Search Results for: blog stop smoking exercise can help

4 Tips to Help You Keep Your Resolution

As I blogged yesterday, my New Year’s Resolution is to lose weight – again.  The thing about making weight loss a resolution is that so many people do it (especially after all those holiday pounds!), but many fail to follow through. What can you do to keep your resolution?  There are a few hints from psychologist John Norcross on how to keep those resolutions: Believe it can be done. That’s right – don’t let the haters keep you down, saying “You can’t do that.”  Believe in yourself that you can succeed. Be realistic. I am never going to weigh 120 … Continue reading →

Helpful Health Information From My Health Insurer

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Today, in the mail, I got something unexpected from my health insurance company. It wasn’t a bill, and it wasn’t a scary letter about cancellation. Instead, it was a helpful little pamphlet with advice about dealing with asthma. Part of the Affordable Care Act includes something called the medical loss ratio. It requires health insurance companies to spend at least 80% of the money that they get from customer’s health insurance premiums on things that actually can improve a person’s health. The insurer cannot include things like salaries, advertising costs, or other administrative costs in that 80%. One of the … Continue reading →

Insurance Companies Should Cover Exercise Classes

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Exercise is good for you. It helps you to lose weight, and it keeps you in shape. Exercise can help prevent certain health conditions, and ease the symptoms of others. Considering the benefits of exercise, shouldn’t health insurance companies have to cover its costs? A researcher from Florida thinks so. Dr. Marco Pahor, who is the director of the University of Florida Institute on Aging, has stated his opinion that health insurance should cover the cost of structured exercise classes. He feels that private insurance companies should cover this, and so should federal health insurance programs like Medicare. The main … Continue reading →

Great American Smokeout 2009: November 19

It’s Smokeout season again: the American Cancer Society celebrates the Great American Smokeout on the third Thursday of November each year. On a smaller scale, Smokeouts began in the 1970s. In 1971, a guidance counselor in Massachusetts asked people to give up smoking for a day — and donate the money they would have spent on cigarettes to a high school scholarship fund. A Minnesota newspaper editor organized the first D-Day (Don’t Smoke Day) in 1974. Just two years after Minnesota’s D-Day, the American Cancer Society in California got close to one million smokers to commit to not smoking for … Continue reading →

Can Hypnotherapy Help You Create a Healthy Lifestyle?

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A friend of mine hates answering the phone. She hates it so much that she ignores any calls from unknown numbers and never even checks her voicemail. As a small business owner, she fears that she’s losing lots of business — but even that won’t get her to listen to her messages. She mentioned wanting to try hypnotherapy to help get her past her phone problems. Personally, I think it’s a good idea. Hypnotherapy isn’t just the stage tricks we see at fairs and on television. Working with a trained, licensed hypnotherapist can help a person make huge life changes. … Continue reading →

Five Ways to Lower Your Cancer Risk

Here are some tips to help lower your risk of developing cancer — after all, prevention is the best medicine! Cut back on the couch time. And the desk time. And the beanbag chair time. You get the idea — get moving! Thirty minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week can keep your heart and body healthy. Exercise can also help cut your cancer risk! Lengthen and strengthen your workouts for better cancer protection. Aim for a forty-five to sixty minute workout five days per week to lower your risk of breast cancer by twenty percent. Workouts after … Continue reading →

Dear Heather … Exercise & Addiction

Dear Heather, My son has struggled with drug use over the last two years and while we have tried to get him into rehabilitation programs before and more to help him to quit, we’ve not been successful. Recently after running away and getting hooked again, he came home and said that he’s done with drugs for good. He’s been exercising regularly, running four and five miles a day. At first, I wasn’t sure if he really was doing it and I hate to admit it, but I’ve followed him and so has his father on many occasions and he’s doing … Continue reading →

Why Yoga Might Help You Quit Smoking

You may have already gone through several cycles of trying to quit smoking just over the past month of forgotten and renewed resolutions of the New Year. Before you resign yourself to just trying again next year, see if anything here gives you motivation to try again. Becoming more aware of how your body feels and of your breathing patterns is one of the most easily experienced side-effects of practicing yoga. A simple, Gentle Yoga class could provide you with enough body awareness to firm your resolve. The focusing exercises, combined with poses and breath, allow you to better feel … Continue reading →

The Fitness Blog Week in Review November 18-24

Good morning and Happy Saturday – what a crazy week this has been. For me, it involved taking some much needed down time and time off from the writing. Though you saw blogs from me here, most of these were written ahead of time when I could and others were written on the fly. My daughter and I planned to do a lot together this week, but she came down with a nasty cold at the beginning of the week so we spent a lot of our week snuggled up together and watching movies as we nursed her through her … Continue reading →

The Fitness Blog Week in Review: November 11-17

Welcome to the end of an eventful week, as I described in last week’s Fitness Blog Week in Review, I’ve been trying to quit smoking. I slipped this week and you’ll see more on that in Day 11: Falling off the Horse later on today, but in the meanwhile, here is our Fitness Blog: Week in Review. Sunday, November 12 In Day 5: My Throat Hurts and My Sinuses Hate Me I described how I was doing in the cravings department, although Saturday I was miserable ill. We thought it might be the detoxifying, but as it turns out it … Continue reading →