NaturalCounselor Health and Wellness Blog For Women

No matter how busy we are, we should never forget to take care of ourselves – mind, body and spirit.

One little thing you can do for yourself is to indulge yourself in a mini spa day.

This beauty remedies tip will help you relax to feel and look fabulous.

Are you ready for a homemade beauty remedy recipe that will make you feel and look fabulous?

Relax, Rejuvenate and Detox with an Essential Oils Healing Bath

By taking a relaxing healing oil bath you may be able to reduce your stress level, lower your blood pressure, heal a headache, balance your hormones, address your sleep needs to sleep better, achieve a natural weight loss, detox cleanse, and feel sexy.

According to Ayurveda, the perfect bath should stimulate all the five senses, provide relaxation and a feeling of emotional fullness. After your full body massage, you should let your skin absorb the oil for at least 15 minutes before you get into the tub. During this time, you assemble everything you will need for a full sensory experience.

Taste: It’s important to remain hydrated while you are cleansing and detoxifying your body. For a soothing drink, try herbal teas. Nettle Tea is specially designed to calm the mind. For an energizing beverage, you can add a few teaspoons of Cocoa. Ayurveda does not recommend drinking coffee and alcohol because they stimulate the body instead of soothing it.

Sight: For a peaceful atmosphere, light a few candles and turn off the lights. Make sure you place the candles in a secure place, where you can’t knock them off while bathing.

Sound: To help you focus on your spa experience, turn off your phone and mute the answering machine. Put on your favorite soothing, low-volume music. You can also listen to a CD with pacifying melodies of nature, which will help revitalize your body, mind and spirit. If you have a portable CD player, you can place it in the bathroom but away from the bath tub for safety reasons.

Smell: Now you are ready to fill your tub with warm water. Do not bathe in hot water because it dries your skin and depletes your energy. Make sure to use a filter if the tap water is heavily chlorinated. Soften and scent your bathwater with essential oils, which come in different aromatherapy combinations such as relaxing, rejuvenating or energizing. You can also try the Epsom salts to relax your muscles.  Natural aromas will uplift your spirit. If you are planning to soak for a while, you can use bath pillows to cushion your head and neck.

Touch: Use natural sponges or scrubs such as loofah, to soften rough elbows and knees, and pumice stone to scrub calluses on your feet. Instead of petroleum-based soaps, use vegetable soaps to cleanse your skin. (adopted form Maharishi Ayurveda -www.mapi.com)

Click to listen to our discussion with Mary- Beth Janssen, Health and Beauty Expert on Pleasure Healing and Self Nurturing Tips for Busy Women.

P.S. You can also take a lavender bath with lavender essential oils, aromatherapy lavender, a tea bath, or healing oils as a beauty remedies stress reducer to detox cleanse and to feel sexy.

Breathe, smile and be happy.

© Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health and Nutrition Counselor and Coach

So how good are your eating habits?  Do you eat while reading, watching TV, looking at your computer, talking over the phone, etc.?

Have you ever noticed when you multitask you can eat a lot without noticing what you are actually eating? Even when you have dinner with your friends or coworkers, as soon as the conversation starts, the control of how much you eat ends..

As a Holistic Health and Nutrition Coach and Counselor, I always remind my clients that if you eat while multitasking, you will give your brain the wrong signals. You can call this mindless eating.  If your brain is thinking of work, it isn’t thinking of eating and won’t tell your body to stop eating .

If you focus your mind on your eating you will:

• eat less,
• be full faster,
• digest your food properly,
• absorb all nutrients
• lose weight

Here are some healthy tips and ideas to help focus your brain for mindful eating:

• Take a couple of deep breathes to slow down before your meal.
• Bless your food, or at least give thanks – it will help you feel gratitude, which by itself a powerful stress relief technique to help your digestion.
• Try to enjoy what you eat by noticing the food, smelling and savoring it.
• Chew properly – it helps enzymes from your pancreas and other organs get into your stomach and small intestines.
• Eat slower to feel full faster.
• Have a quiet happy family dinner at least twice a week instead of eating on the go.
• Chant “Sat Nam” five times.( Sat Nam is a healing sound or meditation mantra).
• Say Bon Appetit before every meal even if you eat alone. It will help you set your mood for eating and enjoying the food.

