As you may know I'm a Certified Health Coach.
I represent a great program called Take Shape for Life.
I can help you get and stay healthy.
One of the tools I use is a book called Habits of Health by Dr. Anderson. Right NOW he is doing a 30 day Habits of Health Challenge. If you care at all about getting and/or staying healthy go to THIS web site and sign up.
You will get emails for 30 days with small challenges designed to improve your overall health.
Here was today's lesson #1.
Lesson 1: Your Changing World
The Habits of Health Philosophy
Welcome to the beginning of a life changing journey. I am excited to help you leave behind the world of obesity for one of vibrant, long-lasting health. Most health programs immediately force you into an extreme workout with an extreme diet, promising unhealthy levels of weight loss in an unrealistic amount of time. The result: the diets fail, and any weight lost returns quickly and with vengeance, leaving you even less healthy than when you started.
The Habits of Health approach is designed to help you make a sustainable life change . Exercise and diet will be important parts of your journey, but they treat systems of unhealth rather than the cause. The first step in living a healthier life is changing the way you think about yourself and about health. Once you have made a mental change, making and maintaining the physical change will be much easier.
Your Changing World Our body's innate design has served us well-for our first 3 million or so years on earth. Our elaborate system of energy conservation and 40 billion fat cells helped us use every calorie efficiently and hoard energy when needed. Usually, back when we hunted all day for energy sparse food, our daily calorie consumption matched the effort we expended to get those calories, enabling us to maintain a balance of energy in and energy out. We may not have lived long, but we were lean, mean, fighting machines.
While our natural tendency is to store energy, our bodies haven't adapted to living in a world with constant exposure to abundant calories , and because our bodies are designed to conserve energy, we gravitate to machines and devices that rob us of the muscle-building movement that could help offset that higher intake. On top of this, we lose on average a pound of muscle per year after age 20. Since each pound consumes 50-70 calories of energy in a twenty-four hour period, by the time we're forty we've lost about 1,400 calories of energy expenditure a day!
Further complicating the problem is nutritional pollution. Over 90 percent of the food we eat is processed, meaning that in addition to all of those energy-dense extra calories, we're eating a diet that's:
- High glycemic (e.g., high fructose corn syrup)
- High fat
- High in salt
- High in chemicals
With the steady creep of Sarcopenia, shrinking muscles, and with high-glycemic foods turning on insulin to put your body in constant fat-storage mode, you have a recipe for metabolic syndrome-a cluster of symptoms that affects over 70 million people in the U.S. alone, a downward spiral of medication, doctor visits, and hospitalization.
Tomorrow we will evaluate your food and drink intake as well as your energy expenditure.
Our simple to follow plan begins by getting you to a healthy weight, but to get there we first have to look at and adjust your current habits. Health is ultimately a result of choices. Essentially, you are either making obesigenic choices or leptogenic choices. Obesigenic choices make you obese and leptogenic choices make you think.
Today: Your Weekly Habit of Health
Most of us are not working labor intensive jobs, so our daily activity is limited. Make the leptogenic choice to take the stairs whenever you can. If you start out by going up one flight and taking the elevator the rest of the way, that's perfectly fine. The goal is to do more than you were doing before, and small improvements are a lot bigger than they seem.
Tomorrow
Read my Getting Healthy story.
If you are interested in learning more about getting and staying healthy please contact me!
Jennifer Z. Lewis
Certified Health Coach
Web site: teamlewis.tsfl.com
No comments:
Post a Comment