Yoga Helps Maintain Good Mental Health

Everyone is trying everything they can to improve their physique these days. From weight lifting to triathlons, it is starting to seem as though people think they need to beat themselves up to be in great shape.

This is not so! As a practicing Yogini for the past twenty years, I can personally testify to the amazing results you can achieve and maintain. Yoga, one of the gentlest of all sports, does give your body great results.

The various postures of yoga target specific areas of your body and every single pose has alternate benefits besides the obvious physical. For example, if you are prone to anxiety, depression or stress a few yoga routines worked into your daily workout will help by increasing the oxygen flow to the brain.

It's important to remember that yoga is a routine. You can't just step off a treadmill and start your yoga. Like any other physical conditioning system, you need to warm up, maintain a state of mind and follow the guidelines for each posture.

With yoga, you are striving for muscle control, graceful movement and maximum stretch. Get to that point, hold for the time indicated and then slowly and in a controlled manner come out of the position.

1. Easy Pose (it is not-that is just the name) Sukhasana

2. Cat Pose (feels great, makes me smile every time I practice) Marjaryasana

3. Standing forward bend (remember, only stretch to your most comfortable limit, no more.)

Popular Diets: Do They Work?

Given the enormous interest in weight loss in our society and the growing waist lines on many of us, a fundamental question has to be asked about popular diets. Do they work? To start with it is important to separate out short term from long term results. There are many well known diets on the market that help with weight loss over the short and medium term.

But that begs another question - when you want to lose weight, shouldn't you look at your overall lifestyle to see if it can be changed to accommodate long term weight management? The reality is that even though you may follow any of the most popular diets for immediate weight loss, if you simply focus just on this aspect, you may succeed in dropping several pounds but the loss will only be temporary. In order to have long term, sustained weight loss you should consider the following when deciding whether or not a specific diet will work for you:

1. Rate of Weight Loss

Diets that claim you can lose 10 pounds in 10 days, while perhaps true statements, are usually not true from a long term weight management perspective. If you need to drop a dress size or two before the 20th high school re-union this type of rapid weight loss may be OK. But for long term, healthy weight management, look for programs that aim for a loss of 2-4 pounds per week.

2. Maintaining Metabolic Change

One of the more effective weight loss methods that has emerged over the past ten years from some of the most popular diets that combine exercise into their overall approach include Fat Burning Furnace or Truth About Abs is a focus on resistance training to build muscle mass. Increasing muscle ups your metabolic rate and that helps to burn calories. This is a healthy approach but you have to embrace the ongoing exercise routines necessary to maintain and build muscle, otherwise the weight will come back over time.

Beauty Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder

I recently got a new client, we'll call her Amy. She has given me permission to share some of her experience here. When I got my first email from her inquiring about coaching she talked about how hard it had been for her to get out there in the world, to date or anything else, since her car accident. She'd suffered extensive

scarring to her face. Amy felt like she'd never been a pretty woman, but after the accident she was so ashamed of the way she looked that she was frozen. She knew her appearance was a big deal because people acted like they just didn't even see her. Amy felt invisible, and frankly she liked it that way.

Fast forward a week to our first session. Amy shows up on Skype and I wondered if I'd gotten my client wires crossed. Where was the scarred car accident victim? The woman in front of me was stunning, and not in a disfigured and scarred kind of way, but in a supermodel way. Amy is 5'8". Toned and fit at 135 pounds. Gorgeous, flowing, long blond hair, and blue eyes the color of a summer sky. I felt awkward for the first ten minutes of our video chat because I was distracted, studying her makeup bare face, trying to find the scar. Finally I had to ask where it was and tears rolled down her cheeks as she turned her head to the left, pulled her beautiful spiraling curls back, and there at the edge of her hairline, was a barely perceptible red line where stitches had once been.

Now one might think this is a beauty obsessed woman, being ridiculous about a scar. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. Amy never, ever saw herself as beautiful and to be honest, it wasn't long before her drawn, shame filled, self-persecuting energy started to affect the way I was seeing her too.

Being gorgeous for a split second to be photo ready in the commercial world, is a very different thing than being the kind of beautiful that weaves in and out of the moments of our days and lives. That kind of beauty has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves, not how others perceive us, because it truly is an inside job. I have coached more than one professional model that had serious self esteem issues.