Feel like you’re sleepwalking all day, even after a full night’s sleep?  You need to find ways to boost your energy and fight fatigue so you can get your spark back.

One of the best read articles on this blog is titled 10 foods to boost energy. Week by week it will be in the top three blog posts visited.  This demonstrates to me the desperate attempt that so many people are making to find for themselves the answer to how to boost their energy. It seems to be a problem that plaques society. So many people suffering from a lack of energy.

In truth the reasons are simple to diagnose. In most cases their diets are bad, they don’t exercise enough, or get enough sleep and they are suffering from untold stress. One of the end results of this type of lifestyle is a lack of energy. Yet the solution is so simple.

Feeling exhausted all the time is so common, particularly with our busy and stressful lifestyles. The best thing we can do to boost our energy is to make the necessary lifestyle changes so that our stressed systems can recover enough to work the way they are supposed to.

Boosting your energy really can be very simple, yet I understand so many see it as such a daunting task. We have to get our lives back in control and do those things we’ve always known we should be doing. In fact, most of us know that we should be doing these things, but have been putting them off.

Eating tasty appetising takeaways is so much more tempting than a healthy home made grilled chicken salad. Partying all night rather than getting to bed at a reasonable hour to ensure your 8 hours is much more fun. Drinking full fat coke seems to be far more too people’s taste buds favour than healthy bottled cold water. Sitting on the couch watching reality television is the way most prefer to spend an hour instead of going into the gym to look after their body.  Alas everyone of those choices ensures you have a lack of energy where the alternative would considerably boost your energy. A simple choice!

Naturally boosting your energy will take a bit of diligence on your part, and will be something that you need to work at. But stop avoiding the obvious answers to what will boost your energy. There’s no need to keep searching for miraculous answers, just do the basics right.

No one ever said boosting your energy or living a healthier lifestyle wouldn’t take effort, but surely having loads of energy and better health is a price worth paying. .

So, if you want to boost your energy, do the following:

Eat Healthily- Eating healthy balanced meals, made up of protein, and complex carbohydrate meals, every 3 hours or so with small portion sizes will keep your body fuelled all day long so you always have an energy source. Start every day with breakfast, and for my favourite choice try a bowl of porridge with granola and fruit to get your day started off right. Make sure  you eat plenty of fruit and vegetables so to provide your body with the nutrients you need.

Get Enough Sleep – To ensure your body is fully charged you need to be getting around 8 hours of sleep a night.  Your body refuels with sleep; in order to wake up revved you need to ensure you get a good night’s sleep. We all have experienced when your body gets too little sleep you feel wiped out the next day.

Drink Plenty of Water – When your body is dehydrated your energy quickly deserts you.  So it is crucial to keep your body hydrated, and the best way to do this is drinking water. Yep it’s really that simple. Need an energy boost? Drink water. Staying hydrated by drinking water will help increase your energy and assist you in fighting fatigue.

Exercise every day – Want to feel better, have more energy and perhaps even live longer? Look no further than exercise. The health benefits of regular exercise and physical activity are considerable, but one of the main benefits is how energised you will feel. 30 minutes of exercise a day will give you more energy to get through the day.

Practice relaxation – Giving yourself time to do some relaxation exercises such as meditation can help you relax,  Meditations help refocus your thoughts and create positive energy.

So there you have it. The simple things you should be doing to boost your energy levels.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

We can allow ourselves to age so fast if we let ourselves go but shouldn’t we be saying goodbye to middle age spread?

Is it worth all the effort keeping healthy and getting fit?

Only you can decide, but maybe this article may help.

Having been a fitness instructor I found a majority of the guys I’ve trained were obsessed with getting ripped, defined & big. While for the women they generally want to get rid of all their body fat that’s accumulated around some specific body part and they want to achieve a slimmer figure with toned muscle. Who of you hasn’t picked up a magazine, looked at the front cover model, and thought to yourself ‘if only I could have a body like that.’

Although I’m someone who believes working out is fun, I don’t kid myself, what really makes it all worthwhile making the effort of exercising is the results you get from doing it. The better your results the more you seem to enjoy the process. But the worse your results the harder it seems, the less enjoyable, in fact you feel more frustration, lose motivation, then you miss workouts, and ultimately quit all together. As a fitness instructor, we do get disappointed when we see members drop off, and we know that they’ve given up on their dream of getting into shape, or whatever it may have been.

