Health Awareness Seminar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDNBH9ByBq8

A health seminar was conducted by yours truly at Patrakar, Pune. A gathering of around 250+ strong came to benefit from the educational seminar taken to develop the mindset required for optimum health.

General lifestyle in India in the current scenario leading to a high death rate at an age as low as 72 Years and reasons thereto being discussed. Way to a healthy lifestyle was displayed along with the importance of protein in our lives.

The seminar ended with answering the queries of various attendees of the seminar. Further, the participants were encouraged to ask themselves as to how do they treat their body temple?

The A to Z of Zzzzssss

You would often hear a lot of your friends these days, bragging about how much they sleep. And then you have those people saying how unproductive it is to sleep. But everybody knows that sleep is necessary and bunking on your sleeping sessions is not a good idea.
Let me put it to you this way; assume a war is going in your body between the good troops and the bad troops. Well to will be logical to say, the good troops will fight better if they are given rest, right!
Sleep Deprivation can cause heart attacks; can increase the possibility of a heart stroke up to three times and can even lower down your alertness while you are at your job, or even lower down your responsiveness while you are driving thus, increasing accidents. And trust me it’s as good as being drunk.
As Dr. Stevenson puts it , “you will have to work at sleeping well”. Here’s how:

Get steady: Your “Circadian Rhythm” is simply the pattern of biological functions (such as the release fo certain hormones or changes in the body temperature and metabolic rate) that vary with how and when you feel sleepy or alert. You sleep the best when you go to sleep in the night the same time and when you wake up at the same time every day.
Haphazard sleep schedules, on the other hand, will ruin your Circadian Rhythm. So when you get up you will feel like you are not sleepy nor are you alert at the same time, feeling like a zombie all day.

Stay Steady: “Hey man! it’s a weekend! Let’s stay up late this night and probably we can get up in the morning whenever our sun rises” many of us say. Let me point out to you that sleeping timely 7 days a week is important and not just 5 days. The part of our brain that generates sleep does not know Saturdays and Sundays.

Catch Up On Your Lost Sleep: It is bound to happen. An important deadline or may be a late night party you couldn’t miss, you could recover your lost sleep the next night. But the right way of doing this is not getting up late but to sleep a little early the next night.

Ease your way down: If you want a healthy sleep, then you will need to relax your body first. As Dr. Stevenson says “you are another part of your life, and you can’t do it in an instant. You need to withdraw slowly.” Slow down take half an hour to 60 minute to relax your body.
Have a glass of milk or a warm bath may be, as that will help you relax. Watching TV relaxes some, but then it upsets others.

Keep naps short: For everybody who thinks taking a mid afternoon nap, my suggestion is keep it short. For the amount of time you spent in sleeping on the afternoon, you will replace your night sleep. Besides, longer naps can work against your Circadian Rhythm.

So have a good night sleep (not while you are reading this entry) and as always any queries you have with respect to your sleeping habits, you know I am always there to help.

Beat that stress - I

‘Human life’, from Stone Age to modern age has changed a lot, with respect to all the physical and mental challenges it faced. Not that I have to been to the Stone Age, but from all the history lessons it could be derived that life has more complexities in modern life.
But being humans we adapt, we change and are ready for our next challenges before we know it. In that race, we are often not able to address one of our worst enemies, ‘stress’. ‘Every human being has stress’, looks like a bold statement, right! ”But Gaurav, I am not stressed” you might say. Well, the question is not that you are stressed or not, because the possibility is that you probability don’t realize that you are.
My point is not to make you feel miserable about your lives as being stressed, what I want you to realize is the amount of stress you have, how to recognize is it, and change your lifestyle in a way to remove the possibilities of stress being originated in your life. “Well then, Gaurav tell me how do I know that I am stressed”. You might ask. Trust me recognizing stress in your life is not a big deal because it shows.
It shows on your face, your whole body reacts to it, the way you react to situations changes.
Effects of Stress
Physical effects: As I said, “your whole body reacts to it”. To name a few immediate effects, muscles tense in preparation of an activity, blood pressure increases more blood is pumped to these muscles, in turn respiratory system reacts, and further the body shut downs some functions like reduction of blood to kidneys and ceasing of digestive functions of the body.
Prolonged effect of these, skin becomes paler, increase in pimples, lowering down of metabolism and at the end affecting the immunity system.
“Heart disease and cancer are two major effects of stress.”

