Every Day, Give Your Heart Loving, Healthy Care

Every Month is a Time to Love Your Heart

Written by Austin Catmull February 10, 2016 in Heart Health Month, products, Supplement Spotlight with 0 Comments

Did you know February was American Heart Health Month? It seems only fitting that the month we see so many fun Valentine hearts floating around is also the month we are asked to remember the physical state of our hearts by being more health conscious.  And of course, we need to give special attention to our hearts, which pump so faithfully for us day in, day out, week by week, month by month.

Since February was heart health month, I thought it was time we talked about one of USANA’s premier products for heart health: Proflavanol^® C100. Let’s discuss how this supplement can help support the health of you and your loved ones.

A Lovely Combination

Proflavanol has two main ingredients for heart health: grape seed extract and vitamin C.

Grape Seed Extract
When it comes to “super fruits” that have antioxidant benefits, grapes are one of the best sources out there. I know, I know, grapes aren’t a newfound, ultra-rare berry found in some remote jungle, but they pack a punch when it comes to antioxidants. The seeds in grapes are rich in bioflavonoids, that help support a healthy heart.*
Poly C^® Blend


What makes Proflavanol even more unique is that it’s made with USANA’s innovative Nutritional Hybrid Technology, so it combines these two nutrients into one powerful supplement to help you maintain good health. A study USANA Scientists conducted in collaboration with Boston University found that supplementation with both grape seed extract and vitamin C has a positive influence on healthy blood flow to support cardiovascular health.

Keep it Pumping

Did you know the average adult heart pumps 2,000 gallons of blood each day? And as one of the hardest-working organs in the body, the heart has unique nutritional needs. USANA’s heart health supplements are specially designed to support healthy heart function:

• Support healthy circulation*
• Help maintain healthy cholesterol levels already within the normal range*
• Maintain good health by neutralizing free radicals, which can cause excessive oxidative stress over time*
• Support healthy immune function*

So you can see Proflavanol is a fantastic choice if you’re looking for a supplement optimized specifically for heart health.*

If You Struggle with Exercise

In addition to proper nutrition, we should all work on fostering healthy habits of regular exercise and activity. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been fantastic at following a consistent exercise routine. My efforts have been sporadic at best, but I do love to stay active. I especially enjoy tennis and snowboarding.

See, exercise can be fun…and cold.

I came across this concept years ago, and it really stuck with me: “If you find an activity you love doing, you’ll never have to exercise a day in your life.”

So if you’re the type who struggles with a regular exercise program (like I do), try to find fun hobbies or activities that will get you off of the couch and moving around. Doing these a few times a week can help out.

On top of that, eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, and limiting highly refined carbohydrates is important in supporting a healthy heart. And don’t forget to take your Proflavanol as well.*

For further information please contact Deanna Waters, www.ddwaters.com  thewatersedge@shaw.ca

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

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Place your success in the tasks you can control

I recently had a hard week and work, nothing seemed to be working right, was making those easy mistakes and was struggling to feel good about myself.  I am sure we have all had weeks like that.  In the evening I would go home discouraged and found it hard to get started on anything around the house.

I then realized a concept that is probably well known to everyone else but is a new concept to me.  A job is a big part of my life, for me in IT it is huge.  Every week I am on call meaning they can call me in if there are issues at the plant.  When things aren't quite an easy of a fix that they think they often look for someone to blame.  This leaves someone leaving work with a bag of guilt.  Do my bosses feel the same way about their work?  No!  So why do I?

I decided then and there that when I am at home, i need to place my priorities and efforts as well as my value on things I can control, and things I can make a difference on.  For many years I have owned several small based business that I haven't put a lot of effort into.  Why, often I felt tied to my work, and felt that I would be interrupted or I would miss a call, all sorts of reasons this job held me back from doing things I wanted to do, something that I can learn to do better and something that I would feel would bring me successful feeling that I desired.

