Archive for the ‘General Health’ Category

During my multiple former lives as a child care director, high school cheerleader coach, and health club owner, I was required to take CPR many times.  The problem was, by the next week I couldn’t remember how many compressions and how many rescue breaths they said to do!

This uncertainty can cause people to hesitate if they find themselves in a situation where they actually need to use their emergency life-saving training.  And every second counts when CPR is needed!

Now the doctors at the Sarver Heart Center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine have developed a new technique called “continuous chest compression CPR.”  This method does not include mouth-to-mouth breathing at all.  Here is a video demonstration.

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In the last post we talked about the dangers of having too much belly fat inside your abdominal wall, the visceral fat.  So the two questions we need to answer are:

1. How do I know if I have visceral fat?
2. What can I do about it?

How to tell if you have it

If you want to be absolutely sure and you have lots of money to spend, you can have a CT scan or MRI.  But the easiest way to tell is by using a tape measure.

Place the tape around your abdomen at the level of your belly button.  Do not measure where your waist curves in, do not suck in your tummy, and do not pull the tape tight to smash down your gut!  If you’re just going to try and “trick” yourself, don’t bother doing it at all!

What does the tape say?  If the diameter of your belly is 35 inches or more, you probably have excess visceral fat.

If you don’t want to measure but you notice that your pants are getting tight around the waist but not elsewhere, you probably have excess visceral fat.

Why me?!

Part of why you tend to gain weight in certain places is determined by your genes and your age.  Women tend to add a lot of visceral fat when they go through menopause.  If you have had children, you will be more likely to add visceral fat than women who haven’t had children.  And, oddly enough, if you were born a low birth weight baby, you are more likely to develop this unhealthy belly fat.

How can I prevent or get rid of it?

Guess what?  Getting rid of belly fat is easier than getting rid of thigh or hip fat! Follow these tips for reducing visceral fat in your belly:

• Don’t smoke. Smokers tend to store more fat in their abdomens than any place else.
• Take care of your emotional health. Women who are stressed or depressed accumulate more visceral fat.
• Get the right amount of sleep. Regularly sleeping less than 6 or more than 8 hours per night is linked to gaining belly fat.
• Get plenty of calcium. Women who have more calcium in their diets tend to put on less visceral fat.
• Exercise. Get at least 30 minutes a day of exercise.
• Eat healthy. Follow a balanced diet that keeps you at a healthy weight.

What doesn’t work?

• Crunches Although crunches help tighten your muscles, they don’t reduce belly fat.
• Liposuction This procedure removes subcutaneous fat, not visceral fat.

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Do you have a higher percentage of belly fat than fat in other locations such as the thighs or hips?

If so, you could be at risk for multiple health problems.  Even if belly fat isn’t a problem for you right now, it could become a problem as you age.

Before the middle of the 1990s, doctors and researchers considered fat cells to be nothing more than places the body stored fat for future use as an energy source.  But since that time they have discovered that fat cells are actually quite active.

It turns out that fat cells function a lot like glands that produce hormones and other molecules which can affect other parts of the body, leading to chronic health conditions.

There are two kinds of fat.

Subcutaneous fat, which makes up around 90% of all body fat, is a layer of fat stored just below the skin.  In some people, this is a thin layer; in others it is quite thick.  This type of fat can feel soft and squishy when you pinch or poke it.

Visceral fat is the second type of fat.  It occurs inside the abdominal wall,  filling up the spaces surrounding your internal organs.  You can’t feel it from the outside because the abdominal wall surrounding it is tough and firm.

Both of these fat types produce hormones but the visceral fat cells are more active and have a much more negative effect.

So what type of health problems are we talking about?

The hormones produced by visceral fat have been linked to these health conditions:

• high blood pressure
• type 2 diabetes
• higher triglycerides
• lower HDL (good cholesterol)
• colon cancer
• asthma
• dementia
• breast cancer
• rectal cancer

In the next post we’ll talk about how to know if you have visceral fat and what you can do about it.

Will this kill you?

Recently I saw an alarming video clip from the Today show.  The people being interviewed talked about all the horrible, dangerous, bacteria-laden filth that covers our floors.  They made it sound as if you dropped a Cheerio on your floor, then picked it up and popped it in your mouth, you would keel over dead in a matter of seconds!

