The Holiday Season is upon us and that means that the holiday parties and get-togethers are also here.  While this can be a joyous time of year, the average American gains 7-10 lbs during the Holiday Season.  Here are a few tips to help you avoid weight gain at your parties this season:

1. Eat before you go out:  By filling up on something healthy, like a salad before you head off to a party, you’re less likely to overindulge on things you would normally pass up.    

2.  Get a plate:  If you’re eating fingerfood all night, the tendency is to overeat if you never get a plate and see how much you’re eating.  If you’re talking all night, you might not even remember half of the things you ate.  But if you put your food on a plate, you can be more conscious of what you’re eating.  And hopefully there will be a little bit of green on your plate.   

3.  Throw that plate away when you’re done and stick to it!  After you’ve eaten a plate of food, throw it away and enjoy the rest of the party.  If you ate something before and a plate of food at the party, you’re most likely satisfied.   Anything else that you eat will just be mindless, social eating and is going to make you have to make that dreaded New Years resolution of losing weight again next year.

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ZUCCHINI HONEY BREAD

1 cup of olive oil

3 eggs

1 cup of honey

2 cups of zucchini pulp

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons sea salt

1/2 cup wheat germ

1 1/2 cup oat flour

1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mixture 1: Beat eggs, add oil and honey, beat until thick, and mix in zucchini pulp. Mixture 2: add flour, wheat germ, baking soda, baking powder and walnuts. Add mixtures 1 & 2 together. Pour into 2 greased loaf pans and bake for approximately 1 hour.

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 Overhead Kettlebell Lunge

Your body performs along forward, backward, rotational and diagonal planes of movement everyday. A lack of balanced strength along these planes will result in injury-such as a twinge in your back when picking up a suitcase or indulging in your first golf game of the season.

To be fair, machines do have a place in rehab and training, when muscle isolation, or the ability to control movement, speed, direction and intensity is desired. Machines are also useful for novice exercisers who may need a very structured program of movement to build some very basic strength. Machines can also have a role in “bulking” up the body with muscle for unspecified strength. Obviously, body builders will want as much muscle as possible, and aren’t as concerned with how that muscle performs precise, athlete movements. But functional training should be the core of a fitness program for anyone who wants to develop an athletic body along with strength, skill, agility and balance for sports (and life) outside the gym.

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Functional training is “reactive” teaching muscles to “fire” in a pattern, with primary “moving” muscles and secondary “stabilizing” muscles working in sequence to execute movement. This integration engages strong, stable “core” muscles aiding in balance. The result? Your body attains equilibrium between strength and flexibility, between agonist and antagonist muscles, increasing functionality while reducing risk of injury.

The bottom line: you can either have a bulky, unfunctional body that is injury prone or a lean, functional one that is resilient. It also never hurts that functional training workouts are shorter, more effective, and more interesting than all those monotonous curls, leg curls, bench presses, etc.

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Wellness is generally used to mean a healthy balance of the mind, body and spirit that results in an overall feeling of well-being.

Therefore, we believe that wellness involves more than just being clear of the flu or other diseases. Wellness is rather a pursuit to be all that we were created to be in mind, body, and spirit.

No matter how sick or ‘well’ you currently are, our goal is to educate and guide you to better wellness.

So, what is Extraordinary Wellness?

We define Extraordinary Wellness as someone who has the following attributes:

• Super Energy
• Sharp & Focused Mind
• Incredible Fitness
• Banished Aches & Pains
• Healthy Back
• Healthy Heart
• Never Giving Cancer a Chance to Start
• Vital Living to 120!

So, are you Extraordinarily Well? If so, that’s great!! If not, don’t you want to be?

Transformation’s Extraordinary Wellness Mission:

1. ) Promote only natural non-invasive (no needles!) therapies, as God, through nature, has provided safe and natural remedies.

2.) Encourage a lifestyle that will enhance homeostasis and total wellness from the head down.

3.) View the individual as a whole person consisting of mind, body and spirit.

