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A very good reason to get back to the gym for
The Harvard Heart Health Letter just revealed research results which may inspire you to go back to the (home) gym after all.
I will personally get back to swinging my kettle bells on a daily basis for I really need to lose some weight and definitely get back in shape.
Here’s an excerpt of that article:
“Add strength training to your fitness plan
Boosting your muscle mass may trigger changes that enhance heart health.
When you do aerobic exercise—brisk walking, biking, or swimming, for example—you breathe harder and your heart beats faster. This “cardio” workout provides a wealth of cardiovascular benefits. But you might not realize that strength training—also called weight training or resistance training—is also good for your heart.
“Strength training maintains and may even increase muscle mass, which people tend to lose as they age,” says Rania Mekary, a visiting assistant professor of surgery at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at MCPHS University. Boosting your muscle mass speeds up your metabolic rate, so you burn more calories—even when you’re not exercising.
Burning calories and belly fat
Burning more calories helps you avoid weight gain, which keeps your heart healthier than if you pack on pounds. And strength training may be especially important for keeping off belly fat. This so-called visceral fat, which surrounds your internal organs, is particularly dangerous for your heart.
Mekary and colleagues at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that healthy men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training had less of an age-related increase in abdominal fat compared with men who spent the same amount of time doing aerobic activities”…
Mindfulness Helps You Tame and Eliminate Stress
Because stress is so widespread, most people have started to believe that it’s something they just have to put up with. But you don’t have to live with stress. Mindfulness is a technique that can help you control and get rid of the stress in your life.
Stress can impact your brain. It impacts the way that you think because it causes your brain’s cortex to actually slow its ability to reason when you’re under stress. This is why people who experience stress can often make choices that aren’t in their best interest.
What practicing mindfulness does is calms the brain’s reaction to stress – which in turn calms the body’s reaction to stress. You’ll gain a healthy way to cope with and get rid of anxiety.
During mindfulness exercises, what you’ll learn to do is to be fully present in your life. You’ll learn how to be aware of what’s around you, of how you feel, and of the thoughts that are going through your mind.
These exercises can focus on a portion of each – such as thoughts and feelings – or they can separate them out so that you are only focusing on one at a time. You might simple direct your attention to how you’re feeling in the moment.
Or you might instead pay attention to the sounds of the birds you hear or to the movement of the wind in the trees. The idea is that you’ll be paying attention to what’s going on where you are right now rather than focusing your attention on whatever it is that caused you to experience stress.
To deal with stress, something else that mindfulness does is help you let go of the need to judge whatever it is that’s going on. You won’t get on the hamster wheel of running the heavy situation over and over again in your mind.
Mindfulness is used so that you don’t carry the negative emotions stress can bring with you into the present moment. It also prevents you from continually thinking about the stress.
You learn to let go and to simply be, to accept what your present moment in time is offering. When you can utilize the ability to practice mindfulness, you can eliminate stress.
You can do this because the negative feelings and thoughts from the past won’t be what you focus on. By using mindfulness to remain in the present, you also don’t reach for the future.
So much stress enters into our lives because of past issues. We worry about the past, but we do the same about the future. We spend hours, days, months and even years fretting and stressing over things that haven’t happened and may never happen.
Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future increases stress. Mindfulness controls stress. It teaches users how to let go of anxiety and tension and live fully in the present.
When you practice mindfulness, you don’t allow your mind to wander and dwell on things that can cause stress or keep the stress alive. Pick something specific to focus on and allow it to give you clarity about what really matters.
Mindfulness Addiction Therapy
Seeking therapy for an addiction can be a good way to set yourself free from a behavior that you don’t want to have any more. Some therapy treatments focus only on one particular addiction.
Mindfulness addiction therapy can be used to successfully treat any addiction. Because mindfulness helps people to focus and be aware of the present, this can help them to learn how to react when their body starts sending out signals for the substance.
There are many triggers that cause the body to react with a signal for a substance and one of these is stress. When you feel stressed, the emotions that go along with stress can trigger whatever addiction you may have.
Mindfulness addiction therapy teaches people ways to deal with addiction and how to bring them under control by changing the way that they respond to the emotions and desire for a craving.