My main responsibility as a gym instructor was to make sure each one of my clients approached training with a new mindset, a new vigour, and most importantly a new “certainty”. What do I mean by certainty? Simple really, if you eat less calories than you use, eat the right foods at the right time, and train the correct way, you will lose weight, burn fat, tone or build muscle. There may be a billion dollar business out there, showing hundreds of ways of achieving these results, and millions of people trying so hard to achieve them, but the truth is follow simple basic principles and you can make your desired results a certainty. Easiest is best. I’m convinced that a lot of people struggle with the journey of weight loss because they get confused with all the conflicting information, and the new must do magical programs.

The difficulty so many people are faced with is there is too much information out there, and people are just too confused as to what they need to do. The problem is this stops them from even getting started. Maybe you’re one of these.

Have you told yourself that you would start exercising “on Monday”?
How many times has “get into shape” been on top of your to do list?

Well I hope that I really do know what I’m doing, because right now all my knowledge is required for one very special client …. Me. I think I’d better explain. My name is Larry and I was once a fully qualified personal trainer and owner of gyms. Neil my business partner asked me just the other day ‘Larry, why aren’t you any longer writing articles about fitness, like you did when you first started blogging’.

Well back then I worked out every day. Consistently. In fact I had done so for close to two decades. But circumstances have prevented me from doing so in the last few years.

Since my eye operation back in May 2009 it has become far more irregular. I was not allowed to exercise for over a year, and after that work had changed so much for me it was much harder to schedule. Now that sounds like an excuse if I’ve ever heard one. Then last year, something I’ve never mentioned before, I was diagnosed with a cyst on my brain. This only affected me by way of a permanent headaches and a lack of energy, which with medication and willpower, I managed to work through. But if by now I hadn’t been a full time blogger, writing my beloved blog at Healthy Lifestyles Living instead still needing to work my shifts on the gym floor, well I would have struggled big time. Another reason why I know blogging was my fate, my destiny. But I digress. Every time I tried to exercise my headache intensified by 100%, the world began to spin, and for an hour later I was like a spinning top. Just bending down to pick a medium weighted dumbbell of the floor, would make my head go.

So my body has deteriorated from where it was. My muscular shaped body has disappeared. Fast being replaced by this aging over weight tub of lard, well ok, it’s not that bad, but it’s not that good either. Being a fitness expert with many years of experience helping other people get in shape I’ve always not only talked the talk, but walked the walk, being in really good shape myself. And I find it really difficult to keep pronouncing my knowledge and advising people what to do, while my body is no longer what it should be.

With my passion being helping people & promoting healthy living and personal development I want to be able to once again be able to do, live and be my passion without bodily limitations, so I am going to start working out again, and writing about it.

You need a strong, healthy body in order to live a full and healthy life.
You need energy.
You need strength and functional fitness.
You need a strong core & lower back.
So you need to exercise.

I’ve reinvented myself many times but then I was younger, so this challenge is no doubts going to be tough, but it won’t beat me. I will get this body of mine back in to shape. A fat to fit journey is now what I need to bring about my transformation.

Anyone can do this. Middle age is not the beginning of the end where we have to accept old age graciously and accept deterioration of our mind and bodies. Age is just a number, and I’ve always been useless at maths.

I’m not one who want to laze around on the couch after work. So I’ve made a choice, to no longer beat myself up about this body I’ve acquired, but simply to do something about it and get myself back into the body I’m used to having. ,

I have to get myself back into the gym, just no longer as a fit person. I know I will have to get over the embarrassment and just get it done. It’s time for me to bounce back while navigating through my own workout hell. And blog about it so I can help others do the same thing.

I want to get back into shape and I want to help you do the same. For some of you we may be talking about getting you into the best shape of your life. I promise you this is not just a worthwhile journey, but also a possible one.

If it seems too difficult right now, don’t worry, just take one small step at a time. Healthy living is an obtainable goal, you don’t have to get there in double quick time. And the fact of the matter is getting healthy has to be one of the most important things you can do. So as I start my journey of regular exercise, healthy eating, stress management and getting plenty of sleep, let me show you what us oldies can do and follow suit. I will journal it all, and provide the knowledge you need.

Everyone can do something to improve your health, let me know if you’re interested. .

So for me it’s now time to get in the gym. I will also write in future about my friends at Bio-Synergy and some of their awesome supplements which are going to help me get the results I’m going to be working so hard to achieve.

