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How to get a better night's sleep as a busy mom

10/21/2021

We are a society that has become overcommitted and overstimulated, we don't get enough down time or sleep time. 51% of moms are getting less sleep then they need and it is killing us. We need to take more care of our sleep time. It is a time for cell renewal and rejuvenation, allows us to manage our stress hormones, gut health, weight gain, reduces chronic disease development, cognitive functioning and our overall safety.

If you aren't getting enough sleep you are increasing your risk of disease, did you know that one week of poor sleep decreases your immune system function for up to a year.

So if you are unsure about whether or not you are struggling with sleep, I want you to think about these 3 things.

Do you have trouble falling or staying asleep more than 3 days a week
Struggle to fall asleep for more than 30 min, or if you wake up in the middle of the night are you up for more than 30 min.
Does this happen for 3 weeks or longer.

Us mama's our hormones will be affected, grehlin will go up which will have you craving more sweet and carbs and leptin will go down which is the hormone that helps you to feel full. (Go deeper in our master class in the membership portal).

5 things to help you get a better night sleep:

1. The lighting with electronics and dim the lights in the house

2. create a routine (weekend warriors-you are messing up your sleep clock as it takes 4 days for your body to get back on track).

3. Breathing techniques to really let your body know that it is time to relax and calm down.

4. Consume alchohol at least 3 hours prior to bed as it will mess up your sleep cycle.

5. Try to go to bed before 10pm, 2 reasons-your skin senses and processes light so even if you are sleeping your hormones are starting to be affected and for each hour before midnight you go to sleep you can count that as an extra hour of sleep.

If you are struggling to get the mind to stop racing in the evening I recommend Ashwaganda helps to relieve depression, anxiety, and stress to help with this or Melatonin- hormone of darkness doesn't help you to sleep, it just tells your body it's time to sleep

Wishing you a good night's sleep this week and if you are ready to dive in deeper to your personal and family health journey along with understanding and supporting your hormones involved in sleep, you will want to join our Membership program.

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How to organize your papework at home

10/19/2021

I had the opportunity to speak with Tracy Hoth, with Simply Squared Away, about best practices to organize our lives as busy moms and families. Some days the clutter and amount of paperwork that comes home can be overwhelming. How do we know what to keep, where to keep it and how long to keep it? As a professional organizer Tracy has great tips to help us get ourselves organized and to help our kids stay organized.

Many times when we look at all the clutter and paperwork mounting on the counter or desk our brains get overwhelmed. Tracy says we need to get to the nitty gritty of our mental block.

Why can’t we organize?
What is stopping us from cleaning up?
Once we recognize what is stopping us from starting then we can flow and begin with one step at a time to organizing our lives.

When it comes to organizing all the paperwork that comes home from school, Hoth recommends the following:

Immediately go through the paperwork and add to a keep or trash pile. If the keep paperwork has an action attached to it then add it to the action bin so you know to follow up on it.
If a form has a date on it, add to your calendar when the form is due or needs to be completed by.
For the items that you will keep, put them in the bin. Then when you have more time you can go through that bin and organize it even more.

Once we have ourselves on the road to organizational bliss we can then turn our attention to helping our kids organize themselves. Taking time once a week to sit down with children and plan out what they have to do is immensely helpful to teaching them how to organize. It can be a quick check in to help them know what they have coming up that week, what assignments or tests are due and activity schedules.

Tracy has many more great ideas when it comes to organizing ourselves and our families. Listen to episode 24 How to Organize your Paperwork at Home for great tips and tricks and to learn about joining Tracy's online program through her company Simply Squared Away.

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Calm the nervous system with breathing

10/18/2021

If you are feeling anxious I want to teach you a skill I learned from reading the book Breath by James Nestor. Depending on the nostril you are breathing through with depend on whether you will have a s sympathetic or parasympathetic response. The right nostril is one that is like speeding up, you think of if you want to breathe through your right nostril, you're speeding everything up. So your blood pressure rises, your heart rate increases, cortisol levels go up, your body gets hotter. And this is actually really good. If you are in need of doing something like making logical decisions, or computing information, because this kind of activity uses the prefrontal cortex.

The other side, the left nostril is more your parasympathetic, it slows everything down. So thinking of it in the sense of you know, when you're getting ready for bed at night, wanting to slow heart rate, drop your blood pressure, lowers the temperature of the body and reduces anxiety.

So what we are going to have you practice is just practice breathing through the right and left nostril. Now they he makes a recommendation in here about when you sit down to eat, you want to be more of a parasympathetic state. So we're thinking of slowing down during that time, relaxing, moving through the eating nice and slow, or at the end of the day, when you're getting ready to go to sleep. That is when you're going to want to breathe through your left nostril. But right after you have eaten, then you're going to want to flip to the right nostril and use that to aid in digestion. So we're going to heat up the body and it's going to aid in digestion. And this is going to be really, really easy and that's why this is a fun movement snack in regards to breath. So when you want to calm your body down, you're going to cover your right nostril with your thumb or an index finger and breathe through your left side.