When you practice mindfulness, it can center your focus on your breathing and help you to learn how to be more conscious of your thoughts and actions. Because of this, it can help you when the addiction cravings begin.
You’ll gain a better sense of control as well as being more mindful of making better choices for yourself and what’s healthier for you. One of the things that can cause an addiction to hold people in its grip is the cycle of a habit.
Negative emotions can trigger a negative response, which then causes a reaction in you that’s negative but you might have set up as positive. For example, the addiction smoking is often triggered by stress or negative emotions in relation to negative situations.
The negative response is that you then choose to smoke. When you smoke, the nicotine release causes you to feel relief from the stress, so you see that as a positive.
This reinforces the effect of smoking. Mindfulness can break the habit by allowing you to deal with the nicotine craving. Practicing mindfulness will show you that a craving is simply a feeling that you can focus on rather than run from.
It teaches you to find the connection between the craving and what’s going on internally. It’s the same concept with having a food addiction. People who have a food addiction will turn to food to deal with emotion.
Plus, certain foods do have an addictive quality to them. When you eat food, it makes your emotions feel better for a while. These emotions, such as happiness, then reinforce that the habit is good.
Mindfulness can help you break the food addiction by showing you how that food is neither good nor bad and by being aware of the sensations within your body, you can control the cravings.
Taking drugs is something that people often do in order to escape from the pressures of their life. By taking the drugs, they gain the escape which also reinforces the addiction.
Mindfulness can help to take away the control that a drug has over a person’s actions. An alcohol addiction can also benefit from practicing mindfulness. Learning mindfulness can make you understand the feelings that you’re experiencing that are causing you to have the alcohol addiction.
You’ll learn not to judge yourself for the feelings that cause you to crave the alcohol and you’ll also learn to accept yourself with positive reinforcement rather than giving place to negative self-talk. Mindfulness can set you free from situations that may cause you to want to give in to the addiction.
Mindful Living Can Help Slow Down the Aging Process
From the time that you’re born, your body begins to age. Some people end up aging faster than others. Some people know that the key to slowing down the aging process is found in mindful living.
When you practice mindful living, you not only add years to your life, but you live a better quality of life as well. Scientific studies have shown that there’s a direct link between the emotional health of a person and his or her physical health.
When someone experiences negative emotions such as ones fueled by stress, it can speed up aging because it has a negative effect within the body. When you practice mindfulness, you can slow down the aging process because you’re fighting back against the causes of aging.
Inside your body, you have DNA that act as caps on the end of your cells. These caps are called telomeres. These are needed to help your cells continually divide. As time passes, these telomeres would gradually lose their length and the result would then be cell death.
You can prevent the shortening of the telomeres by practicing mindful living. The connection between mindfulness and the length of telomeres rests in an enzyme known as telomerase.
This enzyme is responsible for keeping the telomeres at a healthy length. One of the key factors that can impact the length of the telomeres is stress. When you have stress, it damages your cells and can lead to cell death.
There are many health conditions that can be linked with the telomeres once they begin to shorten. Among these are heart disease and some types of cancers. When you have stress, especially if you have a lot of it, this will cause the telomere length to shorten faster.
But, you can change that by learning how to live mindfully. When you live mindfully, you can defeat the stress that’s causing so many negative reactions within your body. You can learn how to do mindful exercises that can boost the grown of the telomeres.
When you practice mindful living, you focus on the present and you don’t practice self negativity and you don’t judge what you think or feel. What mindfulness does is it boosts the amount of telomerase that’s present in your body.
You learn how to stop the cycle of negative emotion and thoughts that tie in to stress. Mindfulness also boosts positive thoughts and emotions which are linked to physical well being and the aging process is slowed.
Mindful living will allow you to have better concentration, gain self control and allow you to have more compassion for yourself and toward others.
Mindful Fitness Tips for a Better Workout
Mindfulness is a technique that you can use to make your workout more effective. When most people exercise, they don’t realize how closely associated the mind is with it. What you think and how you think can have a great impact on your workout.
Mindfulness can make a difference in whether you can stick with an exercise routine long enough for it to become a habit. When you practice mindfulness, it can help you to have a better workout because it lets you focus on the goal that you have at that moment.
One of the reasons that some people have an ineffective workout or give up working out completely is because they fail to keep the focus on the present. They look at where they want to be.
