Health & Fitness

The Weekly Round-Up: An Introduction

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First post by our new contributor, Hamza:

How’s it going readers? Starting from today, I’ll be putting up a couple of links from around the blogosphere of articles that are either a must-read, extremely useful, or just plain interesting. These will of course be sticking to the themes of healthy living, productivity, business, personal finance, inspiration and life in general.

Without further ado, here are 8 interesting articles for the week ending Sunday, 12/04.

Stay tuned for the next weekly round-up!

Health Calculators

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Thee very useful links for anyone concerned about calories in our food and other health indicators:

Calories Burned provides a calcalutor where you input your weight, activity and duration. A 76-kg person can burn 44 calories while sitting and blogging for half an hour, or 153 calories by swimming for the same amount of time!

Calories Calculator is a helpful tool to measure the amount of calories and fat in what we eat. E.g. a medium size banana has only 0.6 gm of fat and 105 calories, while half a cup of banana chips have 16 gm of fat and 239 calories!

Health Calculators is part of Medindia.com that offers many useful calculators e.g. heart rate, blood pressure, stress meter, drugs directory, calories in Indian food, teeth chart and even world population and death clocks!

If you want to control your weight but find calorie counting too complicated, stay tuned for the next post on easy steps to better health and fitness.

Health Facts

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Some useful facts from Women’s Health (April issue):

  • Increasing your water consumption by one liter a day for a year can result in five pounds of weight loss.
  • Obese people are more likely to develop age-related macular degeneration – AMD, a disease that destroys part of the eye responsible for seeing detail.
  • Eating red meat increases the risk of malignant tumors.
  • How much more likely you are to be overweight if you eat quickly and until you feel full: 3 x

Calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index)

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A good first step towards improving your health is to bring your weight to normal. And BMI is supposed to be the best indicator of whether you are ‘normal’, ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’.

Here’s a useful calculator to calculate BMI.

You can also download a ready reference table where you can match your height and weight to find out your BMI. There are other more accurate ways which take into account gender and frame etc. but this one is a good start.

How to achieve and maintain a ‘normal’ weight is another story 🙂

Excuses for Not Exercising

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Some excerpts from an article in this month’s The Oprah Magazine:

“I am already too busy – I can’t deal with one more thing I’m supposed to do.” Too many women put their jobs, obligations, and the people they care for before themselves. Most women wouldn’t say out loud, ‘I am not as important and I don’t deserve the time’, but that’s exactly what their actions say. Try justifying regular trips to the gym by reminding yourself that unless your needs are met, you’ll have trouble meeting the needs of those counting on you.

“How can I exercise when I am always tired?” First you have to realize that there are two types of energy – physical and mental – and they feed off each other. Chances are, you’re mentally tired from sitting at your job all day, and you need to get your blood circulating to rev your engine again. Tell yourself, I will do just ten minutes. And call it quits if you are still slogging after ten full minutes.

“I’ll start out gung ho, but I know I’ll get bored and quit.” Predicting failure is a classic way of protecting yourself. Rule out success, and you don’t have to try. If you are put off by the thought of setting up an effective program, consider spending a bit extra on a personal trainer to get you through the challenging first few weeks.