Finding Time For Walking Despite A Busy Schedule

Walking is one of the easiest ways to exercise throughout
the day. Experts recommend taking 10,000 steps a day for optimal health benefits. You don't have to set aside a large chunk of time and go out for a long walk to get your walking fitness done. There are some easy ways to fit walking into a busy schedule.

Park at the far end of the parking lot when going to work or shopping. You can even park a block away. The few minutes that it will take you to walk that little bit further will increase the amount of steps you take for the day without eating into a large bite of your time.

Use the stairs. If a building you work in or a store you visit has a choice between stairs or elevator, take the stairs. You'll get a quick boost to your heart rate and help get more of your daily steps completed.

Take short ten-minute walks. Just go outside and walk around the block or walk around the building you are working in. Doing this a few times a day adds up to a lot of walking without interfering with your other daily activities.

Walk early in the morning or late in the evening. Setting aside time to walk before your day has begun or once your other activities have been completed means you can spend more time just walking and enjoying the sights around you.

Walk your children to school. Cars can be a hazard near schools anyway, so take the simple approach and walk your children to school. It will help with traffic congestion around the school and will benefit your children’s health as well as your own. If you live too far away, just drive part of the way to the school and walk the rest.

11 Things You Can Do To Help Yourself Lose Weight

1. Write everything down that you eat. It will help keep you mindful of what and how much you are actually eating. Be completely honest.

2. If you're counting calories, don't count the calories in most fruit and vegetables, so you can eat as much of them as you want. (I love, love, love strawberries.) It'll help you choose to eat more of these nutritious foods. Remember some fruits are better for weight loss than other fruits. (For example, while bananas are a healthy food to eat, they are not particularly helpful in weight loss, but strawberries are a great weight loss aid.)

3. Make sure you include some fat-free dairy in your diet. Studies have shown that including more non-fat dairy in your diet, such as the dairy found in non-fat yogurts, can aid in weight loss.

4. Limit your breads, pastas, rice and flour products, but when you do have bread or burrito shells, go for wholegrain ones as the extrta fiber in wholegrain breads, rices amd pastas will help with digestion.

5. Do have desserts, but get creative in cooking up healthy desserts, or buying low-cal versions of things you hate doing without. Telling yourself you can't have nay desserts will just make you start craving them more, but by allowing yourself the occasional treat, you avoid making desserts become too much of a temptation.

6. If you're buying low fat products, check the ingredients. Sometimes "low fat" just means "high sugar." Better yet, stick to naturally low in fat, high in protein foods.

7. Eating things like bacon, ham, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, lamb, etc is fine as long as you go with lean versions or extra lean versions. Lean meats are an excellent source of protein, and protein tends to keep you feeling full for longer than carbohydrate-laden foods.

8. As often as possible, cook your food from scratch. This way you know what's in your food. The more processed something is, the less healthy it probably is. Once you start cooking more, it can be fun to experiment with healthier cooking.

9. Don't obsess. There will be times when you eat something bad for you. Do not see yourself as a failure because of it and then go on to eat more junk. See those times as a momentary blip in your healthy eating plan and go right back to eating healthy. Don't let yourself feel out of control.

10. At meals, fill your plate 1/3 full with vegetables/fruit, then add your meat & whatever else to the space that's left. If you are really hungry and need seconds, that's okay, but do the same thing again (filling plate 1/3 with vegetables).

11. Get some exercise. Even if it's just a bit of walking, it will help your heart and aid in upping your metabolism.

The Courage To Dream

Empowerment

What does the word mean to you? I’m not asking about anything related to electricity or turning your washing machine on. In regards to you as a person, what does the word empowerment mean to you? Do you feel empowered? Or do you feel weak and helpless?

The reason I am asking this is because so many of my friends seem to be embracing the idea of being powerless about making changes in their lives. They have dreams, but they feel as though everything is against them achieving those dreams and that they have no say in whether or not they can make those dreams a reality.

