Blog #4: Mental Wellness

Today I want to talk about mental health and the importance of emotional wellness. Last week, Quinnipiac hosted a mental health day with fun and relaxing activities for students to take part in. These activities ranged from making snow cones to writing down on a white board what you are thankful for in life, I found the topic relevant and informative to readers!

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel and act as we cope with life. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood,”. Therefore, mental health serves as a sort of baseline for overall wellness and extends much farther beyond the mental aspect of a person’s life. Mental heath includes emotional, psychological and social well being, that is how well someone is interacting within his or her environment. If just one of these aspects is thrown off, this can negatively impact the way a person interacts with others, interacts with him or herself and cognitively makes decisions. 

Ultimately, mental health is an ever evolving concept that never stops developing or transforming. Here are some tips to better your mental health and cope with daily stressors that can off balance your overall happiness:

1.)  Make time for things you enjoy

• According to FamilyDoctor, “People who are emotionally healthy are in control of their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. They feel good about themselves and have good relationships. They can keep problems in perspective,”. These people also MAKE time for the things they like to do, whether its running, yoga, meditating, drinking coffee or going for a long car ride. Your brain needs to decompress just like your muscles do after a long work out, give it the rest it needs!

2.) It’s OK to have an off day

• Sometimes, days just do not go as planned and leave you feeling down in the dumps. It’s a terrible coach, a boss or co-worker, friend, partner and even teachers. It’s all it takes for one of these stressors to overload your brain and suddenly you are wishing you are anywhere but the place you’re in. That is OK. However, it is not OK to let these stressors take influence over your life. Take the time to be mad or upset over something that happened, then move on. Let it go. Life is never perfect and in order to preserve mental health, you must keep evolving alongside with it. Do something to make your day better like the coffee you always wanted to try or the pair of shoes you never bought yourself. Even the worst day have 24 hours, never start with the broken pieces of yesterday. 

3.)  Aromatherapy

• Aromatherapy is the practice of using the natural oils extracted from flowers, bark, stems, leaves, roots or other parts of a plant to enhance psychological and physical well-being. The inhaled aroma from these "essential" oils is widely believed to stimulate brain function and overall feelings of happiness. I can personally atest that taking a bit of aromatherapy oils and rubbing the tiniest bit over my temples relieves my stress and calms me down after a long, hard day. 

4.) Meditation

• Many people are picturing bald men in robes saying “Mmmmmmm,” really loud right now. Meditation is not contorting your body and seeing how long you can hum a word for. Actually, meditation can be simply controlled breathing for 10 to 15 minutes! I have included a breathing exercise for you to try at home to quiet the mind and get in touch with your mental wellness below from How to Mediate:
• “The first stage of meditation is to stop distractions and make our mind clearer and more lucid. This can be accomplished by practicing a simple breathing meditation. We choose a quiet place to meditate and sit in a comfortable position. We can sit in the traditional cross-legged posture or in any other position that is comfortable. If we wish, we can sit in a chair. The most important thing is to keep our back straight to prevent our mind from becoming sluggish or sleepy.
• We sit with our eyes partially closed and turn our attention to our breathing. We breathe naturally, preferably through the nostrils, without attempting to control our breath, and we try to become aware of the sensation of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils. This sensation is our object of meditation. “

5.) Yoga

• Yoga is a discipline that uses breath control, simple meditation and specific bodily postures to better physical and emotional health and relaxation. Yoga is a great way to clear your mind and get your body long and lean. 
• I have included the link to some helpful morning yoga exercises that will get your day off to an amazing and well balanced start!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8tMCpv4F8

http://www.how-to-meditate.org/breathing-meditations.htm/

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/mentalhealth.html

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/prevention-wellness/emotional-wellbeing/mental-health/nutrition-and-mental-health.html

Blog #3: GM Cleanse Experience

The last blog focused on what the GM Cleanse was. Now, I want to share the experience with followers of how it felt to go through this diet. Being a student athlete, I found the daily calorie intake was no where near what I needed to get through a practice, so I made adjustments by adding more lean protein and good fats such as hummus or olive oil. I understand this diet was made for an older generation looking to stay fit while having a desk job so the modifications I made were more suitable for a college aged audience. 

