Your Monthly Check-Up: Defending Your Eating Habits

It’s no secret that obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are huge problems in this country, among many other ailments. The good news is that most of these illnesses can be managed through diet and exercise. It seems a new diet comes out every day, but the best defense is a good offense. Eating well and getting enough exercise and rest are surefire combatants to many of the health problems Americans are suffering from.

“Eating clean,” “organic” and “grass-fed” are just a few of the current buzzwords in the world of healthy eating, and many people are starting to get on this “down with junk food” bandwagon. But it’s not easy, especially when it comes to eating with family, friends and in the workplace, when the lure of pastries, fast food lunch breaks and happy hour appetizers loom large.

An article in the September issue of “Experience L!fe” magazine, titled “Food Fight” by contributing writer Jon Spayde, tackles this very subject. In his article, Spayde consults with food blogger Darya Pino Rose, PhD, about the barriers to overcome when deciding to switch to a healthier eating lifestyle as well as some of the strategies for success.

Spayde and Rose outline six main barriers people may face when embarking on a new eating routine:

• Your own rigidity: going fast and hard instead of easing into it or being more reasonable
• The urge to convert: offering unsolicited advice and thus turning people off
• Feelings of ambivalence: worrying if you can even stick with your new goals
• Fear of not fitting in: maintaining your resolve at dinner parties and out with friends
• Difference of opinion about what’s really healthy: others may be concerned that you’re not getting the proper nutrition
• Reluctance to get support: feeling unsure about revealing your decision to others

These six barriers present challenges, especially when making the decision alone and not as part of a family or workplace eating overhaul. “It’s natural, especially in the early stages of a new eating pattern, to try to obey every food rule to the letter and do everything perfectly – which can lead to a sour, anxious attitude on your part and trigger defensiveness in others,” the article states. Also, in your newfound excitement about eating healthy, you may inadvertently (or perhaps on purpose) offer advice to your family, friends and colleagues that is unsolicited, which can be off-putting, alienating and make you come across as holier-than-thou, the article states.

You also may suffer feelings of insecurity when out to dinner with others and not being able to indulge in the less-healthy options you used to. Your friends and colleagues may question your recent choices, for example, “You say you’re a vegetarian? Where are you going to get your protein?” or “You’ve given up dairy? Won’t you miss the probiotics in yogurt?” the article states. These situations may become overwhelming and tempt you to return to your old habits to avoid such confrontations.

But Spayde and Rose have put together an arsenal of strategies to help you meander this new eating world and equip you with the tools you need to answer questions, make healthy decisions and stick with your eating plan. First of all, realize it’s not about you. “People who approach you antagonistically about food are probably insecure about their own eating habits,” says Rose in the article. Also, framing your responses to these types of questions will help curb some of that insecurity. Rose says, “If you frame the explanation of your eating habits in terms of ‘I don’t eat that awful stuff,’ you’ll antagonize. But if you frame it as ‘I’m eating differently as a kind of experiment to see how I feel,’ you take the value judgment out of it.”

Another way to avoid insecurity or awkwardness regarding your new eating routine, according to the article, is to tell people ahead of time, for example, the hosts of upcoming dinner parties or other such events. People appreciate this and will be more understanding than if you show up with your own food unexpectedly. Spayde and Rose also state that emphasizing real pleasure is a great way to offset some of these questioning looks and comments, too. According to Rose, “You can say, ‘Hey, pizza is great, but so is this salad, believe it or not. I love how it makes me feel. I’m not trying to restrict myself or show off my willpower – I am really into this.’ Emphasizing happiness can really disarm a critic.”

Also, Spayde and Rose suggest choosing your battles. “If it’s my grandmother’s birthday and someone whips up her favorite apple pie and everyone is having a piece (and it’s not a proven allergen or won’t trigger a negative physical reaction), that might be a time for me to have a piece,” says Rose in the article. “There’s definitely something to be said for being somewhat flexible at those times when nutrition isn’t the main value - when it’s a matter of love or tradition.”

The bottom line is, the benefits of switching to or sticking with a healthier way of eating far outweigh any negative opinions or awkward situations that doing so might initially cause. As eating healthier becomes the norm – and hopefully it will – there will be less need to employ strategies for success, so you can spend more time planning your meals and shopping for healthy food and less time planning your counterattack when the questions start flying. Be firm with your decisions. Who knows? You may just change a few friends’ or colleagues’ minds in the process!

Your Monthly Check-Up: Give Yourself a Boost!

It’s 2:30 p.m. and you’re crashing – hard. What’s your plan? Do you reach for the candy bowl? Hit the soda machine? Run out for a sugary beverage from the local coffee shop? Stop right there. While these quick fixes do the trick for a little while, the after effects may leave you even more lethargic than you were before. Sound familiar?