So it’s goodbye to my middle age spread.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

My blog and business is centered around advising people to live a healthy lifestyle and supporting them in that quest.  My blog in particular tries to be both inspirational and educational while showing people what it takes to have a healthy mind, body and spirit.

An incredibly important resource for those who share the common interests of  optimum health, fitness and nutrition is supplementation.  Supplements are a huge area of importance for health and fitness. The supplement market is full of products that promise the world and deliver next to nothing.

When it comes to health and fitness, there are no shortcuts. While the main components of a healthy lifestyle consist of a proper, balanced healthy diet and regular exercise, there are also substances in nature that can help you on your journey to establishing a healthy lifestyle

We are proud to have become a partner with an amazing company and their incredible range of products. Their name is Bio-Synergy and they offer a fantastic range of nutritional products and supplements.

Bio-Synergy is a market leader in premium supplements. They offer a huge range of products, from Creatine to the Bio Synergy Body Perfect capsules. They have established all-UK Bio-Synergy manufacturing facilities and are one of the few certified by HFL Laboratories for Olympic quality, meaning their products are approved for the world’s top athletes.

Bio-Synergy is a UK company committed to providing the very best nutritional and sports supplements on the market. You can’t doubt their ambition or their undoubted quality when you not only look at who their shareholder is but read his words. Lord Seb Coe the man who oversaw the widely acclaimed London Olympics and Paralympics 2012 , a shareholder of Bio-Synergy said:

“Our aim is to be the number one sports nutrition company in the world!”

The name BioSynergy interested me. What did it mean? Like any good blogger I went searching. Psychologist Anthony L. Rose puts it this way:

“Biosynergy is the fundamental and overarching process that sustains life on Earth. It’s seed and its spark have been born and imbedded in every living cell, organism, and ecosystem since the beginning of time. Biosynergy is the inner force that compels each and every individual being to collaborate with others for the greater good.”

The Biosynergy institute define it as:

bi·o·syn·er·gy n.

1. The interaction of two or more biological agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. 2. Cooperative interaction among species, especially among the individuals and groups in an ecosystem, that creates an enhanced combined effect. 3. The theory that organisms cooperate with passage of time in the same ecosystem, mainly as a result of reciprocal altruism, so that biosocial structure and dynamics change to assure the vigor of all life forms. [Greek, from bios, life. From Greek sunergia, cooperation, from sunergos, working together.)

Well we will be working together with Bio Synergy to bring their wonderful products to you and showing you exactly how they can change your life.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

I received a phone call one night last week from somebody experiencing a traumatic event and she was absolutely terrified. She was undergoing a panic attack that came out of nowhere.

There she was sitting on a train travelling to see a friend. Suddenly, a wave of panic overcomes her – her heart raced, her pulse throbbed, the world spun, heat poured through her body and she could hardly catch her breath. She was terrified. Feeling so out of control. It was by far the worst feeling she had ever experienced.

This was the first time she had ever experienced a panic attack. It caught her totally off guard. At the time it really scared her, and now after she is really worried about it happening again. She is very much on edge about this possibility.

I know she’s not alone. This happens to so many people. The good news is that panic attacks can be overcome.

Panic attacks are spells of intense anxiety. They come on quickly, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, and although they usually only last for a few minutes the feelings of anxiety they bring can last for much longer. Also a person that suffers from a panic attack  may feel drained and jittery for hours afterward.

Usually it is a lot of different factors that end up leading up to an attack. In the main it’s all the stress they are under that just seems to build up and eventually explode.

We need to look at your fight or flight response to understand what’s happening.  In response to the release of hormones such as adrenaline, your blood pressure increases and breathing speeds up preparing you for muscular effort. The symptoms displayed when having panic attacks (adrenaline rush, fast heart rate, sweating etc) are the natural reaction of the human body to prepare itself to face and deal with imminent danger. Such as preparing to fight, run or take quick action. Your body is getting you prepared to deal with a crises. But you don’t see it like that.

With the panic attacks seemingly coming from  nowhere and nothing specific that triggers it, panic attacks raise nothing but questions for those who suffer from them.

How to stop panic attacks? That is the one question that all people suffering from panic attacks ask. That’s the question I want to answer today for the lady that phoned me last week.

Here are 10 ways to Stop Panic Attacks.

