Healthiest You Ever

Greens provide amazing health benefits, and one way to maximize their impact is to blend raw greens together to create delicious—and nutritious—juices and soups. Here’s a recipe that provides amazing nutrition:

This smoothie is modeled after gazpacho, a delightful cold soup prepared from a tomato base with onions, cucumber, bell pepper, and garlic. It’s packed with vitamins and minerals, creating a tasty fiesta in your blender!

1. Combine all ingredients except the purified water in a blender and blend until thoroughly combined.

2. If needed, slowly add purified water while blending until desired texture is achieved.

“Nothing good comes in life or athletics unless a lot of hard work has preceded the effort. Only temporary success is achieved by taking short cuts.”

This pose is done standing on one leg with the opposite leg reaching back behind you. Your arms can be alongside your body, out to the sides, or reaching forward with arms by the ears. At first you may bend the standing leg. Once you have found stability, try to make the standing leg all the way straight. The back leg should reach back vigorously with the foot flexed.

Begin the single-leg standing pose with the knee of one of your legs lifted up in front of you. Your opposite leg, which is going to be your standing/support leg, should be completely straight. Next, take your bent leg and extend it out in front of you as straight and as high as you can. If your standing leg is bending in order to balance you, then you are not ready to hold your leg so high and you will need to lower your extended leg a bit for the moment. As you improve and become more stable in this pose you will be able to lift the extended leg higher. Avoid lifting your extended leg beyond the point where you can maintain balance while keeping both of your legs straight. Bending your knees is just compensating for a lack of strength or flexibility, so it’s more important for you to maintain the alignment than to lift the leg as high as possible.

“All those vitamins aren’t to keep death at bay, they’re to keep deterioration at bay.”

Vitamin B₁₂, produced by intestinal bacteria, is a water-soluble vitamin necessary for proper brain and nerve function, blood formation, and DNA synthesis. An estimated 25 percent of people between ages sixty and seventy are deficient in this essential nutrient, as are nearly 40 percent of people eighty and older. A B₁₂ deficiency may be mistaken for an age-related decline in mental function, including memory loss and a reduction in reasoning skills. To hedge your bet, take a multivitamin tablet daily.

Animal products and supplements are the most reliable sources of vitamin B₁₂, as miso, storebought tempeh, and sea vegetables contain an analog that is biologically inactive.

Foods Rich in Vitamin B₁₂

It’s always best to get as many of your vitamins as possible from food sources. These foods are high in vitamin B₁₂:

• Liver, beef, lamb

• Crabs, lobster, clams, oysters, and mussels

• Mackerel, herring, salmon, tuna, cod, sardines, trout, and bluefish

• Cheese and eggs

“Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.”

An interval is a run of set duration—an hour is typical—with planned increases in speed throughout. For example, on a 400-meter track, you do a warm-up mile (four loops), then pick up your speed to high intensity, but not all out, for two loops or 800 meters. Dial it back down to a jog for the same distance, then do another 800 meters at a hard pace. Or you could kickbox for three minutes, and then do lunges for three minutes; or you jump rope for five minutes and then do bicep curls for five minutes; or run two miles and then walk two; or you run up a set of bleachers and then do a set of yoga stretches before dashing down again.

What is happening with your body in interval training is that in the hard part of the workout, you are in oxygen debt and your body is burning glycogen for fuel. In the recovery part of the workout, your body is making an adaptive response to the workout, creating more capillaries to carry blood (and therefore oxygen) to your system. You are increasing your aerobic capacity and training your body to work hard. It helps give you that extra oomph needed to build endurance.

Some studies have found that interval training alters the mitochondria (the engine-like organelles that produce energy in cells) to burn more fat, which means interval training is a great way to pump up your metabolism and make your workouts more fun.

Your training the day after an interval session should be easy. Complete rest on occasion is advisable.

“Focus on your problem zones, your strength, your energy, your flexibility and all the rest. Maybe your chest is flabby or your hips or waist need toning. Also, you should change your program every thirty days. That’s the key.”

Stretch bands come in different styles, some with handles and some without. The bands with handles are the easiest to use. The bands are typically rubber tubing that offer resistance, with handles on each end of the band for ease of use.

The stretch band can also help you with your workouts. One of the best exercises is to hook the band over your feet as you sit on the floor, then pull straight back on the band as though you are rowing. In fact, the exercise is meant to replicate the seated rowing machine you find at health clubs. Be sure to keep your back straight, and when you pull back, make sure your elbows go behind your back.

You can also hang the stretch bands over a door and do “chops,” or lat pulls pulling the band downward at an angle. Another option is to attach the band to something on the floor and do your chops in an upward direction. With each stretch band exercise, work up to two sets of twelve repetitions.

“Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.”

You know you love working on your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, there’s undoubtedly a professional association representing it. To find yours, type the name of your hobby into your computer browser and see what it lists. Or, go to www.hobby.org, where you will discover the hottest new crafts and hobbies in the global marketplace. For example, scrapbooking, quilting and needlecrafts, art, and framing top the list today. The association(s) for your hobby might host annual competitions, produce a magazine, or provide grants or scholarships so that deserving individuals can learn more about their favorite hobby.

While most of us enjoy some sort of Sunday dinner, children living in Third World countries do not get enough to eat and go without clean drinking water. Create good karma by making a little sacrifice to ensure that a child does not have to endure hunger for another day. Donate a week’s worth of money you would spend on going out to eat to www.feedthechildren.com.

• Take a quiz and help end world hunger. Visit www.worldhunger.org./contributefood.htm and take the quiz, and Hunger Notes will make a donation to stop world hunger. The undernourished are increasing at the rate of roughly 15 million each year.

• Build your vocabulary and end hunger—at the same time. Visit www.freerice.com and play a simple (but addictive) vocabulary game. For every word you get right, the organization donates ten grains of rice through the UN World Food Program.

• Click to Give™ free food. Simply visit www.thehungersite.com and click on its homepage—and you’ve donated one cup of food to the world’s hungry. Simple as that.

A QUARTER A DAY MAKES HUNGER GO AWAY

While it might be hard to budget donating large lump sums to organizations, consider setting aside a quarter a day in a hunger fund. Once the quarters start to pile up, take them to the bank and then write out a check (see www.bread.org for donating to hunger organizations).