Establish these stress free eating habits to maintain your weight more easily and feel and look fabulous, shall we?

Breathe, smile and be happy.

© Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health and Nutrition Coach and Counselor

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We all know that it is very important to pay attention not only to what we eat but also to when and how we eat. Unfortunately, most of the time people eat the way they do everything else – in a hurry.

Have you noticed that you can tell a lot about the person by watching their eating habits? What about you? Do you eat fast or slow? What time is your last meal? Do you eat at midnight? Do you cook at home? Do you eat mindfully or while multitasking?

Based on your daily routine, you might have a stressful eating habit which is likely a result of stressful lifestyle, which can bring you nothing but illnesses. On the other hand, if your meals are usually peaceful and at the right time, you are almost certainly a happy and healthy person. Are you?

If you are under stress, and often angry and frustrated, do you thing you would have stress free meals? Of course not! But do you remember what your grandma used to say? Don’t eat and talk, don’t eat if you are angry or upset. Why? Because if you are anxious, frustrated, in a hurry and means under stress, your body’s respond will be focused on  dealing with your stress overload not on food digestion.

As a result, you don’t assimilate food properly, don’t get nutrients you need, always feel hungry….  Sound familiar?

Let’s change that!

Here are some Do’s and Dont’s tips to slow down to enjoy your food for natural weight loss and as stress remedies:

• Don’t eat when you are in a rush, upset or irritated.
• Do: Drink a glass of water instead, calm down, take a walk and only then have your meal.
• Don’t eat if you are busy at your desk, while talking over the phone, watching TV, etc.
• Do: Get your work done first; eat in the kitchen not living room, cafeteria, outside in the park closer to nature.
• Don’t eat with your friends at the restaurant, coworkers in the cafeteria if you are struggling with weight gain.
• Do: Try to eat alone to control how much you eat, and not to be distracted so your food will be digested and you won’t feel hungry sooner than later.
• Don’t eat after 8 pm or later and of, course, avoid midnight snacks.
• Do: Try to adopt European style: the biggest meals are breakfast and lunch, not dinner.

Let us go back to basics and have meals during meal times, shall we?

Always breathe, smile and be happy.

© Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health Coach and Counselor

Do you suffer from seasonal blues? Do you need to lighten up a bit? Don’t be SAD! Let us laugh our winter blues off, because, as Victor Hugo said: “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”

Here are some famous health/women related quotes and proverbs you can use to as laughter therapy to survive the through the winter season with:

“Think about what you’re thinking about. And don’t believe everything you think.” — Loretta LaRoche

”Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” — Victor Hugo

”A woman has the age she deserves.”– Coco Chanel

”Men make laws; women make morals.” — French Proverb

”It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. — Robert Green Ingersoll

“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” — Mark Twain

“To eat is human, to digest – divine.” — Mark Twain

“Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott

“I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?” — George Orwell

“My advice if you insist on slimming: Eat as much as you like – just don’t swallow it.” — Harry Secombe

“At 50, you have the choice of keeping your face or your figure and it’s much better to keep your face.” — Barbara Cartland

“Anatomically speaking, a bust is here today and gone tomorrow.” — Isobel Barnett

“We have no faith in ourselves. I have never met a woman who, deep down in her core, really believes she has great legs. And if she suspects that she might have great legs, then she’s convinced that she has a shrill voice and no neck.” — Cynthia Heimel

“Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.”– John Wilmot (Lord Rochester)

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.” — Harry S. Truman

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.” — Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

“A woman is like a teabag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.” — Nancy Reagan

“People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.” — Leo J. Burke

“My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. I said I’d hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit.” — Jerry Hall

“Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can’t see anything wrong with each other.” — Gene Yasenak

“To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” — Benjamin Franklin

“One must eat to live and not live to eat.” — Moliere

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”– Albert Einstein

“The best way to lose weight is to close your mouth – something very difficult for a politician. Or watch your food – just watch it, don’t eat it.” — Edward I. Koch

“The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books – how not to eat what you’ve just learned how to cook.” — Andy Rooney

“Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it’s for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.” — Elsa Schiaparelli

Let me know which ones you like the most, and stay tuned for more. If you think these jokes might help people you know to feel better, please share this post.

Breathe, smile and be happy.

Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Counselor and Coach