Meditation and Hypnosis

Meditation and hypnosis
No matter how healthy you look or how healthy you think you are, if you lead a stressful life then you will not reap the benefits of your healthy body. Mostly stress is linked to work so there is no way of taking out this cause of stress in your life apart from quitting your job. However, here I will give you exercises to complete that will relax you and take away your stress so that in time you will become a more relaxed person and will be able to cope with the most difficult times in your life without becoming stressed.
I have undertaken research and have much experience in the field of meditation. Over the years i have formulated a method which will help you to:

Clear your mind
Become more focused and allow you to achieve your goals
Improve your internal happiness
Experience the intense feeling of satisfation that can be achieved through meditation

Relaxation Meditation

1. Sit on the floor in the double lotus position, if you can't do this or find it too uncomfortable sit in the single lotus position (only one leg pulled up onto your knee) or simply sit cross-legged. Place you hands palm down on your knees. Don't lean on anything, keep your back straight but relaxed and keep your head upright and looking forwards.

2. Sit for a few seconds, gradually quietening down your thoughts, let your breathing become deeper and more regular, but only naturally so. Breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Concentrate on your breathing and nothing else, focus your mind and silently count the number of breaths you take and when you get to 10, start again from 1.

3. Feel each breath you take refueling your body and muscles with the oxygen that it needs.

4. Focus your mind on the very tips of your toes. In turn, work your way up through every muscle in your body all the way to your scalp. Think about every single muscle and realise that you are not as relaxed as you think. Release the tension that you now feel in your muscles from toe to scalp. You need to remain sitting upright but this is possible without tensing the muscles in your back, simply sit into the position.

5. Now return to counting your deep, regular, natural breaths and imagine that everytime you breathe out, you are expelling all of your tension and stress and also expelling all those things that are bad for your body. Everytime you breathe in imagine that you are breathing in clean nourishing air and all the energy in the universe. At that last point if you start to feel yourself feeling wide awake or jittery just repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 to relax yourself again.

6. If you feel your mind wandering don't bring it back sharply to your breathing, simply guide your mind back slowly and begin counting again.

7. By letting your body become relaxed and by calming your mind and focusing it gently on a simple, you are letting all parts of your bodily system become more integrated. By being calm and relaxed, you are able to focus your mind in a more gentle way. Your mind will become sharper and you will be able to concentrate with greater ease. Realise now that you will experience much less stress if you focus your mind gently rather than forcing yourself to concentrate.

Stopping Smoking

Stopping smoking

Introduction
There are two factors that will determine your success:
1.You must have the desire to give up your habit.
2.You must have the confidence to know that you can do it.

Stopping smoking is, for most people, an uncomfortable experience as cigarettes have given you something to do for a long time. Therefore, it is only natural to think about the ups and downs of giving them up. Many people who have already tried to quit, have failed to do so and will have to try several times before they succeed. Should you have any doubts about giving up smoking, put it off until you are determined to do so. Motivate yourself by writing the benefits and disadvantages of giving up; you will find that your 'disadvantages' list will be very small.
How and when do you want to quit smoking?
There are two ways to effectively quit smoking, immediately, or gradually. When you quit gradually, you use various methods to reduce your nicotine intake before you have that last cigarette. Niether way is better than the other; you have to find the one that works for you. Pick the one that you feel fits your temperament. Either way, a nicotine patch is a good way of helping you to to quit, especially if you are a heavy smoker, but the main ingredient you need is will power.

Nicotine as a chemical
Nicotine creates a biochemical reaction in your body that has an immediate effect on your mood, your ability to reason, and your metabolism. The more that you smoke, the higher level of chemical dependency will be reached. Light smokers can also become just as dependent on cigarettes because of nicotine's psychological impact. In this way it can affect moods and feelings in certain situations.
It is only a matter of seconds after that first puff that nicotine starts to have an effect on your central nervous system, and the rest of your body. Certain areas of the brain, when stimulated by nicotine, help you think more clearly. Other areas of the brain, when stimulated, can make you feel more relaxed and less anxious.
Nicotine also affects the hormones produced by the body, which creates a chemical dependency to nicotine and the accompanying craving. Heavy smokers have become dependent on heightened levels of hormones, stimulated by nicotine, which can have an addictive quality. They need a cigarette at certain intervals of time. After the stimulation of the hormones starts to fall, they need another cigarette to bring them back into the comfort zone. If they do not get that cigarette, the craving begins.

Displacement and Physical exercises
Many people find that including physical activity in their program helps tremendously in the process of giving up.

