10/24 Whole Life Wednesday

10/23/2018

Trevor, Kerri and Amanda all practice breath control to keep them focused during a dumbbell workout.
We are more than halfway through our Fall Nutrition Challenges! Who do you think is going to win? So far Meg, Duane and Kerri are the top three gym Whole Life Challenge players, and we don't know yet who is in the lead in the Macrostax Challenge.
This week's Macrostax Challenge is to consider the role of alcohol in your nutrition program. For many of us its role is in a glass with dinner. However, alcohol has deleterious affects on our physical health and can quickly derail even the most determined among us. Check out the information Macrostax provided our challengers this week.

Our Whole Life Challenge weekly lifestyle challenge is to practice breathing. Yep, really it is. Here are the simple instructions:

Each day, sit, close your eyes, and spend 10 minutes with one of the following breathing practices:

Counting your breaths up to 10 and starting over again.
As calmly as you can, breathe fully in, fully out, and pause briefly before the next breath.
Box breathing: breathe in for a count of 3, hold for 3, breathe out for 3, and pause for 3 before beginning again.

The WLC folks think this is an important lifestyle practice because:

"Can you recall a time when something got you really scared or upset? One of the things you may recall from that moment is that the quality of your breath changed. To recover your calm, you may have told yourself (or had someone tell you), “Just breathe.” Simply taking control of your breathing may have restored both your physical and your mental state.

Your breathing can have both positive and negative impacts on our life in powerful ways.As a result of the stresses in our modern world, many of us tend to have shallow, chest-centered breaths, a pattern typically associated in research and in our own personal experience with fear, anger, and other negative emotions.

Believe it or not, that current runs both ways — emotions can cause breathing patterns and particular breathing patterns can cause particular emotions to manifest. Focusing your attention on establishing calm, belly-centered breathing gives you the ability to instill a pattern that can literally move fear and sadness out, as well as elicit joy.

But you don’t have to wait until you’re upset to practice breathing. Spending a few minutes with your breath can increase your normal level of calm and awareness any time you like. And, yes, it can also do wonders when you are upset to change your breathing before you speak or respond to the others involved.

Taking a greater degree of control and establishing awareness in how you breathe is a practical, potent tool in creating deep physical and emotional well-being."