Come and stretch with me for an incredible way to begin your day!
Follow along as I walk you through my morning stretch routine. I'll show you exactly how I gently wake up my muscles every single day.
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Please share this video with your friends who could use a good stretch and I'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
Are you taking the necessary steps to ensure your skin is safe and cared for?
Join me for a VERY IMPORTANT topic as I not only introduce you to my favorite skin care products, but also SHARE MY SKIN SECRET that will probably shock you!
Below are links to a couple of the products I mentioned in this video:
Colorscience SUNFORGETTABLE® Brush-On Sunscreen
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Share this video with your sun loving friends and I love hearing from you in the comments below too! What's your go-to for fun in the sun skin care?
Are you a yo-yo dieter?
If so, you’re not alone.
I know a now-thin woman who says she’s lost 1600 pounds.
Ask her about it and she’ll tell you she lost 40 pounds, 40 times over the course of her life.
Over the years she had gone to weight loss group meetings and tried every name brand diet.
I've seen her eating nothing but grapefruit and trying a drink made with lemon and cayenne paper. Each and every time she’d brag that she’s lost weight.
Then I’d see her again and all her weight had come back. Sometimes she gained even more than she’d lost.
That is what yo-yo dieting is all about.
It’s losing weight and then gaining it back, over and over again. It’s just like a yo-yo, going up and down.
A person who has a history of yo-yo dieting can take the weight off, but then it comes back every time.
In many cases, they gain more weight than they lose, so their weight keeps inching up. Every time they try a new diet it gets harder to drop the pounds.
And as the weight comes back, they get more and more frustrated.
You need to know that it’s just not good for you.
You need to know what is causing it.
You need to know what it’s doing to your health.
And you need to know how to stop it and switch to something that works.
There are a lot of reasons why diets fail and the weight comes back, but the most common reason is that your original diet is too hard.
Cutting back too much on food never works!
Your body reacts badly.
You’re always hungry.
Your metabolism slows.
You feel deprived all the time.
The same is true for pledging to exercise your weight off.
If you work at it too hard you just exhaust yourself – and make yourself hungry too!
Sometimes it’s your hunger that drives you back to your old eating habits.
Sometimes it’s just that you can’t stand the same dull food over and over again. Most people end up falling off the diet wagon.
They binge eat far more than they did before. They stop working out because they’re exhausted or too sore.
One way or another, if your diet or fitness plan is that hard and you just won’t be able to keep it up.
What makes matters worse is the fact that once you start eating again, you’re mad at yourself and depressed. This leads to emotional eating, and that’s what really packs the pounds back on.
Yo-yo dieting is a problem for many reasons. The most obvious problem is that it just doesn’t take the weight off for any length of time.
But there are also many health problems that can come with yo-yo diets. These include:
These include:
Studies have shown that the more diets you go on, the more weight you gain. There’s a reason for this.
When your body is cheated of the food that it needs, it thinks that you’re starving and stores more fat. The more often this happens, the greater the impact of this effect.
Though most people know that starving yourself makes your metabolism slow down, they're not aware of these long-term effects.
It's a lot like the way that animals are able to hibernate through the winter. Their bodies have learned to store fat for long periods of time.
One study found that people who go on a lot of diets end up gaining more weight over their lifetime than people who never diet at all. It’s because the nondieters’ bodies don’t think they need to store fat for the future.
When you starve yourself, you do more to your stomach than just leaving it wanting more.
You also have a big effect on the bacteria that your gut needs to keep a healthy balance and digest your food properly.
This can lead to serious sicknesses. It also switches your normal stomach environment from what is found in healthy people to what is found in obese people.
This means that once you start eating normally again, you gain weight faster than you did before.
When you put yourself through a constant cycle of starving yourself and then gaining the weight back, it’s depressing.
You start to question your worth and develop a negative feeling about your own body.
You also end up cheating yourself of things that you enjoy, and that crushes your feeling of worth.
Simply put, yo-yo dieting can make you feel bad about yourself.
Being overweight is just not good for you.
It puts you at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses.
When you yo-yo diet, you are not putting yourself on a path to better health.
Studies show that people who yo-yo diet and who already have heart disease have two times the chance of having a heart attack according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to Sripal Bangalore, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City:
“Our finding suggest that we need to be concerned about weight fluctuation in this group that is already at high risk due to coronary disease.”
The greater the range of weight gained and lost, the greater the risk. The same was also true for being diagnosed with diabetes.
The kinds of diets that people who yo-yo diet try all spend too much time on numbers.
They count calories and watch the scale.
