Lifestyle Choices

Do you find it difficult to fall asleep until well after midnight, yet are able to sleep a normal length of time if you don’t have to get up for work? Or, do you fall asleep too early in the evening and wake up too early in the morning? If so, your biological clock may be out of sync with your preferred sleep-wake schedule.

Someone with delayed sleep phase syndrome has sleep-onset and wake times that are later than desired, but little or no difficulty maintaining sleep once it has begun. Many adolescents, because of their neurophysiology as well as school and social schedules, suffer from this syndrome. (more…)

I’ve read a lot about women who serenely cope with the three roles of full-time working woman, wife, and mother. However, I’ve never actually met one. All the ones that I know feel inadequate.

Going back to work after having children is a practical and emotional problem and both are interdependent. You risk worrying about them when you’re at work and about work when you’re at home, and end up being happy in neither situation.

Two requisites for a working mother are stamina and an understanding family Sympathetic they may be until it comes to your interests versus theirs, but they still want their evening meal on time and they don’t want to hear about the bus queue which made you late. (more…)

Should you work part-time or full- time? It depends on your needs. When I had my first baby I did part- time design work at home. Then I worked full-time from an office with resident home help. Then I worked full-time at home with no home help. Now I work at home, full-time during the term and theoretically not at all during school holidays. I have found it easiest (but not always possible) to go out to work full-time, and pay for adequate home help. For me working part-time seemed to involve twice the work for half the money with none of the office perks and protection. (more…)

You’ve no doubt heard plenty about smoking and your health, that your lungs and heart could be seriously damaged by the prolonged use of cigarettes. But one of the funny things about being young is that you don’t believe any of those terrible things could happen to you. Heart disease, lung cancers are for somebody else, somebody who is, well, old, but not for you. You’re different. You’re young and pretty and healthy … aren’t you?

Well, even if you don’t believe the doctors’ warnings about smoking and health, you may be convinced by some cold, hard facts about smoking and your looks. Cigarettes damage the outside as well as the inside of your body, and some of the effects aren’t too attractive. For instance, the negative effect of smoking on the circulation can show up in puffy bags under the eyes. Nicotine leaves permanent stains on the teeth, making them a dingy yellow or brown. If you hang on to the habit long enough, you may develop stains on your fingertips. Cigarettes leave a stale, acrid smell in your hair, on your clothes, and on your breath. Finally, you may even develop a nasty chronic cough, and the quality of your voice could become raspy and harsh.

Now that you’ve thought about some of the effects on your appearance, maybe you’ll want to think again before lighting up. Smoking and being beautiful just don’t mix and wouldn’t you really rather be beautiful?

Every woman has two kinds of energy, male and female. Male energy is like the sun—invigorating, stimulating, creative, and powerful. The male postures in yoga call forth this dynamic energy and release it.

Female energy is recuperative, calming, nurturing, and gentle. The female postures are restoring to body, mind, and spirit. Yoga attempts to release male and female energies and ultimately to fuse them in union—to integrate the person.

The first four postures are male. They are done standing and they revitalize you. The last four are female and calming. In order to achieve the best balance and effect, it is best to do them in the order in which Geoffrey recommends them. (more…)

Where behaviorist techniques can help change the outer things that affect your appetite and eating patterns, creative imagery can help your inner attitudes. And attitudes are important. For how you see yourself, how you think of yourself, and how you think of food, day after day, has a great deal to say about what you become—fat or thin, in control or out of control, truly responsible for yourself or at the mercy of others and circumstances.

