Nutrition Corner

8 Healthiest Types of Bread to Try: Discover 8 healthy and delicious bread options, from sprouted grain to gluten-free, and learn how to choose the healthiest types of breads.

The 13 Best Foods For Healthy Skin: Your skin requires certain nutrients to maintain its health and youthfulness.

Recipe for The Day

Watermelon Salad with Feta and Mint: Few things say summer like watermelon. Jacques Pépin's staple warm-weather salad combines sweet melon and cool mint with savory olives, onion, and feta cheese.

Lifestyle & Fitness Focus

4 Tips on How to Feel Less Tired and More Alert During the Day

• Prioritize Your Sleep: Sleep is as important to your health as proper eating and exercise. Don’t push it aside to make room for other activities. Sleeping too little, or less than seven hours per night, is the most common cause of exhaustion. In addition to leaving you feeling tired, lack of sleep has also been linked to an increased risk for serious accidents.

• Fuel With Protein: If your usual breakfast is a muffin, doughnut, bowl of sugary cereal, or even worse, nothing at all, you’re likely to feel the effects just a few hours into your day. Filling your body with a heavy dose of carbs leads to a spike in blood sugar, followed by a crash that can make you feel desperate for a nap. If you have time, scramble eggs for breakfast. If not, spread peanut butter on a piece of whole-wheat toast, enjoy a bowl of yogurt with fruit, or grab a protein-enriched bar or smoothie.

• Limit Caffeine and Alcohol: Caffeine, in the form of coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks, or even chocolate, can affect your sleep by keeping you awake longer, shortening your restorative stages of sleep, and zapping your alertness the next day.4 Do your best to watch your caffeine consumption; the FDA recommends no more than 400 milligrams (about four or five cups of coffee) per day.

• Make an Effort to Move More: It seems counterintuitive, but daily fatigue can be your body’s way of crying out for more activity. Exercise raises your metabolism, stimulates your mood, and helps you sleep better at night.

3 simple tips to get (and stay) healthy in 2024

• Go nuts: Nuts and seeds offer a little plant protein and plenty of healthy fats, plus nutrients like magnesium, zinc, and vitamin E. So sprinkle them on salads instead of croutons, which are usually salty white-flour bread.

• Add veggies to boost the potassium and lower the salt per serving: Add a pound of steamed broccoli or other veggie to your favorite Chinese or Thai take-out. Mix a bagged salad kit with a bag of undressed lettuce. Add a bed of baby spinach or kale to frozen meals. That way, each mouthful ends up with more potassium and less salt.

• Slash the sugar in your yogurt: You can’t go wrong with some fresh fruit plus plain Greek or regular yogurt, which has no added sugar. Try mixing in frozen wild blueberries or mango or stewed cinnamon apples. Mmm.

Try These 3 Simple Breathing Exercises for Sleep

• Belly Breathing: A form of diaphragmatic breathing, this technique involves breathing deeply into (yup!) your belly. As you do so, you should place your hand on your abdomen and experience your belly expand into your hand on the inhale and contract on the exhale.

• Yoga Nidra: Yoga nidra has been helpful for some people to fall asleep. It's similar to meditation, but different in that with yoga nidra, you're lying down and the goal is to move into a deep state of conscious awareness sleep. Yoga nidra is also generally very structured. It doesn't involve consciously controlling your breath, but rather simply becoming aware of your breath so it can slow down and become even.

• Square Breathing: Square breathing gives you something physical to focus on, and counting the seconds and synchronizing the breath can have a grounding effect and reduce the wandering of the mind. In square breathing, the prolonged exhalation phase also results in the lungs pushing on the heart a bit, which in turn, makes the heart beat more slowly, thereby activating the parasympathetic nervous system to help you fall asleep.

This Core Is on Fiiire! 4 Standing Ab Exercises That Are Trainer- and TikTok-Approved

• Wood Chop: This classic standing move works your entire trunk, with a focus on the obliques and transversus abdominis. In addition to the core, this move also works your glutes and shoulders (deltoids and rotator cuff muscles).

• Cross-Body Leg Lift: This move targets your hip flexors, adductors (inner thighs) and gluteus medius, as well as your rectus abdominis (the "six-pack" ab muscles) and obliques.

• High Knee Lift: This exercise works your quads, glutes, obliques and transversus abdominis (the deepest of the core muscles that wrap around the entire trunk, extending from the ribs to the pelvis).

• Leaning Obliques: No surprises here! In addition to the obliques, this move works your latissimus dorsi (lats), deltoids and triceps.

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