Healthy Living |

How To Treat Your Health Like A Bank Account

November 6, 2009 By Mark

3993006929_c434b080f5 copy I have a question for you, do you treat your health like a bank account? So now you may be thinking what has health and bank accounts got to do with each other. Well when you put money into a bank account, it gains interest, which makes it a small investment.

So why is it that we don’t tend to treat our health the same way? isn’t our health a investment surely, it must be if we invest in our health we are making a good investment just as if it were a bank, and we were depositing money each day. We could apply this to food and exercise.

So much is society these days we tend to focus on wealth rather than health, we seem to be so obsessed with how much money we are earning and we never seem to have enough.

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The Hidden Danger of Drinking Fizzy Drinks

August 17, 2009 By Mark

74729280_489b542f25[1] Try not to be alarmed by the title of this particular post. It isn’t as bad as it seems. However, it does contain some relevant information about what drinking fizzy drinks can do to you.

According to some recent research, which was put together in a study If you drink more than two cans of fizzy drink, it may start to affect your liver. What many people may not know is that sugar can actually make your liver expand.

This is something that I read quite a long time ago now. As regards what sugar can do to you long-term. We normally tend to associate liver damage, with drinking alcohol or if you eat too much fatty food this can cause a similar problem.

Some scientists in Israel found that people in their study that had consumed, a litre of fizzy drink were for more likely to contract. The start of liver disease, what they found from the research, is if you consume a few cans, a day of something like Coca-Cola, or any other soft drink that is high in sugar

Then you’re far more likely to, contract diseases like diabetes, possible heart problems, and diseases of the liver. The study, was done in Israel , they had two groups of people. None of which had any traces of fatty liver disease.

When the results came back. Eighty percent of those that had been drinking high sugar concentration fizzy drinks were starting to show signs of slight liver damage.

One of the researchers involved in the study, commented saying that it’s the ingredient called fructose which is at the root of the problem. It’s probably best to avoid drinks that have high levels of fructose, another thing to bear in mind about this is the initial research was done in Israel and not our country namely the United Kingdom . It’s a good idea to keep your liver healthy as it helps with weight loss.

Source and references http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk

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Get Comfortable Getting Out Your Comfort Zone

August 12, 2009 By Mark

stop_sign copy This is a bit of a digression from what I normally, blog about it is more of a lifestyle post and represents something that I have noticed. That is very prominent in my own life everything you read in this post, can relate to eating food and losing weight.

The reason I say that is because they can also have fear related aspects to them. Some people in a study in France were scared of exercising, just in case they did some damage to their bodies. Or you can be scared of not having something to eat. Or even losing weight

Why do we actually have a comfort zone then, and how is it created?. This tends to be one of those things that, encroaches upon us. With out even realising it, our boundaries can become smaller and smaller over a period of time. But we may or may not be actually consciously aware of this.

It’s more of a subconscious way of being, sometimes the reasons this happens is that something from our past. Has caused us a lot of pain, or it could be a comment that was quite hurtful, and knocked our confidence.

What happens when we are stuck in them

When you get stuck in your comfort zone you can think of it as a circle, and you tend to stay inside it a bit like a virtual bubble. And rather than stepping out of it every so often and feeling some sort of discomfort. We tend to stay inside it and then start to create a very inhibited and restricted lifestyle as a result of behaving this way.

Not only does your world become smaller, it can also become very boring. The reason for this is you’re not really challenging yourself to take any risks. The thought of actually doing something risky, seems far too scary we build these mental pictures up in our minds.

Of what could happen to us, and as long as we continue to do this the fear will always be there. And getting out of your comfort zone will be even harder. So this in effect creates a vicious circle and is probably likely to cause such problems as anxiety and depression.

Frustration itself is a forerunner for anxiety which in turn leads to depression. It’s your minds way of telling you not to do something. As soon as the amygdala in your brain sees you try to do something, out of the ordinary it will start the process of generating the fear.

