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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Weight Management

Definition
Weight management means keeping your body weight at a healthy level.

Information
Regular exercise and a healthy diet are a must when it comes to controlling your weight. A weight management plan depends on whether you are overweight or underweight.
An easy way to determine your own desirable body weight is to use the following formula:
· Women: 100 pounds for the first 5 feet of height plus 5 pounds for each additional inch.
· Men: 106 pounds of body weight for the first 5 feet of height plus 6 pounds for each additional inch.
· For a small body frame, 10% should be subtracted. For a large frame, 10% should be added.
Body fat and body mass measurements are used to determine whether a person is under- or overweight. A registered dietitian or exercise physiologist can help you calculate your body fat. The recommended amount of body fat differs for men and women.
For women:
· Recommended amount of body fat: 20% - 21%.
· The average American woman has approximately 22% - 25% body fat.
· A woman with more than 30% body fat is considered obese.
For men:
· Recommended amount: 13% - 17%
· Adult men in the United States average 17 - 19% body fat
· 25% or higher is considered obese.
Body Mass Index (BMI) is a indirect measurement of your body composition. It takes into consideration both your weight and height. BMI helps determine your risk for certain diseases, including diabetes and hypertension.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Daily Exercise Suggestions

Walk 10 Minutes a Day and Increase Your Fitness Level
Old thinking was to work out in a sweat-filled gym for hours a day. No pain, no gain. New studies show that even short bouts of activity can increase your fitness level, especially if you're new at working out.

Park and Walk
Whenever you have an errand, park your car as far away as you can handle and walk to the store. At the mall, park at the farthest end and walk the length of the mall. Use every opportunity to walk. At the end of the day, it all adds up to better fitness.

Crunch in Bed
Before you even get out of bed in the morning, do 10 stomach crunches while lying flat on your mattress. Increase daily by one until you get up to 100. Think you'll never get there? Try it. You may eventually have to set your clock to wake up 15 minutes earlier, a small price to pay for a flatter stomach.

Aquatics:
Older people find stress free weightlessness in water is a good way to work out. All kinds of new "water toys" to exercise with are on the sports store shelves these days. Younger people also like aquatic fitness training. There's less stress on the joints and less sweat. …Could be the wave of the future.

The 12-Minute Anti-slip and Fall Routine for Senior Adults:
A Florida physician has developed an exercise routine for older adults that can be done in bed and takes just 12 minutes.

Spas for the New Millennium:
More and more hospitals are developing wellness centers that consist of a large variety of fitness machines, whirlpools, lap pools, running tracks and individual health analysis testing.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Prevalence of Smoking