Any goal that’s in the future can seem a long way off. Instead of projecting where you want to be with your workout goals, it’s better to keep your mindset on what you’re experiencing at the time of your workout.
You should want to get better and be able to have more stamina and do more repetitions, but that should not be where your thoughts are. Rather than concentrating on wanting to be able to make it to thirty reps in two weeks, mindfulness can help you keep focused on adding a few additional reps for that day.
More often than not, when people work out, they’re not even paying attention to what they’re doing. They’re working out and listening to the conversation around them. Or they’re listening to music or watching the television.
These actions take away the focus from the working out. By focusing, you increase your stamina and strengthen your mindset. By using mindfulness to keep your thoughts on the present, you can teach yourself how to gain consistency.
A lack of consistency is one of the main reasons that people quit a workout routine. It’s easy to blow off exercising when you’re not practicing mindfulness. Using these tips can help you be mindful for a better workout.
When you’re exercising, think about how it feels to move your body. Pay attention to the sensation of moving your arms and legs as you’re on the treadmill. Picture the body weight going down and your strength rising.
Focus on your muscles as you’re working out and picture them lean and powerful. Through each exercise that you do, choose one tense to focus on – such as what you can hear or feel.
Keep your mind focused on that sense only. This will help to keep you in the present. For the times when you don’t feel like exercising, mindfulness can help keep you motivated.
Insomnia Therapy Through the Use of Mindfulness
Insomnia can cause you to toss and turn throughout the night. It can lead you to waking up even if you do manage to fall asleep. Struggling with this annoying problem can drain your energy and make you feel a deep fatigue.
When you experience insomnia, it can affect your ability to concentrate on even simple tasks. It can raise your risk of having a serious accident, doing poorly at work, having problems in your relationships and even make you physically sick.
Not only will you feel the effects of insomnia physically, but it can affect you mentally, too. Insomnia is known to cause depression. Thankfully, mindfulness can put an end to insomnia and help you to get the sleep that you need.
The way that mindfulness helps is that it eliminates the myriad of thoughts that run through your mind. Unfortunately, unlike toys that can make irritating noise, but thankfully have an off button, your mind doesn’t have that.
This is known as being unable to turn your mind off. It’s why you can’t sleep. When your mind can’t rest, neither can your body. What mindfulness teaches for insomnia is that person experiencing it should practice concentrating on breathing techniques.
Not only can mindfulness help you get rid of insomnia, but it will enable you to feel well rested because mindfulness calms the entire body. It does this by lowering the stress level and raising the sleep inducing hormone, melatonin.
Because mindfulness is not addicting like over the counter sleep medications are, many doctors are now suggesting that people who struggle with insomnia turn to treatments like mindfulness.
The steps that you’ll need to take to get a good night’s sleep using mindfulness are simple. First, you need to make sure that you’re comfortable. You also need to make sure that you have quiet around you.
Don’t have a television or music playing in the background. Make sure you’re away from any bright lights, because bright lights stimulate the brain. Once you’re in place, sit quietly.
Secondly, focus your attention on how your body is feeling. You’ll notice that you feel stressed or tensed. Concentrate on drawing in breaths and as you breathe out, mentally let the stress go.
You should inhale and exhale for a count of five breaths. Third, focus on the sensations that you’re experiencing through your senses. What you hear, smell and feel. Concentrate on these senses for a count of five.
As thoughts run through your head, let them. Don’t judge them because this is what can cause you to tense up. Refocus your attention on the sensations. Remain in this exercise until you feel completely relaxed and ready for sleep.
For Weight Loss and Management, Engage in Mindful Eating Exercises
Too many of us will use food as a means of helping us deal with stress. Some people eat without even realizing what it is that they’re doing. They check or zone out while eating.
This is why you can reach the bottom of a bowl and be surprised to find that all of the food is gone. You don’t even remember eating it all. The problem with eating to feel better about stress or not paying attention when eating is that it can cause weight gain.
Mindful eating can help you be fully present every time you eat. When you’re fully present, this can stop the cycle of eating without realizing what it is you’re even doing. Anyone can practice mindful eating that can help you get rid of unwanted pounds or manage it if you don’t want to gain.
