Three 10-Minute Steps To An Amazing Lunch Break

April 9, 2013 by MikeTremba Leave a Comment

Your daily lunch break: Is it rushed? Inconvenient? More stressful than relaxing?

Do you even take a lunch break, or do you gulp down an energy drink at your desk and keep working ‘til it’s time to commute home?

If that sounds like you, you’re not alone. Most Americans don’t capitalize on the opportunities a workplace break offers to them. Winding down for a half hour in the middle of the day is a healthy habit for mind and body, but a lot of people feel like it’s more of a hassle than a health benefit. In fact, most Americans work straight through what should be a midday reprieve from workplace stress because, for many of us, stepping away from our desks can mean losing momentum and fighting to keep focus for the rest of the afternoon.

If walking away from your desk for a half hour halfway through the day is stressful, you need to reorganize your workday. Lunch breaks are meant to revive your brain and gear you up for the rest of the day. If you’re not taking one, you’re not getting the most out of your professional capacities.

Making the most of your midday break takes preparation; however, in three hassle-free steps, I can take you from noontime stress to 12 p.m. rejuvenation.

All you need is ten minutes.

7 a.m.: Take 10 Minutes To Schedule Your Day

Nothing worth having ever comes without a good deal of planning ahead. Eating well, for instance—any worthwhile regime’s success is heftily contingent on making a game plan and sticking it out. The Truth About Abs reviews, (from one particular eating plan), describe many testaments from folks who’ve only found success losing weight and increasing health through some thorough strategizing. This success is equally applicable to succeeding in the workplace.

So, every morning before you dive head first into the pile of work on your desk, take ten minutes to prioritize tasks and carve blocks of dedicated time out of your workday. Be realistic about your work blocks and give yourself enough time to account for unforeseen distractions, like urgent orders from your boss or a coworker’s request for some last-minute help.

Knowing what’s ahead of you for the day will create a mental map of where your focus needs to be and when, gearing your brain up for when to be on task and when to wind down.

11:30 a.m.: 10 Minutes To Assess Progress And Wind Down

Retrospection is crucial to successful forward movement. Mid-morning, take a look back at what you’ve accomplished.

Not only will this help you plan out the remainder of your afternoon, it will give you a sense of satisfaction. Rehashing your small victories of the morning—maybe you finally turned in a big project to your boss, or were able to deescalate a disagreement with a coworker without issue—will change your brain’s gears from “work, work, and work” to “reward, reward, and reward.”

After recounting the morning’s workload to yourself, spend the hour between your mid-morning check-in and your lunch break tying up loose ends and preparing your work for the afternoon. Don’t start anything too intensive, but don’t let yourself lose focus, either.

Instead, ride on the high of your morning’s victories and create a blueprint for an equally successful afternoon.

12:30 p.m.: 10 Beautiful Minutes Of YOU

Remember: it’s lunch, but it’s also a break. A break for breathing, restoring your energy, and appreciating yourself.

Take your healthy brown-bag lunch on a walk and find a quiet spot in a nearby park, or treat yourself to a health-conscious meal at a restaurant close to where you work. Sit quietly with every bite of your meal and focus on yourself.

Acknowledge any worries or stresses present in the front of your mind, but appreciate foremost the time you’re devoting in this moment to take care of yourself. Being healthy isn’t just about eating lots of veggies and running a mile every day; it’s about loving yourself and wanting the best for you.

If you take a look at, you’ll get an overload of information on the importance of putting a love for yourself ahead of any other goal when it comes to getting healthy.

No matter how you approach it, do yourself—and your health — a favor, and make time for a valuable, reflective lunch break.

About the Author: Dr. Mike Tremba loves lunch breaks, or any chance he gets to appreciate how great life is. He loves sharing his uncommon weight loss tips through his website at http://www.naturalweightlosstruth.com. In his free time, he constantly looks for new activities to stir his imagination, while spending time with his wife and best friend, Shari

A Better Life, Thanks To YOU!

March 26, 2013 by MikeTremba Leave a Comment

Our brains are tricky organs.

They control our every movement, conscious or not, and guide us through our lives; from stumbling into our first steps, to hobbling through our last days on Earth. And we only use a tiny percentage of their full capacity.

Your brain can be trained to respond with certain emotions in triggered situations. That’s how post-traumatic stress disorder works.

But it can also work in your favor. You can program your mind to feed positivity into your perception with just a few conscious triggers.

Gratitude is the most powerful of these triggers.

Call it what you will; Karma; paying it forward; what goes around comes around… the concept has an amalgam of names, but it principal is simple: doing good does good for you.

If you approach your life with the intention of improving it in every moment, you’ll begin to live the best possible version of it. Being constantly conscious of your emotional and physical well-being, and always aware of how you can improve on it, will create neural pathways in your brain which trigger positive feelings and motivation.

Experts know

While I wouldn’t pull the, “Trust me, I’m a doctor,” card, I do have a solid understanding of the human brain. But you don’t have to take it from me; there are countless expert diet, exercise, and positive living gurus out there who can attest to the validity of a positive attitude’s impact.