An article in the July/August issue of “Healthy Living Made Simple” (a publication for Sam’s Club® members) titled “Get Energized” by Dr. Andrew Myers points to several great naturally occurring nutrients that can help boost your energy level, rev your metabolism and increase your output well into the 4 o’clock hour.

According to Dr. Myers’ article, energy is the ability to perform a task, and in order to have an adequate amount of energy, the body requires both macronutrients (food) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). While it’s probably no surprise that most Americans get too many macronutrients in the form of calories, most don’t get enough nutrients, and you need the right balance in order to keep your body healthy, energized and functioning properly.

So besides food and nutrients, exercise, sleep and plenty of water, how else can you boost your energy levels, especially when that 3 o’clock slump hits? Dr. Myers points to caffeine sources such as coffee, tea, kola nuts, chocolate, green coffee and green tea as natural ways to stimulate your central nervous system and even aid your metabolism.

If you’re already getting enough caffeine and are looking for something else, why not try B-complex or a multivitamin? Cheese, eggs, lamb, fish, fortified cereals and soy products are all great sources of vitamin B. Some multivitamins are specially formulated to perk you up, so check out one that might work for you.

Other natural energy boosters include chromium, which is found in whole grains, green beans, broccoli and bran cereals; ginseng; guarana, a highly caffeinated South African fruit; and taurine, which can be found in fish and meat proteins or taken as a supplement. Each of these is also available as an extra which can be taken as a supplement.

Hopefully you’re feeling more alert just reading about these energy boosters, but if not, don’t take our word for it – try it yourself! You’ll be glad you did, and so will your over-sugared body! Let us know what you think works best in the “Comments” section below. 

Your Monthly Check-Up: June is National Safety Month

Safety and wellness go hand-in-hand, especially when it comes to the workplace. This year, the National Safety Council (NSC) is celebrating 100 years of safety.

Each June, the NSC encourages organizations to get involved with National Safety Month, an annual observance to educate and influence behaviors surrounding the leading causes of preventable injuries.

This year’s theme is “Safety Starts with Me.” According to the NSC website, “Successful organizations engage everyone in safety and create a culture where people feel a personal responsibility not only for their own safety, but for that of their coworkers, family and friends. While leadership from the top is important, creating a culture where there is a sense of ownership of safety by all makes everyone in the organization a safety leader.”

Each week in June introduces a new sub-theme under this banner of “Safety Starts with Me”:

Week 1: Preventing Slips, Trips and Falls
Week 2: Employee Wellness
Week 3: Emergency Preparedness
Week 4: Ergonomics

Since the weather is heating up and more people are spending time outdoors, the NSC wants everyone to be extra caution when it comes to summer safety and driving safety, as well. Personal Best suggests taking a course in basic lifesaving procedures and stay aware of weather and water conditions if you spend a lot of time at the ocean during the summer – or anytime.

According to Healthfinder.gov, “Injuries are a leading cause of disability for people of all ages, and the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to 44. When people practice safe behaviors, they can help prevent injuries – and even death.”

We all know that accidents happen, but playing it safe and employing best practices both on the job and at home are steps in the right direction of injury prevention.

Personal Best’s 2013 wellness calendar sums it up best: “When we are without injury, we are, in one sense, well. When we are calm, we tend to make choices that keep us safe. Avoid shortcuts and take time to do the job right, use the right tools and take precautions. Slow down if you’re moving too fast.”

What else can we do to make sure we’re keeping ourselves and each other safe at work and at home?

Your Monthly Check-Up: April Means World Health Day

Although World Health Day is technically April 7, there’s no reason not to keep the good health vibes going all month long – and by extension, all year! The World Health Organization held the first World Health Assembly in 1948 and sanctioned April 7 as World Health Day effective in 1950. World Health Day honors WHO's founding and provides an opportunity by the organization to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health, with international, regional and local events related to a particular theme.

The theme of World Health Day 2013 focuses on controlling hypertension, or high blood pressure, which WHO calls a “silent killer, global public health crisis.” Both preventable and treatable, hypertension contributes to many cases of heart disease, stroke and kidney failure worldwide, according to WHO, and WHO estimates one in three adults over 25 has elevated blood pressure, or about a billion people the world over.

According to WHO’s website, some specific objectives of the World Health Day 2013 campaign are to:

• raise awareness of the causes and consequences of high blood pressure
• provide information on how to prevent high blood pressure and related complications
• encourage adults to check their blood pressure and follow the advice of healthcare professionals
• encourage self care to prevent high blood pressure
• to make blood pressure measurement affordable to all
• to incite national and local authorities to create enabling environments for healthy behaviors

Following a healthy diet, getting enough exercise and rest and losing weight are all great ways to lower an elevated blood pressure or maintain a healthy one. Generally, lowering sodium intake and maintaining low levels of stress are particularly helpful when it comes to relieving hypertension.

