Wellness – Page 5 – NutriFoody Wholly Holism

Heart Disease and Women

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For Women’s History Month I want to talk about diseases and disorders that affect women, especially from a nutritional aspect and heart disease tops the list. Did you know that heart disease is America’s number one top killer? Heart disease kills more American than all the wars combined that this country has had (referenced from the book “How Not To Die by Dr.Gregor).

The thing about this about heart disease is that it is totally 100 percent preventable. That is if we aim to eat a healthy diet of course. The typical standard American diet is far from healthy, unfortunately. The American diet is made up of mostly what is considered fast foods such as hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, pizza, onion rings, chicken nuggets, and milkshakes. Now that is not a diet we can survive off of for a long time because it’s so detrimental to our health and is doing so much damage to our bodies on the inside.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women killing about 1 in every 5 female deaths (CDC). Now that is a high very high number and very frightening. Many things can fall under the bracket of heart diseases such as coronary artery disease, arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, high cholesterol, hypertension, heart failure, and heart attack.

I will explain what each is that falls under this category.

Coronary Artery Disease (CAD): Coronary arteries supply blood to the heart muscle and are the large arteries found on the surface of the heart. When someone had CAD the arteries become diseased or damaged. This is caused by the buildup of cholesterol plaque in the arteries blocking the blood flow to the heart.

Arteriosclerosis: This happens when blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients away from the heart to the rest of the body become thick and stiffen up. Healthy arteries should be flexible and elastic.

Atherosclerosis: This is a type of arteriosclerosis where the buildup of fat and cholesterol forms something called plaque in the arteries. This can eventually lead to arteries being blocked.

High Cholesterol: The level of cholesterol in your blood is high which can be a predisposition to heart disease.

Hypertension: High blood pressure which can affect the heart leading to a heart attack or stroke

Heart Failure: In this condition, the heart doesn’t pump blood as well as it should.

Heart Attack: Total blockage of an artery leading to the heart

Despite knowing all this the rate of heart disease continues to rise. Some things you can do to improve your heart health are

Limiting your intake of fast foods. Fast foods are meant to enjoy once in a while not eat everyday
Limit your intake of processed foods. Sometimes it can be hard to avoid processed foods because these days it can seem like everything is processed but try swapping out processed foods for whole foods. Whole foods like eating fruits and vegetables are more filling and don’t raise your blood sugar so high and keep you fuller throughout the day.
Drink WATER! Drinking water is essential to life. Drinking water helps keep our circulatory system moving along and helps rid of the toxins in our bodies. Stay away from juices and sugary drinks that provide nothing but empty calories.
Limit your intake of certain types of meat such as red meat. Yes, it can be hard do that but consuming too much meat can clog up our arteries
Lastly, keep those sweets in check! Avoid eating too many candies, cookies, pastries, and cakes. It may be good in the moment be eating this regularly does not do any good for our bodies.

References: Centers of Disease Control: Lookup Heart Disease

How Not To Die By: Dr. Gregor

The Ultimate Act of Self-love

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Photo of me taken by me on Valentine’s Day

An ode to Women’s History Month, I want to talk about the ultimate act of self-love. So many things fall under this one term like self-care, self-awareness, loving yourself, mental health, and physical health which is why I labeled ultimate because you have to love yourself as a whole and not in parts. You can’t just love one part of yourself and not the other you have to love it all.

Now I know that that is easier said than done loving all of yourself. For me, for the past year, I’ve struggled with a lot of insecurities about my weight. I’ve watched my body change over the past three years gaining more and more weight. My stomach is bigger, my arms are bigger, and my face is bigger. I can definitely say that I was not loving myself at all more like letting myself go. I have struggled with weight loss even when I would exercise and eat clean the weight would not shift or go down. But then I started to look at other women who are my size and they are owning it. They are in love with their bodies and making it work for them. For me, it was more of an acceptance being this new weight and new weight but I realized I too have to own it and make it work for me. I started to no longer think about trying to fit into my pre-pregnancy clothing and started to focus on what would work for my current body weight. I am starting to get into a mindset of loving myself no matter the size because I am still me. My weight doesn’t define me or change the person that I am. Now being on a holistic journey with nutrition and lifestyle I am learning a lot about taking care of myself from the inside out. I am learning to love myself and accept myself as a whole and this applies to any aspect of life. It’s not just about weight, it is about giving the love you know you need and not allowing anyone to take that away from you or affect that. When we love ourselves and put ourselves first we don’t have to rely on others to make us feel like we are loved because guess what we already love ourselves first.

Now I am going to share with you all a mantra from the book: Deeply Holistic By Pip Walter

This is called Loving Yourself:

Sit or stand in a relaxed way in front of a mirror. Begin with your eyes closed, and take several slow relaxed breaths breathing in fresh energy and out old energy. When you feel ready and relaxed open up your eyes and look in the mirror.

Say this to yourself while looking into your own eyes out loud: (Your name) I like you and I always will. I love you and I always will. You are beautiful just as you are. Repeat this at least three times.

How did that make you feel? Try doing this daily at least for a month. Come back and leave any comments on how did this make you feel.

Smoothies Anyone?

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To start, I would like to say to all of you a Happy New Year! I know we are well into February but I haven’t written a blog post since last October and it feels good to write again. As you can see this site has gone through some major changes one being that I am now shifting my nutrition teaching and education to a holistic approach. This was something that I thought about for a very long time living a more holistic lifestyle using cleaner and more natural products and of course eating healthy.

If you have been a long-time follower of my blog you know that I had a baby towards the end of 2019 and that was a lot on my body and shifting into the postpartum phase and being a new mom everything changed. Most days with a new baby I didn’t eat or cook, I was just too tired or drained to do so, so I mostly relied on ordering and eating out. Then when the pandemic occurred everyone was stuck in the house. Being stuck in the house there was not much to do but eat. For about four months we were stuck in quartine. For these past three years, it became hard to break those habits but now I am ready to embark on a journey to become a new healthier me and meet my weight loss goals.