One-third of the world’s adult population are smokers (47% of these are men, 7% are women) and each year, tobacco causes 3.5 million deaths a year, or about 10,000 deaths each day. It is predicted that in 20 years this yearly death rate from tobacco use will be more than 10 million people. This dwarfs other health problems like AIDS or maternal deaths.
{“Global Tobacco Epidemic, according to WHO,” ASH Review, May/June 1999}
An estimated 50 million Americans are smokers (25% of the population). About 20 million smokers try to break the habit every year, with only about a million actually managing to quit. Another million become new smokers annually.
{“Anytime’s a Good Time to Quit Smoking,” Washington Post Health, July 11, 2000}
An estimated 48 million U.S. adults currently smoke: 28% of men and 22% of women. Adult smoking has remained unchanged during the 1990s.
{ABCNEWS.Com, Jan. 2000}
The CDC says smoking among young adults, ages 18 to 24, has been rising for the first time to the level of those 25 to 44. High school rates are even higher. Banning smoking in the workplace and other smoking restrictions are the major reason for decline in people who smoke.
{John Banzhaf, head of ASDH - Action on Smoking, HealthCentral.com - May 2000}
Over one million smokers of the 50 million are stopping yearly, but one million teenagers are picking up the habit. Presently 10% of the doctors smoke in the U.S. (One fourth of the Japanese doctors smoke.)
Smoking in developing countries is rising by more than 3% a year.
{“Tobacco Deceit,” Washington Post, Aug. 3, 2000}
Effect of Smoking on Life Span
“Action on Smoking and Health” tells us that a 30-year-old smoker can expect to live about 35 more years, whereas a 30-year-old nonsmoker can expect to live 53 more years. The children of a parent or parents who smoke may be at risk from the genetic damage done to the parent before conception (because of their previous smoking), the direct effects to them in the womb, and the passive smoke they are exposed to after they are born.
{“Smokers urged to weigh the ‘facts’ during the ‘Great American Smoke-Out,’ Vital Signs, The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Virginia, Nov. 14, 1993, written by June Russell, a member of Smoke-Free Charlottesville}
The amount of life expectancy lost for each pack of cigarettes smoked is 28 minutes, and the years of life expectancy a typical smoker loses is 25 years.
{“Dying to Quit,” 1998 book by Janet Brigham}
Every cigarette a man smokes reduces his life by 11 minutes. Each carton of cigarettes thus represents a day and a half of lost life. Every year a man smokes a pack a day, he shortens his life by almost 2 months.
{University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter, April 2000}
There are some 1.1 billion people who smoke on our planet earth. Just less than one-third of all adults in the world smoke regularly. Tobacco deaths will not only occur in old age but will start when smokers are about age 35. Half of those who die from smoking-related causes will die in middle age, each losing about 25 years of life expectancy. More than 95% of the tobacco consumed is in the form of cigarettes. About half of all smokers who undergo lung cancer take up smoking again.
{“Dying to Quit,” a 1998 book by Janet Brigham}
Physiology and Psychology of Smoking
Most smokers perceive the immediate effect of smoking as something positive; a stimulant that makes them seem to feel more alert, clearheaded and able to focus on work. However, the smoker’s perception is mostly an illusion. Take a look at what smoke does to the brain.
Within ten seconds of the first inhalation, nicotine, a potent alkaloid, passes into the bloodstream, transits the barrier that protects the brain from most impurities, and begins to act on brain cells. Nicotine molecules fit like keys into the “nicotinic” receptors on the surface of the brain’s neurons. In fact, nicotine fits the same “keyholes” as one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters (signal chemicals), acetycholine, which results in a rush of stimulation and an increase in the flow of blood to the brain.
After ten puffs have flowed through the lungs, the smoker feels energized and clearheaded, but this is partly due to the fact that this was a period which ended a nicotine depravation, and another is about to happen. Within 30 minutes, the nicotine is reduced and the smoker feels the energy slipping away. A second cigarette is lit, and there is another surge of adrenaline, but now there is a feeling of one of the paradoxes of smoking, that at one dose it can stimulate, at another soothe. The muscles throughout your body starts to relax, and your pain threshold rises.
Another 30 minutes pass and the attention of the smoker increasingly drifts away from work and toward the nearby pack of cigarettes. Nicotine prompts brain cells to grow many more nicotinic receptors which allow the brain to function normally despite an unnatural amount of acetylcholine-like chemical acting on it, so the smoker feels normal when nicotine floods the neurons and abnormal when it doesn't. “You might say smokers live near the edge of a cliff,” says Jack Henningfield of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore. “Most are never more than a few hours away from the start of nicotine withdrawal symptoms.”
The American Psychiatric Association classifies smoking withdrawal as a “nicotine-induced organic mental disorder,” and several studies have compared active smokers with ‘deprived’ smokers (those suffering nicotine withdrawal) on their ability to perform simple skill tests. These are often cited (and many were funded) by the tobacco industry as evidence that tobacco enhances alertness and performance. What they really show is that nicotine withdrawal causes dramatic mental dysfunction. Research revealed that a smoker might perform adequately at many jobs until the job gets complicated: a smoker could drive a car satisfactorily as long as everything was routine, but if a tire blew out at high speed he might not handle the job as well as a nonsmoker.
{“How Cigarettes Cloud the Brain,” Reader’s Digest, March 1995}
In 1980, tobacco dependence was listed as a mental disorder in the official diagnostic reference for the American Psychiatric Association. In 1991, the Psychiatric Association reported that smokers have a higher lifetime frequency of substance abuse, severe depression and anxiety disorders involving aggression and antisocial behavior.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Official Google Blog: The new Groups experience

