Hydration Tips to Improve Your Workout at Womenshealthmag.com | Women's Health Magazine

Sweating the Details

Hydration tips to improve your workout

LAST UPDATED: AUGUST 20, 2013  |  BY DIMITY MCDOWELL, PHOTOGRAPH BY STOCKBYTE/THINKSTOCK

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I've come to Austin, Texas, in the middle of July to sweat. Before I even step off the plane, my pits spring a leak. And they're just warming up: I'm on my way to the Human Performance Lab at the University of Texas to get a scientific read on my perspiration. I can easily soak a sports bra during a workout, but I have no idea whether that's healthy — or how often I should reach for a water bottle to stave off dehydration.

Normally, I'm an athletics geek — give me a heart-rate monitor or any other gadget that spits out a numeric assessment of my (hopefully) improving fitness, and I'm as happy as an iPhone beta tester. But hydration? Bleh. Where's the cool data or graph-able output in that?

I arrive at the lab, strip down, and weigh in. After throwing on cycling shorts and a tank top, I pedal a stationary bike inside a chamber whose temperature is set to sweltering: 92 degrees with 50 percent humidity. Thirty minutes later, I'm drenched. I get naked again and discover that I've lost more than three-fourths of a pound. Yikes. Seems like a lot.

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Hydration Tips to Improve Your Workout at Womenshealthmag.com | Women's Health Magazine

What Causes Migraines and How to Properly Address Them

Migraines—What Causes Them, and How You Can Best Address Them

August 22, 2013 | 22,559 views

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By Dr. Mercola

I am thankful I have never had a migraine or, but migraine headaches are one of the most common health conditions in the world—more prevalent than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined.¹ They're also one of the top 20 causes of disability among adults.

More than 37 million Americans suffer from migraines; nearly five million of them experiencing at least one migraine attack per month.² In all, an estimated 13 percent of the world’s population suffer with migraines to a greater or lesser degree.

The condition is more prevalent among women, with about 15-18 percent of women worldwide getting them, compared to six to seven percent of men. About 60 percent of women affected have menstrual-related migraines, meaning they tend to coincide with their menstrual cycle.

Despite its prevalence, migraines are still one of the most poorly understood medical disorders out there. Part of the problem has been that the experiences of those suffering from migraines vary greatly.

Aside from throbbing, searing pain, which may or may not be one-sided, some experience “auras” prior to onset, while others do not. There may also be nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, sweating, and/or sensitivity to light, sound, and smells.

Those who have never had a migraine before can be quite frightened by the neurological symptoms, which can simulate a stroke where you start to have disturbed vision, and even short term visual loss and/or seeing spots or wavy lines, and/or tingling in your arm or leg.

Migraines May Be Linked with Abnormal Blood Vessel Structure

One long-held theory was that a migraine is caused by vascular changes in your brain, from initial blood vessel constriction and a drop in blood flow, followed by dilation and stretching of blood vessels, which activates pain-signaling neurons.

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What Causes Migraines and How to Properly Address Them

For 'Biggest Loser' trainer, diet trumps exercise in weight loss | Reuters

For 'Biggest Loser' trainer, diet trumps exercise in weight loss

By Dorene Internicola

NEW YORK | Mon Aug 19, 2013 4:02am EDT

(Reuters) - Celebrity trainer Bob Harper, of the weight-loss TV show "The Biggest Loser," has built a career putting very obese people through some grueling fitness paces but if he's learned anything from the experience, it's that diet trumps exercise every time.

The Los Angeles-based trainer, who was born on a cattle farm in Tennessee and arrived in California some 20 years ago, said gone are the days when he believed it was possible to just exercise the pounds away.

"It is all about your diet," Harper, 48, said during a break from filming Season 15 of the long-running U.S. show. "I used to think a long time ago that you can beat everything you eat out of you and it's just absolutely not the case."

Harper has spun his TV fame improving the fitness of people who are 100 pounds (45 kg) or more overweight into an empire with DVD workouts and the best-selling book "The Skinny Rules," which offers tips to drop excess weight.

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For 'Biggest Loser' trainer, diet trumps exercise in weight loss | Reuters

Sy Perlis: A 91-Year-Old Weightlifting Champ

91-Year-Old Arizona Man Sy Perlis Breaks Weightlifting Record

June 28, 2013 | 33,466 views

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By Dr. Mercola

Sy Perlis already holds titles as the 2009 state weightlifting champ and the 2010 and 2011 world champ in the 181-pound weight category in the World Association of Benchers and Dead Lifters.