Day 1: Only fruits

• I started the morning hungry. I ate a grapefruit and some pineapple for breakfast at 9:00 AM. I went to my first class feeling fine, around the end of the second class I was hungry again. This was about noon, I had an apple, a banana and some almonds at noon for energy. By my third class of the day I had trouble remembering my homework, where I parked my car and I kept dropping things in my hand. My motor skills were delayed due to how hungry I was. I went home and made a turkey sandwich on wheat bread with grilled vegetables and felt much better. I ended up still losing three pounds this day. 

There aren't any more days to report because I stopped following the GM diet immediately after I had trouble with holding a clear thought and motor skills. I knew this diet was not for me, and that is okay when it comes to eating clean!! Every body reacts differently and needs different levels of fuel. 

However, just because I stopped following the cleanse down to the last detail does not mean it didn’t have key take away points. I continued to eat healthy for the next seven days following these rules. If you are looking to cleanse your body of toxins from food and drink, get in better shape and feel overall better about your day follow these simple guidelines:

• Stay away from anything in a box or bag
• Stop snacking, have meals only
• Eat lots of lean protein and veggies (veggies such as zucchini and squash are almost calorie free, I like to steam them with a bit of olive oil and pepper)
• EXERCISE! If you are able bodied, get up and get active! Whether it’s a nice, long walk on a trail or running stadiums, get that heart pumping almost every day
• Get plenty of sleep... "There is no doubt that insufficient sleep promotes hunger and appetite, which can cause excessive food intake resulting in weight gain," says Eve Van Cauter, director of the Sleep, Metabolism and Health Center at the University of Chicago who has spent 15 years studying the topic.
• Allow yourself a cheat meal or dessert, without balance you might go crazy with trying to consume the froyo you so desperately managed to avoid for weeks
• If a diet isn’t working for you, SWITCH IT UP! Mix in a variety of fruits and veggies or meats you can throw on the grill

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/20/sleep-loss-weight-gain/7507503/

Blog #2: GM Cleanse

Today’s blog will feature the GM Diet, or seven day guide to rapid weight loss. I will explain what the cleanse consists of and in my next blog examine closer the effects it has on the human body.

The company General Motors, “...reportedly developed the GM Diet to help its employees lose weight and feel healthier. GM is said to have collaborated on the diet with both the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture and that it was first used in field tests at Johns Hopkins Research Center in 1985,”. Therefore, GM invented a means for its employees to lose weight and maintain health together in a communal setting. The whole concept behind the diet is that people expend more calories than they consume. Participants claim to lose up to 10 to 17 pounds in a week and have to drink six to eight glasses of water a day, now a trend that people across the nation have adopted. 

DAY 1

• You can eat any fruit but bananas. There is no limit on quantity; eat as much fruit as you want. It is recommended that you eat a lot of melons on the first day, it will boost weight loss. 

DAY 2

• All veggies today. You can eat them either cooked or raw and there is restriction on the types or amount you can eat. You can even have a baked potato for breakfast on this day, with a pat of butter if you like. This will provide the body with the complex carbohydrates that will provide energy for the rest of the day. 

DAY 3

• Except for bananas and potatoes, you can eat a mixture of fruit and vegetables on this day—as much variety as you like, in whatever quantities. Potatoes are no longer needed because carbohydrates will come from the fruit. By this stage the body is prepared to start burning excess pounds.

DAY 4

• Bananas, milk and soup make up the menu. You can eat up to eight bananas and three glasses of milk on this day (although you may find that you don’t eat all the bananas). You may consume as much of the soup as you like. (There is a recipe listed for this soup!) The bananas are important because they will help to replace the potassium and sodium that the body would have lost in the previous three days. There should be fewer cravings for sweets by this point.

