Wellness

 We enjoy life when we have radiant health

Health is all important for feminine confidence. It not only includes good eating but exercise and enough sleep. A woman should be able to look in the mirror and think: “I am beautiful”. We are, after all, the crown of creation. If this isn’t you then it’s time for a change. A woman is not beautiful when she can fit into a size 32 so keep reading. She is beautiful when she has glowing health, good skin, shiny hair, soft skin and a sparkle in the eyes. 

I will never forget the time I was in the gym getting changed for a class, when an older woman walked passed after having a shower. She went to the bench next to mine and dropped her towel to the floor. She was ordinary: mid-length brown hair and a pleasant face. She was a little overweight. Her stomach was chunky, her thighs a little large and her breasts no longer so firm. But I thought wow a woman is beautiful. No one ever thinks a man is beautiful. If he is fit and has built some muscle he can be magnificent, but never beautiful. That privilege is reserved for us alone and it’s not just about being in perfect shape. There was something soft about that woman, curvy and seductive despite her age. This is what we strive for: to be naturally beautiful.

Interestingly, our view of what beauty is, is not necessarily what men find attractive. As Helen Andelin highlights in her book Fascinating Womanhood “Women are inclined to admire artistic beauty such as the shape of the face, the nose and artistic clothes. Men however have a different interpretation of what makes a woman beautiful. They place more stress on the sparkle in her eyes, smiles, freshness, radiance, and her feminine manner”.

So, I’m not saying then that we can forget about staying in shape. We must all strive for high standards when it comes to health. It is less important to be perfect and more important to put the effort in. Every man appreciates his woman making effort to take care of herself; to look good for him. And every man wants to be able to do things with his woman. He wants her to have energy to go cycling or running or hiking. He wants to share life with her. What woman would discourage her husband from wanting to do things with her?

Being fit gives you more energy to do those things and makes other aspects of life easier. Things like climbing stairs, carrying groceries, taking an afternoon stroll, and igniting the energy for your husband... So this is where our journey to radiant health begins.

It’s not about dieting!

I’m not one for diets. I don’t believe in depriving myself of the things I enjoy, and when I have, I have gone on binging sprees devouring half a cake in one day. So, diets don’t work. There are so many books out there on how to lose weight and become healthy – there is the food combining movement, there is the blood-type diets, the south-beach diet, the x-diet, weigh-less. So so many... All of them have merit, but it is the discipline that is the problem especially because we always feel we are depriving ourselves.

When I was in school I was the typical teenage girl. I went to school, played sport, went to movies on the weekends with my friends, but there is something sinister about this day and age. I noticed girls getting too involved in dieting. I also was lured into the deception. I dieted not to loose weight but out of fear of gaining weight, because everyone else was doing it. I thought about food constantly and weighed myself everyday. I basically obsessed about not getting fat.

Then I went to University and I ate boarding establishment food. I stopped thinking about food. I stopped calorie-counting. I was too busy exploring the big wide world, going to socials, meeting new people, studying. And would you believe it... I lost weight! I became thinner than I had been when I was at school obsessing. Now after a year of marriage my husband and I are more in-shape than we have ever been. It is not a special diet that we are following. We are enjoying our food. We drink wine, eat spaghetti bolognaise and ice-cream. We don’t think about what we eat at all! But there is a secret to this...

How to enjoy your food without the guilt 

 

The first step to gaining wellness is eating. If you are eating the right food getting in shape becomes easier: you don’t need to train so hard because you have fewer calories to burn.

So here is my secret: enjoy your food. If you do not enjoy it you will not feel satisfied.

• Do not deprive yourself. “I must not eat that chocolate. Forget about the chocolate. Walk passed the chocolate. Do not look at the chocolate. The chocolate, the chocolate, the chocolateeeee.” Allow yourself some joys in life. If you want to eat chocolate, eat chocolate. As French Women Don’t Get Fat points out it’s all about quantity. Have one piece and not the whole slab.

