Think Your Way to Weight Loss
chachita7
Posts: 996 Member
(Disclaimer) Please note - the information I share is just that, information - I acknowledge everyone is different - you have to make your own choice as to what works and doesn't work for you 
-- Chachita7 *smile*
***************************************************************************************************************************************
How to take control of your weight loss and change your habits for a lifetime of better health
http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/coach-yourself-thin?cm_mmc=Spotlight-_-942018-_-06112012-_-Think-Your-Way-Thin-hed#ixzz1xUNBqKym
As anyone who has ever been on a diet knows, changing your eating and exercise habits can often feel impossible. You succumb to every nutritional and fitness fad and hope the promise of a quick fix changes your life.
In Coach Yourself Thin, professional weight loss coaches Greg Hottinger, MPH, RD, and Michael Scholtz, MA, offer unique strategies to help you end this futile cycle.
Here are some selected bits of weight loss wisdom from the book that will help you create realistic fitness and nutrition goals, awaken your intuition to listen to your body’s needs and regain balance in your everyday life:
1. Beware the Quick Fix Mindset
We have noticed a common way of thinking that we call the Quick Fix Mindset; we see it often among our clients who are struggling to lose weight. This mindset was born alongside the increased prevalence of labor-saving devices and the move away from home-cooked meals and to packaged products.
It is propagated by the advertising industry as the way to “improve” your life with minimal effort by purchasing products ranging from clothes to flat-screen televisions to cell phones, to name just a few.
However, the Quick Fix Mindset runs much deeper than the simple belief that happiness can be found through buying the latest technology and fashion; this mindset significantly influences your overall way of thinking. And when it skews the decision-making that affects your health and body, the consequences can be devastating.
Are you falling into the trap of the Quick Fix Mindset? It can manifest itself in various ways.
Taking medications at the least sign of discomfort or resorting to diet pills or invasive weight-loss surgeries without making any lifestyle changes.
Diving blindly into crazy exercise programs only to injure yourself and have to return to your sedentary lifestyle.
Looking for every imaginable shortcut in daily tasks but spending hundreds of dollars on gym memberships and exercise equipment.
Buying prepackaged foods instead of taking the time and effort to cook meals that include whole foods.
Don’t let Quick Fix Thinking distract you from the hard work of changing the unhealthy behaviors that are the root cause of weight gain.
2. Beware of Half Truths
Even some weight loss programs with some legitimate science behind them seem unwilling to stick to the whole truth. This “smoke and mirrors” mentality refers to any diet and exercise idea that takes a little bit of truth and tries to turn it into groundbreaking news for weight loss.
High-protein diets, for example, blame carbohydrates for the explosion of weight gain and encourage dieters to eliminate carbs completely rather than focus on eating higher-quality carbohydrates such as fruits or whole grains. While giving up carbs entirely can produce impressive short-term weight-loss, the emphasis is on short-term because most people find that giving up a whole food group is unsustainable.
Instead of a new fad, focus on a diet that is whole foods based and includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean sources of protein, nuts and seeds and non-fat dairy products.
3. Drop “Diet” Thinking and Take the Coach Approach
Diet thinking tells you that some foods should be avoided at all costs.
The coach approach is that there are no good or bad foods. You’ll learn to say “yes” to yourself without guilt, and what you want to say “yes” to will become healthier as you leave the guilt behind.
Diet thinking tells you that you can quit your plan today and start over tomorrow.
The coach approach is that there is no set-in-stone program to follow or to fall off. A lifestyle evolves from one day to the next, taking into account what happens to you along the way and what you’ve learned from it.
Diet thinking makes you believe that you have to be hard on yourself to change and that negative emotions like disgust and anger are motivators.
The coach approach is that negative thoughts don’t lead to change. Transformation is the result of positive feelings that build you up rather than tear you down, so improving your self-esteem and confidence actually precedes weight-loss success.
Diet thinking says diving in with both feet and pushing yourself to the max both lead to greater success.
The coach approach is that you may need to lower the bar in order to jump over it. Keeping your weight-loss expectations realistic from the get-go will motivate you to move forward instead of frustrating you so much that you give up before you’ve even started. You can continue to increase your standards as you make progress and gain confidence in your abilities.
4. Take Back Power from the Scale
Weight Fixation means being so focused on the number on the scale that it interferes with your ability to be consistent with your program and see the progress that you may be making. If you struggle with Weight Fixation, you experience turbulent mood swings and engage in erratic, unhealthy behaviors that can set you up for falling off the wagon.
