New Year – Old Habits?…
Five top tips to help you keep your New Year Resolutions from, Fitness and Wellbeing coach Michele Kaye.
Whatever happened to the New Year resolutions you made? Three weeks in to January and by now most people have completely forgotten their good intentions. According to fitness and wellbeing coach, Michele Kaye, if your resolutions were important enough to make in the first place, they are worth following through on.
In her new book ‘Eat, Dance Shine – How to come alive, gain energy and push back the years’, Michele gives her five top tips to help you undo all the excesses of the festive season, and get back in to some good habits.
- Get moving’ every day for at least 30 minutes – think of it like brushing your teeth, just do it! Walk, run, dance around the kitchen, roll on the floor, join a Nia class. Do what you enjoy and listen to your energy levels, vary the intensity.
- Quit all white and refined sugar and white flour-containing products, eg pasta, biscuits, crackers, cakes as they cause your body to become too acidic, providing an environment for chronic inflammation and disease. Also they mess up your normal secretion of insulin leading to fatigue, headaches and weight gain.
- Eat more plants, make meat and dairy your side dish. Aim for 80%, 20%. Enjoy delicious salads and discover gluten-free ‘grains’ like quinoa and buckwheat. Enjoy broccoli and other brassicas as they contain the amazing health promoting sulphoraphane. Make vegetable juice daily, the easiest way to hugely increase your intake of phytonutrients, those colourful disease preventing plant nutrients. Here’s one of my favorites juice recipes- Carrot zinger: juice 4 carrots, 2 sticks celery, half a lemon and 1″ ginger root, (1/2 apple optional)
- Delay your breakfast – so that there is about 16-18 hours between your evening meal and your first food of the day. It’s called Intermittent Fasting. Avoid eating and drinking (except herb tea) after about 6-7pm and then delay breakfast till after 10 -11. This switches on the fat burning and keeps it going while you sleep! Start the day with plenty of fluids though, I like warm water with fresh lemon, also green tea. For bonus points, if you can also exercise during this fasting period you will drop those pounds even faster. And it can improve insulin sensitivity, keeping blood sugar levels stable and limit sugar cravings. Water and green/herb tea is fine before breakfast.
- Smile more, even a tiny one – there’s a good chance your mood will brighten as smiling actually sends messages to the brain and increases the level of happiness hormones: endorphins, serotonin and natural pain killers, Smiling also boosts your immune system and makes you less stressed, even reducing blood pressure.
Michele’s new book Eat, Dance, Shine – How to come alive, gain energy and push back the years’, is published by Filament Publishing in March 2016.
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