Unless you actually start to face it then, and only then will the fear start to shrink.

How they affect us

If you are stuck in a comfort zone here are some of the things that you might have going on in your life.

Feeling very unfulfilled with your life as it is at the moment
Suffering from apathy, which means no real passion in your life, it will feel quite emotionless probably the same sort of emotion a bit like a flat line
Be lacing direction in your life, and not doing what you really want to do have lots of ideas but never really making something of them
You may have a lack of confidence and some self-esteem issues also

Here are some examples which may be prominent in your life, when you tend to get stuck inside a comfort zone.

Robotic lifestyle

when we do things the same way. Day in and day out, it becomes automatic our brains make synaptic connections and clusters of brain cells are formed. In order to make doing the particular task at hand easier. So the more we do a particular thing our brain realises it needs more cells in order to do this process.

And it goes about the process of making it automatic so that, you are able to do other things when the time comes this is why it is easy to create bad habits.

Strange as it may seem we do work very hard at them. Even though a lot of them work against us. There is a saying in NLP which in case you are not familiar with means Neuro Linguistic Programming, which says that if you do one thing one way.

Then you are behaving like a robot, do something two different ways then you are starting to see some changes, do something three different ways then you will see very big changes.

Going through the motions

Every day runs into another it’s almost if as you are on autopilot, this might be a typical day for you or anybody for that matter. Get up get dressed, go downstairs, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, go to work, come home, eat your dinner, watch TV, and go to bed. Now this is only a hypothetical scenario and only represents a basic day but if you look at it. It can represent overtime quite a boring routine. And some people probably do this every day. Because it seems quite normal.

When you live your life from the realms of a comfort zone it does become very restrictive, and there may be so many things that you would like to do, but don’t due to a lack of fear.

The comfort zone thermostat

Just like a house that has a heating system in that monitors temperature. We have something in our minds that monitors our comfort zone if you like, it’s constantly being regulated much the same as the thermostat in the house. As we get near to the edge of our comfort zone, we might start to feel slightly anxious and scared.

Almost as if something terrible is going to happen, even though it isn’t so, when we get close to this feeling we tend to step back. So once the fear/threat has gone, we tend to relax go back in our comfort zone and that is where we stay. And this is going on all day long as long as we are out in the wide world.

This actually acts as a red light in our minds, much the same as a traffic light signal. Telling us to stop when really we shouldn’t be. When we tend to be in a state of mind such as this. We are far less likely to want to take risks so because of this.

Our world shrinks yet again. This ultimately stops us from growing, growth is a great thing once you are growing.

Your whole mindset tends to change you want to try new things, feel far more adventurous and liberated, and feel less restricted in your lifestyle which is far more exciting.

When you are growing your confidence will grow through the roof, and you will be willing to take more risks and try different things. If you are on the flip side however, you tend to be stuck in the middle where you feel comfortable and don’t want to move either side. If you can imagine drawing a line in the sand and keeping yourself the other side of it.

That is where your comfort zone is, it’s not until you actually step out of it that you notice how different things are. The whole world seems a totally different place, it seems open and inviting and welcoming and far less scary.

What can we actually do?

Here are a few examples of things to try they don’t need to be massive things just anything that makes change.

Go home a different way
Do something different at lunchtime
Talk to a stranger in a shop or where ever you may be, this might not be a good idea for children though
Try eating somewhere else a different restaurant
Do something that you have always wanted to do but always felt afraid to do it
Experiment with different ways of doing things, for example have you always wanted to do your own DIY for example, but always thought you couldn’t do it. Have a go yourself you might be surprised what you find
Go on a team building activity holiday not only will this give you interaction with other people, you will be able to strengthen other skills which you might not have known that you had

Here is one less thing to finish this off get a sheet of paper and write down 50 things to get you out of your comfort zone, when you first start to think about doing this it may seem very hard. But you may not even realise that they are there.