Even if you have health problems that make it difficult to lose weight, mindfulness has been shown to be helpful with losing weight and maintaining that loss. When you practice mindfulness, it causes you to be conscious of the food that you eat.
From the beginning of the meal to the end, you recognize and experience each bite. This practice can also be applied to when you have snacks – which is an eating habit that causes many people to gain extra pounds.
When you practice mindful eating, it causes you to take your time and enjoy the food that you’re eating. When you eat slowly, this gives your brain time to register that your stomach is full so you eat less, too.
Mindful eating can be a natural way of helping to end wrong food associations that can lead to conditions such as binge eating. To get started with mindful eating, you have to make sure that you’re eating to get it out of the way or just because you’re supposed to.
Don’t eat while you’re working or driving or watching television. When your mind is otherwise occupied, you can’t focus on the enjoyment of the eating. Some mindful exercises can help you lose weight and keep your weight managed.
When you eat, pay attention to how the food tastes. Concentrate on how the flavors of the food stand out separately rather than as a whole. Become aware of the spicy taste or the sharp flavor.
Enjoy the feeling of the food, the shape of it and notice whether it’s solid or soft. As you eat, relax your mind and body. Keep your thoughts focused only on the eating and nothing else.
If you’ve always eaten a certain way such as sitting in a specific chair or using the same dinnerware change it up and use something different. Sit in a different chair. Face a different direction.
Use your opposite hand instead of the one that you always use. You can practice mindful eating by having a small piece of chocolate or a raisin. Pop the bite into your mouth and become aware of the texture of the bite, of the sensations that cross your tastebuds.
By becoming aware of food, you can eliminate the kind of rushed eating and overeating that leads to weight control issues.
Embark on a Mindful Walk or Run for Fitness and Stress Relief
There’s no doubt that walking or running can help you lose weight and get in shape. It can also keep your heart in good cardiovascular health. If you practice mindfulness as you walk or run, you’ll also find that’s it a great way to get relief from stress.
Using mindfulness as you walk or run can help quiet anxious thoughts, bring your emotions under control and keep your thoughts centered on the present. When you do this, you’ll gain the ability to release the feelings that are causing you to feel stress.
By learning how to control your mind while you’re exercising, you’ll be benefiting yourself physically and mentally. You’ll need to keep your mind focused as you’re walking or running.
When you keep your mind focused, it turns off that inner noise that can make you feel unsettled. Once your mind is quieted, you’ll be able to hear your body as you’re exercising.
A lot of people think that exercising for fitness and stress relief is all about the body. They believe that it’s up to the muscles to find the right rhythm, but that’s not the case. There’s a strong body and mind connection that you tap into when you practice mindfulness.
This connection helps you be more relaxed as you move. It allows you to observe your atmosphere and gain a greater amount of energy. Your mind is the momentum that your body needs to get in motion.
It’s also the tool that can make your exercising healthier for you when you practice mindfulness. As you walk or run, focus on what’s going on in your body. Feel the sensations of the surface against the bottom of your shoe.
Pay attention to the position of your spine and the way your arms are moving. Get in tune with the motion of your body. When you practice mindfulness, you’ll learn how to breathe so that your body is able to get more oxygen which will help you on your walk or run.
As you move, focus your inhaling and exhaling by timing them along with your steps. You should be able to sync your breathing with your walking or running tempo. When you do this, you’ll increase your energy and be more relaxed because deep breathing has a calming effect on the emotions and the muscles.
Mindfulness lets you tune in to your body as you move. You’ll learn how to move and change the way that you move to induce a better run or walk. If you’re huffing and wheezing as you move, that’s a sign that you’re not in tempo with your breathing and it needs to be lined up.
When you keep your focus where it needs to be as you move, you’ll discover that your mind doesn’t become clouded with negative thoughts. You’ll be able to end your walk or run – not just full of energy – but calmer and happier, too.
Chronic Pain Sufferers Can Find Relief in Mindful Meditation
There are countless people who struggle with chronic pain. Sometimes the pain is caused from a medical condition and sometimes it’s a result of experiencing damage to the body through an accident or abuse.
Most people are familiar with dealing with the stress of the pain that feel in their body. But, chronic pain doesn’t simply affect the body. It can also impact how you feel emotionally.
