If you find yourself constantly buying your snacks and meals from the vending machines at your workplace, then it may be time to reevaluate your eating habits. Take a look at where your snacks and meals have been coming from during the past week. Did you bring them from home? Pick them up at a local restaurant or grocery store? Or did you purchase them from a vending machine while on the job? If a good portion of your food has been coming from that last option, then it is definitely time to think about the impact that your choices is having on your diet.

First, consider why it is that you are buying food and drinks from the vending machines. Is it convenience? Do you forget to bring them from home? Or do you often just find yourself unprepared to deal with an unexpected hunger pang or bout of sluggishness? Vending machines certainly can provide a solution to this problem. After all, they never close. They are always faithfully standing there in the same spot, waiting for someone to drop some spare change into their belly in exchange for a snack or soda. There is, however, oftentimes a trade off for the convenience that they provide in that most of the traditional machines provide only snack foods that are loaded down with calories, fats, and other things that can quickly derail your diet.

Additionally, if you are like many people, then the main reason that you choose snack foods from vending machines is because you are pressed for time and it is the most convenient option. This is problematic too though. When a person eats mindlessly, while staring at a computer screen and checking their email for example, they are much more likely to consume more calories than their body needs. In fact, the human body is faithful in sending signals to your brain to tell you when your stomach is full and you should stop eating. The fact of the matter is that people oftentimes ignore or overlook these signals because they are too distracted from the process of eating.

Although it does seem more convenient to just choose snacks from your company’s vending machines, think about the impact that these small choices will have over your lifetime. Make healthful changes in your snacking ways by eating healthy snacks, whether you bring them from your home or if you buy them from a vending machine company that specializes in health foods, like YoNaturals vending business. In fact, choosing YoNaturals lets you have both the convenience of snacking on the go and choosing foods that will do your body good. It’s the best of both worlds.  

The choices you make for your children as they are growing up will have a positive or negative influence on how they function as adults. We know as parents we pave the road for our children in many different ways, but many of don’t realize that the eating patterns we set for our children will also follow them along life’s path. Poor eating habits that you instill into your children are not going to disappear once they reach adulthood nor are they suddenly going to realize the importance of eating healthy meals and snacks. Sometimes it takes a traumatic event such as a heart attack or stroke before the reality of poor eating habits manifests itself in their minds.

Certainly childhood obesity is a growing problem, and though we want to place emphasis on children, we cannot ignore the fact that childhood obesity paves the road to adult obesity. Very few obese adults were normal weight children—the exception being those who are obese because of health conditions such as thyroid problems. In most cases, obese adults began as obese children, and this is the part that we want to address. If we can work to eliminate or reduce obesity in children, we will also be able to reduce or eliminate obesity in the adult population as well.

If we begin teaching children to eat healthy nutritious meals and snacks, they will continue making those healthy choices as they enter adulthood. The foundation is laid in childhood and though they may not always avoid unhealthy foods and snacks, they will understand the importance of minimizing the consumption of unhealthy foods. The problem lies in the fact that many parents let their children have too many unhealthy foods and don’t encourage them to eat healthy snacks. In fact, adults are the worst offenders because even if they have healthy snacks for the children but eat unhealthy snacks themselves, they are still laying the foundation for an obese adult.

Begin teaching your children about healthy snacking when they are children and encourage their schools to purchase healthy vending products. School Healthy Vending and Healthy Student Vending are two companies that YoNaturals supports in their quest to promote healthy snacks for our children. Though the schools cannot control what the children eat at home any more than parents can control what their children eat in school, the combined efforts will teach the children the importance of making good choices in what they eat. With proper conditioning you can raise a child who will choose a piece of fresh fruit instead of a cookie.
Author: Brenda Coxe

We would like to take a break from our regularly scheduled healthy vending programing and bring your attention to your overall spiritual wellbeing, which is just as important as nutrition in many ways.

          Today, our world is so bright, flashing and noisy - a plethora of unwanted, unsolicited and intrusive messages and images our flooding our neurons causing extreme over stimulation of the brain cells.  We can’t handle this.  We’re not supposed to handle this.  This is not natural.  It is not conducive to the way in which our brains are organized.  As extremely complex and miraculous machines, they are adaptable but not to a level such as we have forced it.  The receptor neurons cannot regulate nor change in order to handle and compartmentalize this chaotic disaster we call modern life.