DAY 5

• Today, you will eat beef and tomatoes: six whole tomatoes and two 10 oz. portions of beef. The beef can be eaten in the form of hamburger patties. All of the tomatoes should be eaten but not all the beef needs to be consumed. Increase your water intake by one quart today to help the body cleanse itself of the uric acid that will be produced by digesting the beef. The meat will provide your body with iron and protein and tomatoes provide fiber, which aids digestion.

DAY 6

• You will eat beef again today but will replace the tomatoes with a variety of vegetables of your own choosing. You may eat as much of each as you like. Note that by this day, the body is completely inclined towards weight loss and you should see a noticeable difference.

DAY 7

• On the last day of the plan, you eat brown rice, fruit juice and unlimited vegetables. After following the meal plan for the last seven days, you should have completely cleansed and flushed out your system and should also find that you are 10 to 17 lbs. lighter than you were a week ago.

http://gmdietnow.com

Blog #1: Informative

This blog series bases its entirety off the sole purpose to inform college athletes, students, or any person seeking to get in shape on how to create a better quality of life through nutrition! The blog will concern not only nutrition, but overall health and physical wellness. It also aims to validate the normality of struggling to consistently care for one’s body and will provide tips on how to treat your body right! Whether its staying fit, maintaing physical and emotional wellness or simply how to de-stress. 

For this first blog, I want to draw on my experience with nutrition and physical wellness and shed light on a rising injury in the world of sports. This past year playing Division 1 college volleyball I tore my rectus abdominal muscle off the pubic bone (better known as a “sports hernia”) & also had a traditional hernia alongside it near my belly button, the muscle was so shredded and torn that my intestines began to push through the muscle wall. This also caused me to have internal bleeding at the sight of the tear along with smaller tears in my left adductor and right hip flexor. The American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons define a sports hernia as, “... a painful, soft tissue injury that occurs in the groin area. It most often occurs during sports that require sudden changes of direction or intense twisting movements. Although a sports hernia may lead to a traditional, abdominal hernia, it is a different injury.”

I want to share my return from this injury to explain how quality food, rest and rehabilitation can heal the body and rid it of harm or weaknesses.

It took almost a year for anyone to detect the seriousness of these injuries. Muscles are regenerative, therefore they grow back. They can heal themselves in a stunningly small amount of time with proper rest and care.  My team doctors and trainers instructed to shut me down completely. I wasn’t allowed to do anything that would stress or engage my core for three months.  

During this time, my first thought was that I needed to eat extremely less calories than I did when I was playing. However, after meeting with QU’s sports nutritionist, Dana White, she informed me that was in fact not the truth. An injured athlete must consume MORE calories with the right foods to properly heal the body. The human body expends extra calories (energy) simply trying to heal and repair itself. Eating clean is something I find joy in, so I found relief when I didn’t have to restrict even more than I already had. List of foods that I ate to help muscle growth and strength include protein, amino acid, vitamin A and C rich foods:

• Fish
• Chicken
• Dark leafy green vegetables
• Turkey
• Eggs
• Milk
• Yogurt
• Cheese 
• Orange fruits
• Sweet potatoes

Ultimately, my body had fixed all it could over the course of a year. I went home to Orlando for the summer and saw an orthopedic surgeon who specialized in sports hernias.  With these host of injuries I underwent surgery this past summer in 2015 to place mesh as a structured platform for my abdominal muscles. 

Furthermore, receiving a full nights rest not only helped with the physical aspect of things, but also the mental. Dr. Frank Lipman states, “...during sleep your muscles and soft tissues heal and scar tissue develops. Scar tissue is the dense fiber that the body creates to repair injuries, whether it’s a sudden injury or a chronic injury that develops over time,”. Waking up fully rested left me ready and willing to take on the mental and physical challenges of the day. 

The rehabilitation element of coming back from an injury takes patience. Physical well being straddles the line of give and take. In order to improve, you must push your body out of its comfort zone and test its limits without going over. You must also listen to your body’s demands such as rest, ice, or treatment. Fuel and treat the body right and it will thank you in ways you can never imagine. 

http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00573

http://www.drfranklipman.com/making-the-connection-sleep-and-injuries/