SELF HEALTH + HEALING

You can eat well and exercise, but to round out your identity as a Person Who Makes Healthy Choices you may feel like you need to drain a large water bottle a few times a day. The benefits of chugging H2O are myriad and legendary, but are they real?

It seems every week somebody is proposing a new gadget or app to track how much water you drink (and prod you to drink more). Maxing out your water intake is a simple and actionable thing to do, but we know that focusing on small easy changes can backfire if they’re a distraction from the meaningful improvements you want to make in your life.

"He feels smarter already."

Moving your body may be the best way to protect your brain.

Physical exercise can ease depression, slow age-related memory loss and prevent Parkinson-like symptoms, researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting underway in San Diego.

The findings — some in animals, some in people — suggest that people may be making a mistake if they're relying primarily on crossword puzzles and brain-training games for mental wellness.

"Sleep is a funny subject because people approach it with the best intentions. We know how important it is and how bad a lack of sleep can make us feel, yet it is very hard to change habits for the better."

I have written about sleep several times before here, and here…. This post though sets out to be a little bit different. While there is no scientific evidence to back it up I am a firm believer in the old adage -

“One hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after”...

Coconut Oil Pulling Detox

 I have a habit of asking healthy, thriving seniors what their secret to longevity is.

I get a mixture of old wives’ tales as well as tried and true practices (drink lots of water daily, don’t drink alcohol, eat five veggies a day, don’t smoke). Occasionally I get an answer that piques my interest and leads me to do research and experimentation.

Oil Pulling was one of those interesting suggestions. I can say, after having done it for quite a while now…it really works. This is an ancient Ayurvedic practice used to detox the body with results like:

Dr Mike Hart propose nutrition and diet plans, muscle and fitness with information on shaping muscle mass, weight training and sports nutrition .

There are countless nutritional myths in the health industry. The unfortunate truth is that once a theory becomes “accepted as scientific evidence”, it becomes re-written until it is accepted as undisputed truth. However, some of these theories may not stand the test of time. Governmental organizations aren’t likely to make a public announcement stating, “In light of new evidence, we must regretfully inform you that what we have advocated as healthy food is actually unhealthy”.

I will attempt to reveal 8 nutritional myths that may not only surprise you, but may allow you incorporate the facts into your life to make more informed decisions towards a healthier lifestyle. 

Leading a healthy lifestyle will improve your overall health, and increase your energy and level of fitness

These days as people work more and their lives get busier, they have much less time for themselves. It’s easy for people to forget about taking care of themselves and what’s most important, their health and fitness. However, leading a healthy lifestyle will improve your overall health, and increase both your energy and level of fitness. Here are 5 tips on how to lead a healthy lifestyle:

Chairs: we sit in them, work in them, shop in them, eat in them and date in them. Americans sit for most of their waking hours, 13 hours every day on average. Yet chairs are lethal.

This grim conclusion may surprise you, but 18 studies reported during the past 16 years, covering 800,000 people overall, back it up. In 2010, for example, the journal Circulation published an investigation following 8,800 adults for seven years. Those who sat for more than four hours a day while watching television had a 46 percent increase in deaths from any cause when compared with people who sat in front of the tube for less than two hours. Other researchers have found that sitting for more than half the day, approximately, doubles the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular problems. Overall, when you combine all causes of death and compare any group of sitters with those who are more active, sitters have a 50 percent greater likelihood of dying.

"We've steeped ourselves in the research and the tea leaves read quite auspiciously: tea makes you more alert more relaxed and less likely to die tomorrow. These are all good things."

Humans have been steeping leaves in hot water for 500,000 years. Us Americans drank 79 billion servings of tea last year, amounting to 3.6 billions gallons in total.

So clearly, we're quite invested in the hot stuff--as is the freshly tea-pushing Starbucks--but what does it invest in us? New research into the relationship between nutrition and the brain is helping us to understand why tea time is such an essential part of the day--for the components of tea help us be more alert, more relaxed, and healthier over the long term.

Here’s a term you don’t hear every day: Nasal irrigation. 

If you are familiar with it, you have probably heard of neti pots, and you may be one of the many people who have found relief from sinus and allergy distress with this simple tool.  It can seem a little strange at first, but for people around the world, the neti pot is the most effective thing that stands between them and seasonal & environmental suffering.

Recently the YinOva Center team was filming for the “Best of Alternative Medicine” episode on the Dr. Oz Show, and for treating sinus conditions naturally, the neti pot was what the doctor recommended.

For the first time, researchers show how a plant-based diet, stress management and other lifestyle changes may lead to longevity.

It’s not quite the Fountain of Youth, but it may be the river that leads to it. In a paper published in the journal Lancet Oncology, scientists found that a small group of men who made changes in the way they ate and handled their emotional needs showed longer telomeres in their cells.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/09/16/eat-better-and-stress-less-itll-make-your-cells-and-maybe-you-live-longer/#ixzz2f7lYpROG

The creator of the immensely popular Tabata H.I.I.T method shows you how to get more training done in less time.

Japanese professor Izumi Tabata has become a household name in the world of fitness and high-performance training, thanks to his clinically tested, four-minute interval training system.

M&F: How effective is tabata at burning fat vs. higher-volume programs?

Professor Tabata: We haven’t done specific experiments on burning body fat. However, our research has looked at calorie burning. So we know that Tabata not only burns the same calories in four minutes as an hour of steady-state exercise (biking or jogging), but there’s also a significant “after burn” effect, where an additional 150 calories are being burned up to 12 hours after you leave the gym.