Change Your Mindset to Boost Your Self Esteem

Improving your self-worth and value is important to living a joyful life. If you cannot appreciate your own contribution to the life, it can be difficult to make sound decisions because you don’t value yourself or trust yourself. If you want to have more self-esteem, you can accomplish it in the following ways.

1. Know Your Own Thoughts – Being mindful of the words you say inside your head is invaluable in building your self-esteem. Most of us have someone in our brain (us) telling us negative things. It’s imperative that you become aware of these thoughts so that you can turn them around into something positive that drives personal growth.

2. Use Positive Affirmations – Sometimes, when people see the word “positive affirmations,” they get a mental picture of something quite silly and ineffective. Standing in the mirror saying random nice things to yourself – well, that can work, but you need to be more specific than this. Instead, every single time you think something negative, turn that particular thought around into a positive or even a neutral.

3. Know What You’re Good At – Every person on the planet has a talent that is either known or unknown. If you don’t think you’re good at anything, what have you tried? If you’ve not tried enough things, you may have simply not found what you’re good at yet. Keep trying and learning and growing, and you’ll find it. Then when you do, accept that it’s what you’re good at. It’s OK to be good at something and to claim that you are.

4. Surround Yourself with Positive Energy – This can be difficult if the negativity that is around you happens to be family. However, it’s imperative for your own mental and emotional health that you try to limit your exposure to negative people and energy and maximize your exposure to positivity.

5. Volunteer in Your Community – The key here is to volunteer in a capacity that seems to offer nothing to you in return. The reason is if you’re getting too much out of it for your business, your church, or something other than the value provided to the people, land, or animals you’re helping, it’s no longer about that, it’s about you. Get out of yourself and help.

6. Practice Self-Care – When you think of self-care, you may think of hair care, showering, and that type of thing. But it goes much further. It goes to the food you put in your body, the people you surround yourself with, and everything that you do that affects your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
7. Get Back to Nature – Even if you think that you don’t like the outdoors, the truth is, as a human-animal, you need nature. You need the sunshine to keep your circadian rhythms in check, you need the fresh air to oxygenate your blood, and you need good natural food to provide all the vitamins and minerals you need.

Remember that building your self-esteem takes time. It’s not something you can work on once a month or every January as a New Year’s resolution, it’s something you must practice daily for the entirety of your life. If you do, you’re sure to experience a much more satisfying life because you know you have value, and you know where you belong.

The Dos and Don’ts of Enjoying a Healthy Lifestyle

Living a healthy lifestyle and enjoying doing it is easier than you may think. It honestly is not hard to maximize your health through your lifestyle mentally, physically, and spiritually without giving up on the parts of life you love.

Get Enough Quality Sleep

Unless you’re one of the few people on the planet who has a genetic predisposition to needing less sleep, you need to plan for getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep every single night. It will help if you schedule your day to fit in the things you need to do and the sleep you need to maintain health.

Exercise Daily

You really don’t need very much exercise to maintain health. Walking at a moderate pace of 150 minutes a week is really all you need. That isn’t very much in the scheme of things. If you have a sedentary job, try to go on a brisk, 10-minute walk at least every four hours of sitting.

Eat Healthy

Eat as much healthy food that is as close to nature as possible each day. Crowd your plate with veggies, whole grains, legumes, and other plant-based food. If you’re still hungry, you can still eat the other things you enjoy because food makes us happy.

Don’t Aim for Perfection

Learn about the 80/20 rule as much as you can and apply it to all areas of your life. You never have to be 100 percent perfect at anything you do, mostly because that’s impossible, but also because if you are 80 percent perfect, you’re going to experience most of the results anyway.

Don’t Isolate Yourself

For some people, living a healthy lifestyle is difficult due to temptations that are around. This can cause them to retreat into their own space for safety. The truth is you need people. If your healthy lifestyle is so hard to do that other people are not comfortable with it, maybe it’s not that healthy.

