Brain Twister: Study Showing Good Cholesterol Isn’t So Good Could Still Be Good For Good Cholesterol-Boosting Drugs Matthew Herper Forbes Staff This morning, drug researchers and cardiologists were again shocked by a big “everything you thought you knew is wrong” moment. The FDA was right. Today …
Today was my 1st day of diet, some weeks ago I found somewhere the diet plan which the nutritionist gave me some years ago and I decided to start it again after the Season’s holidays.
I know it’s very important to write everything on a diary, it helps a lot to control the weight, so today I found an agenda which I didn’t use in the past and I altered it’s cover with scrapbooking.
Jan. 9th, 2008
(131/365)
Date Taken: 2008-01-09 17:54:19
Owner: the Italian voice
diet plan
You are what you eat.
Everything that you are, your muscles, bones, skin, face, hands, hair, and brain, is built and maintained from the ingredients you provide your body through what you eat and drink. The better your ingredients, the better your body works. Have you ever noticed the difference between a fertilized bush and a non-fertilized one? The fertilized bush grows taller, stronger, greener, and healthier. That’s how it works with you too.
Given all that we want to accomplish and experience in our lives, we want to be at our best. Making healthy eating a priority is just plain necessary if we want to live our lives to the fullest.
So what and how should we eat? Below is a lightning-fast high-level overview of some ideas you’ll want to put into practice.
Oh, to be 22 again!
The first, and perhaps most important, thing you can do to improve your health is to maintain a healthy body weight. For most of us, that means returning to the weight we were in high school.
Because we are not all the same height, healthy weight differs from person to person. So that we can all speak the same language, the Body Mass Index (BMI) was developed. While perhaps not quite as accurate as some other methods, BMI is very easy to use. See the chart to find your height and weight and to arrive at your BMI. A BMI between 18.5 and 25 is in the normal range. 25 – 30 is considered overweight and >30 is obese.
Walter Willet, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor at Harvard Medical School in his book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy points to evidence that suggests the likelihood of developing heart disease, cancer, and other modern afflictions starts increasing once BMI gets above 22 and continues to increase with each successive point above it. So he recommends people maintain BMI between 19 and 22.
The secret to losing weight
Want to know the secret to losing weight? It’s a simple math problem: Calories In minus Calories Out. Calories In means the number of calories you consume through eating and drinking. Calories Out means the calories you expend through exercise, sleeping and just living. If Calories In are greater than Calories Out, you gain fat. If Calories In are less than Calories Out, you lose fat. With some nuances we can speak about another time, it’s essentially that simple.
So, if you want to lose weight by losing fat, you can either eat less or exercise more. Probably you should try to do both. Personally, I’ve noticed that it’s easier to control my weight though the amount I eat, because it takes a lot of additional exercise to burn just a few hundred calories. But both elements play important roles.
What about low fat diets, low carb diets, and low baloney diets, you say? Doesn’t it matter what kind of calories I eat? Yes it matters a great deal if you want to be healthy. It’s very important to keeping your body running well. But you can’t lose weight (by reducing fat) unless you expend more calories than you take in. There is no way around it.
What should I eat? Quality over Quantity
Michael Pollan, author of the eater’s manifesto The Omnivore’s Dilemma has recently come out with a great little guide book to eating titled Food Rules. In it, his tips on healthy eating are organized under 3 little phrases that together I think provide the best advice I’ve heard on how to eat well. They are:
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
By food, Pollan means to distinguish real foods – plants, animals, and fungi people have been eating for generations – from the highly processed products of modern food science that are now dominating the western diet. He suggests: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Avoid things like potato chips, yogurt in squeezable tubes, packaged cookies, frozen pizza, etc. Instead, think apples, grapes, tomatoes, spinach, whole grain bread, fish, nuts, beans, etc. Shop the peripheries of the grocery store. Avoid the packaged food-ish substances in the middle.
Once you are eating real food, the next step is to be sure you are eating mostly plants, especially leaves. Meat should be used as a flavoring or on special occasions. By eating mostly vegetables, fruits, beans and nuts, you will get lots of fiber, consumer fewer calories to satisfy hungers, and be providing your body with key nutrients. When you do eat meat, make sure the animal you are eating has itself eaten well. Shop in stores or at farmers markets that have wonderful fresh vegetables. The food in these places tastes much better than what you’ll find in the normal mass market grocery store. If you like the food, you’re more likely to eat it.