But earlier this month he accomplished an even bigger feat: when he lifted a 187.2-pound weight, he broke the world record of 135 pounds, which had been in place since 2005. It’s a remarkable victory for any athlete, but what makes this story particularly noteworthy is the fact that Perlis is 91 years old.

91-Year-Old Breaks World Weightlifting Record...

Sy broke a nearly decade-old World Association of Benchers and Deadlifters record in the 90-and-over age division. What makes this especially extraordinary is that he didn’t begin weightlifting until he was 60 years old. And he entered his first competition when he was in his mid-80s.

Unfortunately, increasing physical frailty as you age is commonly accepted as "a fact of life," and this preconceived notion often spurs people (either consciously or subconsciously) to slow down and stop exercising as they get older. But age is not an impediment to staying physically active! If anything, the older you are the more important regular exercise becomes.

While Sy Perlis’ case is certainly not the norm, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. Most of us won’t be breaking word records in our 90s, but we canall strive to stay physically fit. In fact, more and more people are achieving stunning physical accomplishments in their "golden" years. Most of you are probably familiar with Jack LaLanne, who was the picture of fitness well into his 90s, but he is but one example. Others include:

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Sy Perlis: A 91-Year-Old Weightlifting Champ

15 Secrets to Better Health | 2013-08-02 | SUCCESS Magazine

15 Secrets to Better Health

Improve your mental and physical health (including your diet!) with these pointers.

“Take care of your body; it’s the only place you have to live.” –Jim Rohn
With a focus of health and wellness in the September 2013 issue of SUCCESS, Darren Hardy sat down with Jonathan Roche, founder of Breakthrough Health & Wellness Solutions, Inc., award-winning fitness expert and 12-time Ironman Triathlon finisher, to discuss his passion and tips for health and fitness. Roche shares his ideas and tools to inspire people to improve their own fitness and wellness habits, and one of those tools is the “Win Today Check List,” which you can check out in a PDF charthere. The purpose of this list is to tackle your action items and put you in the position to achieve your goals. It’s a list to keep you on track.
“It’s the small steps that ultimately lead to the victory,” he says. These are his secrets to optimizing your life and refining your habits for better health:
Attitude and Focus
1. Concentrate on your health as opposed to losing weight. If you have kids, concentrate on your kids and how you losing weight will help improve the energy you bring to that relationship.
2. Hold yourself accountable and don't make excuses. We are all extremely busy, but you can fit movement into your schedule. You owe it to yourself to have some personal time at least three times per week.
3. When you exercise, be proud of yourself. Know how much that attitude positively affects your energy, health and life.
4. Stay positive. Life is too short to beat yourself up over weight that you have gained or workouts you have missed. Stay positive and it will help all areas of your life.
5. Have fun. If your workouts are not fun, then you are not going to keep doing them. So, if you dread going to a gym, don't go. Instead, go for a walk or play with your kids in the yard. If you can turn the dreaded exercise word into a fun activity, then your chances of being successful dramatically increase.
6. Throw the rear view mirror out the window. Concentrate on today and tomorrow. You can't change the past, and beating yourself up is only going to drag you down and move you in the wrong direction. Today is a new day so take advantage of it.

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15 Secrets to Better Health | 2013-08-02 | SUCCESS Magazine

Tips for Sleeping Better | Vitamins & Minerals

Tips for Resetting Your Internal Clock and Sleeping Better

By Dr. Mercola

Good sleep is one of the cornerstones of health, without which optimal health will remain elusive. Impaired sleep can increase your risk of a wide variety of diseases and disorders, including:

• Heart disease
• Stomach ulcers
• Mood disorders like depression
• Cancer

Numerous factors can contribute to poor sleep, including vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The featured article by LiveScience¹ highlights three nutrients tied to three common sleep problems. To this, I would add melatonin, which is both a hormone and an antioxidant:

• Magnesium deficiency can cause insomnia
• Lack of potassium can lead to difficulty staying asleep throughout the night
• Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to excessive daytime sleepiness

