Food Gardening Basics for Beginners

One of the best ways to eat healthy, save money and find some stress relief all at the same time is to start a food garden. You don’t need to have any prior experience with growing food to get started, either.

All you need are some fundamental instructions and a little bit of planning and you’ll be able to grow your own food from seed to plate in no time. Every season, you’ll be able to boost the nutrients you consume and cut back on your spending for pricey produce.

Planning Your Gardening Growing Space

Once you decide that you want to grow your own garden, the first step is to determine what type of garden you’re going to build and where the location will be. Some beginners grow their garden indoors.

This option is chosen for the purpose of saving money, while still having healthy fruits and vegetables to eat. It’s also a choice made because raising an indoor garden can be easier on those who can’t necessarily get around as well physically.

This type of garden can be grown by anyone of any age. When you create an indoor garden, you’ll have some of the same growing needs to consider that you would have if you planted an outdoor garden.

You’ll need to determine a container system. Many indoor gardens are hydroponic ones. This means that soil isn’t used as part of the growing process. By using a hydroponic system, your plants grow quickly, but they do require power to grow. This is not one of the cheapest methods to use for growing an indoor garden.

Some people use an aquaponics system, which works hand in hand to grow plants by using a fish aquarium. Container gardening is something that can be used indoor or outdoor.

You can use window boxes, pots, planters, or baskets. You can use barrels, plastic containers and more. Nearly anything can be used as long as it has a proper drainage system.

You can create a tower garden in order to grow plants. This means that you’re growing things vertically rather than horizontally. This allows you to grow more plants in less space, so it’s a great idea for things like small apartment patios or other homes with limited room to grow a garden.

You can even grow a tower garden in a corner of your kitchen if you want to have it inside rather than outside. Raised bed gardening is where you plant things in areas built up over your soil. ...

7 simple tips for a healthier diet-Introduction

Carb cycling, Paleo, Keto, Atkins, intermittent fasting, Mediterranean diet… These are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to eating plans and diets. All of them claim to help you lose weight but more importantly, they claim to be healthy nutritional solutions that instill good, lifelong eating habits.

This is not true, as anyone who has tried one of these eating plans will tell you. Diets don’t last long enough to instill lasting habits. In addition, we have negative associations with them related to deprivation, calorie cutting, and hunger. These associations will not help our brains adopt good habits.

Finally, diets don't last forever. Once we've shed the pounds and stopped dieting, we go back to our old eating habits and gradually gain back the weight. What's worse, dieting can actually create very unhealthy eating habits such as binge eating, cravings, and an obsession with dieting, where a person jumps from one diet to the next.

This is why the weight-loss and nutrition market is a booming industry that rakes in billions every year. People are jumping from one "revolutionary" eating plan to the next in search of the perfect one that will transform their lives....

Benefits from Volunteering

Volunteering is a vital service to your community. There are many organizations and people that struggle to get the items and things they need to live a healthy and robust life. It often takes the backbone, care, and empathy from volunteers to provide the help that your community needs.

While your community thrives on volunteers, it can provide you just as many if not more benefits to your life. The following are four benefits to you from volunteering:

Builds More Relationships

When you are part of a team, connections form, loneliness affects 3 out of 5 Americans according to Cigna's 2020 Loneliness Index. Loneliness leads to depression and anxiety that can wreak havoc on people's immune systems and the economy.

When you start volunteering, you’ll meet new people who share your values but are different from you. From those you help and those, you work with to volunteer. Creating new relationships and opening your life to more opportunities, knowledge, and understanding of the world.

Increases Knowledge and Understanding Of Others

As you volunteer, you get a clearer idea of how other people live differently or similarly to you. Opening your perspective and gaining a new understanding of the world. This increases your compassion and empathy. Knowledge allows you to live a more positive life and live with more intention.

Provides A Sense of Purpose

When you know your purposes in life, it’s easier to understand who you are and where you fit in best, within the community. This knowledge also helps to bring you a greater sense of happiness and success. Volunteering gives you a sense of direction and enables you to contribute to society in a meaningful way. As you continue to volunteer, you will gain a sense of pride. This develops your self-esteem, confidence, and strengthens your drive to continue volunteering.

Expands Career Skills and Opportunities

Volunteering often builds and enhances skills that employer’s value most. On your resume, add the teams you were on, the hours-worked, your job title, and your duties. This gives employers an idea of your skills, priorities, and preferences. It also helps them understand how much experience you have in specific areas and what important qualities you already possess.

Volunteering can also provide a new environment, where you can practice solving problems or help answer people’s common questions. Volunteering can be very beneficial, as you learn new things and help make life better for others.

What Can the Diabetes Freedom Course Teach You?

Educating yourself is the key to getting free from diabetes complications. One of the best things you can do to help deal with the disease is to take a course on how to live a healthy lifestyle.

