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There are several super foods that are known to have many health giving properties, but one of the most exciting of all must be green tea. Its been used for many centuries by the Chinese and other Asian civilizations as both traditional beverage and health giving infusion. In the West, we have finally woken up this sleeping dragon and are discovering new ways in which it can benefit our health.

Of all the amazing properties crammed into a cup of this tasty beverage, one of the most important is not necessarily its antioxidants, or weight loss properties, but its ability to calm the mind and soothe the soul, or in short, to relieve stress. For of all the problems that negatively affect a person’s health, stress is the worst and most widely damaging of them all. Anything we can do to avoid stress should be done and if we can’t avoid it, then we should learn how to deal with it so that it becomes no big deal.

Drinking green tea promotes the release of the relaxing hormone serotonin in the brain and this is the property that can help us to relieve the stress if we are suffering from it. But there’s even more to it than that and this is something that we haven’t considered yet, at least in teh West.

The very act of preparing and drinking green tea in the East is a ritual that great care is taken over, great reverence applied to and traditional rules adhered to. Why is this? If you’ve ever watched the tea ceremony being performed, you would wonder at the slow, deliberate and careful way in which it is done.

And therein lies the secret.

Preparing to receive a cup of green tea brewed and served in the traditional manner is part of a process that relaxes the body. This allows the stress to melt away, while the actual drinking of the tea acts on the brain to send those good feeling hormones through the body to complete the task of attaining a state of relaxation.

In the West, we concentrate on the scientific reasons why green tea relieves stress while ignoring the other side to the process which is the physical slowing down of the body to receive it. Sure, the chemical properties of this beverage will do a body no end of good. But that good could be enhanced greatly by taking the time to drink it the way it was meant to be taken, as we have been shown by our oriental teachers but in the most part chosen to ignore.

In our fast paced western lifestyle, we don’t take the time for such things, which is a big part of the reason we have so much stress in the first place!
We package up the product in teabags that can be thrown into a cup of boiling water and drank as fast as possible so we can get on to the next thing we have to be doing. This is not the way it was intended to be taken and I believe that if we were to take the time to do it correctly, then the benefits to health in general would certainly be enhanced.

As for the other properties of this amazing tea, of course antioxidants are incredibly important for mopping up those damaging free radicals. The polyphenol EGCG is much more powerful than the resveratrol found in red wine and is found in abundance in green tea. It is also worth buying organic green tea rather than cheaper brands that may also come with a payload of chemical pesticides and other nasties.

As for drinking green tea to lose weight, it does this in two ways. First it contains caffeine, which ordinarily would boost the metabolism to cause the body to burn calories faster, but while levels of caffeine are lower in this tea than black tea or coffee, it combines with other chemicals not present in those other beverages to cause the metabolism to work even faster. Second, drinking this tea suppresses the insulin response to eating foods (or drinking drinks) that are high in refined sugars. This leads to less visceral (belly) fat being stored and therefore helps to control weight gain.

There are many other health properties associated with drinking green tea that we will include in a future post here.

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The last few posts have covered everything from exercising, keeping fit and diet to weight loss and all that entails, so in this post I want to take a break from all that and take a look at the quieter side of life. There are many ways of staying healthy and they do not all involve frenetically working out or sweating away over a hot treadmill. In fact, I do believe that now is the time for something completely different!

Take it easy!

Yep, I’m serious. With all the exercise you’re doing and couple that with maybe doing a stressful job, looking after a home, maybe kids as well – it all takes it out of you and by the time you collapse into bed at the end of the day, you’re exhausted!

So don’t get exhausted – take a little time out for yourself and just chill. If you can reserve half an hour a day to do absolutely nothing it will do you the world of good. You can do whatever you choose in that time, but you must NOT sit in front of the TV! That’s out as it does not relax you – on the contrary it stresses your system whether you are watching ads which are bombarding your subconscious to buy this or that piece of crap that you don’t really want, or its a suspense filled episode of whatever that will just wind you up. The news is no better as it is always bad news which is depressing – so TV is out!

Better to be in a quiet place (switch off the phone too) where you won’t be disturbed an either learn meditation or do some light yoga (the type where you don’t actually exercise or stretch) breathing exercises and clear your mind of all the clutter.

I guarantee that you’ll feel better for it!

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We all know that walking is great exercise, there really is no doubt about it. But there’s walking and there’s walking! This post is going to take a quick look at one of the ways in which you can make your walking exercise more beneficial by making use of hilly roads if you have them nearby, of course.

It is quite clear that when you’re forced to stroll along at a painfully slow pace, like shoppers in a mall or high street tend to do, is counter productive as it causes stress in people who prefer to walk at a more normal pace to suffer stress at the frustration of getting stuck behind some lumbering fat old ditherer and not being able to get past. That drives me wild!

So the best thing to do is stay out of malls (I’m all for that) and keep your exercise walks for places that are more sparsely populated. The best walking you can do is up and down steep hills as it forces the heart to work harder and burns up much more energy, especially if you go at it with a vengeance. Walking fast and forcing yourself up those steep hills is great for toning leg muscles as well as your whole body. Its also great for getting rid of a flabby bum!

A half hour of this kind of walking is more beneficial than an hour walking sedately along the flat. If you can do it for an hour or more, all the better as you will burn calories in proportion to the length of time you spend forcing yourself up and down those hilly roads.

