Grab Bag Cold Season Tip:
Cold season is coming. The folks at RealAge (FYI… a great site, headed by Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen) report this important tidbit: If you want to do your best to avoid colds, get some extra sleep. In a 14 day study, getting less than 7 hours of sleep made people three times more likely to get sick after exposure to a virus than those who got 8 or more hours. Here’s what they had to say:
Seems your immune system takes a hit from both lack of sleep and poor sleep. In fact, poor sleep may have an even bigger impact than short sleep. People in the study were five times more likely to get sick when their sleep quality dipped — even if it just dipped a smidge. Are you tossing and turning at night? Take the RealAge Sleep Quiz to find out why — and how to fix it.
Deprivation Dampens Immunity. Two important weapons your immune system needs to fight disease: natural killer cells and interleukin-2. But poor sleep impairs them both, so amp these immune-system helpers back up with these sound-slumber strategies:
- Dive deep. Into sleep, that is, with this Deep Sleep Plan from the YOU Docs.
- Step away from the laptop. Find out why surfing the Web just before bed can keep you awake all night.
- Practice good hygiene. Here are the essential sleep-hygiene habits that lead to better sleep.
And avoid these bedtime no-nos if you want a good night’s rest.
Grab Bag Get Fit Moment:
Get up, get out, and give Crossfit a try. Crossfit is a programmed exercise method that now has hundreds of affiliates around the country (and the world). Every day is a different prescribed workout that all Crossfit facilities will use for that day. The exercises generally incorporate the whole body and draw from weight lifting, martial arts, yoga and sports training. The results can be profound.
Don’t let the look of the Crossfit website fool you… this exercise concept is adapted constantly for the level of the participant. The Crossfitters say that the physical needs of the Olympic athlete and your grandparents vary only by degree, not kind. One Crossfit client that works at my local facility is an 84 year old woman. I urge you to contact a local affiliate and give it a go. It’s flexible and affordable, and gives you a great workout. Click on the links below to learn more.
(click on your state name in the left column)
Grab Bag “It’s That Simple” Moment:
Note: I am passionate about eating well. By well, I don’t mean gourmet, but that’s not excluded. What I really mean is eating what your body NEEDS. I don’t have a degree in nutrition, but I sure do read a lot. If you or someone you know is struggling with weight issues, feel free to email me or write a comment below, and I can happily share what I have learned. But let me tell you now… if you’re not willing to make permanent changes, you’re not willing to lose the weight. OK… here’s my rant:
So the over-the-counter weight loss drug, Alli, and its prescription big brother, Xenical, are being investigated for potential connections to liver disease. Forgetting this drug in particular, did anyone REALLY think there would be no collateral damage with such a concept? Does anyone HONESTLY think that weight issues can be erased with a pill? Remember Fen-phen and the resulting heart risks it carried? That resulted in a $13 BILLION dollar payout in damages.
Kids, I gotta tell ya… there is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny and there are no magic bullets OR magic diet pills that are good for you.
The human system functions beautifully and efficiently, based on a QUALITY caloric intake and REASONABLE caloric expenditure. And no amount of bells, whistles, smoke, mirrors and pills is going to change that in a meaningful and sustainable way. The ideal diet must be void of empty, low-nutrient, high fat calories, and it should be ENOUGH TO SUPPORT PHYSICAL ACTIVITY, but not enough to support excess body fat.
This latest possible indictment of diet drugs IS valuable, however, if only to drive home the point that sound nutrition is the one true path to weight control salvation. Can I have a hallelujah?
Show me someone who is overweight, and I will show you someone who is stuck in a series of bad eating habits, many of which they are not aware.
Do you or someone you know have weight to lose? If so, please truthfully answer the following questions:
1. Do you eat small meals or snacks every 4 hours?
2. Do you consume some high quality (eggs, lean meats, fowl, fish, nuts, low fat dairy, fermented soy) protein at each of those meals or snacks?
3. Are half of your meals or snacks made up of fresh fruits and/or vegetables?
4. Do you stay away from nearly all packaged foods?
5. Do you stay away from white flour products and refined sugar products?
6. Do you nearly always drink just water and green tea for your daily liquid intake?
I believe once you can answer yes to just these 6 questions, it’s only a matter of weeks before you will be your ideal weight.
And yes, for nearly everyone, it IS that simple. I didn’t say easy, I just said simple. Alright, I’ll back down off my soapbox now.
Grab Bag Weirdly Fascinating Moment:
I’m not sure how this woman can actually walk around normally. I think she might be part boa constrictor.
Grab Bag Nostalgia Moment:
Warning… Under 40? You might not get this, but these were the days we grew up in, and the perspective we often view the world from is summed up below the images here….
Here’s a worthy reflection that has been circling the internet:
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took gym, not PE…and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option… Even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a white dress and a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
And I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
Oh yeah… And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either, because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known how desperately we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes.
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive it all?
Grab Bag Brain Game:
Take a ball, drag it to the different tools offered, in the correct order, to make it match the picture on the box.
Grab Bag Funny Stuff:
If you liked Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live doing “Dick in a Box”, here is the sequel: WARNING… hilariously adult material..
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LK's Grab Bag 