Natural Way Health Blog

Weight Training – Wait

Weight training is such an essential component of creating a healthy body. If you combine your cardio with weights, this article explains the most helpful way to do so.

Wait for Weights

Maximize the calorie-burning benefits of your workout by tackling cardiovascular exercise before strength training.

Doing cardio first can help you exercise longer, and thus burn more calories, than you would if you were tired out by weight training first. And finishing your workout with weights helps boost post-workout metabolism — the rate at which your body burns calories after you’re done. The result may be an overall better calorie burn, according to a small study.

Although all types of exercise — cardiovascular, strength, and flexibility — help you burn calories, cardio workouts result in the greatest calorie burn. Because of this, it may be best to do your cardio exercises first while you are fresh. You’re likely to spend more time on aerobic exercise and work out harder if you haven’t tired yourself out by doing other kinds of exercises first.

On the other hand, strength training results in the greatest boost in post-exercise calorie burning. It boosts your metabolism for a longer period of time, helping your body burn more calories after your workout is done.

Ultimately, this means that doing your cardio workout first can help ensure that you achieve the maximum calorie burn from it, and ending your workout with a strength-training session helps ensure your post-exercise metabolism stays high.

Source: www.real-age.com

Exercise – in your head

The mind-body connection is powerful. We saw the following article and knew we wanted to share it.

Awareness about being on your health journey is important. Want to know the easiest way to boost the benefits of your workout: Just think about them.

Sounds crazy, right? But it was true in a study of hotel workers. Just 4 weeks after the room cleaners were educated on how their duties counted toward their exercise needs, they saw a drop in weight and blood pressure — despite no changes in overall activity levels.

Placebo Effect at Work
Changing bed linens, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing the bathroom floor — it’s not spin class, but it is physical activity. And if you do physically active things with the right mind-set (namely, think “This is good for me. “), it could translate into greater health gains. Just chalk it up to that mind-body connection to which so many other health benefits (like the placebo effect) have been traced.

Think About It
You need only about 30 minutes of exercise daily to meet the surgeon general’s physical activity recommendations. And keep in mind that things like pulling weeds, painting the garage door, and folding laundry count toward that total. And we mean literally keep it in mind. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Source: www.real-age.com

Choose Your Friends Wisely

Are your friends making you fat? Or keeping you slender? According to new research from Harvard and the University of California , San Diego , the short answer on both counts is “yes.”

Appearing in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a study coauthored by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of UC San Diego suggests that obesity is “socially contagious,” spreading from person to person in a social network.

The study — the first to examine this phenomenon — finds that if one person becomes obese, those closely connected to them have a greater chance of becoming obese themselves. Surprisingly, the greatest effect is seen not among people sharing the same genes or the same household but among friends.

If a person you consider a friend becomes obese, the researchers found, your own chances of becoming obese go up 57 percent. Among mutual friends, the effect is even stronger, with chances increasing 171 percent.

Christakis and Fowler also looked at the influence of siblings, spouses and neighbors. Among siblings, if one becomes obese, the likelihood for the other to become obese increases 40 percent; among spouses, 37 percent. There was no effect among neighbors, unless they were also friends.

The researchers analyzed data over a period of 32 years for 12,067 adults, who underwent repeated medical assessments as part of the Framingham Heart Study. They were able to map a densely interconnected social network of the study’s subjects by using the tracking sheets (which had previously been archived in a basement) that recorded not only the subjects’ family members but also unrelated friends who could be expected to find them in a few years.

The network map took two years to assemble and includes information on the participants’ body-mass index. Among the first things the researchers noticed was that, consistent with other studies finding an obesity epidemic in the U.S. , the whole network grew heavier over time.

Also immediately apparent were distinct clusters of thin and heavy individuals. Statistical analysis revealed that this clustering could not be attributed solely to the selective formation of ties among people of comparable weights.

“It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with,” said Christakis, a physician and a professor in Harvard Medical School ’s department of health care policy. “Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship.”

