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Avoiding the Exercise Plateau

When it comes to exercising, maintaining the same workout program day in and day out can not only become boring and monotonous, but will also most likely lead to that dreaded seven letter word that sends chills up an avid exerciser’s spine… exercise PLATEAU. The human body will respond in positive ways to a new stimulus such as exercise because it’s naturally prepping itself to cope with higher workloads through a process known as adaptation. Exercise PLATEAU is when the body no longer adapts or changes to the force being applied because it no longer recognizes the activity as a new stimulus. The key to avoiding this PLATEAU is to create an exercise program filled with variety. Our bodies are fine tuned machines that quickly become accustomed to the things we do. By incorporating an assortment of exercises, programs, intensity levels, and training methods our body in constantly in this adaptive phase.
 One way to add variety to your cardiovascular training is to cross train. If you are someone that always uses the treadmill, try another cardio machine or better yet, an aerobic class that integrates lateral and multi-directional movements. The drills involved with a boot camp class or the kicks involved in a cardio kickboxing class are sure to target muscles that are not activated by running. Another way to alter your cardiovascular workout is to train at different intensity levels. Familiarize yourself with your target heart rate(THR) and use this formula to find the intensity level that is right for you and your training goals.  Instead of keeping a steady pace for a 30-40 minute duration jog at 55% of your THR, try a shorter 25 minute workout at 75-80% of your THR. Don’t forget to utilize the incline option on the cardio machines to add intensity or add intermittent sprint stages to keep your body guessing.
When it comes to weight lifting, it is important to remember the overload principle. This principle states that fitness improvements are made only when workloads are greater than those normally encountered. Remember increasing the workload includes more than just lifting heavier weight. You can also amplify the work load by increasing the rate at which you are doing the work and by altering the sets and reps to adjust the total training volume. If you regularly perform 15 repetitions, try performing 10 reps at a higher weight for a couple weeks.
Another variation is to train your muscles using isometric contraction versus isotonic contraction. Isotonic contraction is what typically comes to mind when we think of weight training. It is when the muscle length changes throughout the duration of the exercise (picture a bicep curl). Isometric training is the static contraction of a muscle without any visible movement in the angle of the joint (picture holding the bicep curl at the midpoint for a duration of time). While holding a contracted position for a period of time, these muscles are forced to contract continuously which causes your body to activate more and more motor units to help sustain this contraction. This increased activation can lead to strength gains and a more efficient muscle.
Additional training methods that might change up your workout are super sets (when two opposing muscle groups are worked in sequence with no rest periods in between) or compound sets (when the same muscle group is worked continuously with no rest in between). Circuit training is another great addition to any bland workout program. Circuit training is a high intensity, fast paced workout designed to keep your heart rate elevated (like a cardiovascular workout) while incorporating strength training elements. Not only is circuit training a great and time efficient workout, but by rotating from station to station with little to no rest in between, you are maximizing the total calorie expenditure.
When it comes to exercise, a regular routine is something that should be avoided in some sense. Once the body practices the same routine time after time, it grows more proficient at executing the movements therefore it requires less energy to perform them. Keeping your workout program filled with variety will aid in avoiding the exercise PLATEAU and assist with “keeping the body on it’s proverbial toes.” This method will also reduce the risk of burnout. Let’s face your body becomes bored, your mind is soon to follow.…

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Acupuncture Nutrition – A Complete Health Package