Positive Thinking. Panic attacks almost solely originate from the mind. Everyone has mental chatter which is the constant flow of thoughts and internal dialogues within us. We will have at least some mental chatter going throughout the day, but when that is frequently negative we are leaving ourselves open to problems. So it is crucial to cut out negative thinking. People may for years had automatic negative thoughts running around in their head, well now take conscious control, cut them off and allow positivity to take over.

Take Control. When panic attacks strike we feel out of control.  So our first step is to take control. Once you have suffered from a panic attack you now need to turn into a private investigator. Stop looking into the future and thinking about the next time it may happen and instead try and understand maybe why it occurred in the first place. Start by really looking, in detail, at your panic attacks. When did they happen? Where were you? What were you thinking? See if you can identify particular thoughts that trigger the panic attack. By tracing possible causes enables you to take control and make changes.

Put Your Foot Down. Too often we let situations get the better of us. We may be unhappy about things but we do nothing to sort them. We just put up with them.  Often you will find areas in your life that are indeed troubling you.  You may be having panic attacks because there are aspects of your life that are bothering you. These may be connected to your family life, your career, and so on. By identify changes you would like to make can make a huge difference. You simply have to stop putting up things that you’re not happy with. Put your foot down at last. It’s time for you to be assertive. Understand that when you let situation or people walk all over you it undermines you and stresses you out more than most things will and can bring you to a point of great weakness.

Take Time To Relax Your Body. So frequently you see people walking around looking as though they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Their bodies are so tight, you can see the frowns on their face, the clenched jaws, shoulders up around their ears. This physiology is going to do them no good at all. They are carrying stress and just asking for trouble. SO practicing a good relaxation exercise such as Progressive Muscular Relaxation will ease the tension and relax them both physically and mentally.

Make Deep Breathing Your Norm. Many people get into the habit of breathing shallowly, from the upper chest, rather than more slowly from the abdomen. Put one hand on your upper chest and the other on your stomach. Notice which hand moves as you breathe. The hand on your chest should hardly move, if you are breathing correctly from the diaphragm, but the hand on your stomach should rise and fall. Practise this breathing, slowly and calmly, every day.

Get your heart pumping daily. You have to get your heart pumping every day. Many studies have proven that regular exercise is an excellent anxiety treatment in that it reduces the stress hormones and elevates feel good  hormones. You can start with brisk walking, where you aren’t just ideally walking but putting effort in and walking at a tempo of around 4 miles an hour.

Confide in someone close. Let people who are close to you know you have a problem. Try to explain your situation as clearly as possible; talk about things that worry you, don’t conceal anything, you have to trust them and know they care about you and want nothing more than to help you.  Don’t bottle up your emotions. Find someone to confide in.

Sleep is essential. You need to rest your body sufficiently to ensure it is best equipped to deal with the stress and strains of modern day living. On average 8 hours of sleep are required every night. Get some rest. This will equip you so much better for the stresses of daily life.

The good news is that if you’ve only ever had one panic attack 50 per cent of people never experience another attack. Be sensible though and implement some of these suggested changes.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

As a healthy lifestyle living blogger I have a goal: to turn people’s lives around by helping them get fit and healthy. Not everyone loves to hit the gym, slave away on the cardiovascular machines and work their muscles to breaking points with the weights like I do. Fortunately there are so many other options open to everyone, and here at Healthy Lifestyles Living we want to offer solutions to help people get fit and healthy in ways that suit them best.

Sport can impact us all at every level of our being: body, mind, soul and spirit. Sport has been defined as “all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organized participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental wellbeing, forming social  relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels.” Engaging in sport is one of the ways of being physically active and has a great influence on the level of health

Individuals who do sport are more likely to meet the recommendations for physical activity related to health than those who are not active in sport .

WHO defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” To achieve the highest possible level of health, you need to actively participate in physical activity.  Physical activity reduces the risk of most chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, overweight and obesity, type 2 diabetes and several cancers. Furthermore, physical activity improves musculoskeletal health and psychological well-being.

We have no doubts that promoting sport will help many of you to improve your lifestyles. Shooting Hoops. Running on the track. Playing badminton on court. Lifting Weights in the gym. Kicking a football in the park. You have so many choices of sports you could be playing. I have always loved both the competitive of sport and the comaderie that it can bring. Authoring this healthy lifestyles living blog for almost three years it seems a natural progression that sport should find its way back to being a central feature of my life. After all sport should be part of a healthy lifestyle , and just doing it is so good for you. Nobody should disregard the benefits that maintaining a reasonable level of fitness can bring to you.

