Healthy Living Tips
Food & Nutrition
Personal Finance
Today’s Read: 3.5 minutes
We hope you had a restful holiday, full of love, and happy moments. This week we are looking toward the new year. While resolutions are passé, today we focus on the quick, easy ways to care for yourself physically and fiscally.
You want to eat better
Sure, it is simple to say that you want to eat better but life under the weight of the coronavirus makes the motivation to meal plan, shop, and cook still drag. Bloomberg reports that the days of tending to sourdough starter are being replaced with more instant cooking pursuits from coffee to dinner. Eating well can also be an instant pursuit. Here are a couple of companies making food faster without sacrificing taste.
Daily Harvest. What started out as a premade smoothie delivery service has blossomed into a plant-based menu of soups, bowls, and pints. You choose what you want, it is delivered, then you freeze until you’re ready to prepare and eat.
Freshly. This meal service does all the chopping and assembly for you. Most meals are ready in 3 minutes and you can determine your dietary preferences.
Pressed Juicery. If green juices are your thing but you don’t want to spend nearly $10 a bottle, let us suggest this juice shop, whose bottles make their way into our refrigerator every January.Snap Kitchen. Serving mostly the southern part of the country, this meal delivery service prep, cooks, and delivers to your door the meals you choose.
You want to save for retirement
You don’t need to stash away hordes of cash for retirement, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, make tiny changes that can add up. Some suggestions are:
- Keep your savings bar low; such as putting 1% of your salary into your 401K or into an IRA. Low bars are more likely to survive difficult times.
- Celebrate positive steps. Instead of dwelling on past financial indiscretions, focus on the positive things you are doing now.
- Experiment to find savings. Instead of giving up your daily coffee shop visit, look for easy money in other places, like cancelling subscriptions you don’t use or saving a portion of your bonus or tax refund. After tackling these smaller saving situations, look for others that may need more effort: refinancing a mortgage, finding a better cell phone plan, or renegotiating rent.
- Celebrate. Each time you complete a task to formulate your financial future—even as simple as doing a monthly spending review, celebrate the step.
You want to lose weight
Try moving for 40 to 60 minutes six days a week, according to a follow-up study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
In 2018, researchers looked at whether there was a ceiling to how many calories people would consume after exercise. Researchers had participants burn either 1,500 or 3,000 calories a week to see if there was a high point of calories consumed to compensate for calories burned.
There was, and that number was 1,000. No matter whether the participants burned 1,500 or 3,000 calories they ate 1,000 more calories. So those who exercised more lost more weight. The take-home: The more time exercising, the more calories burned per week, the more deficit created, and the more weight lost.
Now, this latest study builds upon the 2018 finding by mostly recreating it. Again, those who worked out the most, lost the most weight. But this time, the researchers discovered that the 300-minutes-per-week workout group experienced changes in their appetite hormones; specifically, the levels of leptin—the hormone that can reduce appetite. What does this mean? The more exercise increased the exercisers’ sensitivity to the hormone, enabling them to better regulate their desire to eat. Those who exercised less didn’t experience this.
Together this pair of studies show how exercise can help us lose weight; more exercise not only creates a deficit but changes our appetite.
The number of people screened at airport checkpoints around the U.S. on Sunday, according to TSA data. It is the highest number of travelers the TSA has recorded since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared in March.
We have all been here.