People!  Stop and think! Since elementary school science class you have known that there are germs everywhere.  Not only germs on the floor but germs in the air, in the water, on your table, in your bed.  We live surrounded by them, even covered in them, every day!  I’m grossed out every time I see that commercial about how your mattress doubles in weight because of all the dust mite carcasses that collect there!

But be honest.  You have to admit that, at least once in your life, you have eaten something off the floor. Maybe you dropped a Frito or an Oreo….

Anyway, what happened when you ate it? Chances are, if you’re reading this, you didn’t die.  Did you have to call 911?  Did you have to take to your bed for several days?  Did you have even one tiny symptom of illness from eating that food off the floor?  Most likely, the answer is NOTHING happened!

Have you ever personally know someone who got sick or died from eating something off the floor?  Probably not.

In fact, have you ever seen a news story about someone who died as a result of floor-eating? I haven’t.

Now, I’m not saying that floors are sterile and we should eat entire meals off them.  I’m not saying that you should allow your child to lick the floor.  And there are some people with compromised  immune systems who have to be much more cautious than the rest of us.

What I’m trying to say is you should apply your own personal knowledge base to a situation before panicking  over alarmist stories you see on TV.  After all, television is in the entertainment business, and stories with a disgusting factor are big sellers.

I once saw a documentary about all the micro-organisms that live on your skin.  It made me feel itchy for days picturing all those critters slithering and crawling all over me. But, when I breast fed my baby, I didn’t dip my boobies in boiling water or pour bleach on them!  Children have been nursing for generations and I’ve never heard of a single one who was killed by breast bacteria!

I suggest coming up with a list of floor eating rules that are within your tolerance level.  Here’s my list:

1. Don’t eat mushy food that has to be scraped up off the floor (mashed potatoes, custard, etc.)
2. Don’t eat off floors in public places.  I used to teach high school and would not even walk barefoot there!
3. If you have guests, don’t serve them food that has touched the floor.  You can’t force your rules on others.
4. Don’t eat food off the floor if you didn’t see it being dropped.  It could have fallen from the neighbor boy’s mouth.
5. If the dropped food is protected by a colorful candy shell, you are home free!  Those suckers have magic properties and can even survive for weeks between couch cushions!

I’d love to see your comments about this post.  Please share it with your followers and friends so we can get a real discussion going!

Ever notice how a gloomy mood can take over because of the silliest thing?

I try to post to this blog at least 3 times per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  It’s been a little more difficult lately because I’ve had to take on more outside work to make ends meet, but I’ve still been able to pretty much keep up with my self-imposed schedule.  Until last Friday….

The last time I missed posting  I was dog-sitting at my sister’s house.  First of all, let me just say that I am not a dog person and she has three dogs who all live inside and insist on touching me with their horrible, gigantic, wet nostrils. I couldn’t correctly adjust the heating system so it was always freezing downstairs and burning up upstairs.  And when she said (as she was walking out the door) that there was nothing to eat in the house, she really meant it!  (Who asks someone to stay at their house for 4 days and doesn’t provide food?!)  Needless to say, I could hardly concentrate on checking Twitter, much less write a coherent blog post!

But I digress.  What happened last Friday?  On Thursday I had a lovely afternoon of lunch and shopping with my daughter.  It so happens that I needed a dress to wear to my niece’s wedding.  Now, I’ve been following a new eating/exercise plan lately and am feeling really fit, healthy, and energetic, and was pretty sure I might have dropped a dress size.

But no!!  Not only did I need the same size, it wasn’t even loose as though I was about to change sizes!  As the afternoon and evening wore on I felt crummier and crummier about this.  I’m not sure why.  Possibly because I was with my size 2 daughter (although I was never a size 2 even at birth!) and she saw my tummy which I wish could be transplanted on to my butt.

Anyway, by Friday night I was over it but I couldn’t believe that such a small thing could work into such a major disappointment in my mind!  Is it just me or do little things sometimes throw you a curve too?

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep things more in perspective in the future, at least for the next couple of weeks until I have to dog-sit again.  This time it will be my sister’s dogs and her teenage daughter……..