Smoking & Weight Loss

Why & How to monitor it?

Cholesterol, although, is an important building block of cellular components, steroidal hormones & a high energy cellular fuel but, an elevated level of cholesterol in various tissues & in the blood defines degree and asperity of a cascade of disorders like cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s, cancer, vascular dementia & pregnancy complications etc. These flagitious disorders can be cured if they are identified before they kick-in.

Nowadays, people have gone quite conscious about dietary cholesterol levels and recent New York trans-fat elimination move was an apt indicator of this common knowledge. However, a lesser known part is that the cholesterol is not just taken in with the daily diet. There are some hereditary factors too that jumble up things & make them merry-go-round! All these divisors make regular body-diet cholesterol monitoring all the more important.

There are several ways by which you can monitor and control the cholesterol levels in your diet and body. This not only helps in the early diagnosis of diseases but also helps to live longer and healthier. Some of these methods are:

• Laser-eye Cholesterol Testing: It is one of those non-invasive methods which measure cholesterol by delivering a beam of light to a patient’s eye. A correlation between the intensity of light scattered from the eye surface and the mobility of the scattered cellular protein is ascertained & is compared to a pre-defined control which helps in cholesterol level measurement.
• Digital Cholesterol testing systems: There are many portable Whole Blood Testing Systems with both single and panel testing capability for cholesterol screening. They are quite easy-to-use & provide accurate results in about a minute which can be stored & reviewed. They usually perform complete Lipid profiling including quantitative analysis of Total Cholesterol, HDL Cholesterol, Triglycerides and LDL Cholesterol results.
• Thin-layer chromatography: Now, don’t let the name scare you off! This is a very simple & a surprisingly cheap method performed in casual undergrad biochemistry classes which can be easily used for cholesterol analysis of foods & oils that you consume every other day.

High Cholesterol can be very dangerous and thus it is important to monitor what you eat and your cholesterol level. It’s certainly better to consult your physician, chart out a cholesterol level target for a healthy body & monitor yourself periodically. Hence, the best thing to do is to combine better eating habits with the use of prescribed medication to decrease the cholesterol in your blood stream.

Okay, before we start, let me explain the purpose of this article. I want you to get so healthy, you’ll never need to make a health insurance claim. You’ll save money by increased fitness. You’ll save money with a long no-claims insurance history. And you’ll look and feel much better.
There’s three sides to your maximum health and fitness. Diet, and Exercise. But that’s only two ! Let me split Exercise into Aerobic exercise and Aneorobic exercise.
Get all three right. Get the right balance. And you’ll get as fit and healthy as your body and genetics will allow.
Whole forests of paper have been filled with advice on each of these fitness factors. Just go into your local bookstore, and see shelves of diet advice. Shelves of exercise advice.
Funny how so much contradicts itself, especially for diet e.g right next to each other on the shelf, you’ll find a book advocating low carbs & low fat; another saying high fat is okay if you keep the carbs low. Yet another focuses on high protein, and says carbs don’t matter…
* Diet
Let me give you this simple diet advice. Stick to low fat, low carbs and high protein. Many medical and weight loss studies over the last 10-20 years prove this approach. Many other diet myths come from way back in time, and look just plain wrong when analyzed with modern methods.
* Aerobic Exercise
Couch potatoes don’t realize how easily they can start feeling fit and healthy. Just walk somewhere 3-4 times per week, for around 20 minutes each time.
Ideally, do some more demanding aerobic exercise. I do a lot of cycling, because it’s great low-impact exercise. And I get to see beautiful scenery while I ride.
Running provides even more intensive aerobic exercise, but careful of your joints. Maybe you prefer hiking, to see the local countryside ? Or take up a sport like rowing or tennis. You also get to meet new friends by taking up exercise as a sport.
* Anaerobic Exercise
Many people work on their diet. Many people take aerobic exercise. But many people ignore anaerobic exercise, or weight training.
What makes weight training so important ?
As you get older, muscle mass decreases. Muscle burns fat. So as you lose muscle, it gets harder to keep the fat off. Equally important, weight training can reshape your body.
No matter how much aerobic exercise you do, you’ll still be a pear shape (a smaller pear shape) if you started out a pear shape.
Using weights you can flatten your stomach, tone your thighs, bulk up your chest and shoulders, and reshape your body any way you want.
Weight training is incredibly beneficial to your general skeleton strength and conditioning. Older women can reduce the effects of osteoporosis, and older men can maintain their strength and agility.
This short article can do nothing more than provide an introduction to the three keys to your health. Follow these and you shouldn’t need to make a health insurance claim.
Slash your health insurance costs with a long no-claims bonus. Slash your health insurance costs with any insurer who rates your fitness.

