The UK is experiencing a heatwave this week and it is particularly hot where I live. Today is especially hot and sticky and I am doing all I can to keep cool.
Heatwaves like this can be dangerous for us because we are not used to dealing with these high temperatures.
Risks Associated with Hot Weather
Dehydration
Heat stroke or exhaustion
Sunburn
Strategies to Avoid Problems
Keep out of the sun between 11am and 3pm.
When outdoors keep in the shade, apply sunscreen and wear a hat.
Wear light, loose fitting cotton clothing.
If the sun is streaming in through the windows close the blinds or curtains to block it out.
Drink plenty of water to keep hydrated.
Relax. Avoid too much physical exercise during the hottest part of the day.
After writing the article, A Few Extra Pounds May Help You Live Longer, I was worried that people would take this as an excuse to not lose weight or even gain weight. However, my article was not intended for this purpose.
What I was trying to stress is that people who are a few pounds overweight who eat healthily and take regular exercise can be healthier than skinnier people who take very little exercise and do not take care with the food they are putting inside of their bodies.
A figure on the bathroom scales or a BMI chart is far too simplistic in regards to health. Although most doctors believe that BMI is a good indicator of a person’s health it is not foolproof. Exceptions occur especially in regards to athletes who have built up more muscle mass than average and so have a BMI score which puts them in the obese category.
Real obesity does have negative consequences on a person’s health. It has been identified as a cause for many different diseases but having a healthy BMI score does not guarantee one is healthy either.
People who do not look fat on the outside can be hiding internal fat which surrounds vital organs like the heart, liver and pancreas and doctors now think this internal fat could be as dangerous as the more obvious visible fat.
Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London has undertaken research funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council. He and his team scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to find out where they were storing fat. They discovered that as many as 45 percent of women and nearly 60 percent of men with normal BMI scores had excessive levels of internal fat. This has lead doctors to worry that thin people may falsely assume they are healthy because they are not overweight.
There is much more to being healthy than just being a healthy weight. As I stated in my previous article, it is also important to make good food choices, take regular exercise and keep blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control.
It is interesting that Dr. Steven Blair, an obesity expert at the University of South Carolina is quoted as saying. “Normal-weight persons who are sedentary and unfit are at much higher risk for mortality than obese persons who are active and fit.”
Therefore, when attempting to be healthy it is not enough to just watch how much you are eating to maintain a BMI score in the healthy weight range. It is also important to watch what you are eating and, arguably even more important, to take regular exercise in order to maximise your health.
Start your week off healthily by making sure you do some form of exercise today.
Being obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or more, is bad for one’s health but a new study reported in the New York Times states that being a few pounds overweight could protect people, especially the elderly, from an early death.
Researchers found that while underweight and obese people die earlier than people of normal weight, those who are overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight.
From this study it looks like keeping a healthy lifestyle is more important than losing a few extra pounds. However, the researchers are keen to emphasise that they are not encouraging people to put on weight as there are many negative health consequences associated with being overweight and obese.
In order to enjoy better health it is important to choose a healthy lifestyle by making good food choices, taking regular exercise and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control.
Perhaps we should all stop beating ourselves up about being a few pounds overweight and concentrate more on achieving a healthy lifestyle if we want to improve our overall health rather than just concentrating on what the scales tell us we weigh.
Quest for Health has moved to a new domain and has a new domain name!
It may take a day or two for the domain name to propagate through the internet so access to the site may be patchy at the moment. However, everything should be normal before the end of the week.
I was not looking forward to transferring Wordpress but the move went surprisingly smoothly and only took a few simple steps. Here is what I did in case I ever need to do it again:
Backed up the database and the site files on the old site.
Created a new database on the new site
Checked the details in wp-config.php, made changes to the database details where necessary and uploaded the backed up site files to the new domain.
On the old site I went to Settings -> General and changed the Wordpress Address and the Blog Address URLs to the new site.
Backed up the database again and imported this backup into the new database using phpMyAdmin.
Checked the new site and added a redirection from the old site via .htaccess.
