Garden Your Way To Health And Fitness: A Fitness Mantra Book Review
The garden is one of the few places that many people would confess feeling truly ambivalent about. While it’s true that a beautifully maintained garden not only adds beauty and value to the home or community it graces, but also provides a sanctuary for nature lovers or serenity-seekers, what’s also true is that the very thought of having to clear, rake, seed, mow, aerate, fertilize, dethatch and water a garden or lawn tends to overwhelm the average person. The physical strains associated with a good day on the yard can be quite substantial and not to be dismissed lightly.
“Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” is a recently published book that shows you not only how to create the perfect garden based on your needs but also how to do so in the safest possible way with minimal strain on your body while getting a good full-body workout in the process! Here is a Fitness Mantra Book Review of “Garden Your Way To Health And Fitness”. I am trying to standardize all future book reviews on Fitness Mantra and after referencing a lot of online examples and references, I have decided on this format. Please feel free to send me your comments and criticisms so I can improve on this.
Title: Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness
Author(s): Bunny Guinness and Jacqueline Knox
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 978-0-88192-881-5
Price (10/24/2009): US $14.96
Preview: On Google Books
Subject: Gardening, Health and Fitness
Theme: Minimizing injury while gardening; achieving good health and fitness from a well-designed garden
Thesis: Stretching and balancing oneself beforehand and using the right tools in the correct fashion while gardening will minimize the risk of injury and allow you to enjoy a beautiful, well-planned garden that can be a personal sanctuary as well as a place to exercise, stay fit and grow ornamental flowers or sustainable fruits, vegetables, nuts and herbs.
Disclosure: I was sent one free copy of this book by the publishers to review. As always, please be assured of completely unbiased reviews on Fitness Mantra.
Review of Garden Your Way To Health And Fitness:
Bunny Guinness, a professional landscape designer and Jacqueline Knox, physiotherapist, come together to create a gardening book that also stresses the importance of ensuring correct posture and balance while in the garden.
The book begins with simple balancing techniques that one can perform even before beginning to garden and one can discern a lot of pilates movements in these exercises. Running the gamut from simple stretches to spine curls, side rolls and so called “diamond presses”, this eight-step routine is sure to get you in limber form before you begin your garden work. There’s even an aerobic section if you plan to do more strenuous gardening.
This is followed by a detailed chapter describing the virtually unlimited potential of a well-designed garden in giving you the workout you desire. The gardening-calorie-chart in the very begining of this chapter makes it clear: gardening work = calories-burned! Collecting grass or leaves for an hour? 260 calories. Chopping wood? 385! Interspersed with amazingly well-taken photographs, you are walked through dynamic workouts like squats, lunges and step-ups. You are also shown the proper techniques for various strengthening exercises.
From here, the authors shift to taking you to more “gardening oriented” material like choosing the optimal tools for safe work, maintaining proper posture while actually performig the various gardening procedures like trimming or moving a loaded wheel-barrow. Desiging the right kind of garden for your purposes follows with beautiful pictures of various functional elements you can think of adding: walkways, sleepers and even multiple-levels all come together to create the perfect environment for your garden.
There is even information on creating ornamental and productive (as in giving you things to consume!) gardens in the end that round up this concise, yet compelling, book.
If there’s one aspect of this book that tends to stand out, it’s the outstanding collection of photos and pictures throughout the book giving you the very correct impression that these authors are genuine experts in their respective fields. Their combined knowledge of gardening and fitnessshines through in these pages and if you have ever considered spending any significant portion of your time in your garden, especially with the idea of getting a good workout in the process and/or growing your own food organically, Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness will be an excellent reference in your endeavour and come highly recommended.
If you have read or benefited from this book, I am eager to hear your own thoughts about it especially if you have implemented some of the more functional aspects of their garden-designs that lean toward health and fitness. Also, I would like to know if this book-review format is to your liking and what, if any, changes you would like to see in it. Please feel free to sound off in the comments!
