Essential Oils: Essential Oils (The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Uncovering the Healing Benefits of Aromatherapy) (28 page)

ACTION PLAN

Not finding the time to exercise in the morning is one of the biggest excuses. So here are a few tips to help you fit an exercise routine into your morning ritual.

• Keep your workout clothes ready next to the bed.
  Plan and prepare for a morning workout the previous night by setting out your workout clothes in plain sight so you’ll be motivated. If you intend to go running, then keep your sneakers ready.
  
• Set a schedule.
  Whether it’s an hour or just 20 minutes, set aside the time in your morning schedule to exercise before breakfast. Time your wake-up alarm accordingly. Please note that it is important to allow some time to warm up and cool down before and after exercise, so don’t make it too tight otherwise you’ll tend to rush it.
  
• Use a motivational poster.
  I once saw a poster with these words from the book ‘Born to Run’ by Chris McDougall above a runner’s bed. It said, “Every morning in Africa, when a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, when a lion wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle—when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.” Enough said.
  
• Enjoy your exercise.
  This may seem a bit obvious but the main reason why many people give up physical activity is because they hate it. If you hate going to a gym in the morning and getting all sweaty, then you will not be able to sustain it for long. If it is the sweat that is putting you off, then find time to take a nice cold shower immediately after your workout so you can cool off and feel refreshed Similarly, if running in the morning is not conducive because of the early morning traffic where you live then you should find a track where you can run peacefully without worrying about being run over by a speeding vehicle. Choose your exercise or physical activity carefully. Find something that you will enjoy or at least learn to enjoy over a period of time. Experiment with different types—Yoga, Pilates, running, cardio, etc.—so that you find a routine that suits you. This is most important because then it becomes a lifetime habit and your morning ritual isn’t complete without it.
  

Eating a big breakfast has long been recommended by doctors and fitness experts as the secret to health. However, it is only recently that eating a hearty breakfast has become popular because it has been proven to help in reducing weight.

Eating to your heart’s content is the opposite of dieting and contrary to common logic, it should contribute to weight-gain but when you eat breakfast regularly, it actually helps you to lose weight.

How?

When you eat breakfast earlier in the morning, it contributes to kick-starting your metabolism after a long period of fasting (6 to 8 hours of sleep) and also regulates your insulin level.

Your body produces hormones that induce hunger according to your circadian rhythm and daily rituals.

So when you eat a hearty breakfast, you are actually feeding your body’s need for carbohydrates and its ability to process them to produce energy. In other words, your body is in a better position to process the calories and convert them into energy-producing nutrients and performing fat-burning activities.

On the other hand when you skip breakfast and have a meal later in the meal, your body is craving for carbohydrates and therefore you tend to consume more calories. Also, by this time, your body becomes less insulin sensitive, which means it is less efficient in converting the calories into energy and therefore builds more fat than muscle tissue.

The proof of the royal breakfast is in its eating.

In a recent study published in The Globe and Mail, researchers observed the results of the eating habits of two different groups of women who were overweight. Both groups were given the same amount of calories (1,400) on a daily basis but with one key difference.

One group was given half their calories (700) at breakfast and the rest for lunch (500) and for dinner (200). The other group had the opposite—a 200 calorie-breakfast, a 500-calorie lunch and a huge 700-calorie dinner. Guess who lost more weight?

Not only did the women who ate a big breakfast lose twice as much weight as the others but they said that they felt less hungry during the day especially, between mealtimes and therefore were less tempted to snack. It was observed that they also had lower levels of Ghrelin in their blood which is the hormone responsible for stimulating appetite and promoting storage of fat derived from food.

This proves that the old adage, “Eat your breakfast like a king (or queen), lunch like a prince (or princess) and dinner like a pauper,” contains more scientific logic than is it normally credited with.

Simply put, eating early in the morning after a good workout, not only keeps you energized and helps to process the nutrition from your breakfast more efficiently but it also prevents you from feeling hungry and eating more during the day. Eating bigger meals later during the day also makes your body store more fat than when you eat a big breakfast.

What is the ideal form of breakfast?

An ideal breakfast should contain most importantly two key ingredients—proteins and carbohydrates. Having said that, an ideal breakfast should give you all the nutrients that your body needs, from vitamins to fiber which is contained in natural food such as raw fruits and vegetables, whole-grain bread, oats, eggs, fish, lean meat such as turkey, yoghurt and almonds.

