HealthiaCynthia

Never too Late to Start those New Year’s Resolutions!

Filed under: Health & Wellness, Rebounder Health, Bouncing, Detox Programs by healthiacynthia on January 10, 2008 5:43 pm

snowy treeWell, here we are at the beginning of another year.  I must apologize for not being very prolific with my blogs… well, obviously, if you are reading this at all, you are reading it for the first time, since no one waits around with baited breath for me to do my daily entries.

Anyhow, this is more or less the beginning of another year.  A Leap Year, as it happens.  Remember that way we had of determining how many days in a particular month when we were children (all you children of the 50s and 60s I mean):

Thirty days hath September, April, June and November,

 All the rest have thirty-one,

Saving February alone,

Which hath 28, and 29 each Leap Year

Or something like that.  Close enough.

Last night we debated the effectiveness of New Year's Resolutions in my Toastmasters' Club.  It was a lot of fun and got me thinking about those commendable commitments earnestly again.  Why didn't I make any earlier this year, I wondered to myself?

So, today I decided I would pick a few and go with them.  I'll blog about them here so you can hold me accountable as well.

HEALTH AND NUTRITION:

Because of the nature of this particular blog, it is important for me to focus on my health. hahaha.  I am entering a 21-Day Challenge on-line starting on the 14th (Monday) to see if I can turn some of my more odious habits around.  Here is my positive reframe of those three habits:

  1. I will go to bed before 11 p.m. at night.  (This will be tough since I lose track of time when I am on the Internet and it seems like I do my best thinking at night– yeah, right!)
  2. I will rebound for 20 minutes daily (I was doing this until quite recently and am now lucky if I rebound for 2 minutes daily)
  3. I will stop eating after 8 p.m. at night.  (This particularly pernicious habit of evening grazing has just creeped in– or more recently, slouched in– to my life)

Those are the three areas that I will be focusing on changing to over the next 21 days (well, starting Monday).  I also have longer range goals and ambitions for the year, but I think I'll just stop here for today.

If you are interested in finding a cleanse that is right for your constitution, health needs, and personal belief system, you might want to download this handy-dandy course on the 21 Best Detox Diets . 


Big Girls Do Bounce

Filed under: Health & Wellness, Good Sleep, Blog Catalog, Rebounder Health, Bouncing by healthiacynthia on July 4, 2007 1:54 pm

A number of years ago in Saskatoon I attended a demonstration of "reboundology" with a woman named Linda Brooks.  I was impressed that this older woman (I believe she was around 70 at the time) looked about my age and had such flexibility and well…just jumpability….on the small rebounder that she was demonstrating on.  She talked about how rebounding is one of the best possible all-round exercises– that every cell in the body is bathed and strengthened with bouncing on a small trampoline.

I'm always looking for ways to get fit with a minimum of actual exercise.  It sounded good to me.  In fact, it looked like fun!  I remembered that as a child we had gone to a lake in the summers where there were pay-to-bounce trampolines and we kids had had a fantastic time on them.  

Linda had talked about how important it was to have a proper small trampoline to jump on.  The cheap units that you can usually pick up at a garage sale for a song are generally too firm and give a jarring effect like you would experience jogging along a paved road.  Jogging on "the best" rebounders will provide as much as 85 per cent less trauma to weight-bearing joints (like hips, ankles and knees).  

I quickly did some research on line and sent away for a pretty deluxe rebounder with "all the bells and whistles": a solid frame made of tubular steel, six legs that sat firmly on the floor, polypropylene covering with polyester reinforcement threads, nickel-plated grommets, good quality springs, a warranty and even a bar I could hold on to when I was 'learning' to rebound (for balance).  

My new rebounder even folded up for portability and went into a neat over-the-shoulder sports bag.

Because I was enthused, and because the thing cost so much, I happily conformed to a "suggested" progressive routine.  I began with the "health bounce" (where the feet don't leave the mat)for a minute, and worked up to a place where I was doing a variety of jumps and jogging routines anywhere from 20 minutes to a half-hour, sometimes three times a day.

