No Excuses!

An article in the Montreal Gazette written by columnist Jill Barker called Turn Excuses Into Action talks about the main excuses that couch potatoes use to get out of exercising. 

One of the biggest excuses, especially for busy moms, is that they are already wound up from chasing after kids all day.  This can no longer be an excuse. For one thing chasing kids all day can be stressful. The purpose of exercise is to release stress, not create more of it. 

If you need to be with your kids all of the time then consider exercising with them.  Play games on your front lawn or in the park with them such as ball, Frisbee or hide and seek. You can also do things like play hula hoop with your kids, hop scotch or jump rope. Yet another thing you can do is just take your kids out for an exercise session based on simple workouts. Do ten sets of simple exercises as a group.   Other athletic activities that kid love are hiking, swimming and climbing. 

Sometimes it is not the kids that are in your way when it comes to getting an exercise program off the ground. An excuse that a lot of people use is 'I'm not a gym person.' You don't have to go to a. Biking, canoeing, swimming, running or even taking a walk in the park count as legitimate forms of exercise.  This way nobody is staring at your body or if you are wearing the latest in spandex fashions.  And unless your kid is a teenager he or she is probably not going to care what you are wearing if you decide to go through a jog in the park with them. 

One of the main excuses that people use is 'I am not in good enough shape to exercise.' This of course is a self-defeating excuse with no way out of the dilemma.   This includes people that feel too fatigued or too stressed to exercise. Unfortunately the more you lie around the more you are just going to want to lie around. This is a vicious circle because it can lead to depression, obesity and other problems.

 Once you feel that you are getting out of shape the best thing to do is nip the problem in the bud before it gets worse. For one thing you are setting a bad example for the kids by lying around all dyad. Barker suggests that the only way out of this one is to keep your goals attainable and start out slowly.  If you are so fatigued that you can't do much more than walk around the block then by all means get up off the couch and walk around the block.  Ask one of your kids to take that walk around the block with you. Every little bit you do will help. In other words, get off the couch and exercise anyway! 

Parenting Tips
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Your Kids Are What They Eat

The cliché phrase is — 'You are what you eat!'  This is absolutely true, however to refine the phrase a little more it should perhaps be revised to 'You are what you digest.'   

This is true for both you and your kids. Vitamins don't quite cut it when it comes to your kids overall health (and yours too.)

The reason you can't replace food with pills is because very few people (especially older people) have much success digesting vitamin pills. They simply pass through the intestines undissolved.  It is a very common problem. The point is that having a good diet is not the same as dieting or popping vitamin or herbal supplements. The food choices we make throughout our lives can help prevent the many diseases that cause premature death or disability, including heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes.  S

ome natural doctors even go so far to insist that diet is the cure for certain kinds of ailments and can go so far as to reverse certain types of ailments and conditions.  To prevent your kids from having dispositions to getting these ailments you need to start them off early. However, the relationship between a good diet and anti-aging is not just speculative in the scientific community.

Nutritionists and doctors are much less skeptical about food as a cure for aging then they used to be.  This is because three long-term studies being conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health have examined the lives of 300,000 people and the findings suggested that a a diet rich in vegetables may help prevent breast and prostate cancer. Another finding was that colon cancer is more common in those who eat red meat and that high fat diets increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer. Furthermore a diet with too many refined carbohydrates increases the risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes Another thing about this study is that an effective healthy diet was not specific to any age.

In other words, what is considered a healthy diet at six years old will still be a healthy diet at age sixty or seventy.  The fact that this type of diet is anti-aging is a given so it is never too late to start rehabilitating the diet through changing your eating habits. This is because it is all about eating in a manner that will prevent the oxidization of cells by free radicals in the first place. 

Yet another important finding of this Harvard Study is that those that those who sat down at a meal and enjoyed it by sharing it with others were more likely to be healthier than those who ate their dinners alone, in front of the television or in a less formal fashion (such as eating on the run.)  This principle focuses the eater to pay attention to what is going into his or her mouth as the center of attention is the meal and not the television set!

Parenting Tips
, , , , , ,