Maybe you have a gigantic dessert the night before you begin your diet or you radically slash calories the day or two before your weigh-in, and then you binge when the scale doesn’t budge. Maybe you fret over the scale going up the day after a big meal or you are enraged because you’ve worked so hard for days and the scale hasn’t budged, even though you step on it several times a day. The scale has so much power over you that it can delight you one moment, devastate you the next, and fill you with dread the morning of your weigh-in day.
To take back your power over your choices from the scale, focus more on your non-scale victories which are victories that have come from your healthier behaviors. These include having more energy, noticing changes in how your clothes fit, sleeping better, finding it easier to climb the stairs, being noticeably more tone, and being able to do your daily tasks with less joint pain.
5. Follow These Simple Nutrition Truths
Regain your balance by avoiding the myths and misconceptions associated with the basics of a healthy diet and focus instead on these simple concepts:
Stay Hydrated. Drink at least 48 oz of water or until your urine is clear or light in color.
Eat Enough. You need enough quality calories each day to support your bodily functions and metabolism. Drop below your calorie goal, and it will actually become more difficult to lose weight. Plus, when you eat enough you will feel better and have more energy for exercise.
Balance your intake. Eat consistently throughout the day to help balance your blood sugar levels and keep your appetite in check. Find the right balance of carbohydrates, protein and fats at your meals and snacks to feel satisfied and control cravings.
Eat mostly whole foods. Stick to the evidence—there is an overwhelming consensus that whole food—all-natural meats, seafood, whole grains, nuts and seeds, beans, vegetables, and fruits—are the key to a healthy diet.
6. Working Weight Loss into Your Schedule
When you are trying to eat better and exercise more as part of a hectic, anxiety-ridden schedule, these 8 tips can improve your efficiency and help you save time:
Make larger portions for dinner and freeze the extras so you have quick and healthy meals for another day.
Put chopped veggies in a bag for tomorrow’s snacks while you make your salad for dinner.
Keep a running grocery list of your healthy food essentials—the fruits, vegetables, snacks, high-fiber cereals, and other household staples that help you stay on track.
Keep a stash of healthy canned goods (like tuna) and a favorite lower-sodium soup in your pantry.
Keep frozen chicken and vegetables in your freezer so you can always pull together a quick and healthy meal.
Go to the restroom and water fountain at the far end of the building for a mental break and a short walk at the same time.
Keep your exercise clothes in a gym bag at the foot of your bed so you’re always ready to grab it and go when you get up in the morning.
As soon as you come back from a workout, re-pack your gym bag with clean replacements.
See the Big Picture
Diets are meant to be broken, but a “lifestyle” is just what the name implies: It’s for a lifetime. This is an important concept to grasp when it comes to weight loss because while you may be able to imagine following a restrictive plan for a few weeks or months, it’s much harder to see yourself following any “plan” for the rest of your life. At some point, it must simply become what you do and how you live.
When you are able to see this larger picture, you will realize that no one decision is a deal breaker; no single missed meal or unplanned indulgence or missed exercise session can knock you off track. Success becomes something you measure by consistency over the long-term, not perfection over the short-term.
8. Free Yourself to Make Choices
There is incredible power in making your own choices. You’re free from the constraints of someone else’s idea of how you should live healthy and lose weight. This independence sweeps away the victim mentality. It’s no longer society’s fault that you can’t find healthy food in a restaurant, your boss’s responsibility that you can’t eat healthy on the job, or your spouse’s attitude that keeps you from exercise.
What stops many people from appreciating the power to choose is that with this power comes personal responsibility for the results of those choices. Taking control of your choices and accepting responsibility for their outcomes requires shifting from an external to an internal locus of control. And as you “let go” of the need to be perfect, and learn to forgive your slips, it will become much easier for you to regain control of your choices.
9. Create a Support Team
Do you have a support team group that you can count on to brainstorm solutions and celebrate victories with you? If not, create one. Start by taking an inventory of your family, friends, and co-workers and identify those who you can count on to be unconditionally supportive of your healthy lifestyle. These should be people who have shown you from the start that they are genuinely happy that you’re taking better care of yourself.
You can rely on them to support you, practically and emotionally, to go out of their way to help you find healthy places to eat, to go for a walk with you, to reassure you when your confidence is low, and to celebrate with you when you succeed.
This group of people will become your “inner circle,” and they will help you overcome any obstacles in your path. Think of it as putting a safety net in place: They’ll help keep you from falling too far or being off track for too long.