So, instead of eating high-glycemic food such as white bread, cereals, waffles, pastries and milk, which cause a spike in insulin levels leading to weight-gain, it makes sense to stick to natural food.

While what you eat is important, equally important is how you eat it. Consuming fruits as juice or shakes are not as nourishing as eating them raw because you lose out on the fiber. Similarly eating grilled or baked meat and vegetables is much healthier than eating them fried. However, eating vegetables raw has been observed to provide the most nourishment compared to it being cooked.

If you want to lose weight, then eat a hearty breakfast. Make your breakfast the biggest meal of your day and combine it with an efficient physical activity immediately before you eat to have a killer combination that will surely produce amazing weight-loss results.

ACTION PLAN

If you are someone who often skips breakfast or who doesn’t have a fixed breakfast ritual in the morning, here are a few tips to start your healthy breakfast habit.

• Choose your breakfast, carefully.
  Ideally you should eat your breakfast within an hour or so after you wake-up. So keep the ingredients to prepare your breakfast ready if you are going to prepare it at home. If you are eating out, find a healthy outlet which serves organic and made-to-order food rather than a place that serves bread and bacon.
  
• Schedule time for your breakfast.
  Remember that this is the most important meal of your day. Don’t make excuses to skip it. If you have to wake-up half an hour early, then it is worth it, especially if you calculate the pounds you will lose in just a matter of months.
  
• Prepare a weekly menu.
  Prevent your breakfast from getting boring by meticulously preparing the menu in advance for a week. You don’t have to actually type it out. You can choose from a dozen recipes available online and tailor a weekly calendar of great breakfast meals.
  
• Include a reward to induce yourself to look forward to it.
  A piece of dark chocolate or a cup of coffee will do the trick. When you put in a tiny indulgence into a healthy breakfast, it will make it seem less of a chore and become something that you look forward to. This works especially if you are someone who usually skips breakfast.
  
• Plan breakfast with a partner during dinner.
  It really helps to discuss what you will eat in advance with a partner who knows your health goals. This will also contribute to keeping accountability checks in your weight-loss strategy, which is the subject of our next chapter.
  

What do athletes, actors and singers have in common? They all need someone to motivate them and bring out the best in them. It could be a coach, a guide, a friend or a cheerleader.

They are performers. If they fail to perform then they are next to nothing.

When you are trying to lose weight or wake-up early in order to inculcate some simple strategic habits that will help you start a healthy morning ritual, it helps to have a partner or a supporter who understands you and recognizes how important it is that you achieve your goals.

Communicating with your accountability partner on a daily basis is important. Scheduling your communications in the morning makes sense because then it becomes an integral part of the morning ritual.

We are what we do, on a regular basis.

“I will sleep in today. It’s only one day. No one will know.” If it’s up to you, there are endless excuses that you can think of.

When you are trying to start a routine, every day and every step of the way counts. If you falter or skip one step, then you will realize that it’s like starting all over again.

Ask any runner who is preparing for a marathon. They will tell you that it is important to log in a given number of miles every day. If they miss one day, then the next day it gets harder because they have to make up for the miles they didn’t run.

Similarly when you skip a habit, then it becomes a chore. A habit is something that you do every day, without fail. If you don’t, then it no longer is a habit but a task.

So, you see why it is important to maintain continuity and consistency.

We are creatures of habit. If we do something consistently no matter how hard it is in the beginning, once it becomes a habit, then it becomes second nature and you start doing it effortlessly. The trick is to cultivate a habit.

Find your Rock of Gibraltar.

There is no better way to cultivate a habit than to collaborate with a partner. Just before you go to bed, you get a text message, “Did you prepare for tomorrow morning? Are your workout clothes and sneakers next to your bed in plain sight?”

Imagine getting a call immediately after your alarm goes off or even before. “Are you awake? It’s already 5am.”

When you are having breakfast, you get another text. “Did you have your five varieties of fruit?”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have someone who keeps tabs on your routine? Remember that your accountability partner is someone you chose and who has a right to call you and talk to you no matter, when or where.

You have to give the person permission to do so. Otherwise, it becomes a one way street and you will tend to ignore or worse, get annoyed and tell the person off.

