Fitness & Wellness

If you’re worried about your teen getting all the nutrients they need, just provide the same type of diet as you would eat for good nutrition. Notice I didn’t stop at the words you would eat. That’s because many adults don’t have the nutrient dense diet they should have. A teenager’s nutritional needs differ slightly, but one thing that’s different is the amount of calories they require. Boys need approximately 2800 calories each day, which shoots as high as 4,000 if they participate in sports. Girls need approximately 2,200 calories a day that increases up to 3,000 when they’re in sports. Adult women only require about 2,000 calories with adult men requiring 2,500.

Make sure they get plenty of calcium, but it doesn’t have to come from milk.

I won’t get into all the studies that are controversial, debating whether drinking milk is good for you or not. Some say it increases the potential for early mortality if more than a glass a day is consumed. Others say it’s quite healthy. One thing is certain, after a child is weaned, the potential for lactose intolerance increases and affects a large portion of the US. There are other ways to get your calcium and ensure your teen gets it. Almonds, beans and lentils, broccoli and dark leafy greens contain it, too.

Protein is extremely important.

Just like adults, teens need protein. Male teens and teens in athletics need more protein per pound of body weight than adults because they’re growing and developing muscle tissue, while adults are simply maintaining muscle tissue. Just like adults, teen diets should contain approximately 10 to 30 percent of the calories from protein. Since the caloric intake is higher for teens, more protein is required. The protein can come from fish, dairy, eggs, poultry, meat or vegetarian options like, lentils, chickpeas, most types of beans and Tofu.

Don’t forget plenty of servings of fresh fruit and vegetables.

You can cook those veggies or serve them raw, however, make sure you provide a colorful plate with many different colors of veggies to ensure your teen gets all the nutrients necessary for a healthy life. The recommended amount is five servings of different types of fruit and vegetables. Another way of saying it is Don’t forget healthy fat. The brain needs fat to operate at its peak, so does the rest of the body. It’s filling, so your teens won’t overeat or reach for snack foods.

• Teach your teen to make smarter choices when it comes to food, such as whole grain bread or choosing brown or wild rice instead of white rice for more nutrients and lower calories.
• If choosing yogurt for a teen’s diet, choose the regular yogurt over the low fat yogurt. It helps boost the feeling of fullness and was found to help people lose weight.
• Avoid serving foods high in sugar and fried foods. Nobody needs extra sugar in their diet and nobody needs deep fried Twinkies, pickles or fries.

You’ll get more from your exercise time when you include lifting weights. It not only helps promote bone density, builds muscle tissue, burns fat tissue and makes you less prone to injury, studies show it can improve your memory. It’s not only muscle and bone tissue that strength training boosts. It helps boost the development of new neurons in the brain, which can improve mental functioning and memory. Chances are, you’re among this majority. The good news is that your brain is a dynamic organ, constantly adapting and changing, for better or for worse.

The brain is not static, it grows and changes.

At one time it was though that people were born with all the brain cells they’d ever have, but new findings show that’s simply not true. The brain has neuroplasticity. It’s the process that causes it to grow new neurons. In fact, age doesn’t matter. The memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, grows new cells continuously, if you follow certain protocols. While the memory center of the average person may decline with age, one study found that it grew by one or two percent in people who exercised.

Studies show that exercise helps not only fight dementia, but also create large cognitive gains.

When you workout, you improve the blood flow to your brain and even increase it. It also helps increase the creation of compounds that protect the nerves. Exercise helps boost the survival of neurons in the brain, while boosting the development of new ones. Damaging plaque can form in the brain in diseases like Alzheimer’s. Exercise lowers the amount of that plague and reduces beta-amyloid peptides that form them.

Studies show that as little as 20 minutes of weight lifting could boost your long-term memory.

A study at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta chose 46 random volunteers. They were divided into two groups, active and passive exercise. Before the exercise took place they were shown 90 pictures to rate as positive, negative or neutral, then later asked to recall those images. Then the researchers used a resistance exercise machine and had the active group do 50 extensions at maximum effort, while the passive group let the machine move their legs for 50 extensions. The training took about 20 minutes. Two days later, the same procedure of showing images was used with new images in the mix. There was a significant difference between the two groups with the active group identifying 60 percent, while the passive group only identified 50 percent. That was two days later and just one training session!

