Meet the healthy new you in 2014

Weight training

By Asunta Simoloka

Happy New Year to you all.  With commitment, determination, and enthusiasm, you can enhance your health this year.

Much as it is helpful to have others motivate you to live healthy, the motivation that shapes your health comes from you.

Have a relationship with your body, listen to your body and watch what you put into it.  Many people are so detached from their own bodies that they really do not pay attention to what goes in.

Worse still, when disease strikes, people fail to associate illness with unhealthy habits, they simply blame ‘bad genes.’

Do not be discouraged if you fall, quickly get back up and keep moving.  Occasional unhealthy choices do very little harm; your health is only endangered when those unhealthy choices develop into habits.

Stop being overly fixated on body weight instead analyze your waist size and fitness level.  Weighing yourself is like measuring the wrong results because the scale cannot specify the amount of belly fat and fails to distinguish between fat and lean muscle.  Weight gain does not always mean fat gain; sometimes being slightly heavier is because of added lean muscle and bone mass due to exercising regularly.

In 2014, adopt a healthy lifestyle not a short term diet plan; wellness is a continuous process that has no end point.  Cook your own food and eat out less.  That way you have more control over what you eat because you can select and use healthy ingredients to prepare food.

If exercise is proving to be difficult, start out with a sport or activity you enjoy, then exercising will be fun and you will be motivated try other exercises.  Fitness infuses tremendous vitality into your daily life and keeps you from feeling overwhelmed and sluggish, you feel great just being fit.

I love doing these exercises and you may like them too; kickboxing, boxing, jogging, weight lifting, rope jumping, yoga, and Pilates and I walk very long distances.

Get adequate sleep, drink plenty of water, manage stress, control your anger, socialize, and know how to be happy.  Wishing you happiness and good health in 2014 and beyond.

Diabetes tip
Millet contains phosphorus which improves blood circulation thus avoiding stroke