Tag: fitness

  • Health, Fitness,Courses,Aerobics, Fruit Diet Non Sense

    ‘Health Conscious and people who follow Health Care(?) and those who do not agree with them’ was  a programme telecast by Star Vijay TV yesterday in Tamil.

    The people who were proud to call themselves as Health Conscious and ‘Health Freak'(their terminology) made a sorry sight.

    Health Care industry
    Health Care industry

    There were people who were practicing Aerobics( the demonstration was so funny , it looked as a kid jumping here and there and the lady proudly proclaimed she was paying Rs.1000/m for the course for fitness and she looked obese to the point of panting while jumping),

    to a girl who eats six meals a day,one with only fruits, next chicken without skin,salads,only Chapatis….:

    a man who dispose of garbage personally to reduce weight,another applies special(?) Oil before gardening to reduce tummy!!

    The List is endless and quite hilarious.

    Another is consuming tablets instead of Breakfast and he said there people who were consuming only tablets all the time instead of Food, reason being the tablets contain nutrients found in Food!

    More hilarious is are the reasons for following these Health care programmes.

    1.To ward of Cancer!

    2.Reduce Diabetes.

    3.Look trim.

    4.Prevent loss of Hemoglobin Count.

    5.Reduce Tummy.

    There were times when we used to go to a Doctor when one is sick.

    I remember , in my native place,, the doctor would give a Carbon mixture and if he goes in for an injection, it means , it is serious.

    His refrains were’

    Eat light,Sleep”

    Now we go to a doctor at the drop of a hat.

    Worse still we may not be ill.

    We think we might be.

    Then we have ‘Health Consciousness!

    If you are not well, you will become conscious of it and not the other way round.

    The Advertisements, Manufacturers of useless products and media  scare you to death and you immediately buy anything from something that can make you grow 50% Taller to reducing weight in one month.

    And internet!

    Any one who can type goes to goggle and sees results, follow them, without knowing whether the information they get is authentic .

    Read my post on the disastrous consequences of Dieting by following Internet advice.

    In the midst of our conversation,or should I say my monologue, my friend received a call from well qualified, working daughter that she was feeling exhausted and was on the verge of collapse.

    He immediately rushed to meet and take her Home.

    Reason for the complaint.

    His daughter has been a Diet of only vegetables and Fruits since last night, as advised in an article she found in the Internet.

    This was her effort at reducing weight and keeping fit.

    My daughter also went on a Diet of not eating Rice the whole day and was eating only fruits for about a week before she was exhausted

    http://ramanisblog.in/2013/01/28/diet-weight-loss-and-fruits/

    The Human body knows how to take care of itself.

    The food habits we have have been developed over centuries taking into account various factors including climate.

    Being ideal weight is purely a matter of opinion.

    There is no preventive medicine for Cancer, Obesity,Diabetes.

    The suggested foods are only guesses and not based on correct findings.

    Before some one jumps the gun , please check the counter view on any diet and weight. Diabetes etc.

    Heart attack, Cholesterol .There is no final saying that cholesterol causes Heart attack  in fact it helps the Heart please read my post filed under Health).

    Take every thing in moderation .

    Don’t keep on thinking about illness and engage your self in work, some Physical.

    For more information see under Health in this site.

    If you have money to burn , educate an underprivileged Child.

    I am no statistician, bu can say ‘Statistics is like a Bikini, it conceals more than  it reveals.

    From my personal experience .

    My Father never even had fever till his death at the age of 78.

    And he used to take Meals in the morning around 8 am;Curd rice at 1pm

    Again Curd rice at night.

    Occasionally Snacks, idli dosa, adai etc.

    He can consume One Jack Fruit at 6  am and ask my mother  for regular food at  8 am!

    Quantity, well one can not imagine, such huge quantities.

    My elder brother is a Man of clean habits(80), he  is very regular in habits.

    He  does not drink,No Smoking,No Betel Leaves…nothing.

    He has Cancer for the past 4 years!

    I used to travel for my profession,

    Irregular Meals, Slleep, Drinking, Smoking, ( left Smoking 25years ago, drinking  8 years ago)Pan chewing, awake till 1 am.

    I have no Illnesses as on date.

    Excepting a Heart attack  about 10 years ago which I have totally ignored aftertaking drugs and finding them useless.

    By medical opinion I should have Liver failure, Hepatitis,Lung cancer, Diabetes,!

    Forget it.

    Do not bother about what the money mad doctors or the manufacturers’ say and Media , they have to write some thing to get circulation.

    You feel and know what is best.

