Let The Games Begin!

Well ladies here we are again starting another healthy living competition. Some of you are new and may feel a bit overwhelmed at first by all of the things I will ask you to do and track daily. Others are back again for a little tune up and refocus on those things you know you need to do to live a healthier life.

So what must you do to begin?
1. Go to http://sandeehealthyliving.blogspot.com  and read the Rules tab and the FAQ tab (yes do this even if you have competed with me previously)
2. Enlist a female partner to participate with you on the challenge.
3. Sign up for MyFitnesspal.com (If you are new to the competition please friend at least 4 people on myfitnesspal  -- look at my e-mail headers if you need people to friend)
4. WEDNESDAY MORNING weigh yourself, and take your bust, waist and hip measurements. (Note I also like to measure my arms, abdomen and thighs just for my own info but these are not included in our competition) Write these down in a safe place and enter them on myfitnesspal under weigh in.
5. E-mail me with the contact info for you and your partner. I need your: E-mail address, Cell phone # and your home address
6. PayPal (MomSandee@aol.com) or Mail (1290 Northridge Drive Longwood FL 32750) me your $40 entry fee for the 8 week competition.
7. And our challenge for Week 1 (to earn the daily bonus points)  is to make daily contact (text, phone call, in person, smoke signal, carrier pigeon) your partner every day this week and encourage them to do all of the things listed on the blog! You can do it!
8. Borrow or purchase a pedometer. We will be using a pedometer specifically for one of our weekly challenges but for any week you can count 10,000 steps walked in a  day as your daily hour of exercise (even if you earned some of it cleaning your house or walking around your work place)
9. As always e-mail me with any questions.
10. I think I gave out an incorrect ending date. We will end on July 2

Eat the Rainbow

Eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables

Not sure about you but I find it really easy to slip into eating the same thing every day. Yes it can be simpler and easier but rarely does a narrow repetitive menu of foods provide the wide variety of nutrients our bodies need.

Ever heard of the “rainbow diet?” It’s not an actual diet - it refers to choosing fruits and vegetables of every color in the rainbow.

Eating the full rainbow of foods regularly is an easy strategy to make sure your body gets the nutrients it needs. In addition to fiber, vitamins and minerals, naturally colored foods contain phytochemicals. These powerful nutrients are the disease-fighting substances that also give fruits and vegetables their array of colors.

Research has shown that eating a variety of these nutrients can work together to:

1. Strengthen your immune system

2. Lower your risk for certain cancer

3. Help ward off type 2 diabetes

4. Reduce high blood pressure

5. Prevent some eye diseases

6. Reduce high blood pressure

7. Prevent some eye disease

8. Maintain urinary tract health

9. Maintain heart health

10. Improve memory

11. Help build strong bones and teeth

Your daily quota

Only about one out of four Americans eat the minimum recommended servings of fruits and veggies per day. Instead, most of us eat too many high-fat, high-calorie foods such as fatty meats, junk foods and sweets.

And the five-a-day requirement we have used for our health living challenge is actually really low. This is one area that more really is better. Look at some recent dietary recommendations:

} Children 2 to 6 years old should get three servings of vegetables and two servings of fruit, for a total of five.

} Children older than 6, teenage girls, active women and most men should get at least four servings of vegetables and three servings of fruit, for a total of seven.

} Teenage boys and active men should get five servings of vegetables and four servings of fruits, for a total of nine.

So what is our last weekly challenge? For every day you get at least 4 of the 5 colors in your daily diet by choosing a variety of fruits and vegetables you will earn the 5 bonus points. And if you want to challenge yourself further why not step up your fruit and veggie servings to 7 or even 12 servings a day?

Red: Red apples, cranberries, red grapes, pomegranates, raspberries, strawberries, watermelon, pink or red grapefruit, tomatoes, radishes, radicchio, red peppers, red onions

Blue/purple: Raisins, blackberries, blueberries, plums, purple grapes, eggplant and purple cabbage, purple figs

White: Bananas, white nectarines, white peaches, garlic, cauliflower, mushrooms, onions, potatoes.

