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It doesn’t happen very often, but every once in a while I get a client that actually wants to workout to improve other things, like their vision or their cognitive skills. It’s true, working out makes your brain fit and can boost your mental powers dramatically. While everyone has the vision of the muscular athlete that has a box of rocks for brains, in reality, it’s just not true. Most athletes, particularly college athletes and pros, are extremely intelligent. One reason is the exercise they get and the experiences they have as athletes.

Exercise helps build new neural pathways.

Your IQ changes. Unlike the past, where children were given an IQ test and then classified forever by that score, today we know there’s such a thing as brain plasticity. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continuously change throughout life. In the past, it was thought that all the brain cells you’d ever have were there at birth. Now, we know that new neural pathways and cells are created and one way to do that is through exercise. Exercise increases plasticity and can increase your brain power.

You’ll build your hippo-campus when you workout.

There’s a lot of studies looking for ways to improve the brain and fight dementia, which has been increasing worldwide. One study from the University of British Columbia found that exercise that raises your heart rate and causes perspiration makes the hippo-campus bigger. The hippo-campus is the part of the brain responsible for memory, the nervous system and emotions.

Exercise boosts growth factors, while it reduces inflammation and insulin resistance.

Inflammation plays a huge role in many brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. So, you can see that by reducing it, it immediately can help your brain. The body releases growth factors when you exercise and those help create new cells and vessels in the brain. Insulin resistance not only affects your body, it affects your brain. While the brain is considered insulin-independent, insulin is necessary to maintain energy homeostasis and maintain glucose. If the body has insulin resistance, it can lead to cognitive damage and dementia.

• Exercise can reduce stress and the hormones created by stress, which can clear your mind and eliminate fuzzy thinking.
• You’ll sleep better at night when you workout regularly, plus improve your mood. Both of those help you improve your mental acuity. If you’ve gone without sleep and found it was tough to focus, you know that’s true.
• Some studies show that people who workout have both a larger prefrontal and a medial temporal cortex. Those are parts of the brain that control memory and thinking.
• Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, bringing oxygen and nutrient rich blood. That increased oxygen and nutrient rich blood helps you think better.

If you want to look better, feel better and even live longer, learning healthy habits should be at the top of your to-do list. Sometimes, it’s the small things we do every day that either make or break our potential for living a healthier life or even losing weight. For instance, if you have a few colas throughout the day, even if they’re diet cola, you could be adding extra calories or extra inches to your waist. Both contain phosphoric acid that can act with the caffeine as a diuretic and rob your body of nutrients. Both affect the heart, blood pressure, dental health and waistline, with people drinking diet sodas having more visceral fat and a bigger waist.

Move around for five minutes out of every hour.

That’s right. Just getting up and moving around for about five minutes every fifty to fifty-five minutes can extend your life, even if you workout regularly. Studies show that sitting for longer than 50-55 minutes without a break to move around can even reduce the benefits of your workout or wipe them out. Your body wasn’t meant to sit longer, so set a time and every fifty minutes or so, get up and move around. While you’re at it, take the stairs to your office, not the elevator and walk as much as possible.

Get rid of refined sugar in your diet for a few weeks.

While I could have said eliminate sugar for the rest of your life, it might be too much for most people to consider. Instead, don’t give it up for forever, just for a few weeks. This one takes a little effort, since you’ll find sugar in about everything from processed meats to salad dressing. Eat whole foods as much as possible to avoid all the label reading and make sure it doesn’t sneak in somewhere. Fill in that desire for sugar with fresh fruit. I have a client who tried this and kept a bowl of cut up cantaloupe in their refrigerator. They found that at the end of two weeks, that cantaloupe tasted extremely sweet. Sugar is addictive, so expect this step to be TOUGH!

Get plenty of sleep at night.

Getting a good night’s sleep is just as important as exercise when it comes to health. Studies show that when you have inadequate sleep, it boosts your ghrelin hormone and suppresses the leptin hormone. Ghrelin sends a message to the brain that you’re hungry and leptin tells your brain that you’re full. You can see how that could affect your weight. Lack of sleep increases your risk of coronary disease and stroke, too. Turn out the lights and turn off the TV and any other distractions. The TV and light can interfere with the production of melatonin.