They push you to focus on the wrong things instead of thinking about adding healthy habits and eating foods that are good for you.
A person who thinks of their eating as either being “on” or “off” of a diet sets them up for failure because when they are no longer on a diet, they go back to their old bad eating habits.
Everybody has a certain rate at which their body burns calories. This is known as your basal metabolic rate.
You may know that you can push this up by eating certain foods or by exercising and building muscle.
But did you know that too much dieting can actually push it down permanently?
If you deprive your body of the calories that it needs for too long, it directly changes your rate of calorie burn. That’s a hard thing to fix.
When you starve your body of the food that it needs, you end up eating into muscle and fat that your body needs to keep healthy.
This causes real stress to your body.
Your level of the stress hormone cortisol goes up and that causes damage to your arteries and increases inflammation.
Did you ever notice that when you lose weight, it comes off of your face first?
That’s because we tend to lose weight from top to bottom. We also gain weight from bottom to top.
So, if you are constantly gaining and losing weight, the weight at the bottom tends to stay longest and get added to first.
You end up with more fat on your hips and belly.
Inflammation is what can lead to a number of serious health conditions.
These include hypertension, heart attack, stroke, and metabolic syndrome.
It also raises your risk of diabetes.
Studies have shown that the more you weight cycle, the higher your chance of having this reaction.
So, we know that yo-yo dieting doesn’t work. And now we know that it's terrible for your health.
What is the solution to losing weight?
The real problem with yo-yo dieting is that people can’t keep the weight off because of the extreme approach they take to losing it.
By choosing a diet strategy that is not sustainable, they end up quickly gaining the weight back.
What’s the right strategy?
Start with breaking the bad diet habit. That means more than choosing the wrong method of losing weight.
You also need to change your approach to food in general.
Here are some helpful tips that will put you on the road to permanent weight loss, and better health too.
The whole idea of comfort food is a disaster waiting to happen.
If your answer to feeling bad or stressed is to find something fattening to eat, you’re just going to end up feeling worse.
The worse you feel when you’re eating to soothe yourself, the less you are paying attention to what you’re eating and how much you’re eating.
Fix it: Sit down and write down other, better choices to make you feel good.
Maybe it’s going for a walk or reading a magazine article.
Maybe playing with your cat lifts your spirits, or talking to a friend.
Make a long list that you can choose from, and then instead of opening the fridge when you’re blue, take out your list and pick your best option.
This goes for counting calories as well as setting yourself a weight loss target.
If you tell yourself you have to hit a target weight, you are setting yourself up for a fall.
The same goes for choosing a diet that means you are constantly thinking of food in terms of its numerical value.
Fix it: Instead, make your goal adding healthy habits or eating more healthy food.
When you tell yourself to start drinking more water each day, you have set yourself an achievable goal, and then you can add on to that.
At the same time, learn more about what foods are good for you and start changing your food shopping and eating habits.
By pledging to cut our processed foods and adding more whole, fresh foods, you will see a slow, steady, sustainable change in your body and your weight.
You'll also start feeling a lot better, and you’ll have more energy.
Where yo-yo diets often involve too much exercise all at once.
Fix it: If you commit to working out every other day, or three times a week, you will find it easier to fit into your schedule.
You can also help your efforts by being more mindful about building in steps to your day.
Choose a parking space that’s farther away from your destination.
Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
If you make these things into a habit instead of something you’re doing for a short-term weight-loss goal, you’ll be adopting healthy habits that last a life time and keep any weight that you lose off permanently.
Starving yourself kicks your brain into starvation mode and will actually make your body cling fat. Let's face it, it's also not a very pleasant way to live.
Fix it: Eat 6 times a day. That means 3 meals and yes, you should snack between every single meal.
By eating small meals throughout the day, you will keep your metabolism humming.
This works much better for weight loss than skipping meals and starving yourself.
Healthy weight is about a lot more than you might think. Starving yourself and feeling bad about how you look is doing your body no favors.
Fix it: Be mindful to improve every area of your well being.
Get plenty of sleep. Drink more water. Nurture your soul's passions by doing activities you love. Floss your teeth. You get the idea 🙂
Focus on really enjoying your meals by eating more slowly and mindfully.
You'll find that you have more energy, plus you'll enjoy your life much more.
When you stop thinking of dieting as something that you get done in a short period of time and start thinking of it as a new way to manage your life, you will stop the yo-yo weight loss cycle and feel and look better.
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Please share this important info. with your loved ones who are always on a new diet and don't forget to leave me a comment below. Have you fallen into the yo-yo diet trap before?
Metabolism. We talk about it all the time.
