The Benefits Of Drinking Coffee

For years we have been told that too much coffee is bad for us; some experts even went so far as to suggest that drinking it in any amount wasn't good for our health. Much like fashion and trends, expert opinions can change over time. With the completion of many long-term studies experts concede that there are some really great benefits to enjoying a good cup of coffee.

The most obvious benefit is enjoyment. Java drinkers are well known for enjoying their cup of joe; most coffee drinkers find savouring their steamy cup to be relaxing. What most studies fail to address is whether the benefit is due to enjoyment of the beverage or enjoyment of the experience; regardless of the genesis of the enjoyment most java drinkers credit their drink with starting their day off right.

According to the ever growing amount of research results; drinking coffee may benefit by lowering the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes, Dementia and Parkinson's Disease. When compared to other beverage drinkers, coffee drinkers seem to be less likely to suffer strokes (especially for women) and certain types of cancer. In addition, coffee drinkers seem to encounter fewer heart rhythm issues.

When calorically compared to soda pop, a good cup of coffee shines. Unless it is dosed with additives such as sweetener and creamer, it is very low in calories. There are a mere 7 calories in a 6 ounce up of black brew; calories soar to 46 calories with cream and 23 calories with just one teaspoon of sugar. As you can see, black is the best way to drink it for health.

It is well known for its positive effect on mental alertness. This effect is due to the chemical compound known as caffeine. Study after study has shown that caffeine enhances mental performance; caffeine has also been shown to improve some individual's attention span. Researchers generally agree that coffee is beneficial in increasing concentration and in alertness, both critical factors in performance capability.

The beverage enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a stimulant. It is absorbed into the blood system within twenty minutes of consumption. Once in the blood system caffeine works to block adenosine receptors and as a result, the central nervous system is stimulated which in turn increases alertness. The effects of caffeine can last for hours. According to findings of two independent health studies, increasing caffeine intake does not necessarily result in increased levels of alertness.

Mood enhancement is another benefit attributed to drinking a steaming cup of joe. A much needed coffee break during work hours is a time to refresh and get ready for the rest of the day; research shows that caffeine not only increases alertness but it also enhances feelings of contentment, lowers anxiety levels, increases motivation and inspires self confidence; all these benefits come after consuming only one cup of caffeinated.

The benefits of drinking coffee are real. Habitual coffee drinkers are revelling in study results that indicate healthy adults can enjoy it in moderation (4-5 regular cups daily) and reap the benefits of increased mental alertness, enhanced mood and perhaps decreased chances of suffering from some very serious medical conditions.

 The Truth about Weightloss and Diets

Low calorie diets have traditionally been recommended for weightloss. But fitness experts are starting to avoid the use of the word “diet”. They encourage their clients to change their dietary habits instead.

You have to look at what you are currently eating in order to decide if any of the following recommendations apply. They might. They might not. These are just some of the more common obstacles that overweight and obese individuals face.

Eating Out

Restaurants increase their profits by increasing portion sizes. It actually costs them less to give you more. Their commercials are designed to make you hungry. The food often looks better than it actually tastes.

If eating out often is one of your habits, you can try to eat only half of the typical restaurant portion. You can always take the rest home and have it for lunch tomorrow.

The best suggestion is to eat out less often. Learn to prepare your own food. It’s healthier and you have more control over what goes into it. It’s easier to keep track of calories and nutritional value by buying whole foods and preparing them at home.

Frozen Weightloss Dinners

There are about a dozen different brands on the market. You have probably tried some of them on previous diets. While the manufacturers might mean well, they are not doing you a favor. You could use one of the “systems” and lose all of the weight that you want. But what happens when it comes time to maintain that weight loss?

All you have to do is to look at the celebrities who endorse the systems. All of them eventually regain the weight, because they don’t learn how to eat.

Research has shown that most of the frozen diet dinners contain more sodium than you need. Many overweight people are sensitive to sodium. The more they eat, the more fluid they retain and the higher their blood pressure goes.

Diets That Work

There are some diets that work for weightloss and for weight maintenance, because they include a maintenance plan. You don’t have to buy special packaged foods. You learn to cook your own.

Atkins, the Zone and South Beach are a few good examples, but there are many others. Read the books. Don’t buy the packaged foods unless you really feel a need to.

If you feel that you don’t have time for cooking, try to make time. If you are too tired, try taking some good dietary supplements and exercising more. While it might not seem like it, exercise will actually give you more energy. Once you start, you won’t feel sapped at the end of the day.

Regular physical activity is also a key for weightloss and maintenance. It’s good for every part of your body. So get up and go for a walk. Then start thinking about what to cook for dinner.

 Stress Management and Relaxation Suggestions

Relaxation and stress management are things that everyone needs. Researchers have found a connection between chronic stress and life-threatening diseases. Heart disease, cancer and many others may be related to an inability to relax. Here are a few suggestions to help relax and possibly avoid those diseases.