    Go to a doctor as a last resort.

    Fie with these pseudo health acre ,Consciousness , unconsciousness.!

    The influence of the Western Food  on South India is  not noticed by many of us, as we are not conscious of  proselytism.

    We are being changed without being aware of it.

    First, the eating Habits.

    Normally  South India takes meals in the morning,refreshments in the afternoon and meals at night.

    This consisted of a healthy, yet not taxing to the stomach.

    Then came the habit of the British Culture.

    Breakfast-Are we breaking a fast from 10 pm the last night?

    Then Lunch.

    Evening Tea(?) substituted by us with refreshments.

    Then Dinner or Supper.

    I am not sure how many know the difference between  Supper and Dinner!

    Timings: Around  8.30 am,1 pm,4, 7 pm and 10 pm.

    Compare this with South Indian Timings ; 10 am,4 pm,7 to 8 pm.

    http://ramanisblog.in/category/health/page/2/

  • 50 Best Websites ,2011-TIME.

     TIME has Released the Best Websites of 2011, to honor

     “the scrappy newcomers and established players that make the Web so useful, entertaining and just plain indispensable”. Artistic, conceptual sites like Dear Photograph, therefore, can rub shoulders with an established gaming and tech site like The Escapist.

    The sites are divided into broad categories including Sports, News and Info and Social Media. Time has run the list since 2005, adapting the broad categories a number of times since its inception.

    Initial nominations for the list were made by Time Magazine’s editors, with the final 50 being decided by public vote. The list was then released with commentary by Time columnist and editor of tech siteTechnologizer, Harry McCracken.

    Here is the list by category:

    http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2087815_2087821,00.html

    Music and Video 
    8tracks
    HBO GO
    Howcast
    My Damn Channel
    Turntable.fm

    Family and Kids
    CafeMom 
    Dear Photograph
    Poptropica
    Proust
    Wonderopolis

    Sports
    Bleacher Report 
    Grantland 
    Jayski’s Silly Season Site
    Onion Sports Network 
    SB Nation

    News and Info
    Big Think
    GetHuman
    Instapaper
    ScienceDaily 
    Techmeme

    Financial and Productivity
    DuckDuckGo 
    Evernote
    Join.me
    Kickstarter 
    LearnVest

    Shopping and Travel
    Airbnb
    Gogobot
    Hipmunk
    Polyvore
    Retrevo

    Health and Fitness
    CalorieKing
    HealthGrades
    MapMyRun
    Summer Tomato 
    Zen Habits

    Social Media
    Google+ 
    Klout
    Pinterest
    Quora 
    Storify

    Games
    The Escapist
    Giant Bomb 
    OnLive
    Touch Arcade
    Retrocade

    Education
    Freerice
    Khan Academy
    Open Yale Courses
    Smarthistory
    Starfall

     

     

  • When You Eat May Be Just as Vital to Your Health as What You Eat.

    Breakfast-not later than 7 am,Lunch-not later than 1 pm,Dinner-not later than 10 pm.
    Breakfast must be heavy;avoid drinking water during meals.Fill the stomach half part,1/4 water,leave 1/4 empty.Avoid oil in breakfast.
    Lunch must have leafy vegetables,nothing should be deep fried,oil to be used minimally,use spice rarely,drink butter milk,minimal use of meat and root vegetables.
    Dinner-avoid milk products and curds and desserts like ice cream.
    Do not engage in conversation while eating.( Source;Indian food habits as per Smriti)

    Take fruits in empty stomach.
    ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver — the body’s metabolic clearinghouse — is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it.
    See Also:

