Читать книгу The Lunch Box Diet: Eat all day, lose weight, feel great. Lose up to a stone in 4 weeks. - Simon Lovell - Страница 7

Learn a relaxation technique. Practising relaxation isn’t difficult. All you need is five minutes in a quiet setting. Close your eyes, breathe in deeply through your nose and feel your belly fill up. Exhale through your nose feeling your belly empty. If thoughts come to mind, just let them go with the breath. Concentrate on the breath – that’s it!

Listen to music. Keep music in the car, in the kitchen, in your bedroom, in the study, at the treadmill, in your gym bag…everywhere! Choose the background music to your life. Music can relax us, it can fire us up, and it can touch on every emotion in between. It’s also a great way of relieving stress.

We’ve heard for years about stress affecting our hearts. But it affects more, so much more. It affects nearly every part of our physical selves.

When we have very stressful lives, there are many physical symptoms. Joints ache, muscles feel weak, our hormones are out of whack, our immune systems are weakened, and these physical problems just add to the psychological pressure we’re under. And guess what? As if the plate of brownies you consumed the other night after losing that promotion to your idiot colleague wasn’t enough, the physical way in which your body responded to all that stress you’ve been under might have added a few extra pounds as well.

We produce the hormone cortisol when we are under stress and the kicker is that Cortisol can cause you to produce more abdominal fat. Abdominal fat is undesirable aesthetically, and it also contains the most dangerous type of body fat. This is called ‘visceral fat’, and it has been linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes as well as breast cancer in women.

So, should you just give up and let yourself go? I mean, after all, it’s not as if we can stop stressful things from happening, right? What do we do? First of all, you stop putting undue stress on yourself. Maybe it’s inadvisable to tell the boss what you really think about his or her latest idiotic idea, but you can reduce personal stress by choosing not to follow ridiculously restrictive diets. Stop starving yourself or following plans that are clearly unhealthy. Stop denying yourself the foods you love. Stop eating flavourless foods because you’ve been told you’ll lose weight if you follow a particular meal plan. It makes me so angry that people are adding to their life stresses because of their constant quest to be thin and perfect. It really doesn’t need to be that way.