Tea Time

Tea Time
Green tea is a uniquely powerful beverage for improving health, burning body fat, and preventing disease.

Today, this ancient beverage has a bright future owing to a steady stream of new studies showing the health benefits accrued buy drinking it.

We routinely have a cup of decaf tea green tea in the evening after the kids are in bed and we can relax and enjoy spending some quiet time together.

We try to drink two to four cups throughput the day and find decaffeinated green tea keep us focused yet relaxed.

It is also one of the best sources of beneficial phytonutrients that are helpful in preventing aging and disease.

Tea is a great way to stay well hydrated without consuming excess empty calories.

Green tea increases your metabolism and appears to selectively mobilise the fat stores from inside your abdominal cavity. Regular tea drinkers have a lower risk of diabetes high blood pressure and heart disease.
Tea Time

Physical Fitness

Physical Fitness
Physical fitness is the ability of your body systems to work together efficiently to allow you to be healthy and effectively perform activities of daily living.

Being efficient means being able to do daily activities with the least amount of effort.

A fit person is able to perform schoolwork as well as responsibilities at home and still have enough energy and vigor to enjoy school sports and other leisure activities.

A fit person has the ability to respond to normal life situations such as raking the leaves at homes, stocking shelves at a part time job, or marching in the band at school.

A fit person also has the ability to respond to emergency situations such as running to get help or aiding a friend in distress.

As a child you were probably very active and thought little about improving or maintaining your fitness.

However, most people become less active as they grow older.

Developing a personal plan for regular physical activity can help you keep your activity level high and avoid sedentary living.

The activities you choose can be those that you like doing best and those that are best for you. Getting fit and staying fit can be fun when you choose activities that you enjoy.
Physical Fitness

General Definition of Obesity

General Definition of Obesity
Obesity is generally defined as the abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat in adipose tissue to the extent that health may be impaired.

Measuring the level of adipose tissue and determining when it is likely to affect health is not an easy task.

Quantification of adipose tissue mass can be achieved by a number of laboratory methods including underwater body density measurement and body fat content estimated by dual energy X-ray absorptiometer.

In addition, the development of new techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT), has provided researchers with the opportunities to describe human adiposity in more detail.

However, most of these methods require costly equipment meaning that there is limited to clinical research setting.

In large scale population surveys and clinical/public health screening, an index of body weight adjusted for stature is commonly used as a surrogate for body fat content.

These indices are defined as different combinations of weight and height, such as weight divided by height or are defined as weight expressed as a percentage of mean weight divide by height or are defined as weight expressed as a percentage of mean weight for a given height and sex.

The most widely used in Quetelet’s index, better known as body mass index (BMI), which is body weight (kg) divided by height squared (meter square). This index has been shown to correlate weakly with height and strongly with body fatness in adults.

Determining the weight status status and level of adiposity in children and adolescent is even more problematical.

This is a stage of rapid growth and development.

During growth in childhood and adolescence, not only does height increase but body composition changes as well, thus classification of obesity according to a single measure is difficult.

In addition, international or regional weight status standards for children and adolescents may be less reliable as the age of onset of puberty and its associated physical changes often varies between different countries, ethnic groups or cultures.
General Definition of Obesity

It is not our fault

It is not our fault
Before planning how to get well, it may help to consider the various reasons we get sick, only a few of which are under our control.

Sometimes our genes are programmed for susceptibility to one or another awful disease.

We may lack sufficiently healthy food or water. We may grow up without opportunities for exercise, fresh air, education, relaxation or love.

Studies of stressful life events – job loss, divorce, relocation, death of a family member, etc – consistently show higher rates of all types of disease following such stressors.

To these, we can add all of our maladaptive response to life’s insults: bad posture, attitudes, or diets, unacknowledged emotions, lack of exercise, overwork, hurry, various forms of self abuse and addition.

All of these injuries behaviors were learned somewhere or adopted before we knew better for reasons that were necessary - or at least seemed like good ideas – at the the time.

Most disease, then except for overwhelming infections or pure genetic defects, arise from numbers of factors stretching back through our lives and heredity and outward though all our social and environmental influences, a web of causation that we cam never completely sort out.