Breathe

Most people think of breathing as something automatic. They don’t need to think about it. But stressed out individuals are usually shallow breathers. They fail to take full deep breaths.

Shallow breathers have poorly oxygenated blood and their blood pressure is higher. This is one of the reasons they have an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.

Drink Plain Pure Water

Stress-type headaches are those that feel like an elastic band is wrapped tightly around your head. One author described headaches as one of your body’s “many cries for water”.

The next time that you have a headache, try drinking an 8 ounce glass of pure, unflavored, chilled water. Give yourself 10-20 minutes of relaxation time. Try to focus on your breathing and clear your mind for those few minutes. This will relieve a stress-type headache faster than aspirin.

Cut Back on Caffeine

Caffeine and stress management do not go together. Caffeine is a stimulant drug. It causes increased heart rate and increased blood pressure. It stimulates the adrenal gland to produce adrenalin, which causes your muscles to tense. This is the beginning of the fight or flight response.

According to the Mayo Clinic, your maximum daily caffeine intake should not exceed 500mg. That is equivalent to five 8 ounce cups of coffee. If you drink a 24 ounce cup of coffee every morning, you are getting 300mg first thing.

Cutting out caffeine completely may trigger a different type of headache. Our bodies become addicted to the substance very quickly. A better idea is to cut back slowly.

Exercise

Exercise is an important part of stress management. You can do yoga if you like. The type taught by most instructors will help you increase your flexibility. They also teach you how to breathe for relaxation.

You might not like the idea of doing all of those funny poses. If that’s the case, do whatever you like. Walk, ride a bike, jog, lift weights…any kind of regular physical activity will help you become a more relaxed person.

Deep breathing is something that occurs naturally when we exercise. Whatever activity you choose, do it every day. Call it your daily prescription for stress management and relaxation.

Managing your Stress Levels with Effective Time Management

Time management is basically about staying focused. Staying focused keeps you on track, if you’re on track with what you are doing there are less chances of making mistakes. This will help you achieve the desired goal much quicker, not having to go back and correct mistakes takes less time and allows more productivity.

Some people view time management as a list of rules that involves setting goals, keeping track of appointments, careful planning, creating ”to do lists” and prioritizing various tasks. These core basics of time management should be clearly understood in order to develop an efficient personal time management skill. Once you have the basic skills they can be fine tuned further to include more defined points of each skill that can provide you that extra reserve to help you achieve your goals and desires.

But there are many more skills involved in time management than the core basics. Skills such as decision making, inherent abilities such as emotional intelligence and critical thinking are also essential to your personal growth and success.

Your personal time management involves everything you do in daily life. No matter how big and no matter how small, everything counts. All of the new knowledge you acquire, each new advice you consider, every new skill you develop should be taken into consideration.

Having a balanced life-style should be the key result in having great personal time management. This is the main aspect that many practitioners of personal time management fail to grasp.

Time management is about getting results, and getting all of your goals accomplished. It’s not about being busy.

The six areas that personal time management can improve anyone’s life they are:

Physical - involves having a healthy body, less stress, less tension and fatigue.

Intellectual - involves learning and other mental growth activities to keep your mind stimulated and active.

Social - involves developing personal communications with others and being an active contributor to society.

Career -  involves school and work, helping you to be more productive.

Emotional – involves appropriate feelings and manifesting them. Changing your negative thoughts to positive ones.

Spiritual – involves a personal quest for meaning, and realizing you have a purpose in life is very important.

Thoroughly planning and having a set of things to do list for each of the key areas may not be very practical, but determining which area in your life is not being giving enough attention is part of time management. Each area creates the whole you, if you are ignoring one area then you are ignoring an important part of yourself and not allowing yourself to reach your full potential.

Developing personal time management skills is not a hard task to achieve. It is a very sensible and reasonable approach in solving everyday problems big or small.

A great way of learning time management and improving your personal life is to follow several basic activities.

One of them is to review your goals whether it be immediate or long-term goals often.

A way to do this is to keep a list that is always accessible to you.

Always determine which task is necessary or not necessary in achieving your goals and which activities are helping you maintain a balanced life style.

Each and everyone of us has a peek time and a time when we slow down, these are our natural cycles. We should be able to tell when to do the difficult tasks when we are the sharpest.

Learning to say “No”. You actually see this advice often. Heed it even if it involves saying the word to family or friends.

Pat yourself at the back or just reward yourself in any manner for an effective time management result.

Try and get the cooperation from people around you who are actually benefiting from your efforts of time management.

Don’t procrastinate. Attend to necessary things immediately.

Have a positive attitude and set yourself up for success. But be realistic in your approach in achieving your goals.

