How To Stay Hydrated During The Summer

That guy looks thirsty. Summer is upon us and we love to get outdoors to enjoy the weather. These range of activities can include everything of hanging out with friends at an outdoor event to visiting the beach. If you are going to go outdoors and enjoy what  the summer has to offer, we have some hydration suggestions that you can use so you can get the most out of your activities without feeling thirsty or worse. Here is what we found.

Water makes up between 45 percent and 75 percent of your weight. For many, especially active folks, maintaining a healthy fluid balance can be difficult. However, keeping your body hydrated is vital for proper functioning.

Staying hydrated not only helps with your alertness, controlling appetite, and improving activity and sport performance, but it also keeps every day symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and dry skin at bay.


First Thing's First: Are You Properly Hydrated?

There are two simple ways to measure your hydration status. One method can be used anytime and the other is useful after performing physical activity. The first way to measure your hydration status is to examine the color of your urine. If you're hydrated, your urine will appear to be a very pale yellow--almost clear (keep in mind the water in the bowl will dilute it some). If your urine is much darker--like the color of apple juice or tea--this means that your body is dehydrated.

The other method is used to determine your sweat rate. To do this, weigh yourself naked before performing any exercise. Once you've finished exercising, weigh yourself naked again (sweat-soaked clothing will give you inaccurate results). For every pound lost, drink 16 fluid ounces to replace it. 

Are You Keeping Hydrated During Exercise?

To maintain proper hydration, it's important to drink before, during, and after exercise. When heavy sweating is expected, drink two to three cups of water two to three hours before exercise. Thirty minutes before exercise, drink five to ten ounces. During activity that causes a lot of sweat loss, drinking every 10 to 20 minutes can be beneficial. Those who sweat less can drink every 20 minutes. After exercise, weigh yourself to determine how much you will need to rehydrate adequately.



Are Sports Drinks Good for Rehydrating?

Water is generally the best drink to rehydrate with. However, sports drinks are appropriate after 60 to 90 minutes of intense activity or heavy sweating. Drinking sports drinks casually (when no exercise has been performed) may lead to weight gain since these drinks typically contain calories.

7 Great Tips to Staying Hydrated

If you're living a busy life, even simple tasks--like staying hydrated--can be difficult. So here are seven easy ways to keep your juices flowing.

1. Fruits and vegetables are great sources of water. Be sure to eat these daily, not only to stay hydrated, but to maintain optimal health.

2. Keep a large water bottle handy to encourage you to drink water wherever and whenever.

3. Have a glass of water before each meal.

4. After each trip to the restroom, drink a glass of water to replenish your fluids.

5. Set reminders on your phone, watch, or email to drink every hour.

6. Track your intake of fluids to make sure you get enough daily.

7. Add a slice of lemon, lime and/or basil to your water to give it some flavor without adding any extra calories.


 These are great ways to stay hydrated. Be sure to keep these tips in mind. Thank you to fitday.com for their useful suggestions. If you would like to contact us with any questions or feedback, you can reach us by email.

Thank you for visiting!
Joseph A Jones & The Welllife Team

Hosting An Easter Dinner

 

 

Spring is rapidly approaching. In fact, year after year spring sometimes arrives very fast. We also find our self attending Easter meals each year by our family. Wouldn't it be a good idea to host an Easter dinner?  As Men, it is important to try new activities and further develop our skill set. It is not that hard. Actually, all it takes is being organized. We found a wonderful article from simple.net that shows you how to host this holiday meal.

Ten Simple Ways to Instantly Be a Better Host At Easter

Now, granted these are minor details, but that is the beauty of it – they are all completely doable. Your guests will leave knowing that they have been well cared for by an attentive host.

1. Greet guests. Yes, at the door. No, don’t send your six-year-old while you scramble around the kitchen. Your guests need to feel welcomed.

2. Start with a drink. Or at least offer one. Be it iced tea, Perrier, or a glass of wine, this is a great way to help guests feel at ease.

3. Add a seasonal decoration on the table. Keep it simple: spring flowers, seasonal fruit or vegetables, painted eggs, etc. Don’t over do it.

4. Warm plates. Keep oven at 150°F with your dinner plates inside until ready to serve. Hot plates will keep the food warm longer during the meal.

