Fighting Stress With Healthy Eating

Whenever we get too busy or stressed, some of us make poor food choices that tend to increase stress and cause other problems. To get the most of your healthy eating and avoid stress, follow these simple tips.

Always eat breakfast

photo credit: Bahadorjn

Even though you may think you aren’t hungry, you need to eat something. Skipping breakfast makes it harder to maintain the proper blood and sugar levels during the day, so you should always eat something.

Have a snack handy
Keeping some protein rich snacks in your car, office, pocket book or handbag will help you avoid blood sugar level dips, the accompanying mood swings, and the fatigue. Trail mix, granola bars, and energy bars all have the nutrients you need.

Healthy foods to munch on
If you like to munch when you’re stressed out, you can replace chips or other non healthy foods with carrot sticks, celery sticks, or even sunflower seeds.

Bring your lunch with you
Although a lot of people prefer to eat fast food for lunch, you can save a lot of money and actually eat healthier if you take a few minutes and pack a lunch at home. Even if you only do this a few times a week, you’ll see a much better improvement over eating out.

Stock up your kitchen
As important as it is to get the bad food out of the house, it’s even more important to get the good food in! The best way to do this is to plan a menu of healthy meals at snacks at the beginning of the week, list the ingredients you need, then go shop for it. This way, you’ll know what you want when you need it and you won’t have to stress over what to eat.

Stuck for meal ideas?
Visit Bigoven at www.bigoven.com that has more than 160.000 recipes from around the world and all free for members to share, vote on and use. Enter ingredients you’ve got in your fridge and find out what you can make with them. Great place with tons of delicious recipes for any occasion.

Healthy Soups That Help You Diet

A favourite slimming and healthy eating weapon of ours is soup. Soup is satisfying, which means we’re not hungry again 5 minutes after and goes so well with a salad and most guests (including kids) seem to love it. Another advantage is, large amounts of soup can be made all in one go, that can be frozen in portions, then quickly reheated for meals in next to no time at all. Read more

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Get The Perfect Weight

If you are having problems with losing weight - you’re definitely not alone. Most people find it difficult, but here’s something that may interest you to know and could help you get your ideal weight on track - so read on.

Dr. Roberta Temes a weight loss psychologist, has finally published the same hypnosis sessions she uses with celebrities and other VIP New York clients. These sessions allow them to follow the advice of their dieticians almost effortlessly, even with their hectic schedules.

She has had great success in working with people who have problems following the eating and exercise plans they know they need to use in order to get to and maintain their ideal weights.

Although she’s worked with celebrities, she’s also been able to help normal people gain control over cravings they never believed they would overcome.

Ann Carlo from Sag Harbor from New York is an example:

“Enjoying Weight Loss is fabulous. Thought I forgot all about it yesterday, until I realized that I ate breakfast (which I rarely do), drank a lot of water, had a veggie dinner and DIDN’T EAT ANY SUGAR . . . A MIRACLE! Can’t convince me that this system does not operate on some level . . . even though you’re not always conscious of it at the time.”

Dr. Temes is on the Department of Psychiatry at the SUNY Health Science Center Medical School, so everything she does is based on research, not “pop” psychology. That’s why her program is the first hypnosis program we have ever recommended.

This is not the typical weight loss program you might be used to. It’s not a diet or a workbook, and it won’t try to psychoanalyze you with a bunch of “inner child” mumbo jumbo. It is straight medical hypnosis from the author of Medical Hypnosis, the first hypnosis textbook used in medical schools.

Here are some of the amazing things you will learn when you go through Dr. Temes’s seven-session program:

• How to stop your cravings instantaneously, allowing you to stop bingeing before you start.
• How to get off the diet roller coaster. (Learn how to move from being a “dieter” to being someone who is permanently healthy.)
• How to create new neural pathways that empower you to replace unhealthy eating habits with healthy ones.
• Why willpower will not work as a long-term weight control plan, and how to create effortless motivation.
• How to eliminate your desire for sodas and replace them with a craving for WATER!

And that’s just a tiny fraction of what you’ll learn how to do in this 4-CD audio program. The best part about this program is that it uses hypnosis, so there are no guide books or things you are supposed to do later. All you do is spend 15 minutes a day listening to the sessions and the changes start to happen. Most people notice a dramatic change within just 21 days.

This program is recommended by doctors, trainers, and dieticians who use it to help their clients with diet adherence:

“I have been using the Enjoying Weight Loss program with my patients who tell me they don’t even think about ‘bad’ food anymore . . . it’s just a fact in their mind. They find it easy to change self-destructive behaviour and ’stay with the program’ that I recommend. This has always been my biggest challenge as a clinician.”

Dr. Deborah Baker-Racine of
Huntsville, Canada

Daily Program for Stress Management

Stress management is a must when the stress starts interfering with your work and family life or affects your physical and/or emotional health. Stress management is a critical skill that should be mastered by all and is a set of interventions designed to identify, interrupt, and redirect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours as they relate to the expression of stress and/or anger.

Because the inappropriate response to stress is a learned behavioural response, learning is the key to success in stress management.

Since stress is almost unavoidable in life, it’s important to find ways to decrease and prevent stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to stress. Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering them, as life is basically a routine to follow like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. You can do a few of them in a longer span of time.

