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by Staci Rosenberg, APOGEE Life Coach

Many of my life-coaching clients have a wish list that looks nothing like their to-do list. They wish they could spend more time with family and friends; wish they had more time for fun; wish they could develop a long-term, loving relationship.

But their calendar says work, work, work. Even their family time is all about chores.

My prescription: Have a summer fling! There is no time like summer to loosen up, expand your horizons and live the life you dream of. Whether you want to meet people, spend time with friends and family, exercise more or just relax and read a book or knit, now’s the time. But how?

1. Schedule a date for your fling.
If you find time to complete work projects, answer e-mails and stay current with TV shows, you have time for a summer fling. Take out your calendar and make an appointment with yourself or friends: Plan a walk before breakfast or after dinner; block out a Saturday morning for a hike or bike ride. Make your fling as important as an appointment with your boss or doctor.

2. Change something about yourself.
If your wishes aren’t coming true now, you need to change. If you always wear black, choose a color. If you always look serious, try smiling in public for a day or two or wear a silly t-shirt to your exercise class.  If you never go to art shows, museums or concerts, now might be the time to start.

3. Take advantage of the summer warmth and light.
Just go outside! Once you’re out of the house, office or car, it’s easy to make an evening or afternoon—even your coffee break—special. You can sip a cup of tea or dine outside, plan a picnic in a park, walk to your destination instead of drive, or stroll your neighborhood until dusk. Slow down and experience the space you’re in.

4. Connect with people who are already having a summer fling.
It can be tough to invent a summer fling by yourself, so join one already in progress. Accept an invitation; attend a free outdoor concert, play or art opening; join a hiking or bicycling club—invite friends, your spouse or child. Try a Zumba class at APOGEE. Once you’re in a group, look around, join in and have fun.

Need inspiration? Follow the words of Henry David Thoreau , who wrote, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” 

by Jennifer Vagios, RD
APOGEE’s Dietitian

Have you ever said, “I’m going eat well, starting today!” Of course that’s an admirable goal: Your health, energy and weight will benefit from a diet of whole, natural, unprocessed foods. But such a sweeping, all-or-nothing plan is hard to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s important to have a target to motivate you and provide a focus. But goals without practical steps may set you up for failure. I help my clients at APOGEE by making sure their goals are SMART –that is, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. And once you’ve reached your goal (and I promise you will), you can build on it.  Here’s how to make sure your plan is SMART.

Specific
Your goal is specific if you can ask yourself: what will happen, where and when. For example,  “I will eat a healthful breakfast of fruit and yogurt at home four days this week,” and  “I will bring a salad to work for lunch two days this week” are specific. A non-specific goal is, “I will start eating better lunches.”  The what is the food, the where is at home or at work and the when is four times this week.

Measureable
Your goal is measurable if you can ask yourself: How will I know I’ve reached this goal? The simplest way to quantify your goal is to include a number: Three lunch salads a week or four breakfasts. Then, choose a timeframe: “I will eat a healthful breakfast of fruit and yogurt at home four days this week.” If you achieve the goal, extend the timeframe—for two weeks or until the end of the month, for example.

Attainable
Make your goals small-scale and you’ll achieve success. For example, it’s tough to go from never eating breakfast at home to always eating breakfast at home. Instead, try the new behavior two days a week. Succeed at that, and within a month you’ll be more likely to be practicing the new behavior most days of the week.

Timely
A goal should have a time frame—so there is sense of urgency to complete it—and a beginning and an end. “This week, I’m going to eat a salad at lunch on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” is timely and specific. Plus, success will come quickly when you have an end date in the not-too-distant future.

Realistic
Be certain that you are willing and able to make the changes you need to in order to achieve your goal. It’s not realistic to say you will never eat cake or chips again! Instead, look at your life: If you’re eating cake every night now, perhaps you can cut back to cake once a week and fruit on other nights. If you’re snacking on corn chips every day, perhaps you can switch to crunchy vegetables on weeknights and corn chips on the weekend. Being realistic sets you up for success.

Good luck being SMART! Let us know how this style of goal-setting works for you by posting a comment here or on our Facebook page.

If there’s one thing in a woman’s life that stays the same, it’s change: From adolescence to young adulthood, to motherhood and beyond, a woman’s body changes every month. Decade by decade, our roles evolve at work, in our communities, and in our relationships with parents and children.

With change being such a constant, it’s important to take a look at how you negotiate the cycles and evolutions of life. “If you’re self aware, you can use times of change as positive, transformative experiences,” says APOGEE life coach Persephone Zill. But the twists and turns of life can be stressful for many. “How you dealt with change in the past is a pretty good indicator of how you will deal with it in the future,” says Persephone.

How you cope now: Your most valuable asset is your attitude about change. “You need to be able to recognize how you cope with change so you can develop ways to help yourself that work best for you,” says Zill. “Look at something like the recent economic downturn—how did you react to that?” Perhaps you were able to make adjustments, dial back in certain areas, or find satisfaction from simpler things. But if you tend to run away and hide out—by watching TV, surfing the internet, overeating, drinking alcohol, or overworking—then you may be missing out on opportunities to embrace change and find satisfaction from new behaviors and new ways of being. Mind-body exercise, such as yoga, Pilates and meditation, can help you develop more of an observing self-awareness of yourself and your attitudes about life events.

Identify your resources: To be certain you have a full range of tools to negotiate change, Persephone recommends looking at six areas of your life: physical/nutritional, family, social, mental, work/ finance and spiritual. (You can draw a circle and make each area a section, like pieces of a pie.) If each area is vital and satisfying, it has the potential to be a resource for you to draw on during times of change, says Persephone. But if an area is dormant or even a source of friction, it can deplete your energy and throw the whole pie out of balance, limiting your ability to deal with life’s shifts.