Green: Green apples, green grapes, kiwi fruit, honeydew melon, kiwi, avocado, broccoli, spinach, okra, artichoke, zucchini, lettuce, celery, asparagus

Yellow/orange: Yellow apples, apricots, cantaloupe, oranges, peaches, nectarines, mangoes, grapefruit, pineapple, yellow peppers, pumpkin, sweet corn, yellow tomatoes, lemons, sweet potatoes

Time To Dust Off The Exercise Bike

            We probably still have a bit of winter to suffer through before we get to spring and the "spring cleaning" it invites, but I AM going to send you into your attic, garage, overstuffed closet etc. for this week’s challenge.

            It seems our dreams and enthusiasm often get us started on a path of fun and exercise. We buy a treadmill, a mini-trampoline, a tennis racquet, swim goggles, a treadmill, road or exercise bike, jump rope, hula hoop, Wii exercise game, some hand weights, a yoga DVD, a softball and glove etc. etc.

            But somehow life and all it asks of us, so easily comes between us and the fun we’d like to have.  We meant to toss the ball with our kids or go for a ride on our bike or jump rope for a few minutes but we never seem to get around to it.

            You guessed it. This week’s fitness challenge requires you to get out some of your fitness toys and equipment and actually use it. You can use the same equipment every day or choose something different for each day of this week. I’m not even going to set a time requirement because so often all we need is something to get us started!

            So for every day this week that you use some kind of fitness equipment or tool (that you have NOT been regularly using)  you can claim the daily bonus points.

            And if you are one of those people that honestly has never purchased any fitness equipment check with friends and neighbors as I am sure they have something you can borrow. Or run down to Wal-Mart and invest in a jump rope. But keep moving ladies

Real Foods do not have a long list of unpronounceable ingredients!

         Years ago when my youngest daughter was in high school she decided to go on a diet of “no processed foods.” It was one of the busiest weeks of my life! In an effort to support her I was baking bread, cutting up fruits and vegetables and even tried my hand at making crackers. Yikes!

         Luckily for me the phase only lasted about a week but it was a good reminder to me that a healthy diet is a diet rich with real food—food your grandma would recognize, food without a long list of ingredients that you cannot pronounce.

         Whole foods are foods that are unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and refined as little as possible, before being consumed. Whole foods typically do not contain added salt, carbohydrates, or fat. Examples of whole foods include unpolished grains, beans, fruits, vegetables and non-homogenized dairy products. Originally all human food was whole food

         Diets rich in whole and unrefined foods, like whole grains, dark green and yellow/orange-fleshed vegetables and fruits, legumes, nuts and seeds, contain high concentrations of antioxidant phenolics, fibers and numerous other phytochemicals that may be protective against chronic diseases. "A diet rich in a variety of whole foods have been recognized as possibly anti-cancer due to the synergistic effects of antioxidants and phytochemicals common is whole foods.

                       A focus on whole foods offers three main benefits: they provide greater nutrition for being a source of more complex micronutrients, they provide essential dietary fiber and they provide naturally occurring protective substances, such as phytochemicals.

         You  may be staying within your daily calorie allowance and even getting in your 5 servings a day of fruits and vegetables but you may still be relying too much on highly processed foods.

         In general foods with really long shelf lives are the most highly processed foods. You have to wonder about the freshness and nutritive value of something with an expiration date 18 months from today! Yikes!

         I love Michael Pollan’s (I LOVE his book Food Rules) reminder that fried foods, pastries and even soda are treats and should be very occasional treats. He goes on to share that potatoes became America’s favorite vegetable only when the food industry did all the work of peeling, cutting and frying the potatoes—and cleaning up the mess. His theory is that if the only time we ate French fries was when we made them from scratch ourselves they would be the occasional treat they were intended to be. He purports that the same is true of fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies and ice cream. He advises to enjoy these treats as often as you are willing to prepare them yourself from scratch and he guesses that will not be daily.

