You can diet. You can work out at the gym. You can take up martial arts. But why bother, when laughing is such a fun way to shed those pounds?
A burst of hearty laughter can give your body what neuroscientist Dr Helen Pilcher calls a “mini-aerobic workout”. It makes your heart beat faster. It makes your chest heave. It makes your belly muscles tighten. Facial muscles tighten (good for keeping the skin looking young). It’s a good all-round workout - a belly laugh can help shrink the belly.
There is some bad news and some good news in this. The bad news is that you have to laugh heartily for an hour to burn off 100 calories. The good news, is that an hour of extra laughing each day would be good for us party-pooper adults who forget to laugh throughout our day. How can we add more laughter?
Sign up for some humorous email broadcasts.
Follow some funny people on Twitter and befriend some funny people on FaceBook.
Get up from your desk every now and then and drop in on the office clown, or anyone with whom you have found you can share a laugh.
Tickle somebody (probably best to do this one at home); it often can end in getting very playful.
Have kids. Yes, they also can cause a lot of stress, but they give you someone you can repeatedly tickle.
How would you increase the laughter in your day? Please let us know in the comments below.
By the way, you can tweet this post by clicking here: ReTweet this
If happiness rests on health, health rests on…four pillars.
1. Nutrition. How we choose to fuel our bodies very much effects our health, and certainly as we grow older it makes a difference how mobile and disease-free we feel. If we fill our bodies with sugar and artificial coloring, will that really make us healthy?
2. Fitness. As I watch family and others age, it is clear that nothing affects their mobility more than their level of fitness throughout their lives. It’s never too late to start, and it’s always too early to stop.
3. Stress. If we feel stressed all the time, it takes a toll on our bodies. We can’t always feel relaxed, but we can take control of our stress and just say “no”. Not always easily, but we can do it.
4. Sleep. Boy, am I in trouble. Sleep affects everything else, and I never get enough of it. When we feel fatigued, we tend to eat all the wrong things, skip the workout and create stress with people around us.
How are you doing with your four pillars of health and happiness?
Imagine you were stranded on a desert island and had only 10 foods at your disposal. For your health you had better hope there was more than cheesecake, chocolate truffles and jelly beans. In fact, it is incredibly hard to choose just ten foods, but here are my picks.
For the record, I am no dietician, but I believe these make a good combination of pretty much all the nutrients we need. I would love to hear some discussion of this, so please provide some feedback in the comment space below.
Broccoli
Eggs
Salmon
Almonds
Blueberries
Milk (1%)
Multigrain bread
Cantaloupes
Garlic
Beans (not sure which type)
Of course, the reality of being trapped on a desert island would be that you would have mostly fish and leaves to eat, but this is just for fun.
A couple weeks back, I wrote about aging gracefully. Today I was reading an interview with William Shatner, and some of what he says resonates, so I thought I would share these three Q&As from the interview.
Q: Do you ever see yourself retiring?
A: Yes, as I slowly draw my last breath–not the shallow ones, where you’re panting and unconscious, but the deep one, where you say, “My God, I’m dying”–I’ll retire.
Q:It was your 77th birthday a few weeks ago. How did you celebrate?
A: I took one jump in the air and realized I could still do it.
Q: What’s the best thing about getting older?
A: Marveling that the passion’s still there. And the worst is discovering that on occasion, it’s not.
So keep that passion burning, and you need never grow old…at least not until it’s time to retire.
Watching my parents age, especially my father, is very instructive. OK, that’s the mild term for it. Nobody can watch their parents age without undergoing a whirlwind of emotions.
Just as we see so much of ourselves in our children, even our own hope for the future and carrying on our own legacy, so, too, we see so much of ourselves in our parents and we see them paving a path that bears our name on it, as well.
What I am mostly seeing now is my father unable to climb stairs or lift his foot high enough to get into the bathtub. Yes, simple things. Everyday movements. Things we take for granted without even giving it a second thought.I have never been afraid of dying (although I find it pretty surrealistic trying to imagine a world without me - not being interpreted through my own perspective), but I confess to being afraid of going old. I have always said that I don’t want to slowly waste away - just drop a piano on my head. I don’t even want to see it coming.
Of course, watching my parents lose their mobility stirs certain emotions in me.
But one surprising emotion that has appeared is gratitude. Yes. My father is showing me how blessed I am (and hopefully will remain for another half a century) to be able to walk without even thinking about it. To run. To jump. To chase my kids through the forest. To dig in the garden. To do my morning push-ups. Yes! Whatever you take for granted - that’s what deserves appreciating and cheering for the most.
And he is motivating me like nothing ever has before to keep fit. To not let fatigue or overscheduling keep me from at least carrying on some strength and flexibility exercises. This, too, is a very good thing.
NOTE: A previous article on self-esteem and aging gracefully that I wrote…um…how long ago? Gee, I’m racing toward my aging years a lightening speed!
So Chloe Marshall, a plus-size model, has been named Miss England. And the debate rages on. Is she fat? Well, she has a little extra fat on her body and she could use to lose it. How much extra you need to be labeled fat, I don’t know, but would you write it out about somebody in big letters in the newspaper. Shame on the Daily Mail and on writer Monica Grenfell.
Is Chloe lazy? You can bet your bottom dollar she is not. Nobody gets to be Miss England without putting in a lot of effort…especially after failing the mandatory anorexia test!
Is she a poster girl for ill health? I’ll buy that one from a fitness/nutrition perspective, because she is overweight (with a BMI clearly exceeding healthy proportions), but only if her detractors concede that she is no more a poster girl for ill health than 99% of models who show young girls how glamorous it is to be anorexic. The fact is that both anorexia and obesity are dangers women face and both are worrisome. And the modeling industry vigorously promotes anorexia. So taken in isolation, Chloe might be a poster girl for ill health, but taken in the context of the modeling industry, she actually represents a faint glimmer of balance.
(post continues below photo)
What short-sited observers like Monica Grenfell fail to recognize is that nutrition is not everything - that self-esteem and a healthy body image are also important. I do not think Chloe sends a message to young girls (or old girls, for that matter) that they should eat too much. No risk of that.
But in a world whose subtext is be skinny to get ahead, Chloe is the poster girl for “even if you fail at what everyone else says you have to be, you can still go out and do what you want and even succeed!”
So whether you happen to be born too short or too tall, with wide bones or narrow. Whether you happen to have challenges keeping weight off or pimples off. Whatever physical traits you might have, beyond your control or simply challenging to control, do not let them stand in your way of pursuing your dreams and reaching your goals. You are more than your packaging.
If you look carefully, the categories are actually in order. For instance, vegetables is the first category, whereas natural sweeteners are at the bottom.
And if you click on any of the 129 healthy foods, you get a very detailed explanation of why and how it is healthy. I was surprised to see spices on the list, thinking they were just flavoring eaten in too small a quantity to really provide much health at all. But I learned better. I now know that I need just two teaspoons of cinnamon in my cake to get 10% of my daily intake of iron. Of course, I would have to eat the whole cake. But even a little cinnamon added to one’s diet helps with several minerals.
Of course, the healthier we eat, the happier we feel, so get cooking with fresh, natural, home-made ingredients.
THEHAPPYGUY.COM: ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR PERSONAL GROWTH WEBSITES ON THE INTERNET SELF-HELP HAPPINESS: ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR PERSONAL GROWTH BLOGS ON THE INTERNET
I ran across this