So get to it if you want to get yourself fit and healthy while losing some of the excess flab while you’re at it and find some hills away from other people and get walking!

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For many people who are intent on losing some weight and are feeling a little inundated by all the information, advice and misinformation that is around, especially online, the lure of trying some easy system of losing that weight is very tempting to say the least. Ok, I can see from the look on your faces that you don’t believe there is any such thing as easy weight loss. Well, that could be ninety percent of your problem.

Belief.

Belief is a powerful thing and making good use of it can mean the difference between success and failure, especially when it comes to our health. You see, when you believe something will make you well when you’re sick, then chances are it will make you well. This is no idle chatter, by the way – I’m referring to the placebo effect and it has been scientifically proved to work time and time again for the vast majority of people who have tested with it.

So what is the placebo effect?

Essentially, the placebo effect is when you convince someone that something will have an action and they believe it to be true then that action will come about. The basic placebo effect has been extensively tested by taking a group of people who were suffering an illness and dividing up into groups. One group would take a propriety medicine specifically for that illness and the other group would be given a sugar pill but be told they were taking the propriety medicine.

Results of these tests show that the group given the placebo (sugar pill) recovered from their illness every bit as quickly as did the group given the actual medicine.

That proves that belief is a powerful method of getting what you want.

When you believe that a certain weight loss procedure works beyond a shadow of a doubt, then it will work for you. If you place another person side by side to you but they did not believe the procedure would work, then the result you would see is that you would lose the weight and the other person would not.

It’s all down to belief.

So when I tell you that there is such a thing as easy weight loss tips, I am not pulling your leg. It is easy when you believe it to be so. On the flip side, if you don’t believe that something will be easy, then it will not be easy for you. So the trick to making something easy is to get yourself to believe that it is… and then it will be. It’s as easy as that!

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A big part of staying healthy is maintaining a healthy body weight as well as shape as this keeps you feeling happy and looking good. All this boosts your confidence and the way others perceive you, which can only be a good thing. So what are the best ways to make sure you maintain that healthy weight and shape? Let’s look at some of the obvious things here such as the fundamental weight loss tips that really work and are completely natural, some of which might even surprise you a little.

The first thing you have to know and this is probably the most fundamental thing about weight maintenance is that as long as you balance the number of calories you consume with the number of calories your body burns, you will not gain weight. This is something dieters are mostly pretty well aware of as they are always conscious of the number of calories they allow themselves to consume in any one day. There are many very good diet solutions to help with maintaining the correct number of calories being consumed, such as the Nutrisystem diet, or eDiets and similar programs. But this is only half of the story. The other half is, of course, the part where you need to burn off the calories you consume and you do this through exercise.

Sure, there are some tricks you can pull that will increase your body’s metabolism by eating certain foods or even resorting top taking some diet pills or certain berries and these do go some way to achieving something approaching the results they claim. But none of this is a healthy alternative to good, old fashioned healthy exercise!

When you exercise every day, you build strength and stamina into your body’s muscles. It is these muscles that are responsible for burning the lion’s share of the energy that your body uses and the stronger and more hard working those muscles, the more calories you are able to burn at every session of exercise that you do. This is building efficiency into your body’s metabolic process so that you have no need of artificial boosting pills or potions nor do you need to eat expensive berry extracts. Over time your body will become so efficient at burning calories through exercise that it will even be doing it while you sleep!

This is one aspect of fitness that bodybuilders and athletes are well aware of. During sleep is when the muscles repair themselves after the exertions of the previous day and while they are repairing, they are using energy to do so. That energy has to come from somewhere and because you are not consuming any as you sleep, the energy is taken from your body’s store of fat. To get to that stage, of course takes time and some dedication, but you don’t need to exercise or work so hard as bodybuilders do to get the same effect, unless of course you want to.

So really, its all boils down to combining a healthy diet with daily exercise and when you do that right, you will maintain a healthy, fit body that weighs what it should do for your height and build. You’ll look good, feel good and have far more confidence because of the way you look and feel.

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One of the really healthy things you can do to improve your life no end is to get outdoors and enjoy some sunshine! It’s so good for you in manageable doses that your health will improve for your trouble.
What, raining again?

Then get out in the rain! It doesn’t really matter too much what the weather is doing for you to simply get yourself out of the house and go for a walk. Better if you can take that walk in the countryside or large urban park so you can get some lungfuls of fresh air.

Of course the very best you can do is get out, in the countryside or by the sea on a warm sunny day because then you have the combination of all the good things that can help you not only improve your physical health, but also the state of your mental health too.

I’m not suggesting you are going senile if you stay locked up in your apartment staring at four blank walls all day or whiling away the long hours glued to the television set watching heaven knows what.

Or maybe I am.

You see, television is ok in small doses if you want to get some entertainment for a while – as long as you watch shows that are actually entertaining. If you are hooked on reality TV, then you are losing it and should consider throwing the television set out the window. That’s because there is no real entertainment value to any of that crap – it’s rammed down the throats of viewers who simply don’t know any better to satisfy the natural human instinct for voyeurism. Because that’s all these Big Brother type shows are – watching a bunch of ordinary people try to live together with cameras watching their every move.

What is that?

You call that entertainment?

Then you really need to get outside your four walls and get some fresh air into your brain before you really do go senile!

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