Managing Stress

Shira Litwack, LWMC, CNS, CPT

Medial Fitness Professional

Your personal & Corporate fitness coach

(416) 417-6353

Shira@fitfan4fun.com
Lifestyle Weight Management Coach, Trainer

Certified Nutritional Symptomatologist

The Stress Monster

Fitness is the best way to tame stress. Fitness is a lifestyle, not going “on and off” a diet, joining a gym and not going. Fitness is about making better choices for a healthier lifestyle. When one incorporates fitness as an integral part of who they are, it is not “another pressure”.

Any type of exercise can decrease the production of stress hormones, counteracting your body’s natural stress response. Your regular fitness program that helps stave off disease, builds muscle, makes you look great & builds your self confidence also helps you better control your body’s negative response to stress.

Just a few dramatic ways in which exercise reduces stress:

1)Relaxes tensed muscles and helps you sleep better….is sleep important to stress management?

2)Exercise stimulates blood flow to the brain bringing additional sugars and oxygen to feed the brain while you are hammering out that business plan. Maybe that’s why I say I do my best thinking during my cardio!

3)While deep in thought, the neurons of the brain are much more active. As in all cellular activity, there is cellular waste. You know that feeling that my brain is overloaded? Feel you need to “clear your head’? By exercising, you speed the flow of blood through your brain, removing the cellular waste. So instead of going outside to smoke a cigarette, feeding more toxins into your body… go for a walk!

4)Endorphins…my personal addiction. Exercise stimulates the release of endorphins into the bloodstream. Also known as “runner’s high”, these endorphins give you a pure, healthy, happy feeling, exhilarating our overall sense of well-being, makes us much more productive with our time, confidence soars and makes us ready to conquer the world.

5)The immune system is our body's protective network designed to block invasion by harmful substances, including bacteria, viruses, and harmful chemicals, and to act as a surveillance system against the development of cancer. We know how stress weakens our immune system…makes sense why? The lymphatic system (which is responsible for immunity) on its own is a pumpless system. It is dependent on the pumping action of strong muscles to circulate through the body. Exercise is essential to our immune system.

Food plays a serious role in either managing or elevating stress levels. Unfortunately, our body’s usual response is to head for exactly the WRONG foods when we are stressed. Here is another example of how important good, dependable lifestyle habits are necessary. Learn to condition yourself to make the right food choices ESPECIALLY in stressful times. The foods we have learned (most probably from childhood) to reach for are for quick fixes - our “comfort foods” as they are so belovedly referred to. We can learn to retrain our minds to want to reach for different “comfort foods”, or maybe not even food at all! Stress is an inevitable fact of life. We need to relearn the way we deal with it. This is very possible. This should be an integral part of your corporate health program.

In the nutrition business, we put a twist on the old expression “You are what you eat”. We say “You are what you eat, what you digest, and what you absorb”. Stress can REALLY play a number on absorption and digestion of the food we eat. Let’s make sure you are doing all three!

The beauty of a true lifestyle fitness program is that you equip yourself to be much for proactive with your health & wellness rather than reactive. This really helps us feel in control of ourselves, our emotions and our reactions.