Enhancing Your Body with Your Mind

by Sepano Hassanzadeh

I have a confession to make. I've been wrong. Dead wrong. I thought I had it right, but I didn't.

You see, I've been focusing a lot on enhancing the Body. Train smart, eat smart...that kind of stuff. Yes it's solid advice and yes, it provides results. But I've been ignoring an underlying element: the Mind.

“Eat Well, Think Well, Move Well”

I first heard the above words uttered by a very knowledgeable chiropractor and right away I thought, “This guy's a genius. He has simplified health, fitness, and lifestyle success to six words!”

I adopted and practiced this philosophy and saw great results. But something was missing. I ate well. I trained well. But was I truly THINKING well? Up until recently the answer was a resounding no.

Okay, And Your Point Is?

My point is that it all begins with the Mind. If you hope to be successful in your health, fitness, and life goals, you must FIRST STRENGTHEN YOUR MIND. So how do you go about strengthening your mind?

Think of the Mind as the command center or central processing unit. It's the General, the King, the CEO.

Think of the Body as the physical organism. If this organism is the puppet, the Mind is the puppeteer. Hopefully you are starting to understand the roles, given all the awesome analogies I'm providing.

You should begin to realize that the stronger the Mind is, the more powerful the Body can be. The better the leader is, the better the company can and will be.

Strengthening Your Mind: The Unlimited Power of Thoughts

Remember that part about “thinking well”? Now we have arrived to it. Strengthening the Mind involves thinking POWERFUL and POSTIVE thoughts.

It is well-documented that our thoughts and beliefs actually affect our genes and how they are expressed within the organism. Genes are like blueprints for the Body. This gets into the field of Epigenetics and Energy Medicine on which books have been written. If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief.

The basic principle, however, is this: if you are constantly thinking about your strengths and looking at the positive in any situation, you will actually manifest those qualities. There will be no room for negative thoughts and therefore the positive thoughts which are dominant will begin to prodice higher energy, better mood, and greater motivation.

Feeding The Mind & Body: A Reward System for Success

Just as the Body requires nutrients to survive and thrive, the Mind also needs “food” to grow and function optimally. It starts to make sense when you find yourself with more food cravings during very stressful or frustrating times. This is the Mind telling you that it's starving and needs to be fed and rewarded.

Once you understand that both entities require daily nourishment, you can give yourself the proper rewards to live a healthy lifestyle and achieve the body you want, without going insane in the process.

Below I've listed some examples of food for the Mind and Body.

Mind Food Essentials

* Positive thoughts/empowering beliefs

* Top 3 favorite foods (what food can you not live without?)

* Social occasions (getting together with friends)

* Watching uplifting movies

* Reading thought provoking books

* Listening to inspiring music

Body Food Essentials

* Exercise (sports, weight-training, cardiovascular training)

* Nutrient-dense foods

* Certain supplements (fish oil, multivitamin, protein powder)

Important for Both

* Relaxation techniques (breathing, meditation, etc.)

* Yoga & other recovery exercise

* Massage

* Acupuncture

* Deep sleep

* Power naps

Wrap-up

As we can see, the Mind leads the Body and therefore should be strengthened in order to achieve a better and healthier body. Therefore, strengthening the Mind is just as important as, and should by no means be sacrificed for, strengthening the body.

To do this, we must “feed” the mind with powerful and positive thoughts along with mind-nourishing activities. In the end, it’s all about balance. We must nourish both our bodies and our minds each day.  An example is getting a good night’s sleep, and then making sure we read a book and exercising during the day.

If we can focus our efforts both of these areas, we can enhance our ability to achieve any goal we set our mind and body to. To the feast!

Mind Your Liquids to Minimize Your Gut

If you have ever wondered if there was a simple way to be more healthy, I have good news for you! One of the easiest and most effective strategies for improving your health is to just change the liquids you put into your body. For some, this alone can create dramatic changes in body composition and overall well-being. So put down the diet coke, pick up your water bottle, and let’s run through how to best tackle liquids.

Water:

Water plays a pivotal role in optimizing health. If you do nothing else, simply drink more water to improve your health. To determine your optimal water consumption, follow this formula: body weight (lbs)/2 = oz. of water. So, if you weigh 150 lbs., your goal will be 75 oz. PER DAY. This means that most (if not all) of your liquid should be coming from water. Now it should be noted that this is a generality and people do vary in the amounts they need. Depending on what food you are eating and the amount of diuretics you drink, you may not need as much. That being said, having too much water is rarely a concern. If nothing else, just replacing your current beverages with water would be a great start. You can work to build a water routine so that you ensure success. This could include a glass or two every 3-4 hours. If you build it into your day, you are much more likely to meet your daily needs. 

If you want to be as fit as possible, water is just about all you should be drinking. Unsweetened tea (green tea being best) can also be a great addition, especially if you are trying to get off coffee. Other than these drinking, you are better off dropping the sports drinks (did you really sweat out all of the sodium in your body?), energy drinks, juices, and Crystal Light. 

