The old saying that the greatest of journeys begins with one small step is even more relevant to everyday life than you may imagine. The big changes that we each make in our lives, the all encompassing changes that are long term, often do not happen in one inspirational moment with a dramatic musical score. 

The real changes in our lives happen gradually, in small steps that slowly bring about lasting change.  With each small change comes a switch in momentum, building the drive and dedication until that eventual Big Change happened already, quietly and unobtrusively.  One day, you wake up and you became what it was that you dreamed of.

Small adjustments, Big changes

If you are making changes in your life with renewed dedication this year, try to remember that a singular, massive effort to enact real change may not be what you are looking for.  Small efforts will be those things that you can actually do with relative ease and little discomfort.  Because the changes are small and easy, you’ll be more likely to keep up with them and include larger changes as time goes on.  Before you know it, large changes happened.  They may have taken longer to happen, and they were less noticeable, but they were permanent.

Here are some small adjustments   vs   the bigger changes that you eventually want to happen:

Writing down the food you eat:         Reduce Calories by ¼

Park at the far end of the lot and walk:      Get More Exercise at Work

These small changes are examples of first steps on a journey towards lifelong healthy changes.

If you are stressed out and anxious because you’ll be hosting a dinner or party this holiday season, you should try and remember the point to hosting in the first place.  You want to bring friends, family and loved ones together in a caring, fun atmosphere, and like it or not you will be the center of that atmosphere.  If you are nervous and uptight, that anxiousness will spread to everyone at your get together and an otherwise wonderful party will be made an uncomfortable experience.

A party, dinner or get together is  supposed to be fun.These events are all about laughing, telling stories, and reconnecting with loved ones.

Hints to stay relaxed during your party or dinner event:

The most effective tip to staying calm and relaxed is often the most overlooked. Keep your party simple.  The more complicated you make your party, the more the balance of the party shifts from what is important to what is trivial.  Your guests take second place to your foods, your decorations or your carefully planned entertainment.  Everyday life is busy enough, try to keep your party casual and close.

Being the most popular hostess comes with a price.  You often don’t have a moment to enjoy your own parties.  Don’t play into the hype of trying to be a super-host.  Be a good friend, a caring family member and welcome people into your life, not just invite them to a party. Give yourself permission to be human.

Hosting for the holidays can be a  lot of work, but you can still make sure you offer a balanced, loving home to your guests.

For a family, memories are sensual and emotional events that incorporate so much of your history that entire traditions are created around them. For families that are making the transition from one home to another, the ability to let go and move on, away from the memories of a childhood home, is a difficult one. You can help your family create a new tradition cherish old memories while also helping them move on from the past when you include Legacy Traditions.

Legacy traditions are family traditions that serve as focal points for memories and the balanced emotional health that comes from processing those memories in a healthy and personal way. Helping children Preserving the memories and transition with the least amount of emotional turmoil is one of our goals for families who are moving to a new home.

Legacy Traditions

A very popular and very Green Legacy Tradition that serves as the perfect way to help children transition from one home to the next is to plant a tree at your old home, leaving a living legacy of your family at your original home. It might even be a good idea to explain this to the new homeowners so that they might take extra care of that new sapling, and pass on the idea that they themselves could plant another tree next to it if they decide to move. Giving this gentle nudge of an idea may just leave a legacy of homeowners that each successor will cherish.

Healthy family traditions and legacies can be benifical to everyone.

Maintaining your health during the winter is often about taking advantage of your ability to manipulate your environment. Yes, you can keep your house warm no matter how cold it is outside, but traditional heating methods also lead to dry, stale air that can contribute to breathing problems, dry skin and general ill health. In order to combat this, many people turn to humidifiers in order to increase the moisture levels in their homes.

Moist Air in Winter

There are two types of Humidifiers available, the Steam humidifier and the Cool Mist humidifier.

Steam humidifiers use heat to boil water that you add to its tank. The humidifier heats this water to a boiling point and emits a hissing stream of warm mist into the air. The boiling kills off any mould or bacteria that may grow in the water. Many find the warm heat calming in the winter, as a contrast to the cold outdoors. It does, however, create muggy and humid feeling in the room. This type of humidifier does pose a burn risk, however, and is probably not the best choice for use in a child’s room.