5. Change the butter dish. Please, guests don’t want to see your toast crumbs and streaks of jam. Keep the dish fresh and clean –and the butter soft.

6. Add ice. If drinks are meant to be chilled, see to it that they are.

7. Light candles. If appropriate. A sit-down evening meal, for example.

8. Assign seating. Verbally is fine, just before the meal begins. Or have the kids color place tags, but just don’t leave your guests to awkwardly place themselves. Telling them where to sit helps them to feel like they were planned for and appreciated.

9. Warm bread or buns. Ten minutes in a warm oven does wonders for the dinner rolls and makes them taste fresh. A nice crust doesn’t hurt either.

10. Keep room temperature comfortable. Dinner can be miserable if the floors are cold or the place is sweltering hot from the kitchen’s heat. Be aware of the room’s temperature (not just your own) and ask guests if they are comfortable.

Menu 1: Easter Brunch

Fruit takes center stage in this comforting breakfast menu, while bold flavors like mint, maple and cinnamon awaken the taste buds. The kids will grab a scone and their smoothie and disappear out into the garden, but grown-ups will linger over the last piece of homemade Easter bread and cups of coffee.

• Citrus Salad with Honey and Mint
• Easter Egg Braid Bread
• Maple Roasted Pear Parfaits
• Cream Scones with Cinnamon Walnut Butter
• Coconut Milk-Raspberry Smoothies

Menu 2: Easter Lunch

Can’t decide between brunch and lunch? This menu straddles the two, keeping things light with a fresh salad, roasted fillet of salmon, and a savory tart. My mother’s recipe for rhubarb cake rounds out the seasonal aspect of the menu.
This menu would also work well for a buffet. The salmon can be served cold and is lovey with a tartar sauce.

• Spring Crudité with Buttermilk-Black Pepper Dip
• Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Tart (recipe below, pictured above)
• Leek-Stuffed Roasted Salmon
• Spinach Salad with Strawberries & Pecans, Maple-Cocoa Nib Vinaigrette
• Rhubarb Upside Down Cake

Menu 3: Easter Dinner

Here a classic roast chicken is paired with a less-traditional side – baked leeks. An asparagus tart adds another seasonal green, while mashed potatoes and strawberry-rhubarb pie round out the comfort food factor.

• Asparagus Tart
• Lemon & Oregano Roast Chicken
• Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes
• Baked Leeks with Yogourt Topping
• Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

This should get you prepared to be a wonderful host for an Easter meal. Thank you to simple.net for their useful instructions. If you would like to contact us with any questions or feedback, you can reach us by email.

Thank you for visiting!
Joseph A Jones & The Welllife Team

Valentines Day Gifts For Her

Have you ever done this before? The nervous anticipation of giving the Valentines Day gifts for that special person. Will she like it? Am I getting the right group of gifts? Gentlemen, we know this is a date that we cannot afford to pick the wrong gifts. Knowing the importance of this holiday, we offer some practical suggestions so that you cannot go wrong.

Flowers

Flowers are a natural choice for your lady love on Valentine’s Day, and a pretty safe bet when all else fails. Unlike other gifts, flowers are appropriate, whether you’ve been dating her for one day or one year. And there are no calories involved. Stick to the classics like roses, or, if she’s not a traditionalist, go for something exotic like lilies or orchids. FTD has all your needs covered, and it can deliver to her home or office.

At-Home Spa Goodies

Put together a spa experience by getting her everything she needs to recreate a spa at home. Engage her sense of romance with scented Diptyque candles. Swing by Bath & Body Works and throw in a loofah, body lotion and bubble bath. Arrange it in a basket and, voila! You have a home spa kit. For a luxurious addition, try SugarBath Lychee Cubes. The cubes foam into a froth of soapy bubbles while releasing a citrus-y sweet scent.

Sexy Body Products

Set the mood for love with sexy products that pamper her body and arouse her. Kama Sutra is known for the sheer variety of kits and products that serve as the ultimate in foreplay. Gift sets like the Weekender Kit and Strawberries & Champagne Treasure Trove will get her treasure trove hot and bothered. Or try Lust Dust Body Powder. This delicious lickable powder will make it that much more easy to lick her hot bod.