One of the reasons I decided to write this post is it something that has been, a very big part of my life and I thought people may be able to relate to it like I have myself. So on a closing note bust out of your comfort zone and feel comfortable doing it.

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future.

You must break out of your current comfort zone and

become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.

Denis Waitley

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Is you’re Behind Your Best Friend

December 9, 2008 By Mark

sitting In the normal way of doing things in our society, if your like everybody else, somewhere in the world where ever it may be you will be reading this post. More than likely sitting down whether it be, on your laptop or perhaps at home in your nice comfortable computer chair.

But what say for instance if that was doing you more harm than good ? We take sitting down for granted it’s something that we do and probably do it more than we should do, but just accept it as a normal part of everyday life. But now even this can be a bit of a hazard, but the only reason we don’t feel it is one, is because like everything in life sometimes we tend to live like mushrooms in dark corners not wanting to know about our own bad habits.

And the more time that you spend sitting down in a chair the more it slows down the natural fat burning properties. Within your body the medical name for this particular problem is called, metabolic syndrome there are now in the United States of America 47 million people who have this particular problem.

Which causes health problems like diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Researches have now have come to the conclusion that it’s because we like to keep our best friend happy by sitting on it too much, this groundbreaking research has found that too much sitting about for long periods of time by far doubles.

And even in some cases can triple the amount of cases of people whom have problems with obesity and other health issues related to being overweight. The reason for this which has been brought to light by all these various studies, is a an enzyme in people which encourages fat to be used in the body which is called liapse, when this particular hormone is working and switched on its job role is to take up fat into muscles, so it is used for energy.

Otherwise what tends to happen is the fat will recirculate around your body, and clog up arteries an end up being in your organs etc which is where it doesn’t need to be. Samples of plasma were taken from various participants in studies, when the people were sitting down and ate a meal the sample was very cloudy.

However when they took the same sample from somebody, who had eaten and was standing up, it was found to be clear. So the researchers have said that if you are doing something then doing do it standing up, rather than sitting down. Dr Hamilton one of the lead researchers of the study said that we are not talking about a small amount of fat here, it is a awful lot. Dr Hamilton himself swapped his own chair for a treadmill once he found out about this method of fat being recirculated in human bodies.

There is no reason why you can’t stand up and walk around while you are on the phone, or even watching TV for that matter. You can burn 60 calories or thereabouts just by standing and there is another added bonus. It also improves your cholesterol levels namely HDL which is the better of the two cholesterols, LDL is the bad cholesterol which blocks up your arteries. So the moral of this story is stand up for your health.

Source http://www.sciencedaily.com

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Rise of The Teletubbys

September 24, 2008 By Mark

We have a generation of up and coming obese children these days, and this is probably mainly due to the fact that they don’t exercise like they should do, unlike they did in years gone by. It has been recently reported that the amount of time that modern-day children spend actually doing exercise is at it’s lowest levels in a long time.

A lot of parents these days grossly under estimate how much exercise their children are actually doing, which is putting their children on a obesity timebomb, which is ticking away without even them realising it.The study which was done from corresponding universities Glasgow and Newcastle proved that many six and seven-year-olds are dangerously under active, what they managed to evaluate from the study was that by the year 2010.

A lot of children will be overweight unless they actually start to do some physical activity, children are supposedly supposed to do one hour’s exercise either running around or playing with their friends, or whatever it is they like to do.

Government figures have shown that six to seven-year-olds tend to be active for 146 minutes each day. But this research that has come to light has said that girls have roughly 22 minutes and boys only 26 minutes exercise per day. The researchers used a device which is called a accelerometer which measured their overall activity throughout the day.

Children are being advised to take lesser car journeys and parents please take note here, how many of you take your children to school in a car when they could be walking or going on their bike instead. It has become apparent that the child obesity problem has been overlooked very much so by the government. It would seem times are changing very much so compared to how they were when I was younger.

