Healthy Habits for Busy People

31/10/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Walk More

Walking is one of the most natural ways to improve both physical and mental health. For most people, walking is the easiest way to boost physical activity and trim body fat and body weight.

The physical benefits of walking is that it can reduce pain and stress on joints, and improve circulation and posture. There's too many studies to cite, but research indicates a daily walk can reduce the risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease.

Mentally, walking can help reduce depression and anxiety, improve your mood, increase creativity, and improve your memory.

Walking can be as beneficial as a workout, if not better. You just have to know how to get the most out of your walk.

Try these tips to maximize the efficiency of your walking workout:
1. Walk hills to burn more calories and strengthen your leg muscles. If using a treadmill, use the incline feature.
2. Alternate your pace for better cardio endurance. If using a treadmill, set it to intervals or vary the speed.
3. Carry light weights. Perform exercises, such as shoulder presses, curls, or punches, while walking; or stop for a quick set of an exercise.

Try these tips to get more steps from walking throughout the day:
1. Walk to work or shopping
2. Park in the back of the parking lot
3. Skip the elevator and opt for the stairs

Try these tips to make a walk enjoyable:
1. Walk with a friend
2. Schedule phone calls and walk while talking
3. Listen to music or a podcast while walking

Task for the week: Practice one of the tips from the 3 lists above each day of the week. But don't stop at the end of the week. Mix-and-match the practices and get into a daily routine of walking more to improve your long-term physical and mental health.

Have an awesome and healthy day. :)

Rich

p.s. To meet your health goals, walking and other forms of exercise must be paired with a proper diet. If you want to improve your diet, but don’t know where to start, I offer a comprehensive guide that will teach you simple, fast, and measurable ways to eat better. Access the guide here:

- Learn why eating healthy is easy: it takes no extra time or effort- Discover simple, fast, and measureable tasks to improve your diet- Includes BONUS material to help keep you focused and provide inspiration List of Foods to Eat & Foods to Avoid Morning Routine Checklist 4 Healthy Breakfast Re...

09/10/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Go Outside / Be With Nature

Go outside and take a breath of fresh air. Stepping outside onto a busy city street is not the idea here. Head into nature and experience the benefits of grass, trees, and plants; all of which produce fresh oxygen we need to survive. Oxygen is essential to maintaining a healthy brain, breaking down food into energy, and powering your immune system.

Fun Fact: high brain activity requires about 1.5 calories per minute. So you burn about 90 calories per hour just from thinking hard.

Spending time outside away from your home and work has also been proven to help reduce stress and improve concentration because it helps your mind refocus on your new environment and the beauty around you. Being out in nature, you're also more likely to move around and get some exercise, which as we know has numerous health benefits (more energy, improved mental focus, lower blood pressure, and decreased heart rate).

Task for the week: Take 1 hour and enjoy nature, away from crowds of people. Find a park, beach, woods, lake, mountain, field, etc. and admire the sights, smells, and sound of nature. It's important to find somewhere with little to no people, so you're not distracted from focusing on nature. Besides, other people often can cause us stress, and one of the main reasons to spend time in nature is to avoid stress.

Tip: If you can't commit an entire hour at once, split it up into (2) 30 minute sessions or (3) 20 minute sessions throughout the week.

p.s. Stress is also exacerbated by poor diet. If you want to improve your diet, but don’t know where to start, I offer a comprehensive guide that will teach you simple, fast, and measurable ways to eat better. Access the guide here:

- Learn why eating healthy is easy: it takes no extra time or effort- Discover simple, fast, and measureable tasks to improve your diet- Includes BONUS material to help keep you focused and provide inspiration List of Foods to Eat & Foods to Avoid Morning Routine Checklist 4 Healthy Breakfast Re...

18/09/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Drink Lots of Water

Staying hydrated is vital for your body to function properly. Water is involved in every process in your body, and it helps each process to run more efficiently. There's been a lot of research that indicates many people are not drinking enough water each day.

Water is vital to weight management; it boosts metabolism and can also help lose weight. It also helps with the digestive process, making sure your kidneys filter out minerals that are harmful to your health.