I am still working through the site to make sure everything is working as it should. If you find anything not working correctly I would appreciate you letting me know as it is easy to overlook something.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Quest For Health via RSS or email to keep up-to-date with the current news. Click on the link in the sidebar, choose your favourite reader and then click on the Subscribe Now button. Then everytime you check your RSS Reader you will be notified when there is a new post to read at Quest for Health.
Since beginning this blog a few weeks ago my exercise routine has taken second place. At the best of times it is all too easy for me to push exercise to the back of my mind and find a multitude of other things to do as I do not particularly enjoy exercising. Beginning this blog was a great excuse. I did not mean to use the blog to get out of exercising. It just sort of happened somehow.
I know exercise is very important for a healthy lifestyle and I do feel better when I have a regular exercise routine. It is just the initial starting that is difficult especially after an extended absence so I went looking for some motivation. I found this short aerobic video on YouTube which is an ideal gentle introduction. It only takes a minute to complete but hopefully it will spur me on to do some more exercise during the day.
I cannot remember where but I read that you should always do some exercise on a Monday and a Friday because if you don’t it is unlikely you will do it any other time during the week. This makes perfect sense to me so today is a great day to get back into my exercise routine. I hope you will join me!
Val’s recent blog post, Organization, schedules, sunscreen and lipstick in which she describes the organisation or lack of organisation in her life made me chuckle because she sounds so much like me.
The lack of organisation in my life drives me nuts and every time I spend hours searching for something I vow that I will be more organised in future. However, no matter how much I want things to be organised and no matter how much energy I put in to getting things more organised, my life is still in chaos and the more I try to organise things, the more chaotic I seem to make it!
However, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes I decided that I really needed to organise my diet much better than I had up until then. I decided that all processed and convenience foods would be eliminated from my diet and I would live on natural foods as much as possible.
I also had a family to look after which included two adult males and I was responsible for cooking the evening meal. I did not have time or the will to cook separate meals for them and separate meals for me so what was I going to do?
I explained to the men that the food I had to eat had to be what a normal person on a healthy diet would eat and fortunately, probably due to media influences around the time, they decided that it would be a good idea if they improved their diet too.
Now all I had to do was to get organised.
This is how I did it:
I found some healthy recipes to cook for our evening meal. There are lots of recipe books and websites full of healthy recipes available these days so it was not that difficult to find some easy to cook family recipes.
I made myself a weekly meal planner and jotted down the meals I planned to eat that week.
I bought myself a ring binder and put those recipes in plastic pockets inside of the binder.
I then made my shopping list by jotting down the ingredients I needed from each of the recipe pages.
It was easy and I was on my way to a much healthier way of eating.
I have kept this system up for almost three years and I could not live without it now. The best thing about it is that it frees up my time for more interesting things. I no longer have to spend hours thinking of things we can eat and no longer just pick up anything in the supermarket. Grocery shopping is now much quicker too.
Over the years I have added lots of new recipes to my recipe file and have a four week menu plan so we never have the same evening meal more than once a month. This makes sure our diet is varied and also helps us not to miss out on our favourite dishes. The ring binder is especially flexible as recipes can be added, taken out and rearranged as necessary.
Below are some Weekly Meal Planners I have created for you to use to set up your weekly menus. Click on the picture of the meal planner you would like. The meal planner will open as a PDF document for you to print. Alternatively, right click on the download link and save to your hard drive.
I hope these help you to organise your diet with very little hassle.
I watched Dr. Lisa Hark’s advice on YouTube today.
She is a registerd dietician and offers the following advice about a healthy diet (with some extra comments by me):
Exercise regularly. Aim to do 30 minutes of moderate activity at least three days a week. If you prefer you could split the 30 minutes into 3 lots of 10 minutes. Make exercise part of your daily routine by walking the dog or walking to the shops.
Watch for hidden sugar in drinks. Water has no calories. Neither has black tea or coffee. However, if you add milk to tea and coffee make sure it is skimmed milk which has less fat and do not add sugar.
Eat three portions of fruit and three portions of vegetables a day. Filling up on fruit and vegetables is much better than eating biscuits, cakes and other high fat, high calorie snacks. This is good health advice as well as a good dieting tip.
