Health Management Tips for Business Owners

Once you have developed a great business and are doing well for yourself, be sure you live long enough to enjoy it. The money you earn will be of little use if most of it goes to medical bills. Act while there is still time, and ensure that you enjoy a great quality of life.

Here are a few tips:

Don't Skip Meals(and treat breakfast as sacred) - Doctors report that a large number of patients skip meals and only have coffee and snacks. Breakfast in particular is the keystone of a healthy diet. A nourishing breakfast gives you energy and a feeling of well - being that is so essential to being a productive person. There is a reason for following this practice. If your last meal was dinner at, say, 7 pm and then you skip breakfast and have a snack at 1 pm the next day, you have gone without a meal for about 18 hours. Your body shifts into starvation management mode and begins to conserve the energy you have. The result is fatigue and lethargy. Your body begins to crave fatty food and simple sugars. This makes you pile that plate high at lunch - exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

Eat Those Fruits and Vegetables - With the trend toward eating processed foods comes all kinds of diseases and ailments. Add a healthy serving of fruit and vegetables to every meal. Doctors and nutritionists advise that you must eat parts of the rainbow every day. Be sure to eat at least three different colors of fruits and vegetables every day.

Stay Hydrated - Most of us don't get enough water in spite of knowing that our bodies are 75% water. Even a small water shortage has a profound effect on the body's functions. At least eight glasses of water are necessary every day, and don't count any fluids you take with alcoholic beverages. Don't wait until you get thirsty.

Try to Exercise Every Day - OK, we all know how important exercise is, but this advice is frequently ignored for many reasons. You may lack the time or the motivation, or it may simply be too boring. There are two easy ways to handle this dilemma:

Build exercise into your routine. Do you really need to use the car to go someplace only a few hundred yards away? You will probably spend more time looking for a parking space than you will save. A few hundred yards several times a day will add up to something healthy. Just 30 minutes a day is all that is required.

Make exercise enjoyable. Play a light game, bond with your children, spouse, coworkers, or neighbors. This form of exercise is far more valuable than pumping iron or running long distance alone because it gives you social and emotional benefits as well.

So much for the physical state of well - being. Now we must consider some higher issues:

Think Long Term - Many people think that business is a game and money is how you keep score. But there are things far more important than money. Once you have gone beyond a certain point - when you are secure and your fundamental needs are met - think long term. Have you developed a relationship with your children and your spouse where they look up to you and where you look forward to sitting together? Or are you all leading separate lives living in the same house? Who will cry when you die?

Give - Have you heard of tithing? This is a practice of giving away 10 percent of what you have to a charitable cause. You are not bound to do this, but there is great evidence that proves tithing helps you overcome a feeling of scarcity and actually helps you achieve greater wealth and prosperity. Working for a cause greater than your own interests provides a great psychological boost and a tremendous source of mental well - being. For many people, it is very important to lead a life that encompasses living, learning, loving, and leaving a legacy.

Health management is critical to a quality of life that all of us look forward to. There is more to health than just a good body mass index and muscle tone. Good all - around health will ensure that you enjoy your allotted time on this planet and leave it with a sense of satisfaction that you have achieved what you set out to do.

The Golden Rules:

Your health is critical to enjoying your success; look after your health

Think about the long term; relationships are critical; don't damage these for small gains

Share your wealth to make a better world; even a little bit helps

Health and Fitness Are Not The Same

Few would argue the fact that regular physical activity has been shown to reduce the risk of certain chronic diseases, including hypertension (high blood pressure), stroke, coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer and osteoporosis in addition to improving one's quality of life. According to the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology, to reduce the risk of chronic disease, it is recommended that adults accumulate at least 60 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most, preferably all, days of the week. At this point you are likely wondering how you could possibly perform 60 minutes of physical activity consecutively, let alone find a free hour in your busy day. Before these thoughts cause you to stop reading this article, let me emphasize the magnificence of CSEP's recommendation and what researchers have discovered about exercise. The key to health and chronic disease prevention is the accumulation of daily physical activity. Further notice that the specifics of the type of physical activity are also missing. Sure, some activities are indeed better than others, but the term 'better' is specific to one's goals. For cardiovascular health, activities that use large muscle mass and rhythmic motions such as walking, biking and swimming are great, but this doesn't mean other forms of physical activity aren't effective. In fact, any activity that gets you moving will do just fine. I have intentionally been avoiding the use of the term exercise. Exercise is typically associated with pain, sweat, and in some cases misery! By using the term physical activity we encompass things such as gardening, washing the car, dancing, playing with children and even housework. To understand why these activities, even in small amounts are great for our health we must first understand that multiple short bouts of physical activity provide all the health benefits of a single long bout of physical activity.

How can this be? If we separate the terms health and fitness this will make more sense. Health is defined by the World Health Organization as 'a total physical and psychological sense of wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease'. Fitness on the other hand is tied closely to physical performance and sport such as the ability to run quickly or for long periods of time. A regular walker or hiker can therefore be every bit as healthy as a marathon runner despite lacking the fitness attributes that allow the runner to complete a race in a limited amount of time. A more concrete example of this would be comparing blood pressure and blood cholesterol between runners and walkers. Assuming that other lifestyle, diet and genetics are similar, the results of these tests would be similar and doctors would give each a clean bill of health with respect to these measures.

How does one train for health or fitness? Different intensities and types of exercise confer different benefits. Vigorous physical activity (running and sprinting) provides greater benefits for physical fitness than does moderate physical activity (walking) and burns more calories per unit of time. Resistance exercise (such as weight training, using weight machines, and resistance band workouts) increases muscular strength and endurance and maintains or increases muscle mass. These benefits are seen in adolescents, adults, and older adults who perform resistance exercises on 2 or more days per week. Also, weight-bearing exercise has the potential to reduce the risk of osteoporosis by increasing peak bone mass during growth, maintaining peak bone mass during adulthood, and reducing the rate of bone loss during aging. In addition, regular exercise can help prevent falls, which is of particular importance for older adults.

It is important to recognize that the intensity of exercise is relative to the individual and not the activity. Thus brisk walking for an inactive individual with excess weight may be the same relative intensity as jogging for an avid runner. Thus a heavier individual should expect to experience elevated breathing and heart rate at lower intensities than a lighter or more fit individual.

The barrier often given for a failure to be physically active is lack of time. Setting aside 60 consecutive minutes each day for planned exercise is one way to obtain physical activity, but it is not the only way. Physical activity may include short bouts (10-minute bouts) of moderate-intensity activity. The accumulated total is what is important-both for health and for weight management. Physical activity can be accumulated through three to six 5-10 minute bouts over the course of a day. Consider incorporating both longer bouts and shorter accumulated bouts of activity into your day to increase your odds of achieving 60 minutes physical activity daily.

Pedometers are great for measuring the accumulation of physical activity. It does not matter if physical activity comes from house hold chores, a walk, a hike or a run. Further, a pedometer provides motivation, reminds us to spend less time sitting and rewards us for all activity. Remember, what matters is accumulation of physical activity and every step counts. Changing our minds about what counts as exercise can be motivating, rewarding and when you realize that all activity counts, you might just have the best kept yard and cleanest house on the block!