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The name DASH diet is an acronym. It stands for Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension. While you can’t always avoid medication, you can certainly improve the odds that you won’t need it to control blood pressure with a combination of healthy diet and regular exercise. Exercise increases the heart’s efficiency and also increases nitric oxide that causes vessels to widen so blood flow is increased. Exercise also helps you attain a healthy weight and avoid serious conditions, like diabetes.

Diet plays a huge role in overall health and blood pressure.

The DASH diet increases food that has more magnesium, potassium and calcium, but is lower in sodium. Compared to other healthy diets, it’s been shown to lower the systolic blood pressure, the top number, by a significant amount—-up to 14 points. While it’s good for your blood pressure, it’s also healthy no matter what your fitness level. It includes whole grains, low fat milk, poultry, fish, beans, nuts fruit and vegetables. The DASH diet also has food lower in sodium, less red meat and less food and drink with added sugar. Trans fats and saturated fats are also reduced.

Weight loss might be one of the side effects of the DASH diet.

Unlike medications, when you use exercise and diet to control blood pressure, the only side effects are ones that are good. For instance, weight loss can occur when you do both, which is helpful if you want to lower your blood pressure. The dash diet is not extremely strict, so it’s easy to follow. The amount of vegetables you can eat is unlimited, but five servings is a recommended minimum. You’re allowed cereals or whole grains, daily fruit, fats, fish, lean meat, poultry or eggs a day. You can have 4 or 5 servings of nuts, legumes and seeds each week and up to 5 servings of sweets each week.

The DASH diet makes you more aware of what you’re eating.

It does more than that, it encourages eating more vegetables. While low salt intake is the accepted norm for those with high blood pressure, newer studies show that a diet high in added sugar also raises blood pressure. Just eliminating sugary soft drinks or processed meats can be a great start and go a long way to lowering blood pressure. In fact, results from the DASH diet have occurred in as little as two weeks.

• While the DASH diet was created to reduce blood pressure. It’s a healthy diet that could be used by anyone, regardless of their blood pressure levels.
• One study placed 43 obese children who had high blood pressure on a diet with little added sugar and within just 9 days, blood pressure, sugar levels and bad cholesterol levels all dropped significantly.
• A healthy diet is a good start to lowering blood pressure, but to make a significant difference, you need to combine it with a program of exercise. Our personal trainers can help you with both.
• Before you undergo any exercise program or change in diet, always check with your health care professional. Never quit any medication unless the doctor tells you, even if you feel you no longer need it.

For more information, contact us today at BioFit Performance

If you’re old enough to remember having a daily planner before tracking your appointments via tech became popular, you’ll appreciate the usefulness of a fitness journal. A fitness journal can be anything that helps you stay motivated, exercise or eat healthier. Here are some fitness journal ideas that you might want to incorporate into your regimen for fitness. There’s nothing better than writing down the goals and tracking them with paper and pencil. It may be old school, but it works and is easier to see your progress by just flipping through the pages.

Make your fitness journal a daily effort and make it fun.

Use colored markers, drawings and diagrams if you want. Track the food you eat during the day or your exercise program. If you’re just starting out, tackle one part of your fitness program at a time. It can be as simple as tracking your water intake and doing a checklist of tasks for the day with exercise or walking being one of those tasks.

Use it to plan your meals or plan your workout.

If you aren’t using our meal planning app, use your planner to do that. You can also track everything you eat, even if you’re using our app. You’re human, so if it’s not on the meal planner, track it in your journal. It happens. List the exercises you’ll do that day and it can help you get through your workout quicker without stopping to think about what comes next. It also helps ensure you vary your workout. When you list the number of repetitions and sets you do and how you felt doing them, you’ll be able to track your progress, too.

Create bar charts to track more than just exercise and diet.

Track your energy levels, too. You’ll be able to start to see a correlation between a combination of healthy eating and exercise to your energy level. Make sure you also add a chart to show how much sleep you got that night, which also provides a lot of insight. Throw in a few motivational phrases on each page.