Don’t “Go Cold Turkey”

Anytime you’re trying to change your behavior habits, going “cold turkey” can be a mistake. Instead, chunk changes down into small incremental changes. For example, if you want to eat healthier, add healthy things instead of taking away unhealthy things. If you eat healthy food until you’re truly satisfied, you won’t be able to eat as much of the other things.

Don’t Diet Too Often

You’ve heard it many times that dieting is not good for you. You can call your eating plan a diet if you want; however, don’t focus on a specific diet too much. Rather, focus more on eating the healthy foods that you like at each meal and snack time. Plants and other whole foods are always healthy.

Enjoying a healthy lifestyle is one of the best ways to ensure you live joyfully life. Health and happiness do go together. It’s up to you to practice good eating habits and what you know to be true at least 80 percent of the time. This enables you to enjoy 100 percent of the benefits.

Low Carb Eating to Help Reverse Diabetes
Getting diagnosed with diabetes can feel like a huge shock – especially if you don’t know a lot about how to control or reverse the disease. It used to be that whenever someone was diagnosed, they simply took whatever treatment the doctor ordered.

Usually, this meant taking a pill designed to help lower the levels of blood sugar in your body. Today, however, well informed patients know that taking control of their health is a good route to take.

By being proactive, you can make lifestyle changes with how you to eat, exercise and de-stress to be proactive about your diabetes diagnosis. And medicine isn’t always your only option.

Why Are Carbs Dangerous for Diabetics?

Once you’re diagnosed, you might be told that you need to watch your carbohydrates. But, there’s a world of carbs out there and simply being told to watch your carb intake isn’t helpful enough.

You need to know why carbs can be dangerous for those who have diabetes. There are different kinds of carbs. You can have simple carbs or complex carbs. These carbs are processed by your body to turn into glucose, which is how your body gets the fuel that it needs to run on.

Without enough of the right carbs, you won’t have any energy, but with the wrong kinds of carbs, you end up with fatigue, very high blood sugar levels and if you have a lifestyle of eating of the wrong kinds of carbs, this can lead to damage within your organs.

When you eat foods that are refined, it sends your blood sugar higher. You’ll feel great for a little while, but then you’ll realize that you’re hungry again not long after.

Some carbs don’t have enough benefit to make them worth eating. Foods have a glycemic rating. The higher the glycemic rating, the more dangerous it can be for diabetes because you can end up with highs, then sudden drops in sugar.

Most people assume that these dangerous carbs are things like the white flour foods. Items like white rice, white potatoes, white bread, and junk food like cakes, cookies and chips.

But there are some carbs that might look good and seem healthy but because they have a high glycemic rating, they can drive up your blood sugar. An example of this is corn flakes.

This food ranks at 93 on the index for a serving. The closer a carb is to 100 on the index, the worse the food is for someone with diabetes. A serving of graham crackers is a 74 on the glycemic index but an apple is only 39.

If a carbohydrate is simple, it’s dangerous. Because it has a simple amount of sugar molecules, your body can break that carb down too fast, offering you little in the way of energy or nutrition.

When you look at carbs, you want to look at two things. The food’s sugar level and the fiber level. A food can have a lot of sugar – such as fruit – but because fruit is high in fiber, it won’t break down as fast. This means you won’t get those sudden swings in your glucose level...

How a Low Carb Diet Works

Going on a low carb diet means that you’re making food changes in your life. It means that you’re avoiding the high fat, sugar-loaded foods that contain a lot of carbs.

Not only will you be able to reverse those diabetic numbers, but you’ll end up feeling better and having more energy because you won’t be putting the wrong foods into your body.

A low carb diet means that you’re limiting the amount of carbohydrates that you consume. You’ll be getting rid of foods that are starchy and putting in their place foods that are higher in fiber rather than carbs.

