Motivation for Exercise

Ask Dr. J—How can I stay Motivated?

Question: Dear Dr. J, Every time I start an exercise program, eventually it fades out of my life and I stop doing it altogether. Can you give me some ideas on how to avoid this? Is it bad to start again, stop again, start again, stop again, etc.?

Answer: Sticking with your exercise program regularly and consistently is your best bet for overall health. While there's no specific danger in starting and stopping over and over again, it's important to set personal goals and identify what motivates you to exercise. Even if there's been a long lapse in your sessions, you should do your best to get back to regular exercise as soon as you can.

The first thing you need to do is find out what motivates you. For some, it's disease prevention. For example if a close family member has been affected by heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, or cancer, that may be what motivates you to stay healthy and avoid the same path. Regular exercise reduces your risk of developing these and other diseases and will help you maintain a healthy body weight.

For others, living longer could be a motivator. Research has shown that exercise may extend the years of your life. It can greatly enhance your quality of living, too, by making regular day-to-day physical activities such as climbing stairs, carrying groceries, and vacuuming easier.

Now, the most important thing is getting started and sticking to it. How one starts an exercise program usually will dictate whether you stick with it. If you have started programs in the past only to quit a month later, pay careful attention to setting realistic goals. For example, don't try to run a marathon or lose 10 pounds in a month. Begin slowly and try a number of different exercises.

 

You also can try my favorite technique of all………VISUALIZATION! Picture yourself enjoying your workout and then feeling great when you've finished. Then, picture the body you want. Go ahead…….tell me this does not motivate you to keep it up.

If boredom is hindering your routine, try doing new exercises, pick a new sport, or recruit an exercise partner. The key is finding something you like and sticking with it.

Something else I like to do is distract myself during exercise. This works especially well for cardio activities. Distractions, such as reading, listening to music, or watching television while you work out, can also help keep you motivated. Try exercising at a different time of day, or break up a workout schedule to include aerobic exercise in the morning and strength training at night.

Overall, it's important to not get discouraged if you miss a week or two of exercise. It's never too late to get started again. When your program gets derailed, try to figure out what went wrong and learn from your mistakes. Best of luck and keep training hard and smart!

If you have diabetes and peripheral neuropathy, it's critical that you carefully control your blood sugar levels. High blood sugar over time damages the blood vessels and nerves in your legs and feet. Fortunately, a good diet and regular, moderate intensity exercise can help improve your body's use of insulin, get your weight under control, and improve blood sugar.

Adopting healthy eating and exercise habits is "tremendously important" because it keeps blood glucose (blood sugar) levels under control. There is considerable scientific evidence that lifestyle changes can prevent the development and slow the progression of microvascular complications. In addition, exercise like walking can relieve the pain, probably because it improves circulation.

To change your lifestyle:

• Get regular physical activity. Ask your doctor for an exercise routine that is right for you. Aside from helping you reach and maintain a healthy weight, exercise also improves the body's use of insulin and improves circulation. It also strengthens muscles, which improves coordination and balance in muscles that may have been weakened due to decreased nerve activity. Your doctor can get you started on an exercise program that won't be hard on your feet -- like walking, swimming, biking, or yoga. You may need to limit exercises that do stress your feet, such as running or aerobics. People with neuropathy -- especially those with bone deformities -- should always wear well-fitted shoes to avoid pressure sores and ulcers on the feet.
• If you smoke, stop. Smoking makes circulatory problems worse, which is thought to be one cause of neuropathy, and worsen the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. Smoking also greatly increases the risk of heart disease in people with diabetes. Talk to your doctor about ways to quit smoking. Often, people turn to counseling and to drug therapy, such as nicotine patches, gum, or other aides. Antidepressants can help reduce cravings and help control pain from neuropathy at the same time.
• Carefully limit alcohol. Excess alcohol intake can worsen neuropathy and make it hard to control your blood sugar levels.

Eat a Balanced Diet

To keep blood sugar as close to normal as possible, it's important to follow the right meal plan. A well-balanced diet can make a big difference. You might want to consult with your doctor or a dietitian to learn what foods are best, when to eat, how much to have of each food, and what to avoid.