Your accountability partner has to be supportive and strong enough to stay focused on your goals. It could be a friend, a sibling, your spouse, a colleague or even your physical trainer.

Whoever it is, it has to be someone who is committed to your health objectives and is doing it because they have a genuine interest in your success. Otherwise, you are only straining a relationship.

ACTION PLAN

Choosing an accountability partner has become relatively easy in today’s online world. The person need not even be in your own locality or even country. They can even be in a different time zone and still keep tabs on you, if they are committed to you. Here are a few tips to find the ideal accountability partner.

• Discuss your strategies and goals and gain consent from your accountability partner.
  Even if he or she is your best friend, if the person does not agree with your weight-loss strategies, then it won’t work. It has to be someone who believes in you and in what you are doing.
  
• Find someone online.
  If you can’t find an appropriate accountability partner among people you know then look for one online. It need not even be someone you know but just needs to be someone who shares your goals and understands them. You can search for a suitable partner on online forums.
  
• Advertise or look for likeminded people in online forums.
  This is another collaborative way to partner with someone. You may find someone who is interested in implementing the same strategies that you are and you can support one another.
  
• Join or form a social networking group.
  Whether online or in person, stay in touch with your partner on a regular basis using digital networking tools or by meeting them from time to time and exchanging notes and ideas.
  

Chapter 8: Meditate to find your rhythm

Is it possible to meditate and lose weight? Though the simple answer is yes it is very difficult to acknowledge this is possible. Isn’t it?

After all, weight-loss involves the body and meditation involves the mind and therefore you immediately see no connection between the two. Meditation also enjoys an airy-fairy reputation. That is to say that in the popular context at least, meditation is associated with something that is either spiritual, or requires a certain level of concentration.

Then there is the general perception that meditation involves a lot of inactivity. Sitting still and doing nothing. How on earth can this help one lose weight?

Open your mind.

First of all, let’s clear the air and establish what meditation exactly is. Though there are many different types of meditations, especially coming from the Eastern traditions such as Zazen and Vipassana, we will avoid any specific definitions and try to look at meditation from an unbiased and fresh perspective.

Meditation is nothing but spending time alone and concentrating or contemplating on a subject consistently, regularly and without any disturbance or interruptions. In other words, meditation is cultivating mindfulness.

Take for instance when you are running, you focus on the act of moving your legs and hands, one after the other. You don’t think of anything else or anyone, whether it’s a race or just a morning practice, you are focused and in the zone. This could be an example of meditation.

Alternatively consider something that you enjoy doing such as a hobby whether it is gardening or skateboarding. Your presence with all your mind and intent is in doing what you are doing, nothing else matters. So when you cultivate this form of mindfulness then every act that you do with full presence of mind, however trivial, whether it is washing dishes or cooking, becomes a form of meditative act.

What’s the connection between mind and body?

Do you know that stress causes you to gain weight? When you are stressed, it stimulates the production of cortisol. Now, cortisol, on its own is not bad because it actually helps your body to deal with a crisis or a stressful situation. That is it helps regulate your blood pressure and activate your immune system. In other words, it is a natural reaction, a coping mechanism to stress.

However, cortisol also causes sleep disturbances, interferes with your normal appetite making you eat so-called ‘comfort food’ when you are stressed and contributes to fat gain especially around the midriff. So regular exposure to stressful situations will trigger cortisol and cause you to gain weight despite regular exercise and carefully watching your diet. This is where meditation comes in.

Stress is caused in the mind. If you can will your mind to relax, if you are less prone to panic, if you can keep your cool when everyone else around you is losing their heads, then you are in control. How can you do this? There is enough evidence to show that regular meditation can create a sense of calm and equanimity in a person.

Jon Gabriel lost 220 lbs without surgery or dieting. How? The best-selling author and coach, who claims to melt fat using his mind, teaches a 21-day meditation program that shaves inches of your belly and sheds fat just by meditating 10 minutes a day.

There is a connection between the mind and the body and if you are willing to explore this connection by trying meditation, then there is no better time to do it than in the morning. As soon as you wake up, set aside some time to stay calm and focused on your mind.

You will find plenty of online tools such as audios and videos to help you start a daily meditation practice. Alternatively, you can enroll for a meditation program in a yoga studio or a health club near you.