Archive for September, 2008

Stress Management Tips – Effective Ways to Manage Stress

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

One of the biggest causes of stress is the workplace. From worrying about job security, dealing with heavy workload, and going through the daily commute, your job carries with it a lot of pressure.

Studies have shown that stress can have a severe negative impact on your health and well-being. Heart problems are just one of the physical manifestations of the tension you feel. If you bring your stress home as well, it can also severely impact your personal relationships.

Before your life reaches this point due to stress, you must take action to keep it from happening. Instead of always resorting to dealing with stress negatively, there are other means for you to approach stress in a healthier way. Here are a few stress management tips to help you overcome stress.

Stress Management Tip # 1: Take a break. Yes, that’s right. To be able to cope with stress better, you need to step away from what you’re doing and get your energy together. Working under pressure and completing your duties while you’re stressed will only wear you down upholstery cleaning service could also affect your performance. Removing yourself from a stressful situation, even for a brief moment, will help you breathe more easily and give you a fresh perspective.

Stress Management Tip # 2: Pamper yourself throughout the day. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate and lengthy. You can do it by enjoying a hot soothing cup of herbal tea, particular ones with calming properties, or buy yourself a small massager to soothe your aches and pains.

Stress Management Tip # 3: Be organized. If you’re juggling too many things all at once, you tend to forget how to schedule your work properly. cheap upholstery cleaning a list of everything you need to do, and then arrange them in order of urgency and when they need to be completed. This will help you stay focused on the things that need to be done right away instead of turning your attention to the ones that aren’t as urgent.

Stress Management Tip # 4: Say “no” to more responsibilities. You already have too much on your plate and not much time to work on them, which is why you’re getting frazzled and stressed. You don’t need more responsibilities. But don’t fabric cleaner this won’t make you look irresponsible and incapable. If you have a hard time saying “no” to extra work, simply think of all the work you need to do and the time you don’t have to accommodate more work.

Stress Management Tip # 5: Get help. You might want to talk to a friend or a loved one to help you vent out your frustrations or perhaps even distract you from what’s causing temporary loss of memory stress. Acknowledge that you’re not capable of doing everything, and don’t be afraid to get help around the office too.

Put these stress management tips into good use and you’ll soon find that you’re feeling better at the end of the day. They can even help put your worries behind you and just let you enjoy a nice relaxing time at home with your loved ones.
Source: http://www.corsavoo.com/stress-management/0,2577,334013,00.html

How to Prevent Premature Baldness: Five Rules to Remember

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Rule # 1. The scalp, hair follicles and hair shafts benefit from proper nourishment. A healthy diet to prevent premature hair loss should incorporate foods that contain plenty of essential vitamins, minerals and fatty acids. Unfortunately, the Standard American Diet, also known as SAD, is heavy on devitalized junk foods, processed grains, and sugar-loaded products that provide little nutritional value. In order to support the growth of thick, healthy locks, hair roots particularly need such vital minerals as magnesium, iodine, zinc, iron and selenium. The richest sources are marine foods – mussels, oysters, kelp, lobsters, shrimps, and deep-ocean fish, including herring, tuna and salmon. Another important group of nutrients to support successful hair growth is B-vitamin family, which is contained in a variety of whole foods, including potatoes, nuts, meats and liver. Also, do not forget to supplement your diet with traditional foods that contain vital cholesterol and animal fats – be it nitrite-free bacon, natural butter, free-range egg yolks, or cod liver oil. Contrary to what is preached by “diet dictocrats”, these nourishing foods are highly beneficial not only for your hair, but also for your general health, good mood, and overall vitality.

Rule # 2. Healthy hormones equal healthy hair. Hormonal imbalances brought forth by genetic predisposition, iodine deficiency, oral contraceptives, or diets loaded with phito-estrogens, such as soy products, can damage hair follicles and trigger premature baldness in both men and women. Female patients often suffer from excessive hair shedding right after pregnancy or during their menopausal transition. Many men tend to be genetically predisposed to testosterone overload in their mid-life, which may result in the production of toxic substances that damage hair roots and induce male-pattern baldness. Underactive thyroid is known to contribute to hair thinning, too. If you suffer from hormonally-triggered hair loss, consult your doctor about balancing your hormonal levels by means of herbal or pharmaceutical therapy.