For various reasons, our bodies and minds (do not get their needs met, and they react by getting sick.)

Our bodies weren’t made to last forever and years of wear and tear eventually cause breakdown.

Therefore, it makes no sense to blame ourselves for illness, to feel guilty about things we could not control.

Guilt doesn’t do anyone any good. Far worse than guilt, though, is helplessness, the feeling that turns us into victims without hope of salvation.
It is not our fault

Effects of Exercise on Mood

Effects of Exercise on Mood
Everybody now knows how that physical activity and feelings or energy are integrally related.

Moderate exercise raises energy temporary, and physical conditioning through long term exercise leads to sustained levels of higher energy.

Of course too much physical activity can reduce energy but the low levels of physical activity that modern people maintain usually do not reach that point of diminishing energy, except in short term exertion or in conjunction with health problems.

Exercise also can reduce tension, although this mood relationship with exercise is not as clear as the exercise association.

In any event, the mood effects of exercise have been evident in study after study.

Therefore, in managing moods it is essential to be fully aware of how physical activity affects you.
Effects of Exercise on Mood

Walking –The King of Exercise

Walking –The King of Exercise
As you walk grasp yourself in the small of the back and feel how your entire frame responds to every stride.

Notice how almost all of your muscle are functioning rhythmically.

No other exercise gives us the same body harmony of movement and improved circulation. Brisk walking is the best exercise for almost everyone.

Your walking should never be done consciously, No “heel and toe” business. No getting there in a certain time.

Let it be fun and natural. Walk naturally with head high, spine and chest lifted up. You will feel elated, so you will carry yourself proudly, straight, erect and with arm swinging.

Vow to become a health walker and make the daily walk a fixed item on your health program all the year around, in all kinds of weather.

If the outer world of nature fails to interest you, turn to the inner world of the mind. As you walk, your body ceases to matter and you become as near poet and philosopher as you will ever be.

By end of the days, the healthy functioning of your muscles and quickened blood circulating with a sense of balanced harmony and happiness.

Gardening is another rewarding form exercise. It may give enough exercise in the open to help keep you in good physical condition.

But gardening may not prevent weight gain if there is too little movement and because you are bent over more instead of being erect.
Walking –The King of Exercise

Shake the Salt Habit

Shake the Salt Habit
The health of your arteries is critically important to virtually every aspect of your health.

Too much salt (sodium) ages your cardiovascular system by raising your blood pressure and hardening, stiffening and thickening your arteries and the walls of your heart.

You want to keep your blood vessel soft, smooth and supple like they were when you were a child and a teenager and avoid developing the rigid, inflamed and crusty pipes that can lead to heart attack, stroke, and congestion heart failure.

As an American adult, chances of developing high blood pressure during lifetime are 90 percent.

If you continue to follow your current lifestyle, sooner or later you will probably get hypertension – the medical term for high blood pressure.

Why? For starters, the average American consumer about 4000 mg of sodium daily, which is about six to ten times more salt than we were designed to eat.

Add the fact that blood pressure rises in response to too much body fat, stress and sugar and too little sleep and exercise and you have to the recipe for high blood pressure.

Excess sodium does much more than just raises your blood pressure. A study shows that high sodium intake reduced blood vessel wall function.

In addition, salt leaches the calcium from your bones, making you prone to osteoporosis and fractures, and also appears to increase cancer risk – especially in gastrointestinal tract.

A recent study found that extra salt the diet increased the like-hood of heartburn (also known as esophageal reflux) by as much as 70 percent.

A good place to start lowering the sodium in our diet is by removing the salt shaker from the table and hiding it in an inconvenient spot.

But only about 5 percent of the salt in our diet comes from the salt shaker; 75 percent comes from processed and restaurant foods.

Most people do not choose to eat high sodium product – they jut eat the foods that are readily available in our culture.

Salt is everywhere in our modern diet even in foods such as bread that don’t taste salty.

