3 Foods That Will Make Your Type 2 Diabetes Even Worse

Did you know that some “safe” foods might be making your diabetes even worse?
You know to stay away from sweets, but some so-called “healthy” alternatives could be hijacking your blood sugar.
>>>What if you could REVERSE your Type 2 Diabetes and throw away your insulin shots? A new medical discovery makes it possible

Keep these blood sugar-boosters off the menu to maximize your energy level:

Fruit Smoothies

You’ve been told your whole lives to eat your fruits and veggies, but here’s what they didn’t tell you…
Many smoothies contain as much sugar as three cans of soda…
…especially fast-food and restaurant smoothies.
So how can you get the necessary vitamins and fiber while avoiding blood sugar spikes?
The solution: make smoothies yourself.
Just make sure to stay away from super-sugary fruits like bananas and peaches.
Try these instead:
Apples
Blueberries
Strawberries

Potatoes

I know what you’re thinking:
“What could go wrong with a food that’s fat-free, cholesterol-free, and full of fiber and vitamins?”
The problem with starchy foods, like potatoes, is that they’re digested into the bloodstream lightning-quick and can trigger sharp insulin spikes.
Don’t scrap your spuds just yet, though. The key to a diabetes-friendly potato is in the preparation and portion size.

Preparation tips:
Cook them with a healthy fat, like olive oil
Add leafy greens or vegetables
Chill the potato or add lemon juice to slow digestion
As for portion size, stick to about 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes or a computer mouse sized baked potato.

White rice

In the diabetes world, white flour is like sugar’s evil minion.
Combine this with all the frying and processing involved with cooking flour, and your bloodstream is about to become a war-zone.
In fact, regularly eating white rice significantly increases your risk for Type 2 Diabetes. The risk increases 11% for each additional daily serving.

Thankfully, there is another option: brown rice.
Whole grains have fiber, which slows the rush of glucose into the bloodstream. Two servings of brown rice per week can actually lower your risk of diabetes, and help keep your blood sugar in check.

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Using A Pedometer To Keep Track Of Your Walking

Setting aside some time to go for a 45 minute walk isn’t always easy. We all live busy lives and between family and work, fitting in a workout isn’t always possible. What if I told you that you didn’t have to dedicate a set block of time for your walking workouts? What if you could get the same health benefits by working in a little more activity here and there throughout your day? And what if there was a fun little gadget that helped you keep track of it and motivated you to move more?

There is and it’s called a pedometer. You can pick up an inexpensive model at your local super store or order it from Amazon. Or you can go with something a little fancier like a Fitbit for example. But before you head out to spend any money, check your smart phone. Many models have a pedometer built in. All you need to do is download a free app and you’re good to go.

The pedometer will track how many steps you take on any given day. It will also track how many minutes you’ve spent being active and how many miles you’ve walked. In other words, it keeps track of how much exercise you get during your day. And the good news is that it doesn’t matter if you head out after work for a 45 minute walk, or if you work out in little spurts here and there throughout the day. Maybe you start your day by parking a little further away from the office and walking a couple of hundred extra steps. Then you take a quick stroll during your lunch break. You wrap up your day by walking around the park while your kids play. And just like that you’ve gotten your exercise in without having to block out any additional time.

Give it a try. Put on a pedometer, or start tracking with that phone you’re always carrying around anyway and see how much you’re walking around any given day. From there, try to get a little more active as time goes by until you hit your stepping goal. For most of us 10,000 steps per day is a good long term goal, but if you’re feeling more ambitious than that, go for it.

Keeping track of your steps is very motivating. Looking at your pedometer and realizing you’re 2,000 steps away from your daily goal may be just the motivation you need to head out for that after dinner stroll.

Walking Can Help You Lower Your Blood Pressure And Strengthen Your Heart

Walking has all sorts of health benefits among them the ability to help lower your blood pressure and strengthen your heart. Many people at risk for stroke and heart disease are overweight, unhealthy and have a hard time exercising. Thankfully walking is an easy, low-impact workout that almost anyone can do.

Start where you’re at. Just put on your shoes and head out there. If all you can do is walk for five to ten minutes, start there. It’s a great start and that’s a lot more exercise than you’ve been getting. Stick with it for a week and then see if you can make it for 15 minutes.

If you can go for 30 minute walk, start there. Pick up the pace, walk briskly and after a week or two, try to go for 45 minute walks. Or break up your walking workout into 3 shorter sessions interspersed throughout your day.

If you have any health conditions and in particular, if you’re suffering from high blood pressure and are at risk for heart disease, discuss your walking plans with your doctor. The two of you can come up with a plan that’s appropriate and safe for you.