Have a record or journal of all your activities. This will help you get things in their proper perspective.

These are the few steps you initially take in becoming a well rounded individual.

As the say personal time management is the art and science of building a better life for yourself.

From the moment you start putting your time management skills to work, you will have opened several options that can provide a broad spectrum of solutions to your personal growth. It also allows more doors of opportunity to open.

  Time Managment Tips

Your personal development is dependent on your strategy to achieve your goals and effective time management, this also shows that your time management skills, goal strategy and actual goal setting are inseparable. If you were to define management I believe you would say that it is really your ability to manage time, organize your life and control events and people as opposed to mismanagement being the antithesis of a good time management system.

Simply, control is the key element of time management skills:

Lack of control is directly linked to low personal development in individuals just as those with a high sense of control also have a high personal development capacity.

Your time management techniques are a major strategy. The ability to work smart and organize your life is effective time management and once developed you will control many things which you previously thought were beyond your control, emphasising the importance of time management.

There is one thing you cannot do with time – make it go backwards. You cannot put back into the ground a flower you have picked, you cannot unsay any word that comes from your lips, you cannot reclaim any minute that slips by without action in your quest for goal achievement. Putting things off rather than getting them out of the way by taking action is a common trait of those who have very low time management skills. They live by the creed ‘Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow, good time management is alien to their way of life.

It is a fact that if you keep putting off tasks until the last possible moment not only will you re-enforce poor time management skills you will suffer far more stress than those who see a task and handle it immediately – the answer organize your life starting today.

Your time is stolen by two major time bandits:

1. Yourself (internal)
2. Others (external)

Hold your hands up! There is one person totally responsible for wasting most of your time and for allowing others to waste your time – YOU!

ONLY YOU CAN CHANGE THIS

There are six major time management skills you have to master that illustrate the importance of planning:-

1.  Pursue your goals daily
2.  Develop a time management system
3.  Organize your life and become totally committed
4.  Go public
5.  Keep things in perspective
6.  Start at the end first

The greatest threat to best time management and organizing your life is that of rationalization. There is one skill that the majority of people who do not know how to manage time have mastered – rationalization?

The greatest time bandit of all is rationalization. What is rationalization, it is when you justify not doing the things you should do to achieve a particular goal.

While it is true that lack of a time management system organizing your life and lack of satisfaction are the offspring of rationalization, worse of all lack of action will sabotage any pursuit of a goal.

The importance of planning with positive action is the real antidote to rationalization. Your power will come by visualizing and concentrating on all the benefits you will get from good time management.

Strangely the quickest and most effective way to save time before you start your course of action. Ask yourself this question: Simply ask yourself what do you want to achieve in taking the action you are set on taking?

In order to experience effective time management there is a simple thing to do, write your intended result of any situation down before you set off on your course of action, it will help you concentrate and focus on the task in hand.

 Getting the Proper Amount of Sleep is Essential to a Healthy Life

Whether you are a brand new mom, or your children are a bit older, feeling exhausted after a busy day happens all too often. Sleep is very essential in order to maintain a healthy life, and helps your body ward off serious diseases.

If you don’t get enough sleep, it can have a major effect on brain function, the healing process ( especially if you are a new mom and recovering from a c-section), elevate stress levels, and it may also increase your anger and irritability. If you are lacking sleep may be inclined to feel depressed. Studies have also proven that the right amount of sleep will help prevent Cancer and Alzheimer’s.  

There are some circumstances that may prevent you from getting the amount of sleep your body needs every night, but there are ways to cope.

Getting sleep if you are a mother of a newborn baby:

If you are a new mother, you may be adjusting to your new baby sleep schedule. Babies have a tendency to wake up all hours of the night and this will be disruptive to your sleep patterns.  There are many ways around this, one key is to sleep when your baby is sleeping. If your baby sleeps in the day time for a few hours, have a sleep at the same time he or she is napping. If you are really exhausted and you have some help from family members or close friends, ask them to come over and watch the baby while you take a nap. Family members and close friends will love having the opportunity to spend time with your new baby, and this will allow you to recharge your batteries and be able to cope with getting up throughout the night. Forget about the house chores, and what needs to be done, it can wait. Your health is more important, so sleep when you have the chance.

If your children are older, chances are they don’t get up through the night. Therefore there are several things you can do for yourself to ensure you get the right amount of sleep needed.

How much sleep do we need?

According to the National Sleep Foundation the average healthy adult requires 7-9 hours a sleep per night.