Acupuncture and Nutrition go hand in hand. A perfect balance of the two can ensure lasting benefits. Injuries happen to everyone and healing takes time depending on the treatment process. The body needs the right amount of nutrients to get back to normal shape. It is scientifically proven that Vitamins A and C assist in injury healing. Zinc and copper can speed up the healing process. Apart from this a balanced fat diet can promote healing and also aid in controlling inflammation. Choosing the right acupuncture diet supplement is vital for enhancing your treatment. A professional and licensed acupuncture nutritionist will tell you what type of diet would go well with your injury or your health condition.
There is no doubt that acupuncture is an alternative medicine that can give immediate relief from your health related problems. A well balanced acupuncture and nutrition diet can support your treatment. Herbal diet has far reaching effects and hence it is widely practiced world over. Before starting acupuncture treatment, the practitioner may ask you to take herbal supplements to enhance the healing process. Nutritional diet does not have any side effects though it is wise to alert your acupuncture nutritionist of your allergies to food types and herbal medicines. Certain types of food that are not suitable for your body type has to be avoided and the nutritionist will provide a chart on the dos and don’ts. The nutrients help to build body defense system making you stronger and fit to fight any kind of ailments. Moreover it gives quick relief from pain.
Always look for clinics that offer customized programs to suit your health history. Chinese nutrition is completely different from western nutrition. Normally in the west aspects like vitamins, proteins, fat, minerals are given importance. But in Chinese nutrition the energy effects a particular food can offer to the body is analyzed and a diet program is prescribed. Before starting Chinese medicine, the practitioner provides nutritional counseling that can help learn about your health condition. There is always a treatment plan and the practitioner works accordingly. Preliminary tests are conducted to learn about the disorder and then a treatment plan is devised. Depending on the individual’s condition a treatment program is chalked out.
Acupuncture improves blood circulation in the body by stimulating specific points in the body. Poor circulation can result in stagnation of blood which means the energy or chi is not distributed throughout the body leading to health disorders. Acupuncture ensures that the flow of energy is unhindered thereby the energy is equal throughout your body. Each pressure point has a specific function and when this point is activated it can yield the desired results. Acupuncture can help patients with chronic inflammation that is triggered due to nutrient deficiencies. Acupuncture diet can help eliminate inflammation and improve the digestive functions by increasing nutrient absorption. Acupuncture can also improve muscle tone and balances emotional responses. Poor nutrition cannot control inflammation despite having the best of medicines. A balance of nutrition and diet can help eliminate your health issues.…

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How to Wash Your Hair With Conditioner

Why would you skip shampoo and just use conditioner? It’s been trending around for awhile now, and so far it hasn’t gone away. Is the conditioner-only wash for you?

Shampoo – even gentle shampoo – contains chemicals that dry out your hair. Shampoo cleans the unwanted dirt and oil out of your hair, but it also strips your hair of the oils that it needs. That means that your hair gets dried out and your scalp works overtime trying to produce more oils to make up for the ones that are missing.

The idea behind conditioner-only washing is that you eliminate those chemicals that strip your hair and just add moisture. Complete elimination of shampoo doesn’t work for everyone, but it does work for some people. Here are some steps and options for cutting down on the ‘poo.

First, don’t go off shampoo cold turkey. Your hair will be greasy and gross (which may happen a little bit, but not as much if you ease into it). Start by not using shampoo a couple of times a week and just washing with conditioner. You might also try not washing your hair every day when you do this.

When you wash with conditioner only, you can either wash your hair with just water and then follow it up with conditioner as usual, or you can scrub your hair with conditioner and follow it up with moisturizing conditioner.

When you wash your hair with conditioner, start with a wet head. Use plenty of conditioner. You’ll want to scrub your scalp with your fingers – probably harder than you would with shampoo, since there’s no lather to help you along.

Make sure that you rinse very thoroughly. Conditioner can build up in your hair and attract more dirt if you don’t make sure to get your hair really clean.

If you need to shampoo once a week or so to really get a deep clean, it shouldn’t mess up your goals. This is common with this kind of cleaning.