In recent years, many useful techniques of meditation, often coupled with guided fantasy or creative imagery, have been developed. They can be helpful to the dieter in three ways. First, all of them demand the use of some form of deep relaxation practiced twice a day. (more…)

Step Four: Take a Look at How Fast You Eat

Overweight people tend to eat much faster than their slimmer friends. When you eat too fast you bring about two negative effects, both of which should be eliminated from any weight-loss diet. First, eating fast makes you unaware of both the taste of what you are eating and also how much of it is going down. You eat a lot simply because you have no real idea of how much you are taking in. This, and the fact that you will not be able to digest fully the starches you eat unless you chew them thoroughly, make it important that you slow down. (more…)

Behavioral psychologists begin with the notion that eating behavior is learned and maintained as a result of interaction between you and your environment. And their definition of environment includes everything around you—people, events, things you see and respond to. These psychologists are not very interested in deep-seated motives for compulsive eating and they acknowledge that there is nothing you can do to change your genetic inheritance. But what you can do, they say, is to get to grips with overweight by looking at it as a voluntary disorder brought about by habit and environmental stimuli (remember how the habit of eating at certain times or the sight of food triggers hunger in overweight people). Change your environment, they say, and you will alter your habits and your eating patterns so you lose weight and keep it off. (more…)

Lean is supposed to be beautiful. As a result, some women spend most of their adult lives trying to get thin and stay that way. For, in our society, thinness has become a symbol of loveliness, success, self-control, and social acceptability—and being overweight the twentieth-century bete noire of womanhood. You know the kind of thing: “Lose that nasty twenty-five pounds with our super new slenderizing regimen and it will transform your life into a wonderful world of bliss.” Well, don’t believe it. (more…)

Your unconscious mind is tremendously powerful. It is a source of energy and creativity which—provided you can get in touch with it and turn it toward your desired ends—will work wonders for you. The use of creative imagery specifically geared to slimming can help you harness your own power. Following the principles of creative imagery, here are a few imaginary trips you can take to help you slim. Some will bring insight and increased self-awareness, others will help you get accustomed to yourself as a healthy, lean woman, still others can help you shed old, no longer useful thought patterns that have been hampering you. (more…)

About 5 percent of overweight is considered to be the result of a metabolic disturbance. But most often the cortical or hypothalmic dysfunctions on which overweight is blamed are the results of overweight rather than the cause. Sometimes a tendency to be fat originates in infancy. Bottle feeding and the early introduction of solid foods often result in overfeeding, which probably sets up eating patterns that are carried over into childhood and adult life. Some authorities believe too that when a baby is fed too much, it develops an excessive number of fat cells and from then on will always have a tendency to be fat. (more…)

Going on and off fad diets is an ineffective way to lose weight. It can also be dangerous, for you risk creating subclinical vitamin and mineral deficiencies that will not only affect your physical well-being and your emotional stability, but in the long run can also make your weight problem even worse. Fad diets upset your health in another way as well— because of the inevitable weight gain that follows each. When your weight seesaws up and down your skin ages more rapidly and serum cholesterol builds up in the cardiovascular system, making you more susceptible to heart disease. (more…)

The only way to lose weight is to change your eating habits permanently so you follow a life regimen of eating moderate quantities of good, wholesome food, which provides a full complement of nutrition for lasting health and beauty. This means reeducating both your palate (to expect different tasting, lighter foods) and your appetite so that you lose weight gradually. This way you also do not have any of the diet shock that leads to going off a regimen and defeats its purpose. Two pounds a week weight loss should be your goal, not more. Then you can keep it off. (more…)

Instant broth cubes are superb for quelling an appetite and they cost you only about twelve calories a cup. You can also carry them to work with you or, if you don’t have boiling water available, make them up in a thermos to take along. They are also nutritious whereas coffee and tea will do nothing for you in terms of building health and beauty. Herb teas (no calories) are also excellent although they don’t give you the same full feeling that broth does. They can be sweetened with a teaspoon of honey, which is an excellent source of essential trace elements such as zinc, copper, iron, manganese, and chromium—often in scarce supply in ordinary slenderizing regimens. (more…)

The enormous fuss that is made about cellulite always surprises me. “Does it or doesn’t it exist?” “What are its causes?” “What, if anything, can be done about it?” Such is the way women tend to treat cellulite, as if it were some kind of externally imposed curse to which they fall innocent victim.

