Improve Your Health Blog

Anyone who is trying to lose weight or simply trying to lead a healthier lifestyle will point you to the direction of having more fruits and vegetables in your diet. Most likely you want to heed the advice but you struggle from time to time.
Here are some tips to help you incorporate veggies and fruits to your diet:

Start early

Dieticians recommend about 5 servings of vegetables and fruits in day. Start with them early and have some for breakfast. Try bananas for your cereals or some berries to your cup of yogurt. You can also mix some vegetables to your omelet.

Make the healthy foods visible

As much as possible make the veggies and fruits visible and accessible to members of your household. This somehow encourages everyone to grab a fruit for snack. You can also prepare quick snacks like carrot sticks instead of having junk food.

No problem with frozen veggies

If you have a very busy lifestyle and you cannot buy fresh goodies frequently, you can freeze some vegetables like carrots or peas just to make sure you always have some dose of veggies. You can add these frozen veggies to your soup dish or casserole dishes. They are still as nutritious as their fresh counterparts if that is what you are thinking of.

Veggies first rule

Make it a priority that the bigger portion of your plate will be filled with vegetables before you think of grains or protein to go with it. So if you can have half of your plate filled with your favorite veggies, the better.

Fruits for dessert

The best dessert is to have some fruits after a meal. You can also puree some berries and make it the sauce of your ice cream for example. The ice cream part may not sound so good but having a fruit sauce is better than your usual chocolate syrup or caramel. You can make some smoothie with your favorite fruit.

How you work out while you are in your 20s is different on how you should do your exercises after a few decades.

Exercise helps delay aging and help you deal with factors lie stress, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. The longer you are active too, the lesser aging will catch up with how you look. Here’s how you can remain fit thru different stages of your life:

20′s

When you are in your 20s, your body is ready to deal with the workload of exercise. You can go for half an hour of cardio and half an hour of weights three times a week. You can blend this with 3 days a week of pure cardio by doing an hour of straight cardio regimen. Give your body a day to rest and recover.

30s

In your 30s you can do four times a week an hour of cardio and weights plus high intensity straight cardio for one day. One day is devoted for a good rest. During your 30s, the extra poundage does not come off that easily like before. Your metabolism will be dropping, muscle decreases, and fat increases. You really do not need a lot of calories to do your daily functions. Keeping fit is a bit harder but vital on this decade of your life.

40s

When you hit your fourth decade, you can do weight training for about an hour three times a week plus around 45 minutes of straight cardio five times in a week. One day is also devoted for rest. Notice that cardio work out is longer but involves lower intensity and impact exercises.

50s

Your metabolism during your 50s might be starting to crawl. Experts recommend that you do 20 to 40 minutes of cardio routine four to six times a week. The intensity of the workout should allow you to answer questions but not really chat. This is how you gauge your exertion. Add to this an hour of doing weights twice a week. Do not forget to do warm up and cool down exercises.

Undoubtedly, regular exercise brings a ton of positive effects to our health and we are able to live a happier, more active, and longer lives.

Fitness experts also want to point out that you do not have to workout to the point of exhaustion or allot a big amount of time to reap some benefits. They noted though that a lot of people are not exercising or they are doing too little to feel any gains.

A lot of people has no time to exercise. This is our number one excuse. We point to lack of time because of all the things that keep us busy like work, hours spent in traffic, or stuff we have to do at home.

Amid our rants of having no time, fitness experts insist that participation in any regular exercise can give you a ton of health benefits.

Physical activity helps our body control its sugar levels and also lowers the blood pressure. It follows that exercise lowers the risk for diabetes and heart disease. It also gives us a better mood, keeps our brain sharp, and improves our memory.

A survey in the US though reveals that more than 25% of its population do not engage in regular activities like swimming, running, golf, walking, or gardening even their during free time. In a more recent research, only about 5% of American adults engage in vigorous exercise.

Scientists conclude that aside from the busy schedule of people, a lot of us still do not understand and appreciate the positive impacts of physical activities in our lives.

There is a new screening method for stroke which may help determine if a person has a high risk of getting it. The new test makes use of a technology similar to ultrasound.

The number of people suffering from stroke is around 800,000 every year in the US alone. One sixth of these patients succumb to the attack while a lot of them go thru significant disability.

The test will allow doctors and health experts separate patients who have clogged blood vessels in the neck, those who are highly like to suffer a stroke, and those who are not at risk. In turn this will help determine who needs to go thru the surgery which will help clean up the cholesterol blocking the arteries.

The proponents of the study reiterate though that the test must be correlated with other studies.

The new screening test will be making use of two kinds of ultrasound which basically will scan for the carotid arteries and the blood vessels on the brain itself. The screening will take around ninety minutes to finish. The results are also a bit difficult to interpret.