Cool mist humidifiers give off mist without the danger of heat. Water is not heated at all in this type of humidifier but instead agitated at high speed to create a mist. There is no heat and no burn risk. Many people prefer this type of humidifier in the summer because it feels refreshing in contrast to the hot outdoors. Lack of heat does, however, mean that there is an increased chance of bacterial growth in the humidifier.

It is important to follow the manufacturer’s directions for maintaining and cleaning the product to ensure that are not sending bacteria-ridden water mist into your lungs with each use.

Keep your family health this season and use the right humidifying product for your health.

One of the most important reasons that many people begin researching a balanced diet is to help them correct a health problem or to help them maintain their good health.  Fortunately, there have been many studies on the natural benefits of specific nutrients and vitamins and there is information on which nutrient or vitamin is most beneficial for just about any health issue. 

Nutrients and Vitamins for Eyes

Here are some of the four most important factors to maintain good eye health:

• Vitamin A is the first and most immediately important nutrient to consider when discussing an eyes-healthy diet.  Even a moderate deficiency in Vitamin A intake can cause night blindness, which manifests as a difficulty perceiving details in low light conditions. Greater deficiencies cause greater visual defects in fairly short order. This is a definite hazard for anyone driving at night, making this vitamin a must.
• Vitamin C is also an important nutrient that helps maintain the body’s immune system, and your eyes can be a typical place to acquire a casual-contact infection.  In addition, some studies suggest that Vitamin C may play a role in screening out damaging UV rays and delaying the development of macular degeneration and glaucoma.
• Vitamin E is important because it maintains the health of the eyes’ mucous membranes.  When eyes dry out, they begin to suffer surface damage. Keeping the eyes lubricated is therefore very important, and vitamin E is a natural way to take care of it without resorting to eye drops.
• An important non-vitamin nutrient for healthy eyes is Lutein.  Lutein has been directly linked to the amount of pigmentation in the human eye in several important studies.  High levels of pigmentation have been shown to decrease the chance of age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.

Here are more articles on information and research about nutrition and your daily health.

There are few real discussions about children’s health supplements however one of the most common nutritional supplement given to children is fluoride.

What is Fluoride?

Fluoride is a natural element found in the earth’s crust in addition to being found in the water and air. It’s also considered a nutrient because our bodies need fluoride to grow and develop properly.

Many fluoride minerals are known, but paramount in commercial importance are fluorite and fluorapatite. Fluoride is found naturally in low concentration in drinking water and foods. Water with underground sources is more likely to have higher levels of fluoride.  Fresh water supplies generally contain between 0.01-0.3 ppm, while the ocean contains between 1.2 and 1.5 ppm.

Why is Fluoride Important to Your Health:

Fluoride helps with the growth and maintenance of strong teeth.  It does this by mixing with tooth enamel, the hard coating on your teeth, and making it stronger.  This extra layer of strength prevents tooth decay, or cavities.
Fluoride can also help adult teeth that have already formed their enamel.  This nutrient helps by working in conjunction with saliva to protect tooth enamel from plaque and sugars. By using fluoride toothpaste, for instance, brushing your teeth becomes an exercise in preventative care and actual maintenance. everyone can enjoy some cavity protection.

Studies found many years ago that kids who naturally had more fluoride in their drinking water had fewer cavities and stronger teeth as adults.  Interest in purposely fluoridating drinking water was building and community wide water supplies were given fluoride treatments.

Fluoride comes in so many ways and from so many sources that you may think it would be impossible for a child to not be exposed to it, however in many rural areas without access to community water supplies and reservoirs, fluoridated water isn’t a part of their daily lives.

Many of the bits and pieces of advice handed down to us from our parents were typically ignored until we grew up.  As we got older and, if we were lucky, a bit wiser, we found that some of the simplest bits of advice had real logic and science behind them.