This probably isn’t for everyone, but for people with dry and damaged hair (especially anyone who regularly uses heat styling) it can really help to restore your hair to something softer and healthier.…

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Liver Cleansing Detox – My Tried and True Recipe

“The bottom line is,” my naturopathic doctor was telling me, “for good health and a strong immune system you have to get your kidneys, liver and colon cleaned up. And the ways to do all that cleansing are not as easy as washing your face.”
The liver is tremendously important in the big picture of good health. Its primary functions are:
1.    Production of bile
2.    Cleansing the blood
3.    Lymph production
4.    Carbohydrate metabolism
5.    Protein metabolism
6.    Lipid (fat) metabolism
7.    Storage of vitamins and minerals
8.    Crucial actions in immune system
9.    Controls sugars
10.    Red blood cells – stimulates production and removes dead ones.
11.    Bone function
12.    Produces life dependent enzymes
13.    Removes drugs and poisons  
This is just a brief overview of the 500 known functions of the liver. Now you can understand better why it is so important to tune it up.
Here’s my liver flush recipe. I have tried other liver cleansing detox methods, but this one works for me.
First and very important, do a parasite cleanse. The liver will not flush if there are live parasites in it, and you will wake up in the night as sick as you have ever been. It’s bad. Don’t risk it. Get a tincture or capsules from your health food store. It doesn’t matter the form, but you must have these three ingredients:
1. Cloves,
2. Wormwood, and
3. Black Walnut Hull
Follow the direction for a full 10 days to 2 weeks. I’m serious. Don’t risk getting sick like that.
Also, try to get off coffee and meat for a week or so before the flush. The better you prepare your system by eating a clean diet, the better and easier the process will be. Taking supplementary detox herbs will help support the liver. Ask your naturopath for a recommendation, or go ask your health food store salesperson for help with this purchase.
OK – The morning of the flush, ask yourself if this is the day. Trust your instincts. If you get a “no”, then wait a few days and try again.
On the day, drink 16 ounces of organic apple juice upon waking. Then drink 8 ounces every 2 hours until 4 or 5 o’clock. After that, only water. No food all day. If you must eat something, eat an apple. The apple juice softens the stones so they slip out easily.
Then, a half hour before bed, make the following potion:
2 ounces fresh squeezed organic lemon juice
2 ounces fresh squeezed organic pink grapefruit juice. It makes the oil like water!
3 ounces of organic olive oil.
Put it in a jar, shake it up and drink it down. You will be amazed at how the grapefruit juice changes the oily texture of the olive oil. It is much easier to drink this way.
Thirty minutes later, do it all over again. Only this time, drink it by your bed, standing up. Then get into bed. Do not clean up the kitchen. Do nothing but get into bed. Lie on your right side if you like or flat on your back. Try to remain quite still for the next 30 minutes.
The next day – stones! Pea green and most often pea sized globules floating in the toilet to show you how successful you have been. They are made of fat so they will float, and they will be the unmistakable green color of bile. You may feel tired and nauseated so do it on a weekend when you can have time to rest. Definitely drink a lot of water. Your body is really working to help itself. The next day you will feel much better.
If you don’t get stones, your liver needs a little coaxing. Diet is key, so try again after 2 weeks and after you eat simply for a few days; fresh fruits and vegetables, and no fried foods.
Once you do get your liver to open up, you will love how you feel afterwards: clean, light, happy and with digestion noticeably improved. …