“Not too much” means eating until you aren’t hungry. That’s very different than eating until you are full. Eating the right amount has a lot to do with focusing on your eating when you are eating. Don’t eat when watching TV, talking on the phone or while multi-tasking. Don’t eat because you are bored or because it’s “lunchtime”. Eat when you are hungry, to satisfy that hunger. Eat consciously. Sit down at a table, focus on the food, enjoy it, and stop before you are full.
One way to help control cravings is to avoid foods that make cravings. Foods high in sugar, fat or salt all cause cravings. Because they do, manufactured foods are full of this stuff to make you eat and buy more. By eating real food like your great grandmother did, you will avoid these trigger ingredients and stay more in control.
Make the change
If this kind of eating is new for you, get excited, because you are at the start of a wonderful adventure. Taste buds will reawaken, energy will return to you, and you will live longer. Focus on the wonderful new food combinations you are experiencing, rather than on the old foods you are giving up. Before long, you won’t miss them. Did you ever switch from whole to skim milk? Remember when skim milk tasted like water compared to what you were used to. Now you probably like it better than whole milk, which may seem like drinking thick paste. The same things will happen as you change to this better way of eating.
So welcome the adventure and dive in. It’s the single most important thing you can do to develop a healthy body, avoid cancer and heart disease, gain energy, look better, and live longer. It’s the kind of diet we have eaten as a species for millennia and it’s the approach to eating that will work best for you today.
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By: Terry DeWitt
Posted:
healthy eating
Learning how to practice healthy eating can certainly be confusing. Many people fear that they will have to give up everything that they enjoy eating and only enjoy boring foods, but this is not true. You may not have to make drastic changes to your lifestyle and you can still enjoy a healthy diet plan. All you need to do is determine how much you already know, how much you need to change, and what you need to do. Here is a healthy eating quiz that can help you see what you will actually need to change and why. Take this healthy eating quiz as a way to get started n the road to a healthy lifestyle.
Does healthy eating involve giving up all fat in a diet?
Many people know that fat is bad, and they think that this means they have to give it up completely. However, some amounts of healthy fats are a required nutrient. You do not need to give up all fat. You just need to limit the amount you consume.
What are the Effects of a Healthy Diet?
Many people just do not realize how many health and medical problems that can be avoided by healthy eating. However, there are numerous health effects you can gain from a healthy meal plan. For example, healthy eating will help you avoid high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, high cholesterol, gout, obesity and cancer.
Does healthy eating mean I have to give up my favorite foods?
As you will see in this healthy eating quiz, the whole idea of a healthy lifestyle means creating balance. This means, you need a nutritious diet that includes items from the whole healthy eating pyramid. You still need meats, breads, fruits, vegetables, and dairy. You do not have to give up everything and eat only a bland diet. You just need to learn how to make more healthy choices.
Will healthy eating help with weight loss?
Most definitely. The main side effect of an unhealthy diet will be obesity. When you make the change to a healthy eating diet, you will find that your weight loss becomes much easier. In fact, you will find yourself losing weight quicker than you had imagined.
How did you do on this healthy eating quiz? If you feel like you have more to learn, then keep studying! Healthy eating does not have to be hard. You just need to know how to get started.
By: Russell MacDonalds
Posted:
The St Bernard Health Center teaches hurricane survivors healthy eating tips.
The Community Center of St Bernard works to help hurricane Survivors in St Bernard and the Greater New Orleans Area. www.ccstb.org
Date Taken: 2010-01-26 13:22:48
Owner: ccstbp
healthy eating
Copyright (c) 2007 Stephen Lau
Taoism is a way of life, practiced in China for thousands of years.
Lao Tzu, one of the greatest Chinese philosophers as well as the founder of Taoism, said, “The Tao’s principle is simply spontaneity.” Spontaneity is the key to healthy longevity.
What is spontaneity? How does it affect your physical health?
