Healthiest You Ever

—Cindy Moore, MS, RD, director of nutrition therapy, Cleveland Clinic Foundation

Artificial trans fat is produced when liquid vegetable oil is treated with heat, chemicals, and hydrogen to transform it into a product that is semisolid at room temperature. Food producers began using it because it’s inexpensive, performs beautifully in both baked and deep-fried applications, keeps food fresher longer, and provides a nice “mouthfeel” to many products—but artificial trans fats are also one of the few food ingredients that is truly bad for you.

Basically, your body doesn’t recognize these trans fats as an artificial substance, so doesn’t discard it in the digestion process. Instead, it is used in chemical reactions as though it was a normal fatty acid. In your cell membranes, in the lining of arteries and veins, and in your liver, brain, and kidneys, trans fat is fully incorporated, changing the functions and properties of your cells and of the enzymes that fuel your body. Sometimes knowing how something affects your body inspires you to eat healthier. Trans fat has been proven to affect our bodies negatively in the following ways:

Foods high in trans fats include: margarine, fast food, baked goods, chips, crackers, cookies, and candy.

“Great changes may not happen right away, but with effort even the difficult may become easy.”

Whether you are young or old, heavy or lean, a long-distance runner or a sprinter, you will benefit from weight training, also known as strength training. The increase in lean muscle mass that results from strength training is key to overall strength and to your body’s ability to burn calories. This is because muscle cells require more energy (and also burn more calories) than fat cells. Overall fitness requires more than just cardiovascular fitness. A balance of endurance, strength, and flexibility must be achieved. The most often recognized components of fitness include:

The last item, body composition, acts as a guide to how your body is doing overall, but it is not a pure component of fitness. Although running is one of the best cardiovascular activities, other than strengthening a few specific muscles and rapidly burning a lot of calories, it does not fulfill many of the other criteria of overall fitness, which is why weight training is essential to your overall health.

“Thought is cause, experience is effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.”

According to Daniel G. Amen, MD, author of Making a Good Brain Great, every thought releases brain chemicals. Positive, happy, hopeful, optimistic, joyful thoughts produce yummy chemicals that create a sense of well-being and help your brain function at peak capacity; unhappy, miserable, negative, dark thoughts have the opposite effect, effectively slowing down your brain and even creating depression. If you tend to focus on what can go wrong, or what is wrong, or how unhappy you are, or how someone hurt you, these negative thoughts can dim your brain’s capacity to function. It saps the brain of its positive forcefulness. Dr. Amen suggests writing out negative thoughts to dispel their power over your brain.

A HAPPY BRAIN IS AN ENERGETIC BRAIN

Thinking patterns have been shown to affect brain activity and negative thinking has been shown to affect the brain in negative ways. Negative thinking slows down brain coordination, making it difficult to process thoughts and find solutions. Feeling frightened, which often happens when focused on negative outcomes, has been shown to decrease activity in the cerebellum, which slows the brain’s ability to process new information, and the left temporal lobe, which affects mood, memory, and impulse control.

Nutrition is one of the most important considerations you face when intensifying your workouts to build endurance. Eating right is a major contributor to your overall comfort level and enhanced performance. Building endurance requires rigorous activities that stress muscles and longer and more intense workouts that can frequently lead to injury, if you don’t take precautions. Preventive medicine, for example, holds that if you take steps to avoid injury, it is less likely to occur. Another preventive measure is to provide for your body from the inside out: Feed your body what it needs to work to capacity, and it will be better able to perform. To that end, nutritional therapy can help. This includes:

• Vitamin C to support healing, reduce swelling, repair tissue, and keep ligaments and tendons strong.

• Omega-3 fatty acids, such as flax and fish oils, as natural anti-inflammatories.

Most people (who don’t play golf) think that golf doesn’t require a lot of athletic prowess or offer a lot of exercise. It does appear to be a low-level physical activity, especially if you use a golf cart. However, golf actually requires a fairly high level of physical fitness—especially flexibility. When playing golf, every single muscle has to work properly and work together to execute the perfect golf swing. Although it may not looklike you need to be very flexible to swing a golf club, the truth is that you need a solid combination of strength and balance to power a golf ball long distances, with maximum accuracy. Even putting requires good elasticity in your muscles to twist and turn your body correctly. From your hands and wrists that help grip the golf club, to your hips that help create the acceleration of the golf club, to your feet that help swing through the golf ball, flexibility is one of the most underrated aspects of the game of golf.

Outside of just feeling better on the golf course, flexibility has some real benefits to it. For one, you can improve muscle elasticity and blood circulation throughout your body. You can also prevent injuries to your arms, shoulders, wrists, hips, back, and legs. If you want to improve at golf, work on your flexibility by taking it to the club often.

When it comes to exercise, it’s always good to have a variety of options. Doing so means that you’ll be working different muscles and alternating intensity. When it comes to recreational exercise, variety keeps it interesting—and works different sets of muscles and builds different sets of skills. Maybe you want to take a country line or ballroom dancing class one night a week, then join a mountain-biking, birdwatching, hiking, or dog-walking club that gets you out of the house a few nights a week. You could add long walks or bicycle rides or even gardening another evening, and hiking on Sundays. Just as it’s important that you enjoy your exercise regimen, because it reduces the chances that you’ll get bored and quit, it’s also important to have a wide variety of nourishing, fun activities that keep you energized, enthusiastic, and happy.

“As we free our breath (through diaphragmatic breathing) we relax our emotions and let go our body tensions.”

Most of us rely on shallow breaths (ones that don’t progress beyond the lungs), when what our bodies need for rejuvenation and energy is deep breathing. Here’s how to deepen your breaths: Lie down with bent knees, and begin breathing through your nostrils and observing your breath. Become aware of the natural length of your inhalation and exhalation, and the pauses in between. Remain relaxed, without changing or forcing the breath. Let the breath flow smoothly and evenly. Relax your facial muscles and jaw.

Now place your hands on your lower abdomen, allowing them to rest there lightly. As you breathe in, feel your hands fill with your breath as your belly gently expands. Notice how your belly contracts, moving away from your hands and receding into your body upon exhalation. Spend ten to twelve breaths observing the movement of the breath in your belly.

Next, lightly place your palms on your lower, front, floating ribs. Let your wrists relax down to your body. Again, let the breath come into your hands upon inhalation and feel your ribs contracting on exhalation. Do this for another ten to twelve breaths.

Lastly, place your hands on your collarbones and observe the breath filling the area under your hands on the inhalation. Notice how your top chest recedes with the exhalation. Practice this for ten to twelve breaths.

Then allow your arms to come back to your sides, palms facing up. Continue to watch your breath, feeling the three-part breathing pattern. You may find that the breath comes in more easily to one area than it does to another. For example, many people find it difficult, initially, to fill the top chest on inhalation. Over time and with practice, you will be able to breathe more fully and deeply, filling your entire body with the breath.