You will need to keep close track of the carbohydrates you eat since they have the most immediate effect on your blood sugar. Carbohydrates are in these food groups:

• Fruit
• Milk and yogurt
• Bread, cereal, rice, pasta
• Starchy vegetables

You should eat plenty of fiber since it plays a role in the digestive process, reduces heart disease risk, and can improve blood sugars. Choose from:

• Fresh fruits and vegetables
• Cooked dried beans and peas
• Whole grain breads, cereals, and crackers
• Brown rice
• Bran products

It's important to eat foods that are low in fat. Good choices are:

• Lean meats. Bake, broil, grill, roast, or boil - never fry
• Low-fat dairy. That includes cheese, milk, yogurt
• Low-fat vegetable cooking spray
• Low-fat margarines and salad dressings

Avoid high-sodium foods which can cause high blood pressure:

• Salt
• Boxed mixes of potatoes, rice, pasta
• Canned meats
• Canned soups and vegetables
• Processed and packaged foods (lunch meat, sausage, bacon ham)
• Salty snack foods

This is not my usual place to speak about financials, but recently this has become a topic of major significance. More specifically, I am talking about your financial advisor. Your financial advisor must put your interests first.

The problem is that many, but certainly not all, financial salespeople are compensated based on the fees and commissions they generate.

So, how do you know if your financial  advisor is acting in your best interest? There is a term called "fiduciary". Fiduciary signifies that the advisor is legally bound to act in the best interest of their investor clients.

Make sure your financial advisor is a registered fiduciary. Some brokers, however, will tell you that they are able to act as both your fiduciary and salesperson...alternating between the two (typically depending on which role pays the most) without taking 100% fiduciary responsibility 100% of the time.

You can take the following steps to safeguard your assets:

1. Require all financial professionals working with you to sign fiduciary aggreement. Ask your attorney to draft the agreement and have it notorized.
2. Ask your financial professional how he or she is compensated.
3. Request a financial advisors' rerferences and ask those references whether they found that advisor honest and competant.

These simple steps will truly show who is willing to act as your fiduciary and act in your best interest.

What is it about Dreams???

I want to touch on a book that I just finished reading. It starts out a bit drab as it discusses the psychological work of Carl Jung. You may remember studying him during your early college years. Then, it gets into some really interesting analogies from the Bible. In the book, Dreams, God's Forgotten Language, author, John Sanford draws on the work of Carl Jung to show how dreams can help us find healing and wholeness and reconnect us to a living spiritual world.

Dreams traces the role of dreams in the Bible and how God speaks to us. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, pioneered a whole new outlook on the way we tick. He peered into our darker spaces and our dim, forgotten corners.

To start, lets discuss our shadow. If you stand facing the light, you will cast a shadow. Unless, you turn and look on the floor behind you, you will not be aware of the dark shadow following you. The shadow is the part of our personality, which is in our background, of which we are usually unaware. Similar to Eckhart Tolle’s idea of “the ego,” our shadow is the part of ourselves we want to hide from the world...our mistakes, guilt, failures, insecurities and demons that we bury under a carefully crafted ego of armor.

So the shadow is our angry side, our weakness, our sickness, our primitiveness, our sensuality, our rebelliousness, our inferiority...whatever it may be about ourselves of which we are most afraid and would rather not face. The shadow slinks around and most often we would rather die than have someone say we are like them.

Where do we see our shadow? In our dreams. It appears as the sinister or inferior figure of our own sex. The more we try to remain unaware of it, the more it manifests itself. To understand the shadow, we can contrast it to the persona. The persona is the front we put on. It is a form of adaptation to the society in which we live. Most often, we come to identify with the persona. We think we are the person whom we would like to appear to be. The shadow stands in direct contrast.

From a Christian perspective, our dreams reflect the life process at work in us that seeks to make us aware of Christlike totality or wholeness. So, it is not a matter or "either or", but of "both." We cannot give our shadow a full license, but instead, we become one with our good side and reach out  and intergrate our lower nature. This solves the "Christian Problem."

To learn more, consider reading Dreams, God's Forgotten Language by John Sanford. You will see illustrations of dreams and visions in the Bible and you will also see how we, as Christians, have suppressed our shadow and have literally become "split."

