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Now we can move forward with some serious positive thinking to get you further psyched up to change your unhealthy lifestyle for a healthy lifestyle!

First up is all about visualization and imagination. What the mind can conceive… you can achieve – always believe that and you will be able to do anything that you have a mind to do. The technique couldn’t be simpler.

You relax and clear out any day to day worries or negative programming that has gone on before and then place a picture in your mind of how you want to be. Put it in the present tense, as if you have already achieved your goal, be it some weight loss, or improved muscle tone, or better health, whatever is important to you. You just place that picture of you as you desire to be in your mind as if you are that way right now.

Then you imagine yourself walking around like that. Make a point of feeling and experiencing exactly how good you feel about yourself being your ideal weight, or ideal body shape, or ideal level of health and fitness. Imagine feeling the clothes you are wearing, the sun shining, the day warm and bright and everything else that makes a perfect day for you.

This is all about placing yourself right there in the image you are holding in your mind and really feeling, really experiencing what it is you are visualizing at the moment. Its a very powerful experience and you may surprise yourself at the depth of the feeling that you have while you are going through this amazing process. It can feel so real in the moment that you come out of it feeling really and truly wonderful as if you already had achieved your goal and were experiencing it for real right at that moment.

Practice doing this visualization exercise every day and you will achieve what you set out to do!

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We’ve looked at a lot of things to do with health in this blog, from losing weight to maintaining a good fitness level to eating a healthy diet to improving your mood by being more positive. So this post looks at the overall big picture of the importance of improving your lifestyle to bring about an improvement in your overall level of health.

If you want to improve your lifestyle, you have to work at it. That doesn’t mean sitting on your lazy backside in front of the television dreaming about having a body like that model on that advertisement for perfume, either! That will get you nowhere fast and just add to your feelings of laziness and morose morbidity.

You have to get up onto your own two feet and make that start today. Right now!

Tell yourself in no uncertain terms that you are going to get fit and you are going to do it all by yourself. That’s a powerful self improving statement because it affirms to your own subconscious that you are now determined to make the necessary improvements to your way of life in order to bring about the change that is necessary to improve your lifestyle.

That’s the first step – there are many others to take and I won’t lie to you and tell you it will be easy, because it will not. But you have to make that conscious decision for yourself, because no one else can do it for you – only you.

So start today and amaze yourself at what you can achieve!

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Welcome back to this healthy place where I want to look at the importance of that part of your day that you spend doing nothing much at all. I’m talking about the end of the day when you go to bed and hopefully drift off into peaceful slumber.

You see, one of the most important things you can do for yourself is not to forget to sleep!

Sleep is the body’s repair time, when it goes into it’s own self-replenishment period each day. Old, damaged cells are replaced with new healthy cells, tired muscle relax and repair any minor damage and the organs rest from the daily bombardment of toxins that we throw at them while we’re awake.

But a lot of us are simply not getting enough quality sleep for our bodies to do their full repair workouts at night, which leaves us feeling tired and listless during the day. In fact new research has shown that women are up to twenty percent more likely to come up short with the sleep than men.

Insomnia hits everyone at some stage in their lives, but some people are more prone to suffering than others. If that includes you, there are some simple things you can do to help prevent those sleepless nights becoming a real health problem.

You could try clearing out your bedside table so that it’s not piled high with books, notepads, diaries and puzzles etc. These things send out distracting signals and messages to your unconscious, so by keeping this area clear you ensure that it and your bedroom is reserved only for sleeping.

If you lay awake at night worrying about work-related thoughts, then you can try a re-focusing technique. This works by making yourself consciously remember what you were doing this time last year. As soon as you settle on a memory, run through it in more detail in your mind. Think about how you were feeling then, what you were wearing, what the weather was like – that sort of thing.

By running calming thoughts and happy memories through your mind you create a calmness that you can enhance by then running calming words through and listening to the soothing sound of them. Words like “soothe”; “calm”; “relax”; “breathe”. They will relax you further and help you to drift off to sleep naturally.

So you see anyone can relax themselves enough to let go of the day’s troubles and enjoy a peaceful, revitalizing and natural sleep.

For more information on maintaining a healthy body, there is an older post that covers being healthy from the inside out and is a good addition to this post.

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What follows is a guest post from Dena White, a fellow advocate of health and wellbeing who promotes nurses and the medical profession in the health sector.

Twitter is a simple, unique and easy-to-use tool that has everyone wondering why no one has come up with it until now. It may seem a bit ridiculous to some, those who are wondering why anyone would want to use such a tool. However, it is ideal for communicating with people through brief messages, getting feedback on specific topics, updating others on what is going on in your world and best of all, finding out what is on the mind of today’s nurses.

Wanted: Twittering Nurses

Several organizations are reaching out to nurses through Twitter. The site is used to encourage nurses to contribute ideas and converse casually. It is a fun and inventive way to stay on top of the nursing community.