• Create a seven-day, fourteen-day or thirty-day challenge. Outline an achievable exercise program with the daily workout perfectly outlined. Make the final day of your challenge more difficult than day one. Work to achieve that goal.
• Create a reward at the end of each week or month if you’ve accomplished your goals. Make it something you really want that’s appropriate for the energy expended and persistence it took.
• Color code your progress. If you’re counting steps, use a different color based on the number of steps you took. If you’re working out, use one color for success and another color if you did an extra set or two.
• You can opt for premade fitness trackers or just use a spiral bound notebook, journal or daily planner and get creative. It can be as artistic as you choose, the important part is tracking what you do.

For more information, contact us today at BioFit Performance

If you feel anxious or depressed all the time, with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, it’s time to take action. Those feelings can come from stress. I have clients at BioFit Performance in Oviedo, FL, who workout specifically to do exercises that relieve stress, Stress can be both good and bad. It’s necessary for survival and prepares the body to run or fight when there’s danger. It was especially important to early man, when running and fighting could help with most stressors. Today, things that are stressful aren’t the same. Traffic jams, an angry boss or customer and getting the house ready for your in-laws visit doesn’t require either, so you never burn off the hormones of stress to return to normal.

You can mimic the act of running and the movements of fighting.

Doing a tough workout can be just as productive when it comes to burning off stress hormones, according to science. After they burn off, the body replaces them with hormones that make you feel good. There are various studies that show that exercise can help lift mild depression and anxiety as well as medication and is a good adjunct therapy for more severe cases. Weight lifting is one type of exercise that can burn off cortisol, which is associated with abdominal fat, and other stress hormones.

If you want to mimic flight, as in fight or flight response, start running.

When you think of aerobic workouts, you probably immediately think of running, but there are other aerobic workouts that are beneficial to relieve stress. Any exercise that gets your heart pumping will do. You can make it a steady state run or maximize the benefits by alternating your pace, going at top speed for a short period and reverting to a recovery period and back again. It turns an ordinary run into HIIT—high intensity interval training.

Out of shape and stressed to the max?

Start simple with what you can do. Taking a walk can be a start. You don’t have to go to the gym or lift heavy weights, just put one foot in front of the other and get moving. Modify your pace throughout the walk, speeding up for a while and slowing down to recover, then back up again. Have you ever noticed how you pace when you’re stressed or know someone who does? It’s because it’s comforting and cuts the stress. As you get fitter, make your stress release more difficult. Include other types of exercise like flexibility training and strength training.

• Working out not only makes you feel less stress, it also helps your posture. That makes you look more confident and feel more confident, too. In many cases, people find that one change often reduces stress in their life.
• Getting rid of stress can occur when you workout and even after you finish. Consider using our cold hot plunge or the chromotherapy infra-red sauna after you workout or even before to limber up a bit.
• If you’re a senior, don’t kid yourself thinking you don’t have stress. Stress doesn’t have to come from the work world and in seniors, it often masks itself as depression. Getting out, working out and enjoying the challenge of getting fit can help reverse or prevent a problem.
• When it’s possible, workout on the beach or exercise outdoors. Go barefoot and feel the energy of the earth. Direct contact with the ground is called grounding. It feels good and many believe it helps relieve stress.

For more information, contact us today at BioFit Performance

Eating whole foods like fresh fruit and vegetables, is always encouraged, especially if you’re trading it for unhealthy options like pastries and candy. Fruits have phytonutrients that boost your health and antioxidants for cell health. They contain fiber, so even though they’re sweet, the fiber slows the absorption of the sugar in fruit. The nutrients in fruit also provide a wide variety of health benefits. You can eat too much fruit and that amount is determined by your body and circumstances. How much is enough and when does it become too much?

Start with a healthy diet that’s well-rounded.

If you’re eating all types of macronutrients in a well-balanced diet, you probably won’t experience a problem with eating too much fruit. The biggest potential for a problem occurs when you eat fruit to the exclusion of all other types of food. That is what fruitarian does. It’s a type of diet based primarily on fruits such as apples, bananas and oranges. It neglects many important nutrients. Eating too much fruit can also lead to problems with diarrhea and bloating. It can cause people with diabetes to have a rise in blood sugar levels, too.