Your mental capabilities are also highly reliant on water intake. Brain function can suffer with even just a 1% loss of body water, causing impaired mood, headache, and loss of concentration.

So how much water do you need? The golden rule is to drink 1/2 oz to 1 oz of water each day for each pound you weigh. This is a large range and depends on other factors such as the environment and where you live (hot, humid, or dry areas), your diet, your activity level, and your current health.

If you're unsure how much to drink, follow my routine. I set a daily goal to drink 3/4 oz of pure water per pound of bodyweight, and figure other beverages and foods will contribute the remaining balance of water my body needs in a day.

Task for the week: Drink a glass of water (12 - 16 oz) at most 30 minutes before every meal. Research shows that drinking a glass of water right before a meal can help you feel more full and eat less. This can lead to less calorie consumption and prevent overeating.

Bonus: Add flavor to your water with slices of cucumber, lemon, lime, mint, orange, or watemelon.
Have an awesome and healthy day. :)

Rich

p.s. Drinking more water is just one easy way to improve your health. Find out the other easy ways you can easily start on a road to better health here:

If you want to be healthier, you can google "how to be healthy" and find millions of things you can do to maintain your health. But how do you know where to start? Here are 5 easy things you can start doing NOW, EVERY DAY, to get healthier. 1. Stretch: Before you start the day, set aside 10 minutes....

13/09/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Train Your Muscles

Everyone knows that lifting weights helps build muscle and strength. The act of building muscle through strength training boost your metabolism, helping you to burn more calories and trade fat for muscle.

But did you know that strength training also strengthens your heart, builds bone density, and develops slimmer figure? It's true. It's these lesser known health benefits that makes strength training such an important activity to incorporate into your weekly routine.

In addition to improving your physical health, strength training has emotional benefits. Developing yourself physically builds confidence and makes you feel better.

Task for the week: Participate in (2) 30-minute sessions of strength training. Don't be discouraged if you don't have a gym membership or weights at home. Strength training is often associated with weights, but also includes calisthenics, isometrics, and plyometrics.

And if you don't know how to get started, follow these basic moves for a perfect home workout:

I know you're tired of waiting for coronavirus to end, and you're probably looking for new ways to beat the boredom and get back to being active. I don't know when the parks, gyms, and studios will open back up. No one does. But don't let that get you down. This is the time to learn new ways to keep...

05/09/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Get Enough Sleep

To be your best each day, you need to be well rested. A good night's sleep keeps you alert, improves your mood, sharpens memory and focus, and helps your ability to learn. It is vital for both the mind and body.

The American Society of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and Sleep Research Society (SRS) recommend adults get at least 7 hours of sleep per night. Their recommendation was determined from a project conducted by a Consensus Panel of sleep experts, who concluded that sleeping less than 6 hours per night is detrimental to an adult's health and safety, and more than a third of the population are sleep deprived.

Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence concluded from studies that indicates how too much sleep affects personal health, so sleep organizations and professionals do not place a limit on the amount of recommended regular sleep for adults.

In addition to an adequate amount of sleep, quality, timing, regularity, and absence of sleep disorders are also important for healthy sleep.

Task for the week: For optimal performance during the day, aim to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night, every night. Try improving your sleep hygiene with the following practices:

1. develop a schedule and go to bed and wake up the same time every day, even on weekends
2. create a pre-bed routine to get you in the mood and make it easier to fall asleep
3. if caffeine or alcohol keep you up, avoid consuming them during the few hours before bedtime
4. disconnect from screens including phones, computers, and TV 30 minutes - 1 hour before bed
5. eliminate disruptions from the bedroom such as light and sound, or use a sleep mask or earplugs as an aid

To help make a new sleep routine easier, discover 3 tips to building a habit here: https://www.healthyhabitsforbusypeople.com/post/how-to-build-healthy-habits.

p.s. If you suspect you may have a sleep disorder, it's best to consult with a doctor.

Forming a new healthy habit isn't easy, but there are things you can do to make it easier and give yourself a better chance of succeeding. Here are 3 hacks to build healthy habits: 1. Start small and easy and do it for 21 days 2. Get buy-in from others 3. Make it visual

24/08/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Avoid Added Sugar

One of the worst nutritional plagues damaging America's health is added sugar, or as I like to call it "unnecessary sugar".