So remember, left nostril slows things down. Right nostrils speeds things up. So if you are wanting to, you know when you wake up in the morning and you're wanting to get moving and get going start practicing breathing through the right nostril, keeping your mouth closed. And then when evening comes about, start breathing through the left nostril. Again, for those of you who deal with anxiety, this is also a great practice to start practicing breathing a little bit more through one side to create more of a response.

If you are interested in learning more about breathing techniques and what they can do for the body, then join us in our Membership and use code: fit50 to receive the first month for just $12.50, you can cancel at anytime.

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Meditation and breathing

10/13/2021

Meditation is a mind body practice that has been shown to increase calmness and physical relaxation. It is such an important element to add to our lives while we work to balance our lives and reduce our feelings of overwhelm and stress. While many people feel they don’t have time to add one more thing to their daily lives think of meditation as a way to give your brain a break. We are constantly on and doing things in todays world. Taking five minutes out of your day to rest your mind can allow you to truly feel connected to yourself.

One way to add meditation to your day without sitting down is to do a walking meditation. Go outside for a walk. Leave your music and phone at home and focus on enjoying the sounds around you. Remember when as a child you would look up at the clouds and come up with what they looked like? Channel your inner child and take five minutes to watch the clouds or the flowers and just be in that moment.

A humming meditation is one you can do while driving. Humming has been shown to help reduce stress and blood pressure while increasing lymphatic circulation and melatonin production. It is a simple way to stimulate brain cells and allow the body and mind to become one again. Take a few deep breaths and on the exhale begin to hum until you need to inhale. Do that as many times as you’d like or set a timer. You will feel the results immediately as your body will feel more vibrant and awake.

My final suggestion is to try box breathing. This technique is used by the Navy SEALS as a way for them to stay calm in stressful situations. Starting with a count of four, breathe in for four counts and exhale for four counts. Continue doing this pattern for 5-10 minutes and as you practice this method you can increase the count for both inhales and exhales.

There are many ways to add meditation into our day without making it feel like one more thing we need to do. Listen in to my podcast episode 15 where I dive deeper into meditation, various ways to meditate and why it’s so good for you.

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Helping your Child Navigate life after High School

10/8/2021

Children are constantly asked what do they want to be when they grow up. From a young age it's fun to dream about all the different things kids can be when they leave the nest. This question gets more critical as they enter high school and get closer to graduating. Parents start stressing about a plan for when their child turns 18 and graduates high school. On the other hand, our high schoolers stress when they don’t know what they want to do and worry about making decisions that seemingly determine the rest of their lives.

For many parents and kids they think the only option is to go to some type of college and obtain a degree. Author Stephanie Haynes wants parents to know that there are many options outside of the traditional four year college route and wrote the book College in Not Mandatory to help parents and children navigate this next major milestone.

Haynes wrote the book after realizing there is a cultural stigma if children don’t plan to attend college after high school. Many people think that a person can not be successful without at least a bachelors degree. After one of her own children went through college and at the end found they wanted to do something that didn’t need the degree they got, she felt the need to let parents and kids know the other options that exist. College and formal education is not always where a child thrives and she lays out a process parents and their children can follow to ask the hard questions of what to do after high school.

The book covers five main options that exist after high school graduation. The five options include:

community college
trade school or apprenticeships
taking a gap season
joining the military
and college or a student who wants to pursue becoming a professional athlete

With each option Haynes details steps the parents can take with their child to help them navigate what might be new territory to them.
Helping to assess your child and their goals for after graduation is a main purpose of College in Not Mandatory. Listen in to episode 22 where I go into more detail with Haynes about the five options and how she suggests we start the conversation with our kids.

Struggling with Eczema or other Skin Conditions

10/6/2021

I recently had the opportunity to try products from The Hard Lotion company. As a mom who has children who have struggled with eczema in the past I was excited to try it as an alternative to the steroid creams prescribed by our pediatrician. I was amazed at the results and asked Renee, the founder of Hard Lotion, to tell me how and why her product is so successful with just three ingredients.

Renee is a mother of nine children. As a mom of nine you can imagine she’s seen her fair share of skin rashes but she also struggled with cracked hands and fingers herself which were exacerbated by the many times she was washing her hands everyday as a mom. Her mother introduced her to a lotion bar which was all natural with no harsh ingredients or fragrances and was amazed at how well the bar worked. Renee enjoyed making her own things like yogurt and decided she would try to make her own lotion bar formulation and that was how her company began.