Glycemic Index

• In the past, we used the terms simple and complex to describe carbohydrates
• The problem some complex carbs caused a rise in blood sugar similar to simple carbs
• Now we use the term Glycemic index
• Measures how fast food is likely to raise your blood sugar
• Glucose is given an arbitrary value of 100 and other carbs are given values relative to glucose
• The impact a food will have on blood sugar depends on many factors such as:
• Ripeness
• Cooking time
• Fiber content
• Fat content
• Time of day
• Blood insulin levels
• Recent activity
• Particle size
• Low glycemic index foods are those values less than 55—these are foods that as they are digested produce a low, slow blood sugar response
• Intermediate glycemic index are those values between 55 and 70
• High glycemic index are those values greater than 70—these foods are quickly broken down in the intestine and cause the glucose level to rise quickly
• GI, however, tells you only how rapidly a particular carb turns into glucose. It tells the quality of the carb. It does not tell you how much of that carb is a serving for a particular food (quantity)
• Glycemic Load takes quantity of available carbs into account. Glycemic load equals the GI times the number of carb grams in a food

Lets be careful!!!!!!!! The worth of any food cannot be measured by a single number, but a single number can tell you a great deal about how the carb in that food affects blood glucose levels. For instance, the number tells us nothing about the nutritional value, vitamin/mineral content, or fiber content. The numbers can be misleading. Some worthless foods like diet soda have low numbers and nuts, for instance, have higher values.

• Meal planning:
• Hulless barley in the rice cooker sweetened with splenda and cinnamon
• Bread is near 100 on the GI, but using a different grain such as corn, soybeans, oat bran, or barley are good choices. Burgen Soy Lin in the lowest GI bread available
• Pasta substitutes include Shirataki noodles in the refrigerated section. No need to boil them….simply heat up and eat. Any other high fiber pasta is appropriate to substitute
• Cereals such as Mc Cann’s Irish Oatmeal which are steel cut oats instead of rolled oats
• Chips such as Trader Joe’s Soy and flaxseed Tortillas
• Veggies
• Nuts such as walnuts
• Dry roasted Edamame and frozen variety in place of higher glycemic veggies (peas, carrots, corn)

HEALTH INSURANCE DOES NOT EQUAL HEALTH CARE

Health insurance doesn't automatically lead to health care. Today, the average American life expectancy is close to 80, and the fastest growing segment of the American population is adults 85 years or older. While there may not be an actual fountain of youth, we are continually re-defining old age and pushing the limits of lifespan further and further.

Increased lifespan may sound like a dream come true. But it may be a nightmare in progress. Unless we assume far greater responsibility for our health, current increases in longevity spell decrepitude and financial disaster for millions of Americans.

If rates of disease and disability continue at their current levels, America will become a nation of sick, senile, disenfranchised, impoverished seniors, with too few resources to care for them and astronomical medical costs that will cripple our economy.

For example, the average American over the age of 65 suffers multiple chronic conditions, including hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, hearing and vision disorders. This group accounts for one third of all health care spending, one third of prescription drug use and 40 percent of doctor visits.

Over 25 percent of those 85 or older require institutional care. Unless the economic structure of the nation is substantially re-vamped, Medicare will run out of funds by 2029. Suddenly, the idea of living 100 years or more loses some of its luster.

Unfortunately, health care in the U.S. is currently in crisis, and many people have lost confidence in medicine. Medical services are expensive, and insurance is becoming prohibitively costly. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans, there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have. Of course, we're promised by the Obama administration that universal health insurance will avoid all these problems.

Obamacare is facing a perfect storm. First, there is an ongoing court battle to determine the law’s constitutionality. This legal challenge, now at the federal appellate court level, is sure to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, the question being when, not if. The Obama administration is clearly in no rush to see this happen, because if the court rules against them, it will have a major impact on the 2012 election. By 2014, most of the features of the bill, including the individual mandate, will be instituted, the Independent Medicare Advisory Board will be in place, and millions more patients will be signing up for Medicaid or receiving subsidies for individual private policies or paying penalties. Once our health-care delivery system is significantly altered by these provisions, it will be much harder to repeal or remove them.