There didn’t seem to be many days go by where I wasn’t on my pushbike, playing football, playing cricket, or just generally running around playing games. I can quite honestly say I used to be all over the place, I don’t think children these days play games like I used to when I was younger.

Which involved moving around a lot, it does make me wonder if they actually had to do a cross-country run, like we used to have to do I dare say most of them. Wouldn’t even get past the first part of it let alone complete it. I sometimes wonder if it’s not being cool being a person who looks after your health. Or are you somebody that might be called a sissy if you are doing regular exercise.

Or is it merely just a sign of the times that our children are growing to grow up, as obese adults and contract diseases such as type two diabetes, heart problems and all the other things which are associated with being overweight.

I suppose when you have the choice between sitting down and playing a computer game for hours and hours, or playing a Xbox game with your friends online. Then getting some exercise outside probably does seem quite boring compared to doing that.

The problem is we really do need to educate our children to what will happen to them if they don’t start to move around a lot more than they are now. Here are some other things I used to do when I was younger I wonder if the children of today even attempt half of these.

Cycling where ever I went long and short distances

Swimming

Playing football

Judo

Walking to the swimming baths

Cross-country runs

Physical education twice a week at school

Rugby

Cricket

Doing errands for my parents

Delivering newspapers in all weathers I might add

Scout camping

Blogging Is It Good for your Health ?

March 18, 2008 By Mark

Is Blogging good for your health my thoughts

This is what computers looked like back when we first made Blogger Well based upon my own experiences of blogging, I would say that most of my experiences have been good as far as blogging is concerned. The reason for writing this post is I came across a article on Discoveries website which speaks about this very thing.

How it helps

Blogging as a medium has a social aspect to it, which means you can tend to feel less lonely in your everyday life if you don’t come into contact with other people very often, also you have freedom to express yourself in writing, this can be very therapeutic if you have something on your mind that you would like to get off your chest. Lots of people write about lots of different topics as far as blogging is concerned whether it be a health problem, or what you did today it doesn’t really matter.

Blogging as a whole can give you a sense of community very much the same as in the real world when someone leaves a comment on your blog, it can mean such a lot especially if it is a positive one, you will get negative ones but that is just the very nature of blogging. Comments as a whole are a great way to get to know other bloggers.

The study information

In the study that was conducted it was found that the participants that blogged, felt that they were more socially supported, than those who didn’t blog. The mental health of people hadn’t blogged previously were put side-by-side, to see what differences there were, the researchers messaged 600 members on my space.com, who filled out a questionnaire. They said that what they would call potential bloggers felt less satisfied as people.

They felt they had no community connection with other people and felt more isolated and therefore a lot less happier, and they were far more likely to use vented anger, as well as expressing their emotions.

When they were more inclined to become bloggers it was as if they were saying to themselves “I’m going to do this because I know it will help me”.

Two months later the potential bloggers were asked the same questions again about how they felt as people. This time round they said they found that they felt a sense of community, with other people because they were interacting with other people whom were doing the same activity as them.

Also some participants who didn’t blog but networked socially through my space felt less stressed and depressed over the two-month study period.

How blogging helped me

Well firstly when I started this blog initially it was my way of documenting my weight loss journey but now it has evolved way beyond that now, for instance when I first started trying to lose weight I used to document my weekly weigh-ins. People would come along and leave a comment, and tell you how well you were doing which is like having support in the real world, in order to help you towards your goal. Which gives you moral support very much like in the real world.

But other aspects of it are doing the research for posts you become very knowledgeable about what foods to eat, which stop cravings and leave you feeling fuller for longer, what kind of exercise will give you the best benefits. I don’t think if I would have started this blog that I would know what I do now about food nutrition etc and exercise.

Also it gives you a focus, when you’re bored you’re far more likely to eat food rather than if you are doing something ,I know it tends to work for me. I eat far less when I am writing posts than I would do if I was doing some other activity such as watching television.

Conclusion

I would say that from my point of view I would agree with everything that has been said as regards the study, it would be interesting if anyone else reading this would be able to add their own experiences by leaving a comment thus proving that the theory of this does work.

