Practice Mindful Eating
These days, it’s common to chow down with your eyes glued to a screen, but eating when you’re distracted leads to overeating. Take time to slow down and pay attention to your food, pausing to put down utensils between bites. “When you eat mindfully, it’s easier to notice when you feel full, plus you’re more likely to enjoy the foods you eat,” says Johns Hopkins dietitian and research nutritionist Diane Vizthum.
Happiness
🤗 Feel Good Hack ~ Happiness strengthens your immune system
Happiness strengthens your immune system
Do you know a grumpy person who always seems to be getting sick? That may be no coincidence: Research is now finding a link between happiness and a stronger immune system. In a 2003 experiment, 350 adults volunteered to get exposed to the common cold (don’t worry, they were well-compensated). Before exposure, researchers called them six times in two weeks and asked how much they had experienced nine positive emotions—such as feeling energetic, pleased, and calm—that day. After five days in quarantine, the participants with the most positive emotions were less likely to have developed a cold.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Christmas Day
Modify Eating Your Times to Jive with your Relatives’
Do your in-laws’ meal schedules fly in the face of yours? Here’s how to compromise: Say they wake up later than you do and serve a late breakfast at 10:30. Then they skip lunch and serve Christmas ‘dinner’ at 3 p.m. To keep your blood sugar steady without overdoing it on calories, have an early-morning snack (such as a piece of whole-grain toast) before your relatives rise and shine. Their late breakfast will count as your ‘real’ breakfast, plus some of your lunch. Enjoy the 3 p.m. meal – but don’t overdo it! – and have a small snack at around 8 p.m.
🤗 Feel Good Hack ~ Christmas
Live in the moment.
We can get bogged down with preparing the Christmas dinner and making sure that everyone is having a great time. When this happens you realise that Christmas went by in a blur, for the wrong reasons. Take time this year to watch your loved ones open their presents. Savour your food and drink. Be grateful for who you’re spending your time with. When you focus on the good things in your life, you get more good things to be grateful for.
🤗 Feel Good Hack ~ Counting Your Blessings Really Works!
Make Time for Gratitude and Appreciation
Creating a routine of writing down three things we feel grateful for each day helps us focus more on what we’re grateful for in life. Starting a gratitude journal can help too.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Need a Mood Boost?
Indulge in some tasty foods such as dark chocolate, leafy greens and other folate-rich foods, blueberries, chamomile or lavender tea, and magnesium-rich seeds such as pumpkin or sunflower seeds. Nutrients in these foods are thought to be related to emotional health.
🤗 Feel Good Hack ~ Make Date Night a Priority
Date night. Make your marriage a priority and get out for some grown-up time. Connecting and communicating with your significant other is good for your health.
🍎 Health Hack ~ 3 Tips for Healthy Holiday Eating
- Take 10 before taking seconds. It takes a few minutes for your stomach’s “I’m getting full” signal to get to your brain. After finishing your first helping, take a 10-minute break. Make conversation. Drink some water. Then recheck your appetite. You might realize you are full or want only a small portion of seconds.
- Distance helps the heart stay healthy. At a party, don’t stand next to the food table. That makes it harder to mindlessly reach for food as you talk. If you know you are prone to recreational eating, pop a mint or a stick of gum so you won’t keep reaching for the chips.
- Don’t go out with an empty tank. Before setting out for a party, eat something so you don’t arrive famished. Excellent pre-party snacks combine complex carbohydrates with protein and unsaturated fat, like apple slices with peanut butter or a slice of turkey and cheese on whole-wheat pita bread.
🤗 Feel Good Hack ~ Catch a Ride on the Sun
Get Outside
Step outdoors for a few minutes to pull some weeds, sit in the sunshine, or just get some fresh air. Research shows that time outside can give you more energy, a better memory, and less anxiety. Even if you’re in a city, notice trees, flowers, and parks. Soak up nature to give yourself a boost.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Good Relationships = Longevity
[If] you’re surrounded by a tightly connected circle of friends who regularly gather to eat and share gossip, you’ll not only have fun but you’re also likely to live an average of fifteen years longer than a loner. One study of almost three thousand Americans found that people with close friendships are far less likely to die young, and in 2004 a Swedish epidemiologist discovered the lowest rate of dementia in people with extensive social networks. Fifty-year-old men with active friendships are less likely to have heart attacks than more solitary men, while people who have had a stroke are better protected from grave complications by a tight, supportive social network than they are by medication.
Source
