Ace Quality Info

Quite a lot of us spend time worrying about something that happens in our lives although for most of us this worry does not last too long at any one time. Unfortunately there are people who spend almost their entire lives worrying about something, and their worries become part of anxiety symptoms which trap them in a never ending cycle that in turn produces an anxiety disorder.

This cycle of endless worry and anxiety is known as a mental disorder as opposed to a physical disorder. Anxiety symptoms can manifest themselves both physically and psychologically. Anxiety disorders happen when our brain warns us about a perceived danger that is about to occur. In this situation your body will ready itself for a fight or flight reaction. Your heart, lungs and other parts of your body will work faster and produce stress hormones and adrenaline to cope with that perceived danger.

This in turn can trigger abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, dry mouth, rapid heartbeat, palpitations, tightness and pain in the chest region, shortness of breath, dizziness, frequent urination and even difficulty in swallowing. This list covers just the physical effects that anxiety disorders produce.

Psychological anxiety symptoms on the other hand include insomnia, irritability, anger, the inability to concentrate on various day to day tasks, a fear of madnessor of losing your mind and mental faculties, which can be combined with a sense of being detached from reality and not having the ability to control your actions.

As if that isn't enough, apart from these anxiety symptoms you may also experience emotional symptoms. This could lead to a constant feeling of unease that has nothing to do with your present situation. You might that you experience enhanced anxiety due to being involved in a stressful situation like pressure at work or within a relationship. Your anxiety symptoms may then rear their heads, possibly leading to more anxiety about suffering from an illness, real or imagined because of the physical symptoms you are experiencing in relation to your anxiety. Couple with your body’s reaction to perceived dangerous threats, these emotional stresses can and will increase your anxiety symptoms dramatically.

When you first experience anxiety your doctor must be able to diagnose your complaint. The doctor has to be able to decide if your symptoms are a medical condition or if they are a mental problem. Once you have been identified as having an anxiety disorder, treatment to cure or control your condition can begin.

The symptoms stated above may be considered as anxiety symptoms if they are of a prolonged or severe state or if the feelings of anxiety come into existence when there is nothing dangerous or stressful in your current situation to cause them. If your anxiety symptoms start to interfere with your everyday life and activities like work or social events then you can be pretty certain that you are suffering from anxiety disorder.

If you do suspect yourself to be suffering from anxiety symptoms get your self-diagnosis confirmed as soon as possible by a qualified medical practitioner so that they can recommend a treatment which will help to cure these symptoms for you. There are many good practitioners available who can help you to overcome these symptoms, and learn how to rid yourself of this level of distress.

If you're one of us unfortunates who’s either constantly going back and forth between one diet or another, or who knows they need to watch what they eat but always seem to be too busy to do this effectively, then you need to know that there is help out there!

I have to confess that I before I discovered this I would go from one diet plan to another and stick with it only long enough for it to work a little. After a short time I would find it increasingly difficult to stick with it and would go back to my old eating habits. Naturally this wasn’t healthy, but by a great effort on my part (and the intervention of internet searches) I have been able to turn my whole life around. Instead of alternately bingeing and dieting I’m now joining the healthy route of sensible eating ideas and regular exercise. The main help I have with this is in using a few really tasty low fat recipes that I found on the internet which really help me with my new get-fit regime.

Until I hit on these recipes, I had found there weren’t really too many things that I could eat that were quick to prepare but also good for me and tasty. Previously, I had scorned low fat foods and meals since they didn’t seem to taste very good, but recently I’ve learned a lot, and have become quite inventive at finding ways to make easy low fat recipes that tickle my taste buds.

Eating low fat meals really is a sensible way to contain your excess food and fat intake. Having easy low fat recipes on hand however, just makes it all the more easier for you to stick to the new plan. Think about it, if you have to slave over the stove for a long time only to produce something that’s only slightly edible, and has no compensation of fats in it either would you really do it? If you're like me, that's a definite no, no. Everyone needs motivation to do something and using easy low fat recipes is one the best ways that I’ve found to stay on my sensible eating regime.

Many of these recipes are easy to remember, and to rejig a little for a simple, yet different meal choice, they don’t need to utilize a lot of ingredients either. If you need a little extra motivation, you can always stick them on cards to your fridge. I’ve really found that easy low fat recipes are my ticket to getting myself back into a good routine, and my weight back into a good balance. So if you want to give this a try, go to your favourite search engine and type in low fat recipes, you should be amazed what you'll come up with to help you. Good Luck!

Did you know that sleep deprivation can cause all kinds of physical problems and also lead to memory loss, dulled reflexes and is a major cause of accidents in work and on the roads?