• Get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. Take a walk outside for 20 to 30 minute three to four times a week without sun block. While extensive exposure to the sun is bad, you need some to create vitamin D for your body. Studies show that most Americans have a shortage.
• Take longer strides when you walk. Several studies show that people who walk faster and take longer strides live longer.
• Make laughter and smiling a habit. The more you smile and laugh, the healthier you’ll be. Laughter is good medicine. It reduces stress and triggers the creation of hormones that make you healthier.
• Chew your food carefully and slow down at the table. Always sit down at a table to eat. Don’t eat on the go. Even if you have to sit at a park picnic table or bench, make it an “official” meal time and enjoy every bite.

If you’re like most people, when you hear the word hormones, you immediately think of testosterone, estrogen and other sex hormones. These are indeed hormones, but not all of them. Hormones are the body’s messengers that tell the cells how to act or help it through a process necessary for life. Hormones not only affect your health, they also affect your behavior and mood. They control how much you eat and when you feel full as well. Ghrelin, for example is the hunger hormone, while its counterpart leptin turns on the switch that says you’re full. Hormones even affect your mood. Some mental illness is believed to be caused by hormonal imbalances.

Most people have heard of insulin, but may not have realized it’s a hormone.

Lack of adequate insulin produced is what causes type 1 diabetes and insulin resistance causes type 2. Insulin opens the cells and makes them receptive to the sugar in the bloodstream, glucose. The cells then use it for energy to stay healthy and nourished. When the there’s a problem using the cells using insulin or the creation of insulin, there’s high levels of sugar in the blood. When high blood sugar levels are due to insulin resistance, exercise and a healthy diet are often used to control and reverse the condition in some cases. For those that don’t create any or enough insulin, taking shots or oral insulin is the solution, but eating healthy and exercise is also part of the prescription.

Cortisol plays both a positive and negative role on your health.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that’s created in the adrenal glands. It prepares the body for the flight or fight response, but if left unchecked maintains the body in a high form of readiness for either running away or fighting. That causes changes that affect good health. It’s associated with abdominal fat, the most dangerous type of fat, too. Cortisol is for more than just situations where you face stress. Almost all cells have receptors for cortisol. That’s because it performs a lot of functions. It keeps your metabolism in check, controls blood sugar levels, helps you remember better and as a steroid hormone, aids in inflammation reduction. It’s necessary to be healthy, but you can have too much of a good thing in the case of cortisol.

There’s a hormone that’s considered the fountain of youth in the world of hormones.

You may have heard a lot about HGH—human growth hormone. It’s been touted as the miracle hormone that’s the fountain of youth. That’s because it helps in muscle development and when you’re younger, growth spurts. HGH has a lot of jobs in your body. It regulates heart functioning, bone growth, body fluids, fat metabolism, body composition and sugar metabolism. Doctors use a synthetic type of HGH to treat muscle wasting and kidney disease. While there’s no concrete evidence that it slows aging, that’s never stopped people from spending thousands of dollars to try it. Since the stomach acids destroy it, anyone spending money on HGH pills is definitely wasting their dollars. However, working out regularly, particularly using high intensity training, and eating a healthy diet does boost it’s production.

Some of the mood regulating hormones include serotonin, dopamine, glutamate and norepinephrine.

• Serotonin helps regulate your mood, sleep cycle, memory, appetite and more. Low levels can cause weight gain, depression and insomnia. Dopamine helps control behavior, emotion, and makes your feel good.
• If you want a good night’s sleep, you need the hormone melatonin. It only works in total darkness, so shut off your TV and lights. Lack of it is associated with obesity, diabetes and cancer.
• If you want bulky muscles, you need more testosterone. That’s one reason women don’t bulk up like men do, they have far less.
• Both sexes have estrogen, just as both have testosterone. However, men have far less estrogen than women do. It’s important for muscle recovery and exercise can boost its production.

Do you cringe at the thought of the extra expense to buy organic food? There’s a lot of reasons to do it, but also ways to save money. Exactly what is organic food? It’s food that’s raised using no pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, sewage sludge, GMO organism or ionizing radiation if you’re talking about fruits and veggies for animal products, it’s ones fed organic food, allowed to graze on grass or eat a natural source of food rather than man made feed. These animals are antibiotic and hormone free.

You’ll get more nutritional bang for your buck.

Farmers who grow organically use natural means to build the soil. That isn’t done overnight. In fact, it takes three years or more to build the soil. Unlike more traditional or modern farmers, they don’t add nitrogen, potassium or phosphorus from a bag, which limits the soil’s trace minerals. There are several studies that tested the nutritional content of organic food, compared to those grown traditionally and found that organic food has a higher nutritional content. Other studies show the nutrition of traditionally grown food has dropped over several decades, which might be as a result of limiting fertilizer to the potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen and not replenishing the trace minerals.

