Transform your Body, Emotions, Relationships and Health

Eating healthy and being active is so important for your health. You are what you eat. This popular saying holds some truth and it does indeed have validity. When you fill your body with excess calories you will experience excess weight. When you eat an imbalanced diet of mostly sweets and carbs then you will have imbalanced emotions and thoughts. When you eat healthy one or two days out of the week and unhealthy for the rest of the week you will find that you experience that same behavior in every other aspect of your daily life: one or two days a week of excellent performance days and the rest of the week only average performance. Poor health choices can affect every area of your life: your emotions, your relationships, your work, your home life, your weight and your health.

Consistency creates more consistency. Eating healthy goes beyond food and it affects every area of your life. What you eat affects your chemistry and your chemistry affects the way you think, feel and respond to every day life. Eating healthy is really something that you need to do for yourself. You deserve it. You need it. Consistently transforming your eating habits will transform your life. Adding activity and exercise to your life along with a change in diet will double the affect on your metabolism and your overall health. Many people try to lose a few pounds but do not add activity and fitness to their lifestyle. This is usually ineffective and the weight is put back on in a relatively short time. If you desire to stop yo-yoing back and forth with your eating habits then start today. Do not wait until tomorrow. You can make a difference starting today. Here are a few tips for eating healthy and adding fitness to your life.

Transform your current lifestyle into a healthy lifestyle and you will notice a quick transformation in your life. Add vegetable to your diet each day. This one change in diet will replace useless calories such a French fries and chicken fingers and will add vitamins and nutrients to your diet that are crucial to your health. Adding vegetables to your diet is easy. Here are a few suggestions. Have a salad for lunch. Add cucumbers, carrots, broccoli and sweet peas for crunch, flavor and health. Purchase bags of precut veggies such as broccoli, cauliflower and carrots. You can snack on these in the afternoon or evening while dipping them in organic salad dressing. This snack will give you the crunch that you desire and the organic salad dressing will replace high calorie dips. You can also easily toss this same bag of veggies in the microwave with a few holes poked in it. In a few minutes you will have freshly steamed veggies that can compliment your dinner. The added nutrients will brighten up your skin and give you a healthier and more consistent emotional life. You will find that when you consistently eat vegetables your outlook on life is brighter. This is because you will be properly feeding your brain the nutrients that your body needs.

Add fitness to these diet changes by walking more. Take your sneakers to work with you and go for a walk on your lunch break and during bad weather walk in the mall rather than outdoors. Take the steps rather than the elevator and park farther away from work and stores and practice walking a little extra everywhere you go. Add exercise to your week by joining a gym or a low impact aerobics group. Exercising just twice a week for 45 minutes will make a big difference in your health. Your blood pressure will begin to regulate and you will notice you are losing weight each week.

Gain stability and consistency in your life by getting these basic health issues established in your life. Clean out your refrigerator and cabinets and get rid of junk food such as soda, ice cream, and chips. Add veggies and exercise. Replace unhealthy foods with healthier choices and you will see a change in your overall out look on life. You will begin to see that your body responses to this new healthy lifestyle with healthy skin, hair, and emotions. Diseases will diminish and your immune system will be strengthened. Gain stability and health in every area of your life by transforming your lifestyle of eating and fitness.

But What if Your Sweetheart Loves Meat?

The vegetarian culture is one that fosters a certain “snootiness” because of our insistence on pure foods. It is also easy to get a superior attitude because vegetarian living is clearly a superior way to live from a health perspective and because so often our reasons for becoming a vegetarian is grounded in moral, ethical or religious values. And this is all well and good as long as you are functioning within the vegetarian community exclusively.

But what if your sweetheart is a meat eater? If the one you are dating, engaged to or even married to is not a vegetarian, that can lead to some pretty delicate moments. The last thing the vegetarian movement is about is hostility. So we have to have some guidelines on how to live in peace and harmony if your romantic partner has not joined you in your the vegetarian lifestyle.

Of course, one resolution is for your sweetheart to become a vegetarian with you. You could go with the argument of, “well if you loved me you would give up meat.” But forcing someone to join the vegetarian community out of guilt is a terrible reason to make that change of life. Your sweetheart will just resent giving up a food he or she loves and will probably cheat and eat meat when not around you. That kind of tension, resentment and deception is no grounds for a long term love affair.

A better way is to come to terms with your differences, find ways to live with them and then see if down the road, your sweetheart might convert of his own free will. The first step, as is true of any conflict in an intimate relationship, is to talk about your differences openly. Sit down and talk about where each of you is on this issue. Agree to disagree. But also agree to find compromises and not to hold the other in contempt or to mock the other for the life choices he or she has made. By reaching a loving agreement, each of you can allow the other to be who he or she is and the romance can continue as the dietary dispute is resolved peacefully.

Together you can look for restaurants that offer both vegetarian dishes and meat dishes so each of you can get what you want. Now you don’t have to go to a restaurant that shouts in its advertising “We Serve Vegetarians!” All a good restaurant needs is a few good menu entries that are meatless and you can find what you want while your sweetheart enjoys a meat dish. Most good restaurants offer a tempting salad offering that you can customize so any meat, bacon bits, boiled eggs or even cheese are left out. By working together to build a good list of restaurants both of you can enjoy, you have a compromise for date nights that will last a long time.

Finding ways for both of you to enjoy your diet of choice is a good long term step. But your loved one may have a misconception that vegetarian food can’t taste good. So make a deal that he or she might try it one night. Then you can put your best foot forward by preparing a sumptuous vegetarian meal that nobody can resist. But be aware that if you do try to make such a deal, you might have to agree to let your sweetheart try to convert you back to the meat eating world with a sumptuous home made meat based meal. If that is not ok with you, don’t make the deal.

