Natural Health Remedies

The other night I was watching Jamie Oliver’s Eat To Save Your Life where a selection of slightly over-weight to morbidly obese people were shown what eating the wrong foods are doing to their bodies.

For one of the demonstrations three men (one slightly over-weight, one obese and one morbidly obese) went through a test to see who was the fittest. It appeared that the obese man (who happened to be vegetarian) was the fittest out of the three.

So they went on to give each man a CAT scan to measure the fat inside their bodies. The surprising thing is that the obese vegetarian had considerably less fat than either of the other two men. The reason was that he also had a lot of muscle from playing rugby.

What is Body Mass Index (BMI) and How is it Calculated?

To determine the level of obesity for the show, BMI was calculated. BMI is calculated using your height and weight to give you an indication of how healthy you are. You then compare your score to those on a chart to determine whether you are over-weight or not.

The problem is that it doesn’t take into consideration muscle. People who work out at the gym, work in a manual trade or play sports will receive a high BMI score suggesting they are overweight. When in fact they are perfectly healthy.

What Alternatives Are There?

Because very few of us will ever get the opportunity to have a CAT scan purely for the purpose of finding out how much fat there is in our bodies, we need to look at some alternative for calculating our body fat percentage.

Calipers – This is the traditional method which you can have done by a professional in your local gym or do yourself at home. You use the callipers to measure how much fat you have under the skin (subcutaneous fat). The measurements are then put into an equation to provide you with the percentage.

If you want to do this at home the suggested calipers to use are by Accu-Measure as they have been recommended by Body-for-LIFE, EAS, & World Natural Bodybuilding Federation.

Although this is fairly accurate method of finding out the amount of fat in your body, it’s not 100%. The reason is that as we get older we produce more internal fat around our organs and calipers cannot measure this.

Weighing Scales – There are special scales that you can easily buy which emit a Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA). Don’t worry it’s totally harmless. It calculates the density of fat in your body by passing an electrical current through you. These currents pass through bone and muscles much more easily than fat, so the more resistance the currents experience, the less fat you have.

BMI may help give an indication to health but it has some serious flaws which make it worthless if you have a lot of muscle. Although callipers and BIA weighing scales are not 100% accurate they are a lot better and do allow you to chart changes and see the progress you are making. Many people who go to the gym to loose weight become disheartened when they don’t see any changes on regular scales. This is because although they are loosing fat, they are also are gaining muscle which weighs more.

Last year I wrote a blog post 5 Reasons You Need to Laugh More. Well it seems that the Government in Thailand also believe that laughter is a great medicine because they’ve treated their police force to 2 x 3-hour laughing sessions as you can see in this video.

(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader you may need to click here)

Sponsored Review

I’m glad that I’ve been given the opportunity to review PhysioRoom.com because I really like the site. To give you a brief background of the company, they first started in 2000 to provide information about sports injuries in a format that we can all understand. It wasn’t until 2003 that they opened an online shop selling a variety of products relating to fitness. One of them being Swiss Balls…

Swiss Balls

Just for Girls? When I used to go to a gym one of the most popular products was the Swiss Ball. If you’re a “macho” kind of a guy you might think that they’re just for girls; believe me, they’re not! My Mum’s personal trainer used to be a trainer in the Army said that they make you’re body work harder and really strengthen your core muscles (that’s the muscles in your stomach and back).

Prevent Back Pain - One of the main reasons you want strong core muscles is that it prevents injuries to your back. So many people suffer from back pain, whether it’s caused by lifting heavy objects or sitting in an office chair all day. My dad had to take a lot of time off work years ago through lifting heavy shopping bags out of the trolley and into the car. Remember, prevention is better than cure.

Flat Stomach - And for anyone who wants a flat stomach you really want to get one of these. I went to a 1-hour Swiss Ball class last year and it was probably the most gruelling exercise regime I’ve ever encountered. The following day carrying out simple tasks like opening the fridge door made my stomach muscles ache. Ouch!

If you’re looking for advice about sports injuries and want to buy products to help PhysioRoom.com is a website well worth checking out. They are based in the UK but they can ship worldwide. Here are some articles you may find interesting (all their articles are written by professionals):-

• Neck Injuries
• Hip and Thigh Injuries
• Sports Injuries Case Studies
• Ask the Sports Injuries Experts

Having spent almost four months blogging about health I just realized I’ve missed out a very important topic: memory. We all know that to keep our bodies fit and healthy we should get physical exercise and have a salad a day. But what about memory? Most of us think that loosing our memories is just something that goes hand-in-hand with getting older, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  If you want to learn how to improve you’re memory you’ll be pleasd to know that there are some memory techniques that can be learnt.  Bear in mind hower that your memory won’t magically improve over night.  You really need to work at improving your memory over time, it will happen, you just need some patience.

