6.30am Before getting out of tone up your pelvic floor muscles with 5 minutes of Kegels

7.00am Roll out of bed and rev up your engine for the 3 sets of 15 free squats

7.15am Give your   vitamin D levels a good boost with a15 minute walk in the sun

7.30am Have a light nutritious breakfast of high quality easily digestible protein and complex carbs

8.30am Take the stairs at work

10.30am Have a nutritious mid morning snack such as a piece non starchy fruit and a small handful of raw nuts ( e.g Almonds), or seeds ( e.g sunflower, and/ or pumpkin) or protein bar and green tea

2.00pm climb the stairs again

3.00am snack of fruit and nuts

Between 4.00pm and 6.00pm Take another 30-45 minutes of exercise either cardio, weights, core, flexibility or a combination

Yours in health,

Nancy

Hi fellow bloggers, yes I know its been awhile, life’s been very full lately. In my last blog post we talked a

little about healthy food for hormonal balance. Today I’m going to share some healthy recipes that could help

support your hormonal balance. These are beverage recipes that can be used as part of your main meal menues or to

add to your collection of   healthy snacks. All the recipes serve two.

Soy contains Phytoestrogens. These are plant hormones that are similar in structure to animal hormones, and thus

provide a good source of these chemicals that are vital to our wellbeing. Phyto estrogens bind to estrogen sites in

the body and can augment the body’s supply when needed.

Miso Soup:
2 cups hot water
2 tablespoons miso or to taste
100g tofu cubed
Thumb size piece of ginger root grated
Or 1/8 t dry powdered ginger
1 clove garlic grated
Sliced chives or spring onion to garnish

This soup is can be made with any kind of miso. Light coloured miso is mild and sweet, darker misos are more

pungent in flavour. Choose the miso that suits your palate. Enjoy this warming highly alkalinizing soup which has

many health benefits, from the prevention of simple bacterial and viral infections to, in addition to other

lifestyle modifications, the  prevention of hormonally dependent cancers such as breast and prostate cancer

Oaty Soy
4 tablespoons oat bran
2 cups organic non GM soy milk
2 teaspoon brewer’s yeast ( food yeast)
2 teaspoon bee pollen or zylatol
Filtered or  pure spring water to taste

Choose a soymilk you like, my favourite is Vita Soy. Blend in order given for a nutrient dense power drink!

Substitute zylatol for bee pollen if you like a sweeter taste.

Tranquillity Plus

2 cup soy or oatmilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ripe banana
1 tablespoons raw tahini
1 tablespoon bee pollen

Oats help the body regulate estrogen. Tahini ,made from ground sesame seeds, and bee pollen are potent source of

calcium, bananas are a good source of fibre, potassium and B6, which is so important for adequate hormone

production. Oat milk is available in health food stores.  To make your own bring to the boil 2 tablespoons of quick

cooking oats and one cup of water, then simmer on low for a few minutes. Cool and blend till smooth sweetening with

100% pure maple syrup or zylatol. For the recipe above blend in order given, one ingredient at a time, blending in

between. Add water to desired consistency.

The herb Asiatic Ginseng has a direct effect on the hypothalamus and pituitary glands the master glands of the body

and in its 3,000 year use in traditional herbal medicine as a tonic, it has become renowned for providing strength

and energy.

Shake Rattle N’ Role
2 cups apple juice
2 bananas
4 tablespoons rice or oat bran
2 tablespoons Spirulina
16 almonds
1teaspoon ginseng powder
water to taste

Pre soak or grind the almonds in a coffee grinder for better digestion. The zinc form the almonds and Spirulina and

the chromium from the bran and the banana help regulate blood sugar levels and therefore energy production. Get

your Ginseng from a reputable health food store or traditional Chinese medical practitioner.
N.B: To optimize safety omit the Ginseng if you are suffering from an acute infection, acute asthma, hypertension,

excessive menstruation or nose bleed or are on MAOI antidepressant medication

See our website www.flexibilityplus.com  for more information on some of the above power foods.

