Active Lifestyle

A physically active lifestyle is fundamental to good health. Regular exercise is one of the best predictors of health, and no matter what you weigh, you can’t afford to be a couch potato. Yet most Utah adults don’t meet the recommended levels of physical activity.
So where do you start? Escaping from a sedentary lifestyle can seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. Here are some tips for developing and maintaining a regular physical activity regimen.
Just start, no matter how small! The rule with exercise is that none is bad, some is good, and more is better. Don’t worry if you can’t meet the recommendations right away. Be patient, and aim for progress, not perfection.

• Start with aerobic activities, which have the most substantial health benefits. Use large muscle groups for enough time to raise your heart rate and break a sweat. Later on, you can add balance, flexibility, or strength training for even more benefits.
• Start slowly and build up slowly. If you’ve been inactive for some time, you might just take a ten-minute walk every couple of days. But schedule a time and make it a part of your routine. Later, you can increase the duration of the exercise, and then the intensity. Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity each week. (Just 30 minutes, five days a week!)
• Sit less. Too much time sitting can increase your risk for chronic disease, even if you get the recommended 150 minutes a week. Aim for less than two hours of screen time a day, not including work and school, and try to sit for less than six hours total. If you have to sit a lot, stand up and move around for two or three minutes every half hour.
• Do what works for YOU. You’re more likely to keep a habit that reflects who you are and what you enjoy. Exercising with a friend or family member can help you stay on a schedule and can make workouts more fun. But listening to music or audiobooks can give you time for solitude and reflection. Find what works for you.

Benefit of Physical Activity

The benefits of exercise go far beyond weight management. They also include:

• A lower risk of anxiety and depression
• Better sleep, and a boost to your energy, mental sharpness, and creativity
• Lower risks for hypertension, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and breast and colon cancer
• Greater muscle mass and bone density, fat reduction, and an improved body image
• Reduce risk of cardiovascular disease
• Strengthens bones and muscles
• Improve your ability to do daily activities and prevent falls, if you’re an older adult
• Increase your chances of living longer

Check with your doctor before starting a new exercise program, especially if you haven’t exercised for a while or if you have chronic health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis. If you want a personalized plan, your primary care provider can help get you started.

Intuitive Eating - Honor your Health --Gentle Nutrition

Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

Intuitive Eating - Exercise - Feel the Difference

Exercise--Feel the Difference

Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

Intuitive Eating - Respect Your Body

Respect Your Body

Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

Intuitive Eating - Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food

Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food

Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover, but food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

Intuitive Eating - Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Discover the Satisfaction Factor

The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to   decide you've had "enough."

Intuitive Eating - Respect Your Fullness

Respect Your Fullness.

Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

Intuitive Eating - Challenge the Food Police

Challenge the Food Police

Scream "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

Intuitive Eating - Make Peace with Food

Make Peace with Food

Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

Intuitive Eating - Honor your Hunger

Honor Your Hunger

Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates.
Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with  yourself and food.

Use the Hunger & Fullness Scale to listen to your body and pay better attention to when you are hunger and when you are full.

Intuitive Eating - Reject the Diet Mentality

Intuitive eating is an approach that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body. Over the next week or so we will focus each day on 1 of the 10 guiding principles of Intuitive Eating. 

Reject the Diet Mentality. Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight  quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

Serving Sizes and Reading Food Labels

Dimensions of Health and Wellness

Health is not just a physical aspect. Consider the other aspects of health and think of ways you can improve your health by focusing on something beyond the physical.

Hunger & Fullness Scale

One way to get back in touch with your body and to live a healthier life is to pay attention and be mindful when you are eating. Start by paying attention to your hunger and fullness. Use the scale below to help you get more in tune with your eating habits and develop a healthier relationship with food.

Choose My Plate

Measuring Success

During the first week of the contest we will highlight and explore the information found in your participant packet. We hope that you will take the time to read through all the information that is provided to you. The information is intended to help you determine a healthy approach to living a healthier life. We hope this contest will help you establish LIFESTYLE changes that will improve your health.

Living a healthier lifestyle is not just about weight loss. Another measurement of success you could consider is through inches lost or muscle gained. As you become more active you may lose inches and maybe not necessarily pounds. Maybe your goal is to increase your bicep size...whatever your goal is hopefully this tool will help you measure a different kind of success.

This chart is a way to keep track of your measurements at the beginning of the contest and compare the difference at the end of the contest. A copy of this chart can be found in your participant packet on page 13.

Daily Caloric Intake

Whether your goal is weight loss or not it is important to understand and know how much fuel your body needs in order for you to be healthy and function properly. Look at page 14-16 in your participant packet to find out what your energy needs might be for you to accomplish your health goals.

Nutrition Challenge Starts TODAY!

This is a great opportunity to focus on improving your diet. The Nutrition Challenge is designed to encourage you to incorporate a more balanced diet into your daily life. Use the tracker sheet on page 7 of your participant packet to mark off the boxes as you complete the weekly challenges. Each challenge is worth 10 points with a max of 70 points per week. Points earned will go toward contest point totals.

Understanding Body Composition

During the pre-assessments you should have had your body composition measured. It is important to understand what the information means so you can evaluate your improvement throughout the contest. A copy of this sheet is available on page 12 of your participant packet. If you have further questions about understanding your body composition talk to us at the weekly weigh-in or send us an email.