Drink plain old water with a squeeze of lemon and you will be good to go.

Coffee:

Depending on how you respond to caffeine, coffee may be your best friend or your worst enemy. For those of you who find that coffee really makes you feel better (and have actually made the effort to NOT drink coffee at some point for comparison purposes), here are a few guidelines for how to use it most effectively.

1) If you have not tried it before, I highly recommend taking 2-4 weeks off coffee to see how you respond. If you actually feel better, maybe coffee is not the drink for you. 

2) If after 4 weeks, you are still not feeling great and coffee really makes you feel great, then get back into the habit. The good thing is that at this point, your tolerance should be lower so keep your intake to 1-2 cups in the morning. Afternoon/night coffee rarely results is anything positive.

3) If you need to add something, go with whole whipping cream. This will actually increase the absorption of the caffeine, so you may find that you do not need to drink as much.

4) Avoid sugar, artificial sweeteners, and creamers. This is where many people get into trouble, so take this seriously.

Alcohol:

While alcohol is not the healthiest beverage, you will probably continue to have your wine/beer/tequila regardless of its consequences. So, instead of telling you to avoid all alcohol, here are some tips for limiting the damage.

1) The less, the better (If you usually have 2 glasses of wine each night, try having 1. Or keep the 2 glasses, but only drink 2-3 nights a week).

2) Drink before dinner instead of afterwards. The more time you have between your last drink and the time you go to sleep, the better. Plus, you will feel it more, so you will not need as much!

3) For liquor, add lime/lemon & club soda. This will help you to avoid added sugar while also utilizing the acidity in the lime/lemon to blunt the usual insulin response. The club soda will increase the absorption of the alcohol, again meaning that you will not need as much. 

There are not many good reasons to consume other types of liquids than the ones mentioned, and if you decided that caffeine and alcohol are not for you, your body would very much appreciate your thoughtfulness. I also want to reiterate that “diet” drinks are not a healthy alternative, and should be limited as much as their full-sugar siblings.

Bottom line: stick to the water and start seeing and feeling the benefits today!

Eat That Frog!

When you woke up this morning, did you feel inspired and ready to take on the opportunities that awaited you or did you feel resistant to even get out of bed? It has been my experience that most people generally relate more to the latter statement than the first. But why is that? Each day we have the opportunity to move ourselves closer to exactly what we want out of life and yet we act as if we would prefer to just let our lives pass in front of us. Today, let’s talk about how to better situate yourself so that you find that energy each morning to get the most out of your day.

In a great book on time management, Brian Tracy talks about the importance of prioritizing and planning each day to allow yourself to get the most out of each day. Before we get into his advice, let me ask you this: do you have a plan when you wake up? I ask this because having a plan is the most fundamental step toward life fulfillment, yet most of us go through each day just trying to survive our to-do lists. Think about each day as if you were building a house. If you just start laying cement, putting up dry wall, and nailing pieces of work together with no thought-out plan, you will end up with a big mess. If, however, you lay out a plan for completing your project, you will know what to do and in what order to complete your task. Your day is the same way. If you leave it to chance, you will leave yourself frustrated, stressed, and without a feeling of accomplishment because all you leave yourself with is a mess of inconsistent and incomplete tasks. If you really want to take a positive step toward reaching your goals, you must put in some time to plan out your day!

We have talked before about the need to establish goals and create a plan, but the idea of the daily plan takes this to a whole new level. In Brian’s book, Eat That Frog!, he presses the importance of spending 10-15 minutes each day planning out all the things you need to get done. This could happen the night before or the morning of, as long as you take the time to think about what you need to get done. Your next task is to put those tasks in order of importance. What is the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do to get closer to your goals? This will obviously depend on what your main goals are, so if you have not figured out your goals yet, go back and establish what it is you really want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals and you have your list of prioritized tasks, all that’s left to do is to take action! That means that the FIRST thing you do each day is your most important task. This is what Brian means when he calls on you to “eat that frog”! His point is this: if you have to eat a frog (or do something that you would not normally be inclined to do), you might as well get it over with and free up your mind for the rest of the day.

The idea is to get going on those things that will have the biggest impact on helping you to reach your goals. These are usually the actions that are hardest and on which we tend to procrastinate. If you commit to completing them first, however, they will not lingering over your head all day, potentially not being completed at all. If it’s a big task, maybe you break it up into multiple 1-2 hours chunks of work that you can get to over the next week. The idea is not that you will get everything done each day, it’s that you will make positive action each day and that you will get the most important of those actions done first!

The best part about this is that when you do complete a challenging, but highly important, task in the morning, it provides momentum for the rest of the day. You feel good about yourself, your progress, and your ability to take control. All by spending only 15 minutes a day! So tonight, plan to take that 15 minutes and write out all your tasks for the next day. Put them in order from most important to least important. Then schedule time on your calendar to complete those tasks. (Hint: You may have more tasks on your list than you have time for…that’s okay! Look at those tasks that were not your top priorities and start thinking about which ones you could delegate or eliminate. We often have a series of tasks that do very little for helping us to reach our goals or could easily be done by someone else. If so, set some time in your day to delegate what is appropriate and just eliminate the rest!)

