less dynamic because our body produces less melatonin. To fight against the fatigue and the melancholy of winter, try to sleep eight hours a night and go to bed at about the same time each evening. Do not heat up your bedroom too much to avoid waking up sweaty in the middle of the night.

4. Eat properly

With the lowering of the temperatures comes the time to warm up with delicious and nutritious food. To prepare winter soup with relaxing effect, use warm and healthy ingredients, such as chickpeas, carrots and potatoes.

5. Take care of your skin (especially your hands)

Cold temperatures put a strain on your skin, so it is important to take care of it. To reduce dryness, use a good moisturizing and nourishing cream. In particular, the hands are more exposed to cold and need more attention and protection. To always have soft and well-groomed hands, keep a hand cream with you and use it when you need it.

6. Put your mobile aside

Due to a lower outdoors activity during winter, we are inclined to spend more time on social media. As you know, looking constantly to the mobile (or any other device) is not a good thing. Your mobile forces you to look within yourself and this may cause you a winter depression. Moreover, it disturbs your sleep. From time to time it would be better to put your mobile aside and read a good book.

7. Play games with friends

Sometimes when the evenings are particularly cold, you may want to call your friends to your place to play games. This activity is not only perfect to fight winter melancholy and apparent social isolation but it is also useful to improve your intellectual abilities. A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine has shown that playing social games keeps the brain young and active and would protect from senile dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

What about you? Do you have your own winter routine?

Four Tips for Fitting Self-Care Into Your Busy Schedule

No matter how busy you are, it is important that you take a little time for yourself. This is called self-care, and far from the extravagant images the phrase may call to your mind, the practice is about providing you with the energy and stability to live your best life every day. This often consists of the basic needs you may take for granted (and often skip past after a stressful day), like taking breaks and getting enough sleep. The good news is it can be easy to incorporate self-care into your busy life, whether you use a device to track how many steps you take in a day or take a quick nap during your lunch break. Here are some ways you can incorporate self-care into your day in a way that will actually help you when you need it the most.

Enhance Your Fitness with a Tracker
Many who lead busy lives believe that there just isn’t enough time in the day to exercise. The reality is you can squeeze it into your schedule, and you should. Exercise can make you feel more relaxed and less stressed, and it can provide an energy boost to help you get through your day. If you don’t know which workout to try, start by adding more walks into your schedule. Take a stroll through your neighborhood after dinner, or park farther away from the supermarket. Be creative and look for more ways to walk and take the stairs instead of driving or riding the elevator.
Make the Most of Break Time
Breaks are critical for your emotional health throughout a work day, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice a portion of the time you have to accomplish your tasks each day. Instead, use the time you already have set aside as a time to do double duty. Most people take the time, whether it is a quick 15 minutes or an extensive hour, to have a healthy lunch in the middle of their day. You can take this one step further by using your lunch break as a break in the larger sense of the word. Do not take a work project to the deli with you, and don’t bring back a sandwich to eat while you make the finishing touches on a report. Instead, use your lunch break as a time to distance yourself from work and clear your mind.
Use Your Breaks to Evaluate Your Workload
Your daily breaks can also help set you up in the right position to be healthier in a well-rounded kind of way. Taking breaks from the constant stream of work can give you an opportunity to go over your current workload in a more analytical way. For instance, if you feel like you never have enough time to spend time with family or friends, or even to take care of yourself, you may need to practice saying “no” more frequently at work. Saying “no” is not intrinsically a bad thing, in fact, it can be very healthy, as turning down projects means you are self-aware enough to understand you cannot take on any more projects without sacrificing your health. If you constantly feel stressed, there is a chance you are trying to do too much.
Support the health of your gut
Finally, when you cook your meals each day, you can make them even better for you by focusing on the health of your gut. Gut flora, the bacteria that live inside your digestive system, are critical for maintaining healthy levels in your body. You can help keep them healthy and support good bacteria by eating (or abstaining from) certain food or by including certain supplements into your diet. Bacillus coagulans, for instance, support intestinal health, while
saccharomyces boulardii protect against harmful microbes.

By making the most of your break time and regulating the amount of work you take on each week, you can help take care of yourself without even changing your schedule.

The Benefits of Yoga

Do you know yoga can do more than just strengthen and tone your body? Recent research shows it can have a powerful effect on your health—making it a perfect remedy for several diseases, from high blood pressure to anxiety and depression.

