Diet and Health Articels

Can you believe it's the end of April already? It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the New Year and then it was Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day and Easter and now - tomorrow, we celebrate May Day, then Cinco de Mayo, then Mother's Day and the list goes on and on and on. We've come out of the Winter, into the Spring and now we are on the fast track to summer and the swimsuit season. There's no better time than today to make your fitness plans, check your goals and more.

End of the Month Fitness Goal Check

The following questions are designed to be a checklist of sorts, you can write them down in your journal or just answer them mentally for now. The idea is to give yourself a solid idea of where you've been so you can make the choices and decisions for what you are going to do next.

So here are some questions I want you to ask yourself:

How often do you work out?

Do you perform cardiovascular exercise, strength training and flexibility training?

Have you recently been ill? Are you recovering from surgery?

Have you actively been working on personal goals whether they are associated with fitness or other?

What obstacles, if any, are preventing you from achieving those goals?

What can you do to overcome these obstacles?

Where would you like to be 31 days from now?

Assessing Yourself

Taking the time to assess yourself, where you are and where you are planning to be is a good way to check yourself. I spent a week in London, walking, walking and wait for it, walking some more. I felt good that I could keep up, but I was so sore at the end of the day that I know I need to do more.

How about you?

So after my sleep studies, I was diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea. Aimee's provided a lot of great information over in the Health blog about sleep apnea, so I won't go into too much detail here about what it is.

Adjusting to Sleep Apnea

Being told you have sleep apnea is not something anyone wants to hear. The treatment course requires the use of a CPAP (Continuous Pulsing Airway Pressure) mask. The CPAP, when worn over the nose (in my case I have a nasal mask) will push air down to keep the tissues in my throat separate. This will create fewer incidents of obstructive apnea and allow me to actually sleep.

As skeptical as I was of the entire process, I have to admit that the sleep I get with the mask is profoundly improved over the sleep I get without it. First and foremost, I don't wake up with a headache nor a feeling of grogginess. Secondly, my energy levels remain higher throughout the day and I don't feel the need to nap.

But the biggest thing for me -- in all honesty -- is how much more like myself I feel. I am writing, I am developing ideas, I am multi-tasking and I am -- wait for it -- exercising again. I don't feel like I am dragging face down no matter what I do.

Get A Check Up

If you feel like something is wrong or that you aren't feeling the way you should -- get a check up, talk to your doctor and be proactive. You may be feeling like you aren't yourself because you aren't -- and something is wrong. My only wish right now is that I did this years ago instead of excusing the tired for being related to just being a mom -- I can't imagine how much better I'd feel if I'd had this kind of energy years ago.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a magic wand that we could just wave that would make fitness easier to attain? I used to think that some people were just born fit and other people, well - we weren't so lucky. Fitness is a state of mind, it's who you want to be. It's not just saying I want to be fit, it's being active. In the words of a writer, fitness is about show, don't tell.

Lifestyle Choices

When you make the choice to be more fit, you are talking about making lifestyle choices. The lifestyle choice could be as simple as going for a walk every evening after dinner and as complicated as joining a gym with a childcare facility in order to make sure your child can go with you.

If you work an irregular schedule, you may have more choices to make. For example, one of our readers MomSam works from 8 in the morning to noon, then again from six in the evening until ten. Her schedule allows her to be home when her children are and she doesn't go back to work until her husband is home. Her schedule is pretty demanding with only about an hour of time between when she gets home from work and when she must depart to pick up her children and start their afternoon activities. She has to fit her workout into that hour as well as anything else she might want to do for herself.

So what does she do? She alternates a thirty minute yoga session with cardio every day. She calls it her me time and even if she doesn't make her weekend workouts, her weekdays give her the crucial time she wants to meet her physical and mental needs for being fit and healthy.