What’s the recommended amount of daily fruit.

The American Heart Association recommends four servings of fruit every day. That’s about two cups. Their diet also includes a wide variety of other types of food, such as meats, fish, vegetables and vegetable proteins. It’s more important to eat adequate vegetables, than it is to eat adequate fruit. You need 2 ½ to 3 cups of vegetables every day. Your body will tell you if you’re eating too much fruit. It bloats and demands you spend more time in the bathroom.

Variety is important when it comes to fruit.

The rules are the same for fruit as they are for vegetables, vary your diet and make it a rainbow of color. Each color indicates different phytochemicals that improve your health, boost the benefits of other nutrients and act as antioxidants to protect cells. Berries, for instance, are good brain food, while apples are good for many parts of the body, including teeth. Including variety from bananas to berries and apples to avocados can ensure you get all the nutrients you should.

Choosing fruit over fruit juice is important, especially if you’re diabetic or prediabetic. The fiber in fruit slows the absorption of glucose to keep your blood sugar level and also helps fill you up, so weight loss is easier.

Throwing fruit into your smoothy can be exactly what you need to make it more palatable. Unlike juicing, putting whole fruit in the blender provides fiber and all the nutrients in the skin.

Don’t be fooled by yogurt with fruit added that you find in the grocery cooler. It normally has added sugar. Make your own fresh fruit and yogurt combo to ensure there’s no added sugar.

Try new fruit periodically. Dragon fruit, jujube, lychee, mulberries and mangosteen are a few more exotic fruit people seldom eat. Each type of fruit has different benefits for the body.

Do you remember when you were a child and you could hardly wait until you became 10, went to high school or was old enough to live on your own and make your own rules? Ironically, once that age was reached and has passed, we often look back at those younger years and yearn for the energy, dreams and vitality of those days. Instead of looking to the future or yearning for the past, it’s time to live your life to the fullest. You can live your best life by focusing on the here and now and realizing happiness and satisfaction doesn’t have an age.

Staying fit and healthy makes a huge difference in how enjoyable your life is.

The older you get, the harder it is to stay fit. Your body slows the production of hormones that help you build muscle tissue. Your body produces less energy because of free radicals and your metabolism slows. Those changes and others cause weight gain. Brain activity can slow and inhibit the production and release of hormones that keep the body running its best on a cellular level. As you gain fat, chronic illness can begin and you slow down due to the excess weight, causing the problem to become worse. While that sounds horrible, with the right diet and a program of regular exercise, many of the problems these changes cause can be reversed.

Find ways to reduce stress, which adds to the aging process.

Stress not only kills, it also creates hormones that can add years to your appearance and increase abdominal fat. How do you reduce stress in your life? You can learn breathing techniques, meditation and even exercise to help reduce stress. You can also make changes in your life to avoid stressful situations. If you feel you’re constantly being bombarded by stressful news, turn off the television, avoid social media and take a break for a while. Go out for a walk instead.

Follow a dream.

One of the saddest parts of getting very old is that too often, people give up on their dreams or don’t look for the next challenge or goal. Dreams are what make life worth living. They’re a reason to get up in the morning. You don’t have to have big dreams, anything you’ve always wanted to do that’s important to you is good enough. No matter what your age, having a goal, a dream will make your life richer and more worth living.

• Identify what you have and don’t dwell on what you don’t have. If you’re constantly looking at others with envy, you’ll miss all the great things you have in life. Focus on those and count your blessings every day.
• Learn something new each day and find ways to improve. Whether you take a language class, read a classic or learn how to ballroom dance, learning something new not only makes life interesting, it keeps your brain active.
• Be adventurous. Take a vacation to someplace you’ve always wanted to go. Be open-minded to trying new things. Take a part-time job to learn more about a field that interests you.
• Take care of problems that you can solve. Even if you’re dreading cleaning out that closet or facing a more serious problem, just do it. Start on the process and you’ll find it can lift a lot of stress from your life and may not be as serious as you thought.

For more information, contact us today at BioFit Performance