• Drink water. There is the tendency always to want to drink something nice, but as much as you can stick to water. If it doesn't taste good add a little squeezed lemon. Don't buy fizzy drinks and cut down on fruit juice (1 glass per day). These contain too much sugar. Even fruit juice, though it may be healthy in small quantities, is concentrated fruit. Each time you drink a glass it is like eating three or four fruits. Too much energy to burn. You can drink a glass of wine or a cider or a cup of coffee or tea but make sure your enjoy it.

• Keep food as natural as possible. Replace tinned and frozen food for fresh food. Exchange tinned tomatoes for fresh tomatoes and frozen veggies for fresh ones. The fresher the better!

• Do not cook with pre-made sauces. Cut out sugar-loaded sweet chilli sauce and chutney. Make your own salad dressing out of ingredients you have in the pantry. You will be surprised what manufacturers put in the processed food you eat.

• Make food interesting. Add colour; add flavour. Spicy food is more satisfying than buttery-sugary-salty western food. An added bonus is that chilli increases your metabolism and promotes the release of endorphins (feel-good hormones) so you feel great after eating hot food!

• Exchange refined food for raw food. Exchange sugar for raw honey, direct substitution has worked in every recipe I tried (honey is sweeter than sugar so use less in baking). Eat oats, mealie meal or sorghum as your cereal in the morning rather than the processed boxed cereals.

• Make the “not so tasty” food interesting. I make a salad of baby corn, a range of different lettuce leaves, herbs, baby tomatoes, carrots, fresh peas, spring onions, red pepper, feta, and olives and then add my own spicy salad dressing. I don’t want to eat boring salad either so make it tasty to eat! As a side note my husband hated salad and now we can eat a whole bowl between us and he even goes for seconds!

• You need the fridge to be the fullest storage for food in the house. We only have meat in our freezer; our pantry is just as bare. There are some starches such as rice, polenta, mealie pap and gluten-free pasta; some oils; nuts, biltong, and spices... That is it.

• You can’t subsitute everything so keep that which you cannot give up. We still use tinned coconut milk and bottled green curry paste in recipes.

• Buy a good recipe book. The easiest way to make tasty food is to use a good recipe book. Cook out of there until you have learnt enough to make your own combinations. I recommend the Australian Woman’s Weekly series. Their food is delicious and there are low-fat healthy eating books in the series which are great. 

And finally... enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Pour yourself a glass of red wine. Turn the music on and make cooking an adventure. Enjoy preparing the food. Enjoy seeing your creation take shape. Enjoy smelling the delicious aromas coming from the oven. Enjoy presenting it and enjoy eating it. You will need to be prepared to take more time to cook but I guarantee the above will help. We need to celebrate food, not despise it!
 

And of course enjoy your husband being lured away from behind the TV, computer or anywhere else he might be to sniff the air in the kitchen, see what’s up and then come give you a kiss in the neck. Well, that’s what mine does anyway...

Exercise: the next step to radiant health

This is the second step to being a beautiful and radiant woman. Exercise is important to keep you fit and trim, supple and energized. The benefits are too numerous to list but all of them keep you young. The idea is to maximize the effect exercising has on your body. You can exercise 7 days a week but if you don’t eat right it will be so much more effort to reach your goal. The worst thing you can do is to eat unhealthy and then try to counter that with exercise. It is the most demotivating thing to exercise without seeing results. Therefore, good eating comes before exercise.

To tackle the exercise issue I refer to a principle Mireille Guiliano mentions in French Women Don’t Get Fat: walk! You don’t need a gym contract to stay healthy and fit. Do small things everyday to help you get enough basic exercise: walk the stairs, park further away from the shopping centre; even walk or cycle to the shops if they are close. Housework also counts as exercise, so for those ladies who are at home this is a good thing! Sweeping, vacuuming, dusting and washing all working your muscles. I actually find housework more tiring than going to the gym because you are constantly bending and picking things up! If you do these small things everyday the time you will need to spend at the gym will be less. For example a 60 minute walk uses the same number of calories as a 30 minute jog!