I hear from them, over and over again, phrases such as, “I wish...”, “I can’t...”, and “If only...” I never hear positive phrases such as “I will...”, “I can...”, and “I am...” But in speaking in the negative tones that they speak in, they are, in fact, ignoring any power they have over their own situation. In not even considering the chance that they can do something to change things, they are making themselves helpless. But they don’t have to be helpless, and neither do you.

What is it you want from life? Is it to lose weight and get fit and healthy? Is it to write the next blockbuster novel? Are you unhappy in your current career and want to change it? Do you want to earn a better income or take a trip across the world? Nothing is out of your reach! What do you dream about doing? Tell yourself that you are going to do it! Wouldn’t it be great to empower yourself? Wouldn’t it be great to feel strong and capable and in control of where your life is heading? Wouldn’t it be great not just to have the courage to dream but to have the courage to grab for those dreams too? The only things that stand in the way of your dreams becoming a reality are the limits you place on yourself. And you can remove those limits with nothing more than a thought!

The first step is to have the courage to dream. Make a list of the things that you really want in life. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? Write it down! Have you always wanted to take a vacation in Ireland or Hawaii? Have you always wanted to own your own house? Do you want to lose weight or build up muscle? Are you a banker but always dreamed of being a teacher? Write it down!

The second step is to believe that you are capable of achieving that dream. Sounds simple, right? The good news is that it really is that simple. Believe in yourself. Believe in your abilities. Tell yourself you are strong, capable and even fearless if the need arises. You can do this. You will do this. You will make your dreams come true. Get rid of that negative little voice in your head that whispers to you that you can’t do it, you’re not strong enough, it’s too hard and all of the other negative words. Just ignore it. You know, deep down, that you can achieve your dreams, so follow that deeper inner voice and believe in yourself.

The third and final step is to decide what steps you need to do to achieve your dreams and then take those steps. If you’re dreaming of becoming a novelist, then you need to start writing. You need to set aside time every day to write. Maybe you need to fine tune some of your writing skills so taking a class would help. If you’re dreaming of being a teacher, then you need to get the requisite training and degrees, even if it means taking classes after work while you continue your current job. If you dream of taking a trip to Europe, then you need to find out what it will cost you and start setting aside money from each paycheck. If you dream of owning your own house, then you need to clear your debts, clean up your credit history and save up the deposit. If you want to lose weight, then you need to find out what diet and exercise plan will work for you and you need to start doing it. Fit in exercise every day. Eat less junk and more healthy food. For whatever your dream is, you need to start working in the direction of making that dream a reality. Stop defeating yourself with negative thoughts and empower yourself, not just with positive thinking but with your actions.

You might be asking yourself why I care whether or not you reach for your dreams. I care because I used to feel powerless. I used to feel like all of my dreams were just out of my reach and that there was nothing I could do about it. I used to feel as though I wasn’t strong enough or good enough or capable enough to make my dreams a reality. But all along, I was deceiving myself into inaction. And I don't want anyone else to go through that, to live through feeling helpless when there is no need for them to feel that way.

When I finally started to take charge of my own inner voices, when I started to tell myself that I could achieve my dreams and when I started taking the steps that were necessary to get to my goals, I began to empower myself. And one of those dreams has already come true as a result. And now that I know that anything is possible, that I am capable of making my dreams come true, look out World!

10 Ways To Inspire Your Child To Write

1. Read to your child or make sure he or she spends time reading every day. Not only does reading help her get used to using her imagination, but it also improves her vocabulary by introducing her to new words.

2. Tell your child made-up stories. Seeing you using your imagination to come up with interesting stories for him helps inspire him to do the same.

3. Play story-telling games with your child. Start by saying one line of a story, and have the next person continue the story by coming up with the second line, and the third person has to come up with the third line. If this proves too difficult, each person can come up with a paragraph instead of a line each. This is a great way to stimulate your child’s creativity and get her thinking about the things that make up a good story.

4. Have your child and some of his or her friends write poems and make it a contest. Make sure they don’t put their names on the poems, and then collect the poems into a pile. Read the poems out loud, one by one, and tell them all they can vote for one poem, other than their own, that they thought was the best one. Then tabulate the votes and the winner gets a treat, like a candy bar, a sticker or a new notebook (depending on what you can afford to give and how old your child is). Do this once a week, at the same time each week, because knowing that it is coming up will have them all thinking about their poem throughout the week.