Just a thought to bear in mind next time that you are pushing yourself a little too hard for those last minute reports, exam studies (or clubbing activities).

Our bodies reward us for taking a little care of them and sleep is as important to healthy functioning as is a balanced diet and a little exercise.

Technorati Profile

One of the main (overlooked) reasons for being over or even underweight, can be that your body is just not getting the right nutrition for it's needs. This can lead to a variety of different ailments that your body just is not equipped to handle. In such cases you could be exposing yourself unnecessarily to further risk from infection which your body will find increasingly dificult to handle in that state.

If you think this is you, then supplementing your diet with nutritional supplements might be a useful thing for you. Nutritional supplements are also good if you are an athlete or if you are a firm exercise fanatic. They can help you to cope with the added stress that your body receives when you’re exercising. Nutritional supplements are also able to help you cope with some medical ailments as well, although they shouldn’t be taken as a replacement for conventional medication.

Always remember that nutritional supplements are just that – supplements. They will supplement your diet and give you the vital vitamins and minerals that it is easy to overlook in your normal diet. If you think that you might benefit from nutritional supplements though you should first talk this over with your doctor, especially if you’re taking conventional medication of any kind, as you wouldn’t want any supplements that you take to react adversely with your prescription medication.

Having said that, many people these days are aware of the potential benefits of nutritional supplements and indeed, take some form or other of them to ensure that they receive the correct balance of nutrients for their body. It is an unfortunate but true fact that the diet many people follow today isn’t a very healthy one, and most of the nutrients that we would normally receive from eating natural foods like fruits and vegetables is vastly lacking. Processed food can all too easily take the place of eating healthily and its' allure threatens to keep pulling us back into the cauldron of “bad” eating habits.

Nutritional supplements come in the form of vitamin tablets, or herbal tablets, as powders, tinctures, or syrups. Sometimes you’ll even find them in the form of protein shakes and suchlike, so if you feel that you will benfit from them, there is usually a format to suit your needs.

Always remember however, that although nutritional supplements can be very helpful at times to supplement the nutrition we receive and ensure that we receive a well balanced diet, the most healthy approach to a balanced diet is to gain as much nutrition as possible from healthy foodstuff such as vegetables, fruit and protein, as well as dairy and carbohydrate in moderation.

If you’ve dieted at any time within the past few years, there’s a good chance that the diet you went on was one of the many low carb diets that are around these days. It's hard to believe that the very first of the low carb diets, the Atkins diet, has actually been around for about 30 years, because the huge trend for low carb diets has only taken off comparatively recently.

The major trend can be accounted for by media hype plus the fact that there appear to have been a number of genuine success stories. Then if you throw in a celebrity or two to the mix, you can see why this trend has grown so much in recent years. Provide enough positive coverage and everybody jumps on the bandwagon which is what happened in this case for low carb diets.

What you need to ask yourself if you’re thinking of trying one of these low carb diets is if the Atkins diet is so popular now, and really works to help you in reducing your weight, why didn’t it gain in popularity long before this? After all if it has been around for as long as 30 years, where were the original success stories? 30 years is a long time for a diet to be around when it's only been popular for the past few of those.

Another serious consideration here is, if these low carb diets are as good for you as all the books and practitioners of the diets will tell you, then why is there so much opposition to these diets from nutritional and medical sources? These are questions that many people choose to ignore becuase if all you want to do is lose some weight in the short term, then these low carb diets may seem to be ideal for you. Without doing some research and answering these questions for yourself, the only thing you won’t truly know for certain is what kind of long term effects these low carb diets will have on your system.

Sure you’ll reduce the weight and lose the fat off your frame in the short term, but at what cost? The Atkins diet isn’t the only low carb diet that you will find advertised out there these days. There’s the ever popular Zone diet, the South Beach Diet, the Hollywood diet, the Stillman diet, and a whole host of other low carb diets. They are all pretty similar diets in that they promote a high fat, high protein, and low carb intake in order to reduce weight fast. Each of the diets has its slight differences and quirks though so which one you choose depends entirely on what you’ve heard, or read, about these low carb diets.

For the constant yo-yo dieter these low carb diets may seem to be just what they need, because despite any drawbacks that they may have, they do work for enough people in the short term, and they do help you to lose weight initially. If you’re going to diet, and it doesn’t matter overly much to you which diet you choose as long as it helps you to lose weight and keep that weight off, you should always choose to eat and diet sensibly. Remember that losing a few pounds quickly won’t help you in the long term because keeping weight down means changing your eating patterns for life rather than for the course of the diet until you reach your goal.

