Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life!

So you are ready to get healthy? The benefits of getting healthy are too numerous to mention. We are going to be talking about diet, exercise, sleep, and mental well-being.All of these component to heath are related. I am going to give you challenges to keep you motivated. I am on this journey with you. I have made it my life's work to find out how to be healthy but I - like you - have a hard time keeping on the right path. This blog is to help us do this together.

If you don't know me, my name is Cindy Ramirez. I am 51 years old. I teach high school English and I have been a Zumba instructor for 5 years. I chose Zumba simply because it is fun and I stick with it. It is important to find something active that you like to do. I chose to teach Zumba because it is harder for me to blow it off when I am the teacher. It is always easy to put exercise on the bottom of the priority list. I like the saying - "It is a lot easier to find time to move 1 hour a day than it is to find time to be dead 24 hours a day." YOU have got to be a top priority in your life. If you don't find time to be healthy, you will not be at your best for the rest of the important things in your life.

First thing you need to do is get a notebook that you can take everywhere with you. In this notebook you are going to record all the food you eat. I like to add any exercise I do and what my weight is when I weigh in weekly. I try not to weigh myself more than once a week because our bodies go up and down all day long. We need to get them to bounce down more than up. You will go crazy if you track it daily. This notebook helps you keep away from food that you don't want to have to admit you eat and it also helps you move more because it is satisfying to write down exercise.

Today's challenge - We will start out easy. I want you to make time for a healthy breakfast. If you skip your morning fuel you will crash and burn. We also need to understand how our bodies work. If you skip breakfast, your body thinks that you didn't have access to food and it needs to slow down to preserve the fuel that you do have. Calories will burn more slowly and you will not burn the calories you need to so you can burn off that fat that you want gone.

I also want you to do 30 minutes (is a sitcom and you can watch it while you do this) of strength training. If you need ideas message me on facebook and I will give you 100 ideas. I am under Cindy Penney Anderson Ramirez. You can also email me at cyn0508@frontier.com. I like to do one of my belly buster DVD's, yoga DVD's, Zumba toning, bands, or hand weights.

*Tip of the day - There is a website www.sparkpeople.com and it also has a free app if you have an iphone. It tracks your diet and exercise and sets mini goals for you to reach your ultimate goal. Cool program I just discovered.

Good luck and I will post another challenge tomorrow for you.
Cindy