Soon sport will be playing an even bigger part here at Healthy Lifestyles. We will be bringing you an online store that will be stocking products necessary to build a healthy lifestyle or to keep fit or play sport. Our collection will grow through the year. My excitement about this phase of our growth knows no bounds. We will be selling fitness and sporting goods, selling dreams and selling a healthy lifestyle.

I still have to shake myself to believe we are about to open our very own sporting goods shop. To have this opportunity to marry my love for my work with my lifelong passion for sports seems almost too good to be true.

Sports has always been central to my life. I do an hour minimum of sports seven days a week. I run, I lift weights, I’m on the treadmill .I used to do a lot of team sports in the past such as football and basketball. I played racket sports weekly, squash and either badminton or tennis depending on the time of year.  Now I will be doing this again and who wouldn’t when they have the best equipment money can buy at their fingertips.

That’s the most amazing thing. We are not selling cheap made products but the best of the best, all the famous brands. This has all come about thanks to being a blogger and believing in the power of blogging as a platform for launching a business. So soon Healthy Lifestyles Living will be a blog supported by a fully fledged fitness and sports shop. We are making living a healthy lifestyle even easier allow you to get busy doing it.

It is amazing what’s possible when you bring your passions, hobbies and commitment together. And today I end this blog with a plea to you, do something where you are actively using your body. Whether it be walking, running, cycling, playing sports, going to the gym, doing a dance class, choose one, and begin this week.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

“If you’re trying to be miserable, it’s important you don’t have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don’t read anything informative, don’t listen to anything useful, don’t do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind.”
― John Bytheway, How to Be Totally Miserable

Today I want to discuss a subject that I think about a lot when I am working as a consultant. I come across time after time a mindset where people are entrenched in a survival mode. There entire existence seems to be on the back foot trying to scrape about, fighting their corner just keeping their head above water.  These people are bogged down struggling to just get by, and alas it seems to be more and more common.

I want to stand on a platform and shout ‘Life doesn’t have to be like this!’  ‘You don’t have to live in survival mode when you can achieve so much more when you set your sights higher, live to thrive!’

There is so much more to life than living to struggle and survive. To get home every night exhausted by your exertions, stressed by the pressures of your difficulties.

I lived like this once. I worked every hour I could, but my mindset was all wrong. I was merely trying to survive paying my bills and not much more. I was fortunate that I learnt something that would change my life, and I now am giving you the very same piece of information that enabled me to switch from survival mode to living with what I now call prosperity mode.

We have the freedom of choice to decide how we live our life. We can either choose to merely survive or we can make the choice to thrive and flourish.

I made the choice to no longer just exist, float aimlessly through life working hard just to survive just getting by emotionally, physically and financially. Instead I decided I wanted meaning to my life and I wanted to thrive in all ways. From that moment forward I was empowered, and so can you be.

Can you imagine if your life were truly thriving?  Imagine how your life would be if you were living in a prosperity mode.

Visualize yourself waking up in the morning excited about your day, the life you are living, the work you are performing.  Think about what it would be like if every day you were thriving in every area of your life.  Your finances, work, family, health, creativity, and spirituality. Imagine all the possibilities that could open up for you, if you are consciously, deliberately creating the life you desire.

Can you see it? If you can isn’t that the way you want to live? Well you can make it happen!

I know that you want more from life than to just exist or get through the day.  You want to be happy, joyous and live a life where you fulfil your full potential.  No more living in survival mode dealing with the constant demands  and pressures brought on by the frantic pace of life where you have little or no control over what happens to you.

Take the opportunity and give yourself time to get a life. No more allowing yourself to be  overwhelmed with the day-to-day struggles of trying to make ends meet. Instead get focused on the exciting opportunities, possibilities and experiences life has to offer. Don’t settle for just surviving from day to day. Start looking forward to what the future has in store for you.

No longer settle for mediocrity or merely surviving. I encourage you to believe in yourself and your destiny, trust, persevere, keep your head up, hope, dream and never give up because the committed person is both unstoppable and unlimited in what he may achieve.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

Is your glass half full or half empty?” The way you respond to this question shows the way you see life, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.

Optimism comes from the Latin word optimus, meaning “best.” An optimistic person is always looking for the best in any situation and expects good things to happen. Optimism is where you believe, anticipate or hope that things will turn out well. When they don’t an optimist is able to always find the silver lining in every situation.