Instead of reaching for a candy bar or some crackers, you can have a fruit or vegetables. You’ll end up losing weight, too – which also helps you deal with a diagnosis of diabetes....

5 Great Core Workouts

Every great workout routine includes an intense core workout designed to improve core strength and tone the abdominal area. While it’s important to focus on your core at least once a week, there’s no evidence that daily core work will give you washboard abs and a flatter stomach.
What you do need to remember about targeting your core muscles is the variety of muscles that make up the core. That means selecting exercises that focus on your abdominal muscles as well as your obliques.
Here are five incredible core exercises to help you tone and strengthen your abdominal muscles!

Planks
Planks are great stationary exercises for stimulating the core muscles and building endurance in the abdominal muscles. This exercise requires you to hold a position similar to a pushup but holding the position on your elbows instead of your hands.
To build endurance, you should be holding this position as long as possible while keeping your body flat and stable. If you’d like to target your obliques as well, you can perform side planks on each of your elbows.
Planks can be made easier by holding the “up” position of pushups or made more difficult by holding a plank with your feet elevated.

Leg Raises
Leg raises are an incredible exercise if you’re looking to target the lower section of your abdominal area and your hip flexors. Lying flat on your back on the floor, you’ll raise both of your legs to a 90-degree angle and then return them to the floor.
To get the most out of this exercise, you should be making every effort to keep your legs straight throughout the exercise. This exercise can be made significantly more difficult by gripping a dumbbell between your two feet and performing the exercise as normal.

Crunches
Crunches are much easier to perform than sit-ups but provide somewhat similar benefits. When you’re performing crunches, you should be making sure that your feet or legs remain stationary while you bring your head and neck upwards.
The form is most important when it comes to performing crunches. Placing your hands behind your neck or head or purely for support purposes and you should not be using your hands or arms to help bring your upper body forward.
To make crunches more difficult and yield greater benefits, you can hold a weight or dumbbell at your chest as you bring your upper body forward.

Bicycle Crunches
Bicycle crunches require a similar form to regular crunches but place more of an emphasis on the obliques. This exercise requires alternating movements of your legs and arms in order to work on the oblique muscles.
That means as you bring your right knee inward, you’ll extend your left leg and rotate your left arm inward. You’ll then alternate the movement to hit both sides, one after the other.

Russian Twist
Russian twists are the easiest oblique exercise to perform. You’ll sit on the floor and allow your feet and upper body to hover. Then, you’ll rotate your upper body to the left and right while holding this position.
This exercise not only targets your obliques with the rotational movement, but also requires some effort from your lower abs to keep your legs elevated throughout the exercise. If you want to make this exercise more difficult, you can hold a weight or dumbbell in your hands.

Final Thoughts
If you want a six-pack or just more tone in your core, you need to make sure you’re doing exercises that focus on the core muscles. There are plenty of exercises that you can choose from to target every area of your core, which gives you more control over your exercise routine!

Is Entitled Thinking Driving Your Emotional Eating?

One common cause of emotional eating among many people is that they’re thinking in a sort of entitled way that makes sense to them. You can find people using this same kind of logic all the time, and you might even be guilty of it yourself.

Entitled thinking is often seen in thinking that you deserve some kind of reward. For example, if you had a hard day at work with a lot of people getting on your nerves, that would be the cause for your desire to eat emotionally.

However, your reasoning for doing this is that you deserve it after such a hard day at work. This sort of reward system mindset is entitled and far from healthy. Other times, you might think that you’re above all of the hardships that you have to face, so you deserve a little treat.

That little treat tends to be emotional eating, in which you stuff yourself with all kinds of unhealthy food just because you feel like it and you can. Everyone has hardships in life, some more than others, but it’s not an excuse for emotional eating.

While you can think you deserve all these things and have earned some sort of treat for not having them, that’s really not the case. Of course you can’t control everything in your life, but if you’re not actually working towards the things you think you deserve, then you shouldn’t be rewarding yourself.