Some ways to ensure you get a good night’s sleep:

• Go to bed as early as possible. 
• No TV right before bed – it provides too much brain stimulation and will make it harder for you to fall asleep quickly. 
• Avoid snacks before bed – especially grains and sugar, a sugar filled snack will raise your sugar levels and inhibit your sleep. 
• Keep your bedroom as dark as possible. 
• Keep your bedroom temperature comfortable, no more than 70 degrees F. 
• Avoid Caffeine. 
• Go to the bathroom right before bed. 
• Don’t drink any fluids within 2 hours before your bedtime. 
• Take a hot bath or shower before bed. 
• Listen to relaxing music or write in a journal before you turn out the light, this will help your mind unwind. 
• Get your alarm clock out of view – if it’s there it will keep you from sleeping. You will find yourself looking at it throughout the night. 

Although getting more sleep may be easier said than done, we must do what it takes to ensure we keep our bodies healthy. Getting the proper nutrition and enough sleep will help us to enjoy the time we spend with our family, lower our stress levels and extend our life.

Ways to Deal with Everyday Stress 

With all of the everyday stresses such as bills, household chores, relationship issues, keeping a house running smoothly, work and everything that goes along with being a mother. One can’t help but be a little overwhelmed and stressed out.

Here are some of the things that can help you deal with stress and anxiety caused by everyday life in general:

Managing your time

Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity at home and in the workplace.

Improving time management:

Save time by focusing and concentrating on what you are doing, When you concentrate, you don’t make many mistakes and this way you won’t have to waste time going back to fix things.

 Delegating things that can be done by others (like making a meal, doing laundry or doing the dishes) this will free up some time for you  and allow you to schedule some time for yourself.

Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time. This will allow better time management in the future when you look back and see what you have done.

Prioritize what has to be done and make a list rating tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect your time to those activities that are important and meaningful to you.

Manage your commitments by not trying to fit too much into your schedule. Don’t commit to what is not important to you or your family.

Use a day planner deal with procrastination, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines for yourself.  Everything will be less overwhelming this way.

Develop healthy coping strategies for stress:

Start a Stress Journal: record the stressful event in your life, your reaction, and how you coped with the situation. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones-those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body fights off stress. Try to:

• Balance your personal life, work, and family needs and obligations.
• Have a good sense of purpose in life.
• Get enough sleep,  it is a known fact that your body recovers from the stresses of the day while you are sleeping.
• Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress.
• Get moderate amount of exercise during the week.
• Limit your consumption of alcohol.
• Don’t smoke and if you do, now is the time to quit.

Social support and interaction with others:

Social interaction and support is a major factor in how we deal with stress. Social interaction and support is the all of the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is the feeling that you are cared for, loved, and valued. Lately research has indicated a strong relationship between social support and better physical and mental health.

Changing the way you think:

Change your way of thinking to positive thoughts, when an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. Emotions  have the ability to trigger the body’s stress, just as an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts  and trying to change your way of thinking to positive thoughts can help reduce stress.

When you feel yourself having a negative thought, change your thought process and turn it into a positive thought instead.

Getting rid of  irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.

Thinking of ways to solve a problem helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it appropriately.

Learn to communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, upset or intimidated.  This will help you avoid future stressful situations with the ones you are communicating with.

Let’s be honest, everyone experiences stress of some sort from day to day, if you follow the simple strategies to reduce your stress, your life will be much happier, more meaningful and more enjoyable.

So get out there and enjoy a stress reduced life!

 Dealing with Postpartum Depression

Having a baby is a big life changing event, especially for the mother who is undergoing physical and emotional changes after giving birth.

Currently 1 in 5 women suffer from postpartum depression.

Symptoms include:

• Lack of concern for yourself 
• Negative feelings toward your newborn baby 

Causes of Postpartum Depression:

A rapid hormonal change accompanying pregnancy and delivery which triggers depression. After the birth of a child, the mother experiences a sudden drop in progesterone and estrogen hormone levels. In addition to hormonal changes, thyroid levels drop as well causing depression and fatigue.

Woman who have a history of depression may be more susceptible to developing postpartum depression.

If you think you may be suffering from Postpartum Depression you should seek medical help from your doctor. There are many treatments available to help you get through this difficult time.

Treatments include:

• Psychotherapy 
• Anti-depressant Medication 
• Hormone therapy 
• Personal counselling and/or Marriage counselling 

There are also great books available to help you through, I recommend “Down came the rain” by Brooke Shields. This was a great account of her experience. After reading this book you will definitely not feel alone.

Postpartum depression is a treatable condition and you should not be embarrassed to ask for help. 

• Loss of happiness and pleasure 
• Lack of Motivation 
• Lack of Energy 
• Loss of interest in activities 
• Feeling guilty or worthless 
• Fear of hurting your baby 
• Lack of interest in your baby 
• Re-occurring thoughts of suicide or death 
• Changes in sleep patterns (wanting to sleep more, or not sleeping) 
• Changes in appetite and weight changes 

Don’t get caught up in the feelings that people might not understand what you are going through, there are lots of resources available to help you. Don’t be afraid to reach out.