Archive for April, 2009

Many people assume that swimming is a just a fun activity and are unaware of the potential health benefits of swimming.

Learning how to swim and going for regular swimming work outs can reduce your risk of developing health problems that arise from being overweight – things like diabetes, hypertension and stroke among others – because swimming is a very effective fat loss program, which can in the long run lead to healthy weight loss. The way it works is that swimming tends to aid in the conversion of fat to muscle because while swimming, your whole body finds itself having to exercise to overcoming the resistance posed by the water you happen to be swimming in. Now overcoming this resistance results in the build up of muscles which in the short term might manifest as a weight gain rather than a weight loss. Well developed muscles, however, turn out to be your best weight loss allies in the long run because the kind of tissue that makes up muscle actually burns fat even when you are not doing much. Exercise which build up muscles – and swimming is a very good example of it – is therefore best seen as a weight loss investment because the muscles so built can then help the person who has developed them to lose weight almost on ‘autopilot’.

People who suffer from diseases that are characterized by inflammation like arthritis and who are overweight at the same time are yet another group that can benefit from swimming. This is because swimming offers them the opportunity to lose weight without causing too much pain in their joints, which they would have to do on most exercises on dry land.

The kind of breathing required while swimming, too, can really strengthen one’s heart as well as the lungs – keeping one from the health troubles they would have had from these vital organs.

Learning to swim and then going swimming regularly can also lead to better mental health because swimming, like any form of exercise leads to the release of ‘feel good’ chemical in the brain – resulting in good mental health. Furthermore, as a good weight loss exercise, swimming can help a person who is overweight to attain a better body shape, in turn leading to a better body image and higher self esteem, which is the foundation of good mental health and happiness. The very activity of flapping of arms and legs in water involved in swimming together with the continued soothing feel of water against the skin is itself also very therapeutic.

Of course swimming is an activity that is usually carried out in groups and in this way, it gives the person undertaking it to really go out and meet other people – fellow swimmers, swimming instructors and lifeguards at the swimming site for instance – meaning that they have an opportunity to get outside themselves. This can be a great boost to mental and emotional health, seeing that most mental and emotional health problems have loneliness and self-confinement as their root cause.

Most of the weight loss pills that people take – and which some swear helped them to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight – work by boosting your body’s metabolism. In a similar manner, even most of the natural aids to weight loss – things like green tea, work by stimulating your bodies metabolism.

Metabolism, as it turns out, is the rate at which the body burns up the food you consume into energy to fuel its various functions. Some people are naturally endowed with high rates of metabolism – and these are the people who will eat amazing amounts of food on a daily basis, without ever losing weight. Others are endowed with sluggish rates of metabolism such that even when they eat measured amounts of food, they still end up putting on weight.

You need not resort to pills – most of which leave a trail of obnoxious sidle effects in their wake – to speed up your metabolism. There are some things that can help you in speeding up your metabolism naturally.

Changing your eating habits is one such thing that can help in speeding up your metabolism naturally. This means eating smaller meals regularly through out the day – rather than eating the three huge meals that we have been socialized to do. Eating smaller regular meals gives your body a steady supply of calories- and once the body (which is intelligent in itself) comes to realize that there is a plenty supply of the calories, it reacts by increasing the rate of metabolism to burn them up before the next input. Moreover, this habit of eating smaller quantities of food throughout the day keeps the body’s digestion mechanism perpetually working – and this too boosts your metabolism – metabolism being the rate at which the body converts the food put into it into energy for its various functions, and digestion being one of the most energy-intensive bodily functions.

Good stress management is yet another step you can take towards speeding up your metabolism naturally. Bodily stress, as it turns out, is one of factors that have shown a consistently high correlation with metabolism shut down. This has to do with the body’s biochemistry and body-mind link. The exact mechanism which this comes to be can be understood by the fact that the natural role of stress was to initiate a fight or flee response in a danger through the release of stress hormones like adrenaline (at a time when man faced lots of predators in the wild). In these kinds of situations where one needs to fight or flee, the body tends to shut down all the other non-essential functions (all of which consume calories) and keep the essential functions to the bare minimum, with the aim of focusing the body’s energies to fighting – or fleeing – from the imminent threat. Unfortunately, in today’s world, there are people who due to the stress of modern living (most of which does not result from real threats), are perpetually in this fight or flee mode, and these are the people in whom metabolism is likely to shut down. Obviously, the best solution to their problem is to address the stressors in their lives, rather than popping a metabolism boosting pill which does not address the root cause underlying their metabolism shut-down.

With growing number of people taking responsibility for their physical fitness, coupled with growth in E-commerce and the convenience of conducting transactions over the Internet, the number of websites selling fitness and exercise accessories (which is considered a prime niche) is growing exponentially. Exponential too, is the growth in the number of people shopping for fitness and exercise accessories over the Internet.

Most of the people who opt to shop for fitness and exercise accessories of the Internet are allured by the convenience of Internet shopping. With growth in E-commerce transaction systems, it has now become possible to order for the accessories from the comfort of your desk, make payment through your credit card from right there (at the back of your desk) and have the equipment delivered right up to your doorstep, without ever leaving your desktop. Indeed in some websites that promise same-day delivery, it is possible to go through all this process in a single day, and so expeditiously that in some cases, the equipment you order gets to your doorstep even before you leave your desk (especially if you happen to be a heavy browser, and the supplier from whom you buy the equipment happens to be in the same city as you.)

Another factor that makes shopping for fitness and exercise accessories over the Internet attractive is the fact that online vendors tend to be, on average, cheaper than brick and mortar vendors. This is because vendors who are completely internet based have the opportunity to save on some costs – the fixed cost of paying rent for a shop for instance, as well as the fixed cost of paying for showrooms – all of which add up to a quite a tidy sum, which can be passed on to the buyers.