Eat lean meats, poultry and fish. They are low in fat but be careful about how you cook them. Do not add extra fat during the cooking process. Steaming, poaching, boiling, grilling, baking and microwaving are the best ways of cooking meat to keep the fat value and calories down.
Limit alcohol consumption. Alcohol is high in calories and has no nutritious value. Scientific research has shown that drinking red wine regularly is good for the heart but other research has linked alcohol consumption to breast cancer so while trying to lose weight it is probably a good idea to cut down on the alcohol.
I think these are very good tips. I must find the motivation to exercise more!
I was interested to read Why those oh-so-healthy diet foods make us eat even more in the Mail Online which tells us that people who are on diets to lose weight can eat just as many calories as they would if they were not on a diet even though they are eating healthier food.
It reminded me of a good friend of mine who, when on a diet, thought he could eat as many crispbreads as he wanted. Even though I tried to explain that it was not what he ate but the amount of calories he consumed that make him put on weight, he still could not understand. He had it in his head that chocolate, biscuits and cakes made him fat but crispbreads, apples and other so called diet food would not make him put on weight. Needless to say, he did not succeed in losing weight.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is, if you eat more calories than your body uses up in energy then you will put on weight. Your body does not care where those calories come from. If it cannot use the calories up then it stores them as fat. Eat just one more apple than you need each day and at the end of the year you could put on more than 7lbs of fat.
The lesson to be learned is to eat healthy food but not to eat too much of it!
We are in good company in our quest for health! Michelle Obama is on the same journey!
The New York Times tells us in its report Michelle Obama’s Agenda Includes Healthful Eating, that Michelle and her family have ditched processed foods and are actively supporting healthy eating and one of her favourite meals is creamless creamed spinach prepared by White House chefs. This is great news as it gives healthy eating a greater profile but it got me thinking about spinach.
I am not too keen on spinach, probably due to too many soggy spinach served with meals when I was a child. However, it is one of the most nutritious foods available as it is full of iron, vitamins and minerals. If you are interested in finding out exactly what goodness is in it, the WHFoods website gives a detailed analysis of the nutrients in spinach and the positive value it has for health.
I wish I liked spinach more because of its health value and also because of its reported benefits to eyesight. A while ago I watched an interesting programme on TV about research in the UK which showed that when elderly people ate a half a bag of spinach a day they found a significant improvement in their eyesight. You can find out more about this study on the BBC website. Be sure to also watch the Can spinach save your eyesight? video too.
While I do not like spinach, I love eggs so when I came across a recipe for spinach and cheese frittatas I gave it a try. A frittata is rather like a cross between an omelette and a quiche without the pastry and this recipe provides me with the goodness from the spinach and satisfies my love for eggs. I now keep frozen spinach in the freezer especially for this recipe.
Spinach and Cheese Frittatas
Ingredients
150 g (5 oz) spinach leaves or the same quantity of frozen spinach
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 eggs
2 egg whites
60 ml (1/4 cup) skimmed milk
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
freshly ground black pepper
Method
Preheat oven to moderately hot 200C (400F/Gas 6).
Place the washed spinach leaves and garlic in a saucepan, cover and steam for 2-3 minutes or until the spinach has wilted.
Drain the spinach in a colander and squeeze out the excess water and then roughly chop the leaves.
Place the eggs, egg whites, skimmed milk and Parmesan cheese in a bowl and whisk to combine. Stir in the spinach and season with freshly ground black pepper.
Spoon the mixture into a muffin tin, filling each of the holes about three quarters full. You should be able to fill about six holes with the mixture.
Bake for about 15 minutes until the Frittatas are golden brown and set. Serve immediately.
Serves 6
Are you a spinach lover like Michelle Obama or do you, like me, only eat it because of its health benefits?
I am not a medical professional so the content on this website is my own personal opinions and beliefs. It consists of the things I do, or wish I could do, to improve my own health and lifestyle. Everyone is different and what works for me may not work for you. If you have any medical concerns you should talk to your doctor and not rely on anything you may read on this site.
June 30, 2009 4:32 pm | 
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