          This being said, the alarming millions of Americans depending on psychotropics such as, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety’s, mood stabilizers, prescription narcotics, legal drugs such as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine and the entire range of illegal drugs, give us a glaringly obvious clue that there is a problem.

          For every problem, there is a solution.  Meditation is a step into a new world, one where today’s world disappears.  When we learn the relaxation, deepening and protection techniques with faithful practice and willingness, we may be freed from this overload.  We may be freed from dependence on substances that we use simply to function.  With an open mind and a true desire for relief, anything is achievable.

           Meditation tends to scare many people.  Why is this?  I think it is because they erroneously believe that meditation is a practice that must be done in some yoga position during which one achieves pure nothingness.  How in the world, especially this world can we possibly empty our minds or live up to an expectation that seems so remote an attainment that we balk at beginning?

           We don’t need to balk once we learn that there are many methods of meditation and you can find one that works for you.  They all produce health benefits.  If you are new at meditation or have tried it and believe it can’t work for you, then don’t despair.  Only the smallest amount of time and patience is needed to achieve results that will change your life and even the world around you.

           Relax.  Find a quiet place and a few minutes, before going to bed, or upon wakening are sometimes the only time we can find.  You can lie down, sit up, that’s not important, as long as you’re comfortable.  You can also grab a few minutes in the car before or after work.  Doing it in the car, after a long day at work, before you drive home is nice because then you return to home life rested and relaxed instead of stressed and feeling crazy which will only be expressed towards your family or friends.

Every day find those few minutes and say to yourself that you are relaxing, and releasing tension with every breath you take, breathe deep and affirm to yourself that with every breath, you are becoming more and more relaxed and all the tension is flowing out of your body.  You will feel different.  You will feel better. 

Clarity of mind and calmness are uncovered through this natural method of releasing your body’s own ability to relieve itself of stress.  The attainment of the goals you desire will also evolve into your life as joy, success, contentment and bounties indescribable. 

Jessica Vachal wrote this article for Yo Naturals vending.

Money always plays a very strong role in how people live their lives. When they have money, they tend to do very little for their neighbors and fellow humans. After all, why would the wealthy need to make moves that would save their neighbors stress or environmental toxins? These wealthy individuals are able to drive their gas-guzzling cars and buy conventionally grown foods with little care of how their actions are affecting the rest of the world. They do not care that they are polluting the air with their oversized vehicles and polluting the ground with the pesticides put onto the conventionally grown foods they choose to purchase and consume.

That is how the wealthy are portrayed, and of course that is how some wealthy think and act. Yet there are plenty of other wealthy Americans who understand that they are part of the world as a whole, who are conscientious of the way they live their lives, who eat organically because they can afford to, and who help to educate the rest of the world on how numbers equate power, and if we all banded together to fight for organic foods or cleaner-burning cars, the industries would respond accordingly. However, those strapped for cash could hardly be bothered to listen, generally-speaking, as they were more concerned with putting food on the table than with the impact they were having on the masses.

However, now that America is undergoing such economic struggles and almost all monetary circles of our society are struggling to save some pennies here or there, people are becoming more aware the impact an individual has on the whole. People are suddenly become much more cognizant of buying their food locally, of looking not only for organic foods but also for food which was grown in their city or their own, that which was grown close to home, literally. The reasons that people are looking to buy foods locally are so that the additional prices and taxes due to the costs taken on in trucking the produce into your particular city or town will be mitigated and the savings transferred onto you, the consumer.

The power of money is a strong one, people always need or want more of it, and when they have it, it hardly seems like enough. Yet when money is tight, the ways to be frugal seem to crop up with much more frequency and the ways to live your life in a more green fashion very often follows suite. Buying your food organically and locally are one ways to keep costs down – in comparison – while upgrading the quality of the life you lead. Buy organic and buy local, like Yo Naturals – your body, and your wallet, will feel better, and the rest of the world will become better for your actions as well.