10. Invite Communication From Your Body
In a culture that espouses the “no pain, no gain” philosophy, it is no wonder that you feel like you should push through pain if you want to get in shape and lose weight. The Quick Fix Mindset urges you to take the painkiller without even considering making lifestyle changes. It doesn’t tell you that silencing the pain is like taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm, or that if you aren’t careful, the underlying “fire” can become a torn meniscus in your knee or damage to the ligaments in your shoulder.
A healthier path is to invite communication from your body and to take steps to work with it. If your pain is not severe or debilitating, what actions can you take to slowly eliminate an indigestion medication or an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory?
How many of the symptoms that you’re experiencing are caused by an inflammatory diet, lack of movement, inadequate strength or flexibility, sleep deprivation, or stress? If you are in severe pain or have a more serious medical condition and eliminating medications is not an option, how much can you lessen your pain or other symptoms, and at least reduce the dosage of the medications you are taking, by changing your lifestyle choices?
11. Invest in Yourself
If you’re finding it challenging to make the time for healthy food, try shifting from thinking that the time spent shopping, cooking, and cleaning as drudgery to thinking of it as an investment in your health. Would the effort be worth experiencing a significant boost in energy after just a few weeks of replacing 80 percent of your less-healthy, on-the-go meals with balanced, home-prepared meals?
Would redefining the kitchen cleanup tasks as “exercise” rather than “work” make it easier for you to burn a few more calories? The calories you burn doing the kitchen cleanup count every bit as much as those burned on a treadmill.
And if the idea of cooking just isn’t appealing and still feels too time-consuming, you can have quick and healthy meals, like a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, along with hummus and baby carrots. And stay open to what is possible: You may come to truly enjoy shopping for fresh foods and preparing them for yourself and your family.
12. Regain a Sense of Play
A key to sticking with exercise is to find something you enjoy and/or that gives you the strength and confidence to do the things you want to do in life. We have lost much of our sense of play in today’s busy world. Going to the gym can seem like just one more task that has to be done.
You can make your movement more fun by selecting activities that you feel are more like recreation or play; go to dance class, play a sport, get outside, or include your spouse or kids. If the activity itself isn’t inherently fun, then try to link it to the ability to do something that is. Maybe lifting weights in the gym seems tedious. But by connecting the strength you gain at the gym to your ability to play with your children or grandchildren, you make the gym a slightly more desirable place to go.
13. Spend Some Time Outside
There is evidence that exercising outdoors is good for your health. Exercising outside has been shown to have a greater effect on improving mood and decreasing anger, anxiety, and depression than the equivalent exercise performed indoors.
That’s not to say that indoor exercise is not recommended. Many people live in areas where exercising outdoors may be unsafe, and there are certain types of exercise, such as strength training with machines or step aerobics, that are better done in a gym. But getting outside to play once in a while can give your mood an added boost!
14. Rejuvenate
Rejuvenation is one of four key areas of fitness that discussed in Coach Yourself Thin. It refers to restoring and refreshing your mind, body, and spirit after a busy day or in the midst of life’s stresses and challenges.
It is an essential, though often overlooked, part of your exercise plan. It will help keep you feeling motivated, improve your exercise performance by speeding up your recovery from workouts and making sure you are able to move through a full range of motion, and reduce your chances of a layoff due to injury or illness.
Some active ways to refresh and renew include:
Breathing exercises
Pilates
Stretching
Tai chi
Yoga
Some more passive methods of rejuvenation include:
Baths (warm baths for relaxation and ice baths for recovery from workouts)
Heat packs
Cold packs
Hot tubs
Meditation
Saunas
Sleep
15. Make Small Daily Choices for Big Outcomes
Everyone likes to work toward exciting outcomes. If you envision yourself as physically fit and capable, you may be working toward the goal of being able to walk all five flights to your apartment. If you see yourself as an athlete, perhaps you’re training for a 10K.
Or maybe your vision is sharing romantic and exciting vacations with your significant other, and the outcome you want most is walking through a museum without worrying about your knees giving out. But, you may not have given as much thought to the behaviors that will help you arrive at that outcome.
Your behaviors are made up of the little daily choices you make: your decision to exercise for 20 minutes, eat a healthy breakfast, or drink water instead of soda. And unlike the eventual outcomes like body weight or your 10K time, you have immediate and powerful control over almost all of your health related behaviors.
Adapted from Coach Yourself Thin by Greg Hottinger, MPH, RD, and Michael Scholtz, MA (Rodale 2012).
