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Sometimes when you’re done with your daily responsibilities, you may feel totally stressed out and just want to watch TV or videos. While it might feel good to engulf yourself in the story, it won’t help you relieve the stress you feel. What should you do instead to relieve stress? The answer is simple, just workout. Try it sometime and you’ll see. It doesn’t have to be a traditional workout, just running up and down stairs or going for a brisk walk can help lower stress levels and make you feel great.

What does stress do to the body?

Stress causes the body to change. Your brain creates hormones when you’re stressed and those prepare you to run or fight. The fight or flight response was important for early man, when stress was caused by real danger, like wild animal attacks. Today, much of our stress comes from traffic jams, an angry boss or just the chaos of everyday life. The brain doesn’t care. It still sends out the same hormones and makes the changes to get you ready for running or fighting, even though the situation doesn’t call for it. These hormones increase the blood to extremities so you can run or fight, dilate the eyes to see better, increase heart rate and blood pressure, slowing blood flow to other areas, like the organs for digestion.

How does exercise help?

Since stress changes the body to run or fight, running and fighting causes it to burn off the hormones. Exercise mimics those activities. When you’re working out, you’re doing exactly what it takes to eliminate the hormones of stress and increase the hormones that make you feel good and act like natural pain killers, something else important if you’ve just fought off a saber-toothed tiger.

Not all stress is easy to identify or eliminate.

Danger can be real or perceived. We all understand how getting screamed at by the boss can be stressful, but what about people that are afraid of a tiny spider? That doesn’t make sense. Have you ever felt stressed and scared just watching a movie or waking up from a nightmare? Your brain doesn’t differentiate between real and imagined, just as it doesn’t differentiate between fighting and exercise.

• Exercise increases circulation, which can help clear your brain and make you more alert from the extra oxygen and nutrient laden blood. It relieves muscle tension and that goes a long way to relieving stress.
• While exercise is important, so is healthy eating. No matter how much you exercise, if your diet is filled with sugary treats, your body will react with stress from the spikes and valleys of blood sugar levels.
• If you’re feeling anxious, studies show that exercise can help. In fact, it’s used as an adjacent therapy for anxiety and depression. In some studies, exercise was used as a replacement for medication.
• An imbalance of your gut microbiome—the microbes in your digestive tract—can affect your emotions. Exercise can help increase the beneficial bacteria, so can a healthy diet that includes prebiotics like fiber.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

The minute you enter Rising Fitness in Houston, TX, you’ll realize that we’re different. We take a holistic approach to fitness that’s based on each person’s individual needs. If you’re already eating healthy, but have a difficult time with stress and don’t get nearly enough exercise, there’s no reason to focus on your diet. We talk to clients to find the best ways to help them. While the person with a healthy diet may get a few tips, we’ll focus more on the problems he or she faces, stress and a sedentary lifestyle.

Creating an exercise program shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all project.

There are four types of fitness, endurance, strength, balance and flexibility. You need all four to be your fittest. Some people may be quite strong, but unable to run more than a block. Others might have great endurance when running and even be quite flexible, but don’t focus on strength building or balance. You need all four. Flexibility increases range of motion, balance helps prevent injury, endurance is good for your cardiovascular system and strength-building helps prevent injuries and reduces the risk of osteoporosis.

A healthy diet does more than just help you lose weight.

If you’re eating healthy, your plate is filled with vegetables in a rainbow of colors. Knowing the best combinations to ensure your diet contains all the nutrients your body requires can be important. If you’re under stress, part of the problem and part of the solution can be found in your diet. You may not have to lose weight, but you also may not be giving your body the nutrients it requires. Healthy eating should include foods high in nutrients, like vitamin C, which is often depleted when you’re under stress. It shouldn’t include foods high in added sugar that can actually add to your stress.

There are more factors to living a healthy lifestyle.

Lack of sleep and inadequate hydration can interfere with your good health. Too often people neglect their sleep to put more time into work, only to find that simple tasks at work take far longer than expected. Adequate hydration is so simple, you’d think it wouldn’t be a problem, yet it is for some people. Even mild dehydration can cause exhaustion, a headache, constipation and confusion, among other problems. Both ensuring adequate sleep and hydration are extremely important to good health.

• Inadequate exposure to the sun can cause a vitamin D deficiency. Too much sun without sunblock can cause cancer, but safe sunning that’s timed can boost your health, especially since it’s hard to get vitamin D from the food you eat.
• Friendships and a sense of community are important, according to a variety of studies. People with a good social life tend to live longer and healthier.
• Good recovery techniques can improve your fitness level. When you recover rapidly, you’re ready for your next workout and even look forward to it.
• Including the family in your journey can help everyone enjoy good health. It can be a bond that ties a family together. Getting children on the path to fitness with an active lifestyle, healthy diet and other good habits is important.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

If you’re tired of all those weight loss myths, magic diets and ridiculous “get thin quickly” schemes you find on the internet? Many of my clients at Rising Fitness in Houston, TX were and came to get sound advice that really worked. We use science-backed training and an individual approach. No two people are alike and that should be reflected in their weight loss program. Some gyms and trainers do a one size fits all approach, which doesn’t work for everyone.

