Researchers Have Discovered the Surprisingly Simple Trick to Actually Loving Exercise

If you’re not fitting workouts into your life—and you’d like to, the first thing you might want to do is stop thinking of it as a workout, suggests a new study published in the journal, BMC Public Health. The study revealed that women who take the attitude that exercise interferes with and interrupts their lives are less likely to be physically active than women who believe that exercising enhances their lives.

The study’s lead author, Michelle Segar, PhD, Director of the University of Michigan’s Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy Center, has been studying how culture fosters or undermines people’s ability to sustain healthy habits for 20 years. In her 2015 book, No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, Dr. Segar first floated her theory that the key to achieving lasting fitness is finding reasons to enjoy physical activity and discovering realistic ways to fit it into our lives, including broadening our view of exercise to include less intense forms of physical activity such as walking and playing with the kids. These household chores certainly count as “exercise” because they burn a ton of calories, especially if you try these tricks for turning chores into legit workouts.

For the newly published study, Dr. Segar and her team asked 40 women between the ages of 22 and 49 (recruited from the greater Washington, D.C., area) what makes them feel happy and successful and how working out either fosters or undermines those feelings. All of the women, regardless of activity level, turned out to want the same things out of life, including having “meaningful connections with others,” feeling “relaxed and free of pressure during their leisure time,” and accomplishing whatever goals they’ve set for themselves, whether personal or professional. Where the more physically active women differed from the less physically active women was in their attitude toward working out. The women who were less active viewed exercise as counterproductive to connecting with others, relaxing and accomplishing their goals—even their fitness and weight-loss goals, because the idea of exercise tended to inspire dread, in part due to a narrow view of exercise as “seriously heart-pumping and sweat-inducing.” The women who were more active viewed exercise as an opportunity to connect with friends and family, a means to relaxation and a sense of accomplishment.

Ultimately, the study’s findings support Dr. Segar’s belief that in order to change our bodies, we have to change our minds. For example, as Dr. Segar suggests in her blog, “Instead of dragging yourself to the gym because you want to lose weight, consider how moving makes you feel….Do you tend to feel an energy boost? Do you sleep better? Does your stress go down? Make those your reasons for exercise—and watch your desire to exercise increase.”

The study itself provides a handy reference guide for substituting exercise-sabotaging attitudes for exercise-positive attitudes in the context of a variety of scenarios.

For days when you still find you need that extra “push,” check out these gym hacks to make your workout less of a chore.

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Why Caring For The Nose And Throat Is Important For Healthy Living

Most of the acute infections to which man is heir enter the body through the nose and mouth. Common colds, influenza, tonsillitis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, diphtheria, infantile paralysis, and so on, through a long list of diseases, find their way into the body through this portal. Measures which reduce the infective material which gains access to the nose and mouth, such as frequent washing of the hands and keeping them away from the face, the use of individual drinking glasses, and the avoidance of exposure to persons with these diseases, are all Worth while.

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12 Foods That Will Turn Your Meals into Calorie Burners

Chili peppers

Chili peppers do a lot more than spice up your food—in fact, here are six health benefit to peppers. They contain a component called capsaicin, which has been linked to increased energy expenditure and fat oxidization. “Capsinoid consumption has been found to have the ability to ‘turn on’ certain processes in the body that cause our body to work harder (increase energy expenditure) and use fat for energy (oxidizing fat),” explains Meg Hager, MS, RD. “Chili peppers can be added to salsa and then eaten with eggs, eaten with hummus and even added to soups for a spicy kick.”

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Can’t Meditate? The Quicker Practice That Gets You the Same Benefits in Less Time

Some people just don’t get meditation. The devotion, the time commitment: Meditation asks a fair amount of you—though the payoffs in stress relief and improved health make it worthwhile. But if you’re not the meditating type, don’t lose hope: Hypnosis may offer an alternative. This mental technique focuses on the subconscious mind and can produce results in just one session, while meditation is a life-long practice that allows results to happen in a more spontaneous way. Put simply, “meditation is deep relaxation and hypnosis is deep relaxation with added suggestion,” says Orlando, Florida-based hypnotist Richard Barker.

