Thinking of Spring

The weather here in the North Georgia Mountain area is challenging this time of year isn’t it? It is officially spring time, trees and flowers are blooming and the allergies have kicked in, yet we still have to layer our clothes or just end up inappropriately dressed for the weather on any given day.

I speak of spring because traditionally this time of year is when we all tend to break out the short sleeved shirts, shorts, and yes……the dreaded bathing suits. It is my job to help others to not only get ready for this time of year, physically and mentally but to learn to look forward to spring rather than dread it’s impending arrival. No, we can’t hide under our layers all year, unless of course we move to Alaska.

Anyone in their 40’s and above can attest that it takes much more commitment and diligence than it used to in our 20’s and 30’s, to have what would be a pleasant experience when we shed our layers  of clothing. This process should not be a similar situation to cramming for a final exam. I find that so many of us wait until March to decide to develop a fitness and nutritional plan in order to shed some excess weight. Though, it’s better late than never, I believe that for the long term health of the body, we must be more proactive and learn to develop new and lasting lifestyle habits and have them remain year round.

Here are a few tips on shedding the fat for Spring 2011:

• Find a friend or group of like-minded individuals who are also looking to live healthier lifestyles.
• Take the time each week to plan out your meals; it helps cut grocery costs as well.
• Minimize your intake of process food and complex carbohydrates; eat more protein, vegetables and fruit.
• Start moving; find a group class, personal trainer or a buddy who will hold you accountable. Start with 30 minutes 3 x week minimum.

Join us here on April 7^th at The Spa on Green Street for our “Shed the Fat” Seminar at 6pm. We will discuss the details and starting points to helping you change the way your live and transform your body permanently!!! Sign up soon as space is very limited. Call us today 678.450.1570

Skin Care Meets Fitness Meets Nutrition Seminar a HIT!

I wanted to thank everybody for attending our Skin Care event last Tuesday.  We had a lot of fun discussing proper skin care from both an aesthetic perspective and a nutritional and fitness perspective.  We hope you are enjoying your gifts and are using them daily to improve the quality of your skin.

I thought it would be helpful to briefly recap some of the nutritional elements we considered that evening, as everyone contributed to a great discussion and we all learned so much from each other.  In helping to overcome or improve any health condition, it’s smart to simply be mindful to being economical and resourceful.  This is sound advice I’ve received from my friends and teachers over the years, and it directly applies to this topic of healthy skin.  How?  Well, before you try to add value to your skincare by using high-grade cosmoceuticals such as the Anakiri skin care line, you want to make sure you are not detracting from the health of our skin by the types of foods you eat.  Many common foods in our diet can be quite harmful to the health and appearance of our skin.

I asked the participants which foods they thought was the absolute worst for skin health.  The answers slowly but surely came.  Caffeine was the first example.  We know that caffeine-containing beverages can cause the body to eliminate a lot of water which then can give the skin a less supple appearance.  It is a good idea to keep well hydrated, and products like Rehydration can help in this regard.

Next, someone mentioned sugar.  Sugar is well known to cause a host of metabolic problems in your body, most notably relative to weight and blood sugar control.  High blood sugars cause a process in the body called ‘glycation’ which can end up accelerating the aging process of all tissues and cells, including the skin.

After that, someone mentioned saturated fats – and here we were closer, right around the corner from the answer I had in mind.  Saturated fats have surely been demonized in our low-fat dietary recommendations that our nutritional establishments have been circulating for the last 50 years or so.  However, recent evidence has pointed out that the body has a need for saturated fats and indeed, there is no link between saturated fats and heart disease as previously thought.  Now that’s some refreshing news!

The big culprits here are the trans fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils.  These have been seriously linked to a host of imbalances and diseases – to the point they have been banned in cities like New York and Chicago where restaurants are strictly forbidden to use them.  They cause a rapid oxidation, or breakdown of cellular tissue, much like you would see in the face of someone who is a chronic smoker where the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles are higher than average.  Avoid these artificial fats like the plague and your skin and whole body will thank you!