5. Get your child a library card. As in the first point above, reading is important for your child if she is going to develop the ability to write. Reading a variety of stories and books, as a library card will allow, will help her to become familiar with different writing voices and styles.

6. Self-publish his stories and drawings so that he can hold a physical book of his own creation in his hands. This can be done through places like Amazon’s CreateSpace, Lulu.com and Blurb, Inc. Or you can create the book by hand using your printer and the right materials. If you are completely lost on how to create the book, use a service such as Your Kids’ Creations. Having a physical book of his own words and drawings that he can hold, read and share with others inspires a confidence in his own writing that is hard to capture in other ways. This confidence will inspire him to write more.

7. Do some writing yourself. Seeing a parent take writing seriously and spend time writing emphasizes the importance of writing in a child’s mind. It’s a case of leading by example.

8. Have your child write and illustrate a poem. This helps show your child the connection between the beauty in words and the beauty in the world around her. It helps to make the connection that you are painting a picture with words when writing. As an extra step, you can even put her masterpiece on a mug, poster or magnet at Zazzle.com for her to keep as a physical reminder that she can create beauty with her writing, or just to show her how proud you are of her work.

9. Help your child create a newsletter. Let him take pictures of his friends or other things with a digital camera, or provide him with pictures if a digital camera is not available, and he can write stories about sports he loves, games he plays with his friends, or just interesting news about his friends and family that he’d like to share. Help him put it all together in a newsletter format. Print up several copies and he can hand them out to his friends and family members. He can even let his friends participate in the newsletter by contributing stories to it.

10. Let your child have his or her own blog or use other social media outlets. With the proper supervision, writing for her own blog or keeping in touch with her friends through other social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook can really help inspire your child to reach for even greater creativity. Using a blog source such as Blogger.com makes it easy for her to choose a template and set up her own blog (though, depending on her age, she might need your help), and you can set it to not allow comments or to only allow comments after they’ve been moderated by you. She can share her writing of stories and poetry as well as her drawings and even simple journal entries in her blog. The blog can be set to private or public and you can monitor it to the extent that you think is necessary. Facebook and Twitter accounts can also be set to private and you can only allow them to authorize friends you know, but this frees them to chat freely and be creative with their friends.

There are many ways to inspire creativity and a love for writing in your child. Even as simple a thing as writing a letter to his or her grandparents can help bring out the creative writer in your child. It’s up to you to encourage your children and to lead by example in their lives. If you put importance on writing in your life, your child will see it as important too.

How To Keep Fairy Magic Alive For Your Children

Children are creatures of magic. In a child’s eyes, anything is possible, from the mundane to the truly magical. Through their innocent eyes, the world takes on a whole new presence, full of mystery, magic and wonder.

But somewhere along the way as children grow older, they begin to lose this sense of wonder and belief in the impossible. They mature and their dreams of flying and their fantasies of other worlds within worlds start to lose their luster as a new reality begins to creep into their consciousness little by little, a reality where magic is only a trick and the fantastical never happens.

How can we, as parents, keep the magic alive for our children? How can we help them retain their sense of wonder and their belief in the impossible? Is it an impossible task in this world where reality can all too often seem mundane and routine, or even sometimes cruel and harsh?

There are, indeed, ways that we can help our children keep their youthful innocence and belief in the magic and wonder of this world alive for them.

It is important that you retain your own sense of playfulness. Children need to see us, the adults in their lives, play and act silly from time to time. They need to understand that becoming an adult does not mean leaving our playfulness behind us, and the only way they can learn this is by seeing that sense of playfulness in us.

Dance. Sometimes, keeping the magic alive for our children is as simple as turning on some music and dancing with your kids. You don’t even have to dance well; in fact, the sillier your dancing is, the better it will suit the purpose of keeping magic and wonder in our children’s world.

