How Exercise Helps Quickly Lower Blood Pressure

An article was published in the Journal Circulation in 2000. Researchers wanted to know the effects of habitual exercise on arterial distensibility. Researchers concluded that regular aerobic-endurance exercise reduced age-related arterial stiffness.

Sedentary healthy middle-aged and older men were able to restore arterial distensibility by regularly working out. The researchers concluded that this may be one mechanism by which habitual exercise lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Researchers reviewed the effects of exercising on the distensibility of large arteries. The review was published in the Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews in 2003. The author reviewed the findings of a number of studies. According to the author, recent findings show that regular aerobic exercise can modulate age-related increase in arterial stiffness.

Another study was published in the American Journal of Hypertension in 2006. The study was conducted on post-menopausal women. The researchers concluded that both moderate and vigorous physical activities have favorable effects on central arterial stiffness in postmenopausal women.

Physical Activity is the Answer
One can very quickly lower blood pressure with commitment to working out. Commit yourself to work out for 3 months. You will be amazed at the results. Research has shown that working out can effectively make your arteries more distensible. Distensible arteries can very quickly lower blood pressure.

Garden Cafe @ The Curve

Last weekend, I went to Garden Cafe at the Curve for a gathering with my ex officemates of whom I haven't met for about 7 or 8 years. The food is presentable. And the quality is not bad. The ambience is excellent, it is indeed a place for gathering be it for family or friends. Here goes some of the dishes that we had picked for the afternoon :

Appetizer

Ceasar Salad











Fried Calamari

Pasta Marinara


Chicken Chop - Excellent food arrangement, taste wise not bad indeed!


Pasta Vongole - Pesto is used for the pasta sauce and it does taste nice.


Turkey and Pineapple Sandwich


Prawn Olio - Not up to my expectation. A bit bland for my liking.

Desserts : Chocolate Cake and Apple Sorbet



Well, I don't mind coming back for another round of lunch or dinner as some of the food served is quite good.

Carbohydrates, Protein and Fat for Correct Weight Loss

Carbohydrates, protein and fat are known as macro-nutrients. Macro-nutrients make up the bulk of our everyday calorie intake. Not all carbohydrates and fats are created equally. Choosing macro-nutrients wisely could help one’s weight loss efforts tremendously. It also allows one to sustain a healthy lifestyle without deprivation.

Carbohydrates for Correct Weight Loss
The bulk of our calories come from carbohydrates. Eat carbohydrates wisely. Understand the concept of glycemic index and glycemic load. Choose low glycemic carbohydrates. Understand the difference between complex and refined carbohydrates.
Ensure that there is minimum refined carbohydrates in your daily diet. Taper the amount of carbohydrates that you eat in the day. Breakfast should have the largest amount of carbohydrates and dinner the smallest.

While a low or totally “no” carbohydrate diet could produce faster weight loss, the results are not sustainable unless you exercise. Very few people are able to sustain a low carbohydrate diet for long. The weight comes back with a vengeance when one starts consuming carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates equals to refined carbohydrates.This especially so if one starts indulging in refined carbohydrates.






Avoid going on diets that you cannot sustain for a lifetime. Educate yourself instead. Learn to identify and eat complex carbohydrates. Totally eradicate refined carbohydrates from your diet. This is the secret to sustainable weight loss without a self deprivation low carbohydrate diet.

Protein for Correct Weight Loss
The digestion of protein requires the most amount of energy. When 100 calories of protein are consumed, 30% of it is used to process the food. This is the energy required to bite, chew, swallow, digest, transport, metabolize and store the food that is consumed. As such, the conversion efficiency of protein is approximately 70%. C0mpare this in contrast to the 93% conversion efficiency of carbohydrates and 97% conversion efficiency of fat.

Most people do not eat enough protein. Anyone trying to lose weight should try to consume protein in every meal. It is highly advisable to consume protein for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Protein often comes packaged together with fat. For this reason, choose lean meat as your main protein source. Eggs are an excellent source of protein. To reduce the amount of saturated fat from eggs, consume egg whites. Whenever consuming eggs, use 1 whole egg with 1 egg white as a general rule.

Fat for Correct Weight Loss
Most people are terrified of eating fat. This is understandable as people relate fat to the blubber that they carry in their bodies. This unconscious programming causes people to misunderstand fat. One should be able to differentiate between healthy fats and unhealthy fats. Unhealthy fats are essentially trans fatty acids, hydrogenated oils and margarine. Saturated fats should also be avoided.

People should instead eat healthy fats such as olive oil and grape seed oil. Omega fats available from cold water fish also have tremendous health benefits. These fats benefit the process of weight loss. Ensure that you use extra virgin olive oil. This is they healthiest type of olive oil.

