This Week’s Healthy SC Challenge Tips

First Family Encourages Healthy Changes in Nutrition, Exercise and Tobacco Use

COLUMBIA, SC – July 10, 2009 – The Healthy SC Challenge is the Sanford family’s effort to persuade all South Carolinians to do just a little more to live a healthier lifestyle. The tips are designed to encourage individuals and communities to live healthier lifestyles in three categories: nutrition, exercise and help to quit smoking. The tips can also be found on the challenge’s website, www.healthysc.gov.

Healthy Tips

Nutrition

What are your triggers? Learning to recognize your eating habits will help you manage them better.

What makes you eat? Each of us has different eating triggers, and some might be more obvious than others. (Rereading your food journal is one excellent way to spot occasions and foods that tend to trip you up.) Learning to recognize your own eating cues will help you figure out how to manage them better, so let’s take a look:

Certain places or actions: Walking in the door when you get home from work, sitting down in front of the TV or even sitting in a particular comfortable chair can be powerful “feed me!” triggers. Or perhaps you can’t talk on the phone or read the newspaper without having something to nibble. However it began, you may have come to associate those activities with eating a snack.

Seeing and/or smelling food: Tantalizing aromas and seductive visuals of food can get your digestive juices flowing and activate your “hunger” meter. Some people seem to be more susceptible to these cues than others. If walking by a pizzeria or a doughnut shop gets your senses reeling, you might be one of these food “hyperresponders.”

Boredom: If you’ve got downtime or are busy with a task that doesn’t command your full attention, you might crave food simply to have something engaging to do. Going to get something to eat might feel like switching channels to a better station.

Emotions

While some people react to stressful or unpleasant situations by losing appetite, many people find themselves eating more to help them cope. It’s easy to see why: food is pleasurable and comforting, and after all, eating is one major way we care for ourselves. Overeating can even produce a drowsy calm (some call it a “food coma”) that can be quite soothing. The act of eating itself can be a distraction, too, if you’re a procrastinator: ever wonder why you’re longing to cook up a delicious, complicated dinner when you have a deadline looming?

Research shows that positive emotions can trigger overeating, too. You might find yourself eating more when you’re celebrating an accomplishment, anticipating a happy event or falling in love, for example. –www.eatingwell.com

Physical Activity

Longer days and rising temperatures signal summertime. The American Heart Association has some tips to help you stay active, safe and heart healthy when it’s hot outside. You can stay active and beat the heat by:

• Going to a gym for a nice, cool environment with a variety of activities.
• Visiting your favorite local swimming hole or taking swimming lessons at a pool.
• Starting a walking group with your friends at the mall.
• Taking up an indoor sport, such as racquetball, basketball or volleyball, or taking an aerobics class.
• Going ice skating.

If you exercise outside when it’s hot and humid, wear light, comfortable clothing and work out in the early morning or late evening. Know the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you experience symptoms, stop exercising and cool down immediately by dousing yourself with cold water. You may need medical attention. Heat exhaustion can progress quickly to heat stroke, which can kill you.
-The American Heart Association, www.americanheart.org

Tobacco

It’s normal to feel sad for a period of time after you first quit smoking. Many people have a strong urge to smoke when they feel sad or depressed, but remember that if you give in to your craving for a cigarette, you may feel even sadder that you didn’t stick with your decision to quit.

What to Do:

• Identify your specific feelings at the time that you seem to be depressed. Are you actually feeling tired, lonely, bored, or hungry? Focus on and address these specific needs.
• Add up how much money you have saved already by not purchasing cigarettes, and imagine (in detail) how you will spend your savings in six months.
• Call a friend and plan to have lunch, or go to a movie, a concert, or another pleasurable event.
• Make a list of things that are upsetting to you and write down solutions for them.
• Keep positive about changes in your life.
• Increase physical activity. This will help improve your mood and lift your depression.
• Focus on your strengths.
• Plan your next vacation or fun activity.
• Try deep-breathing exercises.
• Draw up a list of your short- and long-term personal goals.
• Think of how healthy you’ll feel when you are totally free of smoking.
• If depression continues for more than a month, see your doctor.
  –www.everydayhealth.com

  The Healthy SC Challenge is an outcome-based, cooperative effort aimed at encouraging individuals, communities and organizations across the state to show shared responsibility in developing innovative ways to improve the health of South Carolina’s citizens.