America’s Best Eye Care

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Eyes have always been our most treasured gifts from the Lord above and it is our primary duty to take good care of them and out them to soft use. By this, I mean to use it with caution to cause any kind of permanent damage and this is necessary because of the increased number of people with various kinds of eye ailments. Thankfully, America has been bestowed with some of the best eye care centres in the world. Any type of eye ailments are treated with utmost precision so that you can lead the rest of your life having taken up a complete cure at one of these hospitals. Also, many of them offer eye exam coupons, sometimes even free of cost, so as to get in more people to get their eyes checked regularly to keep it clear of any kind of ailments.

JC Penney Optical Center is one such centre where the best eye treatment equipments are always available and once you go for an eye check up and if you are diagnosed with any ailment, you can get yourself treated here in a jiffy so that you can return home peacefully. Empire and Walmart are other such vision centres dedicated for eye care and you can choose any of them as they all offer some of the best eye care in the region. Also, if you need to make lenses for yourself in case your eyes have some visionary defect, then you can get lenses made exactly for you according to your taste at Lenscrafters using their eye exam coupons. There is also Pearle Vision centre for you to choose from. So, go select one of these centres and get your eyes the best treatment.

When Is the Optimal Time to Exercise?

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Exercise is a vital part of a healthy lifestyle, but finding the best time to exercise in our busy schedules is not always easy. Work, family, and a variety of other responsibilities often take precedence over exercise.

The most common excuse for not exercising is that there’s just not enough time. I’m going to stop you right there. Sure you have plenty of commitments and it may seem difficult to schedule in regular exercise, but it can and must be done.

There are plenty of people who find the time. There’s no reason you can’t as well. Your health should be a priority right up there with work and family. Once you make the decision to make exercise a priority in your life, you then need to figure out the best time to do it.

This is not always an easy decision. There are a number of factors that you need to consider when coming up with a good exercise schedule. Just like finding the best exercises is important, finding the best time to exercise can also play a major role in improving your health and helping you reach your weight loss goals.

Your Circadian Rhythms

Believe it or not, your circadian rhythms can play a major part in finding the best time to exercise. For those of you who aren’t familiar with a circadian rhythm, it’s a biological process that all living things have. Your circadian rhythms are the physical and mental changes that your body goes through over a 24 hour cycle. Light from your environment has a major effect on your circadian rhythms, as well as your genetics.

Your body has certain patterns that it follows. This is evident in the fact that some people are night owls while others are considered morning people. This is primarily determined by your circadian rhythms. In addition to your sleep schedule, these rhythms determine what your energy levels and body temperature are throughout the day. These are all important considerations when choosing a time to exercise.

Clearly if you’re not a morning person, then exercising in the morning might not be the best idea. You’ll have trouble waking up and your energy level will be lower than at other times in the day. Each person has to figure out their own cycle and use it to determine the best time for them to exercise. However, just because the afternoon may be the best time for your body to exercise doesn’t mean it’s the best time for your schedule.

Scheduling the Best Time to Exercise

When do you have time to exercise? This is really the first thing you need to consider. One of the reasons most fitness professionals recommend working out in the morning is because a person’s morning schedule is often more flexible. The rest of the day is full of work and family responsibilities. Not to mention people are exhausted later in the day and often use that as an excuse to avoid exercising.

By working out in the morning this excuse is usually eliminated. Early morning workouts have other benefits as well. The biggest one is that a person raises their metabolism for the remainder of the day. Any physical movements throughout the rest of the day will have added calorie burning power.

For those with more flexibility, however, late afternoon or evening workouts are a great choice. In terms of workout efficiency, late afternoon workouts have been shown to have the best results. The lung capacity of most people peaks around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In turn, this block of time is ideal for those interested in rigorous strength or endurance training. Injuries are also much less likely to happen during afternoon workouts.

Exercise Before Eating

It may seem counterintuitive, but some studies have shown that it may be better to exercise on an empty stomach. The theory is that your body has fewer carbohydrates to utilize so it is forced to burn fat stores. The end result is that you are able to potentially lose more weight.

That’s not to say that you have to exercise on an empty stomach. As with everything else not everyone’s body works the same. For some people, a snack may be necessary to give you the energy you need. You have to learn to read and trust your body. Eating a healthy snack for energy or exercising an hour or more after a meal are both fine.

Creating a Good Routine

Matching the best time to exercise for your body with the best time for your schedule is no simple task. You may find that exercising in the late afternoon compared to the morning gives you the best overall workout. However, if you are less likely to exercise in the afternoon on a regular basis, then you’ll be much worse off. Consistency is the key.

Unfortunately it is impossible to identify the best time to exercise for everybody. There are too many factors to consider. Only you can make that determination. The key is finding the right balance between what works best for your body and your daily schedule. It has to be something you are willing to stick with over the long term. After all, it doesn’t matter how great your workout program is if you only do it once or twice a month.

Another Weight Loss Diet New Year’s Resolution: Another Upcoming Disappointment

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Do you have your 2014 New Year’s Resolution figured out yet? Are you going start ANOTHER diet with the hope to lose weight, lose fat, and get in shape?

