Smoothies are an awesome snack. They’re great for getting lots of fruit into your diet without a lot of fuss, grabbing those vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, curbing cravings and getting an energy boost. They’re the dieters best friend, the health and fitness freaks true love and the busy man’s mistress. And if you get a little cunning, they’re easy on your wallet as well as your tastebuds.
Here are some of my favourite combinations
Small pleasures are good for us. Little bubbles of soul food amidst the day. They help moderate stress, improve our overall health and tend to make us a little nicer, they can also provide us with the odd little insight.
Kidnapping the cat for a cuddle always makes me feel better. Sitting with the rabbits for a few minutes and watching them demolish silverbeet and kale is surprisingly calming – and I’ve known people who were uninterested in rabbits before to have found just watching them very interesting and relaxing. A cuddle with my horses is always beneficial, and anyone who has a horse will know how good they smell.
In todays (dare I say it) fast paced world, too many people work too many hours, skip lunch, skip dinner, skip breakfast and probably skip sleep in between. Work follows you home like a large angry dog that holds the keys to your livelihood, and somehow we become quivering, electrified balls of stress.
Yeah, that sucks.
There’s lots of great information out there about the reasons for lowering your stress levels, from a personal and a business perspective – you need fewer sick days, you’re more productive, easier to work with, deal with customers and other associates better, your homelife and your health improves and your significant other doesn’t recoil in horror when a pale zombie crawls into bed at 2am, and spends the night screaming that the Jipson account was done two weeks ago, damnit.
The most effective way to lower your stress levels would be an already lifestyle change, eat right, exercise, work a little less, segment your time and leave work outside of certain places, however that’s something that you’ll have to decide to do as and when you’re ready/having enough heart attacks.
So, in the meantime, here are a few ideas to help lower your stress levels during your work day.
Baked beans
These are an old staple, but you can jazz them up with a little bit of milk or yoghurt (a tablespoon or so while it’s cooking), or some chopped onions, chives, etc. Try adding red kidney beans and lentils if you like, or capsicum and tomato. If you like it hot, add a little paprika.
Stress has it’s place in life, it can act as a motivator, it can tell us where we’re going wrong and what doesn’t work for us, but we’ve overdone it. We’ve overdone it like George Lucas overdid Star wars merchandising, or Microsoft overdid sucking-at-making-programs. Stress causes a build of all kinds of nasty toxins, it affects appetite, sleep and immunity, it can cause all kinds of health problems. For some people that means they can’t eat when they’re stressed, for others it means jumping at every sound, being more irritable, it causes physical pain in more cases than you’d think, for example muscle tension, or stomach pain.
The ideas in this article are not designed to cure stress, there will always be some stress in life, and to sort out major stress you need to look at it’s causes and how to handle them, or ditch them completely. These are ideas you can use to relax now and then. Some are cheap or free, others are not, some are quick, some are slow, some will work for you and others won’t.