A Gift of Serenity for Your 3-Dimensional Health

Most of us lead pretty hectic lives. It can be hard to find time for ourselves despite its importance for our overall health. Take this quick serenity break. It will only require a little over a minute of your time ...yet the positive affects on your 3-dimensional health could last all day.
After viewing, you can use your browser's back button to return here and comment on the serenemoments.wma, or use the link back to the Glad Living blog found below the video file.

Go Here- Serenity Moment and then click on the WMA file to experience some much needed rejuvination for your body, mind, and spirit.

Spend Time in The Great Outdoors for Better Glad Living

Summer is almost here. It is great to be able to spend more time outside now that temperatures have warmed up for most of us. You can find many fun and healthy activities to do outdoors. The fresh air will do you good in many ways.

Fun and healthy outdoor activities

• Walking
• Hiking
• Biking
• Jogging
• Swimming
• Softball
• Basketball
• Soccer
• Tennis
• Shuffleboard
• Volleyball
• Golf
• Boating
• Fishing
• Picnicking
• Bird watching
• Butterfly and lightening bug chasing
• Gardening
• Camping
• Horseback riding
• Roasting marshmallows and weenies
• Backyard parties
• Scavenger hunts
• Attending Street fairs
• Sightseeing at State and local parks and nature preserves
• Botanical garden tours
• Taking in art, music, and culture festivals
• Family days at amusement parks
• Visiting local historical monuments and treasures
• Zoo visits
• Going to boat, car, and RV shows
• Bargain hunting at garage and yard sales, and flea markets
• Treating yourself or the whole family to a movie at a drive-in or walk-up outdoor theatre
• Dining at outdoor eateries and the occasional cone from local ice cream shops
• Stargazing

You may know of many more fun and healthy things to do outside. Physical activity is good for body health. Breathing in fresh air and drinking in the sights and sounds of nature can be good for the health of your mind and spirit. Head on outdoors and find exciting ways to have fun and to provide your body, mind, and spirit with the nourishment needed for maximum health, and more glad living.

How do you like to have fun while enjoying the 3-dimensional health benefits the outdoors offers?

Safer Food Alternatives

Buying foods from Farmers Markets and growing their own foods in family gardens or in community garden projects, have become popular with many people these days. More and more people are fearful about the safety of foods sold in grocery stores, chain stores, and restaurants, with the numerous recalls that there have been on a variety of foods and food products in recent years.

Consumers feel that the foods offered for sale by local farmers are safer and certainly, farm families eat a portion of the crops they grow to provide their families with incomes. Organic foods are also hugely popular now as well. Organic farmers grow food crops without using pesticides that are dangerous to humans and the environment. Organically raised animals that people consume for food, feed on all-natural diets, and are not given hormones and other synthetic chemicals that can pose a health risk to people when they eat meats and other foods containing them.

Buying your families foods from a local farmers market can reduce your family’s grocery bills. Since smaller vehicles are used, and fewer miles driven by farmers to bring local foods to market, buying foods from your local farmers market is good for the environment too.

If you want to have more control over how the foods your family eats are grown, grow your own in a family garden. There are many books available to help you to plan a family garden, and to provide you with useful planting guides, and tips for preventing pests from damaging your food plants.

If you like the idea of community members working together towards the same goal, join with other members of your neighborhood or community to help build and oversee the care and tending of food plants in a community garden. Everyone shares in the work, and everyone shares in having the healthier fruits and vegetables grown there.

Do you buy your family’s food from a local farmers market, grow some or much of the foods your family eats in a family garden, or participate in a community garden? Please share with us the advantages you and your family have experienced as of a result. If you still buy all your foods from your local grocery store, we would like to read your thoughts on this subject as well.

Eat More Veggies For a Healthier You

The average American diet is woefully lacking in the consumption of the right amount of vegetables each day. According to the USDA’s Food Pyramid, we should be eating 3 to 5 servings of vegetables every day. How many servings of vegetables do you eat daily? Adding more vegetables into my daily eating plan is how I started on my path to regaining control over my weight and health.

You do not have to go completely vegan, unless you want to. Simply adding a side salad to your lunch menu and a large salad or steamed vegetables with your dinner should help you to get your 3 to 5 servings of vegetables daily. As an added bonus, you are likely to find that by eating a salad or a serving of vegetables before digging into the main courses of your meals will help you to feel fuller faster and to eat smaller portions without feeling deprived.