One study showed that just 40 minutes of exercise daily, elementary school students boosted their IQ points by almost four points.

• HIIT—high intensity interval training—can boost your brain while it boosts your body. It should include not only strength training, but also core work.
• Sitting for prolonged periods can be your biggest hazard. Don’t sit for more than an hour without getting up and stretching, running in place or doing some other type of activity to get your body moving.
• Rather than speeding up your weight training, consider slowing it down. It not only helps prevent injury, but works much the same way as HIIT.
• Besides exercise, eating healthy, getting adequate sleep and drinking plenty of water boosts brain activity.

It may not be the topic of conversation over the dinner table, but the discussion of gut bacteria and how it can help your overall health can be quite enlightening. It’s amazing how these tiny microbes either work together or against one another to create a healthy digestive tract or if out of balance, affect your overall health. Various research studies show that there’s a difference in the gut bacteria of healthy people and the gut bacteria of those who are sick. Those that are sick have an imbalance of bacteria or lack the variety of bacteria healthy people have. Exercise can change that.

Serious conditions like diabetes show a link to the bacteria in the gut.

Whether you’re fighting type 2 diabetes, heart disease or obesity, the bacteria in your gut may be part of the cause. The type of bacteria you have can affect your overall metabolism and even determine the amount of calories that you get from the food you eat or the nutrients you absorb. The wrong type or balance of gut bacteria can cause fatty liver deposits by turning fiber into fatty acid. That can lead to Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Other serious conditions can come from bacterial imbalances.

Inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s, colon cancer, arthritis and certain disorders of the nervous system are all linked to different balances of bacteria. Those with colon cancer are found to have more disease causing bacteria than those that are healthy. Believe it or not, your gut has loads of nerve endings that send messages to the brain. It’s called the “gut-brain axis.” There are some studies that show a link to conditions like autism, depression and anxiety based on the gut bacteria. Certain type of bacteria are linked to inflammation. People with rheumatoid arthritis often have more of those bacteria.

Exercise can change the mix of bacteria in the gut.

A study done at the University of Illinois found that as little as six weeks of regular exercise could change the makeup of the bacteria in your gut. In this study, they didn’t introduce diet into the mix, but stuck with exercise alone. The study included both thin and obese people with the researchers measuring the microbes at the start. The participants exercised for six weeks, three times a week for 30 to 60 minutes. When the samples were taken at the end of six weeks, the researchers found microbe balances changed, increasing some and decreasing others.

• The six week exercise study continued by allowing participants to go back to sedentary ways. The microbe balanced returned to pre-exercise levels.
• Combining health eating habits with regular exercise has an even bigger impact on overall gut health.
• The study brought attention to an interesting question. Is it the bacteria changes from exercise that brings the health benefits?
• One reason people often fail at keeping weight off may be that they fail to continue exercise, which can cause gut bacteria to revert back to previous levels and slow metabolism.

No matter what your age, having strong bones and a good teeth is important. You can achieve those two easier by adopting healthy habits. Exercise and diet create stronger bones and teeth for a start. There are many other factors that impact both teeth and bones, but these two factors also affect your overall health, making them a great place to start. It’s long been known that exercise and eating healthy reduce the risk for many serious conditions, so you’ll get double the benefit starting with these. Many of the same nutrients necessary for building bones are also necessary for remineralization of tooth enamel. Again, you get more benefit from eating healthy than just stronger bones and teeth.

Exercise can boost your bone density and slow the depletion of bone mass.

If you were active as a teen and into your 30s, you may be lucky enough to have great bone density. Lots of things affect how much bone loss there is in later life, including genetics, diet and activity level. After 30, the building process slows and the balance shifts to more bone lost than gained. Here’s where exercise and diet are even more important. If you’re younger, in the bone building stage, exercise can boost the amount of bone tissue creating, so even if there’s bone loss, it isn’t as critical. If you’re past 30, exercise and diet can slow the loss of bone and even reverse it. Studies show that weight bearing exercises and strength building exercises can increase bone mass, no matter what your age.

What you eat makes a huge difference.