When you are an optimist you don’t ignore the bad things that happen in life, it just means that you focus more on the positive side of things. You don’t let bad things hold you down instead you find ways to work through them.

You realise that anything is possible!

You appreciate that life is way too short to waste too much time seeing everything from the pessimistic view. Why would you throw away the precious time you have been gifted on this earth worrying about things that mat have happened in the past, or perhaps could possibly happen in the future.  What good can this do? The answer is none, it has no benefits, and can only hold you back from moving your life forward.

Do you think you’re a positive person? A positive mental attitude can improve your health, enhance your relationships, increase your chances of success, and add years to your life.

The fact is, most people are bombarded by negativity each day. Sure, it’s easy to blame others for throwing negativity your way. The truth is much of your negativity is self-inflicted influenced by your personal perspective on life’s realities.

When you feel pessimism clouding your judgment or you hear your mind’s negative chatter about the doom and gloom it sees ahead for your future, remind yourself that every second counts and you have no time to waste on doubting yourself or the future you could build for yourself.

Optimism is a powerful tool that will benefit your personal life in a huge way.  Optimism is also an important component of achievement, and is especially important in times of difficulty. Those who have an optimistic outlook will roll with the punches, will be more proactive and persistent and will not abandon hope. In the face of setbacks, challenges or difficult jobs, pessimist are more likely to do worse than predicted and even give up, while optimists will persevere.

Let’s face it, life is so much better when you see your glass as half fall than when you see it as half empty.

Regardless of how bad something may be or feel, often the end result can be magnificent. And it usually is so much better than you could have ever imagined for yourself. Optimism pays off it really does.

So how can you adopt a die hard optimistic attitude:

Reframe how you define events. Instead of dwelling on a bad experience, when things go badly or simply they don’t work out the way you wanted analyze what happened  to figure out what good can come of it. There is something that can be learned from every situation. You can find good things as long as you look.

Change your negative self-talk. One of the biggest things you may need to change is those negative messages you keep running through your head well now it’s time to shift your thoughts . So for example when a negative thought comes to mind, ask yourself if your negative thought is really true. There is nothing to gain from the constant chatter of negative thoughts circulating in your head, but everything to benefit from positive ones.

Avoid dwelling on downers. To build your positivity it is crucial to reduce the downers in your life. You can develop resistance to worrisome thoughts and transform your internal critic becoming more optimistic all the time.

Brainstorm for Creative Thinking. Do everything to trigger the creative process. Often valuable ideas are the result of an initial “crazy” thought. For more you learn to brainstorm, triggering your creative thoughts and ideas, the more you will develop your abilities to mastermind.

Search for the silver lining. Looking for the positive in a negative situation is a key attribute of an optimist. It’s so easy to see the bad in a situation, but finding the good takes more skill. Will this ability though you will be able to move forward no matter what obstacles get in your way.

Focus on Success. Expect success. Nurture a culture of optimism. We will all experience failure, but optimists see this just as a step on the way to ultimate success, Our minds know with certainty that eventually we will succeed in reaching our goals.

Take charge of your Life. You don’t have to be a victim of your circumstances. Stop thinking about what is happening to you and start thinking about what you can make happen. If you’re not happy with the way your life is now, take control. Once you accept full responsibility for your life, and realise your decisions and actions are what count then you will know what has to be done to achiever success. You can have no doubts now.

Avoid negative environments. Don’t allow yourself to be surrounded by naysayers. Get yourself away from negative situations and people.

Focus on your strengths. Focus on what you do well, and when you do you enjoy your work so much more because you also know you’re doing what you do best.

Life is too short to be pessimistic, so start turning your thinking around! Positive thoughts first and then an optimistic outlook. The end result will be far more happiness and huge improvements in your work,  relationships and all the other areas of your life.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Napoleon Hill

We will all face obstacles that we need to overcome to reach our desired destination. Every one of us will discover hurdles that we must get over to reach where we want to go. It is essential that we are determined to overcome all challenge or obstacles that come our way and refuse to let them stop our progress in life.

Success is very much down to having the determination to overcome difficulties and triumph over whatever hurdles we face. You have to refuse to let anything or anyone stop you from having and doing everything you truly want.

Once you have decided that you will allow nothing to stand in the way of the path that you choose, you will need to develop your courage, persistence, and faith. These qualities can be strengthened by your refusing to ever give up.