The surgery to remove cholesterol buildup is also somewhat controversial since , in Canada and the United States, there are a lot of patients who undergo the surgery without even showing significant symptoms.

The study involved 428 patients who were diagnosed with clogged carotids but are still symptom free. They were subjected to the scans and observed for two years. The patients who showed warning signs after the scan had a 9% risk for stroke while majority had less than a percent of risk.

The clogged carotid blood vessels may contribute to stroke but subjecting patients who had no or very few symptoms to cholesterol cleanup may prove to be hazardous. There is also a study that shows 95% of patients without symptoms are better off without going thru surgery and another study that doing something to them may trigger a fatal stroke.

Experts are saying now that with this new scanning tests, scanning a lot of people for risk may prove not to be too helpful as this may lead to a lot of unnecessary surgical operations.

According to researchers in Australia, the more you walk, the less you are prone to diabetes.

The experts monitored 592 adults in an attempt to map the occurrence of diabetes in Australia from 2000 through 2005. The subjects went through a health evaluation before the start of the study and also gave certain details about their eating habits and lifestyle.  They were also issued pedometers and given instructions on how they will use them.

After five years, a follow up was done and the results showed that those with higher step counts also had lower ratio of the waist and hip and also had better sensitivity to insulin.

Comparing the insulin sensitivity, they found out that those who walked about 10,000 steps per day is 3 times more sensitive to insulin compared to those who walked 3,000 steps per day, 5 times every week.

The study concluded that higher levels of physical activity to better BMI or body mass index, waist-hip ratio, and sensitivity to insulin.

The current recommendation is to have at least 3,000 steps a day for at least five days per week.

According to reports from the HealthDay News, video games like the Nintendo Wii can actually help keep seniors physically active. This is good news for a lot of overweight seniors who have difficulty keeping up with outdoor exercises. With the Wii and similar video games, they can now get their much needed exercise in the comfort of their own homes.

Although Wii activities can’t burn more calories than outdoor activities, researchers found that movement-oriented video games tend to motivate seniors more than difficult outdoor sports could. This is probably because they can control these movement-oriented games more than they could an actual game.

Certainly, these movement-oriented games help curb the growing health risks for this sedentary population. Thirty percent of males and forty of adult-females over 70 hardly get any physical activities. This is due to the fact that they’re hesitant about staying outdoors. These video games are good exercise alternatives, and a few studies have actually used the Wii to keep older people and those with disabilities fit.

Twenty-four obese men and women were outfitted for this study. They were all asked to wear wrist accelerometers so the number of calories they burn can be measured. Each test lasted for half an hour. According to their findings, a total of 20 to 176 calories can be burned playing the Wii bowling game. A team bowling game, however, proved to give less health benefits, only letting players burn 18 to 89 calories.

The Wii tennis game helped players burn 17 to 72 calories, while baseball helped senior players burn 22 to 155 calories per half an hour.

It is a good time for chest congestion. That is, a lot of people are suffering from it.

If you are not interested in over the counter medications, there are plenty of natural remedies for this problem.

For starters, herbal tea can be extremely helpful, especially if you inhale the steam. By adding apple cider vinegar to hot water and/or herbal tea, you can also get a lot of help.

Eucalyptus oil is another helpful cure. Specifically, again, add it to hot water so you can inhale the steam. Lavender, oregano, and thyme as herbs or essential oils can also be used in this remedy.

The weather is changing.  That has a lot of people getting sick.

They might just get little colds, but those are still awfully unpleasant, especially as the weather starts to get warmer.

So let’s take a look at some natural ways you can get rid of your chest congestion!

Now that we have talked about one agent that absolutely helps when you are dealing with pain, let’s move onto another herb that you might not know about.  That one is Devil’s Claw.  This is actually an herb that is a shrub and native to southern Africa, however it is definitely an herb that you should have.

This particular herb and its dried roots have been used since the early 20th century and it is definitely one herb that is worth buying.  When you use it, it does not have any side effects, like the other drugs that you may have seen on the market.

Also, you can actually use it in capsule, tablet or liquid form and it is very non-toxic!

Typically, when you are in pain, what do you reach for?  The pill bottles right?  Well, there are actually a ton of different and natural ways that you can cure your pain and I can tell you that they work.  That is what we are going to talk about in the next couple blogs, how you can naturally stop your pain so you are not constantly taking pills!

The first method up is actually white willow tree bark.  This is actually one of the most common alternatives to normal medicine for pain relief.  The reason for this is because it actually has anti-inflammatory properties, which is something that works fantastic on any and all pains that you might have.

One thing to keep in mind though is that it does take a little longer to work than normal pills and you might want to get it in powder, tea, capsule or even in liquid form!