The course, Diabetes Freedom, teaches you that and more. But the course also teaches you what you might be eating every day that can actually make your diabetes symptoms worse.

There’s a green vegetable that you might think is healthy. It’s not - and you might accidentally be sabotaging the control of your diabetes by eating it. You can’t help what you don’t know, but what you don’t know can have serious consequences.

That’s why you need to understand how to fight back using the Diabetes Freedom material. The course gives you a manual that covers the three stages to ending diabetes complications.

Once you buy the course, you’ll gain access to a list of foods and beverages that are recommended for diabetics. But you’ll also get the information on which foods and drinks you need to stay away from.

In the first stage, the course teaches you how to follow an eating plan that can have your diabetes symptoms under control within just two months. In the second stage, you’ll learn about healthy fatty acids and how you can use these to gain more energy and help stabilize your blood glucose levels.

The third stage of the course shows you how you can put principles in place to control your diabetes for life. You’ll learn what super drinks are and how to apply them as part of your healthy eating plan....

Diabetes Is One Disease That Can Be Managed and Reversed

Diabetes is not a death sentence like some people fear once they hear the news. Hundreds of years ago, before the medical field gained the knowledge on how to deal with the disease, the prognosis wasn’t good.

But now, a diabetic can live a life that’s just as healthy as someone who doesn’t have the disease. In fact, the bright side of this diagnosis is that it does put you in control of your destiny, helping you feel more empowered.

By taking certain action steps, you do have the power to manage it. As long as you’re willing to step up and make changes in your life, you can handle the disease or even make your numbers return to normal.

But you do have to be willing to make these changes in order to fix the problem. You may need to give yourself some time to come to terms with the diagnosis because you might feel shocked once you’re told.

That’s normal. But just realize that you’re not alone. If you’ve been diagnosed with the disease, the first thing you want to do is find a support system or group so you can surround yourself with help and positive support....

Don't Drink Caffeine or Alcohol During Hot or Cold Weather Conditions

Weather conditions can affect you physically. What you drink can make what you go through physically much worse - whether it’s hot or cold. One of the things that can have an impact on your health is caffeine.

While drinking beverages containing caffeine in moderation isn’t necessarily bad for you, it does cause physical changes in your body. Whenever you consume something that contains this stimulant, it makes your heart beat faster.

It also makes your blood pressure rise. You might think that’s not a big deal, but when it’s hot outside, the weather does the exact same thing to your body. When you get hot, your heart starts to beat faster and harder as it tries to keep you cool.

This can tax your cardiovascular system. When it gets cold outside, your body’s heart also beats faster and harder, because instead of trying to cool you off, it’s trying to make sure that you warm up.

Both of these effects alone are a natural part of your body’s survival mechanism. But when you add caffeine to the mix, your heart is working harder than it’s supposed to. This is why you’re more susceptible to a heat related incident if you drink things containing caffeine.

The same way that your heart is affected by caffeine also happens when you drink alcohol. These kinds of beverages make your heart rate go up and they raise your blood pressure, too.

When you factor in the cold or hot weather, it can cause health problems. Plus, caffeine acts as a diuretic. So you’re going to have urinate a lot more often than you normally would.

On a hot day, that means you’re losing hydration much faster than usual. So your odds of becoming dehydrated are greater. Sometimes people choose to drink alcohol when it’s cold out because they believe that alcohol can help them stay warm.

But the opposite is actually what happens. When you drink alcohol, it’s also a diuretic. On top of that, alcohol relaxes blood vessels. This means that your body temperature can decrease and you’re more susceptible to the colder temperatures.

You may think that by drinking caffeinated beverages or alcohol that you’re keeping up with the right amount of fluid intake, but what’s happening is you’re losing fluid and your body is less aware of the impact of the temperatures - whether hot or cold.

Instead of drinking beverages with caffeine or alcohol, choose drinks that are better for your health during the hot or cold weather. When it’s cold outside, drink warm beverages such as caffeine free hot chocolate, warm milk, decaf tea, and of course water.

You still need plenty of water, even when it’s cold. During hot weather, you’ll want to drink plenty of water, even more so than in cold temperatures. The amount you need increases the more you sweat. Consume drinks such as flavored water, coconut water, sports drinks, or fruit juices. 

How Diabetes Complications Can Upend Your Life

Unfortunately, not everyone will put in the work to manage their diabetes. Like any other disease, if you don’t care of yourself, it will get worse. Some of the complications that occur with diabetes can be mild and more of an annoyance than something that disrupts your life.

Some of the mild complications concern the urge to urinate more frequently. This happens because the glucose levels are too high and the body is trying to expel the extra glucose.

Not only can this lead to dehydration but it can also cause sleep disturbances, because you might have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Neuropathy, also known as nerve damage, can happen as a result of having diabetes.