Cellulite is the manifestation of the wrong kind of lifestyle for health and beauty: eating wrongly (or too much), living under prolonged stress, being exposed to too many pollutants, and all the other things that we tend to think we can get away with, but never really do. And no number of expensive or painful treatments is going to help the problem for long unless you change the things that brought it on in the first place. (more…)

When there is a serious misalignment in the body, such as a chronic stoop that begins to distort the soft S-shape curve of the spine, heavy, shapeless piano legs, or twists, curves, and bulges in parts of the body, that stays there even after the loss of excess weight, cellulite treatment, and exercise, then you need professional help. There are a number of different disciplines that can be useful. Osteopathy or chiropractic, through manipulation and specific exercises, can realign spines as well as eliminate pressures on nerves or blood vessels in the spinal area. Left unattended, these pressures may result in serious back pain, varicose veins, poor lymphatic drainage to the legs, and bad cellulite. The Alexander technique can help straighten a spine bent by years of discouragement and rehabilitate the personality that carries it in the process. Tai chi and yoga work slowly and gradually, but are capable of restoring most bodies to perfect alignment and balance as well. But I’ve found two other techniques—Rolfing and connective tissue massage—to be especially helpful in treating body problems that, by interfering with perfect form, mar beauty. (more…)

Most of the research and development into the use of fetal and placental extracts comes from Germany, where they are regularly used by dermatologists as medical, rather than strictly cosmetic, treatment. One such German preparation, available only on prescription, by the name of Cellcutana, made by Cybila Cytobiological Laboratories, in Heidelberg, is designed to stimulate and regenerate skin that has been either chemically or physically damaged and to prevent abnormal healing, including scars. It is an effective treatment for burns and premature aging. A filtrated extraction of fetal skin, fetal connective tissue, placenta, and suprarenal gland, it comes as a liquid suspension mixed with the supplied dilutant before use. Similar mixtures in diluted form can be found in many of the best French and Swiss treatment creams. (more…)

Crash diets

There are 3-day diets, 5-day diets, diets that promise you’ll drop a pound a day for 2 weeks. These are very appealing for people who want to lose weight for a special occasion. And they are the leading cause of yo-yo dieting.

Remember: If it’s fast, it won’t last.

As soon as you go back to eating the way you always have, the pounds will come back. And chances are, they’ll come back with a vengeance since the deprivation of the quick diet will have slowed your metabolism, requiring fewer calories and causing your body to store the excess as fat.

These diets claim to “jump start” your weight loss, but in fact they do just the opposite. Going on a quickie diet implies going off it. You haven’t changed your eating habits. You haven’t incorporated more activity into your day. All you’ve done is temporarily forced your metabolism into starvation mode. (more…)

The behavioural treatment of obesity is based on changing daily habits and behaviours to reach the desired goal. The basic premise of behaviour therapy is to reward beneficial behaviours and discourage detrimental ones. However, state of the art behavioural treatment has a wider perspective and focuses on eating behaviours, social support, exercise, attitudes and nutrition. The aim is to modify the situations which promote eating and to evaluate the consequences of eating behaviour. Behaviour therapy involves specific processes which are aimed at modifying behaviour.

Self-monitoring

The client is asked to monitor when she eats, how much she eats and why she eats. This increases self-awareness so that eating cannot ‘just happen’, and enables her to evaluate her success and whether any changes have occurred. put their eating into context and to learn to say ‘I am not useless, the odd slip is inevitable and I will now return to my diet‘. This eradicates an ‘all or nothing response’ which can often result in the client abandoning the diet. (more…)

The average member of Weight Watchers is 2¹/2 stone overweight. However, this number is high owing to the few obese members who push up the average. Most members have only a stone to lose. Do most of their members need to lose this weight or are they responding to media pressure to be thin?

Slimmer Clubs accept people with only a few pounds to lose. These women are encouraged to see these few pounds as a problem and something to get rid of. They are not asked why they want to be that little bit thinner.

The Cambridge diet is recommended for use by the severely overweight only, i.e. those about 50 per cent above the average weight for their height. Yet it is available to anyone who wants to lose weight — even if that person just sees themselves as fat.

Women who are not obese or even overweight also want to lose weight. They believe that if they could shed a few pounds their lives would be better and they would be happier people. These women also attend slimming clubs and read the dieting literature. (more…)