Getting out and walking will help you on several different levels. The act of walking itself, particularly if you can go for a walk out in a pretty park is very relaxing and will lower your blood pressure soon after the walk. That’s a terrific benefit of walking and something that will help you feel better right away. But the benefits don’t stop there.

The regular exercise will strengthen your heart. Remember your heart is a muscle and going for a brisk walk works out more than your leg muscles. As you work out your heart, it gets stronger and better at pumping blood through your body. And as you strengthen your muscles and your body overall, you are likely losing body fat. That’s good news for your blood pressure long term. All it takes is heading out there for a short little walk each day. As you get stronger those walks will get longer and you may even give swimming or riding your bike a try.

Healthy diet, regular exercise, and losing weight are some of the most effective ways to reduce hypertension regularly. Add to that the fact that walking helps you destress and it’s no wonder that walking regularly has such beneficial effects on your health. Ready to get started? Put on your shoes and go for that first walk.

How To Get In The Habit Of Walking More

We were designed to walk for miles and miles to hunt and gather our food. Yet, in modern society, we spend most of our time sitting down. That is not good for our bodies leading to a host of health problems. This is probably one of the most important reasons to make an effort to move around and go for a walk each day. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Most of us sit for our work, we eat sitting down, and to be honest all we want to do when we come home from work is plop down on the couch for a Netflix marathon until bedtime.

In other words, getting and staying in the habit of going for a walk each day can be a bit of a challenge. But that’s exactly what we need to do. We need to get in the habit of going for that walk just like we’re in the habit of brushing our teeth twice a day or taking out the trash on Tuesdays. Once it’s a well ingrained habit, it won’t be as much of a challenge to make sure we go for a walk each day.

A great place to start is to find a walking route you enjoy. It helps to make it as easy as possible. Your favorite walk may offer beautiful vistas, but if it’s a 30 minute drive there and back, you’ll be less likely to do it every single day. Instead, save that walk for the weekends and come up with something convenient and pleasant for your everyday walking routine. If you can, find a route in your own neighborhood so you can leave right from your front door. Just lace up your shoes and start walking.

Taking the same route every day helps form that habit. It’s also encouraging to notice that you can walk the same loop faster or with less effort over time. It proves that you’re making a difference and are getting stronger and increasingly fitter.

Listening to your favorite music, podcast or audio books is also helpful. It will make the time go by faster and give you something else to look forward to. You can even use your favorite media as a way to bribe yourself to go for your daily walk. Let’s say you have a couple of podcasts you enjoy. Save them for your walks and only let yourself listen to them while you’re walking. It’s a great incentive to get out there even on days when you’re not feeling it.

Last but not least consider walking with other people. Find a walking group in your area, or talk a friend or neighbor into becoming your walking buddy. Not only is it more fun to walk when you have someone to talk to, it also has some built in accountability. It’s much easier to skip a walking workout when you know that other people are waiting for you and relying on you to join them.

Give these tips a try and see if they help you make walking a daily habit and an integral part of your health, your fitness, and your life.

Walking Is The Perfect Low Impact Exercise

If you haven’t exercised in a while, or are looking for something easy you can do every single day give walking a try. It’s the perfect low impact way to exercise. It’s easy to do, you don’t need any special equipment and you can start at the fitness level you’re at.

If you’re not in the best of shape, start by going for a 10 or 15 minute walk around the neighborhood and work your way up from there. If you’re already in great shape, walking can still provide an effective workout. Walk fast and incorporate some hills and even stairs.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. If you’re like most of us, chances are you haven’t exercised much since you got out of college and need to start small. Maybe your doctor suggested that you move around more, or maybe you just want to be proactive about your health and well-being. In either case, walking is the perfect way to start.

Find a pair of comfortable shoes, put them on and go for a stroll through your neighborhood. You could also find a local park with a nice path you can walk on. If the weather doesn’t permit walking outside, head to your local mall and walk or hop on a treadmill.

You can even walk in place at home in front of your TV. Here’s a simple little idea to get you moving more. As you’re sitting on the couch at night watching TV, get up during commercial breaks and march in place until your favorite TV show comes back on. If you’re using a service like Netflix, make yourself walk in place for 10 minutes in between episodes. Or turn on the TV and challenge yourself to march in place during the entire show. Time will fly while you’re having fun watching TV and moving.

Speaking of having fun, going for a walk outside can be a lot of fun too. Mix up your route and walk in different areas of town, or visit different parks. Invite a friend to come along with you to walk. It’s always nice to have someone to talk to and having a walking buddy keeps you accountable. Last but not least, grab your phone or MP3 player and listen to music or audio books as you walk to make the time go by faster.

The main thing is that you get out there, move around, and get some exercise in a way that’s gentle on your joints, your heart, and the rest of your body and that’s what walking will do for you. Just give it a try and see if you don’t start to feel better, happier, and stronger after a few weeks of regular walks.