You know that it’s related to your weight. But do you know what it really is?
More importantly, do you know how to fix it?
Metabolism is the body process that takes care of making sure our body has the fuel it needs to run.
Turning food into energy is a complex process that combines the calories in our food with oxygen, and we all do that at our own individual rate, based on a few different factors.
These include:
We burn calories by doing more than going to the gym and exercising. 
Everything that we do requires energy, from breathing and sleeping to healing wounds and generating new cells.
The energy required just to operate our bodies and keep us alive is our base metabolic rate. It’s the number of calories we burn just sitting around or sleeping.
Beyond our base metabolic rate, we burn calories in two other ways.
The first one is exercise. The more physical activity we demand of ourselves, the more calories we burn.
The second is when we digest the food that we eat.
Though you might think that digesting food is a pretty stable way of burning calories, you can actually burn more calories eating some foods than others.
There are also foods that can help to boost your metabolism.
Amazingly, there are some foods that speed up your metabolism. They do this by changing the reaction that takes place when oxygen acts with the calories you take in.
Imagine, just by eating specific foods you can help yourself lose weight!
Include each of these in your diet and reach your weight loss goals that much faster!
We’ve all heard of the grapefruit diet. But did you know why it worked for so many people?
It turns out that grapefruit contains an antioxidant called “naringenin.” It helps to keep your blood sugar in check and use insulin more efficiently.
A study that had obese people eating half a fresh grapefruit before meals found they experienced greater weight loss than people who did not eat grapefruit.
Cinnamon is a spice that adds great taste and smells to our foods, but did you know that it also can help you burn fat faster?
Cinnamon is very effective at fighting metabolic syndrome.
It lowers blood sugar levels, which means excess sugar isn’t stored as fat. At the same time, it helps process carbs more efficiently.
Every time we look at dark chocolate, we find something else to cheer about!
This time it’s the caffeine in the chocolate that has been shown to boost metabolism by between 5 and 8% per day.
Dark chocolate contains catechins, which raise resting metabolism by about 4%.
TweetVinegar of all types lower blood sugar levels. It also slows the speed at which we absorb carbohydrates. Just make sure you buy the kind that contains “the mother.“
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Help me spread the word about these fat burning foods by sharing this article with your friends and I always love to hear from you in the comments below. How many of these foods are in your kitchen right now?
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight or are working on it now, you know all about weight loss plateaus.
They’re that annoying period when the scale won’t budge.
It happens no matter how well you stick to your plan.
Plateaus happen for a reason.
Scientists have recently found that they’re the brain’s way of protecting us from famine. This may have been a help to cavemen, it does little to help us when we’re trying to lose weight.
It can lead to frustration that makes us give up.
The best way to handle your brain stopping you from burning fat is to know why it’s happening.
Weight loss happens when our bodies burn more calories than we take in.
There are a couple of ways to approach that:
But a recent study out of the University of Cambridge proved that when we take in fewer calories, our brains actually slow down the rate at which the body burns them.
This makes it harder to lose weight.
The study showed that the neurons in our brains that make us hungry actually shut down when we cut back on food.
TweetThat is great if we’re starving – it helps to keep us alive.
But if you’re actually trying to lose weight, the mechanism is working against us.
According to scientist Dr. Clemence Blouet:
“If food is available they make us eat, and if food is scarce, they turn our body into saving mode and stop us from burning fat. While this mechanism may have evolved to help us cope with famine, nowadays most people only encounter such a situation when they are deliberately dieting to lose weight. Our work helps explain why for these people, dieting has little effect on its own over a long period. Our bodies compensate for the reduction in calories.”
There are a few steps you can take to counter this effect. Exercise is a great first step, as it can burn more calories and make you feel better too.
A good workout will rid you of stress and help you focus on the good you are doing rather than the scale not moving.
My best advice is to ignore the scale and focus on the changes you feel and see in your body.
It may seem crazy when you want to lose weight but the key is to eat 6 small meals a day so your brain doesn't kick into starvation mode.
That works against you.
Eating frequent meals and snacks is how you make your brain and your body work for you! This often comes as a great relief when people ask how they can boost metabolism to burn more fat.
Oh, the irony! Your brain may be working against you when you don't eat enough BUT…It's still THE MOST POWERFUL weight loss tool you have!
The other BIG thing you can do to stay focused and keep your eyes on the prize is to visualize a better, slimmer, fitter you.
By looking at yourself in the mirror and imagining the you that you want to be, you can focus on the positive and give yourself the mental boost you need to get past the plateau and keep working towards your weight loss goal.
When you look to the future, you keep yourself from dwelling on a single day’s disappointment.