All of the above represent items in your diet you should avoid if you want better health and better skin.  Remember, out with the bad first, and then in with the good to maximize your results.

Committing to a lifestyle that embraces proper nutrition and fitness is a surefire way to achieving that radiant glow which people cannot resist.  Then you will see your skincare products work magic!

Fitness meets Skin Care

Ricardo and I are so excited to hold our second Fitness in the Round meeting of the year this Tuesday night at 6:00pm at The Spa on Green Street. We are going to have an exciting evening centered on anti-aging skin care through nutrition and our top Spa line of skin care products, Anakiri. This will be an interactive event where one of our estheticians will take you through an anti-aging and skin care routine, utilizing Anakiri products as well as our new skin care tool, the renowned Clairsonic, a sonic facial cleansing device. Ricardo will finish the evening discussing the importance of nutrition in skin health and offer tips on nutrients to help fight the aging process.

Our goal this year is to continue to offer quality educational opportunities each month, giving our clients and community as many tools as possible to live long optimal lives. We will be holding fun, interactive events that will include massage, skin care, exercise and nutrition, in an effort to inspire and to promote new perspectives on wellness. We understand at The Body Sanctuary Inc. and The Spa on Green Street that as we age we have to often change our habits and how we care for our minds and bodies; this will often create a plateau as we look to find the right rhythms for each decade of our life. Take the time today to step back and look at your life and assess your needs, please feel free to bring your questions and concerns to us via our blog, our events or our individual services at The Spa on Green Street, where people are eager to find new paths to health.  Have a wonderful week and please give us a call if you would like to attend our Tuesday night event at 6pm, as space is  limited. 678.450.1570

Behaviors, Actions and the Wisdom of Austin Powers

Oftentimes when it comes to achieving some desired outcome in our lives, we are forced to break up common routines that we have set up for ourselves in our daily living simply due to the fact that those routines are the things we do that lead to the person we are today.  If we want something different, if we want to be someone different, then we simply have to do things differently to obtain that desired goal.  Thus, the interplay between our actions and our behaviors becomes an extremely critical component in achieving success. 

In reading through an interesting book on psychology, Control Theory, by renowned psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser, I came across an interesting perspective on the matter of behavior.  He mentions that all behavior is made up of three components: what we do, what we think, and what we feel.  He goes on to say that these elements actually come from inside of us and are not, as most people believe, an automatic response to things and people around us.  Isn’t it true that we tend to justify our actions and behaviors based on what’s happening around us?  “Well, if it wasn’t for so and so, or if wasn’t because of this, I’d already be 10 pounds lighter!”  Not so says Dr. Glasser,  His perspective is more about how our thoughts, feelings and actions are a part of our internal programming, where brain chemistry and physiology meet our psychology.  A lot has been written in this field, and especially in the field of appetite, body weight regulation and food intake where neurochemistry plays a huge role.  Neurochemistry is the study of the complex array of chemical messengers  by which the brain communicates with the rest of the body.

Eating, feeling good, appetite and overeating behavior can all be traced to internal programming and neurochemistry.  It is hard to control our behavior if we are not consistently mindful of our choices and simply just let the old ‘lizard brain’ unconsciously dominate our actions, because it appears that we are almost hardwired to get fat and put on weight as recent scientific evidence supports this being part of a built in survival strategy to deal with times of scarcity.  This of course leads to the worst possible scenario for all of us – lack of control in a never ending calorie-rich environment!  

The lesson here is that your body (lizard brain) doesn’t always want what you (rational brain) — conscious, analytical, rational you — want to happen. If you want to make changes, you have to realize this and not only fight for physical changes, but work to change your mental frame of reference as well. Your psychology is part of your physiology.  (Thanks Matt!)

So, what to do? We have to apply something of a pattern interrupt.