A Massage

The perfect end to a romantic evening? A sexy rubdown. The Rub Me Massage Bar melts easily into the skin, creating a smooth, creamy base for massage. If you find oils to be too messy, this is perfect. If your massage skills aren’t up to par, give her a real spa massage. The atmosphere will allow her to truly relax, while a professional’s touch will help ease her tension-filled muscles. Look on Yelp or Spafinder for top spas in your area.

These are Valentines Day gifts that are full proof in making it a special day for you both. We would like to thank Askmen.com for these useful suggestions. If you would like to contact us with any questions or feedback, you can reach us by email.

Thank you for visiting!
Joseph A Jones & The WellLife Team

 

How To Become More Organized

This is a fitting picture for us.We lead such busy lifes and do not always have time to even organize ourselfs. This lack of organizing then has us forget important tasks and run further behind. To assist us in our organization, we found some useful tips that you can use to take back your life and more importantly schedule.

I must emphasize: these are not my tips, but yours, and when you see the word “I” it refers to the reader writing the tip, not me. Names have been removed to protect the innocent.

1. 3 Most Important Tasks. Writing down and making mental note of my top 3 tasks to get done for the day. Everything else seems to fall into place if I do that.
2. An easy and workable task list, or to do list. While I love all of these handy web 2.0 apps, computer software, very neat gadgets like palms and really cool cell phones, they just don’t work for me. I’m a lazy woman, with an even lazier attitude. I might put a task in Remember the Milk, another task in my palm, one in my Gcal and send another text to my phone. With all of these different ways of doing things, I end up spending much more time trying to organize my to do list, or consolidate it, that I don’t get much actually done.
3. Keep ubiquitous capture device. It might not be the same device for every location (I have a moleskine for work, but use my mobile for inspiration on the fly) but just being able to write stuff down when you think about it is key for me.
4. Choose one tool and stick with it.
5. Do one thing at a time.
6. Do it now.
7. Make use of the word no.
8. Use the recycling bin/trash basket. Organizing unnecessary items is wasted energy. It is amazing how much more in control I feel just by ridding myself of now outdated articles I’d like to read “someday,” or countless meeting notes from which relevant action items have already been extracted.
9. A (good) place for everything, and everything in its place. By finding places that are easy to get to for all the things I use most often, and places that are pretty easy to get to for the things I use less often, I spend less time dreading doing things and more time actually doing things. And the place for things you never use is elsewhere (trash can, place that accepts donations, etc.).
10. Simplify, simplify, simplify!
11. Put it away now. The single, simplest thing I do to stay personally organized is to put whatever tool, item, clothing, bag, hairbrush etc., away immediately after using it. I always know where everything and anything is so I never waste time looking for something. Very efficient. I could tell a stranger where to find anything in my home.
12. Keep a to-do list that syncs with your mobile phone (so you can add stuff as and when you remember it). And make sure every item has a due date.
13. Change. It obsoletes unimportant things. It brings down any method or idea that isn’t timeless. It brings up newer and more important things that you and others can’t resist anymore. Best of all: it’s an organizing tool that operates itself. You simply have to embrace it.
14. Divide material into red, yellow, blue and green plastic file folders. For example, anything that has to be done today (paperwork to be given to a client, bills to be mailed) go in the red folder. Contact material or anything related to customer field support goes in the yellow folder. Your mileage may vary as to how you organize your briefcase, and like me you may also have project-specific manilla file folders as well, but dividing stuff up into just four color coded folders is a huge help.
15. Flylady.net. She helped me realize that I needed to apply GTD principles to my home life and not just work. I had work under control using checklists, projects and next actions. I tried the same system at home and failed. Then about a month ago I discovered flylady.net courtesy I believe one of your blog posts. Wow, what a difference. My house is clean and so is my desk at work. Many if not most of her basic ideas are just like GTD in a slightly different perspective (control journal, baby steps) and also concrete methods for accomplishing next actions (2 minute hot spots, 15 minute timers). Her most useful tip was to put my daily/weekly lists into shiny page protectors in my control journal. I use a dry erase marker and voila no more killing trees or not doing my list because I can’t print it (or want to avoid the hassle). The best thing about this, I am more relaxed, my blood pressure is finally dropping and I feel less stressed.