Processed foods are loaded with salt to help preserve freshness, and the more sodium you eat, the more you will crave salt. When you eliminate highly processed, high sodium foods from your diet, you will take a huge step toward a healthier, more vigorous life.
Shake the Salt Habit

Formula to Good Health

Formula to Good Health
Most American today are overfed yet undernourished, which eventually leads to obesity and poor health.

The answer to those pervasive problem is simply to eliminate the low nutrient to calories ration foods like processed grains, sugars, fatty processed meats, soft drinks and packaged snack foods, and increase the intake of high nutrient to calorie ratio foods like vegetables, fruits, seafood and whey protein.

A diet with a high nutrient to calorie ration supplies with large quantities of beneficial vitamins, minerals and other antiaging phytonutrients, but at the same time it reduces your calorie intake.

If you want to lean, fit, vigorous, and brought and happy, you must do what you are designed to do. People usually eat until they are full or satiated.

If you consume natural high nutrient but low calorie foods like fruits and vegetables, you can eat more volume and thus will feel satisfied for a longer period after eating.

It is very difficult to get fit by eating vegetables and fruit.

If you also make sure to include healthy lean protein with each meal, you will stay full longer and be able to avoid cravings.

If you trying to lose weight and not feel deprived, subtle changes can lead to realm lasting results.

A study researchers tested whether they could fool people into thinking they were eating the same amount of calories even though they trimmed their intake by 800 calories a day.

They did this by “super-sizing” the portions of foods with high nutrient to calorie like vegetable and fruits.

At the same time they cut high calorie synthetic foods containing sugars and fats by about 25%.

As turned out, the participant did not even notice that they were consuming fewer calories because they were eating more food and staying full longer.

On the other hand, when the researchers cut calories by just decreasing portion sizes, participants complained they weren’t getting enough to eat.

In other word, you will feel less deprived and have better luck losing body fat if you increase your intake of fruits and vegetables and cut out processed high sugar and high fat foods, rather than relying on cutting portion size alone.
Formula to Good Health

Take Control of Your Life

Take Control of Your Life
1. Slow down
Save some energy for your body and life, instead of giving every last ounce to work, worry, other demands or entertainment.

2. Make a change
Change something in your life that is damaging. No matter how small any successful change builds self confidence and makes the next change easier.

3. Get help
None of us can do it alone; life is a cooperative effort. Learn to find and ask for help.

4. Value your body and your life
Listen to your body and treat it with respect. Fill your life with more pleasure, love and reason to live.

5. Grown up. Educate yourself, take responsibility, be assertive
Accept yourself the way you are, but don’t give up in getting better.

These steps would sound intimidating, even to me, except for three things.

First, we rarely need the whole program. Anything we do for ourselves is likely to pay dividends.

Second, every single step should feel good; the whole idea, supported by scientific studies, is that improving quality of life will improve our health.

Third, we’ve probably doing many things right already.
Take Control of Your Life

Exercise and Hypertension

Exercise and Hypertension
Lifestyle plays a major role in the development of hypertension and any program to reduce blood pressure must take this into consideration.

Medical experts note that any changes that are implemented must be maintained if blood pressure is to be controlled in a long term basis.

Smoking should be moderated or preferably totally avoided and alcohol intake should be kept to a minimum.

Weight loss reduces blood pressure in this with and without hypertension and be primary goal for hypertensive who are obese or moderately overweight.

Other factors for reducing and controlling hypertension are increased exercise and stress management.

Regular exercise reduces stress and blood pressure, so it is highly recommended as an integral part of your life.

Consistent aerobic exercise can both prevent and lower hypertension.

Swimming, which is frequently prescribed as a non impact exercise to lower high blood pressure, can produce a significant decrease in resting heart rate (a sign of cardiovascular health) and systolic blood pressure in previously sedentary people with elevated blood pressure.
Exercise and Hypertension

Obesity and Weight Loss

Obesity and Weight Loss
Obesity clearly poses a danger to health, have been associated with numerous health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and certain types of cancer.

However, diets for weight loss have been shown to be ineffective and even damaging to health.