The Importance of Melatonin

I personally believe that melatonin is one of the most important nutrients to help you optimize your sleep, as it plays a crucial role in your circadian rhythm or internal clock.
Melatonin is produced by a pea-sized gland in the middle of your brain called the pineal gland. When your circadian rhythms are disrupted, your body produces less melatonin, which reduces your ability to fight cancer.
Melatonin actually helps suppress free radicals that can lead to cancer. (This is why tumors grow faster when you sleep poorly.) It also produces a number of health benefits related to your immune system.
For most people, the pineal gland is totally inactive during the day. But, at night, when you are exposed to darkness, your pineal gland begins producing melatonin to be released into your blood.
Melatonin makes you feel sleepy, and in a normal night's sleep, your melatonin levels stay elevated for about 12 hours (usually between 9 pm and 9 am). Then, as the sun rises and your day begins, your pineal gland reduces your production of melatonin.
The levels in your blood decrease until they're hardly measurable at all. This rise and fall of your melatonin levels are part and parcel of your internal clock that dictates when you’re sleepy and when you feel fully awake.

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Tips for Sleeping Better | Vitamins & Minerals

Bill Clinton Reveals How He Became a Vegan - AARP

Bill Clinton Explains Why He Became a Vegan

The 42nd president of the United States explains how we can — and for our health must — learn to love eating vegetables, too

by Joe Conason, AARP The Magazine, August/September 2013

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Bill Clinton shows off an all-veggie lunch spread representing the foods he now eats, and enjoys. — Ben Baker

En español l When Bill Clinton invited me to lunch in May, I knew better than to expect fried catfish or barbecued ribs. The former president is now a devoted vegan, meaning no meat, fish or dairy products, and he has pursued a healthier way of life for more than three years. While I figured our lunch menu might be bland, that would be a small price to pay for private time with a world leader who is anything but.

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As it happens, the fit, trim and sharply attired Clinton, whom I've come to know well during more than two decades covering his career, is his usual gregarious, charismatic self. But a bland menu? Not even close.

Get Ready, Get Set — Go Vegan!

Hummus with raw vegetable batons. — Kat Teutsch

Dine like Bill Clinton does.Check out great recipes for hummus, quinoa, beets, cauliflower, snow peas, beans and more.

As we enter a private room overlooking Manhattan's busy Rockefeller Center, I'm struck with a dazzling kaleidoscope of a dozen delicious dishes: including roasted cauliflower and cherry tomatoes, spiced and herbed quinoa with green onions, shredded red beets in vinaigrette, garlicky hummus with raw vegetable batons, Asian-inspired snow pea salad, an assortment of fresh roasted nuts, plates of sliced melon and strawberries, and rich, toothsome gigante beans tossed with onions in extra-virgin olive oil.

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Clinton Reveals How He Became a Vegan - AARP

The Healthiest Cocktail Recipes for (Almost) Guilt-Free Boozing

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Matt Posted in Healthy Eating, Recipes Be the first to comment on this article

 

Summer is well underway and if you’re like most of us, you want to looking and feeling your best.  Of course, it’s hard to look and feel your best after having two bottles of wine and a margarita for dinner the night previous.  So how do you still enjoy summer, those late nights on the patio, and the company of friends without having to swear off adult beverages?  Easy.  We’ve taken a look at a ton of different cocktail recipes and have broken down the absolute best and healthiest cocktails you might want to consider if drinking down 2,000+ calories in a single sitting isn’t your idea of summer fun.
Of course, when it comes to alcohol, healthy is a bit subjective.  Anything regarding alcohol needs to be done in moderation, no matter how “healthy” it may be.  So keep that in mind, and look at these cocktails as simply as more nutritious, less calorie substitutes to some of the high-cal, sugary sweet concoctions you’ve been drowning yourself with all summer long.

Vodka Soda

Health Benefits: Under 100 calories, since it’s mostly water it’ll help keep you hydrated as well.
We’re starting simple here.  Vodka soda is the go-to drink for many a fitness nut when they’re out on the town or letting their hair down a bit.  Only hang up here is it’s absolutely, completely, boring, even with a squeeze of lime.  If you don’t mind the lack of flavor, by all means, make this your go-to as well…otherwise, keep reading because we’ve got some better (and tastier) options below.

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Over 400 Companies Who Don’t Use GMOs in Their Products | The Top Information Post

Over 400 Companies Who Don’t Use GMOs in Their Products

Admin / July 11, 2013 / 2 Comments and 0 Reactions

If you want to keep eating poison food, you can join the ‘scientists’ who keep spewing Monsanto-funded lies. They are telling us that genetically altered crops are good for us and the environment – that they are, in fact, a necessity to feed the world population. They say all of this, even though we seemed to feed the masses just fine without chemical quackery until about 60 years ago, all while dumping millions of tons of unaltered food right into the trash bin. If however, you believe GMOs are toxic, cancer-causing substances, you have another option.