For years, yoga was considered part of the New Age. But today you can find yoga classes all over, and people are giving it a try.

You may already be familiar with some yoga moves such as downward dog and mountain pose, but yoga is more than that. It’s a total mind-body workout that includes: postures, breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation that helps improve your health in several ways.

Some health benefits:

Yoga helps you improving your balance, flexibility, strength, and coordination
Yoga can help reduce your risk of heart disease
It may be the perfect way to relieve migraines and fight osteoporosis
Yoga can undo the harmful effects of stress
Relaxing breathing techniques you can practice anywhere so you can stay calm and release tension

Plus, the meditation component of yoga may even help to delay the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease and fight age-related declines in memory.

Why not give yoga a try and see how it can help your health?

Get Your Energy Back by Following These 5 Tips

Spring brings back light. The short winter days are now a memory. It is the perfect time to recharge your batteries and repair your body, your spirit and your soul. Find your energy to get a good start.

Spring is the season of renewal. Every spring day is a new departure. Each morning represents a new chance to reach your goals and follow your dreams.

To get the best out of this spring spirit, here are 5 tips to regain your well-being.

1.Take care of yourself and adopt a healthy sleep pattern. Sleep is essential for physical and mental well-being, specialists recommend sleeping between 7 and 9 hours per night. Feeling rested after a good night’s sleep allows you to better manage your energy during the day.

Tips: Plan your day the night before. In the evening, do restful activities. Create an environment favourable to rest by eliminating strong light and screens (TV, computer but also mobile phone) in your room. Practise yoga or meditation exercises.

2. Energy is on the plate. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. With it, you establish the blood sugar level, avoid the cravings during the morning and give your body the energy it needs to function. Beware of some foods that could be counterproductive. Too sweet food gives you an immediate energy boost but, when over, they will leave you more tired than before.

Tips: Avoid sugars and caffeine in excess and favour food that makes you feel full, such as bananas or apples. Drink large quantities of green tea (which also helps weight loss and prevents cells aging). Buy fresh fruit and vegetables and try to eat less refined food (whole grains would be great). Make the menu of your week and fill up the fridge to avoid coming home hungry and having nothing to eat. By doing so, you will eat what you have and will not order food to be delivered at home. Establish a regular daily meal pattern. Have you ever thought about learning to cook?

3. Meditation is useful for your well-being. We live at high speed. Sometimes this rhythm of life prevents us from fully living the things we do and focusing on them. Many activities can help us take better advantage of the present moment and meditation is at the top of the list. Before going to work, focusing on the rhythm of breathing (inhale / exhale) can help you face the day more calmly. Meditation has beneficial effects on the brain and the general well-being.

Tips: Meditate every day at the same time: wake up your senses by disconnecting yourself for a few minutes. You do not have time? Try meditating in the shower or while you are on the bus or on the metro! It is enough to breathe with awareness. Relax while remaining alert. Follow your cat’s example, if you have one. But don’t meditate while driving!

4. Move to reduce your fatigue. Even if this statement may seem contradictory, sport is the best way to lighten your spiri up, remove your anxiety and regain your energy. Physical activity can stimulate the mitochondria, which are the generators of the body’s energy. So what are you waiting for? Put your sneakers on!

Tips: Walk at least 10,000 steps a day (I know, they are a lot). Try the sun salutation, a sequence of yoga positions that helps you release endorphins in the blood and then help you be in a good mood and spirit and energised. Practise yoga, Pilates, take a bike ride or a walk with your colleagues. Walk with awareness, focusing on each one of your steps and trying to feel the contact with the ground from the top of your heels to the tip of your toes.

5. More balance for more energy We often overlook the importance of emotional balance in everyday life. The harmony of the senses can help us feel better and improve our relationships with others. Pay attention to your emotions and learn to manage them. Do not prevent yourself from expressing them, in the appropriate ways and occasions, of course, otherwise you risk that they would become too intense and then you will no longer take control over them. Take full advantage of positive emotions and try to accept your feelings in moments of sadness or distress. Emotions have their reason for being: they are the ones who determine our actions.

Tips: Try looking at things from a broader perspective: everything in life is useful, even if it does not seem like that. Try not reacting immediately, breathe deeply and remind yourself that it will go away. If you really have to take a position, count up to ten before speaking. Set goals regularly to get the best out of yourself by living again your feelings or thoughts.