Added sugar is sugar that is added during the processing of foods. It adds zero nutritional value, and is only added for taste.

(Although I believe food manufacturers add sugar to products because sugar releases dopamine into your body, that feel-good chemical that makes you want to consume more. Food manufacturers hope you fall in love with how the sugary food makes you feel, so you crave it and continue to buy more.)

Too much sugar in our diets can lead to weight gain, tooth decay, fatigue, poor skin, and trouble sleeping.

The FDA did us a great service recently by requiring added sugars be identified on Nutritional Information labels for all packaged food goods. Refer to the photo below for an example snippet from food labels. A majority of items in the grocery store contain added sugar, so it's very hard for us to consume food without added sugar. However, that doesn't mean we can't limit our intake, and we must be diligent about reading nutrition labels and choose food products that are good for our health.

Do your health a favor and read food labels to understand how much added sugar you consume with each food item.

Task for the week: When shopping for food, review the added sugar content on food labels for items you normally buy. Then try to find a comparable product with less added sugar, and purchase that. It's hard to remove all added sugar from our diets, but decreasing our consumption is the first step to improving our health.

If you want to go the extra mile, track how many grams of added sugar you eat in a day. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends no more than 10% of calories come from added sugar. So for an average daily diet of 2,000 calories, that's 50 grams of added sugar in a day.

19/08/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Keep Your Balance

Good balance helps keep you active and avoid injury. It helps you to perform many activities you do every day, some as simple as walking and standing.

Good balance is more and more important as we get older, as our bodies are more susceptible to injury from falls and spills. Regardless of your age, good balance is essential to your physical health at any age.

The American Heart Association classifies health as one of the four types of exercise, along with strength, endurance, and flexibility. We often don't consider balance a form of exercise, but it is and should be incorporated into your regular exercise routine if you want to improve performance and reaction, and decrease risk of injury.

There are many ways to work on your balance, some of which you may already be doing. For instance, a lot of lower-body exercises help improve balance. Yoga and tai chi are more focused balance exercises that add variety and help keep exercise exciting.

Task for the week: Choose one new balance exercise and perform it at least 3 times this week. Here's a list of exercises to help improve balance: https://www.healthyhabitsforbusypeople.com/post/what-are-balance-exercises

03/08/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Eat A Nutritious Breakfast Daily

You may have heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I completely agree. Eating the right breakfast can provide you with the energy and nutrients you need to perform your best throughout the day.

When you sleep, your body rests. When you awake in the morning, you need fuel to jumpstart your metabolism and to burn more calories throughout the day. Your body also rebuilds when you sleep, and you need to replenish the blood sugar spent by the rebuilding activities during sleeping for both your brain and body to function properly.

I think it's important to recognize a currently popular health and fitness trend that most commonly involves skipping breakfast. It's called intermittent fasting, which involves cycling between periods of eating and periods of fasting. While intermittent fasting may be a proven method to weight loss and sustainable healthy eating patterns, it is not a practice I currently endorse.

Task for the week: Eat a healthy breakfast every day for the next week. Your best options have a mix of carbohydrates, protein, healthy fats, and fiber. For active people, it's important to make sure your breakfast has a healthy portion of protein to keep you energized long through the day. Here's some tips to ensure you get a healthy breakfast:
1. If you are hard pressed for time in the morning, prepare it the night before or meal prep on the weekend so you can grab it to eat on the go. Or wake up 10-15 minutes early and set that time aside for breakfast.
2. If you don't normally eat breakfast and find it difficult to eat first thing in the morning, try eating small portions or eating mid-morning.
3. Try any of the healthy, nutritious breakfast recipes available on my recipes page (link below). There's recipes for oatmeal, smoothies, yogurt bowl, and eggs. Fresh fruit with peanut butter is another quick, nutritious, and delicious breakfast option.

Learn how to make simple, fast, healthy meals for a nutritional diet.

29/07/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Exercise Daily

Get up and move! America is in a pandemic of sitting too much. Think about how much you sit during the day. It's probably a whole lot.

