January 23, 2008

How to make your smile more attractive

Photo from yoshimov

Ever look at the opposite (or even the same) sex, they give you a really warm and nice-looking smile and you get a really good feeling about that person - whether it’s that you’re on the same wavelength, you’re attracted to them or you just want to go over and make conversation?

A nice looking smile is an important aspect of non-verbal communication. A smile is the center of giving thanks, showing appreciation, accepting a deal, falling in love, making small talk and exhibiting inner happiness. I find that when I am naturally happy, grateful for all that I am and have, I smile more realistically than when I just smile for the sake of it.

As science has revealed, there are natural ways to increase the quality of your smile. Here are five ways you can have a warm, nicer looking and much more attractive smile:

1. Brush your teeth properly. Many people restrict their smile because they’re ashamed at the quality of their teeth. Make sure you give your teeth the time necessary to keep bacteria and plaque away. One lady I recently made gave me one of the most amazing smiles I’ve ever seen. I asked her how she smiled so nicely. She told me that as she takes care and time in brushing her teeth, she has nothing to worry about how she looks. (By the way, asking how a lady smiles so well - good or bad pickup line?)  

2. Avoid snacking. Snacks that are high in sugar and carbs are worse as they can attack your teeth using the acid for as long as 20 minuts. Bacteria feed on the sugar and may start to grow on your teeth and gums. These include simple sugars in fruits, breads and vegetables. So ensure you time your eating with cleaning your teeth. 

3. Drink plenty water. The most prominent feature when it comes to your overall health is always about water. Water will ensure your body has plenty fluid and doesn’t suffer from internal dehydration allowing your skin and lips to look smooth and sensational. Also, by drinking lots of water, you’ll prevent getting bad breath.

4.  Straight teeth. We’re talking about a good smile here so I’ve got to write about teeth. Having straight teeth is an important facet of beautiful smiling. If you haven’t got straight teeth, do your best to get some by seeing a dentist/orthodontist and the effort you put in now will be great for future years. A more faster approach but more costly is cosmetic dentistry.

5.  Live a healthy lifestyle. The most beautiful smile shines from within. Working out, eating right and practicing good overall hygiene will not only promote healthy teeth and gums, it will make you feel good about yourself. Your self-confidence and positive energy will radiate out of your expression’s most important asset - your beautiful smile.

Popularity: 16% [?]

January 21, 2008

Facial Yoga - Get rid of your wrinkles faster

A couple of weeks back, I read an article in TIME magazine that discussed a new form of yoga for reducing aging. So much emphasis has been put on anti-aging and the market is huge for providers and practitioners because of today’s boomers.

I wondered if there really was anything new to this kind of yoga or if it really just meant for people to get back to their younger ages and make silly faces and movements with the cheek and face bones so that they are being exercised.

The focus of facial yoga from a marketing perspective is to help boomers reduce their wrinkles so they can look and feel more younger. And as it’s less painful than surgery and cheaper than Botox, it becomes an attractive thing. Also, there’s the huge social element of going to a facial yoga class once or twice a week, making silly faces and movements and then heading back home to daily life - call it a time to get away from the hustle and bustle of life that causes the wrinkles anyway.

Check out some of the facial expressions yourself and try them (it could even be a party game!). New York instructor Annelise Hagen demonstrates them in this UK Daily Mail article. If you can learn this off a book, you could do it anywhere. But do you really need to learn how to make faces from a book? Aren’t these silly faces things you did as you grew up and now you’ve just got to do it again for a health and wellness benefit?

Make of it what you think for yourself. For me, it’s yet another simple service that boomers can buy into for the social aspect of working with others. Aside from that, you could even just practice facial yoga walking down the street.

Watch this video for a quick tip or two:

Popularity: 10% [?]

January 2, 2008

Feed Your Family Right - Book Review

For the family with not enough time on their hands, with children who don’t like vegetables and families that like to eat out, this book makes a good, inspiring and extremely helpful read. Authored by nutrition expert Elisa Zied and someone who had these challenges, “Feed Your Family Right”.

Common themes in the book include making fitness a core part of your lifestyle whether you have 5 minutes or one hour, managing your portions and making use of fresh vegetables for simple healthy recipes.

Remember what one reader of our site once said, “our state of health is the sum total of our daily healthy habits” and so as Eliza Zied shows in the book, all her small tips and guidances all add up to a better healthy lifestyle.

In her book, she has also done great work in pulling out common problems and providing solutions for health seekers to get on the path of health and wellness. For example, she very clearly points out the problem of lack of time. Unfortunately, many parents and young adults with not enough time have put health before career and resort to carefree eating and exercise. Zied says 30 minutes of exercise daily is optimum, she suggests breaking it into intervals of 5-10 minutes throughout the day and that can be done easily at work or at home.