Rule # 3. Minimize your exposure to synthetic ingredients found in commercial shampoos and hair-care products; avoid harsh hair-styling procedures (flat-ironing, blow-drying with hot air, perming, dyeing, etc.); and take steps to protect your hair and scalp from direct sunlight, excessive moisture, wind, and dry air. Use only natural, preferably herbal shampoos, rinses, conditioners and other hair-care products that do not contain dangerous petrochemical ingredients. Regularly massage your scalp with beneficial lubricants, especially emu oil and extra-virgin coconut butter. Lay off most hair-styling products that feature laboratory-made chemicals. Do not use synthetic hair dyes. Always wear a hat when you enter a hot sauna or go outside during a hot, windy, rainy, or frosty day.

Rule # 4. Minimize stress. Stress is known to be a major contributor to premature ageing and hair loss. Try to balance your work with relaxing social activities and proper leisure. Find time for forest walks, regular relaxation massages, yoga sessions, aromatherapy, meditation, or other low-stress procedures and activities that you enjoy. These simple techniques will greatly benefit to the heath of your hair follicles and thickness of your locks.

Rule # 5. Protect your hair from chlorine and salt exposure. Chlorine is routinely added to tap water; it is also a common “disinfectant” in swimming pools; while plenty of natural salts are contained in sea water. Both chlorine and salt are toxic for the hair and should be avoided. A good preventive measure is always to rinse your locks thoroughly after swimming in the sea or a pool.
Source: http://www.stopnowhairloss.com/2008/08/21/how-to-prevent-premature-baldness-five-rules-to-remember/

Leave the fat alone – state bullying won’t curb obesity

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Fat is not a feminist issue, despite what feminists used to say. It is a class issue. Well-to-do, well educated people are rarely fat, still less obese. You see few fat children in private schools. Fatness and obesity are directly related to low income and low education.

A fat map was published last week by Dr Foster Intelligence, showing the areas with the fattest populations, and sure enough the poorest industrial areas in the north of England and in Wales produce the most obese people. The problem seems to be getting worse, fast.

You hardly need expert medical data analysis to understand that. You need only to go to a few supermarkets. At a Tesco in western Scotland this summer I was astonished by the number of horribly obese shoppers waddling round the aisles with their elephantine children, who could not possibly have squashed themselves into an ordinary one-person chair. Young women, with eyes reduced to slits by the pressure of the fat on their faces, laughed grimly with each other as they scanned the shelves. And this is a rich country.

Even though the vast Oban Tesco is full of good food, the trolleys at the checkout were heaped with stuff that is either useless or positively bad to eat – crisps, snacks, swizzlers, twizzlers and guzzlers, cheesy dips and fatty whatsits, cakes puddings and pies, heavily dusted in additives. The obese seem to fill their carts regularly with several times their own weight in eatables that can make them only fatter, that they shouldn’t eat and that nobody should produce, as if they were determined to lay down yet more adipose tissue. Yet you rarely see such bloated people and trolleys in smart supermarkets in rich areas. These days you can easily tell people’s precise socioeconomic bracket and body weight by the contents of their trolleys.

Obesity seems to be the issue of the day, possibly because we are still in the silly season. Coincidentally last week, Andrew Lansley, the Tory health spokesman, spoke against obesity in a long speech to the Reform think tank. He was widely understood as saying that fatties have only themselves to blame; they must take responsibility for themselves and their weight because “we all have a choice”. And while that is a slightly unfair take on his speech, he does seem to mean something of the sort. Yet at the same time he offers what’s now called a whole raft of measures to stop people getting fat. This is awkward for Conservatives; either you interfere with people’s choices or you don’t. Empowerment, a word he used, is often just a weasel word for state intervention.

The question is why a Conservative government should interfere at all in people’s inalienable freedom to choke on deep-fried Mars bars if they choose to. The argument is that the fat and the obese (people with a body mass index over 30, which is something you could spot without a calculator) cost the country squillions in lost productivity and increased National Health Service costs. The obese tend to develop serious illness, particularly heart disease and diabetes, and are, generally speaking, crocked up and expensive to look after.

Somebody somewhere has come up with a figure for the cost of all this, which Lansley quotes – £7 billion a year, for what it’s worth. Last year’s Foresight report said this cost could go up by six times by 2050. And fat is getting fatter so fast. According to NHS figures, the proportion of obese men in the population rose during Labour’s time in office from 13.2% in 1993 to 23.1% in 2005. Among women it was even worse, from 16.4% to 24.8%. That is nearly a quarter of all women. If you consider people who are not obese but overweight (with a BMI of 25-30), 46% of men in England are overweight and 32% of women.

Fat is also an ethnic issue. According to NHS figures published in 2006, Irish and black Caribbean men had the highest incidence of obesity (25% each) and among women black Africans had 38%, black Caribbean 32% and Pakistani 28%. So, with migration trends and immigrant fertility, the costs of obesity are going to rise fast as well.