“Goals…
…and resolutions.”
Yes, it’s that time of the year again.
Why is it that every time Jan 1st comes around, everyone starts to think about their new resolutions for the year? Or perhaps “new” isn’t the correct word — perhaps “recycled” is more apt?  After all, isn’t it true that for most people, “resolutions are made to be broken?”
Goals are a wonderful way to inspire us towards getting the things in life that we want, but more often than not, they simply end up unattained and we get frustrated (again) at the end of the year.
But it doesn’t have to be so.
Really.
You can attain your goals or resolutions, but only IF you know how to go about setting them up correctly in the first place.  And I’ll give you a few useful pointers to help you get started on the right track…
- Begin with the end in mind.  What’s the end result you want to achieve?  Do you want to lose weight?  Or do you want to drop 1 dress size instead?
- Get specific and be realistic.  It’s not enough to just say “I want to lose weight.”  How much do you want to lose _exactly_?  By when?  A better goal is to say “I want to lose 11 pounds in 3 months.”  And make sure your goal is realistic.  If you want to drop 27 pounds, it’s not realistic to say you want to do that within the next 7 days, not to mention that it’s not healthy to do that!  Or if you’ve been putting on the weight slowly over the last 10 years, it’s not quite realistic to say you want to go back to your weight 10 years ago within a month.
- Break it down into smaller and easier “baby steps.”  Let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds.  That seems like an insurmountable task, but it becomes easier to manage if you look at it as losing an average of 1 pound per week, over a course of 20 weeks.  Now’s that manageable!  For you to lose a pound a week, you only need to create a calorie deficit of about 500 calories per day by controlling your diet and increasing your amount of exercises.
- Okay, now for the big “secret” — the missing key to achieving your goals: Write down your “Why” i.e. what are you doing this for?  Most people skip this step, and it’s a primary reason why they never seem to achieve their goals. It’s absolutely critical for you to write down the reasons why you want to achieve each specific goal.  For example, if the goal is to “lose 20 pounds in 6 months,” write down why you want to lose that weight.  And here’s another tip: Make it “personal and emotional.”  The more “emotional” the reason, the more likely you’ll be driven towards the goal. So, let’s say you’ve got kids.  An example of a good “reason why” is “I know being overweight is a leading cause of many health problems — I will lose the 20 pounds and get healthier so that I will not be a burden to my children, and be able to stay healthy long enough to attend my daughter’s wedding and be there to carry my grandchildren.” A ssuming all these things are important to you, of course.   But I’m sure you get the picture.
- “Write it down and put it up!”  It’s usually not good enough to just think of the goals in your head.  You need to write down all your specific goals and the “reasons why,” and then paste it up where you will look at it every day. Don’t write it down on a notebook and chuck that inside the drawer.  Instead, paste it up on your dressing table mirror, or anywhere else that is in plain sight.  Remember, “out of sight, out of mind!”
- Do not be too ambitious.  Aim for a loss of 1-2 pounds per week, at the max!  Losing more than that amount is bad for you.  And it’ll most probably be caused by a loss of water and/or muscle, rather than your unwanted excess body fat.
- Be realistic and “go with the flow.”  The pounds didn’t come on overnight, so don’t expect them to disappear in a jiffy too.  And sometimes the weight loss isn’t as fast (or as much) as planned.  But don’t get stressed out, because stress will only add on the pounds.  It’s important that you don’t think of the weight loss process as “all or nothing.” Instead, think of it as “slowly but surely.”  The weight may go up a little sometimes, but if you stick to your plan, you’ll still be delighted at the end of the year!
Use these simple steps and make a positive difference to your life this year!  Best of luck!