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Simple Autism Prevention

Simple Autism PreventionThere are hundreds or maybe thousands of new products on the market to help autism patients.� But, since there’s no money in it, there’s been very little or no attention given to PREVENTING ‘s a very simple therapy that does just that:At the start of pregnancy (or even before), start taking a minimum of 4000 mg (4 grams) of vitamin C, split into 2 grams with breakfast and 2 grams with dinner.� (I get 1 gram tabs at Costco pretty cheap.)At lunch take a good megavitamin with a day’s supply of minerals, and stress vitamins, such as Solgar’s VM-75 or an equal with good minerals as well as extra vitamins.� BTW, the so-called “pre-natal” vitamins “prescribed” for pregnant women are actually more expensive�and less effective than “standard” equivalents. VM-75 is much better IMO.Since vitamin C in these amounts acts as a mineral chelator, it will gradually take out any mercury, lead, and other toxic heavy metals that cause autism.� Just eating tuna fish (a staple for pregnant women it seems) gets mercury into the body.� The increasing use of coal in power plants also puts mercury into the air and soil. This mercury added to that in vaccines is the CAUSE of autism in this toxicity is removed over the length of the pregnancy, the liver will be better able to filter out new mercury, and autism should go down to the 1 case in 10,000 of not so long those women further along, double or even triple those amounts and split them up more so as to literally saturate the blood.� This should be enough to give the new baby a start without a toxic handicap.� The only “bad” side effect from Vitamin C is diarrhea!The other prevention is to NEVER let the MD’s/hospitals give your child more than one or two vaccines at one time.�� Big Pharma has lied many times about the mercury in vaccines, and proved that it cannot be is chelation?� The word means to “grab onto”, and a chelation chemical is designed to grab onto minerals in the bloodstream, form a new molecule that is water soluble, that is then filtered out via the kidneys and urine system.� Because of the lies about vitamin C made by Big Pharma, very few MD’s and others in the health business know that Vitamin C has the same action.� It also combines with the minerals in the blood to form a water soluble molecule, similar to the action of a chelator such as EDTA.� Glutathione is another similar chemical.� In autistic infants and children, it is almost absent.� This means that an autistic child has very little chance to get rid of mercury, lead or aluminum unless these “natural” chelators or some other chelation method is present.� (There are many really expensive methods of getting glutathione into the autistic person, but all are relatively poor.� Both vitamin C and glutathione go out of the body in a few hours.� Vitamin C is much cheaper.)� The job of the liver is to filter out toxic minerals, store them, and gradually release them back into the bloodstream IF, AND ONLY IF, there is a chelating chemical present.� This means that if an autistic child is tested by using blood, urine, or hair samples, the result will usually be a FALSE negative.� This fact has been used in court cases to “prove” that mercury wasn’t the cause of the autism.� More lies by Big Pharma!�Note that the above regimen has vitamin C at breakfast and other vitamins and minerals at lunch.� This allows the Vitamin “C to take out minerals for the hours it lasts in the morning.� By noon, the Vitamin C has gone when the multi-vitamin/mineral pill is taken.� This allows the nutritional minerals to be absorbed,� With all chelation, ALL minerals are taken out of the body, and so the ones needed have to be added back into the body.� Otherwise, the shortages of nutritional minerals may cause other you know any pregnant woman?� If so, pass this on.� It’s cheap insurance, and as an added benefit, the woman won’t get colds and flus while carrying the baby.…

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Enjoyment of Eating – Enjoyment of Health