A gym contract is great to motivate you because you are paying to exercise, but I find exercising outside more fun. It is good for your body and good for your mood. It somehow feels less like exercise and more like enjoying the sun. So I’ve quite my gym membership. Now I give aerobics classes twice a week and for the other two days my husband and I go jogging. The point is to enjoy what you are doing. It is more sustainable and you are more likely to persevere. Even better if you do exercise that makes you feel sexy and feminine...but it must get your heart-rate up.

To get you moving feminine 

I suggest dance as my number one exercise. It gives you body awareness and confidence, and it doesn’t feel like exercise at all! Dance could include ballet, contemporary, Ballroom and Latin American Dance, Zumba or sensual dancing. Other exercises include aerobics and swimming. Raquet sports are also good, especially if you can wear your little tennis skirt. Helen Andelin’s principle is to make your husband see how feminine you are by doing those things which are opposite to things which are masculine. When you play sports, especially when it is of a masculine nature don’t be so good that you out-perform your husband. This only emphasises how masculine you are. I don’t mean to say you must pretend you don’t have talent when you do. Rather, don’t be competitive and aggressive. Don’t try your best to beat him. Just have fun.

As an aside if you are interested in a classical approach to exercise you would follow the ladies of Jane Austen's time. You would walk to town; take an afternoon stroll; and go horse-riding which is ever so elegant.

What you don’t know about exercise

You probably think, like I did, that exercise is just a tough way to a final result: that is, a slim and trim body. This, however, is not the case. Exercise is far more important than this, and the effect it has on your body is less visible and therefore less obvious.

It is of utmost importance in getting your body to function correctly and has an almost immediate effect on your cardiovascular system (heart and blood vessels), respiratory system (lungs) and mechanical systems of the body (muscles and bones). The internal benefits of function outweigh the external benefits of appearance. This is what exercise does:

• It increases the physiological working of your body (lower heart rate; heart becomes stronger to pump increased volume of blood; increases the capacity of your lungs to inhale oxygen; and increases usage of oxygen by cells).

• It lowers cholesterol.

• It increases lean body mass and metabolism.

• It improves bone density.

• It increases flexibility.

• It improves body alignment and posture.

• It increases physical strength.

• It decreases stress and depression.

The scary thing about one’s body is that it adapts to what it needs. If you don’t exercise and use your muscles there is no reason for your body to support muscle growth and muscle either wastes away, or becomes weaker. This is evident in individuals who need rehab after a period of being immobile. Furthermore, if you do not do the type of exercise that puts stress on your bones (such as weight-bearing exercises or exercise influenced by the force of gravity such as jogging or climbing stairs) cells in the bones likewise “decide” you don’t need the extra density, and bone is resorbed making your bones weaker. This is definitely one reason to keep exercising as you get older!

There is such a fine balance within the body between muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments. When one muscle is weak it can pull out the whole alignment of your body. For example, when your abdominal muscles are weak and your hip flexors are tight (someone who walks with a shortened stride and/or has a deep curvature in the lower back) your hip bone tilts towards the front, increasing the curvature of your lower back by pulling your spine out of alignment. This in turn puts increased stress on ligaments and compresses the disks between the vertebrae of the spine, causing lower back pain. It is just one of many examples where a combination of weak and inflexible muscle creates pain in the body. But the scariest thing is, after a period of time your spine adapts to this position since it is “reprogrammed” to consider this posture as normal. The body adapts.

The good news is that regular exercise improves all those things listed above. The body in itself is the fountain of youth: it regenerates. And with a combination of cardio and strength exercise, and stretching, you reprogram your body to consider good posture and alignment as normal (which it is!). Also, once you have corrected your posture, or any problem areas, the body naturally maintains the muscle tone to uphold the new ideal.

It is my belief that many problems can be solved simply by strengthening and stretching your muscles. It certainly did in my case. I had a knee problem and couldn’t jog further than two blocks. I went to the biokineticist and he gave me exercises to strengthen and stretch the muscles in both my legs. Now I can go further than J. Pain in the body means something is wrong so rather stop the exercise if you do feel pain. Then work to fix it and keep exercising. Dip into the fountain of youth to increase your quality of life, decrease pain and reduce stress and anxiety. What a wonderful free treatment God has given us!

Reference: ACE Group Fitness Instructor Manual. Second Edition.