It’s perfectly normal when you’re dealing with long term pain to experience anger about what you’re going through. It’s also normal to get upset when others have a hard time understand the level of pain you’re experiencing.
If it’s left untreated, chronic pain can wear on a person so deeply that they can begin to feel depressed. Modern medicine tries to offer relief from chronic pain but in many cases, can only medicate the symptom rather than actually treat the condition.
You need something more than that. By using mindfulness, not only can you find relief for your physical symptoms, but you can also find help for the emotional side effects that are common when you have to live with chronic pain.
When you practice the techniques in mindfulness, it can help ease the way that your body feels pain. What mindfulness does is teach people to focus on the sensations of the body along with the emotional feelings when they’re struggling with pain.
This approach is in direct contradiction to the way that some treatments suggest not thinking about the pain. But not thinking about can actually add to the stress, which can cause even more pain.
By learning mindfulness, you can decrease the pain and gain a sense of peace as well. With mindfulness, you find a quiet place and focus on each part of your body and how it feels in regards to the pain.
You don’t judge the pain and you don’t fight it. You don’t view it as something negative either. You just simply become aware of it. While you’re sitting, concentrate on how your body feels in connection with whatever it is that you’re sitting on.
Become aware of the chair and how the floor feels beneath your feet. Picture each area of your body relaxing. Keep your focus centered on your body and don’t view the pain as anything other than a neutral thing within you.
While you’re focused on your body, slowly go over each area of your body. Focus only on that part. Become aware of the senses dealing with that part – such as whether or not it’s cold or warm.
If it feels free or restricted, if it’s against something soft or hard. The goal is to concentrate only on the senses rather than what the pain is doing in that area. After you practice mindfulness on each part of your body, slowly take in the whole body by becoming completely aware.
The mindfulness will help you be able to handle the pain emotionally and relax from the stress, which brings physical relief.
Being Mindful Can Help You With Your Eating Disorder
We all have ingrained habits when it comes to what we eat and how we eat. For some people though, there’s a struggle with eating that can result in an eating disorder.
Any abnormal eating pattern can be helped through the practice of mindfulness. When you engage in mindfulness techniques it means that you’re focused on what’s going on around you in that present moment.
It means that you release the judgment that you have when it comes to your relationship with food. Eating isn’t simply a process of putting food into your body.
Eating is connected to what your body experiences emotionally when you eat. For most people, this would be satisfaction, but for those with an eating disorder, it can be dread.
When you eat, the action can trigger emotions, whether they’re good or bad. If you struggle with an eating disorder, you might feel depressed at the thought of eating.
Or you might crave the food, but be unable to stand the thought of keeping it within your body. Mindfulness can free the negative connection you may have to food.
It can be used to rewrite the past negative experiences you may have had concerning food and lead you to a healthier understanding of eating. When you practice mindful eating, you’re aware of the food, but you don’t focus on the food – which is the basis of an eating disorder.
When you have an eating disorder, whatever you’re feeling and thinking is projected onto the food. The food becomes the enemy and overeating or undereating becomes of way of dealing with the emotions.
Mindfulness teaches you how to understand and find relief from eating disorders by changing the way that you think about food and breaking the cycle of emotions.
There are countless articles about eating disorders where the person who has the disorder isn’t even aware that they have a problem. This is because they’re not fully present, and not focusing on being present with their thoughts, actions or habits when it comes to food.
An awareness toward eating takes away the power of an eating disorder. It breaks the hold that the condition has over a person. In order to heal from an eating disorder, you have to learn how to associate food with becoming aware of your body sensations.
With mindful eating techniques, you would ask yourself why you feel the way that you do about food. But you would not ask yourself this in a judgmental way. The purpose of this exercise is not to make you feel bad about yourself, but rather to help you understand the reasoning behind your thoughts.
Mindful eating helps you to examine when it is that you feel hungry or you don’t and if there are any activities, thoughts or emotions tied in to that hunger or lack of hunger.
When you practice mindful eating, you’ll learn how you handle eating. Whether it’s something that you feel you need to just get through or if it’s something that you feel ashamed of.
Mindfulness will help you be able to be more aware of the behaviors you have toward food that aren’t healthy and lead you to establishing a new foundation with food that will allow you to heal.