I felt swell.  I slept well.  I had lots of energy and went for a couple of walks before/after work each day as well as rebounding.

Then, as sometimes happens, I stopped rebounding.  Maybe we went on a long trip and I just never got back at it?  I can't recall.

A couple of months ago I did a 16-day fast.  At the completion of the fast I was very weak and lacking in energy.  I had not expected this since in the past I 'bounced back' from other fasts with increased vim.  I found that walking upstairs to the bedroom almost drained me of any reserves.  Then I remembered the rebounder and some of the benefits I had read about using it…

I did a quick read of the slim book on rebounding by Karol Kuhn Truman called Looking Good Feeling Great (she also wrote Feelings Buried Alive Never Die ). 

I got inspired!  

Truman covers every possible question around rebounding from "How Does Rebound Exercise Work– and Why?" to examples and testimonials of how rebounding has made a difference for everything from weight loss to sports conditioning to calming a crying baby.  

So, how does it work?  In a nutshell, when we rebound we increase the pull of gravity on our bodies– these gravitational forces "condition, tone, and strengthen each body cell." 

I began with the Health Bounce, feeling a little like I was "slacking off".  Truman clearly states that it is important not to do too much at once… to build up to about fifteen to twenty minutes of rebounding each day.  

I bounce first thing in the morning.  Bouncing wakes ALL my cells up.  Then I go for a walk with my husband and our dog.  Then I have a Red Green Smoothie.  Life is great!  I actually feel much better, and I sleep well.  My husband also is back to bouncing.  We have the rebounder right across the room from our bed.

This past weekend I went on a four-hour hike in a rather remote area near the beautiful Sproat Lake on Vancouver Island.  I was thrilled to walk through the rain forest and invigorated by the activity.  I crossed a bridge of logs over a gorge, and a little later on, a board-covered suspension bridge.  After about three hours on the hiking trail, we forded a small rushing stream.  I peeled off my shoes and socks and savoured the ice cold water on my hot feet.

I am not a regular mountain hiker, so three hours of this activity was beginning to tell on my lack of experience.  I started to feel quite tired and was more than a little alarmed by the prospects of climbing up a rock-laden incline that had been ravaged during the storms of this past winter.  But there was no way around it… I wanted to get home before dark, as I know my fitter, younger, more fleet-of-foot companions did.

Partway up the hill I had to step up on a ledge a little higher than was comfortable and secure-feeling.  In that peculiar slow-motion awareness of a fast-occuring event, I was aware that I had crumpled and was falling hard, onto large, sharp rocks, downhill.  I said a prayer asking that I wouldn't be incapacitated, that I wouldn't need my comrades to carry me out.  God answered.  I was tenderly ministered to by my climbing partner and a couple of young adults who were just happening by at the time of my fall (interesting really, because they were the only other people we came across during the hike).  I was able to gingerly 'walk' by myself, with more than one good hand to hold on to at points on the upward trail.  I have a bruise on my left flank the size of a baseball, and a bigger one on my lower back, but thank God, not on my spine!  

Going back to my former vigorous bouncing right away is out of the question, but I have been doing the "health bounce" for fifteen minutes this week.  I notice that I have much less pain, and we figure that the bruises and pain will be gone by the end of this coming week.  I have used a combination of essential oils (Panaway and Relieve It ) in rotation with Arnica Montana homeopathic drops.  I sleep well and am now able to get out of bed with no excruciating sharp and searing pain.  Ed thinks that this is a great testimony to the combination of 'complementary' treatments, particularly the Rebounding.

In case anyone is interested in seeing what the Health Bounce looks like, I have made a short (and very dorky– sorry) video that you might want to watch.  Just click here to go to it.  I am attempting to put it on youtube and will change the link when I have done that.

 To learn more about the Cellerciser that I bounce on, click above.

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"The Perfect Health Program covered all the questions I had about eating a raw vegan diet."