A well balanced that avoids the wrong dietary fats, refined sugars, and excess calories (which all contribute to weight gain), regular exercise, drinking adequate amounts of pure water and stress reduction can help maintain a healthy weight.

Weight loss has become a national obsession in America. As many as 40% of women and 24% of men in the U.S are trying to loose weight at any given time through such diverse methods as diets, special dietary supplements, exercise, behavior modifications and drugs.

While this obsession is often fueled by psychological needs (the urge to conform to an artificial of beauty fostered by media, fashion and peer pressure) rather than physical needs, it is estimated that 97 millions Americans are overweight.

Excess weight has been linked to a number of health problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, gallbladder disease, respiratory conditions, as well as breast, endometrial and uterine cancers in women and cancer of the colon and rectum in men.

In fact, 85% of Type II diabetes cases are attributed to obesity, along with 45% of hypertension, 35% of heart disease and 18% of high cholesterol.

Obesity has also been shown to result in a decreased life span for both women and men and may be contributing factor in as many as 300,000 deaths each year.

The answers to weight gain and weight loss, though, are not always simple and easy.

Under controlled settings, most people trying to lose weight are usually able to lose about 10% of their total body weight, but up to two thirds of that weight is regained within a year.

To achieve significant and permanent weight loss, you need to come up with a plan – incorporating healthier eating, exercise, and stress reduction.
Obesity and Weight Loss

Eat Big to Get a Smaller Waist

Eat Big to Get a Smaller Waist
Big foods are those that are low in caloric density, but they give you a feeling of satiety on fewer calories.

Examples include salads, noncreamy soups, vegetables fresh fruits, water, nonfat plain yogurt, fish and seafood, and cooked oatmeal.

Because these natural high-volume, or “big,” foods are high in fiber and water they fill you up on fewer calories than the calorie-dense highly processed foods.

You are hard-wired to eat until your stomach is stretched, which generally takes about fifteen to twenty minutes.

If you are eating cheese fries, chicken nuggets and M&M’s and drinking sugared sodas, during that fifteen to twenty minute meal, you will consume thousands of calories, mostly in the form of unhealthy and nutritionally barren foods that will be stored as belly fat and leave you hungry again in two or three hours.

On the other hand, if you sit down to a meal of boil shrimp, crisp celery sticks with guacamole dip, an apple and a tall glass of iced tea, fifteen to twenty minutes later you will be just even full though you consumed a fraction of the calories and loads more antiaging antioxidants, fiber and vitamins.

As a bonus, you remain full for four to six hours without cravings for junk food.

Many healthy foods are essential calorie-free, including spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and asparagus. But not everybody enjoys all the vegetables.

Drinking calorie-free beverage such as water tea and coffee is another way to fill up without stressing your system with excess calories.
Eat Big to Get a Smaller Waist

Variety of Foods: The Good and the Bad

Variety of Foods: The Good and the Bad
You will thrive best if you can learn to eat an array of fresh, natural foods to get the wide range of nutrients that are necessary for vibrant health.

Different foods provide different nutrients, so the greater variety of nature’s bounty in which you partake, the better health you will enjoy.

Eat an abundance of fruits and vegetables and try new ones every chance you get.

Look for brightly or deeply colored varieties as they are high in anti-aging antioxidants.

Variety is also important when choosing animal protein sources. Red meat poultry, nonfat dairy, whey protein, seafood, and fish all have very different nutritional profiles.

Try not to eat the same type of meat or fish day in and day out.

A mixture of protein sources will supply you with an array of healthful nutrients and still help you to avoid the over-consumption of potentially toxic substance that may be present in specific meats or fish.

For instance, tuna is fine once or twice a week, but if you ate it every day, you might end up accumulating toxic amounts of mercury.

Lean red meat is great in moderation, but when eaten in excess you might absorb too much iron, saturated fat, and heterocyclic amines (carcinogens).

Lean chicken breasts are low in fat but don’t have the beneficial omega-3 fats found in fish and seafood, or the high zinc levels of red meats.

Variety, however, have a dark side. The dramatic rise in America body weight over the past twenty-five years is paralleled by a line documenting the number of new man-made foods introduced into the diet over the same time period.

