Clarity Wellness

A good night’s sleep is important for so many reasons, and one of them is your body’s ability to lose or maintain weight. Have you ever noticed that your cravings for sweets and other carbs increase when you’re tired? Your body is looking for the quick energy they provide. When a person is sleep deprived, their insulin response to blood sugar decreases. This means that the sugar isn't cleared from your bloodstream as efficiently and your levels will be higher, which increases your ghrelin levels (the hunger hormone), which increases your appetite. Here are some proven strategies for getting more zzz’s. 1. Get more sunlight during the day.   Try to get out and get some sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning to reset your circadian clock. Most of us could use more vitamin D, which is created by your own body when your skin is exposed to the midday sun (or through a quality supplement. My favorite is from PureVitaminClub.com ). 20-30 minutes is all it takes, but ...

I've been digging deep into the topic of emotional eating lately.  The pandemic hit a lot of us hard and we often ate to soothe our feelings while we were stuck at home.  Food was readily available and we weren't able to go out and do the things that might normally distract us from grazing all day.  We might have felt a lot of fear and anxiety that was easily comforted by eating our favorite foods.  I know at my house there were a lot of movie nights where popcorn, ice cream, and an alcoholic beverage or two made a frequent appearance. Now that we are able to roam a little more freely, and many of our fears have dissipated, we are still stuck with some extra pounds and eating habits that aren't serving us very well. One of the common themes that I have found in reading and talking to people is the feeling that we don't have control over our own lives anymore.  We don't have control over the virus, school, work, politics, other people and their behavior...and the...

If we want to build new habits around our health, it is often helpful to figure out what our anchor habits are first, and build from there.  B.J. Fogg likes to refer to anchor habits as those things that we already do every day without thinking about them--brushing our teeth, making our coffee, eating our breakfast.  If you want to build a new habit, tie it around one of those things.  For example, "While I brush my teeth I will do 20 squats," or "While my coffee is brewing I will do  some stretches in the kitchen."  That's a great ways to implement something new, but I look at anchor habits in a way that's a little closer to The One Thing philosophy touted by Gary Keller. He asks the question, "What's the One Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"  I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around this concept and narrowing it down to just one thing. I tend to have "One Things"...