Kia Ākina

Working towards lifelong recovery from obesity

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Get Active – Five minutes stretching every day

Is there anything stopping us from spending five minutes each day undertaking a set of stretches?  Making the time to do just five minutes of stretches every day is an excellent thing to add to our new recovery lifestyles.   Five minutes is just 0.3% of the (more…)

Take Control – Routines and reality

There’s something very real about standing on the scales and checking your weight. Becoming overweight requires a certain neglect; and part of this neglect is being dissociated from the reality of slowly putting on unnecessary fat. Becoming overweight requires us (more…)

Enjoy Life – By being reassuring, comforting and encouraging to yourself

We all know the “long and happy journey” isn’t always happy. All of us have experienced some ups and downs and most have also experienced some really big ups and downs over the years while coming to grips with our (more…)

Eat Well – Don’t be fooled by the hidden calories in drinks

It is very easy to consume calories through drinking. An excellent new lifestyle strategy is to reduce or eliminate altogether drinks with calories in them, which basically means drinks containing sugar or alcohol or both. When thirsty, we should always (more…)

Persist – By allowing ourselves to become genuinely hungry before eating

Here is a really important persistence exercise to try, which if we can suss will take us a good three steps forward on the long happy journey. It’s about learning to withstand the Beast grumbling inside us. When the Beast (more…)

Eat Well – Deliberately limit portion sizes

To lose weight we have to eat less. Exercising more can do it but we’ve got to do so much exercise to burn off excess food, like 40 minutes of brisk energetic walking for just one small chocolate bar. It (more…)

Get Active – Twenty minutes of moderate activity every day

The Hillary Commission (2001) advises us to undertake 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise at least five days a week for health. This translates to about twenty minutes of activity every day that gets you puffing a little. The key (more…)

Enjoy Life – By being thankful

One of the surest ways of enjoying life is to become more thankful. Counting our blessings means focussing on the good things in our lives and feeling grateful for them. There are controlled psychological experiments confirming that genuine happiness increases (more…)

Eat Well – Eat plenty of lettuce

There is almost nothing better than a lettuce salad for lunch. Lettuce is low in calories, and relatively high in micronutrients – folate, zinc, potassium, iron, Vit A, Vit C – and of course is also a good source of fibre. It is (more…)

Persist – If struggling, don’t give up completely

None of us are perfect. All of us slip up from time to time, generally for very good reasons. The trick with continuing to progress on the “long and happy (recovery) journey”, despite major stress, is to change down to (more…)

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