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slow and steady can win the race

What! Am I taking up running? Not likely! I am here to give a couple of personal pieces of advice.

First on exercise: Start slow and gradually move up. Listen to you body. To develop stronger bodies we actually damage them some and they repair stronger. once you are an adult it seems the way to grow muscles  and soft tissues is to work them and get micro tear, that then heal into stronger bigger muscle tissue. It takes about a week for your  muscles and organs (lungs and heart, oct.) to begin to become stronger. This same process  happens to your tendon and ligaments, but the time frame is two weeks instead of one for the healing to really strengthen and start building. The next time frames is the bones, it is the same process for the bones to strengthen as the soft tissue and connective tissue. The bone actually break down a little to build up when you exercise, but the big catch here is it take about four weeks and during that time the bone actually get weaker before the are stronger. This was news to me and I just found it out yesterday. The study I was read, (by my Husband about runners), said that a lot of people start to exercise this time of year and a fair number get injured in the first month because their lungs, heart , and muscles get stronger  fast, but the connective tissue takes twice as long as the muscles to get the same results, and the bone take four times as long. As people push harder as their muscles feel stronger, a number will damage the connective tissue or get stress fractures. I am having to think on this as yesterday when doing my aerobic, my right ankle started to twinge. Today walking down the stairs in our home, my right knee was sore and my right ankle is giving me some pain if I step on it wrong. I will still try to get my heart rate up and exercise in, but I am going to listen to my body and find ways to do it that are not going to stress the parts that are painful. I hope you listen to your body and not just "push  through the pain". Remember as of yet, this is the only body you get.
Now on Nutrition: As many of us are trying to drop anywhere from a few pounds to a large number, here are a few things to remember. The truth seem to get that you must use more calories than you consume to lose weight. Now the cautions come in. It is more complicated than that. Sometimes people drop to very low calorie diets to loss pounds, in the short term this can seem to work, but if your bodies not given enough quality calories it can not function and get stronger. It will slow your metabolism and make it harder to lose weight in the long run. I personally would never eat less than 1300 calories a day. And those calories have to give your body enough of the nutrient that it needs to get stronger. It can not be candy, bad fats, and refined sugar. If you do not take care of your body it will plateau and your weight loss will stall. Also you need to create a lifestyle that you can live with long term. Yo-yo dieting is hard on the body. The best way to lose weight, in my opinion, is to do it slowly and with healthy lifestyle changes. I will be blogging more on the specifics as I go along. Your body needs protein, good carbs, healthy fats to stay healthy. As you saw if you read the previous blogs, there are may nutriments needed to stay healthy and the best way I have found to do that is to get a lot of and a wide variety of fresh (or frozen if prepare right) fruits and vegetables. Then be sure to include the protein your body needs to grow the muscles, the mineral and vitamins your bones need to get and stay strong. Last for today,  healthy fats are needed to help the body convert what you eat into substances it can use to maintain health. I am not saying you can never eat any "bad" foods, but balance is the key to success, I  firmly believe.

I also believe that there of other areas that help to give a person a healthy life and well look at them as we go on. Such things as emotion, spirituality, and sleep; I will explore more in later blogs. There are many thing to think about to keep in the best possible health, but do not get overwhelmed please, I will take them slow and we can move ahead a step at a time. I really believe one step at a time and slow and steady can really get us there. This week I have lost a little over a pound and .6 percent of body fat. I am not "dieting", I am trying to change my life so I am going to do what it takes even if it is a year or two or more, but I am taking it one day at a time.

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