There are situations in which people can’t help the circumstances that they find themselves in, but you can make positive progress towards the things you want. Unless it’s something essential, then you can’t say you deserve it without working for it in any amount.

That attitude is what fuels you to keep feeding your urges without second thought, and it’s a very unhealthy attitude. By changing your thought process, you might find that you resist the urge to emotionally eat more often, and you’ll also become more proactive in getting the things that you want.

Once you realize that you can’t just expect things to come to you, you’ll go after them with a plan of attack, which often leads to a much better life. One of the earliest results you’ll see is that you’re more capable at resisting emotional eating.

Entitled thinking is a form of victim mindset that seems to comfort you through hard times. But it’s really a saboteur on your ability to strengthen yourself to hardships and succeed in spite of whatever it is life doles out to you in any given moment.

Post Workout Rituals For Better Fitness

If you are currently in the habit of dedicating your precious time and energy to a consistent workout routine, I applaud you. This devotion certainly places in an ever-decreasing percentage of individuals taking accountability of their physical health.

Here are a few methods to really maximize the benefits already available to those who prioritize exercise in their daily lives.

Consistent as you may be with your workouts, this habit only includes a small fraction of the day as a whole. You’ve heard all the usual remarks about how real progress is made outside of the gym.

Although redundant, this idea does hold merit. If you are going to devote an hour or two of the day to exercise, the last thing you want to do is negate the benefits you have certainly earned! Here are some small tweaks to your post-workout routine that will serve to enhance those hard-fought gains.

Stretch

We have all seen gym rat that lumbers their way around the building completely incapable of any movement aside from the occasional bicep flex or head nod. This same individual struggles to place their headphones in their ears and always seems to walk as if they are carrying several large boxes underneath each arm.

While you might not fit this description, there is a good chance that you are not emphasizing mobility enough. Resistance training is a great way to build strength and improve your overall appearance. However, all the muscles in the world don’t provide much benefit if you can’t use them.

Increasing muscle mass leaves the body more susceptible to overall stiffness and decreased mobility. Not only does this hinder functionality in day-to-day life, it also increases risk of injury. Instead of smashing that last set of bench press and heading to the car, take some time to perform a basic stretching routine.

This doesn’t have to include complex yoga poses and back bends, simply stretching those worn out muscles will do a world of good!

Don’t Neglect Those ZZZZ’s

Sleep is by far the biggest factor in maximizing your workouts. You can be an absolute workout warrior, but if you are not providing the body with proper recovery time, the progress you desire will perpetually allude you. Sleep is intended to repair the damage our bodies accrue throughout the day.

A slew of hormones and biological processes are revved up during this time period that allows us to hit the ground running each morning. This is especially true for those of us who consistently ask more of the body in terms of vigorous exercise.

While the specific amount of sleep needed to ensure full recovery differs slightly amongst individuals, 6-8 hours is the general consensus. After working out for a while, you can take note of how you feel each morning and adjust this equation to suit your personal needs.

Don’t minimize your physical progress by staying up binge-watching Netflix after a knockout gym session. Prioritize your sleep the same way you value exercise.

Fuel Your Progress

Many individuals, including the avid gym goer, use working out as an excuse to consume whatever food craving they desire.

While life is meant to be enjoyed and the occasional milkshake or pizza buffet is certainly warranted, it is important to consider what your body needs after a workout session.

Consistent workouts followed by junk food marathons are nothing but an endless cycle of stagnation. If you want your body to function like an Italian sports car, you better be filling up with premium gas!

The occasional cheat meal is perfectly okay as long as your overall dietary habits are promoting the physique you have in mind.

Eating correctly after working out means focusing on carbs and protein and maybe some fat.

