Stress And Its Negative Health Effects

In the long term, stress can lead to several health related problems, including heart disease, ulcers and other gastrointestinal problems, cancer and a weakened immune system.  Stress induced overeating of the wrong kinds of food are at the root of these problems which can lead to a steep increase in the levels of fat on your body.  One way that stress can make you fat is through cortisol, a stress hormone.  Cortisol is released in response to stress and its primary function is to increase blood sugar.  An increased blood sugar puts the body in a state to more readily store fat.  Also, too much cortisol can slow your metabolism down, causing even more weight gain.

I don’t know about you but when I feel stressed, I crave junk food.  Another effect of too much stress is cravings for unhealthy foods such as sweets, processed foods and other low nutrition, high calorie foods.  This leads to increased fat levels and the viscious cycle continues with more stress and more bad eating habits.

Now that we know that stress can be linked to weight gain, let’s look at some productivity tools that can help reduce the stress and help us stay healthy and fit.

Virtual Assistants

One of the best ways to reduce stress in the workplace is to get tasks off your plate.  Especially the ones that are boring, tedious and repetitive.  One way of doing this is by hiring a virtual personal assistant.  By delegating these types of tasks to a virtual assistant, you can focus on tackling the really important tasks on your to-do list.  You might also free up time in your schedule for more relaxing endeavors.  If you didn’t have the time before, you’d now have the time to exercise.

A virtual assistant can perform several tasks including:

* Word Processing
* Desktop publishing
* Proofreading and copy editing
* Putting together presentations
* Scheduling
* Booking travel arrangements
* Transcription and Dictation
* Fax and Mail related services
* Various Web 2.0 services

With a virtual assistant, busy professionals can knock a several tasks off of their “to-do” list and get more of what they want to done.  Some might even help you with scheduling exercise, tracking your fitness goals and helping you eat healthier.  All this leads to less stress and a greater chance of staying fit and keeping excess weight off.

Have A Schedule

Failure to maintain a schedule of tasks, meetings and other things you need to accomplish throughout the day is a surefire way to add unnecessary stress to your life.  Having a schedule will help you use your time effectively.  By having a schedule, you can prioritize tasks, look for tasks that can be delegated to someone else and identify other tasks where you might need a hand.  With a schedule it will be easier to take tasks to completion and you’ll gain a sense of accomplishment which will reduce stress levels.  If you want to avoid stress at work, keeping a schedule is crucial.

Follow A Methodology

There several productivity methodologies that exist to help professionals transform their busy and overwhelmed lives into a system that is productive while keeping stress at bay.  One that comes to mind is  “Getting Things Done”, or GTD for short.  GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by getting them recorded externally.  By doing this, the mind can be freed from the job and hassle of having to remember everything that needs to get done.  This allows one to concentrate on actually “getting those tasks” done.  The GTD system helps to ensure that you’ll keep track of what you have to do and that you get the right reminders at the right time.  This increased focus and control over tasks will lead to decreased stress. Other methodologies work in a similar manner with the goal of keeping productivity up and stress down.

Use An iPhone Productivity App

There are a number of iPhone apps that are geared towards making you more productive with less effort.   These apps can help manage your to-dos, crunch numbers, transfer files, track your time and more.  Some of these apps include:

* Things -> A to-do list manager
* TimeLogger -> A time tracker
* FileMagnet -> A file transfer tool where you can view files on the go
* Zenbe Lists ->An app for keeping multiple to-do lists.  The lists can also be shared with other Zenbe users.
* P Calc -> More than just your basic calculator.
* iTalk Recorder -> A voice recording app with many useful features

By using productivity tools, you’ll find it much easier to stay in control of what you need to accomplish and avoid stress.  By keeping stress to a minimum, you’ll be more focused on staying fit and healthy, keep your body in a mode where fat levels are more easily maintained and you’ll feel great and be happier.

This article has been given by Nick from Offshore Ally. You can read more on his outsourcing blog.

1. More Free Time

By hiring a personal assistant to do tasks that are tedious and repetitive, you free up your schedule.  A schedule that has less stuff scheduled will mean more time for getting out and exercising and working toward your weight-loss and fitness goals.

2. Less Stress, Better Habits

By using a virtual assistant, you’ll be more productive at work, get more done and reduce stress.  As you accomplish more and your schedule is opened up, you’ll be more apt to do things that are healthy such as taking more breaks, getting more sleep, eating healthier and drinking more water.  All of these things are great at aiding anyone who is interested in better fitness and keeping excess weight off.  You’ll also be less likely to pick up bad habits that come with high stress such as unhealthy eating, smoking and drinking.

3. Help Tracking Fitness Goals

Another positive from having a personal assistant is that they can assist you in keeping track of your fitness goals.  They can work with you on starting a fitness program and keeping a log or journal of the progress made during the program.  They can help you track things like weight lost or strength gained,  Having a virtual personal assistant is also very useful when it comes to measuring body fat using calipers which requires the help of another person.  A personal assistant can also take a fitness log and create additional reports and charts to help you analyze your progress and make sure you are on track to meet your fitness goals.

4. Improved Organization

If your work environment is “out of whack” with clutter and distractions, it will be hard for a busy professional to even think about weight loss and fitness goals.  A personal assistant can help whip your work environment into shape by cleaning it up and making it as comfortable and serene as possible, leaving you time and energy to focus on improving “you”.

