Woman's Health

Trick-or-Treat-Give Me Something Good to Eat

via Integrative Nutrition Blog by Integrative Nutrition on 10/28/09

 

It’s that time of year again, the beginning of the season for consumption of all things sweet.  Halloween marks the start of the holiday season that extends until the beginning of January.  The tendency to overindulge in sweet treats rises, the sugar rush ensues, and waistlines expand.    Considering the rise in childhood obesity, here are some ideas to curb the sugar rush, and still keep the kids happy and healthy.

For the ghosts and goblins that come knocking: Select dark chocolate options for trick-or-treaters.  Dark chocolate has health benefits such as antioxidants. Give out granola bars, 100% fruit chews, and yogurt or carob covered raisins.  Look for the fun or mini size candy options for the ghouls and goblins; the smaller the better.  Or, avoid candy altogether and hand out coloring books and crayons, glow sticks, or stickers. 

And for your little pumpkins, avoid all unnecessary sugar on the day of Halloween. Omit soda, fruit drinks, certain cereals and other sugary stuff since you know they’ll be eating candy.  Feed them a healthy meal before they go out roaming the neighborhood.  The hungrier they are, the more candy they will eat along the way.  Get them exercising!  Throw in a Thriller mix and have a little zombie dance party.  Also, have them walk from door to door. 

Do you have any tips for healthy treaters? 

 

 

Posted via email from healthandfitnessnews’s posterous

Can the use of repetitive positive affirmations truly reshape your life, noticeably, for the better?

There are quite a few demonstrations to support the ability of positive affirmations to bring about better conditions, from “creating” a parking spot or a new job, to attracting the perfect life partner, or to furthering inner peace. We might want to take a personal “reality check,” however, to make sure that we genuinely believe that thought, our thought, has creative power before we try to improve the circumstances of our life through a fixed “mental focus” on the changes we want, so that we’re not just fooling ourselves.

We can’t expect to positively alter effects in our individual life by changing their mental cause, i.e., our point of view, through affirmations, if we believe that “certain things” are completely and unarguably physical in origin, have no mental basis or thought equivalent and, therefore, are beyond our ability to bring about a change. What difference would it make for us to attempt to “change our thinking” about our self, or a particular issue, if we didn’t believe without a doubt that by doing so we could “change our life”? If we want our positive affirmations to move a mountain in our personal life, we need to have at least a grain of faith in the power of our mental focus and affirmations to affect physical change in our life.

Everyday, each of us manifests a certain amount of faith. When was the last time you were “surprised” at a sunrise? Most likely you didn’t wonder if the sun would come up in the morning. Most of us don’t question our unshakable faith in the earth’s gravitational relationship to the sun. So, there you are, we all have a a bit of faith, a “starter kit” of unshakable trust. We can begin with that and build a mountain of faith to put behind our affirmations.

Saying affirmations while filled with disbelief, seesawing between faith and fear, is like putting water into a balloon rather than air. Our desires wiggle here and bulge there, but they never get off the ground. Faith gives our affirmations soaring power because grounded faith is mental insistence uplifted to a place of realization. Realization is the “secret” to creative mental power. When our affirmations feel true, when what we say is what we truly believe, then affirmations can really change our life.

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