Your Metabolic Best For The New Year
Welcome to the New Year! It is an auspicious time to set goals and visualize a new you. I am going to encourage you to avoid the phrase “going on a diet.’ Dieting may help you lose a little weight but when you go back to your regular way of eating the pounds usually creep back on. This is because “dieting” tends to really through metabolism out of balance.
Even the best of intentions can fall to the wayside when you are dealing with faulty metabolism. Metabolism is a body system that can become unbalanced just like other body systems. That is why we hope you will adopt a new, healthier way of eating as a long term solution to healthy aging, boundless energy and optimum health. Whether your vision includes letting go of excess weight, increasing overall energy or fortifying overall balance and harmony, creating and sustaining healthy metabolism is possible – at every age!
To actually affect your body’s metabolism and get sustainable results, I encourage a few key lifestyle adjustments. I encourage you to follow your own knowledge and intuition, letting go of scarcity thinking and embracing abundance when it comes to food, exercise and faith.
Our bodies are like walking healthy chemical factories. Metabolism is an intelligent and intricate balance of chemicals and processes. It responds to multiple stressors throughout the day and contemporary lifestyles have truly challenged the balance. Stress, artificial foods, over-processed foods, lack of exercise and diets lacking key nutrients contribute to the imbalance. Skipping meals, limiting calories, choosing unhealthy foods, using excessive alcohol and tobacco also challenges the body’s ability to “burn” and ultimately slows down our metabolism. We can send a metabolic message by making consistently healthy food choices, engaging in regular exercise so that we sweat daily, and taking time out for mindful mind/body practices such as meditation, yoga, and conscious breathing.
All too often we put our focus on removing the “junk” from our diets, but that is only half of the equation. We need to replace the bad fuel with the premium fuel of a balanced diet made up of the right stuff. When we feed our bodies well and with conscious regularity we give our body’s energy stores the green light to go!
Foundational to healthy metabolism is dietary fiber. It is no wonder that sluggish metabolism affects so many of us when the majority of us are not even meeting half of our daily fiber requirement, which is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. Fiber serves metabolism by managing the rate at which sugar is absorbed into our bodies and by acting as a powerful “sweeper” of “stuff” that when left to hang around can further insult our metabolic harmony. You can easily and deliciously meet your metabolic needs for fiber by focusing on plant based foods like beans, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruits and whole grains. A day in the life of fiber success is easy to attain by beginning the day with a high fiber cereal with berries or whole grain toast, a mid morning snack of raw almonds or walnuts, lunching on vegetable or bean soup and/or salad with a whole grain roll, a mid-afternoon apple and a metabolically magnificent dinner of stir friend veggies and whole grain pasta complementing your favorite lean protein. Our menu plans are desired to be fiber rich. Use the wiggle room inherent in our program to see where you can add more fiber on your own!
Secondly, you must eat fat to lose the fat. This may sound counter intuitive but it’s true. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is primarily made up of unhealthy fats that promote disease, inflammation and slow metabolism. This would include partially hydrogenated fats, hydrogenated fats and fried foods. We can move in the healthy, non-inflammatory direction by opting for whole foods over processed ones. Healthy fats help decrease overall inflammation in the body and can actually improve metabolism. Choose healthy fats from fish, nuts and seeds, and oils to help support your metabolism and overall body chemistry balance. Emotionally, mentally and metabolically we thrive when we eat ample healthy fats.
Eat with the end in mind. This means choosing foods and portions that will support your desire to feel satisfied and energized after you eat. Choose variety when it comes to fruits, vegetables and spices. We tend to stay within our comfort zone when it comes to these foods and that means we often miss out not only on some wonderful new flavor sensations but we potentially miss out on powerful phytonutrients and antioxidants that not only support metabolism but help prevent many chronic diseases. Berries, kiwi, sweet potatoes, kale, cabbage, broccoli, ginger, cinnamon, and turmeric are all wonderful additions to consider.
Affirm that the food you are choosing is nurturing your highest health expression and know that within the foods you choose the ingredients for vitality are present. Eating a balanced and size appropriate diet will help to insure that you are covering all of your metabolic bases and keep you moving forward. A balanced diet rich in complex carbohydrates, lean proteins and healthy fats naturally contain all the necessary building blocks for key hormones that aid in maintaining healthy metabolism.
Moving on to moving your body – when you move your body you help to maximize your metabolism. Exercise can help your metabolism in many ways from adding the most metabolically active tissue in your body…muscle, which many of us are losing at a health-robbing rate of several pounds per decade after age 30. Exercise aids in the improvement of insulin sensitivity, which directly supports metabolism. Your thyroid also benefits from regular exercise.
No matter what your age, exercise is an elixir for your metabolism and for your life. Moving your metabolism in a positive direction requires you to move your mind first. Notice which thoughts grow your energy for life and notice what thought patterns tend to zap your energy. As you channel your thinking in the direction of the greater, your body will move there too. The closer you are to what gives you life, the more energy you will have to live!
March 23, 2010
by Optimum WellnessComments
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