A recent study found Americans are lacking several nutrients vital to maintaining good health and helping prevent serious illness. Are you at risk? Women in particular are lacking calcium for good bone health. You can get it from dark; leafy vegetable; dairy products; and finfish. Fiber is also missing from diets. Get it from vegetables, fruits, legumes, and nuts. Fiber promotes good heart health and cuts your chances of developing diabetes. Magnesium helps you maintain healthy muscle and…

There are countless techniques to help you cope with stress - for example, breathing exercises, meditation, counting to 10, relaxation, and taking a long walk. Most of us wait until our senses are stressed to the max before we take advantage of these stress-reducing techniques. But there's another side to stress management--building resiliency. Its focus is your ability to withstand stress better and bounce back sooner from difficult situations or crises. The new awareness of resiliency's…

Mindful awareness is paying attention to the present moment, staying centered, and improving self-awareness to manage stress by stopping, breathing, observing, and connecting with one's inner experience. It's a powerful concept largely influenced by meditation and the research supporting meditation's health benefits. Adding energy to the mindfulness movement is the need to manage stress in our modern age. Mastering this stress is not simply about taking a pill to manage anxiety and tension,…

Knowledge of the physical responses to stress can help you intervene sooner. They include headaches, sleep disturbances, cuts that do not heal well, eyelid twitching, fatigue, catching colds easily, craving sweets, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal cramps, panic feelings and undefined fears, sudden feelings of sadness, forgetfulness, and weight gain. Cortisol--the natural stress response/fat storage hormone--is the culprit in chronic stress. It is emitted by adrenal glands that sit atop your…

Waiting until you feel sleepy working at a computer late at night before going to bed is not a dreamy idea. Ditto, taking a laptop to bed and falling asleep. These behaviors (and others like them) ruin sleep quality. Repeated research has warned that lack of sleep increases your risk of health problems such as cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even obesity. Recommendations from National Sleep Foundation you may want to practice include the following: 1) participating in a ritual of…

Almost anyone who tries to lose weight will discover at some point the body's natural desire to resist further loss even with additional effort. This is called "hitting a plateau". There's nothing wrong with your weight loss program or your body. Instead, we've encountered a phenomenon called the "plateau effect". The plateau effect applies to every aspect of our lives because it's a natural law just like gravity. When additional effort to achieve more of the same result no longer works, the…