Blue Butterfly

Winter Active

Winter Active is a national campaign that runs from Jan 18th to Feb 29'08 to promote staying active in the winter months.

Here are a couple great ways to participate!

Winter Active: Participate in any physical activity(including yoga and pilates) between Jan 18th and Feb 29th and register your participation here quoting the Event ID: 243.

Winter Walk Day: Go for a walk on Feb 6th and email the number of walkers and # of minutes walked .  Last year over 30,000 Albertans walked over 1/2million minutes on Winter Walk Day.

Let the Resolutions Begin...

Tips for Weight Management

1. Eat when you are hungry!  Pay attention to your hunger and eat.  Then (this is the tricky part) stop eating when you are full. 
2. Have snacks!  Avoid starving yourself until the next scheduled meal.  Have a snack to tie you over until meal time.  Remember carbs are brain food.
3. Include protein in every meal.  About a ¼ of your meal should be protein.  This will help you stay fuller longer.
4. Go for higher fiber options like whole wheat and multi-grain, when choosing breads, pastas and crackers (12 grain bread and whole wheat pasta are my personal favorites).  This will give your foods a little substance and help keep you regular.
5. Enjoy a variety of foods.  Even the higher fat choices.  Savor every bite of that chocolate cake. 
6. Take your time when you are eating.  Avoid rushing.   This will allow yourself time to become aware of when you are full.  There’s no need to clean your plate.
7. Proportion your portions.  Eating an entire bag of low fat cookies may defeat the purpose of low fat. When you make a sandwich, use a few slices of meat vs. the entire package.
8. Calories do count.  Drinking 2 classes of juice instead of lunch will not only leave you with a high amount of calories, but you will likely feel hungry again soon.
9. Don’t drown your food.  Keep sauces, gravy’s, dressings, oil & butter to a minimum.  Add just enough for the taste.
10. Spice it up!  Add spices to your foods for taste vs. salt.
11. BREAK the FAST.  Eat in the morning to take your body out of starvation mode, and kick-start your metabolism.  Eat, eat, eat to lose, lose, lose.
12. Avoid skipping meals. If your body thinks it’s starving, it will more readily store the calories you consume rather than expend them.
13. Train your tastes.  If the thought of skim milk turns your stomach, try ½ & ½.  ½ 2% milk and ½ skim.  Then eventually decrease the amount of 2% and increase the amount of skim.
14. Don’t deprive yourself.  Give into your cravings.  Again, really enjoy the taste, take your time.  You may find you will satisfy your craving with a few nibbles rather than an entire box.
15. Keep healthy snacks on hand.  Prepare fruits and veggies.  Try nuts and seeds, cheese and whole grain crackers, cottage cheese and fruit, yogurt, snack bars...
16. Drink a ton of water!

Cardiovascular Exercise

• Step 1:  Exercise regularly.  Keep the workout very comfortable, even easy.
• Step 2:  Increase the duration.  After you have established exercise as a part of your weekly routine, start to increase the time:  30min if you exercise 4-6x/week.  40min 3-4x/week.  Keep the intensity comfortable.  Try breaking the time into smaller segments.  Insert rest periods, flexibility or strength training between.
• Step 3:  Increase your intensity.  When you are able to easily complete the established duration, increase the intensity to more of a moderate level.  You should still feel comfortable but challenged.

Strength Training

• 3-4x/week

• 1-2 sets of 10-15 repetitions
• Feel the muscle fatigue with every set.  You will need to rest between sets or work an opposing muscle group.
• Perform 1-2 exercise for each of the major muscle groups throughout your body.
• Give yourself a day of rest between strength training workouts.

Flexibility

• Stretch daily all the major muscle groups throughout the body.
• Flexibility gives you a feeling of freedom within your body.

Relaxation

• Give yourself moments of relaxation at least daily, possibly several times a day.
• Get comfortable, relax all of your muscles, focus on your breathing & be aware of how this makes your body feel.

• Add these modifications to your lifestyle gradually.  The key is that these changes are meant as a lifestyle change to create lasting results.  So whatever you do to lose weight needs to be something you can keep doing for the rest of your life.
• Realize the changes you are making will make you a healthier person.
• Notice how eating healthy and exercising make you feel.  Focus on the immediate rewards of healthy living, the weight loss is a mere bonus.
• Challenge your body, nurture your spirit and open your mind to health and happiness!

The Unknown Zone of Core Training

Squeeze, lift, draw in, elevate--you want me to do what, with my WHAT??

The PELVIC FLOOR is the true mystery of core training.  We often spend much of our time training our rectus abdominus (6 pack), obliques (sides of the abdominals) and transversus (you can find these muscles by palpating just inside your hip bones and coughing).  We even give a little attention to our backs to balance out our stablitly all around the torso.  Our sides are all accounted for but what about the bottom.  I like to compare it to an open ended box.  Even if a box has strong and stable sides, it is only as strong as the bottom of the box.

So when we do finally attempt to address the pelvic floor, are we even engaging it correctly?  Likely not.  If you are clenching, tucking or tightening, you are engaging another area of the body called the glutes or buttocks.  Engaging the pelvic floor is actually quite gentle.  Think of it as more of creating a brace Vs a strong contraction.  Two actions need to take place to stablize the pelvic floor: 

1. Constrict: imagine drawing the structures of the pelvis together.  Use the most superficial (closer to the surface) layer of muscles to draw the sitz bones together and the pubic bone and tail bone toward one another.  This will create a closing action.  Obviously, there is not much movement happening, it's more about creating intention. "Where intention goes, energy will follow. And where there is energy, there is action."--unknown

2.Elevate: using deeper and deeper muscles, imagine the pelvic floor drawing up like an elevator.

Both actions need to happen simultaneously.  Imagine the action of squeezing a tube of toothpaste.  Initially, attempting to engage the pelvic floor while keeping your bum relaxed is a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly.  But with a little practice and concentration it will start to feel a little more natural.

So the next time you lay down for a set of crunches, planks or extensions, start by bracing the pelvic floor to create strength and stablility in all sides of the core.

Create lightness and ease with even the most challenging yoga poses simply by engaging the pelvic floor (AKA: mula bandha or moolabandha--the root lock).  Check out this fact sheet I found on the wonderful world wide web!

No Pain No Gain NO THANKS

More and more society is starting to realize that physical activity is not an option if you want to live a healthy life.  Physical activity is essential for health and if exercise is going to be incorporated as a lifestyle habit it needs to be a habit that can be sustained for an entire lifetime.  People are looking for ways to include physical activity into their daily lifes without punishing their bodies.  Can physical activity be pain free and beneficial?  YOU BET!  Check out the Nia Now website and look into this unique exercise and lifestyle form.  A great example of how to ENJOY movement.