There are many reasons for this:
With increased activity, the smell of tobacco actually becomes offensive. Whenever you feel the need to smoke after you have decided to quit, get up and move around instead. A brief physical activity can provide you with the lift that you may have received from nicotine. These techniques are also displacement activities; they take your mind away from your craving and give you something to do (other than smoking) until the urge to smoke goes away.
You may use one, all, or a combination of several to achieve your goal. The urge to smoke is immediate, and usually lasts for five minutes. If you can resist for that period of time, you can resist cravings repeatedly and therefore, through this process, cut cigarettes out from your life.

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  Take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and exhale as if you had just taken your first puff on a cigarette. Part of the feeling you get from smoking is a direct result of taking a deep breath. A deep breath allows you to take in a maximum amount of oxygen, and exhaling lets out large quantities of carbon dioxide. This results in a feeling of relaxation. Try it, you'll see.
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  Take a sip of water several times during this five minute period. It can help to diminish the need to smoke, and gives you something to do with your hands. The extra water will also help to flush the nicotine out of your body.
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  Put something in your mouth that has no calories, such as a stirrer, toothpick, or another substitute for a cigarette.
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  Get busy with something, anything, to keep you busy for the next five minutes.
  As long as it does not lead to a craving, chew a piece of gum or a piece of hard candy.
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  Get up and move around for five minutes. It will help the urge to smoke to pass.
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  Use a nicotine patch as replacement therapy.

Table of healthy foods

Even if the calorie content of some of these foods is the same as the more fatty, unhealthy foods that you may eat, the effect of these on your body is not the same. These foods have high levels of complex carbohydrates which give them their calorific value whereas with other foods this value may come from the high amount of fat that they contain.
Basically, these foods are not only good for you in a health sense but also in the weight loss sense, if you eat well sized portions of these rather than skimping down portions of unhealthy food then you will definitely start to see the difference.
These foods are also very good for you and will enable you to eat more than just vegetables, you can also eat generous portions of these but the amount you can eat of these is not unlimited and should be twinned with the above foods.

Corn
Rice
Potatoes
Any kind of beans (even baked beans but try to buy healthier brands)
Tomatoes
Oranges
Apples
Grapefruit
Bananas
Apricots
Strawberries
Raspberries
Many more types of fruit

These fruits are great for a healthy snack or dessert after your main meal (Especially in a fruit salad)

Important factors for healthy weight loss

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  Don't snack on unhealthy foods


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  Don't forbid yourself anything (even chocolate) just be careful about when and how much you eat


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  Have regular meals at regular times


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  Don't eat too much but equally don't eat too little


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  Drink lots of water (8-10 glasses a day), this helps chemical processes in the body as well as your digestive system.


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  Make your own recipes and dieting plan from the information found here, if you restrict yourself to using other peoples dieting recipes you may find that you don't like it which increases your chances of eating more unhealthy tastier recipes. Experiment with the different foods to find something that suits.


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  As always, just eating better food won't help you lose weight as effectively as when you have an exercise regime alongside.

Weight loss

Weight loss

Introduction
In this section I will provide the information that helped me lose my excess weight which works for people with not much weight to lose as well as those who have a longer way to go in the weight loss struggle. I am one person who has found that many other dieting plans do not work for me even when followed to the letter, this plan works because it focuses on more than just one area of weight loss. So if you are like me in this respect, I urge you to give it a go.
When undertaking on a weight loss diet, many people find that the rate of weight loss slows down or even stops after a while. This is because, with many diets, the amount of food that you eat is greatly reduced so your metabolic rate slows down a great deal because your body thinks that it is starving. This is a natural bodily reaction, however, my weight loss dieting plan focuses not on eating a severely reduced amount but on eating healthy portions of the right kinds of food.

Fasting
On the same note, fasting will have a worse effect on your weight gain after you resume your normal diet.
Fasting may appear to help you lose weight as your body starts to use up its fat stores but the reality of this is that it again greatly reduces your metabolic rate so that when you do start eating even a very healthy diet, your body weight will shoot up again, this is called 'yoyo dieting'. This effect occurs during and after low calorific diets but the effects are much more drastic when fasting because when you fast, much of what your body feeds on is lean weight and muscle so you may find that an overweight problem will be worse after a fast.
You may think that exercising whilst fasting will help to speed up your metabolic rate but the effect of this is that, since your body is feeding off itself, the greater amount of exercise performed during this period, the higher the levels of acetate which in itself is toxic to brain fuction. Worse than this, if you have high acetate levels in your blood you have a greater likelihood of metabolic acidoses developing; these can lead to coma and ultimately death. Basically, fasting is not a good idea no matter how you try to control your body's reactions.