Enjoyment of food is just as important as eating healthy food. That may surprise you, coming from a nutritionist who preaches prevention. I try to convince everyone who will listen, that a healthy diet is necessary for a good quality of life because good health is important for a good quality of life.
But the enjoyment of food is also a necessary ingredient of a good life. Although it is true that a healthy diet improves your life by improving your health, if you hate what you are eating, your quality of life will suffer. You probably won’t stick with it anyway. What determines what we love to eat or hate to eat? We experience life through our senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Three of these connections with our world impact our experience of food.
We taste sweet, sour, bitter and tart. Some tastes give us pleasure while others are repulsive to us. The desire for good tasting food entices us to eat and thereby, nourish our bodies. When elderly people lose their sense of taste they begin to eat less and their weight begins to drop, sometimes to a point that is life-threatening.
Our sense of smell is an equally important way we experience food. There are hundreds of odors that we experience every day. They can stimulate feelings and memories that we may not even be aware of. Have you ever noticed a smell and gave you a feeling that you couldn’t quite put your finger on?
The smell of food can have a powerful impact on what we find pleasurable or distasteful. This reaction to smells is deep-rooted in our childhood. It can sometimes have more to do with memories and emotions than it does with the quality of the food. The smell of my grandmother’s rolls cooking in the oven brought up feelings that couldn’t be explained simply by how good they tasted.
Smells have a lot to do with what we think of as comfort food. This visceral reaction to smell is one of the reasons that it is so hard to change the way we eat.
The texture of food, which we experience through our sense of touch, is also an important part of our culinary experience. Crunchy or smooth, chewy or tough, the feel of food is also associated with pleasure or repulsion. Some of us enjoy smooth while others need crunchy or chewy to feel there is substance to their food. A good example of personal preference for texture is peanut butter. Everyone seems to have a definite preference for either crunchy or smooth.
The problem with enjoyment of food in affluent societies.
The problem with enjoyment of food is that those of us, who live in affluent societies, where there are a myriad of choices, can become so obsessed with enjoyment that we forget that food is also for nourishment.
Our natural attraction to food should ensure that we eat enough to keep us well nourished. But is our food nourishing? Are we getting enough of the things our bodies really needs? Nature has provided everything we need for good health, but our food suppliers have tampered with nature. By processing and refining, and the natural balance has been lost. Our pleasure-seeking has become dominant and our bodies suffer the consequences.
Some food cravings are like addictions. Sugar, salt and fat added to foods in excess can impel us to eat more than we need. We can get control of our addictions to them by gradually reducing the amounts we eat. We can’t eliminate them, as with drug, alcohol or smoking addictions, because they are an essential part of our food supply. But we can cut back substantially.
Choosing whole, unprocessed foods and moderate amounts of healthy fats are great ways to cut the excess sugar and fat in our diet. Using herbs and spices to season food in creative ways can improve the quality of our food while reducing the amount of salt and sugar we use. Use olive oil or other healthy oils instead of butter.
Enjoyment and nourishment don’t have to be mutually exclusive. A fresh fillet of grilled grouper is just as delicious as a grilled steak, and roasted vegetables can be tastier than French fries. When we use really fresh foods, we don’t need salt and sugar. Their natural taste is delicious. This is especially true for locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables picked before they are ripe and transported over long distances, aren’t nearly as tasty. You can have the best of both worlds. You can have great taste and great nutrition at the same time. And having both is essential for a truly great quality of life. Bon Appetite!…

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20 Qualities Of A Professional Nurse

An obscure provision in the House of Representatives Healthcare Reform Plan provoked sturdy opposition and highlighted our collective discomfort in talking about end of life care, dying and money. In this examine, it was also discovered that cortisol stage is a more necessary heart attack predictor than high blood, high cholesterol and smoking combined. As you could already know, developments in the health sector is commonly very fast that the health news of last month could now not be as relevant as at present.\n\nIt can’t be over emphasized how necessary an excellent food plan is. It is simply better to get nutrition from food as a substitute of supplements. Just do not forget that they are to supplement a healthy diet. You will need to observe that you just need vitamin D in your body to be able to take up calcium and that steadiness of calcium and magnesium is finest for whole absorption.\n\nWith new healthcare plans, preventive and screening companies like mammograms and colonoscopies might be supplied to the patient without charge, and insurance firms might be required to spend no less than 80% of your premium fees on your healthcare. The Business of Health Care is the strategic omnibus that can undoubtedly carry the trendy medical practitioners into the long run.\n\nThere are a variety of exciting research stories that implies ways to make comprehensive steadiness rehabilitation even more effective. Research printed in the NY Academy of Science suggests that a special kind of electrical stimulation applied behind the ears may be a breakthrough therapy for folk who have steadiness problems.\n\nThe CDC recommends that boys receive the vaccination when they are 11 or 12 years outdated and that any male can receive it up by way of age 26. Nonetheless, it is handiest when given to a male who just isn’t yet sexually energetic, as a result of once he becomes sexually energetic, the possibilities of already being infected enhance significantly.…