Elisa also has advice for parents: lead by example. If you’re overweight, your kids are going to follow. It should be up to the parents to lead by example when it comes to healthy cooking, raw eating, exercising and juicing. It should be up to the parents to also lead by example when it comes to communication and how to interact with one’s health. Parent’s shouldn’t come home and couch in front of the television, nor should they just eat out, come home and sleep.

One thing I like about Elisa’s work overall is her moving-towards-change attitude rather than moving-away-from-pain attitude and those involved in any kind of personal development or self-help will recognize this as an important teaching. She discusses that parents tell their kids that eating more fresh vegetables and fruits and other healthy foods will help them run faster, perform better, increase memory, etc rather than telling them that eating a second bowl of ice cream will make them fat. See the difference? 

For fast readers like me, Elisa helped me read faster and save time by providing the important information in easily digestible charts to analyze and use as required. More than anything, Elisa Zied’s “Feed Your Family Right” is an excellent nutrition guide for parents and young adults that is extremely timely in what I consider to be an unhealthy world that we’re living in. Out of 10, I give this book 7.5 and recommend you buy it or borrow it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

December 29, 2007

Create your wellness plan for 2008

I was pondering putting this information into a PDF that you could download. I may still do that, but for now I thought it best to write it out as a full length blog post.

The new year is only days away now. I truly hope you’ve set yourself some time to look back at 2007 and look forward to what you’d like to do in 2008 if you haven’t already. Doing this much life planning for your forthcoming year will reward you with greater clarity about your life and where it’s going. I want to use this article to discuss some elements of creating your very own wellness plan in 2008. 

When the word “resolutions” comes to mind, I think of the millions of people who set goals to lose weight, eat more fruit and vegetables, cut out chocolate from their diet, drink no alcohol, stop smoking, get fit, etc. The list can go on. But when you make a list of how many people actually achieve those goals, by February, most have forgotten about it, if not done anything to make it a reality.

I like to think of New Years as a time where I set some major ‘ReVolutions’ in motion for my life. Rather than pick many, many smaller goals, I opt to go for at least one big goal in each important area of my life. For wellness for example, 2007 for me was about less junking and snacking and more fuller meals that are high in water-rich content and protein as required. By focusing on the one goal throughout and using people and aids to support my development, I’m now definitely able to see the benefits. I feel and look much better due to my high water intake and I trust if I continue on like this which I’m going to, the benefits will be even better as I get older.

I propose a four-step system to helping you achieve your wellness goals in 2008.

Step 1: Create your wellness vision for 2008

A vision is where you create a view of what you’d like to achieve and something you see using your mind’s eye. It’s got to be realistic but feel free to aim high if it’s going to challenge and push you to new levels. What is the vision of your health, body and mind in 2008? How do you see yourself looking? What’s the size of body you want? How do you want to feel? What do you currently inhabit in your body that you’d like to get rid of - be it wrinkles, unhealthy sleeping habits, smoking, alcohol, etc? Set up your vision and be clear on what it is you want from taking a wellness plan into next year?

It’s also important that when you set up your vision, you become as specific as you can. For example, if you want to lose weight, by how many pounds or stones do you want to be more lighter? If you want to stop junking, what specifically do you want to cut down and how often will you allow yourself to eat that junk, if at all? If you want to stop smoking, by how many cigarettes will you reduce your intake and by when will you totally reduce to smoking none? What will you replace your smoking addiction with and by when? As you can see from these questions and examples, it’s important to set a “by when I’ll be done” date for the vision you have. 

Step 2:  Clarify your reasons

If you’re familiar with any work in personal development, you may have heard of Tony Robbins and his work which states that no matter what goal you set, the more reasons you have for achieving it, the more you’ll convince yourself of wanting to achieve it and you’ll go out and get it. Whether you’re a self-help fan or not, there is considerable truth in his statement. The more reasons you have to doing and achieving something, they more you will achieve it.

What are your reasons for achieving wellness in your particular vision in 2008? If it’s to stop smoking, don’t just say because my spouse told me to or because it’s bad for my health. Dig deeper. Why specifically is it bad for your health? Because it affects your lungs. How will it affect your liver? It’s making my lungs all black and affecting my breathing. What happens if your breathing is affected? I can’t breath well and I may die. Ahhh, so that’s the reason you want to stop smoking? Because you don’t want difficulty in breathing and you want to die of lung failure. 

Do you see where I went with that little rant? I kept digging deeper to find out the core reasons. I’m sure if I went deeper, there would be more to unravel. Come up with lots of reasons, my friend. 

Step 3:  Create actionable chunks

Once you’ve completed step 2, break your 2008 wellness vision down into 12 monthly chunks. By the end of every month, what will you need to have done and achieved in order to stay in line with your goal to make your wellness vision a reality? Again, give each month’s goal lots of specificity like you did in step 1 and step 2. 

Step 4:  Take action 

All that’s left in my 4-step process is for you to then take action on those chunks. Take each month one at a time, figure out what you’ve got to do to make that month’s target a reality and make it happen. Get out there and do what you need to do to lose weight, stop smoking, quit the alcohol, eat healthily, stop junking and snacking, or whatever your vision is.