16. Unapologetically take control of your time and priorities.
17. Sort at the source. My favorite organizational tool is my post office box. I visit it once a week (usually Saturday), stand at the counter in the lobby and sort my mail. I use the P.O.’s trash bin. What comes into my house is only what I need to have. Bills and letters and checks go into my inbox (which by the way is a box with a lid that is wrapped in lovely fabric and has a yellow bow on it so it looks like a present sitting on my desk). Reading material goes on the table by my chaise lounge which is where I do all my reading.
18. A sheet of paper, a calendar and a white board. I’ve found that the easiest way to organize myself, my days and so forth is a good paper calendar, a sheet of paper that I divide into four sections and a medium sized white board. For my paper the top left section is my actual running to do list for today. The top right section is my running grocery list, or list of things I must purchase. The bottom left is for notes such as calls I made, who I spoke to, appointment dates. The bottom right is whatever I need to move to another day. If I’m told to call back on Monday, then I note that on the calendar. As for the white board, the kids can make notes (Can I spend the night at Brian’s on Friday? Grandma called), and I can jot down things as I think of them to be added to tomorrow’s to do list. My calendar, and the white board are in the same location, so I can transfer short notes if need be. I carry my paper task list with me everywhere, so I can make notes at any given moment.
19. Color coding. I’m a visual person, and I find that color-coding my various lists and calendars minimizes the time I have to spend looking at them. This worked especially well when I was in school: I dumped every class syllabus into Outlook, and then color-coded every class period (blue for paper due, yellow for quiz, red for test, etc). It took awhile to set up, sure, but then for the rest of the semester I only had to glance at Outlook to get a very clear idea of what kind of week I was going to have.
20. One binder. I use a binder cleverly labeled “@ 2007″ with the following divisions:
    • @ Today – With my Emergent Task Planner from davidseah.com;
    • @ Week – The remaining days of the week ETP’s as a skeleton;
    • @ Year – All my historical sheets;
    • @ Diet – Which tracks what I have eaten for the day;
    • @ Fitness – Which tracks my workout routine for the day. My binder is with me all the time and it has helped me become a better employee, family member and relationship guy.
21. Write down, execute and tidy up on the way. These are is my organization bible. I’ve been living that way since more than two years and I can say that I’m an organized person.
22. A little whiteboard on my bedroom wall. I have it separated into two sections, a “todo” and a “today”. “Todo” is a list of general things I have to do, like get my car inspected, buy someone a present, etc. Then “today” is what I need to do, obviously, today! Things can be moved back and forth as appropriate. I find having a specific list for today helps push me to get the important things done in a timely manner. I also keep two things permanently on the “today” part, which are meditation and exercise. This seems to help.
23. Note cards. One can write tasks on them — one per card, or in a list (depending on the type of task in question; I do both). When doing one per card, the stack serves as an easy prioritization scheme. But wait, there’s more: They can be arranged on cork boards, shared, annotated, torn up and rearranged. They can be used as placeholders, as mini-white boards and as tokens to model ideas. They are easy to carry around, and to attach to other documents. Further, different colors allow for a visual representation of different kinds of todo’s (as can different annotations). Finally, they are cheap and most importantly of all: easy (much easier than software) to reconfigure as needs and projects change.
24. Never rely on a single point of failure. I’ve seen people pay $1,000 to hear speakers at a conference and only have one pen to take notes. It’s a great feeling when one thing breaks, gets lost, or runs out of power, and you have another one in reserve!
25. Have.. less.. stuff.
26. Delegate. Learn to trust people with critical tasks in all areas of your life. When you learn to effectively delegate tasks you actually find that it is easier to keep the stuff you cannot delegate better organized.
27. You control your life. Whatever electronics or paper you use, make them work for YOU not the other way around. Does Outlook really have to stay checking your email every 5 minutes? Maybe, but I bet you’ll get a whole lot more done if you check it a few times per day. That goes for the Blackberry too! After all, there are so many tools, and one to fit everyone – so use what works, but make it work for you!

These are useful tips to get organized and take control again. We would like to thank zenhabits.net for these practical suggestions.  If you would like to contact us with any questions or feedback, you can reach us by email.

Thank you for visiting!
Joseph A Jones & The Welllife Team