Even when you think you can’t keep going, just try one more time. Don’t think beyond that. Many people come incredibly close to their goals and quit just before that final attempt that would have gotten them there.

To overcome obstacles and fulfil your dreams is a choice that you have the ability to make. Keep choosing to believe in yourself and you can overcome almost anything. I know because it has worked for me.

Many times things haven’t worked out the way they were meant to. At times it seems failure had in fact come my way. But instead of accepting this, giving it all up, I looked at the situation to see what I could learn and found what I could take from it to help me move forward. And there’s the key. Every situation had a huge answer waiting for us to discover it, but it wasn’t immediately obvious, it had to be found under the debris.

I kept putting the effort in, working hard, going on even when the odds seemed stacked against me. I never gave up and as a result I am building my dream business, where I pursued my passion. Those failures and the silver linings they brought changed my live forever.

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. Walt Disney

There is always something positive to be found in every situation, even when it seems overwhelmingly negative. But you have to look for them.

For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour. Mary Kay Ash

You can always learn something when things don’t work out the way you wanted them to. You have to look for the bigger picture and search out the lessons that are there. It is so important for you to realise that there really is so much that can be learned each and every time something doesn’t come together the way you envisioned.

One of the best things we can do is reflect on all those times when things don’t go as planned and discover the lesson they are teaching you. It allows us to make certain we are learning as many lessons as we can from all of our experiences and setting ourselves up for success in the future.

While no one will be spared from disappointments and failures, what separates those that succeed in life and those that don’t is the ability to deal with failure. They look beyond their setbacks and keep going with renewed enthusiasm and vigour. They see the silver lining in the clouds around the setbacks and failures that have happened. They have a more positive outlook towards life and to go beyond failure always seeking answers even from adversities.

Each failure has enabled me to achieve the life I have. Every failure no matter how painful helped me to do better in the future, by opening new possibilities. Accept failure as an inevitable challenge that you will have to face but which will always come with a silver lining holding the answers you search for.

No failure is absolute, and success is a journey which you have to keep moving on to reach a final destination of your choosing. And if you’re like me you’ll treat life like an adventure excited by what each day will throw at you and what you will discover.

Just my thoughts!

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

Do you feel like your life is slipping through your fingers with time passing you by and that you are powerless to stop it?

If life isn’t working out the right way for you, surely you must still dream of a better life and how different things could be.

Once you do, then to create the life you want, maybe all it will take is massive action to bring about your desired outcome, alternatively do nothing and allow mediocrity to be your path.

To many people find life’s a constant struggle and they can see no way out so they end up settling for what they get. I just can’t understand anyone accepting a life that doesn’t give them happiness.

I know life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter, and weeks just seem to fly by. I don’t want anybody to one day wake up and find it’s too late to make the most of the time they had to live a meaningful happy life, instead they’ve thrown it away having promised themselves over and over again that of ‘I’m going to,’ ‘I will do,’ and ‘Someday’, and someday never comes.

Today I’m thinking of somebody I know who is stuck in a rut. Life has not gone the way she would have planned. She’s in her mid 50′s, no partner, no children, no career. Her life is wrapped around caring for her elderly parents and not much more. She seems to just go through life with nothing driving her forward. No excitement, no true dream to spur her on. It shows in her demeanour, in everything about her. Yet I know the talents and skills she possesses, and within the beautiful person she is. It’s all hidden under a rubble of disappointment, but now it’s time for her to dig her way out and find herself again. Noone should allow themselves to allow life to pass you by.

I read a quote that I want to pin to her fridge which says:

“Life may not be the party we hoped for… but while we’re here we may as well dance.” Jeanne C. Stein

I know life is not perfect and maybe events have to this point gone against you. That’s life! That doesn’t, however, mean you cannot still make dreams come true.

There’s no shortage of misery in the world. Why continue to focus on the negative and fail to enjoy the time and opportunities you have. Life is full of possibilities if you give yourself the chance to find them. It takes time and effort to be happy. So do something every day to help yourself find a better way to live.

We have to put ourselves back into the driving seat of life. In my mind I want to go through every day feeling motivated and having a passion for life with focus and direction.

Remember if you do what you have always done you will get what you have always got. So do something different and invest in yourself. See who you truly want to be, do and have and set about creating that life, instead of doing nothing and letting life pass you by.

So, no matter what is going on in your life, make a conscious choice to be happy. Life isn’t always going to be the party we’d hoped for, but while we are here, we might as well dance. Even if you have two left feet like me and are tone deaf you can dance to your own tempo and invent a life as you want to live it.