• For instance, all the times your parents told you that splashing baby oil on your skin and then sitting in the sun with a tin-foil bib was crazy?  They were right.  Tanning like that was a very, very bad idea.  Now, most doctors will tell you to avoid the sun as much as possible.  Dermatologists will agree that, while the sun has great health and mental health benefits, you should avoiding sun exposure on your face by doing simple things such as wearing a hat and using the right sunscreen.
• Your parents also probably told you not to smoke because you would smell bad and you would ruin your voice.  Years later the truly horrific results of cigarette smoking came to light and the list of side effects was disastrous.  Lung cancer, emphysema,  and many other horrible health problems are caused by smoking.  In addition,  most scientific studies agree that cigarette smoke releases an enzyme that breaks down collagen and elastin. As you know, collagen and elastin are essential components for skin health. So not only do cigarettes destroy your insides, but they also deeply affect how you look outside, too.

Good advice is practically ageless, even when it wasn’t completely on target. Our parents knew more than we thought!

We all have idiosyncrasies that drive our spouses and loved ones crazy, and if we’re not careful, we can help proliferate rifts that build in our relationships. What start out as small issues eventually become large issues that destroy marriages and other relationships. We let hurts, resentments, and frustrations build and then it hits critical mass. What begins small grows unless we root out the causes of those issues and find ways to heal those rifts before they get too wide to cross.

Finding the right balance for our emotional and physical health is a difficult thing to accomplish. One of the first things that you need to take into consideration is your daily nutritional intake and how that can be affecting your emotional balance.

Many consumers love the idea of having naturally beautiful products inside their home that reflect their love of the natural world outside.  One of the ways that this love of natural beauty manifests itself is in the ways we decorate.  A hugely popular item used for interior decoration and functionality are granite countertops.

The beauty of natural granite is undeniable, but sometimes beauty comes with a natural consequence.  In the case of granite, occasionally there are also large emissions of radon.

Most radiation experts who have tested samples of granite for radon feel that the risk is minimal because it usually only emits a low amount of radon.  Low, that is, when compared to the radiation that all of us are exposed to every day from the sun, the earth’s crust, electrical appliances and other sources of “background radiation.”

Some researchers, however, have found some granite test samples that emit radiation at levels a hundred times greater than what is considered safe.

What is Radon?

Radon is a radioactive gas.  It is created by the natural decay of uranium found in water, rocks, and soil.  Any time you have granite installed in your home it is in your best interest to have the radon levels measured to ensure that you are not putting yourself at risk of lung cancer.

Most experts agree that the most significant risk comes from radon that seeps into a home through the ground, especially in areas considered high risk.  Areas of high risk include, but are by no means limited to, locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York.  Some locations there are known for such high radon concentrations that a radon test is required for a bank to issue a mortgage on a home.

A Natural balance occassionally needs to be checked.

It takes time, love and work to find the right healthy balance for your family.  Juggling work and home, school, sports, hobbies and passions is an almost impossible feat on some days.  Losing yourself in the daily grind, however, can throw your entire family balance off and you may end up with miscommunications, hurt feelings and unhealthy relationships within your group dynamic.

One of the best ways to help your family find balance and reconnect again is with simple family rituals. Family rituals increase communication and create lasting and supporting relationships, and only you can decide which will be best for your family.  There are, after all, as many different family rituals as there are families and no one set of rituals will mean the same thing to everyone.

Family Rituals

Going Outside for Free Play: In a family for whom sports is a priority, a family ritual might involve getting everyone together after supper to enjoy a family game of soccer or even something as simple as a game of catch. Millions of important conversations have passed between a parent and child while playing ball in the backyard. While the physical body is busy, the mental focus can relax and open up about the day’s events and questions.

Family Mealtime: One of the most common family rituals is the act of eating together as a family and talking about the events of the day. Family supper gives each individual member the ability to discuss their concerns, events and important thoughts as well as the opportunity to hear about what’s important to others. These interactions promote an environment of commonality, communication, understanding and, above all, support.

If your family has found itself growing further and further apart, either resurrect an old family ritual or begin a new one that is more in tune with the activities that you all enjoy. Find the healthy balance in your family.