Maybe you are in the same boat as me, coming home exhasted from work, with nothing but the TV to fill you evening, which will bring you no fulfillment.  I think that everyone should have a project, something that they love to work on that will bring them joy.  Here are what I believe should be critera for making room in your life for something that will bring you that feeling of success:

1. Should bring you together with people that also strive success
Becoming successful at your plan means to surround yourself with successful people that will fuel your passion and support you while you work towards your goal.  These people can come from different walks of life and may even be part of your existing social circles.  They will be there to support you and may correct you as you work towards you goal.

2.  Should be something that you enjoy.

Nobody will work hard on something they don't enjoy doing.  It then becomes a job.  To truly feel success you need to enjoy what you are doing.  For me, health and wellness as well as helping people with technology are things I believe are good things to be a part of.  I work with a great team that encourage me to grow my business and to chase success.

3.  This may involve something new

Sometimes, we all have a great idea that we think can change the world.  I would encourage everyone to chase or at least look at these ideas to see if it is something that you can pursue.  A new challenge often brings together people who chase success.

I hope this helps you choose to put your plan in action, whether that means starting at the gym or a home based business venture.  I encourage you to start.  Please comment if you have some other great advice.

The Importance of water in work and life

One of my major habits of living a healthy lifestyle is the source of fluid I put into my body and I'm been looking for a way to change this as my new year is looking to improve my health, lose some weight and move my life into the next phase of life as healthy and strong as I can to make sure I prevent other health issues.

I'm 42 years old, and work in the IT Field.  I don't drink coffee but rather the past few years consume pop as my drink of choice.  My work day starts at 7am and often I grab a quick pastry and a Coke product to wake me up and get me started.  I can eat it quickly and am off to work with the morning fixes that seem to be the start of every day.

Unlike other IT jobs, my job in manufacturing requires me to do a lot of walking which means I don't spend a lot of time at my desk.  My Fitbit registers up to 10 miles per day of walking before the end of my work day, and I guess I would spend less than 25% at my desk.  This often means I don't drink a lot of water during the day but rather take a coke on the run at lunch.

Deanna Waters, a health and wellness expert posted this the other day which really got me thinking about how important putting water into my bodyd every morning and each night:

Being a Fitbit user, I know I can track my water consumption using their application.  And in reading other articles going to start with a glass of water first thinkg when I get up and one glass before I goto bed.  As well, going to work on tracking my water consumption consistantly in my Fitbit app, to ensure I drink more during the day to meet my goals.  With all of these health benefits it should move me towards my goals as well as leave less of a craving for pop.

Let me know how you ensure you drink enough water.  Would be interesting to know some other methods to help me with my change.

The Firbit activity misread and how you can make the correction for better health

I have been a Fitbit users for 3 years now, and love it.  I love the ability to track my steps and compete with friends.  After a year and half use the Fitbit One, I upgraded to a flex,which I found more comfortable and worried less about sending it thru the wash.  However, I was sad that I lost my stair counts.  But I guess I can always upgrade.

IT Professionals which is what my career choice is, is often an unhealthy one.  Short quick lunch breaks, or sometimes none, overtime, nights working, and in my case a lot of walking.  In a facility of 700,000 sq ft we put on over 10,000 steps a day, which often equals out to 10 miles per day.  When I could I often added my food intake and my sleep numbers as well to try to get a big picture on how healthy my lifestyle was.  According to Fitbit, with this data, I was looking pretty good.

However once I thought about it.  I realized that my Fitbit was lying to me.  Not on purpose but rather a combination of a work environment that was giving false readings.  Often my active minutes were covered by my up from my desk to do a task which they have now corrected.   However, the amount of walking I do cannot be considered real exercise and therefore I believe skews the stats into allowing me to believe I was doing enough exercise and that my weight should be coming down.  It ever was and I wondered why.