This can feel like tingling or a pins and needles effect. The longer your glucose levels remain out of control or your diabetes isn’t diagnosed, the worse the nerve damage can be.

You can begin to have areas of your body where you lose sensation. You’ll notice this by touching the affected area with something such as the tip of a pen. If you run the pen across the damaged area, you’ll notice that you’ll have areas where the pen can touch the skin and you won’t feel it.

Other complications aren’t so mild and can be more extreme. People who have diabetes are more likely to experience cardiovascular problems. This can be things like heart disease and heart attacks....

Increase Cardio for Increased Burning of Belly Fat

Nothing helps you burn belly fat when it comes to exercise as cardio does. Cranking up the internal thermometer in your fat burning body is essential to melting the pounds away.

Fortunately, there are many ways you can perform cardio. You can aerobic exercise that burns the most calories for the amount of time you put into your workouts. You want to assess your body to see how much it can take.

For example, someone with severe obesity and joint pain wouldn’t do well running on a track. But they would do well using a stationary bike, and even being able to apply resistance on the bike.

They could also do swimming exercises without suffering during their workout. Even though you don’t see the same type of intense, sweaty workout, it doesn’t mean your body isn’t performing well to assist you in burning belly fat.

You can start by picking something you’re both capable of and that you enjoy doing. Some people love to incorporate simple walking, jogging or running routines into their day.

Not only does it help burn body fat, but getting out in nature is a refreshing mental escape from the 9-5 grind. You can put in your earphones and listen to music or an audiobook and stroll in an area that brings you peace.

You can also join a gym or order equipment for your home that allows you to do things like an elliptical or rowing machine. These machines burn a lot of calories during your workout and help you shed belly fat easily.

You can also do other things for cardio, such as jumping rope, walking up the stairs, boxing and more. You may want to introduce yourself to a high intensity interval training routine, too.

Ideally you want to adhere to a workout regimen consistently and with as much endurance as possible. The longer you go, the better. Some say you can do shorter workouts, as long as you increase the intensity.

It’s not all about cardio, though. Strength training and building muscle helps burn fat, too. It’s even more important for those who are middle aged or older, because as you age, you lose muscle mass.

That means your ability to burn calories decreases, so it’s important to build a physique that is capable of taking the calories you consume and preventing them from being turned into stagnant fat that spreads across your body. 

Relying on Quick Fixes Like Insulin Can Be Frightening

Sometimes people don’t want to put in the work to address the physical issues involved with having diabetes. This can happen because they might not know what to do. Or they might feel overwhelmed, and this leads to inaction.

But sometimes, people don’t change their ways because they’re set in their habits. They want to eat whatever they want. They don’t want to put any portion limits on the foods that they eat.

So they continue to overeat. Those who are sedentary will often resist change, especially if they’ve been non-exercisers for the majority of their lives. Some people don’t know how to put in the effort and some people choose not to.

The end result for both types of people is the same, however - diabetic complications and a life cut shorter than it should have been. Others decide that they can just rely on quick fixes and think that solves the problem.

So what they do is they figure that their insulin is just going to take care of the diabetes.
They’ll eat whatever they want, won’t exercise and then try to handle it by adding more insulin in order to try to counteract their bad habits.

Assuming that the insulin is going to erase the unhealthy lifestyle is a mistake because it doesn’t work. You can end up eating more than what your insulin dose can handle, so you still get the complications from the disease because your levels aren’t being managed....

Diabetes Is One of the Most Prevalent Diseases in the World

Out of all the diseases in the world, diabetes is known as one of the most common ones to have. According to statistics, more than 30 million Americans have some form of diabetes.

But out of this high number, nearly a third of the people who have diabetes aren’t even aware that they do. These are people who may be having symptoms, but they’ve either been attributed to something else or they’ve been ignored.

It used to be that once you reached a certain age, your risk of developing diabetes increased. But now, you can be diagnosed with it even in childhood. More often than not, diabetes is lumped into three categories.

These are type 1 diabetes, type 2 and then the kind that you can get when you’re pregnant, which is known as gestational or pregnancy-onset diabetes. With type 1 diabetes, it’s usually kids and younger people who get diagnosed with this (although some adults have also been diagnosed later in life).

The symptoms can range from thirst to extreme irritability to fatigue. With this type of diabetes, it means that the pancreas is incapable of making enough insulin to adequately handle glucose control.

When you have type 2 diabetes, more often than not, people associate this diagnosis with being overweight. But you can get this type even when you’re not overweight. With this type, it means that while your pancreas does produce insulin, something has gone wrong with the way that the body is able to use it.

Sometimes the use is impaired by carrying too much weight - but other times, it can be due to a medical cause. With gestational diabetes, women who are expecting a child develop abnormally high glucose levels....