Here is something for the fitness buffs who are into Yoga. The Healthcare Yoga Lift Relaxation Station
This contraption should help relax your bones and joints from the tension of gravity
Price: $29.95
Tags: bones and joints, contraption, enlightenment, fitness buffs, gravity, organs, relaxation station, stress, tension, yoga
I know you are probably sick of hearing about hypertension, blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease by now, but here’s the deal: there are easy ways you can avoid not only hearing about those conditions on the news, but also hearing about them from your doctor (and your insurance company). The steps you can take to control your high blood pressure or risk of high blood pressure were outlined in a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Following their guidelines for a more heart-healthy lifestyle “could lower women’s risk of high blood pressure by as much as 80%.” Here’s what they offer:
• do some sort of exercise every day
• go easy on the sodium
• eat a lot of water-based foods like fruits and vegetables
• low-fat dairy is always a good choice
• supplement your diet with folic acid (especially pregnant women!)
• “maintain a normal weight”
That last one seems a bit vague, and I’m sure that if you follow the other steps you’ll have a better chance at maintaining your weight. My advice to you is this: when monitoring your weight, do not, I repeat, do not, rely on your visual system. You know how you look at a picture of yourself and you think you look awful? Chances are, you don’t, but you are convinced that you do. When you hear your voice on a voice recorded the normal response is to go “ewww! My voice sounds so weird, that’s not what I sound like, is it?” There are neurological explanations for this, but I’ll give you the simple version; your brain is bad at processing visual and vocal information about itself. When you eat healthy for a day, you’ll convince yourself that you look better in a mirror, and when you eat poorly for a day, you’ll convince yourself that you have added at least 10 pounds that day. Monitor your weight by how your clothes fit (not jeans, because they shrink and expand with washing and wear). Try on those khakis to get a sense for how things are going.
Exercising every day can come in many forms, too. You may be thinking that with your work schedule there is no way you could adhere to exercising every single day. That is probably true, but it is good to know that exercise is cumulative. Walking ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the afternoon, and ten in the evening is thirty minutes of walking a day. You won’t improve your 10k performance that way, but you are exercising. You can park farther away, take the stairs, walk the long way, etc.
This study is again one of those obvious papers that you probably could have written yourself, and a problem I have is that these papers don’t provide real world solutions to the problems. They give you a bullet point list of the “easy” ways to maintain heart health. Hopefully you can see a pattern in my simple solutions to these sometimes inconvenient health habits, and think of these three things: move more, eat every kind of food but in moderation, and reduce as much stress in your life as you can.