They are often advertised as low fat, low carb, or vitamin-fortified, but nearly all of these synthetic, caloric-dense delicious new foods are designed to entice us into overeating.

A whole host of designer “fat free” highly processed foods were gobbled up by the American public as it packed on pounds of fat tissue faster than grain-fed cattle in feed lots.
Variety of Foods: The Good and the Bad

Fruits and Veggies

Fruits and Veggies
No matter what your health concerns – preventing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, whatever – the bottom-line massage from every health organization (including the American Heart Association; the American Cancer Society; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; and the USDA) is to eat more fruits and vegetarians.

Yet more than 90 percent of Americans fail to consume the recommended amount.

Ideally, you should include a hefty portion of fruit and veggies in every meal and snack.

Here are some tips to help you boost your intake of these carbohydrate-rich foods that not only fuel your muscles but also protect your good health:

• Whip together a fruit smoothie for breakfast: orange juice, banana, frozen berries

• To your egg (white) omelet, add diced pepper, tomato, mushrooms

• Add blueberries or sliced banana to pancakes; top with applesauce

• No fresh fruit for your cereal? Use canned peaches, raisins or frozen berries

• Put leftover dinner veggies into your lunchtime salad or soup

• Keep within easy reach grap-and-go snack, such as small boxes of raisins, trail mix dried fruit, frozen 100 percent juice bars, cherry tomatoes, baby carrots and celery sticks.

• Add shredded carrots to casseroles, chili, lasagna, meatloaf or soup

Fruits and Veggies

The Juice Fast

The Juice Fast
Juice fasting is a safe and easy way to detoxify the body. Fasting is not harmful. If it were, mankind would not have evolved as a civilization.

Fasts have been recorded in ancient history and have been a part of virtually all religious. For example, in the orthodox Christian church, fasts have been practiced for centuries and are still a way of church life today.

We do not recommend water fasts because they are too hard on the body. Such fasts release too many stored-up toxins without supplying the nutrients needed to detoxify them.

These nutrients, especially the antioxidants (beta-carotene, vitamins C and E and the mineral selenium) supplied in abundance in the juices, bind with harmful toxins and carry them out of the body.

Some word of caution are in order regarding juice fasting. Children under seventeen should not follow a strict juice fast. But fruit and vegetable juices are a great supplement to a healthful diet for your child or adolescent.

Diabetics should seek a doctor’s approval before trying a juice fast. Hypoglycemics may benefits from using protein powder as a supplement during the fast. Whenever you are sick, your body is sending you a signal that it needs rest – both from strenuous work and from foods that are hard to digest – along with plenty of immune supporting nutrients.

Juices offer great quantities of nutrients that support immune system, and the juice fast is a powerful healing tool. But don’t wait until sick then fasting. There is a suggestion that juice fast several times a year. You can fast from one t0 five days any time you like. Some people fast from one to five days any time you like.
The Juice Fast

Fitness benefits of Hiking and Backpacking

Fitness benefits of Hiking and Backpacking
Hiking help increase and maintain fitness levels and contribute to health and well being. One of the great things about hiking is that you can use it to get in shape backpacking.

Hiking and backpacking are fun ways to burn calories, spend times with other people and eat well.

Sunlight offers vitamins D and E, both important for immune functions as well as increased serotonin levels, which elevate mood. Nature has a restorative power and can help alleviate depression.

Contact with nature is correlated with living longer and actual biochemical changes occur in response to trees, plants and animals. As we enjoy the sights and sounds of nature, in addition to learning something about the nature environment, stress levels decrease and endorphins, which also elevate mood, are released.

We experience long term benefits from improving and maintaining physical fitness through hiking and backpacking both on the trail and at home. Moderate physical activity can result in lower healthy care cost and increased work performance.

Regular exercise improves mental healthy, providing a holistic sense of wellness, more positive moods and emotions, better mental clarity and better stress management skills, enabling us to better respond to the demands and joys of life.

This leads to higher self confidence, greater self competence, and better judgment and decision making.
Fitness benefits of Hiking and Backpacking