Nursing students can use Twitter to interact with experienced nursing professionals. Seasoned nurses can use the site as a great way to stay in touch with one another and share you daily thoughts with others.

The problem is that nurses are just now discovering the world of Twitter. Therefore, to help spread nursing throughout Twitter, we searched for and found the ten best nurses to follow. Keep in mind that this list may not be all specifically nurses, but also people in related professions such as EMTs and nursing students.

Top 10 Nurses To Follow On Twitter

Nursedotcom – Misty Turner is the director of Nurse.com. She also enjoys politics, social media and networking.

Vickie_Milazzo – Vickie L. Milazzo of Houston, Texas, is known as the pioneer of legal nurse consulting, as well as a best-selling author. She has been training legal nurse consultants for more than 25 years.

RNpathways – Nurse RN is devoted to helping all nurses, and best of all is employee-owned.

pcRN – A legal nurse consultant from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

ChristianNurse – A great site out of London, England that provides news and more related to nursing and other healthcare topics.

MyNursing – Steven The Nurse from Miami, Florida, brings us MyNursing.org, “Where a nurse can be a nurse.”

Bob_the_nurse – A psychiatric nurse who is presently employed by a mental health drug team.

WorkingNurse – A great place to find job postings and interesting articles for nurses.

NurseAusmed – A practicing RN from New Zealand who is also an avid blogger.

minoritynurse – Minority Nurse Magazine is a great resource for career, education and the nursing community.

Twitter is a great place to find amazing nurses who are obsessed with online gaming, having fun with their families, passionate about their jobs, and “tweet” about their lives or keep up blogs about the things that they do and the patients that they love. The nurses and nurse-like professionals listed above all have hundreds of followers and are from all different fields of nursing.

You will find professionals from all different nursing specialties on Twitter, everything from ultrasound techs to travel nurses. The links listed above are in no particular order; no one nurse is favored over another. In fact, I recommend that you follow them all to help you stay on top of the nursing community.

Dena White is a freelance author and writes about healthcare career topics, such as how to obtain a nursing degree, tips for job advancement, and more.

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In this post, I’m going to look at some of the true benefits of not just living a healthy lifestyle, but being sensible about how to treat yourself in the kind of things that you load up your body with, or choose to avoid in order to gain a better level of overall health and fitness.

Healthy living and a healthy lifestyle are not entirely dependent on your following this or that fitness regime, or healthy exercise schedule. In fact when you really think about it on a common sense level, a healthy lifestyle needs to also come from the inside out.

By this, I mean you need to be very aware of what passes through your lips on the way to your stomach. Food and drink dictate the final outcome of your healthy state, so the saying “you are what you eat” is so very true. That also goes for what you drink, so a little caution and sensible thought put into your food and drink can work wonders with your overall state of health without you making any great changes or sacrifices.

It’s no good exercising down the gym like a lunatic and sweating buckets in order to shed a few pounds if you are simply going to stop off at the local pizza takeaway on the way home and load up with junk food. Similarly its no good to you to stop by your favorite bar and throw a few beers down your throat as reward for your particularly tough workout!

You need to take a whole person approach to health and that means exercising some moderation in all things, including exercise and diet. You can have a cold beer every so often just as you can treat yourself to the occasional pizza if that’s what you like. You have to treat these things as special treats that you award yourself for being good to yourself for several days at a time. That way you don’t restrict yourself to an unreasonable diet regime that you are far less likely to stick to because you hate it! Better to opt for a more easy going and enjoyable diet program that offers you choice, variation and interest.

Be being sensible what you eat and drink, you’ll find that your body will reward you much better for feeding and watering it the right way!

There’s more info in an older post here that continues this mode of thinking and being here at Weight Loss Steps to Health. That post defines some of the better steps you can take to maintain a healthy weight while promoting good health as well.

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Okay, that’s enough exercise for those couch potatoes! In this post we’ll move back to the healthy lifestyle side of things to get the ball rolling for some more healthy practices.

Here I want to talk about the power of the mind in your daily health routine. A lot of people still vastly underestimate their great store of power that is contained in their very own thoughts on the state of their health. Scientific studies have proved that the mind can not only heal the body in many cases every bit as well as a prescribed medicine, but it can also be responsible for the state of a person’s health as well.

When you’re in a negative, depressed and unhappy state, you are actually thinking yourself ill. You are more susceptible to colds, flu and any other nasty bugs that are flying around when you are run down.

On the flip side, when you are happy, upbeat and positive, you are much less likely to come down with a nasty cold or attract any other disease into your life. That’s because when you are in a happy, positive mode of thinking your own body’s immune system is working at it’s peak of efficiency to repel any virus of bacterial infection that might try to invade your body.

Conversely, when you’re down, depressed and unhappy, your immune system is struggling and will not be as effective at keeping out the continual barrage of airborne and contact germs and diseases that are just waiting for the crack in your body’s armor to infiltrate, occupy and multiply into a full blown disease.

So if you want to stay healthy, young looking and free of disease – be happy!

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