We will always need to fight for what we believe in and ignite change through thing like the March Against Monsanto and the upcoming Monsanto Video Revolt (which you should absolutely get involved in, as it’s super easy), but it’s also important to use your dollar not only to vote, but also to keep yourself healthy.

Courtesy of the Non-GMO Project, here is a list of companies who make many or even the majority of all their products without GMOs:

• 365
• 479 Degrees
• A. Vogel
• Adams Vegetable Oils
• Agrana
• Agricor Inc…...

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Over 400 Companies Who Don’t Use GMOs in Their Products | The Top Information Post

Benefits of Whole Body Vibration Treatment in Bone Health

Side Benefit of Space Travel Brings Advance in Bone Health…

November 09, 2010 | 52,047 views

Older adults could benefit from vibration, according to a new study. Whole-body vibration treatments could help reduce the bone loss that occurs as people age.

Numerous previous studies have examined the benefits of vibration on bone density. A 2008 study also found a significant improvement in bone mineral density, as well as a reduction in back pain.

EMax Health reports:

"Vibration is proving useful in other areas of bone health, especially in people who have fractures ... [S]tudies show vibration slows stem cell proliferation, which leads to more stem cells becoming bone cells rather than continuing on to make more stem cells. Other studies have shown that vibration can also improve weight loss and muscle strength."

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Whole body vibration (WBV) platforms originate from research conducted during the 1960s space race. The more precise scientific term for this though is acceleration training. It works on the principle of Newton's second law of thermodynamics, which you might recall from high school physics class.

Force = Mass X Acceleration

Normally we are only dealing with acceleration due to the force of gravity or 1G and the only way we vary the force in exercise is to increase the weight. However if you examine the equation you can easily see that you can increase the force by increasing acceleration by increasing the G force to 2 or more.

These systems work by having a plate that is driven by a motor to rapidly move up and down several millimeters typically between 30 and 50 times per second. The more rapid the oscillations or the larger the plate displacement the higher the G forces. Some machines will reach G forces of 8, or eight times the force of gravity.

However, acceleration training is not only effective at building muscle mass, it may help build bone mass too. NASA has tested vibration platforms to help prevent the bone loss that occurs during space travel, and now researchers are looking into more "earth-bound" uses for the machines as well.

In a new study by Medical College of Georgia researchers, using vibration therapy 30 minutes daily for 12 weeks improved bone density in mice, a finding that adds support for their use in humans, especially the elderly.

It's thought that the vibrations prompt movement of the cell nucleus, which may trigger the release of osteoblasts to build bone.

Previous studies have also found that acceleration training increases bone density in the hip and inhibits bone loss in the spine and hip areas.

Emerging Benefits of Whole Body Acceleration

As Dr. Keith DeOrio, M.D. explained in another article, your entire body musculature, as well as your internal organs and glands, are affected by acceleration training

Your muscle spindles fire secondary to the mechanical stimulation produced by the vibrating plate, and this rapid firing of the muscle spindle causes a neuromuscular response that leads to physiological changes in your brain as well as your entire body.

Traumas and injuries can leave cellular memories in your brain or body tissue that impede normal body movement or function, even after they're healed. Using acceleration training allows your body and brain to rapidly de-imprint these old cell traumas, re-imprinting with positive, healthy information.

This allows for better and more efficient rehabilitation of injuries from sports or surgery than traditional methods of therapy.

Since acceleration training is accomplished with very little stress to your joints, tendons and ligaments -- essentially you stand or perform slow specific movements on a vibrating platform -- it can be a very good therapy regimen if you've suffered injuries, if you're elderly, or if you have disease conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia or multiple sclerosis, which would normally limit your fitness program.

According to Dr. DeOrio, studies have shown that a mere 12 minutes of training on a WBV plate is equal to a 1.5-hour workout with weights!

And a separate study performed by the University of Liege in Belgium found that after six weeks elderly participants experienced:

• 143 percent improvement in physical function
• 77 percent improvement in equilibrium
• 60 percent improvement in vitality
• 57 percent improvement in the quality of walking
• 41 percent reduction in pain
• 23 percent improvement in general health

This was all accomplished by performing four one-minute sessions, three times a week, so in just 12 minutes a week!

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Benefits of Whole Body Vibration Treatment in Bone Health