In the universe, there is an all-controlling force that monitors everything. You breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. You eat and you eliminate. You grow, mature, and deteriorate. In nature, spontaneity is evident in the change of seasons. Spontaneity is the natural built-in mechanism in each living organism. Spontaneity creates balance and harmony.
Nowadays, people focus so much on physical fitness. The gym giants will do anything to keep you huffing, puffing, and paying; the pharmaceutical companies will come up with any supplements touted to keep you lean, muscular, and full of energy. There is so much pumping irony: strenuous and vigorous workouts may be harmful to your physical health.
According to the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CARDIOLOGY, jogging is causing runners to drop dead from heart attacks. Many individuals have experienced heart attacks even after running on a treadmill.
The medical journal LANCET reports that aerobics is causing deadly artery clogs and heart disease in many individuals who never before had such problems.
You do not need to jog until you are blue in the face, or pump iron like Arnold Schwarzenegger in order to be physically healthy. You can be fit the Taoist way
Lao Tzu explained, “The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.” You need not over-exert yourself in order to be physically fit.
Chinese exercises, such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong, are never vigorous. Once your breathing becomes abnormal or irregular over a long period, you lose the spontaneity of the exercise, and hence its health benefits.
Tai Chi is a self-relaxing exercise with slow and even movements coordinated with breathing and directed by a peaceful mind. Therefore, it is beneficial to both mental and physical health. With its thousands of years of practice, Tai Chi can rid all parts of your body of spiritual and physical ailments, clear your mind and strengthen your brain, and promote good digestion and healthy kidneys. Most importantly, Tai Ci exercises can help lower your blood pressure, soften your blood vessels, and regular the flow of “qi” (the internal vital energy) in your entire body.
What is “qi”?
“Qi” is internal vital energy. It is important because it moves your body. It is the source of growth in your body. “Qi” is always in motion in the form of ascending, descending, entering and leaving your body’s organs and systems. It nourishes not only your body by transforming food energy into blood, but also your blood by keeping it flowing. In addition, it helps maintain your body’s temperature. “Qi” plays a vital role in Chinese health and healing.
With regard to “qi”, Lao Tzu said, “Qi is elusive and evasive, and yet it manifests itself.”
Tai Chi exercises focus on correct posture, slow and spontaneous movements, and natural healthy breathing.
Your central nervous system is the most important system in your body: it receives vital information from outside and inside your body; it directs your movements. Your central nervous is healthy only if you keep your spinal column erect because vitality and blood circulation are transmitted efficiently from your lower body to your brain only when your spine is kept erect. Tai Chi exercises are based upon a natural posture (children have naturally erect spinal columns; only adults, especially older people, have bent spinal columns) with an erect spine.
Next to your central nervous system, your digestive system is important to your overall health as it stores and supplies all nourishments for your body. Some of the characteristic movements of Tai Chi reinforce the expansion and contraction of your body in an opening and closing motion, thereby instrumental in vibrating and stimulating your stomach and intestines for a better and healthier digestive system.
Your respiratory system is also critical to your long-term health. In Tai Chi, breathing is valued more than physical power: breathing ‘ not muscular strength ‘ propels the movements of your body. Western physical exercises, on the other hand, emphasize muscular strength instead of the spontaneity of breathing and natural body movements. In Tai Chi, your mind directs the “qi”, letting it sink down into your abdomen, where natural breathing takes place. According to Taoism, you breathe through your abdomen (like babies and young children), not through your lungs. This explains why people in the West limit their breathing to the lungs; as a result, their lungs tend to enlarge as they grow older, crowding their hearts, leading to heart disease.
Your circulatory system is connected to your respiratory system. Tai Chi enhances your deep breathing, which guides your “qi” to move your blood (which cannot move itself) to different parts of your body for transporting oxygen and nutrients. By regulating the circulation, Tai Chi exercises through natural movements and deep breathing provide a healthy heart.
Hormones in your thyroid gland are responsible for physical growth of your body. In Tai Chi, you keep your neck erect without pressure, centered without inclining to the left or to the right; you integrate the slow and smooth movements of your head and neck. These movements not only enhance the activity of your thyroid gland but also act upon your kidneys to remove wastes.