Don’t choose to stay stuck in a life where you are unhappy and unfulfilled, instead find a vision, create a plan, and take whatever steps you have available to you.

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” Antoine de Saint-Exupér

What actions will you take every day to help you find a better way to live? As soon as you start imagining your future, you can begin creating your dreams.

“Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself” George Bernard Shaw

So my question for you all today is are you taking the steps necessary to improve your life or just wishing something would come along to make things better?

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life

Frustration can lead to helplessness when you are suddenly put on the spot.

Have you felt like everything is ready to cave in on you? You are suddenly put into a situation that you know very little about and the harder you try to make sense of it the worse it becomes.

Suddenly your mind starts to freeze up and all of the practical knowledge you have is useless.

Early this week I was faced with such a situation. There is frantic work taking place behind the scenes at Healthy Lifestyles Living. One of the many jobs that we are working on is to build our Healthy Lifestyles Shops. I am currently building my cricket shop because I am passionate about cricket. I have waited a long time to be able to actually start putting cricket items into my shop.  Last Tuesday was my first attempt at doing this.

You may be thinking how hard can it be to put products into a shop? Well there is quite a learning curve to embark on before you even begin to know what to do. It requires you to select an appropriate picture and then scale it to three different sizes using a drawing program. This is the difficult part because the pictures available are not the right size to begin with. After completing that you need to be able to write a catchy description for each product and present in a way that will attract customers.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg because the real work and designing of the shop is left  to our dedicated technician Neil Haywood.  He makes it look easy and just smiles at us as we struggle with coding and all of the technical jargon of setting up blogs and ecommerce shops.

Larry Lewis was teaching me how to set up my shop. Generally Larry is a very patient chap but I could sense his frustration at how long it was taking me to get  this new information. Sensing his frustration even made me more frustrated. To cut a long story short I remember working myself up into a state of helplessness. Here I was after waiting for so long to get my shop up and running and now I  felt like  I just couldn’t understand what to do.

My whole mindset went into a negative spin. I contemplated quitting and giving up right then and there. I didn’t need this frustration and this feeling like I was back at school not understanding what the teacher was saying.

Eventually with some expert guidance on Mr Lewis’s part I was able to get my pictures sorted and into the right categories for the shop. I felt somewhat better yet I came away from the episode in a negative frame of mind. All of the positive thinking and reading about how to focus your energy onto living in the now completely deserted me. It was like my mind went into automatic melt down mode.

As I reflected upon the situation I was unclear as if I wanted to do the hard work of placing the numerous  items into my cricket shop. Negativity had a very strong hold on me and I could have easily succumbed to it. I am not a quitter but the thought did cross my mind. It was a struggle to sleep and to be upbeat about the exciting times that lay ahead for all of us at Healthy Lifestyles Living.  Yes it is a massive work load but it is also about doing what you love. This negates the amount of time and commitment to get the job done.

The amazing part is that  for us to really grow we need to step out of our comfort zone and learn new things. This is a big part of the process.

It is now easy to think back with hindsight of why things happen and that you should be more accepting of learning new things rather than just shutting down.

It is a stark reminder for me that no matter how much personal development you do there will always be challenging situations to test your response and where you actually are in relation to the challenges life throws at you.

It took me along time to get back onto the computer and see if I could remember how to resize the pictures and place the items into the shop. My first attempt failed and this created an uneasy feeling within me, however I knew I had to try again. The second time around I was successful and this made a huge difference to my thoughts.

I could see the products in my shop and the realization that finally I would have my own online cricket shop  sunk in. The negativity began to fade away and it was replaced with enthusiasm and a desire to see how many products I could put into the shop. It was not all smooth sailing but I did feel good about putting five cricket bats into the shop.

Never ever give up and don’t stop three feet from gold continue to play a strong loud sound in my head. I am now buoyed that I didn’t succumb to the desire to quit.

The steps I took to bounce back are worth writing about.

The main one being that I just needed time to let the new information sink in. I needed to walk away and approach the whole process with fresh eyes.

I also had to remind myself of my goal and my why to succeed. I had to see what it was that I was actually contemplating giving up. This made  me realize that this annoying frustration and learning curve was just another hurdle placed in front of me to test my resolve to succeed.

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Healthy Lifestyles Living - For those wishing to improve the quality of their life