Both practices treat a variety of conditions such as anxiety, stress, depression, chronic pain, and insomnia, but if you are looking for proven research, meditation has the upper hand. Numerous studies have shown that meditation has positive neurological effects. While hypnosis has a history that dates back to the 18th century—when German physician Franz Mesmer used hypnosis to treat patients in Vienna and Paris—it hasn’t been until recently that research has uncovered the areas of the brain affected by hypnosis. “Psychology has a curriculum but hypnosis is not yet regulated in the Unites States, mostly because we do not understand it,” says Barker.

What is understood about hypnosis, however, are the results. Like meditation, hypnosis has been tapped by professional athletes to help with performance. Hypnosis is also used to eradicate certain phobias (such as fear of public speaking), to help people stop smoking, sleep better, and help those who are grieving. The number of sessions varies depending on the person, says Barker, but it usually takes just one. “Once I find the root cause of what’s making you do what you are doing, I can change the script,” he says. Another option for people trying to manage emotional issues that can’t be dealt with in one or two sessions is self-hypnosis, which shares many of the same characteristics as guided meditation.

Many of Mt. Vernon, Washington-based hypnotist Kelley Woods clients with long-term anxiety have tried meditation without success. She uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a process that identifies the way we have been “programmed” to think, act, and feel, and then changes the behavior through hypnosis. “In meditation the ultimate goal is to quiet the mind, in hypnosis, we use the ability of your thoughts to focus on what you would like to happen, and then we change the way you think about your challenges,” says Woods. If you want to give hypnosis a try, you can find a certified hypnotherapist through the National Guild of Hypnotists, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the practice. While treatment varies based on each individual’s condition, many conditions require just one session. A typical therapy session lasts about 90 minutes and can cost anywhere from $200 to $1,500.

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Gravity of Good Health

A perfect figure and fine curves are every woman's covet. Similarly every man craves for six-pack abs and a strong attractive muscular physique. But it is also obvious that these aims cannot be achieved as such without enough input of any hard work. Being industrious is a basic requirement for attaining these goals.

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Is Climate Change Wrecking Your Sleep? (Hint: Yes!)

We’ve got yet another thing to add to the list of bad things climate change is doing to your body right now. We already know that it’s associated with an increase in seasonal allergies, diabetes, gestational diabetes (diabetes during pregnancy) and Lyme disease. Much as we’d like to advise you not to lose sleep over it, the fact is, global warming may also be harming your ability to get a good night of shut-eye. That’s the take-away from a scientific study published in the journal, Science Advances, the first study ever to examine the implications of climate change for human sleep.

Using data from 765,000 survey respondents in the United States from 2002 to 2011, coupled with nighttime temperature data, the researchers found that higher nighttime temperatures are associated with self-reported sleep problems, with the largest effects seen during summer and among lower-income and elderly subjects (who may not have easy access to air conditioning). As little as a one-degree Celsius increase in nighttime temperature translates to three nights of trouble sleeping per 100 individuals per month, per the study. That quickly adds up to nearly 9 million nights per month, or approximately 110 million nights per year, according to the study, which also predicts that “every location in the United States may experience an increased incidence of trouble sleeping due to nighttime warming induced by future climate change.”

The study authors report that their findings correspond with growing literature on the links between temperature, climate, and human health and well-being, and suggest that the sleep loss resulting from global warming may explain the connection. They go on to name a variety of bodily functions that suffer directly from lack of sleep, including repair of skeletal muscles, efficient removal of waste from the brain, immune function, cardiovascular health, and mood regulation, all of which can have a subsequent negative effect on weight. In fact, obesity has already been identified as a risk associated with sleep loss.

These small bedroom changes can help you sleep better tonight.

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Benefits Of Pure Water For Your Health

The human body is composed mostly of water. This important fluid is present in our blood, our muscles, our brain and our bones. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends drinking at least two litres of water a day to be healthy and hydrated. Here are 8 reasons to drink water regularly.

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