Olive oil is unsuitable for Asian style high heat cooking. Grape seed oil is the best choice for use in high heat cooking. Olive oil should be eaten unheated.

Understand Your Macro-nutrients
Understanding macro-nutrients is the secret to healthy, sustainable and correct weight loss. Ultimately, weight loss is a journey and not a destination. Forget about diets. Learn healthy eating habits that you can sustain as a lifestyle. Choose a diet that you can live with for the rest of your life. The side effect of such a diet would be permanent weight loss.

8 Activities That Are Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts

A lot of people find that they cannot lose weight continuously. The primary reason for this could be mental blocks that are getting in the way of one’s weight loss efforts. Once these mental blocks have been addressed, one has to further identify daily activities that could be sabotaging one’s weight loss progress. Most people may not even be aware of these saboteurs.

Here are 8 daily activities that could be affecting your weight loss progress ;

1. Calories Consumed are More than Calories Expanded
Most of the time, people who cannot lose weight are breaking this fundamental law. You may not even realize that you are consuming excess calories. Your daily meal consumption starts becoming all to familiar. To create awareness, you can start keeping a food diary. Writing everything that you eat in a food journal for a month will allow you to identify areas where there is excess calorie consumption.

2. Fad Diets
Fad diets may allow you to lose weight temporarily but the results are never sustainable. Fad diets just don’t work. The weight loss usually comes from muscle and water loss and will eventually result in rebound weight gain. The main reason for someone to try a fad diet is because he or she lacks of basic weight loss knowledge. Basic knowledge about losing weight correctly is essential so that you do not waste time and energy on programs that are not able to give sustainable weight loss.

3. Starvation Response Initiated
Some people cannot lose weight because they have initiated their starvation response. The starvation response is initiated when you go on an extreme calorie reduction. The body fears that it is starving and holds on to its fat reserves harder than ever. Once the starvation response has been initiated, no amount of dieting or exercising will yield in any extra weight loss. You have to make sure that the calorie reduction is gradual. The calorie reduction should not be more than 10% of your regular day to day calorie consumption.

4. Weekend Weight Gain
Another reason that you cannot lose weight is weekend weight gain. It would be interesting to note that most people are disciplined on the weekdays. It’s the weekend that sets them back in their weight loss efforts.

5. Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol consumption has been known to completely halt fat burning. It also increases appetite. Most people who drink alcohol cannot lose weight. It would make sense to abstain from alcohol until you have reached your weight loss goals.

6. No Strength Training
Strength training is essential to lose fat and build muscles. Women should not be too concerned about building big muscles. This is because they have very low levels of testosterone. What ever effort goes into strength training yields compact muscles and a shapely body.

7. Too Much of Steady State Cardio
Most people do steady state cardio as their main form of exercise to lose weight. Steady state cardio provides results but its effectiveness reduces with time. Depending on your fitness level, you should gradually start doing high intensity interval training. This provides rapid weight loss. Do note that this type of training can be very intense and strenuous so do proceed with caution.

8. Same Exercise Routine
Some people do the same exercise routine day in and day out, The body is highly adaptive. As the body adapts to an exercise routine, it becomes more and more efficient at doing it. Changing the structure of the program and the exercises will keep the body guessing. This helps provides continuous results.

9. Missing Breakfast
People who skip breakfast have been shown to carry more abdominal fat. Skipping breakfast is harmful to your weight loss efforts. It is the most important meal of the day.

10. Increasing Calories Instead of Tapering Calories
Effective weight loss is achieved by tapering calories consumed in any given day. This essentially means that breakfast should be the largest meal and dinner the smallest. This allows the body to more effectively use calories across the day.

CLEAN YOUR KIDNEYS WITH LESS THAN RM1.00

Years pass by and our kidneys are filtering the blood by removing salt, poison and any unwanted entering our body. With time, the salt accumulates and this needs to undergo cleaning treatments. How are we going to do this?

It is very easy, first take a bunch of parsley and wash it clean Then cut it in small pieces and put it in a pot and pour clean water and boil it for ten minutes and let it cool down and then filter it and pour in a clean bottle and keep it inside refrigerator to cool.

Drink one glass daily and you will notice all salt and other accumulated poison coming out of your kidney by urination. Also you will be able to notice the difference which you never felt before.

Parsley is known as best cleaning treatment for kidneys and it is natural!

Hugging is healthy

Hugging is healthy — try it out for yourself!

When was the last time you hugged your parents?

Can’t remember? Well, blame it on the culture that we grow up in, where the display of child-parent affection should be at its minimum, and most preferably subtle – such as a pat on the shoulder or a gentle touch on the hand.