Following on from the Healthy Living post, I don't know about you, but I regularly used to buy-out the magazine stand when I do food shopping. At least when it came to those glossy slimming, or dieting magazines. I was forever on the lookout for any information that I could find on these subjects and although I tried hard to stick to the healthy living principles I outlined previously, I found I could still do with losing a few pounds and therefore found the true-life stories of some of those people to be positively inspiring, (at least emotionally).

In one of these magazines though, I once stumbled across a nutrition article about types of eating habits, and started reading through it quite idly, as you do. On that occasion I was stunned to find that I could barely put the magazine down though and actually went to the coffee bar so that I could sit and finish it before taking the groceries home, it was that interesting.

Basically it helped me to face up to the kind of eater I was – (the boredom eater, - I ate when I was bored or tired) – and it showed me a few great ways in which I could try and control my bad eating habits. For example, because I ate when I was bored it was recommended that I choose cookies and cakes carefully if I needed to buy them for the family to have around (ie. pick ones that I didn't like so much so that I would think twice before nibbling at them) and keep a few nutritious snacks that I particularly like around the house to help assuage my boredom hunger when it struck. This was fairly easy to do since I love my fruits and all I did was stock up more on the fruits I especially like and kept them handy.

The next suggestion was slightly more difficult because I'm a bit of a chocaholic, but the nutrition article was adamant about this, so I stopped buying chocolate as a regular part of the shopping. The article pointed out, (quite rightly) that if and when I had a chocolate craving it would be more of a deterrent if I had to go out and buy it. Unfortunately, the same applies to ice cream, but you know what they say about "no pain - no gain".

The nutrition article went on to tell me about the various foods that I should include in my everyday diet, and which ones I should stay away from. It explained the food guide pyramid in great detail and gave me a great insight into how I could better manage my meals. I also found that I was eating most of the “right” foods but that I was eating them in the wrong quantities, and my main problem was that I was also including the boredom snacks...

The nutrition article that I came across that day was to me heaven-sent, it's weird isn't it how you come across one thing that suddenly switches on that light bulb in your head, enabling you to just make that change that you have longed for for so long? I now have trained myself to eat healthier snacks of fruit, and sometimes carrots if I do get caught by the boredom demon. However I also indulge myself in the finer things in life by eating all the good-for-me food that I want and even include the occasional chocolate or ice cream in my regular menu - just never when I am reaching for it simply because I am bored! On those occasions I either find myself something else to occupy my thoughts or I choose a piece of fruit or a couple of carrot sticks.

In recent times much is being made of the stressful way in which we live. The "Rat Race" is a much used term & one only has to visit the larger cities such as London or New York, to view for yourself how much faster is the pace of everyday life. The first time that we visited London for example, we were almost swept off our feet by the tide of human traffic on the rush hour tube & found ourselves caught up in the hectic pace, rushing from one station to the next or to the nearest exit even though at that time we were on holiday!

Even in the smaller towns, work & home life are becoming increasingly pressurised areas as we strive to achieve our career goals, earn higher wages to provide better for our growing families & sometimes simply to stay afloat in the business world. Home has greater expectations, with many of us striving to maintain the outward appearance of belonging to whatever neighbourhood we have chosen to live in. Our homes must have the right accessories as must our families, the children must go to the right schools & we must wear the right clothes, drive the right car etc.

In such a context healthy living has come to mean different things I think. There is the kind of healthy which demands that we eat & grow only organic produce, that we follow the latest "Healthy Diet", that we follow a particular exercise plan & conform to whatever is the most recent guideline from the most fashionable guru.

Then if we are lucky we have the (possibly) more down to earth version of healthy living that enables us to choose our own path, which maybe mixes organic & non-organic produce a little, which enables us to listen more to our bodies in terms of what we should eat & how much we should drink. Many of the latest suggestions involve eating a balanced diet containing a little of everything with extra portions of vegetables & fruit to increase our vitamin intake & energy levels. Drinking plenty of water, remembering that this does not include the water used in tea, coffee & sugary drinks. If we want our body to respond favourably, we are told that we need to eat, drink & exercise in moderation & sleep well at night, indeed apart from sleeping, it would seem that moderation in most things is now believed to be the key to that new healthy you.

So if you want to have a healthy lifestyle, try getting 8 hours sleep every night, eating plenty of fresh produce & moderate amounts of protein, carbohydrates & even sweets, drink plenty of water along with moderate amounts of your other favourite beverages & learn to manage your stress levels. Practise taking several deep & slowly released breaths before speaking when you are in a situation where you feel tense or even angry, use that extra thinking time to choose your words in this situation.

Smile often to yourself during the day (& evening), make a conscious effort to think of something that makes you smile however briefly. It is difficult to be angry or sad if you are smiling. See if your friends notice the difference (enough to comment without you mentioning it).