Friday, May 29, 2009

How much alcohol can the average person safely drink per day?

According to leading doctors, "Safely" depends on your own individual situation. You can calculate that yourself by using the following factors. How old you are, how much you weigh, what kind of health do you possess, how you happen to interact with alcohol and so on. But there is no concrete evidence that the amount of alcohol in two medium sized drinks a day can do lasting harm to the average person in good health. It completely depends on the person and their body type.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Baby’s first month.


A baby is considered a newborn for about a month after birth. Newborn babies spend most of their time sleeping. There are certain astonishing characteristics of newborn babies. Most white children have grayish-blue eyes and pink skin at birth. The color of the eyes may change by the fifth or sixth month. This color then becomes permanent. Most black children have brown eyes and relatively light, pinkish skin at birth. The eyes remain brown. The skin begins to darken a few days after birth.
Babies sleep up to 23 hours a day during the first month after birth. Their need for sleep then gradually decreases. For safety and comfort, a baby should sleep in a specially designed crib. Most cribs have barred sides that can be lowered and raised by an adult. Babies should be kept covered in their crib to avoid chills.
A newborn baby's head makes up about a fourth of the total body length and is bigger around than the chest. The arms are longer than the legs. These proportions change as a child becomes an adult. The head, for example, grows less than the rest of the body and makes up about an eighth of an adult's height.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Exercises for fitness


Cardiovascular exercise, strength training and flexibility exercises are important components of a fitness plan.

Cardiovascular exercise

The heart is the most active muscle in the body and regular exercise makes it work more efficiently. The type of exercise that conditions the heart is called aerobic exercise. Examples of aerobic exercise are walking, jogging, cycling, swimming or skipping.
A minimum of 30 minutes, five days of the week is necessary to improve functioning of the heart, lungs and circulatory system.

Strength Training

Strong muscles allow you to do activities with increased energy and ease. Strength training improves bone density, builds strength, enhances the metabolism, improves posture and shapes the body. You can strength train on various types of equipment in a health club, gym or at home. Train each major muscle group twice or thrice a week.

Stretching

Flexibility exercises keep the body supple, flexible and free from muscular stress. Do yoga asanas at least thrice a week or include stretching exercises in the warm-up or cool down phase of your exercise program. As a very famous person wrote that, menopause is a time to act out or live out our dreams.... Dreams that have been put on the back burner all of a sudden come to the front burner!

Monday, May 18, 2009

The Myths of Menopause

Myth: With menopause comes weight gain.

Fact: With age, metabolism slows down. This affects the body nature and causes accumulation of weight. So, therefore we cannot directly link the weight gain and menopause. Eat in moderation and exercise regularly to maintain your weight.

Myth: From here, it's all downhill.

Fact: It depends on how you look at this phase in your life. Perhaps you may choose to view this phase as downhill, but you can choose to control the slope by maintaining a healthy weight, exercising for 30-45 minutes every day, minimising stress, getting adequate sleep and having frequent health check-ups. Many women are making significant health-related lifestyle changes and feeling great at midlife.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

What happens during Menopause??

During Menopause, the main symptoms or signs include,

Weight gain: Aerobic exercise increases the metabolic rate and promotes the loss of abdominal fat, the place most women more readily gain weight during menopause.

Osteoporosis: The biggest culprit in the process of bone loss is estrogen deficiency. Bone loss quickens during perimenopause. Weight-bearing exercise such as walking and weightlifting prevents bone loss, strengthens your bones and helps you feel younger.

Mood swings: Regular exercise is a popular prescription for anti-depression. The 'feel-good' bio-chemicals are high when the endorphin level is high. The mood heightening effect can last for several hours, according to some endocrinologists.

Hot flashes and night sweats: The mood elevating tension relieving effects of aerobic exercise increase endorphin activity and this diminishes the frequency of hot flashes and night sweats which may disrupt a woman's normal sleep cycle.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Few facts about menopause

There are so many misgivings among people who think Menopause is just a simple occurrence in a women's life. This stage of the woman's life is considered the most delicate of all by leading doctors and psychiatrists. Pre-menopause, estrogen protects the cells and tissues from damage and from coronary heart disease and stroke, after menopause, women lose up to 66 percent of their estrogen. This creates a slight problem in the resistance power of the body against various diseases and abnormailities. This causes general weakening of the body, especially the bones. Osteoporosis affects one in four women after menopause. There is also a considerable chance of acquiring cancer due to the change in the hormone levels of the body. Keeping aside all these facts, there are also occurrences of many women who report their happiest and most fulfilling years to be between the ages of 50 and 60 despite the onset of menopause.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Are you afraid of Menopause????????

Most of the women now a day’s fear menopause but with a proper diet and work-out regimen the transition from peri- to post-menopause can be a lot easier. It’s a doctors saying that Menopause can be thought of as a great tragedy - your life is over and you are no longer worth anything or it can be a transition, an initiation into a deeper way of living. Menopause is a "change of life", that most women dread. Educate, exercise and empower yourself and these can be the most fulfilling years of your life! Good nutrition, a low fat, high fibre and calcium enriched diet and a well-planned work-out regimen will make the transition from peri-menopause to post-menopause easier.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

WHAT IS MENOPAUSE?

Menopause is defined as the cessation of menses for 12months, when the ovaries stop making the hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. For most women, Menopause simply marks the end of their reproductive years. The common age of menopause is between 40 and 55 years.

The symptons include irregular periods, spotting, bloating, headaches, mood swings, food cravings, fatigue, night sweats, hot flashes, irritability, fuzzy thinking, depression and weight gain.

The intensity and type of experience actually differs with every woman, based on health history, genes and lifestyle considerations.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Treating depression

Apart from medication, psychotherapy too plays an important role in treating depression. Although medication is one of the cornerstones of treatment of Major Depression, psychotherapy plays an equally important role. A review of the research literature reveals that with a combination of medication and psychotherapy, most people with depression recover completely and are able to approach their lives with a fresh enthusiasm that seemed so elusive when they were down in the dumps. The talking cure Psychotherapy, which has been described by one of Sigmund Freud's patients as "the talking cure", has evolved considerably over the last few decades and today a bewildering plethora of psychotherapies exist, ranging from the more pragmatic approaches to the more esoteric ones. The basic object of psychotherapy is to help us understand what's happening in those parts of our mind that are not readily accessible to us. Or put differently, what precisely our thoughts are doing to our feelings, and our feelings to our thoughts. One form of psychotherapy, called psychodynamic psychotherapy, helps people to create a better life for themselves by understanding their past experiences and helping them deal with these. It can and does help people when they recover from depression. But, of the different psychotherapies available, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy or CBT it is popularly known, is the best researched and probably the most valuable when it comes to treating people going through a depression.