Read article: http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/coach-yourself-thin#ixzz1xUNrPQCG
-- Chachita7 *smile****************************************************************************************************************************************
How to take control of your weight loss and change your habits for a lifetime of better health
http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/coach-yourself-thin?cm_mmc=Spotlight-_-942018-_-06112012-_-Think-Your-Way-Thin-hed#ixzz1xUNBqKym
As anyone who has ever been on a diet knows, changing your eating and exercise habits can often feel impossible. You succumb to every nutritional and fitness fad and hope the promise of a quick fix changes your life.
In Coach Yourself Thin, professional weight loss coaches Greg Hottinger, MPH, RD, and Michael Scholtz, MA, offer unique strategies to help you end this futile cycle.
Here are some selected bits of weight loss wisdom from the book that will help you create realistic fitness and nutrition goals, awaken your intuition to listen to your body’s needs and regain balance in your everyday life:
1. Beware the Quick Fix Mindset
We have noticed a common way of thinking that we call the Quick Fix Mindset; we see it often among our clients who are struggling to lose weight. This mindset was born alongside the increased prevalence of labor-saving devices and the move away from home-cooked meals and to packaged products.
It is propagated by the advertising industry as the way to “improve” your life with minimal effort by purchasing products ranging from clothes to flat-screen televisions to cell phones, to name just a few.
However, the Quick Fix Mindset runs much deeper than the simple belief that happiness can be found through buying the latest technology and fashion; this mindset significantly influences your overall way of thinking. And when it skews the decision-making that affects your health and body, the consequences can be devastating.
Are you falling into the trap of the Quick Fix Mindset? It can manifest itself in various ways.
Taking medications at the least sign of discomfort or resorting to diet pills or invasive weight-loss surgeries without making any lifestyle changes.
Diving blindly into crazy exercise programs only to injure yourself and have to return to your sedentary lifestyle.
Looking for every imaginable shortcut in daily tasks but spending hundreds of dollars on gym memberships and exercise equipment.
Buying prepackaged foods instead of taking the time and effort to cook meals that include whole foods.
Don’t let Quick Fix Thinking distract you from the hard work of changing the unhealthy behaviors that are the root cause of weight gain.
2. Beware of Half Truths
Even some weight loss programs with some legitimate science behind them seem unwilling to stick to the whole truth. This “smoke and mirrors” mentality refers to any diet and exercise idea that takes a little bit of truth and tries to turn it into groundbreaking news for weight loss.
High-protein diets, for example, blame carbohydrates for the explosion of weight gain and encourage dieters to eliminate carbs completely rather than focus on eating higher-quality carbohydrates such as fruits or whole grains. While giving up carbs entirely can produce impressive short-term weight-loss, the emphasis is on short-term because most people find that giving up a whole food group is unsustainable.
Instead of a new fad, focus on a diet that is whole foods based and includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean sources of protein, nuts and seeds and non-fat dairy products.
3. Drop “Diet” Thinking and Take the Coach Approach
Diet thinking tells you that some foods should be avoided at all costs.
The coach approach is that there are no good or bad foods. You’ll learn to say “yes” to yourself without guilt, and what you want to say “yes” to will become healthier as you leave the guilt behind.
Diet thinking tells you that you can quit your plan today and start over tomorrow.
The coach approach is that there is no set-in-stone program to follow or to fall off. A lifestyle evolves from one day to the next, taking into account what happens to you along the way and what you’ve learned from it.
Diet thinking makes you believe that you have to be hard on yourself to change and that negative emotions like disgust and anger are motivators.
The coach approach is that negative thoughts don’t lead to change. Transformation is the result of positive feelings that build you up rather than tear you down, so improving your self-esteem and confidence actually precedes weight-loss success.
Diet thinking says diving in with both feet and pushing yourself to the max both lead to greater success.
The coach approach is that you may need to lower the bar in order to jump over it. Keeping your weight-loss expectations realistic from the get-go will motivate you to move forward instead of frustrating you so much that you give up before you’ve even started. You can continue to increase your standards as you make progress and gain confidence in your abilities.
4. Take Back Power from the Scale
Weight Fixation means being so focused on the number on the scale that it interferes with your ability to be consistent with your program and see the progress that you may be making. If you struggle with Weight Fixation, you experience turbulent mood swings and engage in erratic, unhealthy behaviors that can set you up for falling off the wagon.