Bingeing
Another problem with reducing the amount of food you eat, bingeing. When the body is starved of the correct calorific intake, it gets ready to take maximal advantage of any food that becomes available. So while you think that you will lose weight by not eating two of your daily meals i.e. just eating in the evening, you will be very likely to eat as much at this time as you would do from eating three meals a day. Also it is not good for weight loss for you to have one large intake of food per day as most of this energy will not be used straight away and will therefore be stored. As fat. Even if you do not stuff yourself when eating this one meal, you are probably consuming more than you realise as your body takes advantage of this source of energy.
People who are dieting also forbid themselves from snacking in between meals which can, occasionally, cause the same effect. For instance, if there is an unusually long period between two of your meals for a certain reason (i.e. you had to lunch early or you are going out for a meal in the evening) and you forbid yourself from topping up your energy levels then by the time you come to your evening meal, you will most likely be very hungry and therefore liable to overeat or binge. So if you find that this is the case, have a healthy snack like a piece of fruit, just something small to keep you going. But if you have something larger for a snack, don't try to compensate by eating less in the evening; eat as much as you would have done because this prevents you from snacking late at night.

Losing weight healthily and permanently
The best way to lose weight is to eat a regular healthy amount; by healthy I mean a reasonably sized portion, not necessarily small, of good foods.
The good foods that I speak of are those which allow you to burn up more calories than they contain. These foods will help you to lose weight and also achieve a lower cholesterol level.
I myself achieved my ideal weight after developing a diet that consists of these foods. I was not grossly overweight, I had to lose 1 stone to be my perfect weight but could not understand why i was not losing it as the amount that Iate was less than most of the people I knew who looked fantastic. But then I realised that it was not how much I was eating but the types of food I was eating. These were not high calorie fatty foods and my diet could not be called an unhealthy one but then I realised that to get my weight down I had to change the food and not how much I was eating.

Inner Health

Inner health
Your inner health is just as important as the way you look on the outside. So many people look great but have high cholesterol levels and a low immune system and these things are just as important as losing weight.

Cholesterol levels

What makes your cholesterol high or low?
Your blood cholesterol level is affected not only by what you eat but also by how quickly your body makes LDL cholesterol and disposes of it. In fact, your body makes all the cholesterol it needs, and it is not necessary to take in any additional cholesterol from the foods you eat.
Many factors help determine whether your LDL-cholesterol level is high or low. The following factors are the most important:
What you eat
Weight
Physical activity/exercise
Age and sex
Alcohol
Stress

What you eat
Two main nutrients in the foods you eat make your LDL (bad) cholesterol level go up: saturated fat, a type of fat found mostly in foods that come from animals; and cholesterol, which comes only from animal products. Saturated fat raises your LDL-cholesterol level more than anything else in the diet. Eating too much saturated fat and cholesterol is the main reason for high levels of cholesterol and a high rate of heart attacks in the United States. Reducing the amount of saturated fat and cholesterol you eat is a very important step in reducing your blood cholesterol levels.

Weight
Excess weight tends to increase your LDL (bad) cholesterol level. If you are overweight and have a high LDL-cholesterol level, losing weight may help you lower it. Weight loss also helps to lower triglycerides and raise HDL (good) cholesterol levels.
Physical activity/exercise
Regular physical activity may lower LDL (bad) cholesterol and raise HDL (good) cholesterol levels.
Age and gender
Before the age of menopause, women usually have total cholesterol levels that are lower than those of men the same age. As women and men get older, their blood cholesterol levels rise until about 60-65 years of age. After the age of about 50, women often have higher total cholesterol levels than men of the same age.
Alcohol
Alcohol intake increases HDL (good) cholesterol but does not lower LDL (bad) cholesterol. But drinking too much alcohol can damage the liver and heart muscle, lead to high blood pressure, and raise triglycerides. Because of the risks, alcoholic beverages should not be used as a way to increase good cholesterol levels.
Stress
Stress over the long term has been shown in several studies to raise blood cholesterol levels. One way that stress may do this is by affecting your habits. For example, when some people are under stress, they console themselves by eating fatty foods. The saturated fat and cholesterol in these foods contribute to higher levels of blood cholesterol.