Eating right means:

• Decreasing muscle protein breakdown
• Increasing muscle growth (protein synthesis)
• Restoring glycogen stores
• Enhancing overall recovery

Protein repairs and builds muscle (i.e.: chicken, meat, beans)

Carbs help the body recover (i.e.: fruits and grains)

Fats Can Help Too: One study found that whole milk was better than skim milk for muscle growth (17Trusted Source)

Pat On The Back

While not technically a “workout ritual,” we can make it one. Say congrats and pat yourself on the back for doing a great workout. Positive reinforcement helps tremendously in sticking with and succeeding in fitness for the long term.

Are You Emotionally Eating to Avoid a Life Change

One of the most emotional times in your life is when you’re faced with an important change that you either do or don’t want to make. Even if it’s for the better, change is a scary thing at times, especially if what lies beyond it is unknown and you’re not sure what to expect.

Naturally, right around these moments, you’re going to be in an elevated emotional state. You’re going to be more stressed or sadder than you normally would be, making it a target time for emotional eating.

For example, you might be in a bad or unhealthy relationship. You know that you want to end it, but part of you dreads having to. Whether it be retaliation from the other party, ridicule among friends, or loneliness, there are a lot of things that you might be worried about.

It’s easy to get caught up in the short term negatives while ignoring the long term positives. Before a time like this, you’ll probably experience many emotional eating urges.

Jobs are another very common source of stress and stressful situations. If you have a job that you just despise, you’re definitely going to be stressed. The prospect of quitting your job is an intimidating one for sure, and even the thought of accepting a new job is nerve racking.

This is another likely case in which you’ll resort to emotional eating. The problem with emotional eating in these situations is that it involves you ignoring a major decision in your life that needs to be made just because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Of course it’s more comfortable to be eating a bunch of junk food, but that’s not going to help you make the decisions that you need to – or even carry out the transition from one thing to another after a decision has been made.

There are certain things in our lives that we have to do, even though we hate doing them. These difficult decisions are prime examples of that. Even if you know you want to leave your significant other, you might still dread doing it just because it’s uncomfortable.

However, that’s just the way things go in life, and eating isn’t going to change that. What it can do is permanently damage your health. Even positive life changes, such as a move or marriage, can drive you to eat emotionally because although it’s rooted in happiness, these times are still a source of stress based on an unknown future.

The sooner you learn to stop hiding behind food, the better. It’s a bandage, a temporary solution to a long term problem. You need to be able to face these problems directly if you hope to have a chance at making a positive change for good and protecting your health for longevity.

4 Fun Ways To Get Off The Couch

I don’t need to spend any significant amount of time harping on the importance of physical activity and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle. You are probably well aware that, without physical activity, you will not enjoy the maximum quality of life otherwise available.

Here’s the thing though, most advice pertaining to getting off of your couch and getting moving is all about getting into the gym and pumping iron. Every fitness plan promises to “build this amount of muscle” or “melt away this number of pounds in no time.” While you probably do not mind the idea of either of these things, the odds of you sticking to something you do not enjoy long enough to reap any benefits is slim to none.

Exercise does not have to be the primary variable in a situation. Although intense, focused workouts are certainly more challenging and probably beneficial, any time you get your body moving for an extended period of time, you are exercising.

The focus of this article will be to discuss four ways that you may not have considered that will cause you to get out of the house and get your body moving the way it was intended!

Try Your Hand At Martial Arts

If I asked you to describe some of your favorite movie scenes of all time, I can bet that at least some of them would involve action packed scenarios involving your favorite good guy engaged in hand-to-hand combat with their evil nemesis. These choreographed movements are certainly fun to watch, and you may have never even considered that these are real movements, taught at a real close, probably REALLY close to your home.

Martial arts gyms are really starting to pop up all over the place as sports like the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships) and fitness in general are gaining traction.

The great thing about going straight from your couch to a local gym is that, in whatever gym teaching any of the various forms of martial arts you find your way into, no one is going to judge you. As a practice, martial arts is a sacred, inclusive form of training in which you will commonly find people of many levels of expertise training alongside one another.

