5 Ways to Hack Your Health Even When You’re Busy

It isn’t easy as working women to find time to do everything we need to do in order to keep ourselves healthy. Often, our days pass without us even realizing it. However, keeping our health in check benefits both mental and physical health.

It’s also no big secret that eating well and exercising regularly helps your body deal with stress and fight illness. Stress is triggered by a chemical reaction in your body, and often when stress triggers we seek comfort in foods that are unhealthy and want to become inactive. Taking care of yourself actually helps prevent the chemical reaction that triggers stress and begins the domino effect. But there are ways to make sure you keep yourself in both top physical and mental health even with a busy schedule.

Breakfast, Lunch, & Snacks On-The-Go

Breakfast is one of the most important meals of the day because it helps kick start your metabolism for the day. If you don’t have time for a sit-down breakfast, don’t worry. You can pack healthy alternatives such as:

• fruits (apples, oranges, and bananas are great)
• high fiber, low-cal and carb breakfast bars (Special K and Fiber One have great options)

If you work longer days in the office, you need to pack more than just a lunch. Bringing along two low-cal snacks helps maintain overall weight. Snacks can be similar to breakfast, or you can choose another snack you enjoy that is ready to go when you are such as:

• dairy snacks (yogurt and string cheese are good choices)
• low-cal chips or desserts (Special K and Snackwells have great options)

Make lunch bigger, but keep the calories down. It should help revitalize your energy for the day, which means you need more carbs than snacks require. There are good choices in pre-packaged lunches with reasonable calories and great flavor (Healthy Choice, Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine).

All of these options are great for grabbing on the go while keeping your health in check.

3-Hour Diet

Though it’s also called a diet, the 3-hour diet can be used to maintain your weight by slightly increasing the calorie intake. A fitness expert discovered that eating every three hours keeps the metabolism working at a regular pace. It takes three to four hours to fully digest a full meal. If the metabolism has nothing more to digest after that, it goes dormant and makes it harder to digest the food from the next meal. The schedule is fairly simple. Each step is three hours apart:

• breakfast within 1 hour of waking
• small morning snack
• lunch
• small afternoon snack
• dinner
• evening snack

Schedule Regular Appointments with an App

Keeping up with your medical needs can be difficult when you work all day and time passes quickly. Thanks to smartphones and technology, you don’t have to take the time to call the doctor’s office and sit on hold, or cross your fingers and hope the doctor you get is the doctor you want. There’s an app for your smartphone that allows you to keep in contact with your doctor, and read reviews, by getting a Healthgrades Premium Profile through Solutionreach. It streamlines the whole process for you.

Deskercise

While the term may be new to you, the concept is not. Deskercise is a set of 33 different exercises you can do at work or at a desk. A few examples are:

• taking the stairs instead of the elevator
• flex your glutes while sitting in the chair
• wander the cubicles
• practice the Namaste
• work on one-legged balance while standing at the printer
• and many more

Meditate on Break

Lunch breaks of 15-minute breaks often give you spare time to do other things. A great way to center your mind before going back to work is by taking a few minutes to meditate. Sit in a fairly quiet place, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. This allows you to clear your mind and tame those stress-inducing chemicals.

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