In summary, you need the spontaneity of Taoism in physical movements as well as in natural breathing to optimize physical health benefits from exercise. Western exercises, focusing on pumping power and strength, may seem too “unnatural” for that.
By: Stephen Lau
Posted:
WeCAN! provided the physical fitness zone.
Date Taken: 2011-08-15 21:54:03
Owner: Neighborhood Centers
physical health
Before starting my article I will like to say a few words about health.
“Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.”
“He, who has health, has hope. And he, who has hope, has everything.”
“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”
We all know we need to keep active for the sake of health and fitness. It is hard to avoid all the messages that tout daily exercise or urge us to buy into some kind of fitness plan. Suppose we do not have time to join a gym, break out exercise videos, or even go for a walk every day. How can we exercise under those circumstances? Accumulate minutes. It doesn’t matter if you have no exercise equipment. You don’t need it to follow these suggestions.
The Surgeon General’s Report on Physical Activity and Health recommends that everyone accumulate thirty minutes of moderate intense activity every day or almost every day. “Accumulate” means that we don’t have to do it all at once. “Moderate intensity” means that we begin to feel warm and slightly out of breath as we’re doing it. You can conscientiously work toward total body fitness even without a formal daily exercise program.
It’s not practical to think of doing one minute of moderately intense activity thirty times a day. It takes more than a minute to get the heart-rate up far enough to count. But it is practical to add five or ten minutes of physical activity several times a day. Be very intentional about it, and you can you can enhance your health and fitness without completely changing your daily routine.
Most people spend most of the day either at home or at work. We can achieve the greatest improvements to health and fitness by making adjustments there. Most of us also spend time shopping or otherwise doing things somewhere else besides home or work. It should be a simple matter to apply the same principles that help enhance total body fitness to what we can do in these other places.
Exercise at home
Total body fitness, of course, requires attention to what you eat and balanced daily exercise. Balanced exercise means attention to aerobic training, resistance (weight) training, and stretching. How can we work the various kinds of exercise into what we do around the house as a matter of course?
Do you have stairs in your home? Go up and down them at every opportunity. Now, I have always done that without intending to. Wherever I am, something I want–my glasses, my shoes, my pencil–is bound to be somewhere else, likely as not upstairs or downstairs.
Once it dawned on me that my inefficiency was giving me daily exercise opportunity, I stopped getting upset with myself. Now, I will deliberately carry groceries, trash, reading material, or whatever up or down in two or more trips even if I am capable of holding it all at once. Stair climbing is a kind of aerobic exercise. Carrying something moderately heavy up the stairs adds an element of weight training–especially if we don’t just carry it, but lift it or curl it or otherwise move it around as we walk.
Whether you have stairs or not, you don’t always have to walk normally from room to room. March instead; make sure to lift your knees to about waist level. If you’ve ever marched in a band, you know you have to pace yourself to go five yards in eight steps. You get better exercise by marching than by ordinary walking for just a little more time.
Or, for a variation, do walking lunges. Do one lunge, lift the back foot in front of you and immediately walk into another lunge on the other foot. Keep it up till you get where you’re going. Don’t worry if it feels or looks silly. You’re working on health and fitness. Whether marching or lunging, carrying something moderately heavy enhances the effect.
Do you watch television? Don’t just sit there or lie there on the couch. At least during commercial breaks, get up and march in place or do any other kind exercise: jumping jacks, lunges (including lateral lunges), pushups, sit-ups, crunches, squats, any pilates or yoga moves you know, etc. It’s also a good time to stretch
This article is about daily exercise without equipment, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it if you have some. If you have a stability ball, sit on that during the program. In fact, once you learn a number of basic exercises with it, you can do an uninterrupted exercise routine in front of the television. The same goes for resistance bands, dumbbells, and whatever other similar equipment you might have.
Whatever housework you do, from vacuuming to gardening count toward your daily exercise. Gardening is probably strenuous enough on its own. Other activities may require some creative enhancements to turn them into exercise of moderate intensity. Use your imagination and enjoy yourself, keeping in mind the ultimate goal of total body fitness.
By: Hadi Khan
Posted:
health and fitness
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