         By now I’m sure you are worrying about what our weekly challenge is going to be and this is it:

         1. If you want the big challenge eat only pure whole foods this week supplemented by home made foods  (bread, crackers, ice-cream, protein bars etc.) you have made from scratch.

         2. If you are not up for that you can also earn the 5 daily bonus points if you set aside one meal a day that you eat ONLY whole foods. That’s right if you want a poached egg on toast you made the bread. If you want a garden salad with grilled chicken you grilled the chicken and made the salad dressing from wholesome ingredients. And while there are easy options (a smoothie made out of whole fruits and vegetables, scrambled eggs with fresh herbs and veggies etc.) I want you to notice and be mindful of what whole, fresh, healthy foods taste like so that you will make them a bigger part of your daily diet.

Think, talk and BE Positive!

         I don’t know about you but I can be a real grumbler. And the grumblier I feel and the more I actually grumble the worst it all seems.

         On the other hand there is incredible power in positive thoughts, positive self talk and positive comments. About 10 years ago I trained for and completed a marathon with my oldest daughter . One of the tools I used in the weeks of demanding training runs was positive affirmations. I would notice myself start to think “Oh I’m so tired. I haven’t run yet today. I need to do ____ miles. Oh I am dreading it. Oh it is going to be so hard. Oh maybe I can skip tonight.” And I would stop those thought right in their tracks and replace them with some made up thoughts that honestly weren’t coming from my heart. “Oh I haven’t run today. I can’t wait until I get to run. It’s going to be so rejuvenating. I am going to love it!”

         I know that sounds a little whacky but after continually halting the negative thought and replacing it with a pretend positive thought I actually began to bend my own thinking. I really did start to look forward to and think positively about my training runs.

         You too can use positive daily affirmations to direct your thoughts, focus and beliefs. You can conquer your past and present fears, more thoroughly enjoy your present and create a wonderful future by harnessing the power of positive affirmations. Affirmations can redirect your values, help formulate your goals and prepare you for a variety of challenging situations.

         In general you can say your positive daily affirmations silently or aloud to yourself. For our weekly challenge however we are going to be saying them out loud with enthusiasm. I would like you to write your affirmations on a card ─ and carry it in your pocket, tape it to a mirror, or place it somewhere where it is always visible to you. Repeat your positive affirmations at intervals throughout your day, to reinforce the positive belief and to maintain a positive state of mind.

         You should state your positive daily affirmations in the present tense, that is, use "I am..." rather than "I will be..." Saying things in the present tense will program your subconscious mind to believe that what you affirm is already fact. When the subconscious believes that, it will start arranging for bringing what you affirm to you. In other words, the subconscious will drive you to perform the actions needed to live out what you affirm; and, acting thus, you will create the circumstances that make them actually happen for you.

         Another important guideline in formulating your affirmations is to write them in the positive state. Many people have the tendency to write affirmations in the negative state (ie: I am not going to pig out on candy anymore!) ─ which immediately defeats the purpose and the effectiveness of the affirmation. Affirmations written from the negative perspective will never work.

To earn your daily 5 bonus points this coming week you must write at least 3 positive affirmations, place them somewhere that you will see them often and repeat them out loud and with enthusiasm several times each day throughout the day (Do not forget all day and then blurt them out 10 times before jumping in bed!)

A few ideas for positive affirmations :

1. I love to exercise! Moving my body relieves my stress, calms my mind and is just plain fun.

2. I love fruits and vegetables. I notice when I eat them I feel full of energy and life. They are my favorite treat.

3. I am in control of my health and wellness.

4. I have abundant energy, vitality and well-being.

5. I am always able to maintain my ideal weight of _______.

6. I radiate good health.

7. I sleep soundly and peacefully.

8. I have abundant energy, vitality and well-being.

9. The more I honor my health and body the better I feel.

10. I love clear clean water. It is my favorite drink and I love sipping it all day long.

11. I am a sweet treat gourmet. I love waiting and planning all week for one special dessert.

12. I am a record keeper. I enjoy writing down my exercise and meals. It reminds me I control the destiny of my health.

Please feel free to share your positive affirmations in the comment area of this blog. And have a positive week!