The first step in shopping for fitness and exercise accessories over the Internet is usually the identification of a suitable vendor. The ease with which this can be done is another factor that makes shopping for the equipment over the Internet so attractive, because all you have to do is to enter a relevant search term, for instance, ‘fitness and exercise accessories’ in an Internet search engine, and you get access to scores of online stores doing selling the same, instantaneously. Now compare this with brick and mortar shopping for the same – where you would have to straddle the breadth and width of your city looking for the shops selling fitness and exercise accessories, and you notice just how much more convenient shopping for this equipment over the Internet is.

The second step in shopping for fitness and exercise accessories over the Internet is the identification of the equipment (having gotten into an online store you like), loading the equipment and accessories you have chosen (or rather their graphics) into your online shopping cart and paying for them through credit card or through an online payments account (like PayPal) in case you are averse to revealing your credit card details over the Internet, and the vendor in question happen to offer you the choice of paying through an option like PayPal.

The third step after paying for the accessories is for the vendor to ship the same to you –and the fourth step, if we may call it that, is of course for you to start enjoying using the accessories, upon your inspecting them to verify that they are alright.

As the idea that you can take responsibility for your own health gets widespread acceptance, more and more people are coming out in the open looking for information on how to keep themselves healthy for long. And while the methods employed in healthy living vary depending on the school of thought one subscribes to, the need to ensure that you are eating healthy is one thing that pervades almost all schools of thought on the subject of healthy living.

Generally, food that is considered healthy is food which is as close to what nature intended for humanity as possible. Naturally, this excludes highly processed foods – given that in nature, some of the food processing that we have mechanized nowadays is something that was meant to be done in the body. In any case, some of the elements that are removed in mechanized food processing – things like fiber, serve a useful role in the body. Foods that are too fatty are another group that is generally excluded from what is considered healthy eating, simply because strictly speaking, there is nothing in nature which is as oily as French fries for instance. Food that is too salty, too, is considered unhealthy, given that our current sodium (salt) consumption far exceeds what nature intended for us.

Even for the foods that pass the healthiness test, however, there is still a condition that the food has to be prepared in a healthy way, or risk sliding into the category of unhealthy eating too. Using too much fat in cooking food that is otherwise healthy will turn the food into an unhealthy dish, as is using too much salt in cooking the food that was otherwise healthy.

Since the things which are likely to turn otherwise healthy food into unhealthy food are the very things which add flavor to food, the key to preparing and cooking healthy foods in a way that they can still be delicious is prudent substitution. For instance, one can consider substituting excessive salt with some natural spices, so that the food is still delicious without being too salty. Of course even with the use of these spice substitute for excessive salt, it still takes the tongue some time to get used to eating food that is less salty than it was used to, but the use of such spice (salt substitutes) in preparing and cooking healthy foods can go a long way in helping in the process of getting used to lower salt levels.

Changing food preparation methods is yet another method you can use in preparing and cooking healthy foods in a way that does not turn them unhealthy. Cooking methods like frying – while leading to highly delicious results – are prone to turn otherwise healthy foods into unhealthy dishes as they introduce too much fat in the cooking. One can opt for food preparation methods like boiling, steaming and stewing, which help in preserving the healthiness of the food. With the use of good recipes, it is actually possible to get highly delicious results from these same food preparation methods – like boiling, stewing and steaming – results that are actually more delicious than anything you could get through frying.

The body is the self, and contrary to what many of us believe, you can never quite have high self esteem (and consequently happiness) unless you learn to love your body.

Granted, learning to love your body is not very easy. We have been conditioned to feel that our bodies are not ‘ideal’ – and that there is an ‘ideal’ body that we would rather be in. Many of the beliefs which cause us not to love our bodies are very deeply ingrained in our psyches, and some can actually be traced back to our childhood, starting with what our parents told us about our bodies (and the whole concept of the role of the body in the self), how our friends at school treated us with respect to our bodies (kids can be especially unkind to others who are different in some way) as well as the impact of the media on our body image.

The effect of the media on our respect self-images is particularly worth of special note. The media, perhaps influenced by the fashion and weight loss industries has continually perpetuated the view that the ideal body looks a certain way, and anyone who doesn’t reach this ideal is implicitly said to be ugly. Of course this is a misguided notion, seeing that we are all meant to be different, that it takes all sorts to make an interesting world, and that if we all looked alike (ultra-thin and ultra ‘cute’) the world would be a very boring place indeed. In such a world, for instance, you would have no one to compare yourself to, which is a big killjoy seeing that we derive a considerable portion of our happiness from comparing ourselves with others and feeling that when all is said and done, we are still better off than someone else (even if that happens to be a delusion).

Therefore the way to learn to love your body is to dispel all these fallacious notions that make you not to love your body in the first place. Notions like the one that there is an ‘ideal’ body that everyone ought to have can only lead to unhappiness as all people will never be same, and it is not desirable anyway. Notions like the one that others will love you when you have a better body might have a grain of truth in them, but in most cases, whatever body you happen to have, people only love you as much as you love yourself and as much as they recorn that you can be of some help to them.

Another way to love yourself is to celebrate you uniqueness. You were made the way you are for a reason, and you can always turn the way you are to your advantage, if only you think about it hard enough. Unknown to many ‘huge’ people who are forever seeking smaller body forms, for instance, is the fact that a huge body represents ‘a strong presence’ and in many forums, there are many people who will respect you and love simply on account of your huge. (Of course, if you are huge in an unhealthy way, you should consider losing the extra weight – but from a point of self love).