This is what I would like to call chain reaction of stress.

Causes of Stress

Believe it or not one of the major causes of stress is inadequate nutrition in your body. A healthy body needs its daily allowance of proteins, vitamins, minerals and omega 3 fatty acids which if not provide, reduces the capability of your body to fight stress internally.
The kind of lifestyle you have also determines the stress level you can handle. Sam who is enjoying his summer holidays, playing video games, watching TV, eating junk is prone to more stress than a construction worker. Yes, it indeed means, a more active lifestyle leads to less stress provided you have a healthy nutritional diet.

How to fight Stress?

1. Proper Nutrition: As I mentioned earlier, to increase the capability of your body to fight stress you need to have your daily nutritional allowance (DNA). For you to complete your DNA requirements, you need 4-5 servings of fruits, 8 – 10 eggs, lots of greens, chicken, milk, cereals etc.
That seems a bit too much to ask, right. First of all it is an expensive deal. Secondly, digesting so much food in a day is itself a punishment for your body. To overcome these hurdles, nutritional supplements could be of great help.
2. Exercise: Going to gym or aerobics is not the only solution. Going for a morning walk for 25 to 30 minutes and doing some basic exercise everyday could also do the trick (Look out for the videos of such physical exercises in my future entries).
3. Manage your sleep: Your sleep could hold a key to distress you. At least 6 hours of sleep is required for your body at a stretch in nighttime. Further, quick naps in daytime could also be helpful. I would stress on the ‘quick’ part, I mean to say, don’t extend it beyond 45 min. in any case because then it will work in the opposite direction. (Look out for my upcoming entries on stress.)
4. Positive mental attitude: Attitude changes a lot, make it a practice to do activities that have some positive effect on your precious brain. Activities such as reading positive books, watching a comedy or inspirational movie, and even having great companionship matters a lot.
Include all these activities in your Lifestyle and it is a surety you will have amazing results and yes even positivity shows.
So be merry and tell me how I can help you in achieving a stress proof life and I will do my best to help you achieve it.