Official Google Blog: The new Groups experience

New Year's Resolution: To February and Beyond

It's early January—do you know where your resolution is? At this early stage in the New Year, you probably have a good sense of what it is that you resolved to change in 2006 and are quite possibly making it happen. But where will your resolution stand on February 1st?
“About 75 percent are successful in keeping their New Year’s resolutions for a couple of weeks,” says John Norcross, professor of psychology at the University of Scranton. Even with a strong start, most people have completely abandoned their resolutions by the beginning of February.
What kind of resolve is that?
New Year’s resolutions “are good intentions that rarely have much impact,” says Albert Bandura, professor of psychology at Stanford University, “because they’re too general and too distant.”
Changing how you think about a resolution is the first step to sticking to it. With the right attitude and determination, you can carry your resolution deep into spring.
Resolution tips:
Ramp up slowly.
“Aim modestly and realistically and then build on that,” Norcross says. Will you really cut chocolate completely out of your life?
Resolve to change habits, not reach arbitrary goals.
Set short-term challenges to keep yourself motivated. “In successful self-change, you have to break these distant goals into small steps,” Bandura says.
Believe in yourself.
”Unless people believe they can succeed, they have little incentive to act or persevere when faced with difficulties,” Bandura says.
Expect slips.
Most people slip in the first two weeks. Those who succeed view these slips as nothing more than proof that they should work harder. Those who ultimately fail misinterpret “their slips as evidence of their inability to maintain their habit change,” Norcross says.
Card it.
Norcross advises his patients to carry an index card with a five-point list of steps to extricate themselves from a slip on one side and reminders of why their resolution is important on the other.
Act now.
“We are really well-practiced at putting off what needs to be done under the illusion that we will have more time tomorrow,” Bandura says.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Benefits of Physical activities

The average calories spent per hour by a 150-pound person are listed below. (A lighter person burns fewer calories; a heavier person burns more.) Since exact calorie figures are not available for most activities, the figures below are averaged from several sources and show the relative vigor of the activities.
Activity Calories burned
Bicycling 6 mp 240 cals./hr.
Bicycling 12 mph 410 cals./hr.
Cross-country skiing 700 cals./hr.
Jogging 5 1/2 mph 740 cals./hr.
Jogging 7 mph 920 cals./hr.
Jumping rope 750 cals./hr.
Running in place 650 cals./hr.
Running 10 mph 1280 cals./hr.
Swimming 25 yds/min. 275 cals./hr.
Swimming 50 yds/min. 500 cals./hr.
Tennis-singles 400 cals./hr.
Walking 2 mph 240 cals./hr.
Walking 3 mph 320 cals./hr.
Walking 41/2 mph 440 cals./hr.

The calories spent in a particular activity vary in proportion to one’s body weight. For example, a 100-pound person burns 1/3 fewer calories, so you would multiply the number of calories by 0.7. For a 200-pound person, multiply by 1.3.
Working harder or faster for a given activity will only slightly increase the calories spent. A better way to burn up more calories is to increase the time spent on your activity.
Working better
Regular physical activity —
· helps you to be more productive at work
· increases your capacity for physical work
· builds stamina for other physical activities
· increases muscle strength
· helps your heart and lungs work more efficiently
Consider the benefits of a well-conditioned heart:
In 1 minute with 45 to 50 beats, the heart of a well-conditioned person pumps the same amount of blood as an inactive person’s heart pumps in 70 to 75 beats. Compared to the well-conditioned heart, the average heart pumps up to 36,000 more times per day, 13 million more times per year.
Feeling, looking, and working better — all these benefits from regular physical activity can help you enjoy your life more fully.

Can regular physical activity reduce my chances of getting a heart attack?

Yes! Physical inactivity is a risk factor for heart disease. Overall, heart disease is almost twice as likely to develop in inactive people than in those who are more active. Regular physical activity (even mild to moderate intensity) can help reduce your risk of heart disease. In fact, burning calories through physical activity may help you lose weight or stay at your desirable weight — which also helps lower your risk of heart disease. The best exercises to strengthen your heart and lungs are the aerobic ones like brisk walking, jogging, cycling and swimming.
Coronary artery disease is the major cause of heart disease and heart attack in America. It develops when fatty deposits build up on the inner walls of the blood vessels feeding the heart (coronary arteries) forming plaques. Eventually one or more of the major coronary arteries may become blocked, usually when a plaque breaks and a blood clot is formed in the artery’s narrowed passageway. The result is a heart attack.
We know that there are several factors that can increase your risk for developing coronary artery disease — and thus the chances for a heart attack. Fortunately, many of these risk factors can be reduced or eliminated.