How to Find the Drive and Determination to Work Out Every Day

Working out is something that many of us feel we should do more of – whether that means jogging, lifting weights or training for some kind of sporting event. The hope is that by training, we’ll be able to build more muscle and burn more fat, which in turn will give us the physique that we’re looking for.

Thus we go about creating these elaborate training programs, filled with multiple workouts throughout the week. We combine this with some kind of diet that involves eating a very small number of calories and we generally just force ourselves to live in discomfort for days and months to reach our goals.

Except come day two, we will often already have abandoned that goal. Why? Because it’s just too intense to stick at and we were too ambitious.
If you’re already tired and you’re inactive most evenings as a result, how do you intend to add 5 hours of training to your current routine? And how do you intend to do all that while also factoring in 30 minutes of travel, washing and cool down after each session?
Or when taking into account a calorie deficit giving you less energy than you would normally have?

Be Realistic

The first problem with this type of training and thus the first thing you need to fix, is your ambition. It’s great to be realistic of course – but not at the extent of being realistic. There’s only so much you can expect your body to accomplish in a given week and your energy (not just your time) is finite. Instead of starting with five one hour workouts, who about starting with three half hour ones? And find other ways to make it easier too; such as training from home.

Focus on the Vision

What’s also important is that you focus on the vision and you focus on ‘dream’. Why is it that you want to work out? What are you hoping to achieve? What would it feel like to have that body you’ve always wanted? To feel confident and energetic?

It’s too easy to miss that connection between our dream and the steps we have to take to get there. So to make sure that you’re driven in the right direction, really focus on that dream and what it can deliver you.
Really imagine what it will feel like to accomplish your goals and use this to drive you!

How to Work With Your Energy Ebbs and Flows

When it comes to getting more done and being more productive, mindset is absolutely key.

We need to be able to focus on our goals and stay motivated enough to take the steps necessary to accomplish them and that’s the only chance we have of completing challenges and getting to where we want to be.
But in order to do this, we often have to fight our impulses and our instincts. That means we have to force ourselves to get up and to work, even when we’re feeling tired and just want to go to bed. It means that we have to motivate ourselves to focus on a long, hard day’s work even when we’re tempted to go home early and watch the next episode of Game of Thrones.

This is what many of us think of as mental discipline: the ability to force ourselves to do that which we don’t want to do. To take our ‘medicine’ as it were and thereby keep progressing forward.
But it might not actually be the best method. Because as it happens, being at constant war with yourself is not conducive to great productivity!

So instead of doing that, how about working with your gut instead?

Understanding Your Energy Flow

A lot of us pay too much attention to time management. We act under the assumption that if we have time to do something, then we can do it.
In reality though, our ability to complete work is much more related to our energy. If you don’t have the energy necessary to focus or to work, then you won’t be able to do it or your work won’t be as good.
And as it happens, our energy levels come on in waves and are largely out of our control.

For example, first thing in the morning many of us struggle with something called ‘sleep inertia’. This means our brains are still groggy from the night’s sleep and we aren’t as productive.
Likewise, we tend to be less efficient right after lunch or dinner. That’s because an influx of carbohydrates gets broken down to tryptophan and that tryptophan is then converted into serotonin. In turn, the serotonin is converted to melatonin, making us sleepy!

We’re all likely to be tireder during 4pm too and of course some days are worse than others depending on what we did the day before.

So instead of forcing yourself to change to meet your schedule, how about switching up your schedule so that you’re doing the most important work when you’re the most awake?

How to Fuel Your Brain With Energy

What is your fitness philosophy?
In other words: why do you train and exercise? What is it that you hope to achieve by being physically active?
Many of us train because we want to look better. Some of us train because we want to be healthier and stave off disease. Others train because they want to perform better at a particular sport or activity they enjoy.
But I have a different reason for training: I train because I want to change the way I feel and because I want to change my mindset. And this is also one of the driving factors behind my diet choices.

Tiredness

One of the biggest limiting factors in most of our lives – one of the things that most prevents us from achieving all that we want to achieve – is tiredness. You wake up in the morning and instead of leaping out of bed filled with enthusiasm, you instead struggle to drag yourself up and to actually start being productive. Then you get home and instead of doing something fun, interesting or productive, you instead just crash on the sofa and watch day time TV. Sound familiar?

Everything you do is less enjoyable when you’re tired. All of your decisions are worse. All of your challenges are harder. And I’m not talking about physical tiredness – I’m talking about mental tiredness. And that’s what you can actually fix with the right training program and diet, unbeknownst to many.