Just counting carbs and calories isn’t enough.

A calorie is a standardized measure of energy provided by a specific food. Any energy your body doesn’t burn is converted to fat for later use. When you count calories, you attempt to keep the calorie intake lower than the number of calories you burn. That doesn’t mean all calories are equal. There’s a lot of difference between eating 400 calories of a quality protein food and 400 calories from a simple carb. Protein goes through a different digestive process that causes you to feel fuller longer, while boosting your metabolism and aiding in the weight loss function. Calories from carbs like fruits and vegetables come with nutrients that help weight loss, while carbs from donuts with the same number of calories don’t. What you eat is more important than how many calories or carbs you eat.

Don’t weigh yourself daily or expect the same weight loss every week.

Weighing yourself every day, even if it’s at the same time, can be quite discouraging. If you expect to lose weight at a level rate, you’ll be discouraged quickly. A lot of things can affect how much weight you lose. Water weight affects weight loss and the amount of muscle you gained affects it, too. Judge your efforts over several weeks. If you’re doing everything right, you’ll be successful.

You need more than exercise to lose weight.

While working out is part of getting healthier and losing weight, what you eat makes a huge difference. In fact, there’s a saying that a great body starts in the kitchen. Weight loss is all about calories in vs calories burned and having all the nutrients to keep you torching calories. When you eat healthy and time your snacks to complement your workout, you’ll get more from your workout and lose weight faster. You need both a health diet and a program of exercise, which is why we focus on both.

• One of the most prevalent myths is that you have to starve yourself to lose weight. The opposite is actually true. A super low calorie diet can actually lower your metabolism and make weight loss harder.
• Some people focus on aerobic exercise for weight loss and skip other types of workouts. Aerobic training may burn calories, but they’re from both fat and muscle tissue. When you lose muscle tissue, your metabolism slows. Use all types of training, particularly strength training, for weight loss.
• Instead of choosing special “diet foods” at the grocery, opt for more whole foods that have less processing is best. Even diet drinks can be a trap. Recent studies show diet soft drinks can actually cause you to put on belly fat.
• Don’t fall for those television commercials that tell you that weight loss comes without effort by just taking a pill. Many of those “magic pills” come with a recommended low calorie diet and that’s really why you lose weight. The pills only make your wallet thinner.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

What is BMI? BMI stands for body mass index and is a ratio of height to weight based on sex and sometimes age. It’s just one quick measure of your overall health. BMI is a chart with your height at the side, weight in the middle, and the corresponding BMI at the top of the chart. The BMI formula is (weight in pounds x 703) / (height in inches x height in inches). Putting the information on a chart cuts through calculation time and makes it easy for doctors to take a quick assessment. It’s not a stand-alone test and requires other information.

The amount of muscle you have makes a difference.

If a patient is a bodybuilder or other muscular person, the doctor might make a rash assessment of obesity before seeing the patient. That’s because muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue. If two people were the same height and weight, but one was muscular and the other wasn’t, the muscular person would look thinner. The muscular person would probably be healthier than the one who wasn’t. The healthcare professional would know the difference when they saw them. Insurance companies often require a photograph of a person with a high BMI due to muscle tissue to avoid paying more for life insurance. A large body frame, dense bones, pregnancy, and age can skew BMI.

There are better ways to identify health risks than BMI.

A waist measurement is a better indication of overall health. For men, a waist larger than 40.2 inches has a greater chance of diabetes. The measurement for women indicating the same is 34.6 inches. That’s because fat around the waist is visceral fat. It’s the most dangerous type and the most difficult to lose. It crowds the organs and causes inflammation.

A high BMI leads the doctor to explore health issues by taking other tests.

A high BMI may be the reason for breathing problems or sleep apnea, which can lead to COPD, heart disease, and diabetes. It can indicate a risk for arthritis, liver disease, some types of cancer, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure, too. It’s not a good indicator of the health of children or seniors. Doctors use it as a place to start and other factors, like personal observation.

One study showed that BMI wasn’t a good indicator of cardiac health. It didn’t indicate whether the patient would have a healthy cardiometabolic profile containing blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels.

A better indicator of health is the RFM—relative fat mass index. It uses the formula for men of 64-(20 x height/waist circumference) and women 76-(20 x height/waist circumference).

Better indicators of body density are MRI scans and underwater weighing. The problem is that they are too costly for widespread use.

The range for normal is between 18 and 24. For overweight individuals, the BMI number range is from 25 to 29. The range between 30 and 39 is obese and 40 and higher is extremely obese.