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So what I have done is started using the exercise part of the Phone app and counting that as true exercise.  The app gives you some really nice statistics if you are walking or running and allows you to log other activites which a bit less accuracy but will update your active minutes and your calories burned.  If you are an active worker like myself, don't allow these stats to decieve you into thinking that when you are done for the day, that you don't need to participate in exercise.  The work environment stats we should not consider true exercise and make sure to add some activitiy that you can log.  That way, you can truly tell if you exercise choice is improving either your weight loss or fitness goals or not.  I hope this helps you meet your goals.

Don't find time for everything, set time for everything...

As one of those nice IT guys, its very easy to get swamped down with a ton of different projects and tasks and forget the important things in life.  Getting overwhelmed by projects and promised found me short with my family, tired at work and generally miserable.   My solution which wasn't the right one was to eventally ignore some of the things I promised to do or just to dump them all together without giving warning to the people I promised to.

I needed to realize a different way of doing things so that the most important things got priority.  Here are some of things that I have started working on to help with this.

1.  Family -   The first thing was my family.  I had gotten into the habit of having my family work around my schedule and this wasn't right.  We had a family calendar that was shared out online.  Instead of just checking to see if there was nothing up that would interfere with what I was trying to do, I started putting my tasks in and requesting approval from the rest of my family.  It allows them to help me manage my time.  Another thing is to realize how important I am to my family.

For me, often I felt that if I was providing money to my family, that is what they wanted.  This is not true, they require my time to listen, to enjoy time with them, and to help them with their decisions in life.  What I did is when I got home, I reminded myself that once I got home, my job was to be a part of my family.  I sat in the driveway and cleared my work from my head and prepared myself to focus on what they would need from me in the evening.   When I got into the house, I was better prepared and was able to leave a lot of my work issues outside.

2.  Projects and Home business work


Having a home business is a great way to create a second way of making money, and to recover some of that money that we pay in taxes each year.  It is for me something to get me away from the computer and to develop a second hobby and a healthy lifestyle.  Right now my business is small and I am still learning how to make it work.  However, what I needed to do is give it the time that it needed to breathe.  This also required me set aside time that fit with my family yet gives me time away to enjoy it.

3.  Work

Work is where we spend the majority of our time, we have friends, we have problems, we have great successes and sometimes failures.  A lot of things happen at work that change our lives for better or worse.  It is good to share about your day at work but make sure it doesn't take over your conversations all evening.  Try to dedicate some time to discuss these things at home, but don't let it take up your whole evening.

4.  Relaxing time

I struggle with giving myself time to relax.  I spend a lot of time with a lot of other projects and found myself lonely, and frustrated thinking I was doing everything right and why did I feel miserable.  I often felt guilty about going out and doing something fun and relaxing thinking I was wasting my time.  This often made these events unenjoyable for others as well.

Making relaxing time a part of your life with your family and friends gives everybody a breath of fresh air and time away from the stressful things in life.  Book time for this, and try to include others whenever you can.  Have friends over for a games night, play video games with your kids, or go out for coffee with your spouse or friends.  Your body and mind will benefit from it.  Make sure to focus your time to things that are fun, your dreams, some goals you achieved, plan something that you want to do in the future that will be fun, even though it may take a long time to achieve.


I hope these ideas help better set time for things that will promote good health mentally and physically.  Giving time to relax and prioritizing your life will bring less stress to your life.

How to stop a busy lifestyle from turning you upsidedown!

During this past few months have been one of the busiest and most stressful time in my life.  Several personal events such as having a serious injury in my wife's extended family, having my wife going in for surgery herself and having some changes at work, and having a coworker going down with a serious injury of his own all compounded into a what has felt like a serious life crisis.  I quickly realized some of the big mistakes that I was making and am currently working on getting these straightened out and getting back to where I want to be physically, emotionally and mentally.

1.   Stress can activate bad health habits

Often stress is associated with leading people to drink, especially work related stress.  Its often the joke around the office too.  Right now at work, we've been two people short during a busy time with year end and the plant running at capacity.  My supervisor had a holiday booked that she couldn't cancel, so it left us with two people to run a department that is usually run by five.