Diet Solution Program review testimonies are just some examples of gratitude’s impact on a positive life. Furthermore, every one of my friends in the industry of improving well-being will tell you without hesitation that one of the top ways to make your life better is to be more grateful.

Make every moment a meal.

Look, when you’re about to eat a delicious meal at a restaurant, what do you do? You imagine how wonderful it will taste. You say, “I can’t wait to eat this!” You salivate every time the waiter walks by, and you take a few moments to observe its perfection before diving in fork-first when the course finally arrives.

This primal reaction gears your brain up to receive something good. By mentally and verbally preparing, your brain is laying down a walkway for the pleasure receptors to tell you, “Yes, this IS delicious!”

Acknowledging good things makes them more tangible. Start approaching every day as if it were a tantalizing dish in your favorite restaurant.

It’s simply contagious

If you’ve ever stood near a yawning coworker, you know how contagious human actions can be. But yawning isn’t the only thing you can pick up from a coworker.

In fact, facial expressions in general are contagious. We tend to mirror the emotions of those around us, in an effort to assimilate into the environment, so if you’re always frowning or scowling, you’re likely to find yourself consistently surrounded by negative, unhappy people.

On the opposite side of that same coin, if you don a sincere smile (even a small one) and make an effort to acknowledge the people you see for positive facets—whether you’re complementing an outfit or an act of kindness—you’re infinitely more likely to find yourself in a world of grateful people.

The happier you are, the happier the people in your life are. And once the happiness is pumping, it’s hard to turn off that faucet.

Be constantly grateful

Thanksgiving day isn’t the only time you should acknowledge the things you’re grateful for. An average more conducive exercise in happiness would be the fourth hour of every day, or an even more frequent tip-of-the-hat than that.

It’s easy to get caught up in negativity. You missed the early train to work. You spilled coffee on a report for your boss. The kids decided the living room wall was their own personal Crayola palette. But finding the good things in your day is more difficult, and takes practice. Get yourself into the habit of taking a few deep breaths three or four times a day and consciously—even audibly—talking yourself through the things you’re grateful for in life.

Nothing is to large or small to include on this list, and whether you use the mantra of, “family, home, health,” or personalize it on a daily basis, you’ve found a very active way to incorporate gratitude.

What’s important is that you’re training your brain to be positive.

By doing so, you’re building the foundation for a better, healthier, more positive life.

About the author: Dr. Mike Tremba has personally seen how gratitude can change people’s lives (including his own). Much a product of his own experiences, he developed his website at , www.NaturalWeightLossTruth.com. Whether it’s helping others to lose weight, or simply to find more passion for life, Dr. Mike is passionate about sharing what he’s learned. In his free time, he’s blessed to spend time with his wife (and best friend) Shari near the beautiful beaches of southern Alabama.

Find Motivation to Cook at Home

October 13, 2012 by Featured Author Leave a Comment

When faced with the choice of preparing a meal or dialing for take out, too many people opt for the latter because actually cooking something seems like so much effort. We seem as a society to have somehow convinced ourselves that cooking is difficult, not worth our time and only for those who are talented at preparing meals. In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Cooking at home is often quick, easy, cheap and doesn’t require you to know how to flambé anything.

Here are 4 simple things you can do to motivate yourself to turn that oven on and cook something at home.

1. Remind yourself that you’re saving money

If you are not eating at home then you must be ordering in or eating out. Economic times are hard and both of those options are expensive in the long run. Yet the worst part is that you’re paying more for something you could probably cook better yourself. Why pay for a burger that’s mass produced along with 5000 others when you can cook one yourself at home for cheap and it’ll even be tastier? Seems like there’s no excuses to me.

2. Sometimes cooking yourself is actually faster

Many people justify not cooking because eating out or ordering in is faster. When these people picture making a meal they see themselves slaving away at a stove for hours, and therefore understandably choose not to because they are busy and can’t spare the time.

However, their entire belief system about cooking is actually based on a lie: cooking doesn’t really have to take so long. Perhaps in 1850 a dinner might have taken 2 hours to prepare every night, but nowadays you can knock together a delicious meal in a quarter of an hour if you know how. British chef Jamie Oliver specialises in recipes that can be completed in 15 minutes, showing that making your own food doesn’t have to take over your life. Let’s be honest with ourselves: when was the last time you where served in a restaurant or had take-out arrive in less than 15 minutes?

3. Remind yourself that it’s good for you

If you’re eating out or ordering in, chances are you are not eating the most healthy choices on the menu. By cooking your own food you know exactly what is going into the food you eat and you have much more control over making your meals healthier.

The best part about cooking at home is that the easiest things to make are often the cheapest and healthiest choices too. Nothing is more simple to prepare than a salad or a vegetable stir-fry, which coincidentally are two dishes that are packed with nutritional content. Simple.

4. You don’t have to be a master chef

A reason that many people don’t like to cook is that they feel that they are bad at it. They’ll crack a joke or two about it and make it seem cute that they can’t poach an egg, but in reality they’re just putting themselves down and making excuses.