A good way to fend off the hunger between meals that might cause you to choose less healthy foods is to slice and chop up your favorite vegetables and place one serving of them into individual sandwich baggies, and put them in the refrigerator to keep them fresh. Then when you feel the first pangs of hunger, you can just go grab a healthy bag of ready-to-eat veggies from the fridge.

Making the healthier choice to eat more servings of vegetables per day does not have to be hard. Add a salad to your lunch and dinner. Steam vegetables as side dishes to your main entrées and keep some fresh ready-to-eat veggies in the fridge to grab instead of junk foods to snack on between meals.


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Say No to Diets-Yes To Choices

Like me, I am sure there are a lot of you who are familiar with the Feast and Famine notion of dieting. You know when you eat everything you can the weekend before you start your new diet on Monday, because then most of your favorite foods will be off limits? Yeah, I have been there and done that, more times than I can count over the years.

This regimen of stuffing myself to the gills prior to depriving myself for however long I could hold out (a few weeks, to six or more months sometimes,) never did result in weight loss that I could keep off for very long. It is amazing how hard it can be to lose weight, yet gaining weight can happen so easily for those of us dealing with excess weight issues.

I know there are many people who are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to weight issues. They lose weight rapidly, and cannot seem to gain enough to reach a healthy weight no matter how much they eat. I am sure this can be just as much a difficult struggle for them as dealing with a weight problem is for those of us on the heavier side. I wish I could offer those of you having to deal with being underweight more than just the encouragement to keep trying every possible healthy avenue available for help in overcoming your issue. However, my experiences have been with being overweight, and that is where I am coming from.

I have dropped fifty-six pounds in the last year, and have kept that weight off while I am still working towards my ultimate weight goal. I did not go on a diet or use any diet products. I have given those up for good. They have failed me time after time, and after becoming more knowledgeable about their health risks, I do not consider them the right choice for me anymore. I simply adopted the mindset that the answer to my struggle to lose weight, become healthier, and live longer lies in the choices I make. I chose to educate myself about the real nutrition my body needs for fuel and health, and make my food choices based on that. I also made other choices such as to exercise more, not to smoke or drink alcohol, and to be mindful of the fact that my mind and spirit need as much healthy nourishment as my body does.

The weight loss that I have achieved so far did not happen overnight. I am thankful for that actually. It has given me the time to learn what real nutrition and health is and is not. I have also learned why I ate the way I did, and how I can choose to eat for the right reasons now, and choose foods that are better for me. I will share more of what I have discovered through my journey of losing weight and getting healthier this past year with you in future posts.

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Forget Dieting Pipedreams. Make Healthy Choices for Real Health

Diets do not work for anyone really outside of the creators of trendy new diet plans, and the makers of the zillions of diet products offered on the market. These individuals and corporations make millions of dollars annually off people’s desires to be thin and willingness to put their own health in serious jeopardy just to be the size and weight that our society unfortunately considers beautiful.

The true measure of real beauty comes from within, and we should all stop “buying” into the Hollywood, media, and diet industry fueled illusion that only size two women and enormously muscled men are beautiful. As soon as we start doing this, maybe fewer teenage girls and boys will starve themselves to death trying to achieve this ideal of perfection and beauty that our society has held onto for long enough.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight in a healthy manner if you really need to, or in wanting to improve your health and fitness levels. Scientific research has shown that people with a healthy weight and that are also fit and lead healthier lifestyles, do live longer. Your focus should be in achieving your desired weight and fitness level in healthy ways. Not through depriving yourself of certain foods, feeling hungry and tired from poor nutrition, or by overexerting your body with exercising that is too strenuous for where you are at fitness-wise right now. Popping so-called magic diet pills or drinking diet shakes and beverages whose ingredients may harm your internal organs, is not a healthy solution for you either.

I am suggesting that you eliminate the word diet from your vocabulary altogether and replace it with the word choice. It is choices, and not dieting and using diet products, you do not need and that may be harmful to you, that real overall health is all about.
You can make the choice to eat foods that are healthier and more nutritious to fuel your body with, while also allowing yourself to feast on a favorite treat occasionally. You can make the choice to become more physically active. You can make the choice to live a healthier lifestyle. We all face making various choices everyday. The ones we make concerning our health and the lives we want to live are very important choices indeed.

