Health Archives

009Most people, especially those who are not as intelligent as Einstein, would want to have a boost of their brain power. If you are one of those people who want to think better, your brain power boost might be just a few steps away.

These seven steps might help you in your quest to keep your brain working perfectly fine.

1. Engage yourself in a Regular Exercise

Do simple exercises like a simple walk or jog. It may not be as intense as a full-blown work-out. You just have to keep your body physically fit and active.

Simple work-outs may trigger the release of neurochemicals known as endorphins. These chemicals are responsible for making us feel happy and by feeling happier, a more positive effect on the brain can be observed.

2. Supplement your Diet

Natural supplements are believed to have a good effect on the brain. These supplements not only keep your body healthier, they also maintain the fitness of your brain; thus resulting to better brain power! These supplements are so popular that they can be found anywhere, from your local health and food store up to the web pages of the internet.

3. Use your Brain

If you are to exercise your body, you should exercise your brain as well. Use your brain muscles more often – think and learn. You may read, talk with other people or even play educational games. Any activity that can keep your brain working effectively may be tried out.

4. Play Games

Choose games that will definitely have a good effect on your brain. Refrain from playing games which are “no-brainer.” Nowadays, most computer games are designed to exercise your brain, so all you have to do is to choose well the games that you will play. Gaming consoles are also following the fad into increasing brain function. So, do your part in boosting your brain power, play games that will increase your brain power.

5. Enjoy an Educational Hobby

Choose a hobby that will give you some lessons at the end of the activity. This will not be such a difficult task since most of the time, we learn something from our experiences. Just be sure to do things that are not monotonous. Your hobby should be something that will help you learn new things every time you perform it. This way, you will be able to use some parts of your brain which are left unused before.

6. Sleep Well

Sleeping is the time when your body rebuilds and recharges itself. Most professionals believe that you should sleep for at least six to eight hours a day. Aside from these hours, you should also try to take ten-minute power naps. After these refreshing sleeps and naps, you will surely feel energized to take on more activities for the day. Do not deprive yourself of sleep, and you will then realize that your brain will function better with more hours of sleep.

7. Relax

Because of the complexities of our society today, your brain is exhausted just as much as your body. Thus, you should take the time to relax and cleanse your mind of the worries and stresses that might overwhelm your thoughts. You may want to try on spas or meditations to give your mind a break from all the hassle. After the relaxation, you will feel that you are prepared to take on another complex day! This is how you make better your brain’s health and performance.

Part 1: What is Metabolism?

Some people think that the metabolism is a kind of organ, or a body part, that influences digestion.

Actually, the metabolism isn’t any particular body part.

It’s the process by which the body converts food into energy.

Hence, you’ve likely heard of the phrase metabolic process used synonymously with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same thing.

The Medical Mumbo Jumbo

This isn’t a complicated medical text (which should be great news to most of you!), and so we don’t need to spend an unnecessary amount of time and space focusing on the layered complexity of the human body and its extraordinary intelligence.

Yet without drilling deeply into medical details — which are not relevant for our general understanding purposes — it’s helpful to briefly look at the biological mechanisms behind metabolism.

Metabolism, as mentioned above, is the process of transforming food (e.g. nutrients) into fuel (e.g. energy).  The body uses this energy to conduct a vast array of essential functions.

In fact, your ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your metabolism.

If you had no metabolism – that is, if you had no metabolic process that was converting food into energy – then you wouldn’t be able to move.

In fact, long before you realized that you couldn’t move a finger or lift your foot, your internal processes would have stopped; because the basic building blocks of life – circulating blood, transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide, expelling potentially lethal wastes through the kidneys and so on – all of these depend on metabolism.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say that they have a slow metabolism.

While they may struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic factors, they certainly have a functioning metabolism.

If they didn’t, they wouldn’t even be able to speak (because that, too, requires energy that comes from, you guessed it: metabolism!).

It’s also interesting to note that, while we conveniently refer to the metabolic process as if it were a single function, it’s really a catch-all term for countless functions that are taking place inside the body.  Every second of every minute of every day of your life – even, of course, when you sleep – numerous chemical conversions are taking place through metabolism, or metabolic functioning.

