One of the topics that came up on the Livestream last night was stress. It's pretty crazy how much stress can negatively impact your health overall. And we often can't find real healing until we resolve chronic stress.
Physical Health Effects off stress!
- Cardiovascular Issues: Chronic stress can elevate blood pressure, increase heart rate, and contribute to heart disease or stroke risk due to prolonged release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
- Immune System Suppression: Stress weakens the immune system, making you more susceptible to infections, colds, or other illnesses and slowing recovery.
- Digestive Problems: Stress can cause or exacerbate issues like irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, nausea, or stomach pain due to altered gut function.
- Sleep Disturbances: Stress often leads to insomnia or poor sleep quality, which can further impact energy levels and overall health.
- Muscle Tension and Pain: Chronic stress can cause muscle tightness, leading to headaches, migraines, or back and neck pain.
- Weight Changes: Stress may lead to overeating or loss of appetite, contributing to weight gain or loss, often linked to emotional eating or hormonal changes.
Long-Term Risks:
Chronic, unmanaged stress can contribute to serious conditions like diabetes, obesity, or mental health disorders due to cumulative effects on the body’s systems.
There is so much about stress that is out of our control, but at least knowing how if affects you we can try and understand what to do to reduce those impacts. In addition when there is stress out of our control, the most important thing we can do is limit other controllable stressors, and fuel our body properly!!
On a scale of 1-10 what is your current stress level in life?
Cheese is good! I ate a block of chipotle oven baked cheese with lunch yesterday and it was divine. I love it, but know that it halts any progress I'm making, and will even trigger eating in excess to where I'll gain weight. It's sad but I have accepted it. If I eat it in small quantities with a meal, it's ok, but I really have to work to keep it in check.
What's your favorite cheese? How do you incorporate it? Do you see negative results when eating it?
Happy Sunday! Sharing a video today from our week, one of the highlights. This was Wednesday evening church, normally they have a more casual prayer meeting where someone plays the guitar, but they were doing some construction in the fellowship hall so they had their prayer meeting in the sanctuary. No one was there to play the piano so my my Grandma did it, she's been playing the piano in church for probably 80 years.
For context, she's 88, she had a really bad fall 5 years ago now and hit her head and ended up with a lot setbacks, similar to having a stroke. She has a lot of dementia like symptoms also (I am sure related to her Type 2 diabetes), she really can't read music anymore, and she has trouble seeing well, and she needs to wear hearing aids to hear but hates wearing them, so on this night she didn't want to wear them. My 93 (almost 94) year old grandpa takes care of both of them on their farm. Anyway, on this night she sat down on the piano and led worship as people called ...
Happy Saturday! I hope you are all doing well. I know some people in the group have had some recent tough news for themselves or family members. It really puts the day to day issues we face into perspective, and reminds me to just focus on doing the best I can to be as healthy as possible. To those who are having a hard time, we are all here for you and sending you some prayers and support. 🙏🏼🙏🏼 Just focus today on doing the best you can and remember that food isn't going to bring you the comfort you are looking for.
Here is a little video of Penelopes performance from her piano recital l last night, she's been taking lessons for about a year and a half. 🎹🤍🖤
*Livestream Monday night at 4pm pst/7pm est
November is here!! It doesn't matter how your October went, November is a perfect time to refocus and make sure we don't backslide all the way until January 1st.
My biggest piece of advice for this time of year is to keep your goals very simple. There will be a lot of temptations, so pick a non-negotiable goal that can help keep you on track and just focus on one day at a time. Don't try and do too much this month, we just want to focus on being healthy and making good choices. What is your non-negotiable goal for November?
Happy November 1st! October was pretty good for me, other then the right hamstring tear. It’s healing slowly and barely any pain anymore. I hope to add some walking back into my routine in November, especially with the cooler temps coming to Phoenix. Not sure about Turkey Day, my sister hosts and my mom drives three hours to join us, but now Mom isn’t coming because she’s getting cataract surgery the day before, so not sure if we are going to do anything. Got my bloodwork done this week and very excited to get results. I really wanna see what my A1C is. In April it was 5.9. Doc was very happy with weight loss but said please don’t count veggies as carbs and include them… umm no thanks haha Today I’m going to smoke a pork loin on my new grill and see how that goes!!
Happy Halloween! 🎃👻 My family didn't celebrate Halloween when I was growing up so I didn't have any childhood costumes, but it's been fun to plan costumes with my kids. Wearing Costumes at work for some meetings today too 😂 the first picture is my kids costumes for this year. Second picture is me in a cow costume cooking steaks for everyone a the office a few years ago. 😂 And the last picture is my favorite picture of my kids from Nathaniel's first Halloween.
What about you? Are you wearing a costume or handing out goodies tonight? Keep reminding yourself that all this candy will be here next year, stay strong and just say "no" tonight!! You can do it!!!
I love seeing pictures of kids (and adults) in costumes, so share any pictures from today or any favorites from years past! Hope you have a wonderful day!!
