Reduce Stress with Exercise This Holiday Season

What is the connection between exercise and your mood?  The overall feeling of doing something helps you be motivated and feel you are achieving something.  Even something as simple as taking a walk might help release your mind and body of much despised stress.  Making exercise a regular habit is well known in promoting optimal health.

  The mood-boosting effects of exercise may be the result of chemical increases in the brain. These chemicals include: endorphins, serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. Exercise releases the natural chemical endorphins, which have been shown to be associated with less stress. Endorphins are those chemicals that help us with feelings of euphoria, commonly referred to as "runner's high".

Studies have shown that one 30-minute session of moderate-intensity exercise can help ease tension, distress, self-duress, depression, tension and anger.  This might not cross your mind when you are working up a sweat or feeling soreness after doing that last set of pushups during that 30-45 minute workout, but in the end, deep down you know it is paying off.

Don't give up on your goals.  There are just a few days left in the year and you have just a few more workouts to finish! Get ready for the New Beginnings for yourself in 2014!

Zeke Samples, IFA, CSN, CPR, IDEA

Surreal Body Solutions, LLC

803.322.7649

www.SurrealBodySolutions.com 

& contributing health and exercise author

Personal Training | Nutrition | Supplements | Motivation

Wine or Your Waistline ?

When it comes to your health and your booze, experts can all agree, moderation is key.  Alcohol not only adds hundreds of calories to our diet, but it temporarily stalls the body into burning more fat.

A regular beer can add up to more than 150 calories; a glass of wine, over 100.

The seasonal football season favorite, "beer and chicken wings" can be detrimental to your weight-loss and figure goals.  Scientifically, the body insists on breaking down the alcohol first, leaving the calories from your meal to get stored as fat.

This doesn't mean that you have to totally stop, but if you want to progress, you will need to follow a few rules to keep the "wine from going to waist" !

Simple Rules:

1. Keep it Simple

2. Eat Before You Drink

3. Keep a Count

Keeping it Simple:

- A good rule of thumb is the fewer ingredients in what you are drinking, the better. Mixed drinks can be loaded with extra sugars; sugars that will be stored as fat.  The next time you are considering a margarita, re-think the possibility that you could have chosen something that was lower calorie by subtracting the 'sugary' and keeping the cocktail simple using club soda, or low-calorie options.

Eat Before You Drink:

- Speaking from science, knowing the proper timing of the alcohol can protect you from its ability to be stored as fat from the digestion process.  It may sound a bit hard to believe, but if you are trying to pass up the calories, eating a snack or meal with healthy (Omega fats), protein, or fiber can help to suppress the sugar crash that may stimulate from an evening of drinking more than a drink or two.  Eating before you drink can also help you feel full; helping your mind urge off the temptation of 'tray snacking' when you are offered a bite of something your subconscious knows that you shouldn't have eaten.

Keeping Count:

- Consuming several drinks per night can mess with your blood sugar.  Some clients tell me they have 1-2 glasses of wine each evening.  After a hard day of work, this tends to be the commonality.  Be careful that you do not abstain all week and blow it on a weekend either.  Adding hundreds of calories to your diet, decreasing your judgement in making good food choices, and not staying hydrated will be a quick three dimensional way to add that wine to your waistline..

In Health, 

Zeke Samples - IFA, - IDEA Personal Trainer

Fitness and Wellness Author

Surrealbody@gmail.com