Dealing With Caffiene Withdrawal

Going without that cup of coffee is really rough on people the first few days. So is going without cola, dark chocolate and energy drinks. Caffeine is in all of these things.
Hang in there! There is life after caffeine!
When we stop drinking coffee or other caffeinated we get the typical symptoms of withdrawal which include irritability, drowsiness, fatigue, headache, and anxiety.
The side effects of withdrawal are short-lived, and don’t happen at all for many. Some people do not experience them at all.
Nonetheless, caffeine withdrawal is considered serious enough that caffeine addiction was proposed as a substance-abuse problem to the American Psychiatric Association. The duration of withdrawal is estimated to be two to nine days for most people.
Why do we need to quit caffeine? It is hard to believe but it is just no good for you.
Caffeine further exhausts the body by stimulating our adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. Adrenaline is part of the “fight-or-flight response which is a biological reaction to stress. During this response, your body also produces higher levels of the hormone Cortisol—the “stress hormone.”
Cortisol is considered a stress hormone not because it is inherently bad for you; in fact, at normal levels it helps with glucose metabolism, regulating blood pressure, lowering inflammation, and raising immunity.
Cortisol is not all bad. It also has some short-term benefits when it enters the bloodstream in higher amounts: it creates better memory function, enables a quick burst of energy, and lowers our sensitivity to pain.
Substances like caffeine, can all too easily keep our Cortisol levels artificially high. That in turn can cause problem like lowered thyroid function, cognitive problems, decreased bone density and muscle tissue, higher blood pressure, lowered immunity, and an overall inflammatory reaction in the body.
Also if you have a belly roll around your middle you can probably blame that on cortisol overload as well.
To completely avoid caffeine, you will also want to avoid foods that are coffee flavored, such as ice cream and yogurt.
As far as chocolate goes, dark chocolate has the most caffeine. Even a small serving of dark chocolate can have up to30 milligrams of caffeine in it, nearly the same amount as a can of cola (as compared with 90-150 milligrams in a cup of coffee and 30-70 milligrams in a cup of caffeinated tea).
These foods are verboten during the cleanse anyway, but now you have even more reason to steer clear of them.
If you really can't stand the withdrawal you can yourself off coffee. Begin by cutting your regular coffee with decaffeinated coffee. You can create a mix of two-thirds coffee to one-third decaf for the first week. For week two, drop your coffee down to one-third real coffee to two-thirds decaf.

When It’s Hard to Get Moving

So many moms today are overweight – thanks to stress. This causes us to build up terrible looking gut pots and flabby underarms and all sorts of problems. Many of us are working moms that simply have no time to for frivolous activities like exercise!
Exercise should form an integral part of any sensible weight loss program Taking up exercise always accelerates the effectiveness of sticking to a weight loss diet plus taking no exercise is bad for your heart and your general health in any case.
On the other hand, there is no need or sense in trying to become a decathlete overnight if you have done nothing more strenuous than lifting your coffee cup in the morning for the past few years. Take it easy because if you try to do too much exercise too soon, you are likely to injure yourself which will prevent you undertaking the exercise that you need to take.
Start off by walking as far as you can as quickly as possible. It doesn't really matter if the first time you go for a walk, you can only manage half a kilometer very slowly. Go out the next day and try to get a few hundred meters further at a slightly increased pace and gradually build up your distances and speeds from there.
Alternatively, you could take up something that is perhaps more gentle but nevertheless equally aerobically beneficial such as swimming. Swimming has the advantage that it exercises every muscle in the body at the same time, plus there is no shock on your joints (particularly your knees and ankles) as there might be if you are walking or jogging.
As you may have realized by now, one of the ironies of losing weight is that you almost always lose weight quicker when you are larger, with weight loss inevitably slowing down the closer you get to your target weight. Thus, it might be tempting to do a little bit more exercise than you should do more quickly than is advisable in an effort to shift the last few stubborn pounds.
If you're going to do this, it is far safer to do so in a swimming pool than it is to try to get rid of the extra weight running further and faster than you have previously on hard tarmac or concrete.
Perhaps you think that you don't have time to take exercise but leaving aside for the moment the fact that you have to get exercise if you want to lower your blood pressure, there is always a way of doing least some exercise.
For example, if you use public transport to get from your home to the office every day, how about getting off the bus or subway a few stops early to walk the last few hundred meters? You might need to leave home five minutes earlier in order to be able to do this but setting your alarm clock to wake you just that little bit earlier should not be a major problem when compared to the benefits that doing this will bring.
If you travel by car and work in an office block, how about climbing the stairs instead of using the elevator? A few flights of stairs represent wonderful aerobic exercise, exactly the kind of thing that you need to give your heart and body a good workout. If on the other hand you have not got the time to do this in the morning, take 10 minutes of your lunch break to do some stair climbing.
Remember, whilst one of the primary reasons that you're doing exercise is to help accelerate your metabolism in an effort to shift some weight, it is also a fact that exercise helps to make your general lifestyle far more healthy and conducive to lower blood pressure.
Hence, even after you hit your target weight and presumably find that your hypertension problem has dissipated or perhaps even disappeared altogether, you should nevertheless continue with your daily exercise routines. Whilst you're no longer exercising to lose weight, you nevertheless need to maintain your reduced weight if you want to keep your blood pressure levels low so taking a reasonable amount of exercise two or three times a week is absolutely essential.