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How to Be Happy: 27 Habits to Add to Your Routine

Regardless of your version of true happiness, living a happier, more satisfied life is within reach. A few tweaks to your regular habits can help you get there.


Habits matter. If you’ve ever tried breaking a bad habit, you know all too well how engrained they are.
 
Well, good habits are deeply engrained, too. Why not work on making positive habits part of your routine?
 
Here’s a look at some daily, monthly, and yearly habits to help kickstart your quest. Just remember that everyone’s version of happiness is a little different, and so is their path to achieving it.
 
If some of these habits create added stress or just don’t fit your lifestyle, ditch them. With a little time and practice, you’ll figure out what does and doesn’t work for you.
 
 
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5 Things That Happen to Your Hormones When You're Trying to Lose Weight

These under-the-radar chemical messengers can make or break your weight-loss efforts. Here's how to make them work for you.


1. You can't stop thinking about food
Feeling hungry? Blame it on ghrelin, a hormone made in your stomach. Ghrelin's job is to ensure that your body has a steady supply of energy on tap. It kicks in when you haven't eaten for a while, sending hunger signals from your gut to your brain telling you to start thinking about your next meal. Trouble is, ghrelin doesn't just rise when your belly is empty. It also spikes when you drop pounds, leading to a gnawing hunger that makes it nearly impossible to maintain your new weight.
 
2. Once you start eating, it's hard to stop
If ghrelin makes you hungry, then leptin is all about feeling full. Leptin is produced in your fat cells, and its mission is also energy preservation. When you have sufficient fat, you generate lots of leptin. So, you're easily satisfied, and everyone's happy. But when fat starts to dwindle, leptin follows, making it hard to know when to put down the fork.
 
3. You might want to eat more often
Know how slowly digested nutrients like protein and fiber keep your belly full between meals? There's a hormone in your small intestine, called cholecystokinin (CCK), that does the same thing. CCK works by reducing the rate at which food empties from your stomach. Unless you start losing weight, that is. Then CCK begins to tank. In one study, the longer volunteers dieted, the more their CCK levels dipped.

 
Author: Karen Ansel, M.S., RDN
 
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Keep Oregano Oil on Hand for it's Antibiotic Properties

Every living thing on Earth is part of the proverbial food chain. Animals eat plants, plants eat plants, plants eat animals, animals eat animals. It all works together in the cycle of life and death.

 
Bacteria are the most plentiful organism on the planet. In 1998, scientists at the University of Georgia actually sat down to figure out how many there are: five million trillion trillion—a 5 with 30 zeroes.
 
Lead researcher William B. Whitman concluded, “It had been estimated before that one-half of the living protoplasm on Earth is microbial, but our new figures indicate that this estimate is probably much too conservative.”(1) No kidding. This research helps to put things in perspective: as the most abundant inhabitant, bacteria form the foundation for all other life.
 
As with every other species, bacteria need to eat. Fifty percent of the human body is composed of bacteria.(2)
 
Those that happily live within us serve to destroy invaders and are an integral part of the body’s metabolism.
 
Crisis occurs, however, when harmful bacteria enter us and our little single-cell friends can’t efficiently get rid of them.

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The Benefits of Nature

Major mental disorders are increased by up to 56% in urban settings, which has been suggested to be the chief environmental risk factor for schizophrenia, explaining over 30% of these cases, according to some scientists. In any case, schizophrenia risk is consistently related to urban dwellings, independent of family history, drug abuse, social network support, and sociodemographic factors.

This suggests that possibly the social stress linked to an urban environment is associated with a higher incidence of schizophrenia.

Experiencing nature is known to restore the ability to focus and relieve stress because (according to the biophilia hypothesis) of the inherent human connection with nature. This has been explored with the Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and Stress Recovery Theory (SRT).

The first hinges on involuntary attention to nature, which relieves the strain on voluntary attention. The second highlights the relief of stress that comes with the calming emotions evoked by nature.

Many studies have shown that experiencing nature enhances working memory, restores focused attention, relieves fear and stress, and produces beneficial reductions in heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol levels.

The amygdala is a brain region activated during a task that evokes social stress. The activation is greater in an urban setting, indicating the need for intervention studies to validate the causative role of an urban environment in amygdala activation.

One study showed that walking in nature for 90 minutes reduced rumination and associated brain activity, but not urban walking. This was determined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using the same technology, the authors of the current paper examined brain activity in certain regions, namely, the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), before and after walking for one hour in a natural vs. urban environment.

The aim was to determine if brain regions activated by stress would be activated differently in either setting compared to baseline levels. This was measured at three points.

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