How many years now have you had this as your New Year’s Resolution? How have those resolutions ended? Did you lose any weight, burn any fat, get in better shape?

Many of you may have had some early success and lost a pound or 3 in January. But by the end of February, those pounds were back, and by the end of the year, they had invited some friends to stay over!

“But this year is going to be different!”

Didn’t you say that last year? And the year before that?

What you have to understand is that your failed diets aren’t your fault. Diets Don’t Work. You know it. I know it. Science has proven it.

Check out the results from one diet studied by UCLA:

“One study of dieting obese patients followed them for varying lengths of time. Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 23 percent gained back more weight than they had lost, while of those who were followed for at least two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost, Mann said. One study found that 50 percent of dieters weighed more than 11 pounds over their starting weight five years after the diet, she said.”

They summarized the study by saying people are better off not even bothering to diet in the first place. Check out this one quote from the article: “”one of the best predictors of weight gain over the four years was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started,” Basically, their research found that people who diet generally gain more than people who don’t diet over a 4 year period!

A couple years back, I was in a situation similar to most 40 year women my age. I was active, lean and healthy in my university days, but then I graduated and life happened. I wasn’t playing sports any more. I wasn’t going to the gym as much. I was busy with work and family…

Year after year, I gained a pound or 2 or 5. It was a slow transition and I barely noticed it (or at least refused to acknowledge it). Same with my increasing levels of lethargy and fatigue. Eventually though, enough was enough, and like so many people I tried a few different diets. I tried “watching what I eat” first. That had NO EFFECT at all.

Then I tried Weight Watchers, but I was terrible at keeping track of my points and that plan barely lasted a week.

So my husband and I went on the Atkins Diet. My husband LOVED that diet! All he ate was bacon. He was in heaven. And he lost a lot of weight fast. I wasn’t quite as impressed. I was bloated all the time and low on energy. I was happy though because I did lose some weight. But I couldn’t live on a diet like that and my husband was worried about his high cholesterol, so after a few weeks we went back to the “watching what we eat” diet.

I think he kept the weight off for close to 3 months, but my weight came back in about 6 weeks. And as the UCLA study reported, a year later we were both heavier than our starting weights.

Back then, we weren’t doing the right research and we still believed that there wouldn’t be so many diets out there if they didn’t work. But which diet was best?

We researched the high protein diets (Atkins, South Beach, Dukan) and learned that these diets were effective in short term weight loss. But there were health risks associated with high cholesterol and a lack of micronutrient nutrition. This wasn’t a diet that you would want to stay with for very long.

Then we looked at the low calorie diets (Weight Watchers, Raw Food, Cabbage Soup Diet). It depended upon how “low” the calorie count was to determine how fast the weight loss was. But with many of these diets the weight you lost was muscle based and not from fat. There were also nutrition deficiencies in some, and too much tracking and too much hunger with the others.

So we checked out some of the Lifestyle Diets (Oz Diet, Vegan Diet, DASH Diet). We liked this category best, but found the weight loss to either be too slow, or the diet too complicated to follow.

Finally there were the Meal Replacement Diets (Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, Slim Fast) and found these to a) basically not work at all and b) be super expensive paying for meals that tasted like cardboard. Additionally there are questions regarding where the meal replacement ingredients are sourced and how healthy they ultimately are.

Once we learned for ourselves that diets didn’t work, then we started researching the studies, like the UCLA one, that clearly prove that all diets ultimately fail.

That was unacceptable to us. Sure most people in North America are obese, but not everyone is. Plus there are still lean people in other countries that have access to food.

So what was the “secret”? Well it’s certainly not any of those “Weight Loss Secrets” that appear on my Facebook ads. The “secret” is actually an understanding of nutrition and how your body works. Once you truly understand your body’s requirements and how to meet them, how to cleanse the toxins from your body that have you locked in a fat producing loop, and how to take advantage of your body’s own natural hormones, you’re off to the races.

The bottom line is, if it makes you feel better by “dieting” because you feel like you are being proactive, then go for it. But just know that you’ll just be spinning your wheels. You may lose weight, but you’ll ultimately gain it back, and the studies are saying you’ll probably gain more than you would had you not dieted at all!

So for this year’s New Year’s Resolution, if you truly want to lose weight, burn fat, improve your fitness and health, then resolve to understand your body and meet its needs. Do that and I guarantee you’ll achieve success that you never dreamed possible.

Stay tuned to my other articles for more pieces of the puzzle.

Can I Pass Diabetes Type 2 on to My Child

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Diabetes Type 2 -Can I Pass it on to my Child?

Every prospective parent worries about the health of their unborn child, and that is perfectly normal. In today’s world we understand more about genes and it has increased the worry about what can I pass on to my child. Anyone who has type 2 diabetes knows that it is a serious condition and the complications of type 2 diabetes can be dramatic.

So Can I Pass on type 2 diabetes to my child?