Managing your time

Time management skills can help you organise your daily schedule and allow you more time with your family and friends and very likely increase your performance and productivity. Getting things organised will also help reduce your stress.

A few pointers on improving your time management:

• Save time by focusing, concentrating, delegating, and scheduling time for yourself.
• Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time.
• Prioritise your time by rating tasks by importance and urgency.
• Redirect your time to those activities that are important and meaningful to you.
• Manage your commitments by not over- or under- committing.
• Don’t commit to things that are not important to you.
• Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.
• Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe and what your life is like.

Build constructive and healthy coping strategies

It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording the stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones-those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.

Lifestyle

photo credit: ricoeurian

Some behaviours and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief from stress.

Here are some simple ways to help with choices:

• Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
• Have a sense of purpose in life.
• Get a good nights sleep, since your body recovers from the stresses of the day while you’re sleeping.
• Eat a balanced diet for nutritional defence against stress.
• Get regular exercise throughout the week.
• Limit your alcohol intake.
• If you smoke, start your campaign to stop - don’t smoke.

Exercising to relieve stress

Exercise is an important component stress management program. Exercise, biofeedback, muscle relaxation, and psychotherapy have all been found useful to eliminate stress. Most stress management remedies – for example massage or yoga – offer ways to relax as well, allowing us to wind down when stress gets too much. Exercising is a great way to work off stress that you’ve built up during the day as well as a way to increase your energy level. Regular exercise improves flexibility and also helps to lower blood pressure and cholesterol and is an excellent combination and part of your stress management campaign.

Social support

Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is the knowledge that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. More and more research indicates a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.

Changing the way you think

When an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body’s stress, just as an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts and how you see things can help reduce stress.

• Thought stopping helps you stop a negative thought and in turn helps to eliminate stress.
• Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
• Problem solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
• Changing your communication style helps you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated. This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication. Use the assertiveness ladder to improve your communication style.

Everyone can get stressed, whether you’re the mail person, the CEO, or the average working person and/or parent, stress is definitely one unwanted visitor you need to boot out of your home and your life.

Stopping Headaches Before They Start

Do you suffer from migraines or headaches? Lots of people do in fact these conditions are directly affecting approximately 12% to 14% of the American population alone every day and while the cause of a migraine is still a bit of a mystery to the medical profession as to what exactly causes it, stress in it’s many forms, is a leading cause of tension headaches.

To control a tension headache, it’s important to break any patterns of stress. Stress and anxiety are one of the major causes of headaches, which very often trigger a headache within a very short period of time.

Migraine on the other hand is often misdiagnosed as a sinus headache however, this type of headache comes on when an infection is involved that causes the sinuses to become inflamed and while this type of headache can often be severe, tension and migraine headaches are excruciatingly painful too and are generally accompanied by other symptoms like visual disturbances or nausea and tend to begin on one side of the head, then typically spreading to both sides.

Underlying symptoms can vary from person to person and generally speaking there are several types of headache, which can for example be caused by eating products that contain additives, smoking will certainly cause bring on a headache too. Some research reports state that headaches can also be brought on by certain foods such as fatty potato chips and other snacks.

Other common symptoms are emotional or psychological stress, muscle strain in the neck and back caused by poor posture, eye strain caused by tired, dry eyes, sleep deprivation, jet-lag, and hunger caused by irregular or missed meals.

Migraines and headaches although alike are not exactly the same, but are equally as distressing and painful and both can affect the everyday life of the sufferer to a great extent. People who suffer from migraine especially often have to lie down in a dark room to alleviate the pain. Headaches of any kind are among the most disabling of conditions known to most of the healing profession. However, medication isn’t the only headache relief available:

Often simple home remedies provide the best stress headache relief. Hot compresses can relax neck and shoulder muscle tension helping to relieve pain as well as a hot bath. A relaxing walk in the fresh air can often clear up a headache, especially if caused by stress. There are many pills that can be bought over the counter and home remedies that can alleviate headaches and migraines, most only work for a very short time.

The symptoms and pain associated with the various types of headache, can be difficult for a doctor to pinpoint precisely, but researchers suggest that there may be an abnormal cell passed down through generations that make family members susceptible to certain stimuli that cause headaches. Another viable theory relates to the blood vessel function in the brain that triggers headaches.

Many have had great success with hypnosis, using it to stop chronic headaches before they start. Hypnosis, which is a state of inner absorption, concentration and focused attention, is like using a magnifying glass to focus on the rays of the sun and make them more powerful. Similarly, when our minds are concentrated and focused, we are able to use our minds more powerfully. Because hypnosis allows people to use more of their potential, learning self-hypnosis is the ultimate act of self-control.

People often fear that being hypnotized will make them lose control, surrender their will, and result in their being dominated, but a hypnotic state is not the same thing as gullibility or weakness. If you’re not familiar with hypnosis - read more about it at The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH), the largest U.S. organization for health and mental health care professionals using clinical hypnosis.

To understand how hypnosis can help alleviate and stop your chronic headaches read what people who’ve undergone the process have to say about it here: http://www.hypnosisnetwork.com/testimonials/Hypnosis-The-Headache-Solution

For more information about Hypnosis:
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