In terms of the individual mandate, Obamacare’s biggest deception remains the use of the term “health care” in place of “insurance.” For Obamacare is not only unconstitutional in compelling a patient to buy a product, it is also suspect from a public-health perspective since having insurance does not guarantee access to health care.

If the federal government believes it must ensure health care for all as a public protection, much as a mandatory vaccine protects the public from an emerging disease, then the government must do so by providing the doctors, nurses, and clinics to deliver this care. Doctors have long understood that health insurance of all kinds interferes with — rather than promotes or enables — the practice of medicine.

What may be an option to private insurance is getting beaten down by the White House. Health insurers are adjusting their financial underpinnings to guard as best they can against any major reduction in profits. The public needs to be aware of this and take what measures they can to offset the increases in premiums, co pays and deductibles.  Sadly, Congress is looking to limit rather than expand Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts, which if adopted by more in the middle and upper class could go a long way to easing the hikes being imposed on businesses and individuals by health insurers.  Expansion, not reduction of HSA and FSA accounts should be part of real health reform.  Sadly this Congress and President are not about limiting costs to tax payers, but increasing those costs unnecessarily .

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more information over the upcoming 6-9 months. Educate yourself. Read about your options. Take a stance for YOUR health care. Vote in 2012!

The older you get the fatter you get is a simply stupid statement — don’t you believe it. Perhaps a more accurate proclamation might be the lazier you get the fatter you get.

As I have written in the past, unless there is an underlying medical cause, there is no reason, aging or any other, for one to become obese. Obesity is a result of poor eating habits and lack of proper exercise.

Because more strength is more muscle and more muscle is more calories burned, strength training lowers body fat, strengthens joints & bones, increases cardiovascular fitness and much more.

Below are some helpful pointers to keep in mind:

• Focus on Strength. More strength is more muscle. More muscle is more calories burned. Focus on strength whatever your goal is. Start light and add weight systematically. You should lift more today than 1 year ago.
• Use Free Weights. Free weights force you to stabilize the weight, allow for natural movement patterns and build functional strength. The bulk of your routine should consist of free weight barbell exercises.
• Use Compound Exercises. Exercises that hit several body parts at the same time stress your body more. Your routine should include Squats, Deadlifts, Overhead Press, Bench Press, Pull-ups, etc.
• Use Proper Technique. Decreases the risk of injury and allows for more weight. Bad technique is acceptable on heavy attempts, but build good habits from the start by learning proper exercise technique.
• Eat Whole Foods. Supplements make your life easier, but whole food is better. Eat proteins, veggies & fruits with each meal. Carbs for energy. Plenty of water. Eat every 3 hours starting at breakfast.
• Don’t Be Perfect. Junk food is ok 10% of the time and bad workouts happen to everyone. Train hard 45 weeks/year & eat healthy 90% of the time, you’ll be muscular with a healthy body fat.

Black Friday, 2011. While $11.4 billion was being spent at retail stores and malls, some over-enthusiastic customers decided to make things even more interesting:

• At a Walmart store in Porter Ranch, California, a woman fired pepper spray into a crowd in an attempt to clear a path to an Xbox. 20 people were treated for injuries.

• Gunshots were fired in a parking lot outside a mall in North Carolina around 2 am. While no one was injured, many shoppers were sent into a panic.

• Believing he was stealing a video game, security guards at a Walmart in Arizona left a 54-year old grandfather bleeding heavily from his nose after slamming him into the ground. The grandfather claimed he put the game in his pants to keep it safe while trying to protect his grandson from getting trampled.

• A shopper was shot outside a Walmart in San Leandro, California at 1:45 am after members of his family resisted two armed robbers attempting to steal their purses. The wounded man was in critical but stable condition.

• After punching another shopper while waiting in line to buy video games, a man was stun-gunned by Police in order to subdue him.

• At 1:15 am, customers waiting in line outside a Hollister store in SOHO were a bit upset after learning that that particular location was not opening until the next day. They got tired of waiting for the door to open and broke it down instead, looting the store in the process.