Here’s to getting more done and reaching your goals faster!

If It's Bad for You, It's Worse for Them!

If I told you that there was a way to eat that would help you to lose fat, increase your energy, and decrease your chance of illness, would you be interested in eating this way? If so, would you also want your children to eat this way? I would hope so, but it never seems to work out that way. All too often, children are considered to be different than adults and that they should be allowed to eat differently.

Generally, this difference is that they get more junk food in their diet while we try to avoid it. But look at the issues children are starting to deal with more and more today: obesity, type II diabetes, and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). These are NOT normal, and while there is a component of these issues that is genetic, your genes can be expressed in a variety of ways depending on your environment. The most common environment for children today is full of one thing: sugar.

Sugar is of course found in cookies, cakes, and the like, but it is also found in most breakfast cereals (especially those marketed to children), lunchables, soda & sports drinks, and in many children’s snack items (ever have a Yoplait Yogurt? 26g of sugar!). Even the beloved peanut butter & jelly sandwich is stocked full of sugar. Sugar has become more and more a part of the Standard American Diet (SAD) and its prevalence affects children and adults alike. We are all putting on pounds and becoming less and less healthy. So I ask again, why are we feeding children foods that we KNOW we would avoid?

If you are unsure of how diet can affect your child’s health, here are some good articles talking about the effectiveness of dietary interventions on ADHD

http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/guide/adhd-diets

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/adhd/AN01721

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/12/134456594/study-diet-may-help-adhd-kids-more-than-drugs

I chose ADHD to highlight because hopefully most people already know that obesity and diabetes can be eliminated when you remove sugar from the equation. With ADHD, however, we tend to blame genetics. As you will see in the articles above, there is a mix of opinions on how much diet intervention can help, but all agree that it is a great place to start. I am of the opinion that it will ALWAYS help, even if it does not resolve the issue entirely. I am not saying that ADHD is without other causes; there are many factors involved that may need medication and behavioral therapy to be resolved. However, I do think people are missing a big part of the puzzle if they ignore dietary factors. 

Just think about how you would function if you ate like a child. You would start your day with a big bowl of sugary cereal, have a sugar filled yogurt for snack, have a PB&J sandwich on white bread for lunch, get home and have a juice drink and an apple (maybe) and you would finish dinner with a big bowl of ice cream. If you did this your energy levels would be all over the place! You would be bouncing off the walls for a few hours after, and then you would crash. Then you would be up again, and then down. Children are no different; they just have a teacher right in front of them all day reporting that they are disruptive and unable to focus.

In fact, they are in need of high quality foods even more than us. Their bodies are growing, their brains are forming, and their muscles and bones are building strength. This is when nutrition is most important and yet children’s foods are of the lowest quality. And quality of food is really what it’s all about. If you can feed your children foods that are nutrient dense and can be properly digested, you will be providing them a head start in life unlike most experience. They will have the opportunity to actually function and grow NORMALLY.

Let’s talk about what types of foods children (and you) should be eating. I always like thinking about food in terms of meals, so we will start with breakfast. I am a big fan of the veggie omelet. Eggs are full of fat and protein, two things your children need to grow properly. Their brain depends on fat to develop, and their bodies depend on protein. Veggies in the mix provide the micronutrients and phytonutrients that make everything run properly, and help with digestion. Second up: lunch. Notice that I do not have a snack here. If your children eat a solid breakfast they will not be nearly as hunger for snacks. If they are at a time where they are growing rapidly, they will certainly have an increased appetite, so just let them go back for seconds at their main meals. So back to lunch, which can be the most difficult meal for children to find healthy options. If they have cafeteria food, this will be hard, but if you can pack a lunch you have options. I will defer to a more experienced health advocates on this one. In the links below, you will find great options for feeding your children at school.

http://everydaypaleo.com/2011/04/12/a-week-in-the-life/

http://everydaypaleo.com/2010/09/11/school-lunch-and-a-trader-joes-find/

http://everydaypaleo.com/?s=school+lunch

Once they get home, they should be good to go. If you only keep healthy foods in the house, neither you nor your children will be tempted to have poor food choices, even if a snack is required. Once you reach dinner though, make it a good one. Have a big salad with every dinner, cook up a nice hunk of meat or fish (grass-fed or wild if possible), and throw together some steamed, sautéed, or grilled veggies, and you are good to go. This might be a good place to throw in some root veggies as well; who doesn’t like sweet potatoes!

While this may be a total 180 from where you or your children are now in your eating, just remember that you do not have to overhaul your whole routine right away. Take it one step at a time and just start introducing new options for meals. Find something they like for dinner, then move to breakfast, then to lunch. There is always a process involved, but as long as you are taking steps in the right direction, you will inevitably find yourself exactly where you want to be.