If you’re chronically soaking your teeth in sugar and acidic foods, expect dental carries and enamel erosion. Sugar is a well-known culprit of tooth decay, but so is starch. These mix with the enzymes in saliva and create an acid that plays havoc on enamel. While dried fruits may be natural, they also are high in sugar and can stick to teeth. Opt for fresh fruits over dried ones. You need calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K2 for strong bones and teeth. Getting adequate and safe exposure to the sun is one way to boost your vitamin D. Eating foods higher in calcium throughout the day is far better than taking a supplement. Eating meats, fermented foods and eggs help. Adding collagen to your diet, which is easily done with bone broth, can also help keep bones and teeth strong.

Adopt some strategies to improve your potential for healthy bones and teeth.

Make sure you walk enough. It might sound way to simple, but walking is a form of weight bearing exercise. If you walk between three and five miles a week, you’ll boost bone building. I like the idea of wearing a pedometer. It not only adds a bit of whimsy to the effort, you can get a good picture of just how far you really do walk. While other aerobic types of exercise, such as bike riding, are good for your cardiovascular system, walking helps increase the bone building process.

• Include foods high in magnesium and zinc. Magnesium is necessary to convert vitamin D to the form that absorbs calcium. Avocados and nuts can boost magnesium. Zinc boosts bone building. Shrimp, beef, pumpkin seeds and flaxseeds are a good source of zinc.
• Get the ratio of your intake of Omega3 fatty acids to Omega6 more in line. While the ideal balance is somewhere between 1 omega3 for every 3 to 6 omega6, the average American diet is more in line with a 1 to 25 ratio. Omega3 promotes bone formation and slows bone loss.
• Yo-yo weight loss or too low of calorie intake also contributes to bone loss. Eating healthier without an extremely low calorie diet, under 1000 to 1200 calories, is the best method of weight loss.
• Make sure you have adequate protein intake. The bone is made of 50% protein.

There’s an ongoing debate surrounding the question of the best time to exercise. Well, I know that the best time to exercise is anytime. Of course, I am joking. There’s a lot of science backing early morning exercise, but there’s also other studies that say no matter what time of day you do it, if you’re consistent, your body become more efficient and perform better at that time. There are a few misconceptions about the best time to work out and some definite facts that will make your workout better.

Always drink water and avoid exercising on a full stomach.

Studies focusing on whether exercise could counteract the effects of a poor diet actually found something quite different. One group in the study had sports drinks during exercise and ate before their workout. The second group waited until after working out and drank only water. The third group didn’t exercise at all. All three consumed the same number of calories, but the group that worked out before eating and only drank water, fared better. The group that didn’t exercise gained six pounds in just six weeks. Those that ate first gained three pounds. Both the non exercise group and the eat and exercise group developed insulin resistance. The take away here is not only should you exercise on an empty stomach—at least two to three hours after eating—but avoid sugary sports drinks, too.

Is exercising at night a big no-no?

That is normally the conventional wisdom, but one study showed something quite different. While the studies normally focus on the amount of time it takes to fall asleep, this study focused on the quality of sleep. It showed that people who lifted weights at night had a longer duration and high quality of sleep than those who worked out in the morning. Other studies show that your peak muscular functioning may be later in the evening, rather than early in the morning.

It’s all about you and your body.

The core temperature of the body plays a role in how well you’ll recover from the workout. The colder the core, the stiffer the muscles. If your core temperature is higher, you’re more flexible and less susceptible to injury. As the day wears on, the core temperature normally rises, with the afternoon being its peak, with the corresponding blood pressure and heart rate its lowest. The body also produces testosterone, which is important for a good workout whether you’re a man or a woman. That would indicate that late afternoon workouts are best. But then didn’t other studies show that mornings were and evenings were also good.

• The best time to workout is based on each individual. Almost all studies show that when you pick a specific time to workout and stick with it, your body adjusts to make it the best workout time.
• Even if you have to vary from your normal workout time, don’t worry. You’ll still get benefits from working out. Any time you can get moving more and exercise, is a good time to do it.
• Some people use intermittent fasting with exercise to get lean muscle gain. Hugh Jackman did it to get ready for Wolverine. It boosts the HGH and insulin sensitivity. The fast is simply eating all meals in an 8 hour window and fasting the other 16 hours. That makes a morning workout followed by a meal perfect.
• Even if you workout regularly at the gym, try to fit in other types of exercise and make them part of your schedule. Walking during your lunch hour, playing with the kids or taking the stairs all get your heart pumping and burn off calories.