4.) Teach prevention, by promoting a healthy lifestyle that includes proper nutrition, rest, exercise, etc. while exploring those negative factors in one’s life that can prevent natural health from being achieved.

HOW TO GET STARTED:

STEP 1: Call (919) 845-6596 to schedule an initial Consultation. (Can be done in person, by phone, or over the internet)

Initial Consultations are Complimentary are basically a ‘Get to Know You’ session for information gathering purposes. After setting your goals and a plan of action, we can look at options that will best fit your needs. Rates are based completely on your specific program and needs.

STEP 2: Begin on Your Journey to Extraordinary Wellness!

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Wellness is first and foremost a choice to assume responsibility for the quality of your life. It begins with a conscious decision to shape a healthy lifestyle. Wellness is a mindset, a predisposition to adopt a series of key principles in varied life areas that lead to high levels of well-being and life satisfaction.

A consequence of this focus is that a wellness mindset will protect you against temptations to blame someone else, make excuses, shirk accountability, or whine.

Wellness is an alternative to dependency on doctors and drugs, to complacency, to mediocrity and to self-pity, boredom and slothfulness.

Many wellness promoters, myself included, see wellness as a philosophy that embraces many principles for good health.

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Scripture and medical research agree that modern lifestyles lived without reference to God’s laws and design shorten life and hasten death. It has been reported that in the early twentieth century, a people in the Himalayas called the Hunzas had an average life span of 90 years, and often over 120 years. When a medical team led by Dr. Robert Garrison studied the Hunzas in the 1940s, the physicians did not find a single case of cancer, ulcers, appendicitis or colitis. Heart disease and hypertension were unknown among them. The medical experts also found that the Hunza people ate nuts, grains, vegetables, fruits and legumes. The team could only conclude that the Hunza’s life expectancy was based on clean water and exercise—and to their adherence to a diet very much like the one described in Genesis 1:29.” In 1949, the Hunzas were incorporated into Pakistan, and their life span has since been shortened because of changes in diet.

The bottom line is this: What you eat makes a difference in your health.

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1. They promote maintenance and improvement in Active Daily Living tasks
2. They promote spinal health and longevity
3. They mimic motor patterns that translate into daily tasks, recreational sports, and work activities.

Traditionally, when people exercise, they are working on “cosmetic fitness” – exercising to look good and working on surface muscles or those that we see. The problem with this is that it doesn’t help you in daily tasks. How often do you hear that someone hurt themselves reaching to the back seat of their car, turning quickly, or bending down quickly to pick up something? These are daily living tasks; therefore, it makes sense to train the muscles doing similar movements. You aren’t lying down most of the day doing crunches, yet your abdominal muscles are constantly working to stabilize your spine. So why not train them in a way that makes sense (i.e. standing, sitting, twisting)? That’s what core and functional training are about, and there are several methods you can use.

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• If people are not active in sports or physical education (in other words doing something that challenges their stability and ability of muscles to react), they start to lose balance at the age of 15 or 16.
• After the age of 70, nearly 85% of people die from complications due to breaking their hip.

If those aren’t reason enough to incorporate core and functional training into your exercise program, perhaps learning more will convince you.

What is Functional Training?

Functional training is defined as “activity that trains movement” and includes: balance training, stabilization training, core training, and dynamic movement training. The result of functional training is agility – improved reactionary forces where your body has the ability to compensate for changes in your center of gravity and can move quickly and efficiently. In other words, if you’re falling or suddenly caught off guard, your body is trained to react quickly, meaning you are less prone to injury. Exercises promoting core strength and stability improve or maintain posture and alignment as well as challenging balance and equilibrium.

Core training is different than just training your abdominals. Although the abdominals are an important part of your core musculature, true core training is a more integrated approach; it combines strength, balance, agility, and flexibility of the muscles that control the entire trunk and spine. Regular conditioning of the core muscles is essential to prevent injuries, correct posture, and making you more efficient with all that you do.

Functional training is about QUALITY of the movement, not quantity!

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