Maybe you have a gigantic dessert the night before you begin your diet or you radically slash calories the day or two before your weigh-in, and then you binge when the scale doesn’t budge. Maybe you fret over the scale going up the day after a big meal or you are enraged because you’ve worked so hard for days and the scale hasn’t budged, even though you step on it several times a day. The scale has so much power over you that it can delight you one moment, devastate you the next, and fill you with dread the morning of your weigh-in day.
To take back your power over your choices from the scale, focus more on your non-scale victories which are victories that have come from your healthier behaviors. These include having more energy, noticing changes in how your clothes fit, sleeping better, finding it easier to climb the stairs, being noticeably more tone, and being able to do your daily tasks with less joint pain.
5. Follow These Simple Nutrition Truths
Regain your balance by avoiding the myths and misconceptions associated with the basics of a healthy diet and focus instead on these simple concepts:
Stay Hydrated. Drink at least 48 oz of water or until your urine is clear or light in color.
Eat Enough. You need enough quality calories each day to support your bodily functions and metabolism. Drop below your calorie goal, and it will actually become more difficult to lose weight. Plus, when you eat enough you will feel better and have more energy for exercise.
Balance your intake. Eat consistently throughout the day to help balance your blood sugar levels and keep your appetite in check. Find the right balance of carbohydrates, protein and fats at your meals and snacks to feel satisfied and control cravings.
Eat mostly whole foods. Stick to the evidence—there is an overwhelming consensus that whole food—all-natural meats, seafood, whole grains, nuts and seeds, beans, vegetables, and fruits—are the key to a healthy diet.
6. Working Weight Loss into Your Schedule
When you are trying to eat better and exercise more as part of a hectic, anxiety-ridden schedule, these 8 tips can improve your efficiency and help you save time:
Make larger portions for dinner and freeze the extras so you have quick and healthy meals for another day.
Put chopped veggies in a bag for tomorrow’s snacks while you make your salad for dinner.
Keep a running grocery list of your healthy food essentials—the fruits, vegetables, snacks, high-fiber cereals, and other household staples that help you stay on track.
Keep a stash of healthy canned goods (like tuna) and a favorite lower-sodium soup in your pantry.
Keep frozen chicken and vegetables in your freezer so you can always pull together a quick and healthy meal.
Go to the restroom and water fountain at the far end of the building for a mental break and a short walk at the same time.
Keep your exercise clothes in a gym bag at the foot of your bed so you’re always ready to grab it and go when you get up in the morning.
As soon as you come back from a workout, re-pack your gym bag with clean replacements.
See the Big Picture
Diets are meant to be broken, but a “lifestyle” is just what the name implies: It’s for a lifetime. This is an important concept to grasp when it comes to weight loss because while you may be able to imagine following a restrictive plan for a few weeks or months, it’s much harder to see yourself following any “plan” for the rest of your life. At some point, it must simply become what you do and how you live.
When you are able to see this larger picture, you will realize that no one decision is a deal breaker; no single missed meal or unplanned indulgence or missed exercise session can knock you off track. Success becomes something you measure by consistency over the long-term, not perfection over the short-term.
8. Free Yourself to Make Choices
There is incredible power in making your own choices. You’re free from the constraints of someone else’s idea of how you should live healthy and lose weight. This independence sweeps away the victim mentality. It’s no longer society’s fault that you can’t find healthy food in a restaurant, your boss’s responsibility that you can’t eat healthy on the job, or your spouse’s attitude that keeps you from exercise.
What stops many people from appreciating the power to choose is that with this power comes personal responsibility for the results of those choices. Taking control of your choices and accepting responsibility for their outcomes requires shifting from an external to an internal locus of control. And as you “let go” of the need to be perfect, and learn to forgive your slips, it will become much easier for you to regain control of your choices.
9. Create a Support Team
Do you have a support team group that you can count on to brainstorm solutions and celebrate victories with you? If not, create one. Start by taking an inventory of your family, friends, and co-workers and identify those who you can count on to be unconditionally supportive of your healthy lifestyle. These should be people who have shown you from the start that they are genuinely happy that you’re taking better care of yourself.
You can rely on them to support you, practically and emotionally, to go out of their way to help you find healthy places to eat, to go for a walk with you, to reassure you when your confidence is low, and to celebrate with you when you succeed.
This group of people will become your “inner circle,” and they will help you overcome any obstacles in your path. Think of it as putting a safety net in place: They’ll help keep you from falling too far or being off track for too long.