You don’t need to be a master chef to cook at home, because modern conveniences have made it easier than ever to prepare a meal without a misstep. All you have to do is print some recipes from the internet (you can search for particularly cheap or easy ones) and follow what they say. You can often get by without fancier skills (why sauté vegetables when you can put them in the microwave?) and still make a tasty meal.

Don’t let fear of the unknown stop you from cooking. Download a few recipes, buy some cheap ingredients and see what you can do. The more you cook, the more you’ll want to cook and be assured of your own abilities. Once motivated, it really couldn’t be easier to cook at home.

About the Author: Dora Novak is currently experimenting with fast and healthy foods you can cook with microwaves.

The Power of Accountability

September 4, 2012 by Scott "Q" Marcus Leave a Comment

by guest author John Lenning

The following is a letter that I received from a new friend. I asked him if I could share it because I thought it was awesome.

I just wanted to say “thanks” for helping to get me back on track.
For a little over a year before I contacted you, I had been having pain in my hip flexors. It started off as nagging pains, but got worse and worse with each month. About one month before I met you, I went to my sister’s house for a weekend get-together.

One of my college buddies who I had not seen in over 9 months was there. When he saw me, he said “Haven’t seen you in a while, what have you been up to?”

I paused for a second, then replied “Work, and uhh…that’s about it”

He replied, “Work, that’s it?”

I said, “Yeah….”

He then said, “Seriously, you haven’t done anything else?”

I just kind of stood there with a dumb look on my face, thinking, “Wow, I really have not been doing anything, have I?”

After what seemed like forever, I kind of laughed and acted like it was not a big deal. I then quickly changed the subject to something about his job.

For a week after that, I just kept asking myself what I had been doing. His question made me take a look at myself and realize that I had let my pain prevent me from doing things. I had been using it as an excuse. I had used my hip injury to justify skipping the gym, camping trips, and other things. I even used it to justify my poor eating habits.

I realized that I had been passively going through life, never stopping to see that things seemed to be going downhill.

Even after that experience, it took me over three weeks to convince myself that I needed to start doing something about the pain. I finally convinced myself that I needed to actually do something and was able to convince myself to talk to Mike. The rest is history.

I am thankful that I was able to finally break through the walls that I had built, and ask Mike if he knew what I should do. If I had not, I would still be living a mediocre lifestyle. Thanks to you guys I am back to my old self.

Thanks again,

Here is the lesson:

If you are having a difficult time motivating yourself, get someone you can trust and tell them what is going on. Then, tell them that you are not comfortable in your situation. Ask them to hold you accountable to do something about it. You do not need to ask for “help” or “assistance” just accountability

About the Author: John is a competitive athlete and trainer. When John is not working out, coaching, or eating, he is usually trying to learn something new. He currently writes about the causes, symptoms, and treatment of hip pain at his personal site.

Ways to Stay Motivated While Pursuing your Online Degree

August 31, 2012 by Featured Author Leave a Comment

These days, many people are weighing their options of going back to school and furthering their education.

Thankfully, with the advent of online universities and certification programs, this is now easier and more convenient than ever. Classes can work around YOUR schedule and fit into almost anyone’s life.

Yet, this increased accessibility and availability does not mean that the act itself has gotten any easier. It’s still school. There will still be tests, projects, and more and you will be challenged. That being said, you might need some help staying motivated throughout this journey. Below are some helpful tips and reminders to make the whole experience easier on yourself.

Map Out Your Plan

Goals are much easier to attain when you know what you’re working toward and how you intend to get there. Doing this helps you keep your eye on the prize and also makes the whole process seem more doable. When you have a big, daunting goal such as trying to earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree ahead of you, it helps to break it into smaller, less intimidating targets and objectives, that way you can note and track your progress as you go.

You’ll feel a sense of accomplishment with each passing one, and this will help keep you going.

Find Your Support System

Whether it’s your family, a close group of friends or a combination of the two of them, it’s important to identify who your key support system is, as you will need their help and encouragement during this time. You will likely be stretched thin at times between your career obligations and school requirements, on top of any personal commitments, so when or if this happens, don’t be afraid to lean on those you love. They will help get you through and remind you why you’re doing this in the first place. Now is not the time for pride.

Tune out Naysayers

Just as you should cling to those who offer and provide encouragement and positivity, you should also RUN FROM anyone who brings the opposite energy into your life. I know this might seem hard to do, but it is 100% necessary. Whenever you make any sort of monumental decision, people will give their two cents, no matter how discouraging it maybe, that’s just an undeniable, unfortunate fact of life.

So, rather than letting them “win” and get the better of your, turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to anyone who offers a less-than-productive outlook on things. Because, the truth is, you yourself might get discouraged, which mean you don’t need people around you turning you into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Replace their negativity with more uplifting positive thoughts and you’re sure to succeed.

So, if you make the decision to pursue an online degree, please remember these tips. They may seem simple, but they can make a world of difference. Trust me, I’ve seen it first hand.

About the Author: Patricia Garza is a freelance blogger and education writer that can offer suggestions on anything from choosing between accredited online colleges to picking a major. She welcomes your comments below.

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