However, I wonder how much, if anyone knew the facts, the final cost of obesity would be to the taxpayer. For fat people die sooner and obese people die much sooner than others, thus relieving the NHS and the economy of their needs. It’s true that obese people need expensive treatment for diabetes and heart disease before they die, but that might easily be offset if they had significantly shorter lives – and they do. Current thinking seems to be that the obese die between five and seven years earlier than otherwise they would.

Few papers I’ve looked at on this subject discuss the possible cost-benefit of obesity, although one from an insurance company coyly mentioned the advantage to pension providers if a person died before he reached pensionable age. For years I used to argue that smokers were a net benefit, purely financially speaking, to the exchequer, because they died early. I still feel rather proud of being the first, I believe, to get a known expert (Professor Richard Peto in 1993) to agree publicly to this idea, now accepted. Might not the same be true of obesity? The real drain on the NHS is geriatric medicine; the obese might not reach old age.

If the only reason for interfering with what fat people eat is how much it costs the rest of us, perhaps we should leave them alone. It’s well known that obesity (and fatness) are associated with poor education, poor housing, poor employment or none, low expectations, low opportunities and all the rest. These are all social ills that this government has been trying to deal with for more than a decade. Yet little has improved and obesity – as an indicator of that fact – has swollen vastly while Labour has been in office. What prevents obesity is a good income, a good education, good opportunities and the kind of background that develops self-confidence. Prosperity, in short.

Obesity cannot be defeated by taskforces, better labelling on packets or investing in health accreditation schemes. This has all been tried and has failed. In the presence of a complex problem, and in the absence of a workable solution, perhaps it is better to leave people to their own devices. Nobody can pretend they don’t know what they’re doing. They should be left alone to do it.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article4641974.ece

Yoga More Popular Than Ever

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Who knew terms like downward facing dog, flowering lotus, and half camel would ever be phrases of popular culture without a chorus of snickers being heard throughout a studio, classroom, or lecture hall? Unless you’ve been hiding in a box since the Millennium started, you know what yoga is. The spiritual-based exercise trend has been popular since celebrities started showing up on the red carpet looking extremely lean and giving their props to their personal trainer, their handpicked menu, and the low-resistance, high-meditation strategy that is yoga.

You know that old saying, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from?” Well, Hollywood didn’t invent yoga; India did thousands of years ago as part of the ancient system of Ayurveda. Yoga, now more than ever, is popular among kids, young adults, and men and women alike.

However within the popularity of this trend, when it comes to spiritual enlightenment, some wonder if holding poses, using your core, and/or sweating out impurities are still yielding the best results that they can. More and more kids are being taught yoga in the classroom to help free up their stress levels and improve concentration inside and outside of the classroom for a better balanced mind and body. Even vacationing has an outlet for providing one of a kind workout options for kids these days. Princess Cruises just announced its kid’s yoga program onboard their ships. Launching this fall, children as young as three can take part in the free classes aimed at promoting movement and parents are encouraged to join in the thirty-to-sixty minute classes.

From kids to the elderly, and everyone in between, yoga has also seen a recent boost from menopausal women. Doctors in India took a group of 120 menopausal women between the ages of 40 and 55 and broke them into two groups: one group practiced yoga five days a week for eight weeks and the control group focused on controlling their diet and exercise regimens. The yoga group also was educated on the properties of yoga, as well as how to manage stress through posing, stretching and breathing. The control group was lectured on diet, stress management, exercise and the process of menopause. The Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana of Bangalore, India’s team of doctors including Dr. R. Chattha, noticed after eight weeks a significant change in the yoga group. The women in the yoga group overall had reductions in night sweats, problems sleeping, and hot flashes-usual symptoms of menopause-whereas the control group did not notice these changes.

If you’ve never tried yoga, the good news is that you still can. Yoga centers are popping up everywhere from Hollywood Boulevard to Hollywood, Florida, and flexibility is not an issue. With many different types of yoga, beginners can start small and work their way up to the peace of mind they want. Coincidentally, this September is also the first annual Yoga Month. Approved as a National Health Observance (NHO), Yoga Month is a year round, community-based sponsorship program used to promote health and wellness. During September, the Yoga Month tour throughout the United States and Canada will help to bring yoga awareness to others through support groups, teacher networking devices, and forums to promote new ideas and products that coincide with a yoga-centric lifestyle.

Whether you’re a cancer patient, survivor, health nut, or just looking to gain a healthier perspective, join in the fun, get stretching and remember that it’s alright to snicker when someone asks you to do a half camel.
Source: http://www.healthnews.com/fitness-exercise/yoga-more-popular-than-ever-1671.html