10. Invite Communication From Your Body
In a culture that espouses the “no pain, no gain” philosophy, it is no wonder that you feel like you should push through pain if you want to get in shape and lose weight. The Quick Fix Mindset urges you to take the painkiller without even considering making lifestyle changes. It doesn’t tell you that silencing the pain is like taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm, or that if you aren’t careful, the underlying “fire” can become a torn meniscus in your knee or damage to the ligaments in your shoulder.
A healthier path is to invite communication from your body and to take steps to work with it. If your pain is not severe or debilitating, what actions can you take to slowly eliminate an indigestion medication or an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory?
How many of the symptoms that you’re experiencing are caused by an inflammatory diet, lack of movement, inadequate strength or flexibility, sleep deprivation, or stress? If you are in severe pain or have a more serious medical condition and eliminating medications is not an option, how much can you lessen your pain or other symptoms, and at least reduce the dosage of the medications you are taking, by changing your lifestyle choices?
11. Invest in Yourself
If you’re finding it challenging to make the time for healthy food, try shifting from thinking that the time spent shopping, cooking, and cleaning as drudgery to thinking of it as an investment in your health. Would the effort be worth experiencing a significant boost in energy after just a few weeks of replacing 80 percent of your less-healthy, on-the-go meals with balanced, home-prepared meals?
Would redefining the kitchen cleanup tasks as “exercise” rather than “work” make it easier for you to burn a few more calories? The calories you burn doing the kitchen cleanup count every bit as much as those burned on a treadmill.
And if the idea of cooking just isn’t appealing and still feels too time-consuming, you can have quick and healthy meals, like a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, along with hummus and baby carrots. And stay open to what is possible: You may come to truly enjoy shopping for fresh foods and preparing them for yourself and your family.
12. Regain a Sense of Play
A key to sticking with exercise is to find something you enjoy and/or that gives you the strength and confidence to do the things you want to do in life. We have lost much of our sense of play in today’s busy world. Going to the gym can seem like just one more task that has to be done.
You can make your movement more fun by selecting activities that you feel are more like recreation or play; go to dance class, play a sport, get outside, or include your spouse or kids. If the activity itself isn’t inherently fun, then try to link it to the ability to do something that is. Maybe lifting weights in the gym seems tedious. But by connecting the strength you gain at the gym to your ability to play with your children or grandchildren, you make the gym a slightly more desirable place to go.
13. Spend Some Time Outside
There is evidence that exercising outdoors is good for your health. Exercising outside has been shown to have a greater effect on improving mood and decreasing anger, anxiety, and depression than the equivalent exercise performed indoors.
That’s not to say that indoor exercise is not recommended. Many people live in areas where exercising outdoors may be unsafe, and there are certain types of exercise, such as strength training with machines or step aerobics, that are better done in a gym. But getting outside to play once in a while can give your mood an added boost!
14. Rejuvenate
Rejuvenation is one of four key areas of fitness that discussed in Coach Yourself Thin. It refers to restoring and refreshing your mind, body, and spirit after a busy day or in the midst of life’s stresses and challenges.
It is an essential, though often overlooked, part of your exercise plan. It will help keep you feeling motivated, improve your exercise performance by speeding up your recovery from workouts and making sure you are able to move through a full range of motion, and reduce your chances of a layoff due to injury or illness.
Some active ways to refresh and renew include:
Breathing exercises
Pilates
Stretching
Tai chi
Yoga
Some more passive methods of rejuvenation include:
Baths (warm baths for relaxation and ice baths for recovery from workouts)
Heat packs
Cold packs
Hot tubs
Meditation
Saunas
Sleep
15. Make Small Daily Choices for Big Outcomes
Everyone likes to work toward exciting outcomes. If you envision yourself as physically fit and capable, you may be working toward the goal of being able to walk all five flights to your apartment. If you see yourself as an athlete, perhaps you’re training for a 10K.
Or maybe your vision is sharing romantic and exciting vacations with your significant other, and the outcome you want most is walking through a museum without worrying about your knees giving out. But, you may not have given as much thought to the behaviors that will help you arrive at that outcome.
Your behaviors are made up of the little daily choices you make: your decision to exercise for 20 minutes, eat a healthy breakfast, or drink water instead of soda. And unlike the eventual outcomes like body weight or your 10K time, you have immediate and powerful control over almost all of your health related behaviors.
Adapted from Coach Yourself Thin by Greg Hottinger, MPH, RD, and Michael Scholtz, MA (Rodale 2012).
Read article: http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/coach-yourself-thin#ixzz1xUNrPQCG
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