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FitnessMantra Quotes #3: Every Bite You Eat
A simple concept about the food we eat and what it does for us. But I haven’t seen it expressed quite so succinctly:
“Every bite you eat is an act of nourishment or an act of suicide.” – Dr. Bruce Bond
So, what do you choose? Good or bad? Fitness or Inactive Tiredness? Health or Disease?
Life or Death?
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Is Soup The Best-Kept Diet Secret Of All?
Consider two simple scenarios you could be facing at lunchtime: when you have a solid food and water, you could eat those separately or you could premix them into a soup and drink the whole thing together. Which of the two techniques do you think will keep you full longer hence preventing you from snacking often and gaining weight? If you said “The soup!” then it just shows you have read the title of this blog post!
But seriously, BBC News Magazine reports that eating the same food and water combined together as a soup will help keep you full much longer than if you ate them separately. The secret lies in the way food passes from the stomach to the intestines:
After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work. Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to “filling you up”.
When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists’ scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs. [BBC]
Ghrelin and the suppression of hunger:
Ghelin is a hormone released by the stomach walls when the stomach is empty. This hormone triggers a response in the brains hypothalamus region that causes us to “feel hungry” and we start to look for food. But when the stomach walls are stretched as a result of eating food, ghrelin production is stopped and we “feel full”. So one easy way to keep the feeling of fullness for longer periods of time is to eat foods that stay in eh stomach longer.
But as you saw eating food and drinking water separately causes the water to leave the stomach first and the food left behind is not there long enough to keep you satisfied. Soups on the other hand stay in the stomach in their entirety and are only slowly removed causing you to avoid the dreaded 3:00 p.m. snack craving.
What has been your own experience with soups? Have you ever felt full for a longer period of time when you drank soup for lunch? Do comment your thoughts on this study and head on to BBC to read the entore article also.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
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Restaurant Meals Are Still Very High In Calories
If you are a person who regularly eats out then this news item should come as no surprise at all. With portion sizes constantly on the increase and restaurants forever trying to figure out how to increase the taste in their dishes, is it any wonder that the first casualty in this war on portion-sense is the number of calories in your food?
“Sky-high Calories In Some Restaurant Meals“, on WebMD explores this continuing phenomenon of ever-higher portion sizes. The Center For Science In The Public Interest (CSPI) studied the calorie and ingredient information for some of the popular meals from large restaurants and found saturated fat and sodium so high that it would be enough for three days!
Here are just a few of the major offenders:
- Chili’s Big Mouth Bites with French fries (four mini bacon cheeseburgers with fried onion strings): 2,350 calories, 38 grams saturated fat, 3,940 milligrams sodium.
- Olive Garden Tour of Italy, with lasagna, chicken parmigiana, and fettuccine alfredo: 1,450 calories, 33 grams saturated fat, 3,830 milligrams sodium.
- The Cheesecake Factory Fried Macaroni and Cheese: 1,570 calories, 69 grams saturated fat, 1,860 milligrams sodium. [WebMD]
Even an average meal at a restaurant can run close to 3000 calories when you realize that the entree, main course and dessert could each be close to a 1000 calories apiece. And some are just way worse than others:
Hurley believes diners don’t realize just how indulgent some items are. It’s a given that you’re splurging when you order Uno Chicago Grill’s Mega-Sized Deep Dish Sundae, a chocolate-chip cookie baked in a pizza pan and topped with ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce, she says.
“But how many people would guess there are 2,800 calories and 72 grams of saturated fat when that sundae hits the table?” [WebMD]
The CSPI is petitioning for a law requiring more easily available nutrition information on restaurat menus, menu boards etc. In the meantime, however, it’s upto the consumer to be wary of which dishes are high-calorie ad which ones are (relatively) more healthful.
For more examples of dishes-gone-wild and some tips on choosing good meals at restaurants head on to WebMD to read the entire new article.
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FitnessMantra Quotes #2: Make Time For Exercise
Another little fitness-quotation gem I came across yesterday and thought it worth sharing:
Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. -Edward Stanley
It’s a choice we make everyday: be healthy or not, stick to our diets or not, exercise or not. Well, whatever you choose, just know this: there are always consequences.
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