I know that many of you may be like me and are ready to make a change this year and weight loss may be on your list of goals so my question is what are you doing to achieve your weight loss goals. Are you focusing on nutrition or are you focusing on fitness? The answer really is that you should focus on both, but without proper nutrition, fitness can not eliminate much. So the priority to that we change our diets and develop better eating habits but this takes time.

There are a number of things I am doing right now when it comes to my nutrition goals but I will discuss that in another blog post, but for this post, we will focus on smoothies. Smoothies have been around for many many years and so many people love them. I love smoothies as well! Smoothies are a great source of fiber, they allow you to get an intake of fruits and vegetables, and they can keep you full for a very long time. That is where the smoothie diet comes in. The Smoothie Diet is a 21-day diet that focuses all on drinking smoothies. So the smoothies will replace the meals that you would normally have. So two meals will be replaced with smoothies and your third meal will be the meal of your choice.

The Smoothie Diet consists of different recipes that are specifically targeted to help you lose weight and burn fat. These smoothies can be made in no time, compared to making a full meal. This program provides you with a full guide and grocery/shopping list. It is all done for you all you have to do is gather your ingredients and make your smoothie. The good thing is that once you get through your 21 days you can repeat this over again if you do feel like you want to increase your goals or see more results. This program also comes with two bonuses you get the quick start guide and your detox guide all for $37 dollars. I made my purchase and you should too. I can’t wait to share the results with you all. If you do decide to make this purchase as well please share your results with me. Download the free smoothies fact sheet I created especially for you.

https://yourbodyyourhealth.systeme.io/e239eb28-306fbb4e

Click Link Above to Watch Video

Download your free smoothie fact sheet made by me

free-smoothie-sheet-1 Download

Good luck with your weight loss journey and goals. We can do this!

To purchase make your purchase please click on the link below!

https://yourbodyyourhealth.systeme.io/purchase

Getting Through School During a Pandemic

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Hearing the word pandemic seems so surreal. It sounds like something you only hear happening in a movie or on a TV series but who would have ever thought a pandemic would become our reality.
It’s only been a year but it is been one rough and tough year. Even though we have made major progress, the pandemic is still ongoing and not completely over. ( So please stay safe and healthy). One month before the pandemic began I had just started my dietetic internship for the nutrition and dietetic technician program. This would be the second associate’s degree that I would be receiving from this school and I was so glad I had the opportunity to return to complete the program five years later!

I had also just given birth to my son in October 2019 so by the time the pandemic was officially declared my son was 5 months. So while in school I was also in the stages of being a new mom. Just like everyone else when this pandemic began I was scared and I didn’t know how I could get through school when I all I could do was watch the news of everything going on.

Mentally it was a lot but I knew I had to pull myself together. Some of you are still in the process of getting through school right now and went through it last year as well.

Here are some tips that helped me through school during the pandemic:

Remember your end goal: For me this was my second shot at getting through the program I was in. Even though the pandemic was happening life is still going and I didn’t want to lose sight of the goal I was trying to reach.

2. Remove all distractions : During the time the pandemic began it was kind of hard for to stop looking at my phone and getting news alerts which I had on notifications, eventually I decided to remove the notifications from my phone to try to not think about everything that was happening at the time.

3. Prayer and Meditation: I love meditation especially bible meditations. This is something that I had routinely started during my pregnancy and this still helps me to the day to start my day and end my day

4. Listen to your favorite audiobooks or podcasts: my husband and I would listen to audiobooks and podcast when our son was asleep and we were done with our schoolwork (he also was in school and graduated this year 2021!) this helped us calm our minds down and focus on positive things.

5. Write down your goals for the day: This helped me a lot when it comes to doing schoolwork. I remembered things better when I write them down

6. Talk to family and friends: One thing that I truly learned through this pandemic is to value your loved ones. They can help you get through the toughest of times

7. Play light music in the background while doing your school: This can put you in a good mood especially when you listen to music that motivates you.

These were some of the tips that helped me to get through school during the pandemic and lockdown

Remember you can get through it!

Motherhood Challenges

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Today makes 19 months of me being a mother and I can’t believe how quickly it has gone by. A year and a half later I can definitely say there are challenges with motherhood or being a parent. I won’t talk about all of those challenges in this blog post but I will focus on one that I’ve struggled with probably since the beginning and that is time management. As much as I want to make plans for my day, do things for myself or create content or study that doesn’t quite go as planned. Some days I can barely get to it at all if I’m lucky!

So the question is how do you manage your time or make time for yourself. Good question lol . To start nap time is your best friend. During a nap you can do one of two things. You can take a nap yourself or you can use that time to get EVERYTHING done! . Just kidding, do not do that and try to cram everything into that nap time because believe or not that nap time goes by quickly at least when your little one is past one year old. When babies are first born and in the newborn stages that is when they sleep more. My son used to sleep for 2-3hours and sometimes longer. So you have more time to work with when they are newborns but once they are a little older the nap times become shorter and shorter so do what you can with the time that you have.

One thing that got really bad after I gave birth was the pregnancy brain. Pregnancy brain turned into mom brain and mom brain is much tougher for me and I forget things easily so when I have ideas for content I have to make sure I jot them down right away or I will forget. So always write down your ideas. Always plan ahead if you can and have either a notepad or use a notepad app on your phone. Even if you can’t get to what you need to do, you know that you have everything written down.

So when it comes to time management when you have children no matter their age we have to adjust and that is one thing I’m learning on this journey of parenthood.

Written By: Vanessa J