Please look for a continuation on this important subject of “choices” for health and greater glad living in future posts filed in the body, mind, spirit, and 3-dimensional health sections of this blog.

Block Walk Challenge

The Block Walk Challenge kicks your metabolism into high gear before you sit down to meals, and keeps your fat burning machine running full-throttle after meals as well. Try it and see how much it may help you to lose weight, to maintain a healthy weight once you have reached your desired weight, and help you to improve your fitness and health levels.

How does it work? It is simple really. Before we get to that however, a little note about beginning to exercise when you have been living a mostly sedentary lifestyle. You should get a checkup with your doctor to ensure that you do not have any underlying medical conditions that would make exercising, even on a beginner’s level, unsafe for you. Very few of us have such conditions that would prevent us from exercising safely, but checking with your doctor first, is a good idea.

For many of us it is our thinking and motivation levels, which can keep us from getting the amount of exercise we need for good health and fitness. Some may even groan at the mere thought of exercising, even just a little bit, before each meal, let alone afterwards too. The Block Walk Challenge provides you with a new way to view exercising for fitness and health. It can also help you build the motivation to continue challenging your metabolism to be the hard-working fat-eliminating machine it is supposed to be.

You may not always be in the mood for exercising when you cannot see what, if any, immediate rewards for your efforts there may be. Challenge yourself to think about it in this new way. One reward you will receive for exercising for a few minutes or more now, is a meal (hopefully one that is healthy) to sit down to and eat guilt-free, because you completed the first of the two legs involved in the Block Walk Challenge. Another reward is to know that your body is prepped to fight the fat you are about to consume, so that it has less chance of ending up being stored in your body. Most of us have more than enough fat stores already in our bodies. Extra fat that our bodies do not need, leads to weight gain and serious health issues.

The second leg of the Block Walk Challenge takes place after you have eaten your meal. It helps your body to digest meals quicker and more efficiently. This post meal-metabolism boost helps your body neutralize fat it does not need, and to send that fat to your colon for elimination from your body. People often say, “I am burning the candle at both ends,” to express how hard they are working. This usually means that a person is working himself or herself too hard, and this is not good for anyone. Burning fat at both ends of a meal is a good thing for you and everyone in your family.

Block Walk Challenge-Leg One-Before Meals
• Walk the block around your neighborhood several times before each meal. You may only make it around once or even only halfway around the block the first few times. That is okay. It is about getting yourself moving to spark the fire in your metabolism, rather than the number of times you can walk around the block initially.

• Adopt a straight posture and steady walking pace, but you do not need to make yourself breathless in order to charge up your metabolism.

•The goal is to increase your block walking before meals over time, so that your metabolism does not become complacent about burning fat at a high rate. Ideally, you should walk the block for about 15 minutes. Start with whatever feels most comfortable to you.

•Remember to keep yourself well hydrated during your block walk by drinking water.

•Drinking a glass of water before eating meals helps your body to feel fuller on smaller meals.

•Enjoy eating your meal guilt Free (unless you have chosen junk food, which only defeats the purpose of the block walk challenge and your efforts.)


Block Walk Challenge-Leg Two-After Meals

•Head outside for more block walking

•Keep your posture straight and pump your arms as you walk at a good click.

•Keep walking for 20 minutes to an hour. It is okay to walk for a shorter amount of time in the beginning, and gradually extend your walking times as your body builds strength and stamina.

• Drink water for proper hydration while walking

•Congratulations! You have just completed the Block Walk Challenge for a super fat-burning metabolism and better fitness and health.

You can walk several blocks if walking around only one seems boring to you. What if you live out in the country with no block to walk around? Walk (safely)along a stretch of road that has minimal traffic, the equivalent of a city block, however many times you can, or walk down your driveway and back several times, or back and forth across your yard.

*When inclement weather prohibits you from walking outdoors, walk around or jog in place indoors to rev up your metabolism.

Should you choose to take the Block Walk Challenge, I sure would enjoy reading about what you have gained from the experience here.