The Amazing Memory Kit

My mum bought The Amazing Memory Kit: Everything You Need to Improve Your Memory! a couple of years ago and, surprise surprise, forgot to use it. So over the weekend I decided to drag it out and check it over. The creator is Dominic O’Brien who has won the Wold Memory Championships eight times for being able to recall an amazing amount of information. He always believed that he was a slow learner however after seeing someone recall 52 playing cards in the correct order he decided to investigate a way of remembering better.

The kit includes a 63-page book which describes the various techniques of improving memory; a Magical Memory Journey Mapbook; a Memory Wheel and Memory Cards.

Memory Techniques

When I first looked at the kit I thought that it would be full of IQ-style questions designed to give your brain a mental workout. However when I started reading the book I realized that it’s more of a system which you have to learn and develop.

Visual Imagery

Many of the techniques involve the imagination and creating bizarre stories. For instance, if you have to memorize a list of 10 objects you should include those objects in a crazy story. Here’s the beginning of a story he tells in the book: “An ATHLETE who is starting to FLAG hit the DUST when a GOLBLIN struck him on the TEMPLE with a stone…”

The more crazy the imagery is the more likely you are to remember it.

Other techniques include imagining that you are placing object into drawers eg a bottle of BOLinger is placed in the BOLIVIA drawer. I’m not so keen on this technique myself, but I’m working on it. Of course, everyone is different; you might like this technique straight away.

Memory Journeys

Is there a journey you do so often you can remember it inside out? For instance going to work or the gym? Well, use that mental map to attach objects to landmarks on the journey. Again the more bizarre the imagery the more it will stick in your mind. Included in the kit is the journey map which is great for people who find it difficult to use their own mental journey. I used this book yesterday and was able to remember 25 objects perfectly. I imagined all sort of strange things including stealing sunglasses from a scare crow and using a guitar to play volleyball. I can still remember the 25 objects in the correct order today.

Remembering Faces

This is the part I really have to work a lot more on. When you first meet some one you need to look at their most distinguishing feature and somehow link it to their name using imagery/word association. The kit comes with a wheel that you can rotate that has 13 faces, names and careers on it. You can rotate the discs to give more than 2,000 “party guests”.

Remember Numbers

Let’s face it, numbers are pretty dull. Which is why Dominic has created some techniques to combat memory blocks. He created the DOMINIC method which involves allocating a letter to a number. For instance, 1 = A, 2 = B and 3 = C. These letters then become the initials of famous people. If you want to remember 23 then that would be BC which might be Bill Clinton.

At first I didn’t understand the point in doing this. It all sounds a bit of a palaver. However if you need to remember really long strings of numbers then you can put the names of famous people into your journey map.

To remember 237263 it might be Bill Clinton (23) is washing your car, then you see George Bush (72) pulling hamburgers out a trash can, at the bus stop you see Sean Connery (63) begging for spare change.

Alternatively you can look at the shape of each number and decide what it resembles. For instance a swan looks like a 2 whilst a boomerang looks like the number 7.

Conclusion

The book is really easy to read so you don’t have to worry about it being too technical. Obviously you’ll want to re-read it a number of times to fully understand the concepts but overall it’s very accessible for the average person. Don’t expect to read through the book and suddenly be able to remember better than you did yesterday. You will need to work at it.

The book also talks about using the above techniques to remember poems, speeches and remaining composed during a job interview. These things, you could say, are more practical than just remembering lists as a party trick.

I really like the kit and would recommend anyone who wants to improve or maintain their memory to buy The Amazing Memory Kit. The more you work on it the better you’ll become.

William kindly left a comment on my blog post How to Improve Your Eyesight Naturally saying that he’s got a blog called Improving My Eyesight. On his blog he shares what he’s been doing to improve his eyesight through exercise and nutrition. Some commenters have shared their experiences too.

I learnt something very interesting on his blog, it seems according to research, if you exercise your eyes for 30 seconds every day, your memory can increase by 10% Now all you’ve go to do is remember to do your exercises.