What I quickly found that some of my bad habits started popping up.  I am considered one of the clean IT Techs, not drinking, doing drugs, smoking, and often my associates wonder how I survive.  However, when the stress turned up, I found two bad health habits raising their ugly head, I found myself drinking a lot of sodas, and I found myself eating greasy food.  My Fitbit page immediately alerted of what this was doing to my body as my weight starting going up and down as sugars and waters balances started going haywire and with the extra fat in the food didn't get processed like natural foods.

When dealing with a busy lifestyle and stress, you need to understand that your body needs balance and if you have developed a healthy eating habit.  With a planned and monitored eating plan, you can control the cravings to fall off the wagon and better watch your intakes and make sure your diet is balanced.  The great thing about the Fitbit system is that you can monitor if you life is more walking or moving around to know when to increase your intake.

If some of your other habits including drinking or smoking become more of a regular occurrence, you may want to look for a team of supporters to help monitor and control these habits as well.  Drinking especially has taken down many successful individuals who find losing jobs, marriages or even their lives due to letting their stress feed bad habits.

2.  Make sure you are getting your Nutritionals

When your body is stressed, it causes all sorts of unbalanced states within your body, with horomones sent to give you extra energy and battle the stress often run short.  This week I really realized that I hadn't been taking my supplements from USANA.  I found myself tied, discouraged and unable to work at top levels to help get rid of of the place I was in.

This week, I will get back on the wagon and order my supplements.  The Essential Supplements provide a balanced level of the nutritional minerals and nutrients to help balance my levels out and to improve my energy.  If you need to look at supplements, take a look at USANA or contact me for more details.

3.  Energy drinks

Often when people need to work harder than their body needs to, they rely on coffee or soda or energy Energy drinks shoot unhealthy levels of caffine through your system and although may give you a jolt of energy, they are found to provide unhealthy side effects.  Avoid these if possible, USANA provides a drink called Rev3 which uses green teas to give you a gentle boost of caffine that has long lasting effects and doesn't drop you at the end.
drinks.

4.  Sleep and Friends

This is one of the difficult balances when I found myself in this busy and stressful time to balance my sleep and friends.  Sleep is an easy escape from stressful situations.  I personally found myself searching sleep wherever I could, which affected relationships with my support team in my family.  When I took the time and realized that being with my family is an important job as well as filling me up, I find time with my family enjoyable and not a chore.

During my visit to my place of worship, one of my friends there noticed my tired condition and took me out for lunch later that week.  I was able to talk through some of the things I was going through and he helped lighten the load.  It allowed me to go back to work without some of the baggage I was carrying.  Freeing up to do my job better.  This past evening, I had a great night playing some cards with friends, and found the laughter and sharing times especially rejuvenating.

If you are finding sleep hard to find, that may be a different issue.  many doctors will recommend sleeping pills or other drugs to help you sleep.  Before taking such harsh measures, look at giving yourself a massage, or visiting your chiropractor to make sure that tight muscles or out of place spine isn't causing your restlessness.  And look at taking Melatonin to help you sleep at night.  Melatonin is the hormone that your body creates to signal your body to sleep, sometimes due to stress, this needs to be supplemented.  Visit your doctor and discuss the right choice for you.

Conclusion

Having a busy lifestyle is part of life these days, however, it needs to be monitored and controlled just like anything else.  To use tools and having good friends and family watch be accountable and alert you of warning signs is a good way to avoid these traps.  If you are having issues, always look at the way your life is and look for ways to change it for the better.  Wish you the best of luck.

How to prep yourself for your home business

Everybody dreams of starting a home business and the freedom that it gives and the joy you will get out of working from home, meeting new people and travelling the world.  From some of the great people I've met, I have realized that it is a real possibility and that the hard work eventually provides the benefits that you desire.  However, often we don't see the hard work that goes into developing the home business, the rejection and failures along the way and the extra time that is continually needed to mould you into the home business professional that is taking on the world and leaving your job behind.