5. Accountability

It can be hard to stay on track in a fitness program when there is no one around to keep you honest.  Usually, a busy professional will fall off the wagon all together when work gets very busy and the pressure is on.  A personal assistant will help keep you accountable for the fitness and weight loss goals you’ve set.  They’ll remind you that the work will always be there and your health won’t, giving you a keen reminder that your health needs to be a high priority.

6. Friendly Fitness Reminders

As busy professionals, we get very … busy.  As we get busy, losing weight and staying fit can be forgotten.  You might hit the end of a busy work day only to realize that you forgot to exercise.  Do this a few more times and you’ve developed a habit of not exercising.  A virtual personal assistant will remind you when you are scheduled to exercise.  They can also help with your schedule in general and work with you on the best time of day for you to exercise.  You’ll definitely be much less likely to forget a workout.

7.  Help With Healthy Eating

When it comes to busy professionals and eating, the choices made are typically poor and those choices work against anyone who desires to lose weight and stay fit.  Often times, a busy professional won’t have time for something healthy so they’ll rush to the nearest fast food place and grab something fried or they’ll head downstairs to the vending machine for something that is processed, low in nutrition, and high in calories.  A personal assistant can help you eat better by ordering you food that is healthy and they can pick it up for you.  In some cases, they may even be able to help you put nutritious meals together so you can take  lunch and healthy snacks to work.  This will save money and make staying fit easier.

8. A Motivating Mentor

There will be times where you don’t feel like exercising or you’ll feel like you aren’t doing well in your fitness program.  A personal assistant will give you the motivation needed to stay on track.  They will talk you through why you set your fitness goals in the first place and why you should “keep on keeping on”.  They’ll assure you that you are making progress and they’ll have the data to back it up since they are also helping you track your fitness goals and progress.

Besides motivation, if you’ve chosen a virtual  assistant carefully, they might have some good insights and perspectives when it comes to weight loss and fitness.  They might exercise themselves and have more knowledge than you when it comes to fitness.   In this case, you might learn new exercises, workouts, or even techniques to keep workouts effective yet short for your busy lifestyle.

A personal assistant will not only help you in get things done at work.  Based on the eight reasons above, they can also be a great asset to a busy professional when it comes to losing weight and staying fit.  So whether you are in the conference room or the cardio room, you can be confident and stress-free knowing that a personal assistant has your back.

This article has been given by Nick from Offshore Ally. You can read more on his blog.

When you are beginning strength training you should be very careful as to not put pressure on your body with excess weight. Take a trainers advice to understand just what the right weight is for you to begin with. After the first week of strength training, you must begin to start lifting weight a minimum of ten times. If you face moderate amounts of difficulty while lifting such weight, you have actually passed to the second stage. But, if you think that you are lifting the said weights with great difficulty, you should realise that the weights are heavy for you, so you should decrease the heaviness of the weights.

The next stage of progression includes the reassessment of the difficulty faced while performing each exercise. If you feel that you aren’t facing a great deal of difficulty with your current weights, you can get started on the next stage. This stage, typically includes, performance of overhead press using dumbbells weighing around one pound. The progression doesn’t end here, but continues throughout the duration of your strength training regimen.

Progression is important if you want to experience the complete range of benefits of strength training. Strength training is all about challenging your body every step of the way with heavier weights. This helps in the gradual development of muscles, and these muscles are challenged when you lift heavier weights. This process helps improve the strength of these muscles. It’s all a part of helping you achieve strong muscles that you can be proud of.

Where athletes might go wrong

Athletes might go wrong in the selection of the strength training program. A budding athlete, who knows that strength training, is good for him/her might just choose to go the route of weightlifting programs rather than finding just what is suited for his/her needs and requirements. It’s been noticed that quite a number of athletes choose bodybuilding and Olympic weight lifting programs. Such programs form an important part of the training regime of the athlete. But, such a selection, at times is flawed.

The first thing that comes to anybody’s mind while thinking of strength training is lifting weights. But, the truth is lifting weights is just one of the components of strength training and there are many more facets to it. If you are training for a particular sport, then a more refined approach towards strength training might work more than just an arbitrary selection of a method.

It’s about choosing the right strength training plan

Strength training for an athlete will only work for him/her if it mirrors the demands of the particular sport. So, a bodybuilder might want to develop a specific group of muscles, hence will isolate it and work only this group day in and day out. But an athlete who wants to compete in a track and field event wants to improve his movements rather than muscles. In such cases, going through a strength training routine that includes leg extension, toe raise etc might be better than lifting weights.

Weight training

The purpose of weight training is to provide resistance at the beginning of the movement. The focus of attention is the initiating joint angle. This is the place where the muscle must lose all the inertia that is result of the mass of weight. You might want to perform the repetition fast or go about it slowly. But you must understand that if the repetitions are slow, you might never overcome the inertia. In such cases, thee resistance will always be constant.

Resistance training

As the name suggests, in this form of strength training, there is an opposing force that tries to make your effort difficult. In point of fact, this force is generated by resistance. So, your muscles are moving against the force. The purpose of resistance training is to building the size and strength of the skeletal muscles of your body. If you perform resistance training in the correct manner and that too regularly, you will notice a significant improvement in the general functioning of the body. It offers your body a tremendous amount of functional benefits.

Isometric training

The concept behind isometric training is to make sure that there is no chance in the length of the muscle and the joint angle of the person during the process of contraction. In isometric training the opposing force is equal to the force that is an output of the muscles. This means that the net movement is zero. The focus of attention of this type of strength training is a particular joint angle and the improvement of the strength of that particular joint angle.