Get more information on hypertension and other global health concerns here.

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part III: Sleep

(Click here for Part I: Relaxation and here for Part II: Meditation)

So far we’ve covered relaxation and deep relaxation in the form of meditation. Now let’s talk about the ultimate in relaxation – sleep. Everyone needs it and most aren’t getting enough of it – to the detriment of every area of our lives. You’ll want to stay awake for this.

In “The Healing Power of Sleep,” Pamela Weintraub, Executive Editor of Discover magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic, uncovers just how sleep deprived we are as a nation, the detriment sleep-deprivation does to our bodies and minds and how we can turn this nocturnal habit around.

“People devalue sleep and are completely unaware of what happens to them when they have a deficit,” says James Maas, PhD, a recently retired Cornell scientist and one of the world’s foremost sleep researchers, according to Weintraub’s article. “As a society we are so habituated to low levels of sleep that most of us don’t know what it feels like to be fully alert and awake.”

University of Chicago sleep researcher David Gozal, MD, adds that we treat sleep like a “tradable commodity,” sacrificing it for everything from work responsibilities to entertainment or other lifestyle choices. We create this deficit because it can take upwards of months or years for symptoms of a sleep deprivation-related disease to surface, according to Gozal.

How many of you have used the phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead?” I know I have.

According to Weintraub’s article, sleep deprivation, even by as little as one hour a night, can wreak massive havoc in the body and mind. Most people are aware by now that lack of sleep creates increased food cravings, increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol and disrupted metabolism, all of which can lead to weight gain. However, not getting enough Zs can perpetuate a plethora of other lesser-known symptoms, such as hair loss, hearing loss, skin problems, insulin resistance, vision problems, sexual functioning and even cancer.

In her article, Weintraub recounts the story of Jason Karp, a 36-year-old hedge-fund manager and restaurateur who had reached a dangerous level of sleep deprivation before he sought help. An ambitious learner, Karp taught himself to speed-read and would spend long hours reading as opposed to getting adequate sleep – sometimes sleeping just two or three hours a night.

Karp began seeing double and was diagnosed with keratoconus, a disease that causes the cornea to progressively degenerate, sometimes necessitating a transplant. Then, he began experiencing prostate pain. His hair fell out in clumps and he broke out in a rash. Finally, one doctor told him his cortisol level was so high he may not live to see 40. Karp legitimately believed he was dying.

When Karp came across a bit of research that linked his rash to his keratoconus, he decided to try and cure himself by getting more sleep and altering his diet. Though it took some time for Karp to retrain himself to sleep, about six months later he had recovered from every symptom he was suffering with. And although Karp is an extreme case of someone who trained himself to forgo sleep, these are real symptoms that can occur in anyone suffering from lack of sleep.

Find out if you are sleep deprived by taking the quiz devised by James B. Maas, PhD. How else can you incorporate more rest, relaxation and sleep into your weekly agenda? Do you think you’d benefit from slowing down and taking time out for yourself during the day? What positive changes do you think you’d see? Talk to us in the “Comments” section below!

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part II: Meditation

(Click here for Part I: Relaxation)

While you’re on one of your breaks, why not try a little meditation on for size? Meditation may seem like a fad due to its recent rise in popularity in the States, but it’s a wellness practice that’s been helping people around the world for thousands of years. As daunting as it is to even think about sitting still and being quiet in this time of hustle and bustle, even adding a few minutes of meditation into your daily or weekly routine promotes life-sustaining benefits.

In “The Strength to Sit Still,” EXPERIENCE L!FE fitness editor Jen Sinkler recounts her first attempt at meditation as a fitness buff and how it not only altered her thoughts about meditation, but her thoughts about thinking in general.

Instead of “crack[ing] open the meditation CDs that I bought three years ago,” Sinkler went all out for her first meditation experience with a 3-day beginner’s retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center (SMC) in Red Feather Lakes, Colo. “…stillness emanates from the surroundings here, and when I arrive I finally feel like I have time to meditate,” Sinkler says. “Cell phones don’t work and my laptop is back home, edged out by the towel on the SMC packing list. I suspect this sort of sacred space can be created anywhere, but signing up for a retreat has given me formal permission to carve it out for myself.”

According to Sinkler’s instructor, Charles Rosicky, “The first rule of meditation is to have no expectations,” Sinkler recounts in the article. “It’s like being excited to go on vacation. The vacation you go on is never the vacation you think you’re going to go on. In the same way, it’s better to meditate without ambition.”