The irony is that we find it easier to hug outsiders, such as when we wish a person bon voyage, or hug a girl to wish her a happy birthday, or even hugging a total stranger in a congratulatory gesture.

Why is it that hugging a stranger can be as easy and effortless as smiling, and yet when it comes to a parent, it can be difficult and awkward, maybe even the equivalent of having to sing on stage in a fluorescent bikini?

I have always wondered if parents and children were genetically created with the same magnetic field, therefore repelling each other.

During an English class when I was in Form Two, my teacher touched on the topic of showing affection for one’s parents. She asked when I last hugged my parents.

Startled by her sudden focus on me, I merely stared back at her partly because I wasn’t paying attention. She repeated her question.

I shook my head and said, “Don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” she asked me, as in “I can’t believe it!”

Another question from her: “When was the last time you kissed your parents?”

I shook my head. “Can’t remember,” I said.

She fixed her gaze on me for a few seconds before smiling knowingly.

My teacher said that this was the result of our upbringing and culture – that we weren’t accustomed to showing affection for our own parents. My teacher urged all of us to give our parents a hug as soon as they came home from work that day. She said not to be embarrassed to show our emotions.



If you look at photos in the newspapers a day or two after the SPM or STPM examination results are out, it’s common to see parents kissing and hugging their top-scoring children, and that’s when you notice the awkward faces of those students and their parents as affections flow for the camera. Sometimes you can even see them blushing.

A friend of mine, like many of us, wasn’t comfortable with hugging his parents.

But his perception changed after moving to another state to take up a job. He now makes it a point to give his parents a bear hug as soon as he gets home for a holiday, and doing the same before leaving home.

A simple piece of advice a friend gave was: “Each time you hug, it gets easier.”

Not only that, hugging is also therapeutic, and good for the body.

“Hugging is healthy! We need to be touched – and often,” says Andrew Matthews in his book, Making Friends. “You don’t have to hug everyone, but you have to get your share of hugs from somewhere.

“It also seems that as we become less self-conscious, we warm to the idea of being hugged.”

I remember reading somewhere that a good, genuine hug should never be less than three seconds.

For those people who are troubled by hugging their own parents, perhaps out of awkwardness and embarrassment, wait no more and do it now. After all, you were hugged by them when you were a kid!

And with Mother’s and Father’s Days just weeks away, surely these will be the best opportunities and occasions to hug it out.

Source: Courtesy of The Star

The Lakehouse

"There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison...."...The Lakehouse

Water

What is the relationship between drinking water and weight loss. Can something as simple as being adequately hydrated actually affect weight loss? Preliminary research is showing that adequate hydration has a tremendous effect on cell function and metabolism. This in turn greatly affects fat burning and weight loss. Hopefully this article gives you an insight on the water and weight loss connection.

Our bodies are largely composed of fluids. Approximately 55-60% of our body weight is made up of fluids. It helps with many tasks including temperature regulation, cardiovascular function, waste product removal and metabolism.

Water and Fat Burning
The amount of fluid content in a cell relates to the cell-volume. A cell will expand in volume as its water content increases. It will deflate when the water content decreases. This expansion or swelling of the cell relates to how well hydrated it is.

A study published in the Journal Metabolism investigated the effects of cellular hydration on fat burning. The researchers found that increased cellular volume lead to an increase in fat burning. According to another study published in the Journal Lancet, researchers suggested that increased cellular hydration actually increased the activity of enzymes that facilitated fat burning.

Another related study was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This study reaffirmed the effects of hydration on fat burning and prevention of muscle break down. The authors concluded that when the body was adequately hydrated, fat burning increased and muscle break down was reduced. This is essentially what produces sustainable weight loss. Drinking water and weight loss were closely related at the cellular level.

Water and Weight Loss
Researchers conducted a study on 5785 Chinese and published the findings in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They searched for correlations between energy intake and weight status with nutrient intake. Nutrients here referred to fat, protein, carbohydrates and water. The researchers concluded that higher hydration levels were correlated with lower calorie intake and lower body weight. The researchers also concluded that higher hydration levels resulted in people eating lower calorie density food.

Cell Hydration Affects Its Function
Researchers of a study published in the American Journal of Physiology suggested that cell hydration has a major effect on its metabolism and overall functioning. This in turn also affects fat burning. A cell that is properly hydrated can function at optimum levels. This includes transport of nutrients into the cell and transport of waste out.

Role of Water in Preventing Muscle Loss
Anyone wanting to lose weight should attempt to hold on to their muscles. In fact attempts should be made to increase muscle mass as this helps in maintaining weight loss. A lot of diet programs result in massive muscle loss. This is one of the main reason for rebound weight gain.