All that remains is for you to take action. Without action, there is no result.

It becomes a case of “the ball’s in your court now…”

Popularity: 9% [?]

December 24, 2007

5 ways to get rid of a cold

The common cold, although not lethal can be pretty annoying and it’s not something we really want to have affect us. It makes us tired, groggy, sleepy and demotivated. Here are a few things you can do to get rid of your common cold easily, without drugs and naturally.

1. Get Some Sleep. Let your body get some rest, and ensure the room you’re in has a fresh supply of air. Keep a window open slightly to allow air to recycle otherwise the air you’re exhaling and want to get rid of mixes and is also inhaled.

2. Drink Lots of Warm Water. Water is the best body cleanser in my life. I drink a lot of water daily and can often tell signs of my body needing water on days that I don’t drink as much as I usually should. Warm water when ill is just as good and easier for the body to take. If you don’t like lots of water, squeeze some fresh lime to give it a taste.

3. Eat Water-Rich Content. Lots of fruits and vegetables will do you a lot of good. So too will some hot soup. Keep your intake light and easy on the stomach so that fresh nutrients can help fight off the foreign particles in your body causing the common cold. Steamed vegetables are good and avoid highly cooked, spicy and processed foods.

4. De-stress. Stress can sometimes be attractive to the foreign particles that cause the common cold. Use this time to de-stress by listening to your favourite music, playing a musical instrument, reading and other at-home leisurely activities. Take your mind off things that are currently worrying you and enjoy some time off.

5. Avoid Energy Drainers. Avoid people, foods, music, activities, etc that drain you more. Your goal is to get out of the state of common cold that the viruses have put you in. Allow your body to heal and don’t let others affect that.

What have you done or taken to help you relieve a common cold easily?

Popularity: 45% [?]

December 23, 2007

Christmas Wellness - Five Tips

The festive period is finally here. “Have you done your Christmas shopping yet?” is probably the most common phrase everywhere in the UK. I don’t usually shop for anyone else at Christmas. If I do, it’s to take a bit of time out to shop for myself, although I haven’t got round to doing that yet for myself.

Christmas is a time when we indulge with our friends and family in all types of foods, drinks and games. Some people find it a stressful time with all the materialistic shopping, gift giving, luxuries and all. Others find it realistic. Yet others use it as a spiritual life-cleansing opportunity. However you use your holiday season, celebrate your “me” time and here are some tips to help you make Christmas well, inside and outside of yourself.

1. Keep things simple this Christmas. Engage in a few special meals and deserts, but monitor the natural element of what you’re eating and drinking. How processed is it? How much of what you’re eating has lost its raw taste?

2. Stay replenished. During Christmas, no doubt you’ll be feasting so ensure your body gets the minimum requirements it demands by being water-rich. Drink lots of water and eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.

3. Keep things in perspective. It’s only a few days of the entire year you are celebrating. Take time to review how the other 350-odd days went and what you’d like to do in 2008 to make this year even better.

4. Appreciation for what you already have. Many people lose track of their ego’s during Christmas. Watch where yours is and keep an eye on it. Be grateful for the people, things and ideas you already have; don’t focus on what you don’t have. 

5. Have fun. You just can’t miss out this element.

What are you preparing for this year’s Christmas lunch or dinner?

Why not put yourself to the challenge and consider a raw menu? What’s on your Christmas 2007 Menu?

Popularity: 4% [?]

October 18, 2007

Getting into the right mindset for wellness

Success in life is said to be 80% down to your mindset and 20% practical. No doubt, it’s the same with taking back control of your health and getting on the path to wellness.No matter how much healthy food you eat and how much you exercise, if you don’t do it from the right mindset, you’ll do more to harm your body than if you’d poor nutrition and think well.For someone like yourself, who I presume is interested in getting more fitter, becoming more healthier and living longer, how you think and approach this area of your life is just as important as how you approach your relationships, career, finances, work and other areas of your life.Firstly, I want to ask you why you’re getting onto the path of wellness. Why is it so important to you? What do you aim to get out of it? How do you see it helping you and how will you think about it?The answers to these questions will form your thinking and the approach you have for wellness.Let me give you an example.If one person eats healthily and exercises well but thinks and feel that what he’s doing will have no impact on his body, what do you think the result will be?Correct - it won’t be as good as it could be; he or she won’t experience optimum health and fitness.What about if you were to eat healthily, adopt a more fruitful lifestyle and think positive, happy thoughts about where it’s taking you, how you want to look, how you want people to see you, and more importantly how you want to have more energy to do the things you want and live longer. Don’t you think that’ll make you achieve your wellness goals much faster? You bet, it will!So from today, make sure you’re in the right mindset and you’re thinking good, postive and happy thoughts for the greater good of your body.

Popularity: 3% [?]