So if you have had any positive experiences from blogging then please let us know.

Source Discovery

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Obesity is food always to blame

November 26, 2007 By Mark

obesity Obesity in its own right is a huge problem these days there may be some countries that don’t have it, but most developed countries such as the United States and United Kingdom, do have their own obesity problems. Western lifestyles it would seem are the underlying reasons for it, the basic assumption for this is that you eat too much food or the wrong foods and you become fat.

It would seem it would seem that there are some misconceptions when it comes to understanding this, and they can be more underlying reasons as to why someone may be obese or not, we tend to say and think that person eats too much so therefore they are overweight.

But some people can eat what they want and never seem to put on any weight whatsoever.

Here are some things that are worth considering about this particular problem.

Lack of sleep (insomnia) studies have shown that a lack of sleep can in fact
affect if you will or will not lose weight, also you may suffer from depression and low self-esteem.
Caffeine will ramp up the production of cortisol which is the stress hormone, which as we well know produces the flight or fight response within our bodies and caffeine tends to lower your threshold to stress so you cannot handle it as well.
Too much stress can make you overeat studies were done at a psychiatric institute that proved that when you’re stressed that you will eat more food.
The psychological factors, people tend to eat food when they are bored stressed or for any other emotional reasons the association between the food and the emotion becomes that strong it’s almost automatic you don’t even have to think about it this is the basis for many addictions whether it be alcoholism, smoking, overspending there is always some root cause but because it’s an unconscious process you don’t tend to think about it.

Would you say yourself that some of these listed true I would be very interested in your comments on this.

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How To Get Fatter

September 5, 2007 By Mark

fatty07_03 This post is a bit of a contradiction in terms really,I thought I would do something different for a change,and look at the mistakes we make that keep us fat.

So here’s something things that might make you think or may not which of the case may be.

Don’t read the label on the packaging, how many of us make this mistake day in day out I wonder. It is very important if you’re trying to lose weight to know calorie wise what you are putting into your body, how else will you know what you are eating calories wise.

Don’t forget you are trying to lose approximately five hundred calories per day so if you don’t know how much you are eating as regards fat and sugar and whatever else is the food calorie wise you won’t be able to calculate your basic metabolic rate properly.

Be a commando fridge raider are you one of those who comes down in the night to do a commando raid on your fridge, if so you are really boosting your chances of becoming fatter don’t forget your body needs rest at night not lots of food in it.

Do very little exercise hardly walk anywhere use the remote control to turn the TV station over. When you’re on the phone sit on your bum and don’t move around this is guaranteed to make you fatter. Drive everywhere you go even if it’s a few hundred yards, just get in the car let it do the work that’s a guaranteed way to keep yourself fatter.

Be a unconscious eater,when you’re depressed or just in need of some comfort eating get plenty of chocolate,candy bars, cakes etc.

Have a goodie bin full of crisps,cake,Coca-Cola and aything else that will make you fat.

Have a big plateful of food, and no matter how much there is eat every last bit.

So there you have it some reasons why you may be still getting fatter.

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Weigh In

August 10, 2007 By Mark

Hi folks weigh in time again looks like things are going real good down now to 87.kg on the dot now so here is how it looks.

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Five Reasons To Drink Green Tea

May 15, 2007 By Mark

I never knew that green tea was such a benefit to health before now I do drink it but only knew the odd thing about it. On the front of the label on my pack it says it’s high in antioxidants.

But looking around it seems there is more it than I first realised here are five reasons to drink it.

It can help with blood sugar stability so keeping your insulin levels in check which as we know is important for losing weight.
May help in lowering your blood pressure
Helps lower cholesterol mainly LDL which is that bad type
Protects your liver from antioxidants which is a valid point the liver is responsible for doing lots of jobs and when it’s not working effectively can thwart your weight loss efforts.
Can help with the prevention of cancer.

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