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Share this enlightening info. with your friends and I want to hear from you too! Just drop me a line in the comments below.
Have you ever been to a nighttime party where the host used Citronella Oil torches or candles?
The smell may be sweet and it does a great job of keeping mosquitoes away.
Citronella Oil does not come from the Citronella plant, which is a member of the Geranium family.
In a strange twist, the Citronella plant doesn’t keep bugs away. It may even attract them!
Citronella Oil comes from lemon grass, a plant which is largely found in Asia.
If the only thing you know about Citronella Oil is that it keeps bugs away, you’re missing out on many health benefits.
This essential oil contains phytochemicals and antioxidants. Some of its compounds kill bacteria. Others fight inflammation.
Citronella Oil has been used as a medicine and home remedy for 100s of years. It’s also a beauty aid that’s good for your skin and hair.
They’ll take you beyond Tiki torches and have you buying it for your medicine cabinet.
Citronella Oil is a natural cure for arthritis. It also eases soreness from muscle aches.
The best way to use it is to take a few drops and mix it with an oil like sweet almond oil, then massage onto painful areas.
Citronella Oil is an antibacterial that can kill the germs that cause acne breakouts. It also treats fungus and warts and is an effective treatment for eczema.
Citronella is a natural hair cleanser that adds shine to hair while gently removing oil.
Citronella oil's antifungal property helps fight dandruff.
TweetIt also helps protect hair against the sun’s drying rays and is a great detangler.
Mix a few drops of Citronella Oil to a few teaspoons of almond oil. Massage onto hair then rinse immediately. Or leave it on overnight for a great conditioning treatment that adds volume and shine.
Citronella Oil is a natural and humane way to stop your pet from barking.
Experts say that the oil’s scent calms a dog who is stressed.
The best way to use it is to mix 15 drops of the oil with half a cup of witch hazel and half a cup of water.
When your dog barks, spray the solution in your dog’s direction. You can also spray it onto your dog’s coat to relieve fear of thunder or fireworks.
One of the problems with commercial deodorants is that they contain harmful chemicals that have been linked to diseases.
Citronella Oil is an antibacterial that kills underarm bacteria. Plus, its lemony scent masks body odor. You can make it yourself with this easy recipe.
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Please share this and wow your friends with some healthy facts about citronella that they probably didn't know. Did you realize these things about citronella? Let me know in the comments below
What's the first combo you think of when you think of foods that “go” together?
Chocolate and peanut butter? Peanut butter and jelly?
These are classic combinations but I'm talking about eating 2 healthy foods that boost the nutrients when you eat them together.
These foods often come from different food groups, but the nutrients they contain make the other’s benefits even better.
A good food becomes a super food when it’s paired with the right partner.
Cantaloupe and bananas are both high in potassium.
When you mix a high potassium food with high protein Greek yogurt, you give your muscles a big boost of cell repair power.
These two foods are a naturally delicious snack, but they’re also are a great mix. They stop hunger pangs and lift your energy stores.
Hummus is high in protein. It fills you up, and when eaten with carrots, broccoli or other high fiber foods it’s an even better way to fight cravings and unhealthy snacking.
Avocado is a healthy fat. Fats boost the body’s ability to take in and use lycopene. Lycopene is a “carotenoid” found in tomatoes. It protects against cancer.
Studies have shown that eating avocado and tomatoes together increases the uptake of lycopene 500%!
TweetCarotenoids are also found in leafy greens, so add some guacamole and salsa to a salad. Your immune system will thank you.
Broccoli is a great source of calcium, and egg yolks contain Vitamin D.
Vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium.
Try chopping some broccoli and whisking it into beaten eggs. It makes a delicious and healthy omelet.
It’s great to eat foods that are loaded with vitamins. But sometimes your body needs help to pull nutrients out of the foods and use them.
That’s the case with Vitamin K. Vitamin K is a fat-soluble vitamin found in leafy greens.
When a nutrient is fat soluble, you need a healthy fat to help your body get the best out of it.
Make yourself a kale or spinach salad and toss it with a little extra virgin olive oil.
Everybody knows that spinach has lots of iron. But did you know that eating spinach alone is not enough?
You need help taking up iron from your food, and the best way to do that is by eating foods that have lots of vitamin C.
Vitamin C-rich foods include oranges, strawberries, red peppers, and kiwi.
Here’s one of my favorite salads that combine this healthy and tasty combination:
Yours in health and happiness,
Danette
P.S. Did you realize these foods are even healthier when they're paired? Help me get the word out by sharing this and I love reading your comments below!
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.