Further analysis also suggested that people’s influence on each other’s obesity status could not be put down just to similarities in lifestyle and environment, to, for example, people eating the same foods together or engaging in the same physical activities. Not only do siblings and spouses have less influence than friends, but also geography doesn’t play a role. The striking impact of friends seems to be independent of whether or not the friends live in the same region.

“When we looked at the effect of distance, we found that your friend who’s 500 miles away has just as much impact on your obesity as [one] next door,” said Fowler, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego and an expert in social networks.

In part because the study also identifies a larger effect among people of the same sex, the researchers believe that people affect not only each other’s behaviors but also, more subtly, norms.

“What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size. People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads,” said Christakis.

“This is about people’s ideas about their bodies and their health,” Fowler said. “Consciously or unconsciously, people look to others when they are deciding how much to eat, how much to exercise and how much weight is too much.”

“Social effects, I think, are much stronger than people before realized. There’s been an intensive effort to find genes that are responsible for obesity and physical processes that are responsible for obesity and what our paper suggests is that you really should spend time looking at the social side of life as well,” said Fowler.

The policy implications of the study, the researchers say, are profound. The social-network effects extend three degrees of separation — to your friends’ friends’ friends — so any public-health intervention aimed at reducing obesity should consider this in its cost-benefit analysis.

“When we help one person lose weight, we’re not just helping one person, we’re helping many,” Fowler said. “And that needs to be taken into account by policy analysts and also by politicians who are trying to decide what the best measures are for making society healthier.”

“It’s important to remember,” Fowler said, “that we’ve not only shown that obesity is contagious but that thinness is contagious.”

Water and Health

Recent studies have shown that more than 90 percent of us are dehydrated. In fact, we are not even drinking the minimum required amount to keep our bodies operating at optimal capacity. When our bodies become dehydrated our organs suffer, leading to the possibility of many degenerative diseases.

Water Helps to: Enhance mental clarity ; Increase energy levels ; Maintain a healthy weight ; Regulate body temperature ; Moisten tissues in the mouth, eyes and nose ; Protect body organs and tissues ; Enable proper digestion and prevent constipation ; Lubricate joints and tendons ; Flush out waste products ; Dissolve and aid in the absorption of vital minerals, vitamins and nutrients ; Carry nutrients and oxygen to cells

Source: Mayo Clinic, 2004

Strength Training

The Mayo Clinic lists the following reasons why it is good to add strength training to your exercise regimen. Benefits include:

• Increased bone density: This reduces the risk and impact of osteoporosis.
• Reduced risk of falling: Strength training contributes to better balance, coordination and agility.
• Maintenance of a healthy weight: Pound for pound, muscle burns three times more calories than fat. Increased muscle mass enables your body to burn calories more quickly and efficiently.
• Alleviating back pain: People often experience less pain after strengthening their back and abdominal muscles.
• Making everyday tasks easier: Housework, mowing the lawn or carrying groceries takes less effort. Strong muscles mean you’re less likely to injure muscles, tendons or ligaments.

Continue Reading…

Walking

Any type of walking is good for your health, experts say. Even window shopping on your lunch hour can do your heart some good. Fitness walkers are an increasingly common site in neighbourhoods from coast to coast as they stroll, stride and strut in parks and along city streets and footpaths.

Why is walking so popular? Study after study has demonstrated walking improves cardiovascular health, bolsters weight loss, builds stronger bones and reduces the risk of chronic diseases and some forms of cancer. And since it’s accessible, inexpensive, easy to do and gentle on the joints, it’s no surprise walking has earned a reputation among health and fitness experts as the perfect form of exercise. Continue Reading…

10 Things To Protect Your Health

There are so many ideas and products touted to improve your health that the whole picture is confused. So I started thinking what are the top 10 free things you can do to protect or improve your health?

1. breathe clean air -
2. drink clean water
3. eat food closest to the way nature made it – avoid processing at all costs
4. walk a mile every day
5. grow your own food
6. get 8 hours of sleep a night
7. take at least one day a week off from work
8. avoid pharmaceutical drugs unless absolutely essential
9. spend time with someone you love – even your pet
10. try and do something beneficial for someone else every day

OK – all those things are either free or very low cost and all contribute to your health – everything else is a bonus or an add-on.