Till next time

All the best,
Nancy

One study of previously sedentary women who became active showed that by exercising they halved their mortality rates from all causes. Previously we’ve discussed how two thirds of adults in the West live sedentary lives, sadly the statistics also tell us that women are even less active than men: Over 70 percent of adult women do not engage in any regular activity. We’ve said that adults between the ages of 30 and 70 years of age lose a significant percentage of their muscular strength due to inactivity. Now, with their higher percentage of body fat to muscle mass relative to men, women feel the effects of their loss of muscle and bone strength sooner ( on average 10 years before men ) and more pervasively than men.

The decline in muscular and bone strength frequently sneaks up on women unawares. The heart is of course a muscle and the women who aren’t physically active pay a heavy price for their sedentary ways.  Half the women in the United States die of some form of heart disease, and nearly two thirds of women who die suddenly from heart disease or high blood pressure had no previous symptoms! Have I scared you enough to get those walking shoes on?

Well for those of you who are already out the door, bravo and more power to you! Those of you who are still reading this, there’s more:
As women leave behind their reproductive years and approach elder-hood they can be robbed of  what can be their most productive time in life, because they increasingly begin to suffer frailty, loss of mobility, balance, and so forth, that can occur as a result of physical inactivity. Studies involving women in their sixties and seventies have shown that compared with those in their twenties these older women have lost 30 – 39 percent of their former strength! But wait, there’s more:
Exercise has been proven to reduce a woman’s risk of coronary artery disease (characterised by narrowing of the blood vessels that feed the heart), stroke, type II diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer as well as osteoporosis

Now if you’re thinking that you’ll have to pant and sweat profusely to enjoy the health enhancing benefits of exercise read on. One recent study of eighty thousand women showed the greatest decrease in disease risk is a result of boosting activity from less than one hour a week to between1-2 hours. Women who walk as little as one hour a week halve their risk of coronary artery disease compared with those who are sedentary, and the walking need not be fast paced to prove beneficial. So it’s not difficult to achieve effective results quickly.

In addition to a reducing cardiovascular risk, among the other benefits women derive from exercise, is the reduction particularly in early post menopausal women of bone loss that can occur after the transition to the post menopausal state. Exercise, especially strength training – plays an important role in preventing bone loss and resulting osteoporosis. Exercise reduces other menopausal symptoms as well.

Young women who exercise just a few hours a week in their teenage years can lower their likelihood of developing breast cancer by 30-35 percent. The current theory is that exercise even in relatively small doses promotes a kind of biological shield against cancer. On the other hand training profusely and excessively increases the production of free radicals that can cause cancer. So we don’t want to either over do or under do, the aim is to strike a balance. The exercise programmes we’ve put together on our website www.flexibilityplus.com aim to do just that . If you do begin to enjoy exercise so much that you want to increase the amount and intensity as people often do once they get hooked, there are dietary measures you can take to maximise protection from free radical damage. This information is also found in the products on our website Check it out.

Ready? Then get moving!

Yours in health

Nancy

Let us assume you understand the benefits of exercise and have decided you really want to make a commitment to your health and fitness. How do I get started, I hear you wondering? And once started how do I stay on track, especially when it’s pouring with rain outside?

Here are some principles and ideas that will help

PART I

•    Set goals for your exercise programme: Start with simple, realistic achievable goals, then move on to new more challenging ones, one step at a time. Break up your goals into mini goals. Your first goal may be to do a certain volume of abdominal crunches, for example 50 crunches per day. You look at your goal and it seems daunting.  Right now you do ten crunches and your abdominals start screaming at you. Well, since muscles do recover relatively quickly, to get around the feeling you couldn’t do another crunch, break your goal down into segments over the course of the day; 10 repetitions morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and bedtime. In each succeeding day aim to increase the amount you do each session without changing the overall volume. Your muscles will respond in short order to the regular challenge. If it is walking, cycling or running you have goals for, first achieve your initial goal at a comfortable pace and then, increase your pace before increasing the volume of work. Here too you could at first achieve your total volume over two or more sessions in a day if one session is too demanding.
Whatever the goal do something on it every day. Visualise your goal constantly, commit to it and
•    Notice what ‘s working and what isn’t : Flexibly adapt so that you are doing what works consistently
•    Find a mentor: One who has successfully achieved what you want to and follow their guidance
•    Enjoy the process: To do that you will need to pick an activity or activities you like doing and believe you have the capability to do competently and master over time. If you’re an out door type and the thought of being in a gym turns you off, then exercise in the fresh air. Picking activities that you enjoy doing is critical to becoming and remaining a life long exerciser. This will require a little experimenting, so if you’re a novice try out several possibilities.
•    See exercise as a menu of many exciting and varied options. Keep looking until you find something you believe you could do for the rest of you life.  The more you like your chosen activity the more likely you are to stick with it.
•    Mental attitude has a huge impact on motivation: It turns out that motivation is high when there is a likely chance of success combined with a stimulating reward.