The Benefits of Daily Physical Activity
· Reduces the risk of heart disease by improving blood circulation throughout
the body.
· Keeps weight under control.
· Improves blood cholesterol levels.
· Prevents and reduces high blood pressure.
· Prevents bone loss.
· Boosts energy level.
· Helps manage stress.
· Releases tension.
· Improves the ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well.
· Improves self-image.
· Counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism.
· Increases muscle strength, giving greater capacity for other physical
activities.
· Provides a way to share an activity with family and friends.
· Establishes good heart-healthy habits in children and counters the
conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, poor
lifestyle habits, etc.) that lead to heart attack and stroke later in life.
· In older people, it helps delay or prevent chronic illnesses and diseases
associated with aging and maintains quality of life and independence longer.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Women's Image

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you like what you see? Women in the U.S. are under pressure to measure up to a certain social and cultural ideal of beauty, which can lead to poor body image. Women are constantly bombarded with "Barbie-like" doll images. By presenting an ideal difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits. It's no accident that youth is increasingly promoted, along with thinness, as an essential criterion of beauty. If not all women need to lose weight, for sure they're all aging — which is a "disaster" sure to happen — just ask any middle-age anchorwoman or model — if you can find one.
Other pressures can come from people in our lives.
· Family and friends can influence your body image with positive and negative comments.
· A doctor's health advice can be misinterpreted and affect how a woman perceives and feels about her body.
Celebrate and Nourish Your Body
Building a healthy lifestyle that includes a healthy diet and physical activity is important to improving body image. We all want to look our best, but a healthy body is not always linked to appearance. In fact, healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes! Developing and nurturing a positive body image and a healthy mental attitude is crucial to a woman's happiness and wellness!
It is important to remember that when you change your body image, you don't change your body, you change the way you think about your body.
Essentials to developing healthy body image include:
· eating healthy
· regular exercise
· plenty of rest
Eating healthy can promote healthy skin and hair, along with strong bones; exercise has good about your body. been showed to increase self-esteem, self-image, and energy; and plenty or rest is the key to stress management - all of these can make you feel
With a positive body image, a woman has a real perception of her size and shape and feels comfortable and proud about her body. With a negative body image, a woman has a distorted perception of her shape and size, compares her body to others, and feels shame, awkwardness, and anxiety about her body. A woman's dissatisfaction with her body affects how she thinks and feels about herself. A poor body image can lead to emotional distress, low self-esteem, dieting, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders

Friday, January 19, 2007

Men's Health

No matter how much you know about men's health, there's always room to know more about ways to a better lifestyle, the top men's health concerns, and the importance of getting medical care and regular screening tests. Many of the major health risks that men face can be prevented and treated if they are diagnosed early.
While the life-expectancy gap between men and women has shrunk to five years, the narrowest since 1946, it is no secret that men still need to pay more attention to their bodies. Why? Some reasons include:
· Men tend to smoke and drink more than women and generally have less healthy
lifestyles.
· Men do not seek medical help as often as women.
· Men tend to join in fearless, risky, dangerous behaviors more than women.
· Men also largely define themselves by their work, which adds to stress and
to being disconnected from their emotional side. This can add to problems in
relationships, as well as in jobs and careers.
Women also play an important role in the health care of their men through education and awareness. Many surveys have been done to see where people get their health information. For women, it's usually from their doctors, the television, the Internet, and printed materials. For men in these same surveys, wives, girlfriends, and/or mothers are the source of most of their health information.
The good news is that many of the major health risks that men face can be prevented and treated if they are diagnosed early. So you deserve to pay more attention to yourself! Take better care of yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. Or if you are a woman searching for ways to help the men in your life, tell them the same. One way to start is to use the resources you'll find here.

Monday, January 8, 2007

Welcome

Welcome. I'd like to start by saying that I'm not a health freak, but I do like to stay as healthy as I can. This blog will not tell you the best way to lose weight or stay healthy; it will explain my way of maintaining my weight and staying healthy. Different people use different methods. As most of you know, there are hundreds of weight loss deits, pill and programs on the web, many unsuccessful, but some are successful. I will give you my ways, but I've also listed some sites that I truly believe everyone could learn from.

I try to stay healthy without all the supplements and pills. Natural is better in my opinion. That's definitely not criticizing other methods. I visit the gem at least 3 times a week. I do weight training along with cardio. In my opinion, one is just as important as the other. Maybe once a week I'll work out heave; however, the other 3 or 4 times, I'll do light weight with as many reps as I can stand.

Watching what I eat is just as important to me as exercising. I limit my starches. Potatoes, junk snacks, rice, fried foods, cereals, and others are, I know, hard to resist; sometimes, I must admit, I fall to the temptation, but I do drastically limit the amount. Please keep in mind that this is my way. Many of you may think that I'm stupid; however I challenge you to set a goal, and use whatever program works for you.

I've quickly, as I hate writing and reading, told you my experience with weight and health. It's not for me to decide with method is best for you. If one way doesn't work for you, don't give up. Just find one that does work. Good luck.

 
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