What’s the best exercise to do?
What’s the best diet to follow?
When someone asks me what I think about this exercise or that diet I often find myself at a loss for what to tell them. I know they want a simple answer but sometimes the simple answer is hard to hear. We need to find a balance in our life between exercise and diet, work and play, media candy and meditation. So how do we do that?
What is the best diet? It is the one that keeps you feeling vibrant and alive full of energy and strong immunity to viruses and colds. It is a balanced diet high in vegetables especially the green ones, good quality proteins, a few grains, fruits, nuts and seeds, good source of fresh clean water, and very little processed foods and refined sugars no more than 10 percent because remember balance. Sometimes we need a little sweet in life. And a good balance between the protein, vegetables and grains depends on your body type and what works optimal for you.
Same with exercise. Too much yoga can leave one weak and mushy putting their tendons and ligaments at risk for injury. Too much weight training can leave one tight, and inflexible leading to injury of muscle tissue. And too much cardio exercise like running can lead to stress fractures and imbalanced muscles. Find a balance in your exercise program. Make sure you are getting at least one day of strength training with weights, include some yoga stretching to all your exercise routines and remember cardio. At least 3 days per week of cardio. Doesn’t have to be long, 20 minutes of interval style cardio program where you add in 30 – 60 second sprints of vigorous movement, enough to leave you near breathless.
When it comes to “chilling out” we also need a balance. Chilling out to TV or to our computer/smartphones can disconnect us to ourselves and our species. Too much meditation can lead to a distancing of ourselves from our life here on this earth and in this body keeping us disconnected. However, most of us don’t meditate enough if at all.
Balance can be hard to find. Seems so simple but we convince ourselves that we need to keep working and we don’t have time to exercise or we worked so hard today that we deserve to take ourselves out for dinner. We veg out at the TV or in front of the computer but we haven’t emptied out our head. We keep filling it up with stuff we don’t need.
Where do we start? Try a simple 10 minute meditation in the morning and then in the middle of your day. Sit at your desk, feet flat on the floor uncrossed, hands open in your lap and close your eyes, drop your jaw and just pay attention to your breath. Try this for 2-5 minutes at first then add a minute per day.