The simple answer to the question of passing on of diabetes is yes it can be passed on, but that does not mean that it will be. Doctor Elliot Joslin started a twenty year scientific study about the genetic risk of diabetes in 1946 in a small town in Massachutas. That study is still going on in the Joslin foundation and its conclusions are no means conclusive.

About 1 in every 9 people will develop diabetes type 2 at some time in their lives, but these figures are increasing globally at such an alarming rate that it is almost an epidemic and that suggests that despite the fact that there is a risk of hereditary diabetes, there is another factor in play.

That factor is almost certain to be environmental triggers. In plain language that means that knowing the odds and looking at it as a numbers game is not that helpful as a way of assessing the risk. Too many people who have no hereditary risk of diabetes are contracting type 2 diabetes and that means that the environment and lifestyle choices are a major factor. Not everything in life can come down to numbers and statistics alone.

Gene pools do vary over time, but one generation is not significant in changes. Certainly there are clusters and outbreaks of diabetes that are unexplained by patters. For instance the incidence of diabetes in Northern Europe is higher than in Southern Europe, but some of the islands in Southern Italy have diabetic rates as high as in the North.

It does not take a mathematical genius to work out that the climate is warmer in Southern Europe, but if climate changes the risk then why do Sardinians have a very rate of diabetes? Certainly we do not have a any definitive answers at this time.

Many people who are type 2 diabetics will know of someone in their family who has also got diabetes. That does not mean that there is a diabetic gene which causes diabetes. Over ninety percent of diabetics are type 2 which means that they did not have the disease at birth they developed it at a later stage. Two things are evident here, the first thing is that because of the high number of type two diabetics they are almost certain to know someone else in their family with diabetes and if it was genetic they would have been born with the gene.

Families often share lifestyle choices. If you a child born into a family of couch potatoes, you are not very likely to develop a passion for exercise, of course you may in later make the change towards daily exercise but as a young child you are m ore likely to follow the examples set by your parents or siblings.

Families who eat a very healthy diet are not likely to give their young children the option of eating a large amount of sugar, simply because the sugar products will be in the house in high quantities. That does not mean when the children older and have their own pocket money that they will not buy sweets and chocolate, it merely means that their ability to get chocolate will be restricted when they are younger.

Overall this means that although diabetes runs in family because of the sheer number of people with type 2 diabetes, there are no definite scientific statements that can allocate the risk as a finite number.

Many of the causes of diabetes are not yet fully understood. It is your choice that makes a difference rather than being aware of the risks as a finite answer. Your choices are behavioral choice and there are many things that a diabetic can do to make the risk of passing on diabetes minimal.

The Factors that affect your Risk of passing Diabetes on to your child.

  • A healthy lifestyle
  • How much regular exercise you take
  • The types of food you eat every day
  • Overall control of your weight, and therefore your sugar levels

A healthy Lifestyle

A healthy lifestyle is eponymous, it is not just for after Christmas or to shed a few pounds for a party, it is for life. It means making choices on a daily basis that will have an impact on your health and then repeating those same choices the day after, and the day after that.

Exercise Regularly

Every adult should increase their heart rate for at least thirty minutes three times a week, or for fifteen minutes a day. That does not mean that you need expensive equipment or pay for a gym membership, it means a walk a brisk walk which is fast enough to raise your heart beat slightly.

Children need more exercise than that ideally they should have an hours exercise a day. Even that exercise does not have to be regulated; children play naturally and during play they hide, run away play tag or skip.

If you have young children take them to a nearby park or recreation ground or beach. If you live in a city there are many places to take them which are free. The bank of a river offers opportunities for exercise. Exercise together for added fun and quality time with your children.

The Types of Food you Eat Every Day.

Everybody eats unhealthy food occasionally even my husband who cured his type 2 diabetes eats a pudding occasionally! The operative word is occasionally, the types of food choices you make everyday determines how healthy your diet is overall. A healthy diet is not a chocolate biscuit in each hand.

An overall healthy diet has at least five portions of vegetables a day and two pieces of fruit. Whole grain foods are less processed so brown rice is healthier than white rice because it has had less of its goodness stripped out, the same goes for pasta and bread. Lean white meat and fish are healthier than hamburgers and oily fish such as salmon sardines and mackerel are also good for you. A healthy diet is influenced by fat and the way you cook affects your diet, grilling, steaming and casseroles are healthier than frying food. That does not mean that you can’t have fried chicken as a special treat – just don’t eat it every day.

How you eat also affects the amount of food you eat, fast food joints have upbeat music and bright lights both of which encourage you to eat more. Try to avoid mindless eating, eat at a table and don’t do anything else but eat, turn your phone off

Keep control of your weight

One massive catalyst for diabetes is obesity, eat healthily to be fuller for longer and listen to when you are hungry. If you eat slowly and chew your food you can feel when you have had enough.

In conclusion all of the lifestyle choices you make on a daily basis will have more impact on whether you can pass on diabetes to your child. The choice is yours and yours alone because lifestyle choices can change the course of genetic predispositions.