Read to your children. There is nothing more magical than a well-told story. The adventures in a story book can help to keep your children thinking in creative ways and imagining all the things that could be. It’s a fabulous way of keeping their minds on magical possibilities.

Draw with your children. Along with creating shapes and images out of playdough, this helps children think up imaginary things to create and even helps them express through their own eyes how beautifully they see things that are in the world around them.

Take nature walks with your children. Along the way, point out the different trees and plants, or butterflies and other insects you can spot along the way. Children have a natural tendency to view things in nature with awe and wonder. Teach them about some of what they are seeing. The growth of tadpoles into frogs and the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies can hold an immense measure of wonder and enjoyment for a child.

Play some innocent tricks on your children. This can be really fun. Simple magic tricks are easy to impress small children with, and can be very simple to perform. Pulling a coin from behind a child’s ear or playing a card trick can provide them with a sense of amazement that will last them for quite some time. Find unusual ways to play these kinds of games with your child, like, with a very young child, blow really hard as you come up to an automatic door and let them believe you’ve blown the door open. These are harmless and fun things to do, and they are small ways to add to a child’s sense of there being magic in the world.

Plant a fairy garden. Many garden centers carry kits for planting the types of plants that attract butterflies and other insects like them. Tell your child it is a fairy garden and add some small fairy statues around the garden to emphasize this fact. You can even help your child gather some twigs and fashion an impromptu fairy house to add to your garden.

Create a nature enclosure for your child to play in within the garden. Some shrubs can be fashioned in a circle over time to leave an opening in the center for your child to play within, or, for something more temporary during the summer, you can plant some tall sunflowers close together in a circle. As they grow, they form a wall of flowers with an open circle in the center where your child can play, feeling hidden in their nature “house.”

Create “power stones.” Collect some smooth round rocks and let your children paint them with glitter and colourful paints. Tell them that they can assign these “power stones” with special powers, such as “patience,” “tranquillity,” “happiness,” and other powers. Let them assign the powers and you paint the words on the rocks for them. Tell them that holding each rock, or carrying it in their pocket or purse, will help them hold the special power it contains within them.

There are many ways to create magic and to keep a sense of awe and wonder alive for our children. And finding the ways to do this that work for you and your child can be a fun process and can help bring back a bit of that fairy magic into your world again too.

Making Choices

If you’re struggling to lose weight or to maintain a healthy lifestyle, it’s important to think about your choices. Losing weight would be easy if making the right choices was easy. But too often, it’s easier to choose to eat what we want instead of what’s good for us and to choose to sit and watch tv instead of getting up and doing some exercise.

We make these little choices all the time, throughout the day, and though each choice made has a small impact, if we continually choose these things, they add up to having a big effect on our waistlines and health. Choosing the high-in-fat dessert once in a while won’t do any permanent damage to our health, but if we make these choices on a regular basis, the result can be harmful.

Sometimes, the easier choice doesn’t even feel like you’re making one. You just go on automatic and reach for something salty to munch when you’re bored. Or you get home from work, and tired from a busy day, plunk yourself down in front of the tv for a bit of relaxation.

But each thing you do in your life is a choice. You can choose to walk to the store instead of driving there. You can choose to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. You can choose to grab an apple when you feel like munching something or to go for a run when you’re bored.

Think about the things you do and the choices you are making by doing them. Are those choices helping you make it to your goal or are they hurting your progress? How important is your goal to you? Is that slice of cake and the few moments of pleasure you get as you scarf it down more important to you than feeling healthy and fit or than getting to your goal weight?

Thinking about your choices, once you start to really do it, can lead to helping you in areas of your life other than just health, fitness and weight loss too. Do you really want to chat with friends on Facebook? Or would your time be better spent catching up on writing the novel you dreamed of writing or knitting the scarf you promised yourself you would knit? Does sitting in front of the tv or computer screen mean more to you than spending time playing with your kids?

It’s okay to choose to socialize on the computer, play video games and watch tv sometimes. It’s only when those choices start to take up more of your life and take away from other areas that you have to begin to make different choices. What are your goals? What is it you really want to achieve? If you know what your goals are, then the majority of the choices you make throughout your day should be ones that help you get closer to them.