Above all, don’t mock or look upon your sweetheart’s choice of diet with distain or disgust. Don’t make the “eww” face each time your date has a hamburger or a hot dog. Come to the point that you can live with meat eaters and not feel repulsed when others eat the foods you don’t approve of. After all, you would not your date to make the “eww” face when you had a tofu burger or a big plate of steaming vegetables instead of meat. So treat each other with respect and love. Over time that approach will result in the best long term love affair and maybe even see you come to a time when he or she sees the light and joins you in the joys of vegetarianism.

Vegetarian Quality of Life

It is unfortunate that many people are not very understanding of why it is difficult for people who are not exposed to the vegetarian philosophy cannot understand why living without meat in your diet is not only a better way to live, it is a better way to eat as well. but unless you were born a vegetarian and raised that way, there was some point when you went through that transition. You may be able to remember thinking that vegetarians were nutty and when you could not imagine a meal that did not have a meat as its core ingredient.

Society doesn’t help us evolve toward a meat free world. For one thing, there is an entire industry devoted to keeping us hooked on meats. While that may not be as sinister and frightening as industries keeping us hooked on cigarettes, it does mean that these industries must thrive on raising and selling meat so there is no “understanding” coming from these powerful lobbies. Restaurants often are also not helpful when 90% of their menu offerings are meat based and when they do serve the meals, they are such large portions that their guests naturally eat too much and the wrong things at that.

Fortunately the vegetarian way of life is becoming more common and more understood every year. As more and more people see the value of becoming a vegetarian and how much their quality of life will improve, the vegetarian culture continues to grow. And as the population moves in this direction, business will follow and we will see more and more businesses and restaurants wanting to serve a growing vegetarian population. When you see McDonalds offering salads and vegetable alternatives as they have done in the last few years, you know that the vegetarian quality of life is getting to be more well known.

Its good for those of us that can plainly see that the difference in quality of life as a vegetarian compared to before the transition is as different as night and day to be able to have some understanding for our cultural bias toward meat eating. After all, civilization has been meat based for a long time. Perhaps as far back as the caveman days, the male urge to hunt meat for food is deeply ingrained in us as a species. So to switch to becoming a culture that hunts for vegetables rather than meats is going to be a difficult transition at a cultural level and it is going to take some time.

We should take heart from other large scale changes to how culture works because as a people, we can change. The migration away from smoking is a great example. Just a scant 20 or so years ago, smoking was considered a natural way of life and almost everybody smoked. As the dangers of smoking became more evident and as the quality of life nonsmokers enjoyed became more clear, slowly society responded.

This is not to say the change came easy. Giving up meat may be as difficult for some as giving up cigarettes is. But we now live in a world where public smoking is rare and the percentage of smokers to nonsmokers in society is small. That is progress and we can use that movement as inspiration that we too can bring society around to understand that giving up meat as the heart of our national diet will result in a higher quality of life for everyone.

18 Ways To Lose Weight Without Going On A Diet

To lose one pound of body weight in a week, a person must consume about 500 fewer calories than he or she burns each day. Here are 18 ways to lose weight without going on a diet.

1. Instead of drinking orange juice at breakfast, eat a whole orange. You’ll save about 45 calories.

2. Make your breakfast omelette with four egg whites plus 1/4 cup egg substitute. Replace regular bacon with Canadian bacon to save even more calories.

3. Switch from whole milk to nonfat or lowfat milk. Use sugar substitute instead of sugar in your morning coffee or latte.

4. At lunch, use mustard instead of mayonnaise on your sandwich to save 100 calories (per tablespoon) . Eliminate the cheese and save 100 more calories.

5. Instead of a Big Mac and large fries, go for a plain hamburger and a small french fry and save a whopping 590 calories!

6. Don’t eat potato chips at snack time. Have an apple instead for less calories plus the added benefit of more fiber.

7. Substitute diet cola or iced tea for your usual soda. You’ll save 150-200 calories per drink.

8. Eat every two to three hours with smaller portions. Don’t skip breakfast! Eating small, frequent meals keeps blood glucose levels stable and minimizes the impulse to overeat.

9. Eat more healthy snacks like dried fruits and nuts, fresh fruits, cut up veggies or yogurt.

10. Substitute whole grain foods for white bread, rice and cereals. You will not only cut fat and calories, but whole grains have been proven to reduce the risk of colon cancer by increasing the fiber that your body needs.

11. Saute meat, chicken and vegetables in broth instead of butter. And speaking of butter: replace it with nonfat sour cream on baked potatoes.

12. Instead of Caesar salad, substitute a dinner sald with nonfat salad dressing.

13. Do you love pasta? Have spaghetti with marinara sauce instead of fettuccini with Alfredo sauce. You’ll save at least 500 calories!

14. When you’re going out with friends, watch your alcohol intake. Instead of using Coke or Seven-Up with your drinks, choose tonic water or seltzer.

15. Restaurants are notorious for their huge serving sizes. Eat only half of your dinner and save the rest for lunch tomorrow. Or simply share the meal with a friend.

16. Get moving. Walk to the store instead of driving. Walking is the best exercise you can do to lose weight.

17. Get more walking time by replacing coffee breaks with exercise breaks. Also use half of your lunch break to take a brisk walk with a co-worker.

18. Swim, swim, swim. By swimming for just an hour you can burn 500 calories. You’ll also end up with a firmer, more toned body.

You don’t have to go on a strict diet to lose weight. Change to more sensible eating habits and start moving your body by walking, swimming or bicycle riding. You’ll be rewarded by good health and a fit body.