A group of German researchers investigated the effects of cellular hydration on muscle break down. The finding of this study were published in the Journal Lancet. The researchers suggested that muscle breakdown was greatly reduced when cells were adequately hydrated. Another article in Ital J Gastroenterol reaffirms the importance of cellular hydration and the role it plays in muscle-building and breakdown.

Hydration and Growth Hormone Release
The Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is a hormone released by the pituitary gland. It greatly facilitates fat burning and muscle-building. HGH also has some amazing anti-aging properties.

Weight training exercises and high intensity cardio exercises induce the greatest release of growth hormones. This is one of the main reasons why these exercises are effective for weight loss. An article published in the European Journal of Endocrinology found that exercise induced growth hormone release was effected by hydration levels. Low levels of hydration resulted in a reduced release of growth hormones during exercise.

This was another way in which inadequate hydration levels could be working against weight loss efforts.

Eating Water Rich Food and the Effect on Weight Loss
A study was conducted that examined the effects of consuming high water containing foods on calories intake. The findings of the study were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers concluded that consuming foods with a high fluid content more effectively reduced subsequent food consumption than just drinking water with food.

Water Before a Meal
Researchers studied the effects of drinking water and weight loss when the water was consumed before a meal. The participants were also on a reduced calorie diet. The findings were published in the Journal Obesity. The researchers concluded that drinking 500 ml of water when on a reduced calorie diet produced greater weight loss.

Water Aids Your Weight Loss Efforts
Most of the preliminary research on water and weight loss has yielded positive results. Water and weight loss are closely connected. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being adequately hydrated. Adequate hydration has been shown to aid fat burning, affect exercise induced growth hormone release and satiety. A lot of people neglect the importance of water on their weight loss efforts. Hopefully after reading this article, anyone wanting to lose weight will better understand the water and weight loss connection.

Motivation To Lose Weight

Everyone wants to lose weight but very few people are serious about it. Most people have not found the real motivation to lose weight. Weight loss is going to challenge the core of your character. You are going to need to cultivate habits that may be the exact opposite of your current habits. Without a strong enough “why”, it is very unlikely that you will continue the journey when the going gets tough.

Here are 5 common drivers for most people to lose weight.

1. Losing Weight for Vanity
This is the main reason for many people to lose weight. People want to look good. Carrying excess weight makes one feel miserable and depressed.

Unfortunately, this is the weakest motivation to lose weight unless there is a deep enough desire. Most people who try to lose weight for vanity have to go through a lot of pain. They have to cross a threshold where they can’t take the mental of physical pain anymore. Its only when they cross this threshold that they decide to do something serious about their weight.

2. Losing Weight to Impress the Opposite Sex
This can be a strong motivation for younger people and for those who are looking for partners. Whether one likes it or not, physical appearance does play an important role when trying to woo someone. A lot of people who lose weight to impress the opposite sex do succeed because the desire can be very strong.

3. Losing Weight to Keep up With Spouse
This can be a strong motivation to lose weight for someone whose spouse does not have a weight problem. This desire gets even greater as the couple age. The overweight person tends to age faster than the slim spouse. The slimmer spouse gets more attention from the opposite sex. This can be a very strong motivation for the other spouse to lose weight.

Spouses who try to keep up with each other do end up living very healthy lives. They are able to maintain healthy weight levels as they are constantly competing to keep up with one another.

There are times when the overweight spouse tries to sabotage the slimmer spouse. It is easier for the overweight spouse to drag the other down to his or her level rather than rise up to the challenge and lose weight.

4. Losing Weight for an Occasion
This is an extremely powerful motivation to lose weight. One could be preparing for a wedding, a reunion or a holiday.

People who have such goals almost always achieve them. Setting specific and measurable goals yield unbelievable results. The only downside to this type of motivation is that it is a short term goal. Once the occasion has passed, there are no follow up efforts or concrete steps to maintain the weight loss.

5. Losing Weight for Health
This is another strong motivation to lose weight. Health is something that you do not miss until you start losing it. Most of the time, an increased appreciation for health comes from a wake-up call. This wake-up call could be the sudden death of a friend in the same age group. It could also be attributed to a doctor’s visit.

Increased awareness about health need not come in the form of a health calamity. It could also come from increased awareness via education. People who are lucky enough to have this awareness are the ones who end up having healthy and sustainable weight loss.

Identify Your Motivation to Lose Weight
Find out why you want to lose weight. Make sure that the reasons are not superficial. An example of a superficial reason is trying to lose weight because your friends are doing it. Another superficial reason could be because your spouse wants you to lose weight. Unless there is a deep desire within, you would quit at the first obstacle that comes your way.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Romeo and Juliet

The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness. And in the taste confounds the appetite.