Visit Your Local Driving Range

The truth is golf is really hard. You are very unlikely to hop straight from the sofa to the tee box and perform like a pro. However, for the sake of getting outside and moving around, the driving range can be a lot of fun even if you happen to be horrible at golf.

Whether you go alone or by yourself with a group of friends at a similar skill level, something about a pretty day and a bucket of cheap golf balls really sets a nice tone. Most driving ranges even have clubs available for you to rent, should you show up not even slightly equipped for golf.

I can guarantee that as you hack away at your allotted range balls, you will have a good time, even if most of the balls don’t travel more than a few feet. I will also assure you that you will notice you have been moving. Swinging a golf club, especially for the number of repetitions required to empty a container of driving range balls, will cause even the seasoned fitness junkie to break a sweat.

Experience Your Local Downtown

If you are like most people, your weekly outings regarding where you get the things you need is literal clockwork. If you were to trace your weekly route on a map and compare it week by week throughout the year, you would probably find yourself with one solid, overlapping shape.

A fantastic way to get off the couch and get moving is to check out your local downtown. The great thing about these places is that new small businesses tend to pop up all the time, helping with the monotony of your trips to the local supermarket.

In the way of physical activity, most downtown markets require you to park your car and then go from store to store on foot. This forces you to avoid finding the closest parking spot to the door at the grocery store, navigating aisles with pinpoint accuracy and getting back to your car with as little wasted steps as possible!

Sign Up For A City League Sport

If you live in an area with even a relatively decent population size, there are probably city-sponsored athletics events available to you. These usually include sports like softball and basketball, but larger cities often offer a much greater array of athletics.

A great thing about these types of leagues is that they are very welcoming and usually scaled to the level of intensity you are looking. Within each sport, there will usually be several divisions or “leagues” that offer a different level of competition, so you are able to find the one that works for you.

City league sports are a fantastic way to get moving, and possibly even make new friends (further increasing your odds of getting off of the couch).

How to Feed Your Feelings and Not Fill Your Stomach

One of the main reasons people turn to emotional eating is that they’re stressed out - meaning they have a high amount of cortisol being released in their body due to some unfortunate life circumstances.

Regardless of what’s bothering you, the effect on your physical well-being is the same. When you have too much cortisol, your body acts strangely. You’ll lose hair, gain weight, and turn to emotional eating to try to suppress those feelings.

Instead of eating, you need to address your stress in a different way. What you have to understand is that there is a very clear physical process going in your body when you get stressed out, and then when you relieve stress, you reverse that process.

There are many activities that you can do that have been shown to reduce cortisol production in your body, making you less stressed. However, the effectiveness of the activities varies from person to person.

For example, if you really love animals and you have pets, then you’re going to see a significant decrease in stress from spending time with them, petting them, and playing with them.

Both dog and cat owners have been shown to have lower stress levels when they’re interacting with their pets, so it’s a great activity for both you and your pets. Many people also have stress relieving reactions to certain types of music.

When they get caught up listening to their favorite songs, their bodies stop releasing the stress hormone and instead just focus on the music. It doesn’t have to be traditional calming music - just whatever it is that you really enjoy listening to, because the aim is to make you happier.

For the more athletically inclined, exercise is a proven combatant of stress. It gets your blood pumping and lets your body get distracted from whatever it is that’s making you get stressed out.

It also helps you look better and feel better. Whether it’s going for a 20 minute walk or spending two hours lifting weights, exercise is a great way to blow off steam and release endorphins.

What it really boils down to is doing something that you enjoy that’s productive, because what you’re trying to accomplish is slowing your body’s cortisol production down so that you’re not stressed out.

Whatever it is that helps you do that best is what you should do, as long as it’s healthy, unlike emotional eating. Food is something that should be enjoyable and a nutrition resource – but it should never act as a crutch to prop you up in times of turmoil.