How to Increase Brain Energy

So how can you increase energy in your brain? One method is to increase the strength of your heart. If you do this, then you’ll be able to pump more blood, oxygen and nutrients to your brain, thus allowing it to perform more optimally. How do we do this? With steady state cardio This means the kind of cardiovascular exercise that involves long durations of exercise. A good example is running a few miles twice a week, which can help to enlarge the left ventricle in your heart. This also reduces stress by helping you to lower your resting heartrate and thus produce less cortisol.

Also important is to increase the efficiency of mitochondria. These are the parts of the cells that turn glucose into usable energy and the more you have and better they function, the less tired you will feel. You can increase these with a combination of HIIT training and foods/supplements that are known to support them such as CoQ10, PQQ, l-carnitine and others.

How Your Mindset Can Actually Make You Physically Stronger

Don’t believe that simply changing the way you think can have a big impact on your life or your accomplishments?

It’s a somewhat abstract concept to think that just being more positive or more driven can attract more good things to you, or that focussing more on the good in your life can make you happier.
So how about a demonstrate to show just how powerful the mind is? What if the brain could make you considerably stronger, simply if you change the way you think?

Introducing Hysterical Strength

Hysterical strength is a term used to describe historical examples of people tapping into incredible physical power. The most common story is that of mothers who have to rescue their children from being trapped under cars or some other heavy object. In these scenarios, the mothers call upon some kind of superhuman strength and manage to physically move the cars out the way. How can this be possible?
While this has never been proven, there actually is a good scientific explanation for how it might work and some evidence to support it.

That’s because we normally are only capable of accessing around 30%-50% of our muscle fiber. When exercising or going about our normal routines, we can’t use 100% of our strength because we would risk injuring our ligaments or exhausting ourselves. You can see this when someone gets an electrical shock – this causes the muscles to contract to their fullest which is enough to throw the individual right across the room!

But under times of incredible stress or in life-and-death scenarios, it might just be that the brain is able to tap into those hidden depths. This would work because of the release of stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and perhaps other neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine. Together, these could improve communication across the neuromuscular junction, thereby recruiting a greater number of muscle fibers and allowing the individual to access their ‘full’ strength.

Putting it Into Action

In theory then, you could gain more strength simply by imagining your family trapped under a car. If you could really believe it, then you might be able to access hidden strength enough to break your records in the gym.

But there are easier ways according to the research. That’s because yelling at the top of your voice just so happens to trigger a small stress response and studies demonstrate that this is enough to allow you to gain a little more strength during lifts! Talk about mind over matter…

Types of Meditation: An Introduction

There are many types of meditation instruction, and with our access to information in our modern world, it’s easy to find out about them so that you can choose the one or ones that feel right for you. Depending on what you want to focus on, you might choose a different type of meditation instruction. Below is just a short list to get you started thinking about what types are available and which ones might be right for you.

Guided Meditation

Guided meditations are great for every practitioner, especially beginners who might be finding it challenging to calm their minds. Many beginners start with these and then find they can branch out to other forms. You can find many different guided meditations online, in the form of MP3 audio downloads, podcasts and even videos.

They are exactly what the name states—a person guides the meditator through a meditation, often through the use of visualizing or using affirmations. Some focus on whole body relaxations, such as body scans. They come in many different lengths, which is nice. You might choose some shorter ones to use when you don’t have much time and then longer ones when you do.

Transcendental Meditation

This type of mediation is making a comeback after its popularity in the 60’s and early 70’s. It was very popular with celebrities of the time, including The Beatles, John Denver and The Beach Boys. Transcendental Meditation is a mantra-based meditation in which a word or phrase is repeated over and over during meditation.

Mantras are used in many traditions to help focus the mind. Practitioners meditate for 15-20 minutes twice a day while reciting their mantra. Mantras are giving to individuals by their Transcendental Meditation teacher. This type of mediation requires you to find a license instructor, and there is a fee involved.

Moving Meditations

Rather than sit with eyes closed, moving meditations focus on the sensations felt in the body while in movement. Many people who like the idea of meditation but not the sitting gravitate to this form of instruction. Some types of moving meditations include Yoga and Qigong. To try these, you can find free and low-cost sources online or take a class in your area.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation has its roots in Vipassana meditation, one form of Buddhist meditation. One of its leaders, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, is well-known in the West. Mindfulness meditation is known in the West mostly due to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a doctor who created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This form included sitting and focusing on the present moment and on the breath, attempting not to change anything.

Binaural Beats Meditation

Brainwave synchronization has been used for centuries, but the modern world is just beginning to realize the positive benefits. Studies now report that the use of binaural beats can hasten the process of meditation and let you reach meditative stages that you’ve never before been able to achieve.

Binaural beats for meditation selects certain brainwaves to stimulate the brain and cause deeply relaxed meditation or mental alertness, depending on the mental state you desire. All different types of binaural beats meditations can be found online. You can even try some of them out for free to see if they are a good fit for you!