    “If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism,” says the study’s leader Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.
    The Salk researchers’ findings, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity.
    “We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle,” says Panda.
    In mammals, the circadian timing system is composed of a central circadian clock in the brain and subsidiary oscillators in most peripheral tissues. The master clock in the brain is set by light and determines the overall diurnal or nocturnal preference of an animal, including sleep-wake cycles and feeding behavior. The clocks in peripheral organs are largely insensitive to changes in the light regime. Instead, their phase and amplitude are affected by many factors including feeding time.
    The clocks themselves keep time through the fall and rise of gene activity on a roughly 24-hour schedule that anticipates environmental changes and adapts many of the body’s physiological function to the appropriate time of day.
    “The liver oscillator in particular helps the organism to adapt to a daily pattern of food availability by temporally tuning the activity of thousands of genes regulating metabolism and physiology,” says Panda. “This regulation is very important, since the absence of a robust circadian clock predisposes the organism to various metabolic dysfunctions and diseases.”
    Despite its importance, it wasn’t clear whether the circadian rhythms in hepatic transcription were solely controlled by the liver clock in anticipation of food or responded to actual food intake.
    To investigate how much influence rhythmic food intake exerts over the hepatic circadian oscillator, graduate student and first author Christopher Vollmers put normal and clock-deficient mice on strictly controlled feeding and fasting schedules while monitoring gene expression across the whole genome.
    He found that putting mice on a strict 8-hour feeding/16-hour fasting schedule restored the circadian transcription pattern of most metabolic genes in the liver of mice without a circadian clock. Conversely, during prolonged fasting, only a small subset of genes continued to be transcribed in a circadian pattern even with a functional circadian clock present.
    “Food-induced transcription functions like a metabolic sand timer that runs for 24 hours and is continually reset by the feeding schedule while the central circadian clock is driven by self-sustaining rhythms that help us anticipate food, based on our usual eating schedule,” says Vollmers. “But in the real world we don’t eat at the same time every day and it makes perfect sense to increase the activity of metabolic genes when you need them the most.”
    For example, genes that encode enzymes needed to break down sugars rise immediately after a meal, while the activity of genes encoding enzymes needed to break down fat is highest when we fast. Consequently a clearly defined daily feeding schedule puts the enzymes of metabolism in shift work and optimizes burning of sugar and fat.
    “Our study represents a seminal shift in how we think about circadian cycles,” says Panda. “The circadian clock is no longer the sole driver of rhythms in gene function, instead the phase and amplitude of rhythmic gene function in the liver is determined by feeding and fasting periods — the more defined they are, the more robust the oscillations become.”
    While the importance of robust metabolic rhythms for our health has been demonstrated by shift workers’ increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome, the underlying molecular reasons are still unclear. Panda speculates that the oscillations serve one big purpose: to separate incompatible processes, such as the generation of DNA-damaging reactive oxygen species and DNA replication.
    Panda, for one, has stopped eating between 8 pm and 8 am and says he feels great. “I even lost weight, although I eat whatever I want during the day,” he says.
    Researchers who also contributed the work include postdoctoral researcher Luciano DiTacchio, Ph.D., graduate students Sandhyarani Pulivarthy and Shubhrox Gill, as well as research assistant Hiep Le, all in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.
    The work was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the Pew Scholars
    Story Source:
    Adapted from materials provided by Salk Institute.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125094321.htm

  • Low-carb, high-carb diet both help keep weight off-Reuters.

    Agreed.Low carbohydrates intake may reduce energy levels to perform tasks efficiently,especially in tropical countries where the heat is severe.
    Again it is not yet proven that food habits alone determine obesity.

    Story:
    NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Low-carb and high-carb diets work equally well for maintaining weight loss, Australian researchers report.

    People had the same success in keeping off the weight they’d lost after sharply cutting their calorie intake for 3 months if they followed a low-carb (also called high-protein) diet or a high-carbohydrate regimen for the following year, Dr. Elizabeth A. Delbridge of the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Victoria and her colleagues found.

    Some studies have suggested that high protein diets may be a more effective way to lose weight short-term than high carbohydrate diets, Delbridge and her team note in their report. But there’s less evidence on which approach might be better for helping people to keep off weight they’ve lost, and whether the two diets have different effects on heart health.

    To investigate, Delbridge and her team assigned 141 men and women who’d completed the weight-loss phase of the diet to a year on a diet in which 30 percent of their calories came from protein, or one consisting of 15 percent protein. Both groups also were instructed to keep their fat intake below 30 percent of total calories, and to focus on reducing saturated fat.

    The study participants had lost 16.5 kilograms (36.4 pounds), on average, and only regained 2 kilograms, or about four pounds, over the following year.

    While all the study participants saw their blood pressure go down as they lost weight, average blood pressure went up in the high-carbohydrate group during the weight maintenance phase, but the high-protein dieters were able to sustain their blood pressure reduction.

    While people found it easy to stick to the high protein diet, Delbridge and her team say, the low-protein dieters “struggled to consume the recommended amount of carbohydrate (55%) and to limit their protein intake to 15%.”

    But the low protein group still managed to keep their protein intake at about 22 percent of their calories, significantly below the 30 percent maintained by the high-protein dieters. And there was no significant difference between the two groups in the amount of weight they kept off.

    The findings show, the researchers conclude, that “free-living overweight and obese people” (as opposed to those studied in an inpatient clinic, for example) were able to stick with recommended diet and keep off the weight they had lost for 12 months.

    SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, November 2009.
    http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5AI4ZT20091119?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100