Eating healthy is important to not only your physical health, but your mental well-being too. Incorporating a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy foods, and lean meats, poultry, and fish into your diet can help you stay healthy and energized. Along with exercising regularly and getting enough sleep, eating a well-balanced diet can do wonders for your mental well-being.
health hack
🍎 Health Hack ~ How to Choose the Best Kale
Choose smaller-leaved kale for tenderness and mild flavor, especially if you plan to eat the greens raw. Coarse, oversized leaves are tough. Look for moist, crisp, unwilted kale, unblemished by tiny holes, which indicate insect damage. The leaves should not be yellowed or brown. Kale stems are edible, so check to be sure that this part of the plant is also in good condition.
🍎 Health Hack ~ 10 Tips to Live a Longer Life
Tips for a Longer Life
No matter what your age, you have the power to change many of the variables that influence how long you live, and how active and vital you feel in your later years. Actions you can take to increase your odds of a longer and more satisfying life span are really quite simple:
- Don’t smoke.
- Enjoy physical and mental activities every day.
- Eat a healthy diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, and substitute healthier monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats for unhealthy saturated fats and trans fats.
- Take a daily multivitamin, and be sure to get enough calcium and vitamin D.
- Maintain a healthy weight and body shape.
- Challenge your mind. Keep learning and trying new activities.
- Build a strong social network.
- Follow preventive care and screening guidelines.
- Floss, brush, and see a dentist regularly.
- Ask your doctor if medication can help you control the potential long-term side effects of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, osteoporosis, or high cholesterol.
Source: HarvardHealthBeat
🍎 Health Hack ~ Small Steps Yield Big Results
THINK SMALL
Often the biggest deterrent to improving health is feeling overwhelmed by all the available advice and research. Try to focus first on one small, seemingly inconsequential, unhealthy habit and turn it into a healthy, positive habit. If you’re in the habit of eating as soon as you get home at night, instead, keep walking shoes in the garage or entryway and take a quick spin around the block before going inside. If you have a can of soda at lunchtime every day, have a glass of water two days a week instead. Starting with small, painless changes helps establish the mentality that healthy change is not necessarily painful change. It’s easy to build from here by adding more healthy substitutions.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Skip the Diet! Yikes!
Don’t Go On a Diet
Diets are notoriously ineffective and rarely work well in the long term.
In fact, dieting is one of the strongest predictors for future weight gain (104Trusted Source).
Instead of going on a diet, try adopting a healthier lifestyle. Focus on nourishing your body instead of depriving it.
Weight loss should follow as you transition to whole, nutritious foods.
Source: HealthLine
🍎 Health Hack ~ Choose Real, Whole Foods
Eat whole, real foods.
Make it your goal to have most of your nourishment come from unprocessed, real foods that are as close to the source as possible. What does that mean? Check out the ingredients. If you are eating a handful of almonds for a snack, the only ingredient should be just that: almonds! Whole foods fill your body with more vitamins and minerals, the nutrition we need to stay healthy on the inside.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Exercise is Good for Your Memory
Remember less as the years go by? You’re not imagining things: Your memory declines about 2 percent each decade because your hippocampus (the part of your brain that stores memories) literally shrinks. But you can even the playing field by keeping up with regular exercise, says neurologist Majid Fotuhi, M.D., Ph.D., director of NeurExpand Brain Center, and author of Boost Your Brain. “A third of your brain is made up of blood vessels, so it makes sense that your physical fitness impacts your brain health,” Fotuhi says. “Research shows that after a yearlong exercise program, the size of the hippocampus increases by about 2 percent, which effectively reverses age-related brain loss.”
🍎 Health Hack ~ Do You Eat at Least 7 of the Top 10 Healthy Veggies?
Top 10 Healthy Veggies
- Kale
- Spinach
- Carrots
- Broccoli Rabe
- Broccoli
- Brussel Sprouts
- Peas
- Tomatoes
- Asparagus
- Green Bell Peppers
🍎 Health Hack ~ Another Benefit of Healthy Food
Healthy Food Might Help Reduce Depressive Symptoms
Switching from an unhealthy diet to a healthier one, even for a short amount of time, leads to fewer symptoms of depression . . . [In a] study researchers split a group of 76 university students who exhibited symptoms of depression into two groups. The first group made healthy changes to their diets, such as eating more fruits, vegetables, fish and olive oil rather than processed foods. The second group didn’t change their diets at all. After three weeks, the healthy eaters had fewer depressive symptoms, with depression scores moving into the normal range. The control group, on the other hand, saw no changes.
🍎 Health Hack ~ Chill Out
Feeling Stressed?
When you are facing an overwhelming issue, it is easy to get into a cocoon and feel like shutting everything down. But, sometimes all you need is to take a break and listen to some relaxing music. Music can be calming and is known to have a positive effect on the body and the mind. It can lower blood pressure, balance hormones, and reduce cortisol. If you do not have a favorite type of music, you may listen to some nature sounds. It may sound cheesy, but these two have the same relaxing effect as classical music.