You Are Beautiful NOW!

My friend Barb, over at Barb's Bookshelf, recently posted on a topic
that I, too, feel strongly about. Her post about true beauty reminded me that I had intended to write on this topic too.

As a mother of seven children, five of whom are girls, I find myself horrified by the images that the media portrays as "normal." The idea of one of my children trying to achieve the size of a fashion model is actually horrifying. I point out to them often where the pictures have been airbrushed and digitally manipulated so they can know that the perfect skin, bright eyes, and shiny hair is not what the model really looks like. I worry that they will see these models or tv actresses as some ideal to try and attain, so I make sure they know that what they are seeing isn't even REAL.

I encourage my kids and praise them regularly. It's easy to do as they are all so clever, creative and kind. I tell them how beautiful they are and how much they are loved. Sometimes, as our kids get older, we assume they know that we love them, but they need to hear it, and hear it often. If they know that, at home, they are loved, then it helps them find the courage to face the rest of the world. Loving your kids and making sure they know it is like dressing them in protective armour against any negativity they may encounter out in the world.

In the world of weight loss, feeling beautiful can often be a tricky subject. I've lost 117 pounds so far. In 18.5 more pounds, I will reach a healthy BMI. That's how I chose the amount of weight I wanted to lose, by aiming for what should be a healthy weight. But having lost so much weight, I have first-hand experience on how difficult it can be to feel confident and sexy when carrying around so much extra weight. Sometimes people say cruel things, but far crueler are the things we tell ourselves.

That inner voice can really be an enemy to your self-confidence. But, with a little effort, you can make that same inner voice your friend. Catch yourself when you are being negative and change the negative thought to something positive. It is likewise with the things we say about ourselves around our kids. Do you want your daughter to hear you saying things like, "I'm too fat," "I can't do that," "It's too hard," "I have no control," "I can't eat that," "I'm stupid" and other comments along this vein, or would you rather they hear you saying things like "I feel great today," "Doesn't this dress look great on me?" "I can do anything," "Yummy! That looks great," "Nothing is too hard," "Let's go play outside today" and things along that vein? Change what you say inside and change what you say outside. Your children will emulate you. Give them someone confident and happy in herself to emulate.

There's a wonderful movement called Operation Beautiful. According to the site,

The mission of Operation Beautiful is to post anonymous notes in public places for other women to find. The point is that WE ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL. You are enough... just the way you are!

Women from all over the world are posting notes in random places with encouraging statements for others to find. I love this idea!

My body has changed a lot since my early 20s, and not all of it for the better. My belly has a lot of loose, hanging skin and is covered in stretch marks that cover it in fine lines that branch out resembling a roadmap. I have a huge scar reaching diagonally just below my ribs from a surgery I had after one of my pregnancies. But each of these visual attributes is a gift. My belly stretched out in order to carry my many babies. It developed those stretch marks in its attempt to make room for the cradling of all seven of my children individually. It housed them and nourished them each for nine months. It did it's job, and it did it well. They are marks of love.

My friend Barb talks about her laugh lines and states possessively that she "earned" them. I agree with her. Laugh lines are wonderful to see. They are a sign that a life has been a happy one, full of laughter and smiles. I'm earning some laugh lines of my own, and I'm glad to do so!

Everyone carries some insecurities. Wouldn't it be a great world if others bolstered our egos instead of tearing them down? Or the media decided to use real models with healthy-sized bodies and leave any airbrushing or digital manipulation out? We need to be each others' strength. We need to be the person who says to others,"You're beautiful." Because everyone IS beautiful. Everyone has their own form of beauty, and the important beauty, the beauty that can make the world a better place, is the beauty we find inside.

Everyone should get the chance to feel beautiful right now and not wait until they've reached some ideal in their head of what they want to look like.

In Barb's True Beauty post, she says,

True beauty is not simply what’s on the surface. When you feel good about yourself and who you are, when you carry yourself with confidence and self-acceptance, that makes you beautiful. Beauty is in the mind, not in the body.

I couldn't say that any better!