Catch as Catch Can

A.B. mother of two, ages 14 and 6, works a varied schedule from week to week. Sometimes she works weekends, sometimes she doesn't and she can never be sure which days she'll have off each week. In an effort to meet her own physical needs, she works out when she can. She runs outside when the weather is permitting, she works out inside when it's not. Since she can't maintain a stable workout schedule, she keeps a daily log that allows her to see how much time she spends on any one given activity. For example, if she spends two hours outside mowing, weeding and edging her lawn, that goes on her schedule. At the end of the week, she can account for the amount of exercise she got in, even if it isn't the same every day at the same times.

Make Fitness Your Easy Choice

The important part about making fitness a lifestyle choice and making it easy for you is so that you will keep doing it. All the experts in the world can tell you what they do and I can tell you what I do, but what you need to know is what you can do and what is easy for you to maintain that level of fitness.

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What do you do to make fitness the easy choice for you?

You go to the gym every morning, you put on your headphones, crank up your book on tape, turn on the iTunes or just zone out to the tv screens around you as you hop on the treadmill and start walking your way to fitness. You do the same routine, every morning, five mornings a week and you're starting to wonder where all your progress went. Sure you were crunching away the miles when you got started, but where are you now?

Muscle Boredom Recently, my daughter was really excited because she gets to do the dishes after dinner every evening. She loves to scrape off the extras into the leftover container or into the trash. She loves to rinse them off. She loves to put them into the dishwasher. In the morning, if there's time before we leave for school, she loves to empty the dishwasher out too. She does as much as she is able and I help with the rest.

Of course, your body probably responded to a new routine the same way. Sure you had muscle aches and pains, but soon your muscles were repairing, your fat was burning, your heart was getting stronger and your lung capacity was improving.

So why is it now just a few weeks later and you're wondering what happened to all that wonderful momentum? The most likely culprit is muscle boredom. That's right, boredom. You can tone and shape muscles, but they adapt faster than you think and if you're not asking them to stress a little harder or pushing it a little further, chances are you're going to still be getting a workout, you just won't continue to get results.

The same thing that happens to you over routine tasks happens to your workout. Most of us can do dishes in our sleep, that doesn't mean we're more efficient at it nor that we're gaining anything by it anymore other than we clean the dishes and the counters are much nicer for it. Your body does the same thing with the same routine.

Step It Up

You can jazz up your routine by stepping up the intensity, changing the focus or even just mixing up the order you do your workout in. You might isolate upper body from lower body, creating a more intense workout in the time you have for that particular area of your body. You can also switch cardio routines, for example, if you walk, try jogging or swimming or riding your bike. Different activities challenge different muscle groups. Another possibility you might explore is partner training.

How is your buddy challenge working out for you?

It's important when you're making fitness choices that you make the ones that will benefit you the most and that you avoid the ones that will hurt you. By hurt, I don't mean physical soreness because let's face it -- exercise can make you sore and it should make you sore.

But what things should you avoid?

Starvation Diets

I don't care if you lose 5 or 10 pounds by starving yourself, it's just water weight and it comes right back. Starvation diets hurt you more than they help you. Our bodies are programmed for surivval, when food is scarce, our metabolisms slow down in order to store more fat and to utilize the bare minimum of what it must to survive. You won't lose weight on a starvation diet, especially if you're not exercising cause the body burns muscle before it burns fat.

Rabbit Food All The Time

Don't skimp your steak for salad constantly. Protein provides your body with building blocks for muscles, cells and more. Why do you think that chicken soup tastes so good when you're ill? It's chock full of protein. Many protein products like steaks and eggs also have an amino acid in them called leucine. Leucine is a metabolism booster and it helps muscles out as well.

Avoid Muscle Machines

Lots of women I know don't like lifting weights because they're worried about bulking up, but women don't bulk the way men do. Lifting weights is a fantastic way to build up body strength, muscle mass and burn fat. Lean muscle still burns more calories than no muscles, so don't skip that workout if you can help it.

These are just a few things you shouldn't do with some ample advice on what you should. Can you think of other things that you've done that maybe you shouldn't have?