Insecticides, hormones and herbicides aren’t healthy for the body.

If you’re killing bugs with pesticides, why would eating traces of it on your fresh fruit make you healthier. It just doesn’t make sense to boost your health in one way and cut it down with chemicals in another. What’s even worse is that you can’t always wash off all the pesticides. If you want to save money, check the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 list from the EWG—Environmental Working Group. The Dirty Dozen is a list of the foods that have the most pesticides even after washing. The Clean 15 are those that have the least.

What about organic meat, eggs and milk products.

So you know that organic fruit and veggies are better, what about animal products. Free range chickens and grass-fed beef have benefits, such as the conjugated linoleic acid that’s proven to be more heart healthy that’s in milk from grass-fed cows. There’s been a rise in concern that the antibiotics given cows is producing antibiotic resistant germs and also causing allergies in those who drink or eat the animal products. The extra hormones in these products are also of concern.

Organic meat, dairy and eggs have benefits, too.

Not only are you avoiding the potential for additional hormones in your system and extra antibiotics when you eat organic meat, you’re also boosting the benefits that come from the products, especially when it’s grass fed organic beef and dairy. Grass-fed beef and dairy products contain more Omega-3 fatty acids that are good for the heart, while animal products from free range chickens contain more vitamins A and E, more Omega3 fatty acid and less fat and bad cholesterol.

• You can save money by choosing organic foods from the Dirty Dozen list that contain the most pesticides and going with regular fruit and veggies when eating those from the Clean 15.
• Soaking fruits and vegetables in baking soda and water helps reduces pesticides.
• While organic fruits and vegetables may cost more now, the more they become the produce of choice, the more likely the price will drop as more people start farming that way.  Take it a step further and look for organic heirloom fruits and vegetables. You’ll normally find these at farmer’s markets. These are vegetables and fruits that were produced before hybridizing for various characteristics took place. One example is the Black Krim tomato.
• For a real taste treat that has more nutrition, choose heirloom varieties that are organic. There’s nothing like the taste of an heirloom tomato that hybridizing has destroyed.

I respect all people who start an exercise program, whether they go to a gym or not! Some people find it easier to workout at home and some are so strapped for funds even a small out of pocket expense is budget breaking. Yes, you can build muscle without a gym and in many cases, without any gym equipment, although are some pieces of at home equipment I do like that aren’t super expensive.

Start pressing iron.

Having a couple of dumbbells is affordable, but even more affordable are resistance bands. These also tuck away in a drawer easily and don’t take up much room. If even the cost of resistance bands is too much or you want to start right away, use milk jugs or plastic laundry detergent containers filled with sand or water as an alternative. While the cost of resistance bands is under $20, these plastic bottles are free! Adjust the amount of water to increase or decrease the amount of weight.

Body weight exercises are tops for strength building.

Here’s another way to build strength that doesn’t take up space and saves money. Bodyweight exercises have been used for centuries to prepare military or build strength. Push ups, chair push ups, chin ups and pistol squats are great for strength building. There are hundreds of different bodyweight exercises that can increase your strength. Strength-building starts with lifting something heavy with a part of your body and if that heavy object is you, all the better. You’ll always have your equipment ready to go.

Do a workout and add some weight to it.

So your toddler is bugging you when you’re trying to workout or the cat insists on getting in your way. Make them part of the exercise! Hold them in your arms while you’re doing squats or lunges. It makes it super hard. Toddlers can hang onto your back, cats…not so much…but you get the idea. You’d be amazed at how much mothers of toddlers can lift, just by being mothers and carrying the children. Everything is a weight around the house. Choose a size you can tackle. If you’re just starting out, soup cans can be held while working out. The more fit you are, the heavier your load can be.

• If you already belong to a gym, but travel, resistance bands can be a great friend on the road. Check with your personal trainer for a couple of workouts to have ready.
• Running out of time, too. Get a twofer. Put some elbow grease into daily tasks. Carry a little heavier load than normal or more bags from the grocery to your car—without using a cart!
• Keep yourself accountable with a workout buddy. You’ll build more muscle tissue if you workout! Keeping on pace and with the program is important. That’s why working out with a friend can help you do it.
• If you can afford your own equipment, look for items that give you a full body workout, like kettlebells. These can provide a full body workout at home.