The ‘Whys’ Of Lifestyle Diseases

Diseases don’t just happen. Something has to go wrong. Most of the time “that something” has to do with how you treat your body, that is, what you do with it and what you put into it.
What I mean to point out is that fate has a minor role to play; it’s the “life style” we have which defines how we will be in the years to come. So it’s a matter of choice, right? What you choose is what you get.
But the irony is that, we aptly install antivirus in our computer so that we could prevent it from being infected, we install pop up blockers in our browser so that unwanted things should not show up, but we fail to apply the same prevention and care to ourselves.
Yes, it is in fact possible to have “disease free lifestyle”. It is as simple as making a choice, that ‘yes I will stay healthy for the rest my life’. But “Lifestyle” as a link to prevention to disease prevention is so strong that it demands questions.
For a good lifestyle four areas we need to concentrate on:
1. Eating Right,
2. Proper Exercise,
3. Adequate Rest, and
4. The ‘Mind Cookie’ (+ve attitude).
What are Lifestyle diseases? Firstly, the most important fact we need to know what we are up against. Right! Well, to start with ‘a lifestyle disease’ is a result of day to day nutritional deficiency, increased stress, and lack of exercise, pollution, alcohol and inappropriate eating habits.
Let us discuss facts about five such diseases in India in the years to come:
1. Diabetes: ‘By 2030 Asia is explained to have 190 million Diabetics cases, more than half of them in India and China’.1
2. Heart Disease: World Health Organization estimates that ‘By 2010 60% of the cardiac patients in the world will be Indian’.2
3. Arthritis: ‘By 2020, Scientists expect 40 million people will suffer from osteo arthritis’.3
4. Obesity: Scientists say that the percentage of overweight/obese people in India is on track to rise from 9% in 1995 to 24% in 2025.4
5. Respiratory Disorders: More than 500,000 premature deaths in India are caused by atmosphere pollution each year.5
1. Newsweek Magazine. 2. Time Magazine. 3. Time Magazine. 4. Time Magazine. 5. UN Report.Further, diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and even certain cancers, account for nearly 60% of 56.5 million deaths a year deemed preventable. And it’s all about lifestyle.
So why do we eat, what we eat? In other words, fats in the form of Burgers, Pizzas, wada pavs, and all sorts of greasy foods in the world. Research says, ‘fat brings more mental satisfaction to your body than a mere veggie’. But believe me, “feed a cookie to your mind and not your body” and you will be more than satisfied with the results (I will come to this part latter on).
Further, we have people like Amitabh Bachchan, SRK, Michal Jordan coming on TV and telling us to have cold drinks, pizzas and burgers, who never in their lives would even touch a burger or even enter a place where these things are made. Leave alone these people; we even listen to ‘the joker’ who tells us that a burger will have protein, carbohydrates, fats and vitamins.
I seriously doubt that these things remotely have something to do with health and nutrition. Yet we listen to these people and eventually end up having a fat belly, less active lifestyle, and march our way to various lifestyle diseases, while the psychopath joker is still thin and is still pulling more people to a known doom.
Why don’t we quit smoking? It’s not that a smoker doesn’t care that more people die from tobacco use than from automobile accidents, drug abuse, AIDS, and alcohol combined. It’s that he’s probably addicted. Mind receptors stay eager to receive years after you quit. One puff can get you back to a pack a day before you know it.
It certainly will increase your health-care budget. A Dutch study figured that health-care costs for smokers can be 40 % higher than nonsmokers. A friend of mine is a chain smoker, while in a conversation; I asked him “How much money do you exactly spend in a month on smoking?”. He took some time in calculating, he is a 28 year old young man, a smoker for 5 years. He said “about 2000 INR”. I replied “do you know that is more than my health club fees and supplementation combined”.
So technically he was spending more towards damaging his health than I was spending towards the betterment of mine. And the sad part is that after that conversation he started to smoke even heavily than he was doing before to relieve himself of the tension that arose from this realization.
Why don’t we exercise? Everything is available on a touch of a button, from a pizza to a home theater system. That makes us the only species that doesn't even move to have food. We hardly consider taking a walk, after having our meal. We take our vehicle even if the distance to be covered is half a km.
A person I consulted gave all sorts of reasons not to work, enough for me to create a database, trust me that’s not my intention. But just to name a few,
“Why should I unnecessarily make my body suffer?”
“Why should I pay somebody to make me sweat?”
And my personal favorite,
“I will miss Baba’s yoga Shivir on TV”
……… and the list goes on.
I said “The point is not to watch it over TV but to actually do it as instructed”. He said “that view differs from person to person”.
Why do we ignore stress? Probably because we’re not too sure what it is. I think people understand that stress has a negative impact on our lives. Heart disease is one such negative impact. Some people when they are stressed run to a refrigerator or they smoke as my friend in the earlier conversation did.
Stress slows down your metabolism; it depletes body immunity, increases free radical activity in your body and much more. So to conclude it’s all in your mind but you need to recognize it and treat it accordingly (look out for my upcoming entries on stress management).
But my point is not to concentrate on removing stress but to do things which will actually not give rise to it in the first place.

I encourage you to ask any queries that you have regarding your lifestyle and I will gladly try and answer each and every one of them.Look out for my next entry “Beat That Stress”.