Achieve balance: As a life coach, Persephone helps women identify goals for areas of their life that are currently lacking. Paying attention to one or two neglected areas can enrich and energize the rest of your life, she says. “Exercise can help you sleep better and be more aware of how you react to stress,” she says. “Pursuing a hobby or a creative interest can create additional energy and open-mindedness that you can then use at work or with your family.”

Develop your life balance, says Persephone, and you’ll have the resources to adjust to change—or at least recognize that difficult situations will pass in time.

To learn about exercise, nutrition and life-coaching tools that will help during mid-life, peri-menopause and menopause, attend our free workshop, Embracing Change, on June 22 at APOGEE Bedford Hills. Learn more.

by Woodson Merrell, M.D.
APOGEE’s Integrative Health Advisor

A new study shows that cancer cells migrate and thrive in the presence of stress hormones. Studies such as this reinforce what I tell my patients: Actively working to transform your reaction to stress is the single most important step you can make to take back your vital energy and improve your health.

Notice that I wrote “transform your reaction” and not “cut stress from your life.” It’s often hard to change the fabric of our lives. But you can turn down your reactions to life’s events and turn on a calmer way of being. Once you are calm, you can become aware and better choose how to respond to situations, further transforming your reaction to stress. Your health will benefit in many ways.

Our body has two nervous systems: fight or flight and calming. The hormones produced by your sympathetic nervous system during a stressful or fight or flight response are cortisol and adrenaline. Your body releases these when you react to something you perceive as stressful—whether it’s a traffic jam, a sick child, or a deadline at work.

Ideally, after the excitement, our fight or flight system turns off and the calming parasympathetic part of the nervous system takes over. But researchers are finding that today many people have high levels of cortisol all day; they’re constantly perceiving their environment as stressful. The result is chronic health problems, including high blood pressure, poor digestion, heart disease and general fatigue.

You can turn on your calming system and decrease the amount of stress hormones in your blood in one easy step: Focus on your breath. Just perform this simple in-and-out breath break anywhere and anytime: in a parking lot or on a train or bus, in your office, at home.  Studies of this technique show that it results in slower pulse, lower blood pressure, relaxed intestinal muscles and lower cortisol, adrenaline and blood carbon dioxide levels.

Breath Break

• Sit up straight, close your eyes.
 Breathe in through your nose to the count of four, focusing on the sensation of the air moving through your nostrils.
• Breathe out for a count of four, feeling the air as it leaves your nose. 
Pause for a beat at the end of your exhale before you breathe in again.
• Continue for two minutes.

If an idea starts spinning through your brain during this breath break, just say to yourself, “breathing,” and gently bring your focus back to your breath. The idea is not to engage in thoughts—just to focus on your breath.

Ideally, you should take a breath break every two hours throughout the day. It’s an especially helpful exercise to do upon waking in the morning—just sit at the edge of your bed first thing in the morning, for 15 minutes if possible. Or, if you wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, focus on your breath, gently moving aside intruding thoughts of your daytime life.

You can move this stress-reduction break toward traditional meditation by introducing a word such as “calm,” “peace,” “om”—or any other sound or word that works for you. As long as you focus on the word and not the thoughts that come unwittingly to mind, you are helping to turn on the calming systems in your body.

There are many types of meditation, including mindfulness meditation, during which you focus on thinking kind thoughts about objects or people in your life. There are also many resources where you can learn meditation techniques, including books, CD’s and downloads. But the simple breath-break skill that I’ve described here is a good place to start.

You will find, as millions have before you, that breath breaks and meditation are useful skills that can transform your response to stress and improve your health throughout your life.

Here is a collection of recent health news you can use.  We’re focusing on whole-body health. Click on the links to read more about each topic.

Keep on doing it: Women who were active for an average of an hour a day didn’t gain weight over a 15-year period. That’s a good reason to make movement a daily habit: Schedule an exercise class, take the stairs instead of the elevator, ride your bike to the store, or exit the bus early and walk to your destination. Another reason to spend more time on your feet: Women who walk reduce their risk of stroke.

Pilates keeps a pro in the game: How does a 37-year-old man stay competitive in professional basketball? Six-foot, four-inch Dallas Mavericks point guard Jason Kidd credits his long career to yoga and Pilates. The Mayo Clinic agrees: To prevent injury, Mayo researchers recommend a balanced fitness program that includes yoga and Pilates, especially for middle-aged Boomers.

Connect for your health: Yes, you can work out alone. But joining others—in a group exercise setting, for example—can boost your health in many ways. In this study, feeling lonely raised the blood pressure in those 50 and older. Connection with others is a key component of wellness.

What’s on your plate does matter: You know you’re supposed to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Now a study of half a million Europeans shows that high intake of fruits and vegetables reduced incidence of cancer cases by just 4 percent a year, not as much as experts expected. But there are so many other reasons to eat more plants: In another study, a Mediterranean diet (based on vegetables, fish, and healthy fats such as olive oil) cut risk of Alzheimer’s by nearly 40 percent in a group of New Yorkers. And don’t forget your heart: Research shows that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduces risk of heart disease by 19 percent.

Your breakfast choice determines your day:  A new study shows that if you include fat in the first meal of your day, you set your metabolism to burn fat the rest of your waking hours. The sugary breakfast turned on carbohydrate metabolism. What’s the difference? You have unlimited fats stores in your body, but your supply of carbohydrates is scant. Just make sure your breakfast fats are healthy: Pass by the bacon, and reach for nuts, eggs, and fish. Another reason to quit the simple carbs: High glycemic index foods may raise risk of heart disease in women (Good-bye, plain bagel! So long, cornflakes!).