Wednesday, February 2, 2011

You are my SUNSHINE!

Good Morning!
What a glorious day!!  I woke up this morning thinking about how much I love a sunny day... don't we all?  Do you get kinda blue on cloudy days?  Do you get cabin fever in the winter?  I know I do... that is why I moved south!  :)  I LOVE a sunny day. 

We NEED sunshine to prosper and flourish.  Not to survive... but to be happy and healthy, yes!  We hear all the time that we need to drink more milk to get our vitamin D, right?  WRONG!  The sun actually helps your body produce vitamin D.  It also reacts with our pineal glands behind the eyes helping to release our natural happy drug - serotonin.  So in reality, the sun DOES make us happy!

If you have a hard time sleeping, one thing to help is to change your lighting in the evenings.  If you are used to having all the lights on in your house, start to turn them off a couple hours before you want to sleep.  Turning down or off the lights will affect your internal clock.  It make take a couple days, but your body will eventually realign itself and you should start to feel sleepy earlier. 

We are told constantly that the sun will give us cancer.  If you are a person that goes into the sun and habitually gets burned, then my response would be... DUH.  However, if you are a person that is in the sun a LOT and uses sunscreen EVERY time you go out, you are JUST AS LIKELY to get skin cancer.  It isn't the sun, it is how you treat your body and what you put on your body.  Measure your time in the sun - don't over expose yourself.  Don't use sunscreen, have you ever read the ingredients?  How many people in Africa or the Middle East have skin cancer?  VERY FEW.  The US has the highest cases of skin cancer.  Ok... off my soap box again... sorry.

Back to the sun.  The sun and our food.  During one of my classes, I read that you should always eat your dark leafy greens at your mid-day meal and then to go walk for 30 minutes after.  The sun hitting your skin actually activates the phytosterols from the plants giving you more energy.  It also allows you to eat less, and absorb the vital nutrients better.

I like my greens combined with herbs for my lunch salad - I try to get as many different types and colors as I can... and the herbs not only smell and taste divine, they are healers as well... So grab a dark green salad for lunch and then go for a walk.  Expose as much skin as you can to absorb all the wonderful rays of the sun!  Be HAPPY!  E

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