In part II we’ll cover other important strategies that will help you become a lifelong exerciser

Cheers until next time,
Nancy

You know the feeling, pounding heart, sweaty, wide eyed, agitated, and tense!

Welcome to the stress response. This response occurs when the adrenals, the little glands that sit on top of the kidneys release a combination of hormones that help our bodies produce extra energy in an emergency. This nifty response is useful when we need to escape real physical danger such as our Stone Age ancestors did when they were trying to avoid becoming a predator’s lunch. Our stresses however, are generally psychological in nature. Take the global economic crisis for example. We fear for our survival. The fear is very real, the outcome may mean something physical will happen, but it’s not immediate enough for us to need to run up a tree for safety.

We can’t run away from this type of danger. So the hormones that nature intended to help us deal with stress stick around in the blood stream causing chronic (ongoing) stress, leading to host of unpleasant symptoms, including foggy brain and poor memory. This happens because as we said earlier, stress raises the adrenal hormones, which include cortisol. Ever heard the saying “my brain’s fried”. Well when it hangs around in the blood stream, that is precisely what cortisol does it. ‘fries’ or destroys the connections between brain cells and shrinks the key memory centres in the brain.

What do we do in response to the anxiety that stress produces? Well typically like the ‘fairy God mother’ in Shrek II who asked for something deep fried and smothered in chocolate, when faced with stress, we usually reach for some comfort food, or self medicate with the ‘bottle,’  tranquilizers, or cannabis. These choices lead to biochemical responses in the brain that temporarily turn off the excess hormones and calm us down. In the long run though, the sugar and stimulants will send our blood sugar levels on a roller coaster ride that will evoke another stress response, bad fats will end up clogging our arteries, and the alcohol and cannabis will ultimately leave us feeling tired, grumpy, and unmotivated.

Fortunately there are healthier alternatives. These include, keeping our blood sugar levels stable, which we talked about in the last couple of posts, and exercising.

Remember the purpose of the stress response is to produce more physical energy, so let’s take advantage of it! We may not be able to run away from the credit crunch, like our ancestors ran away from the sabre toothed tiger, but we can stretch, run, dance, swim, bike, row, and walk our stress ‘off’.  Not only will our bodies thank us for it, our brains will too

Till next time, get moving!

Yours in health
Nancy

Who wants to be average? We all want to be the best we can be at whatever we do. Few of us, however, have any idea how important nutrition is to our living a great life. But think about it - what we eat must affect our ability to reach our potential.

Take a high performance car – what happens if you put poor quality fuel in its tank?

Maybe nothing at first but over time your beautiful machine will crash and burn.

Our bodies are no different and yet for some bizarre reason we seem to think that we can chuck down our throats whatever we want without affecting our body’s performance. Well, I have news for you! You will not be able to be your best if you continually neglect to put a decent amount of quality food into your mouth. And, not only will your performance be substandard, poor eating could result in your body needing major repairs (which usually isn’t a lot of fun).

Our social education is partly to blame for our attitude to eating. The media sells us the myth that speed (how quickly you can get your food from the stove to your plate) should be a major factor in our choice of food.

Motivation to change entrenched habits makes it tough to alter our choice of foods. If we don’t appear to have any health problems, why should we change what we want to eat? And, even if we do have some health problem, how many of us connect that condition with the poor quality fuel we pour into our bodies?

So, understanding what is high quality fuel for our bodies and being aware of how our long-term health is affected by our food choices is really important if we want to lead a healthy energetic lives, where we are buzzing with energy and a zest for life.

In my next blog I’ll get into more detail of what provides High Octane Performance.

Until next time, eat well!

Nancy Rishworth