Information provided by National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

Martial arts

Martial arts
For several years I studied the martial art of Karate but found this discipline only to be advantageous in the area of physical fitness. I therefore decided to look into other disciplines and found that the most helpful for the health and development of both mind and body are Kung Fu and T'ai Chi.
T'ai Chi is a gentle art which, whilst toning your muscles, puts your mind in a state akin to that of meditation.
However, if you wish to learn a more vigorous martial art then i suggest Kung Fu. I myself studied this art without a master but if you have not previously studied a martial art you should attend classes. Kung Fu is, like Karate, a more physical discipline which will teach you a great deal about self-defence whilst improving your physical fitness and balance. However, there is more to this art than defence.
Kung Fu also encompasses the mental thought processes that go on before, during and after practice.


Basic Kung Fu exercises
You can benefit from Kung Fu without having to take it on as an obligation or as a sport. In this section I will give you short exercises that will help to tone your muscles and improve your strength and balance:
Always start your work-out with a warm up; here are some stretches that will ready your muscles:
1. Stand with your feet hip width apart. Stretch both hands upwards and bring them down to touch the floor. Don't bend your knees. Do this for 10 seconds and then stretch your arms upwards again. Repeat this 10 times.
2. Stand with your feet about two shoulder widths apart (or as wide as is comfortable), stretch your arms out sideways and bend one leg at the knee to a 90degree angle. Your other leg is straight and stretched out sideways. Put most of your weight on your bent knee. Hold this position for 10 second and repeat 10 times. Then do the same with the other leg.
3. Stand up straight with your feet shoulder length apart and stretch your arms out sideways. Bend your knees and lower yourself to the floor. Your upper body remains upright. Go as low as you can without raising your heels. Repeat this 20 times.
4. Sit on the floor with your legs apart, stretched as far as they will go. Hold your legs below the knee and make sure they do not move as you lower your body, face downwards, to the floor. Hold this position for as long as you can and then bring your body to an upright position again. Do not move your legs. Repeat this 10 times. After you have completed this exercise, jog on the spot for a couple of seconds to get the blood flowing round your legs.
5. Find a table of hip height. Put one leg on the table with toes pointing upwards (make sure both legs are straight). Bend to touch your toes with your left hand if you are stretching your left leg and vice-versa. Hold this position for as long as you can and then bring your body to an upright position again. Do not move your leg. Repeat this 10 times. Then complete the exercise with the other leg.
6. Sit on the floor with both legs out in front of you together. Stretch your arms upwards and forwards to touch your toes. Hold this position for as long as you can and then bring your body to an upright position again. Do not move your legs. Repeat this 10 times. After you have completed this exercise, jog on the spot for a couple of seconds to get the blood flowing round your legs.
If you know of any other exercises that would be appropriate, use a combination of these and the ones you know. You can never warm-up too much.

Improving your stamina
1. Stand with your feet two shoulder widths apart. Bend your knees and 'sit' into the stance. Your knees should be pointing outwards and your knees at a 90degrees angle. This is horse riding stance, the way that you will know you are doing this stance properly is that it will hurt. You will feel the burn in your thighs and calf muscles.
Stand in this stance every day for as long as you physically can, afterwards your legs will feel weak but if you keep repeating this exercise this feeling will subside. Time yourself and have the aim of standing in this stance for 5 full minutes at the end of the regime. Set yourself a reasonable time period to complete this aim.
This exercise will improve your stamina, the strength in your legs and also greatly improve your will power.
2. When you have completed aim one, stand in horse riding stance, hold your fists palm upwards at your hips. 'Punch' your arm out forwards, turning your fist over and finishing with your arm outstretched and your the palm of your fist facing downwards. Do this slowly working your bicep and tricep muscles against each other. This is much more effective than lifting weights as you are working against your own strength and also developing both your tricep and bicep muscles.
You can do this standing with your feet at shoulder width apart if you find standing in horse riding stance too uncomfortable.
3. Your third aim is to complete the above exercise whilst holding dumbells when you 'punch' outwards. If you don't own dumbells then simply attach something of a similar weight to your wrists.
4. This is a similar exercise to number 2 using your legs instead. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. Shift all of your weight onto one leg and steady yourself in this position. When you are steady, bend your other leg at the knee and lift your leg so that your knee is pointing out sideways and the lower half of your leg is behind you. You may find that your upper body needs to counterbalance this movement by leaning in the opposite direction. 'Kick' your leg outwards moving only your lower leg until your leg points straight out sideways at hip height. Hold this position for a few seconds. Bring your lower leg back to its original position and return to your standing position. As with exercise 2, do this exercise slowly whilst working your leg muscles against each other. This will improve your leg strength and balance.