The three ingredients she began with were:

coconut oil
shea butter
beeswax

While simple and natural, the ingredients worked together to layer her skin in a protective barrier so even when she went to wash her hands, she wasn’t washing away the lotion meant to protect her skin. After her experiment on herself she successfully used it on her sons eczema and drastically reduced their use of a topical steroid. At the time, she was a homeschooling mom and decided to have her children help start a small business that would be sold at local farmers markets and that is how The Hard Lotion Company began its journey.

Listen in to episode 18 to hear Renee's remarkable journey and to learn more about the amazing products her company offers. There is also a special discount code: FORMFIT you can use when purchasing products from their website.

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Family Road Trip

10/4/2021

While many moms cringe at the thought of a family road trip they actually can give families the opportunity to create lifelong memories and have time together that otherwise might not ever happen. Planning is key when it comes to a successful road trips. Below I’ve outlined some snack and game ideas to bring along on your next adventure.

When it comes to long car trips kids constantly want to snack mainly out of boredom. Preparing ahead of time to bring healthy snacks will help you avoid the processed foods at gas stations. Below is a list of my family’s favorite road trip snacks:

Frozen grapes- these double as a snack and an ice pack! Freeze grapes a few days ahead of time in individual baggies so they can be packed quickly the morning you leave.

Pre-cut veggies and fruits and single serve dips or nut butters

Trail mix- you can make your own with dried fruit, pumpkin seeds, nuts, pretzels, chocolate chips etc

Homemade muffins

String cheese and crackers

When you family isn’t asking for snacks then keep them entertained with portable activities. For little children bring a jelly roll baking sheet with magnetic letters and numbers they can play with. Another great option for littles are car games such as eye spy, bingo and the license plate game. As children get older you can bring card games, Mad Libs, books and travel logic games.

Lastly, audiobooks and podcasts can entertain everyone. Find audiobooks and podcasts that are geared specifically for children. Many times they cover funny topics and provide a break from just listening to music.

When it comes to road trips, remember to prepare ahead of time and enjoy the journey. Some of your family's favorite memories could happen in those moments and be remembered forever.

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Text Neck

10/1/2021

Text neck is poor posture from looking down at your phone all day and we spend on average about 4 hours a day looking at our phone. Each time you do this, you increase the weight of the head which puts more pressure on your cervical spine (see the above picture). This can cause disk compression, early on-set arthritis, problems swallowing as you age, decrease in lung capacity, and can lead to heart and blood vascular disease.

So it is important that we pay attention to our forward head posture and practice exercises and stretches to decrease the forwardness of the head. There is also an app that will indicate when your holding your phone in a position that decreases forward head posture.

If you notice that you are in this position often I recommend working on some stretches and exercises to help combat this (below), putting the phone down more throughout the day, and buying a NeckRite pillow to help when you and your children are on the computer, phone's or even when reading a book.

Relax your Eyes

9/29/2021

When you and your children spend time staring at phone's it will begin to affect the eyes. Your eyes are a muscle and when they are looking at phones, computers, reading books, and even just being inside all day it means are eyes are having to work a lot (the muscles are being contracted) all day long.

Your eyes get to relax when you go outside and look at something far away, so I would love for you to go outside and look at something far off in the distance to help to relax the muscles in the eyes. Help you and your children have good eye health by getting outside, looking at things far away, and just enjoy all of the beauty that the outside holds.

Helping Moms Get Unstuck

9/27/2021

Holistic health coach Melissa Rohlfs is a wife and mother to two children who has experienced her own sense of overwhelm and now works to help moms become calm, confident and healthy in their motherhood journey.

In todays era of homeschooling, quarantining, mask debates and more she has noticed many mothers having more anxiety as their children return to school coupled with a sense of relief that life is returning to normal. As a way to manage this sense of overwhelm and anxiety Melissa suggests that moms block out 10 minutes a day in their calendar to take a break and decompress and get their emotions in check. Many times doing a “brain dump” and getting all of our thoughts out of our head can help us stay focused and centered.

Another suggestion Melissa has is to be prepared to say no. Before responding with an automatic yes to all favors asked of you, ask to have some time to think about it and look at your schedule. Tell the person asking for your time that you will get back to them within 24 hours and if it doesn’t fit in your schedule time wise, or you feel like you’re already committed to too many things, it’s absolutely ok to say no.

Often overlooked, Melissa believes eating properly and following a healthy lifestyle also helps moms keep their anxiety in check. Binging on sugar, simple carbs and alcohol can have significant impacts on a woman's health and emotions. There is generally an underlying reason why moms are using food and alcohol to relax or feel happy. She suggests asking yourself the hard questions of why or what am I looking for in this experience? Most often it’s not the sugar rush but some deeper level of discontent.