So what are some of the steps to consider when thinking about starting a home based business?  What will give you the advantages to succeed, even through the long tough growing curve, here are some of my suggestions.

1.  Already be doing something you love

Often people look at starting a business because they hate their job, they hate what their doing and they want the freedom to set their own rules.  This is a dangerous place to start a home based business.  I find it skews your goals for your business.  

You will need to be able to balance both a home based business that may require you to put in 25 hours per week on top of your other job.  It may require meeting people during your off hours, including during the day when working night shift or in the evenings if working standard hours.  This may be tiring, so make sure you weigh the costs before committing to home based business activities.  If meeting new prospects, take a look at the ROI that they can provide your home business and then commit time accordingly.

With doing a job that you are already passionate about, you will find joy in both jobs and as well be successful in both if a good balance is in place.

2.  Be in a healthy place, emotionally, physically and mentally

These three states of mind are crucial to being involved in a home based business.  A home based business will push you in all three areas of your life, and you need to make sure you're in a good place when starting and realizing when your business is taking you to a bad place in these areas as your business grows.

A lot can be lost if these three states of mind are not monitored and maintained.  A good mentor can watch for critical signs and give you warnings when things look like things are not running smooth, when stress is taking over and poor decisions are being made, financial, relational and job losses are some of the most important things to protect against by being in a healthy place and will allow you to present your business with the vigor and passion that drove you to seek a home based business in the first place.

3.  Build a healthy home financial situation

A home base business will need to thrive financially on its own but will require some priming from your budget in order to get started.  A healthly financial situation at home will be your first test on whether you can run a successful home business.

Build a good emergency fund for your household, then for your business.  Two to three months of income for your home budget and a starrting account of 3 months of supplies would be a healthy place to start.

4.  Find a passion that drives you and a business that matches

Finding a business that moves you will be key to having business success.  Try and learn about the product, as well as the industry and what makes it stand out compared to other companies that sell the same product.   Unless you know the product, you won't have much success in selling it or promoting it.

5.  Learn how business finances work

Business finances should work the same as your home finances, but there are benefits to running a home based business depending on where you live.  Learn the loopholes and advantages that you can  use to your advantage to free up money to take your businesses further.  It may also help reduces the taxes you pay and help you work towards your retirement.  Make sure to talk to your business mentor and connect with financially smart people and learn these tricks before starting out.

6.  Learn your product inside out

This ties in with point four but often new home businesses often skip this step.  You need to be able to talk to prospects about what makes your product amazing and how it can help them personally.  If it is a great product that you yourself can't use, or know what difference it makes in your life, it will be hard to move.

7.  Be ready to try something new

Often, starting a home based business will network you with new people and take you to new places, and may require you to try new things.  Be adventurous, whether it is trying new things to eat, do and travelling.  Enjoy the new experiences and be ready to learn and enjoy this great benefit to your home business.

8.  If at first you don't succeed...

If you mentor tells you that your business will be easy and take off right away, really consider your mentor and if he has your best interest in mind.  A business will never be a smooth start and lots of learning and a few failures along the way.  Don't be discouraged but be prepared for it.  Learn from it and keep working toward your goal finding a better way of doing things.

9.  Build your boundaries

Boundaries of time, financial and your home need to be considered when starting a home business.  Your home may be used as a board room when first starting our but make sure the rest of your family is on board with this.  Meeting with new clients may require time away from home, but make sure your family should always come first.  Be aware of warning signs when these boundaries are being pushed and adjust your business model to protect your most important assets.

10.  Find good mentors.

A great mentor will be there to help your business succeed and give you advise when things aren't going well.  They will be the one to keep pushing you to succeed.  Make sure this mentor is someone that you respect, and some who will listen to your concerns and goals and respect your boundaries.  It will be someone that you can go to if you need knowledge about your product and will help guide your business to success.  Choose them wisely.

Want to wish all your prospective home business owners all the success that you desire.   If you're looking for a home business and want some ideas on companies that can help you with these goals, e-mail me, and would be glad to talk to you more about it.