For starters, it’s always helpful to have a bit of honest reflection.  If you get off track, do you think and feel that other people or other circumstances are causing you to veer off course, to cause you to behave in a way that isn’t in line with your goals?  That if it wasn’t for that person or that particular situation at work, you’d easily do the right thing, eat the right foods, do your workout?  Well if you’ve seen any of the Austin Power’s movies, think of him simply telling you, “Oh, behave!” 

Watch for those tendencies, because they will haunt you and allow you to rationalize your way out of taking responsibility for your actions.  Not good, as you’ll end up in a mental tail-spin where it becomes very hard to recover from that and get yourself back on track.  Days and weeks can be completely lost, and if you are in the midst of developing healthy habits, then you have lost momentum and greater effort will be required. 

One of the best methods to continue this pattern interrupt and to get our behaviors and actions to line up constructively is to undergo a simple process of goal setting.  I’d like to share with you a step by step plan that I have found to be helpful in this regard, and this will become more necessary if the end goal requires long-term consistency and effort, such as the noble aspirations of greater health, fitness and improved body composition.  Stay tuned for my next post as I will describe this plan in greater detail. 

Are there challenges you are going to face in achieving these goals?  You better believe it, so let’s see how best we can encourage positivity in what we think, feel and do.  I’d love to hear from you and learn what you have done to encourage positivity!

Fitness in the Round Success !!

Last night we had our first “Fitness in the Round Meeting” of 2011 here at The Spa on Green Street, it was a great success. Everyone arrived enthusiastic, excited and full of appreciation for the opportunity to gain education and connect with others who have chosen to take on the daunting task of making “permanent lifestyle changes”.   We discovered over the course of our very short time together, that each one of us has many things to learn and that we each have the ability to make a difference to others.  The sun had set on a great day and signaled a new start for all of us, a new mindset is emerging.

Our country is currently in the middle of a massive health crisis, mostly due to “lifestyle” related diseases, preventable diseases. The only way we can make a difference on a larger scale is to create connections and communities where health and wellness are priorities, and exercise is not considered an option. Exercise can look different for each of us, depending on our goals, physical abilities and our interests. It does not have to look like spending every Wednesday in the gym or slinging around heavy weights to a video in your living room.  Exercise is not about getting in a workout on Wednesday, it is about adding 20 years to your life! If we can look at getting active as a way of extending our lives with quality living, maybe we can find the motivation and inspiration to do so.

A great man passed away recently who lived this motto to the very end, Jack Lalane. He was a heavy child who fell in love with physical fitness in his teens and lived every day as an example to others, an inspiration! He set out to do things that nobody had done relative to group exercise and fitness instruction. He leaves behind an amazing legacy, he revolutionized the world of fitness and created many of the fitness tools we all use today. The last few years of his life were lived vibrantly, not in a nursing home carting around oxygen tanks and various other external containers. Isn’t that how we all want to live our lives?  What we choose to do each day will be the example we set for our children and grandchildren. If we can change the course of OUR future relative to OUR  health we can lift a  great financial and physical burden off of our loved ones, and hopefully break the cycle of disease and create  a legacy of health for our descendants.

 The following are a few questions we left with our group to ponder over the next few weeks . Please take the time to answer these questions and feel free to make any comments or ask any further questions. We will be providing solutions along the way to help with the challenges we face when we are making long lasting lifestyle changes. Hope to see you on February 22,2011 at 6pm for another great Fitness in the Round meeting!

• What have been the biggest obstacles to achieving your fitness goals?
• What is your biggest concern relative to exercise: time, energy, money, motivation?
• What is your biggest challenge when it comes to eating healthy?
• What percentage of ingredients do you understand when you read food labels?
• Do you pay attention to how you feel after you eat? Are you aware of how certain food affect your body?
• Do you know which foods are good to eat and which ones you should be avoiding? Ie: healthy fats, sweeteners, salt, natural foods, soy, etc….