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Hints and tips to get the most from your Nutrition
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Nutrition Tip - Balancing Blood Sugar
Symptoms of imbalanced blood sugar include sugar cravings, irritability and shakiness when hungry, and headaches. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, you may have an imbalance in your blood sugar levels which can lead to insulin resistance and type II diabetes. Tip: To rebalance blood sugar try a period of what I call "eating by the clock". For about 3 to 4 weeks, eat three well-balanced main meals at regular times and healthy snacks between meals. Breakfast should be eaten before 8:00 a.m., lunch at noon, and dinner between 5:00 and 7:00. Snacks are scheduled at around 10:00 and 3:00. If you wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis, try adding a small protein snack before bed. Make sure that each meal and snack has some protein and healthy fat. After 4 weeks or so, try backing off on the snacks, but make sure that your main meals contain adequate protein and healthy fats to carry you through the periods between meals. |
Supplement Tip - Better B-Complex B-Vitamins are used in all energy-producing activities of the body and are instrumental in the function of the body's detoxification processes. Supplementing with a B-complex formula assures that you will have all the B-vitamins your body needs and in the right proportions. Tip: By reading the label, you can tell a quality B-complex formula from a poor one. Notice the type of B-12 or cobalamin the supplement uses. Methylcobalamin is more expensive, but much more bio-available (absorbable) than the less expensive cyanocobalamin. By choosing a formula with methycobalamin, you are more likely to get a supplement with better bio-availability and functionality than a less expensive one. |
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Stress Reduction Tip - Exercise The body is made to respond immediately and efficiently to an acute stressor such as a life threatening emergency. However, when the stress is on-going and chronic such as in our current declining economy, our bodies don't rebound from this as effectively and we become vulnerable to illness and chronic disease. Tip: Use regular, moderate exercise to provide an outlet for the chronic stress of daily life. The exercise mimics the "fight or flight" response of the sympathetic nervous system and helps to rebalance the flow of hormones and bio-chemicals that are released during chronic stress. |
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Nutrition Tip - Balancing Blood Sugar
Blood sugar imbalance is at the heart of most chronic health problems and by addressing this one issue, you can change how you feel almost instantly. Tip: Start your day with a balanced, hearty breakfast that always contains protein. The protein can be eggs, healthy sausage, beans, nuts, or even salmon. The protein will give you lasting energy and allow blood sugar to enter your blood stream in a controlled way. Your mother was right...breakfast IS the most important meal of the day. |
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Stress Reduction Tip - Just Breathe! We live in a stressful time and daily stress is almost impossible to avoid, but you can help your body deal with this health challenge. Tip: When you are having a stressful moment, take three to five deep breaths. Deep breathing triggers the calming branch of your nervous system (the parasympathetic nervous system) so by taking a few deep breaths you break the stress response cycle and you will bring your body back into balance. |
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Supplement Tip - Quality Supplements Clients are always asking me "How do I know which supplements are the best?" Tip: The best way to determine if your supplements are worth the money you are spending on them is to look at the "Ingredients List" that is below the nutrition label. There should be very few fillers, binders, and the like and there should be no dyes, sugars, and artificial sweeteners. A good rule of thumb is less than five added ingredients in the product. |
Exercise Tip - Baby Steps There is a Japanese tradition when learning to meditate...each day add 30 seconds to the meditation time and within a month you will be meditating for 15 minutes; in two months, 30 minutes and so on. Tip: You can apply this concept to exercise: each day add a small increment of time - 30 seconds, a minute - to your exercise routine and within no time you will have doubled, maybe even tripled, the amount of exercise you are getting. |
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Detox 101 What is Detoxification? Detoxification is a dietary program that cleans the blood and removes toxins from the body. Simple enough, but why do we need to detoxify our bodies? Since the industrial revolution, thousands of chemical compounds never seen before have been introduced into the environment. We are constantly exposed to multiple toxins found in our medications, food, water, and air. The sheer amount of toxins that we come into contact with everyday overwhelms our built-in detoxification mechanisms, poisoning and damaging our tissues and cells. Many health professionals feel that this is a major cause of the degenerative diseases in our society today. A detox program limits the amounts and kinds of foods we can eat and provides a time for rest and rejuvenation. This gives the liver and the digestive tract a break in the day-to-day processing of the food that we eat, allows the body to work on eliminating the toxins from our tissues and begins healing our compromised cells. Detoxification is a powerful method to allow the body to rid the body of environmental poisons and heal itself. Read more on this topic>>>
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Nutrition and Your Genetic Inheritance I’m sure you have heard someone say, “My dad died of heart disease so I’m sure I’ll go the same way.” or maybe, “Breast cancer runs in my family; I’m so scared I’ll get it, too!”. Many people tend to think that once the ‘genetic die’ has been cast, there is nothing they can do to prevent what is written in the genes. It is true that some hereditary traits are fixed, such as eye color or shoe size, but a great majority of our physical traits and bodily functions are not determined by our genes alone. Genes are influenced by environment, lifestyle, and nutrition, all of which can then be influenced by our choices and behaviors. The world of biological science and genetics has moved into the future at a fast pace: cloning sheep, genetically engineering corn, and decoding the human genome are just a few of the ways that science has discovered how genetic information is translated into biological function. Today there is a specific branch of nutritional therapy that involves the study of nutritional effects on genetics, Nutrigenomics. It is based on the following principles: Nutrients from food or supplements can... 1) Compensate for some missing genetic information as well as some changes in genetic information by... a) supplying the needed chemical substance such as a vitamin or mineral b) increasing the effectiveness of a protein, hormone, or enzyme c) preventing the excess build up of a toxic chemical that has been produced during natural metabolic processes 2) Activate the expression of a gene to increase production of a desirable protein, hormone, or enzyme 3) Inactivate the expression of a gene that has a detrimental effect on the body Read more on this topic>>>
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Great Nutrition for Kids: The Picky Eater As parents, one of our most important responsibilities is to make sure our children get the right foods to help them grow into strong and healthy adults. This is getting harder and harder to do; children are constantly bombarded with encouragement to eat unhealthy, processed, over-sugared food; we, as parents, don’t have the time to always cook fresh, nutritious meals; and fresh foods grown and processed in large corporate farms contain fewer nutrients and more anti-nutrients than fifty years ago. And then to make things more difficult, children do not always want to eat the nutritious food that we provide for them, becoming more picky with the passing years. How can we encourage our kids to eat the foods that we know will keep them healthy? This Nutri-Tip will focus on the Picky Eater; first looking at some general strategies for helping control behavior problems over food and getting nutritious food into your child instead of onto the floor. Next we will look at three specific age ranges and their unique food habits. Read more on this topic>>> |
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