Sitting for extended periods of time is both bad for your physical health as well as your mental health. We all need to move more. Being active is not as hard as you think; there are many simple ways to include physical activity into your daily routine.

Take a walk, perform calisthenics (squats, lunges, crunches, push ups, planks), stretch, weight train, play a team sport, run, swim, hike, dance, yoga, etc. The list goes on. Moving is great for your body and blood circulation, but also your mind. It helps reduce stress and promotes growth.

Task for the week: Target an additional 10 minutes of intentional exercise daily. Health organizations recommend adults get a minimum of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 5 days a week. Aerobic exercise is any activity that increases your heart rate and breathing.

30 minutes a day may sound like a lot, and if you don't intentionally get aerobic exercise daily, adding 30 minutes a day could lead to injury and soreness. So start slow with these guidelines:

1. If you are getting no exercise, strive to get 10 minutes a day. Take a brisk walk after dinner each night. Perform yard work. Do calisthenics: you can do this while watching TV; check out my simple routine here: Workout at Home

2. If you're already getting some exercise each week, aim to add on average 10 minutes a day (70 minutes across the week). Either add time to your exercises, try different activities to add variety, or increase the intensity of the activity.

3. If you exercise daily and get the recommended 30 minutes a day, try mixing it up with more intense activities. If you normally walk, go for a jog. If you normally jog, try adding intermittent sprints. Challenge yourself to increase your heart rate for short or extended periods of time.

The goal this week is to get you into an exercise routine that you will continue to perform week after week after week. Adding 10 minutes a day is a small enough amount of increased activity that should be easy to manage and add to your lifestyle. After you have added 10 minutes of activity to your daily routine, try adding more.


p.s. This information is not intended as medical advice. Consult your health care provider prior to engaging in any activity that could be a threat to your health.

12/07/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Soak in the Sun

Help yourself feel better by capturing the sun's natural rays through your skin. Even just a few minutes in the sunshine raises Vitamin D levels, which is an essential nutrient for healthy brain function, strong bones, and strong immune system.

You've probably heard that sunlight triggers your brain to release seratonin, which is the hormone that stabilizes our mood and helps with sleeping and digestion. Spending time in the sun also helps you to be calm, focused, and emotionally stable.

Many people report that the sun's warm rays on their skin simply makes them feel good. Research indicates on average 10-30 minutes in the sunlight for 2-3 times per week is enough to enjoy the sun's benefits.

Task for the week: Make sure you produce all the seratonin and Vitamin D you can and attempt to spend 5-15 minutes in the sun each day of the week. If you aren't getting enough sunlight already, here's a few ways you can ensure you do:

1. Find a comfortable place outside to rest and sit or lay down for 5-15 minutes, pointing yourself in the direction of the sun. If convenient, grab a chair to sit or lay down on a towel to maximize your comfort. Strip back your clothes to expose as much of your skin as possible. Think about absorbing the sun's rays, and recognize how good it feels. This can also be a great time to rest your mind and daydream, meditate, or do whatever helps you relax.

2. If you usually exercise at a gym or inside, change your routine and exercise outside. Wear light clothing that exposes as much skin as possible.

3. Eat a meal outside in the sun. If you usually eat lunch inside at home, at your desk, or in the breakroom, take it outside and find a comfortable spot in the sun. Invite friends or family to enjoy with others, and you can feel good about helping them to reap the sun’s benefits.

This task is so easy, and enjoyable, that I have full confidence you’re going to feel the benefits of sufficient sun exposure this week.

27/06/2021

Healthy Habits Tip of the Week: Plan Your Meals

Save time, money, and eat better by considering your nutritional goals. Knowing what your going to eat and when is key to prevent snacking, overeating, and eating poorly. Planning gives you the opportunity to make predetermined, thoughtful decisions about your diet. If you often eat the first thing....

13/06/2021

For a light (only 280 calories), almost non-fat (1 g fat) and super nutritious smoothie, try my Green Banana Grape. I think you're gonna love it!

With only 4 ingredients, the Green Banana Grape Smoothie packs a whole lot of nutrition into a light meal. It has almost no fat and supplies almost a day's supply of Vitamin C and 200% of the recommended daily value of calcium.