In a certain light, the metabolism has been referred to as a harmonizing process that manages to achieve two critical bodily functions that, in a sense, seem to be at odds with each other.

That’s all for now. My next posting will be on anabolism and catbolism.

How To Boost Your Metabolism

Metabolism.

how to boost your metabolismThere isn’t perhaps a more frequently used word in the weight loss (and weight gain) vocabulary than this.

Indeed, it’s not uncommon to overhear people talking about their struggles – or triumphs – over the holiday bulge or love handles in terms of whether their metabolism is working, or not.

Doctors, too, often refer to metabolism when they try and explain why starvation and water-loss diets aren’t scientifically or medically responsible; since, alas, they do not influence or take into account metabolism (there’s that word again!).

So, for all of the usage that this rather daunting and biologically-charged word enjoys in our world, you’d comfortably assume that people understand it, right?

Or, at least, they have some fundamental information when it comes to how to speed up their metabolism, right?

Wrong!

Towards Understanding Metabolism

Regrettably, many people simply don’t understand the concept of metabolism and metabolic change. This, equally as regrettably, is hardly their fault.

There is so much information floating around out there, much of it over the ‘net or through a “friend of a friend who has a personal trainer”, that there’s bound to be some confusion and conflicting messages.

Furthermore, many people (quite understandably) mistake their own weight gain and loss episodes as a matter of metabolic change. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn’t.

For example, there are scientific ways to increase the rate of metabolic change, and thus enable the body to burn more calories.

Eating certain foods more frequently is one way to do this. Yet another way to visibly lose weight – at least on a perceived, temporary level – is to sit in a steam room for a few hours.

Whereas the former method (eating the right foods) is a real, proven weight loss method through increased metabolic change, the latter method (the steam room) is just temporary because the lost weight is merely water, and will return as swiftly as it “melted away”.

The point to remember here is that some people mistake their own weight loss attempts as being related to metabolic change; and, as you can see with the steam room example, that isn’t always the case.

Low Fat Labels

Another big reason that people don’t have clear, consistent information on this topic is because, unfortunately, there are a lot of food and supplement companies on the market who don’t want you to know fact from fiction.

They want you to believe that constantly buying “low fat” foods is going to somehow speed up your metabolism.

While, yes, some low fat foods can play a role in an overall eating program that is designed to speed up metabolism, merely eating foods that come from packaging that screams “LOW FAT!” won’t do anything.

In fact, believe it or not, but many people actually gain weight when they eat too many “low fat” products. Many of these products are laden with calories from carbohydrates or proteins (which are still calories and still must be burned off or they turn into body fat).

As you can see, and probably feel from years of trying to unravel this whole metabolic mystery, this is a confusing, stressful, and indeed, potentially depressing situation.

Each year, tens of millions of people attempt to retake control over their health and the shape of their body; and each year, tens of millions of people feel that they’ve “failed” because, try as they might, they just can’t speed up their metabolism.

The book “How to Boost Your Metabolism” is the antidote to that way of thinking and feeling because the perceived failure is not a failure in any of these hard working dieters and exercisers (of which you may be one).

The failure is with the medical and nutritional sector as a whole, which has simply not provided people with the information that they need to know in order to speed up their metabolism.

And given the size of the nutritional field and the fact that so much of it is influenced by money-making enterprises (not all of the field, of course, but enough of it to make a difference), there’s really no sense in playing a “wait and see” game for when clear, consistent, and helpful information starts to flow out to people like us.

“How to Boost Your Metabolism” What’s Inside

This book is created for the millions of everyday people like us who simply want to know how to speed up metabolism, and how to lose weight the right, healthy, and responsible way. We want to know:

• What the heck a metabolism is, and what role it really plays on weight loss and gain

• The proven, scientific ways to speed up metabolism – not myths and fitness club “speculation”; but the real deal.

• Specific diet and food items and promote a faster metabolism, so that once unwanted weight has been lost, it can be kept off through a responsible eating plan.

And in the pages ahead, that’s precisely what we cover!

Come again for the next instalment:

Part 1: What is Metabolism?