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Web Wellness Wednesday: The Exercise Edition

6/24/2015

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It's easier to stick with exercise if you do it with a friend! Tree pose with Adrienne Michelle Yoga. Photo by Brian Johnson.

Do you enjoy exercising?  Have you found something you love and stuck with it?  Are you an exercise swinger, doing everything from yoga to CrossFit, still searching?  Exercise is a sore spot for some of my clients.  They hate the gym and therefore don't try anything else.  Yet, doing something, even if it's just going for a walk, is better than doing nothing, according to new studies published recently on the relationship between exercise and longevity rates. 

Can too much exercise be bad for your health?  It turns out the answer is yes, but only in a very small population of long-term high-endurance athletes.  Most of us don't qualify here.

What about the relationship of exercise to food?  I used to be a runner.  I also use to eat many, many brownies before running, justifying their consumption with exercise.  It turns out this is disordered eating...an eating disorder.  It's a combination of Binge Eating (one of the top three eating disorders) plus Exercise Dependence.  And an obsession with exercise can have far-ranging consequences. 

As an aside, here is a helpful article about what not to say to someone who has an eating disorder. 

Exercise can be approached like eating.  Finding the right amount is about coming to understand your bio-individuality.  Once you know what exercise you like, find a way to incorporate it into your life and make it not just a habit, but part of your lifestyle.  I'm still working on this.  How about you?  Do you have exercise you like and regularly enjoy?

P.S.  Laughter is great exercise!
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28 Healthy Tips!

3/3/2015

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For the month of February, I challenged myself to post one healthy tip per day on my Instagram account.   It was a lot of fun and there's so much more where that came from!  While I knew I had a lot of nutrition education to draw from as a patient and as a student, this community was so great about providing their own healthy tips and ideas.  Thanks so much for a great conversation.  And per your many requests I've provided a PDF file of #28healthytips that you can download, hang on your fridge, mail to a friend, or stick on your filing cabinet!


Get your 28 Healthy Tips Here

Now, 28 healthy tips is a lot.  It can feel overwhelming.  If you are looking to make changes that last, start with implementing just one or two tips.  Conventional wisdom and scientific studies show that it can take up to 40 times before a new habit sticks and is incorporated into your lifestyle.  It helps if you do it with a friend who can hold you accountable.  Once those one or two tips have stuck, try one or two more tips and before you know it a positive snowball effect of change is occurring in your life.  Also, setbacks are a good thing so stay away from the F word (failure).  Setbacks, mistakes, falling off the path, whatever you call it, you need to have them to keep moving forward.

I'd love to hear from you!  What tip resonated the most?  Which one would be the easiest to achieve?  Which one would be a stretch goal?  For me, breaking up with sugar is a constant process, a constant stretch goal.

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Chicken Found in Purse at Yoga Retreat

2/6/2015

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Originally posted on September 24, 2014

The weekend before last I went to easily one of the best yoga retreats or workshops I’ve attended.  Facilitated by Melanie Elkin of Yoga’licious, the focus of the retreat was yoga as a conduit for understanding how our bodies feel when we stay small (“I can’t”, “I’m afraid”) and when we allow ourselves to expand and to shine.   It also was about self-care.  As in drop the excuses and the busy-ness and take care of yourself.  Let’s face it, as women we tend to prioritize self-care right below a dental exam.  And when we do allow ourselves that massage we desperately need or go to a yoga retreat because we need to feel connection in order to shine, boy oh boy, do we justify it.

We justify the expense of it and the time we are doing it.  You don’t hear men doing this.  I don’t remember my husband crunching numbers and scraping money together from various accounts for his much-needed time sailing, time spent for him doing something that feeds his soul.  Why ladies do we do this to ourselves?

At previous yoga retreats, I can remember feeling pressure to conform, wear the correct clothes, do the poses perfectly, and eat the right way.  This retreat was the antithesis of that, and I hope it becomes a trend in American yoga.  Anything went as long as you were giving yourself what you needed.  It was cool to be on your mat in the fetal position during one of the physical yoga classes as long as that was what your body was requesting.  Everything was deemed perfect, including deciding not to do a pose.

There was a chef provided for the weekend, and he was great.  The food was delicious, and it also happened to be vegan/vegetarian.  This would have been fine, if that was what my body needed.  However, it was a yoga retreat with physical demands held in a beautiful location where the daytime high temperatures happened to be 106 degrees.

What my body needed was chicken.  Just under 24 hours into the retreat I knew that I was feeling weak, untethered, and anxious.   The only cure was chicken.  I voiced this need to my roommate, MC.  It turns out another roommate, KC, also needed meat.   There was a hitch in our giddy-up: both my car and KC’s car were blocked.  Bless MC as she volunteered to be our getaway driver.  Now, this did feel a little bit criminal, sneaking out of the yoga retreat and all its wonderful vegetarian food for meat, but we were doing it in the name of self-care.  Seriously.

We found a great little market in the town where the retreat center was located, smoking their meats out front, with a deli counter in the back.  KC and I were about to have our self-care needs met.  However, we didn’t want to flaunt our treasures in front of the other participants, and so that is how I came to walk back into the yoga retreat with half a smoked chicken in my purse. 

Oh that chicken!  It was so flavorful with crisp skin, good smoke flavor, the right amount of seasoning, and terrific juiciness.  I savored bite after bite.  After eating about one-third of it, I stashed in the fridge.  As I walked away from my chicken, the amount of energy and joy that overcame my body and my mind confirmed the success of following through on an expressed need.

In the name of self-care, I snuck out of a yoga retreat and ate chicken.  And the best part is I could do that very act because of exactly what I was learning at the retreat: to listen to my body, to treat self-care as important, and to put my needs first without excuses or justifications.

Do you make excuses or justifications when meeting your needs?  When was the last time you did something truly nice for yourself without feeling guilty about it? 

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    Author

    Hi friends!  I am Molly.  Welcome to my blog where I share my creations and adventures to help you create a life you love.  I am passionate about food, travel, and health! Thanks for stopping by and looking around.  All photos are taken by me unless otherwise attributed.  I develop and write all my recipes with attribution for inspiration and ideas where applicable.  All of my recipes are gluten free.  

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Photos used under Creative Commons from Brett Jordan, roseannadana