Unfortunately, Sinkler broke this rule. “I didn’t expect to find enlightenment over the weekend, but I did want the act of meditating to feel blissful, life-altering and important,” she says. “I didn’t go on the vacation I thought I was going on. Meditation felt…ordinary. Unspectacular and, at times, like déjà vu.”

But here is where Sinkler’s moment of insight came through. Although she arrived at SMC thinking she had never meditated before, she had in fact experienced the “flow state” of meditation many times, “during particularly good workouts or standout rugby games, where my focus was so singular it became everything.”

That’s all meditation is, anyway – focusing your attention on the task at hand; remaining in the present moment when unrelated thoughts attempt to disrupt your meditative flow. Focusing on your breath is a great way to get started. Sit comfortably and breathe. When your mind starts to wander, which it inevitably will, bring your focus back to your breath. The point of meditation is not to clear your mind. That is impossible. The point is to allow your thoughts to pass by your consciousness without reacting. You can always come back to them later.

“One of the first benefits is that you begin to see that you are not your thoughts,” says Ron West, ecologist for Boulder County Parks and longtime meditator, who was one of Sinkler’s instructors on the retreat. “We self-identify with our thoughts – meaning, bad thoughts equal bad person. You slowly see that thoughts arise in a vast and neutral space, and that it is possible to see that the mind is not solid. The thoughts just become interesting-to-look-at fish swimming in a very large aquarium.”

Sinkler has since incorporated 10 to 30 minutes of near-daily meditation into her weekly routine and has been singing its praises and reaping its benefits ever since her weekend retreat.

Stay tuned later this week when we wrap up our series with Part III - Sleep!

Your Monthly Check-Up: Meditation, Down Time and the Power of a Good Night’s Sleep

Part I: Relaxation

We’ve talked a lot about exercising, eating right and the benefits of corporate wellness to your bottom line in our monthly column. But something we haven’t discussed is how sleep, relaxation and meditation all contribute to your overall health and well-being.

The March 2013 issue of EXPERIENCE L!FE magazine is chock full of information related to all three of these areas that seem to fly under the wellness radar. Many people don’t realize that rest, recovery and relaxation are just as important to a healthy lifestyle as nutrition, exercise and hydration. Relaxation in particular is beneficial in the workplace, since giving your brain a break lets it recharge and gear up for the next big task.

In “Take a Break,” the EXPERIENCE L!FE team urges that, “Random moments of ‘unproductive’ time don’t just make you healthier, happier and more resilient. They help you work smarter, too.” For example, have you ever come up with a brilliant idea whilst showering? We have, too – and so have plenty of other people, which prompted a discussion of this very topic in “Take a Break”:

You’ve no doubt heard the rumored story of Archimedes, who shouted his now-legendary ‘Eureka!’ when he stepped into the bath, saw his bathwater rise and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he’d submerged, abruptly intuiting the answer to what had previously been an intractable mathematical problem.

“There’s a reason so much genius has occurred in bathrooms…and it’s the same reason we often get great ideas while puttering in the garden, getting a facial, taking a walk or just waking up from a nap,” the article states. “Because these are precisely the types of circumstances in which we’re not trying to come up with genius ideas, or really any ideas at all.”

Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman, PhD, a researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., has dedicated his working life to studying the brain circuits involved in these eureka moments and offered up his insight for the article:

The body is relatively relaxed; the brain is being allowed to do whatever it likes, its circuits freed up for whatever associations and information-shuttling activities it deems worthwhile. And it’s those random associations that seem key both to large-scale breakthroughs and handy “aha!” moments. … While the brain lays much of the groundwork for insight by expending focused attention on a particular problem, certain parts of the brain must actually relax and be allowed to wander a bit for the necessary connections and associations (most of which are churned up by the more loosely organized right hemisphere) to be made.

According to the article, psychologist Joy Bhattacharya, PhD, a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, has perpetuated this point by using electroencephalography (EEG) to predict these aha moments up to eight seconds before they even occur. One key indicator is the presence of alpha waves – the brain-wave pattern associated with relaxation – emanating from the right hemisphere of the brain. Bhattacharya suggests this activity makes the mind more susceptible to new and creative ideas.

The moral of this story is that, “Beyond a certain point, sitting for hours at your desk and working harder to solve that problem or come up with that big idea may actually work against you.” The article suggests listening for your “ultradian rhythms” – bodily cycles that occur many times throughout your day – and paying attention to when your body is telling you it’s time for a break. Get up for 20 minutes after every 90- to 120- minute cycle of energy expenditure and let your brain recharge. You’ll end up being more productive than if you don’t!

Stay tuned next week when we cover Parts II and III of our series - Meditation and Sleep!