Healthiest You Ever

Calcium is an important part of a balanced diet because it helps strengthen bones, helps regulate your blood pressure, helps secrete hormones and digestive enzymes, assists directly with weight loss, regulates heart muscle function, and helps boost your metabolism.

The easiest way to stock up on your calcium needs is by eating dairy products like milk, cheese, and yogurt. But there are many other foods that are also rich in calcium. They include dark green leafy vegetables like broccoli, spinach, kale, and collards; fish with edible bones; calcium-fortified soy milk; tofu made with calcium; shelled almonds; turnips; mustard greens; sesame seeds; blackstrap molasses; calcium-fortified cereals; and calcium-fortified orange juice.

“During most sports and recreational activities, your heart rate will reach levels that are very high. Your body should be trained for this kind of physiological demand.”

Stationary cycling (or spinning, as it’s also called) is a popular fitness trend. Widespread availability of stationary bikes makes them excellent supplementary tools for fitness training, particularly when used to slowly strengthen your cardiorespiratory system. Here are two stationary bike routines that will help you improve your heart and lung function:

“You can undergo an emotional reeducation. By meditative exertion and other mental exercises, you can actively change your feelings, your attitudes, and your mind-set.”

For eons, experts believed meditation calmed the brain, and it does, but it also activates the most thoughtful part of your brain. Studies have found that effective meditation increases blood flow to the brain and balances brain wave patterns. It also boosts the immune system and improves cognitive function, including memory. It balances your state of mind, increases creativity, increases sense of peace, increases awareness, bolsters positive thinking, elevates your consciousness, and builds confidence and wisdom. In other words, meditation does a whole lot of good for your brain. There are many kinds of meditation; choose one that works for you.

• Mindfulness Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA offers a selection of audio files you can listen to or download. One provides complete meditation instructions, and others offer a variety of options, time-wise and content-wise. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the technique, you can then opt for mindfulness meditations ranging from three minutes to twelve minutes. There are short and long versions of a breathing meditation, a body and sound meditation, and a loving kindness meditation, among others. See http://marc.ucla.edu.

• You can also find a wealth of audio CDs and digital downloads on everything from Qigong to Taoist to Kabbalah meditations; Tibetan, Buddhist, Vipassana, and Zen practices; and guided meditations from teachers such as Pema Chödrön, Jack Kornfield, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and many others on http://soundstrue.com.

“I was in the gym five days a week, two hours a day. At one point, I was going seven days straight. I had put on a lot of weight, and then I started losing it drastically, so I was worried. It turned out I was overworking myself. My trainer told me that I couldn’t break a sweat, because I was burning more calories than I was putting on.”

It’s human nature to think that if four days of training a week are good, then seven must be ideal. Too bad there isn’t an eighth day! Get that notion out of your mind right now, especially if you are new to physical activity. Even top athletes build rest days into their training schedules, and they know why it’s important.

Exercise and strength training tear down your muscles. They grow stronger in the process of being rebuilt. That’s the wonder of the human body. If you never give your body a chance to rest, the rebuilding process won’t occur or it won’t be as efficient. Injury is the inevitable result of nonstop training.

Those who are new to sports should have at least one day a week with no exercise at all. If you schedule only one day of complete rest (doing little or nothing), you should avoid hard workouts two days in a row. Any time you have an intense workout, it should be followed the next day with something easy—or even a day off if you do not feel fully recovered.

“The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body’s total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?”

The body is always looking to find a state of equilibrium. As you age, this process that is controlled by the nervous system begins to slow down. This slowing down process is inevitable, but with training you can prolong the process and live life to the fullest whatever your age.

Practicing balance exercises challenges the nervous system and helps keep the mind-body connection sharp. It also helps to keep the mind and body sharp in the case that balance has to be regained. It has happened to us all at some point—tripping over a parking block or missing that last step. Without any balance practice your response to regaining balance is slow. In the instance that you may be falling, it is crucial to be able to regain balance quickly.

WHY YOU SHOULD START YOUNG TO IMPROVE YOUR BALANCE

Human beings lose most of their natural balance after age twenty-five. This is part of the reason that elderly people can fall so easily. If they do not practice maintaining balance, they can easily lose balance, possibly leading to a fall that could result in a serious injury.

“It becomes increasingly clear through research on the brain as well as in other parts of study, that childhood needs play. Play acts as a forward feed mechanism into courageous, creative, rigorous thinking in adulthood.”

Children need to play, and so do you. Play is a marvelous way to relax and to be physically active. Here are some ideas on activities you can do as a family together:

• Do chores like cleaning the garage or the yard, going grocery shopping, or walking the dog. If you make it fun, they’ll jump at the chance to spend time with you.

Not only will the whole family get in shape together, but you’ll also enjoy more family time doing group activities.

“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.”

Professor Elaine Perry, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in northern England, told members of a medical conference on the psychiatry of old age held in February 2004 that the plant extracts of sage and lemon balm produced promising results in studies to improve memory and behavior in Alzheimer’s patients. Dr. Perry said: “In controlled trials in normal volunteers, both extracts improved memory, and lemon balm improved mood. Lemon balm reduced agitation and improved quality of life in people with Alzheimer’s disease.”

If you’ve had a stressful week, burn a lemon or sage scented candle, or slather on a lemon-scented lotion.