Jim

If you are one of the over 40 million family caregivers in the U.S. providing care for an aging parent or relative, chances are you wear several hats including chauffeur, insurance wrangler, cook, housekeeper, pharmacist, nurse, and therapist. The truth is that many seniors struggle with feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, and it falls to their care network to help them stay positive and seek help.

Everything from hearing loss to mobility impairment can strip a senior of their sense of independence and self-reliance, so finding creative and fun ways to boost their mood is a must. Check out these top ideas:

Give Their Mobility Aid a Makeover
If having to use a cane, walker, or wheelchair has your loved one feeling down in the pits, help them embrace the situation more positively by upgrading their mobility aid with some helpful add-ons. Personalize your wheelchair or your loved one’s with helpful accessories like bags, baskets, and hanging pockets that make toting around personal items easier. Decorate their cane or walker with a bright-colored paint job. Add padded grip covers and cushions for extra comfort or don their cane with a helpful wrist strap.

Volunteer Together
Few things fill the heart quite like helping others. Even if your aging parent isn’t able to get out of the house to help at the food pantry or join the walk-a-thon, they can still make a difference in the lives of others right from home. Online tutoring, making a meal for a local children’s shelter or neighbor in need, joining a local political group to make calls or do neighborhood canvassing, putting together bags of toiletries, water, socks, and snacks for homeless people . . . the ideas are endless. Serving others helps to re-instill a sense of purpose in your loved one’s life and can be just the silver lining they’re looking for.

Video Chat Faraway Friends and Family
Maintaining strong social connections and interacting with other people goes a long way to fighting depression in seniors as well as keeping their minds sharp. It’s not easy to make long trips to see faraway relatives and friends, and talking on the phone isn’t always the clearest experience. Set up a free, live video chat for your loved one instead with services like Skype or Google+ Hangout. You will need a webcam/mic if you don’t already have one installed on your computer, however, it’s super easy to video call someone over Wifi (for free!) and chat with them face to face.

Listen to Music

A growing body of research is pointing to more and more benefits when it comes to the idea of ‘music therapy’. Music has not only been shown to help thwart motor impairment associated with conditions like Parkinson’s disease, but it can also improve mood and help relieve stress. For older adults with dementia, listening to nostalgic music from their younger years may help stimulate stronger memory and cognitive functioning too. Free services like Spotify and Pandora let you create playlists of songs based on genres and artists your loved one enjoys, try them out today!

A diet is simply a way of eating. Some people diet with too much food, some people with too little food. But for most people, it’s just the wrong foods. However, one thing is for sure, diets don’t work. They never had and they never will. Just ask anyone who has been on any of the well-known, celebrity-endorsed diet plans for any length of time.

Note: Check out this guide to flexible dieting on how to escape the dieting life!

Dieters are often excited about the quick weight loss, but invariably, the diet doesn’t last forever and they quickly find that not only did they gain back all they lost, but they have taken on extra pounds too.

Dieting in the typical sense actually sets you up to fail in your attempt to lose those extra pounds. Immediately on any diet plan, your caloric intake is limited. That in itself isn’t a bad thing. Most meal portions have become unnecessarily large these days and actually need to be kept in check.

When you limit the number of calories consumed to get quick weight loss results on your diet plan, your body has to compensate for this loss. That’s when it begins to break down muscle tissue so as to maintain energy levels. The body also adjusts its requirements for energy and slows down its rate of metabolism.

But what happens when you go back to eating the way you did before? Well, your body is still functioning in diet mode. Your metabolism has slowed, so all that extra food is stored as fat. So you end up heavier than you were before you started dieting.

It’s also important to stress that activity can play a vital role in this too. If you can maintain your normal activity while dieting then you’re one of the few. Take a look at athletes for example. They follow a nutrition plan that that’s heavy in calories as activity like rugby training needs to be fueled. Dieting wouldn’t be an option for athletes and they do not put on unnecessary weight. The point here is that you need to also try and be active to help with your new lifestyle, dieting makes it even harder.

Aside from calorie restriction, here are other reasons why dieting isn’t sustainable for most people;

Too Restrictive – frankly speaking, diets are depressing. They take away all the fun foods and all of a sudden you can’t have chocolate anymore. Oh, now all you see is chocolate, it’s everywhere and everyone is having a bite… except you. Then, you cheat and go right back to square one.

Your Body Rejects It – your body likes eating and wants to eat. Denying your body means your body fights you to get more food. It forces you to cheat and go right back to square one.

The ‘fad diet of the week‘ is not right for your metabolism – your body needs certain nutrients. Your cravings match those nutrients. When you force your body to eat a way it doesn’t like, it slows downs, becomes clogged, and sick. You don’t even need to cheat and you’re worse now then you were at square one.

So how do you really lose fat and keep it off for good?

Getting down to your ideal weight and maintaining it means eating a balanced diet and getting plenty of exercise. It doesn’t mean a severe restriction in calories and spending hours at the gym. Simply pay more attention to the foods you eat and move around more.

Easy exercises like walking, cycling and swimming can go a long way to shaping a leaner, healthier you. Even walking 5 minutes per day is enough to get started. Then, work up to better and better exercises until you are exercising every day, alternating between strength training, cardio, and stretching.

Attaining and maintaining a healthy weight is as much about adjusting your self-concept and attitude as it is your lifestyle.

When you change the way you see yourself, it’s easy to make those necessary changes. In fact they often happen subconsciously. Your weight is governed by your self-concept. When you change the assumptions about yourself and your body, you change the results. That’s how you master weight loss forever.