So here I am in beautiful Goa on an adventure to discover how the East approaches health and wellbeing, in particular, how they manage stress and stay so calm and happy.

I must admit that, although I am fairly fit and healthy in many ways, a peaceful mind has still eluded me. Recently, I became exhausted, adrenal fatigue they told me, which would also explain why I gained a stone in weight when i had changed nothing.

My diet was healthy, and I did more exercise in a day than most people did in a week. It just didn’t seem to make sense. Ok, I knew a little about the cortisol connection to weight gain, however, it is something hadn’t experienced first hand.

As I started to study more about this stress response, and research the people who had come on Fit Farms, it became more and more evident that the body’s biochemical reactions to our lifestyles was a huge factor in many weight problems.

Most of the men and women I speak to with weight issues, it’s not as simple as that they just started eating more, or stopped exercising. It’s a much more complex issue, and the weight is just a symptom of something being out of balance. This may be a lifestyle factor, a demanding job, or one the road all the time. It may be an emotional issue, we are dissatisfied with our lives, and as we have been brought up to reward with food, we are using food to give us pleasure. It may be the type of food itself that is causing the problem, as so many people rely on stimulants, most notably sugar to get them through the day.

Stress and other factors throw the body out of balance. This now seems to have reached epidemic proportions in Westrn society.

Through my own experiences, being let down and disillusioned by Western medicine, I have over the years looked outside of the norm for the answers. I healed my fractured spine with The Alexander Technique, and I believe that our health is in our own hands.

This time I wanted to find a cure, an antidote for stress, and what better way to learn that discovering it for yourself.

I had a feeling that yoga and meditation are a crucial element of this, and where better to learn than in India. So here I am, taking this journey, ironically after one of the most stressful weeks I have had at work in a long time.

By keeping this diary, and just sharing my experiences, I hope that my learning will help others take responsibility for their stress, and their health, and do something about it.

Without our health, we have nothing.

By FitFarms Editorial

Aging is a natural process of human development. However, leading researches show that diseases and health problems are denser in older age brackets. It becomes imperative to ask, is aging really a part of human development?

Fitness is commonly defined as the holistic summation of the overall health of individuals. This naming convention ties up with the common connotation of how to become fit such as doing regular exercise, enrolling in boot camp, religiously following a diet plan and even on scoring pounds of weight loss.

Typically, scientific researches especially on medicine and demographics put emphasis on the physical health of individuals. However, the birth of more comprehensive approaches in scientific research gives the same weight on other non-physical aspects of health such as psychological, emotional and even sociological health studies. The new comprehensive aspect of scientific research on health gave birth to the common definition of fitness. Read more…

At some point in our lives we’ve all encountered the familiar saying “we always hurt the ones we love?” We don’t always mean to hurt them hence love, but we end up doing so anyway. Case in point? Many of our kids are becoming obese.

Despite our best efforts to keep our children healthy and nourished, statistics say that there’s now an alarming rise in the number of obese children in the country. In fact, Sahar Aker’s Fat Fighter TV asks the question “should parents lose custody of extremely obese children?” According to Ms. Aker, an opinion article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says “yes”. Read more…

By FitFarms Health and Fitness Editorial

Planning to lose weight? You’re not the only one. Weight loss is simple enough, conceptually. After all, it’s simply a function of burning more calories than you take in. It should be as simple as having a proper diet and getting enough exercise. However, as we all know, it’s usually never as simple as these sounds. Most fitness programs fail well before target weights are reached. Those who succeed also typically eventually gain back the weight they’ve lost. Keeping it off may even be harder than losing it!

Many attempts at weight loss are often met with cynicism precisely because most fail to stick to their planned regimen. It often takes an enormous amount of willpower to be able to carry through with a fitness plan. This isn’t usually because dieting and exercise are physically difficult- most do not necessarily have a problem with the physical aspects of exercise. Rather, it is often the mental aspect that stymies most fitness programs.

Knowing this, it’s important to know that eating the right food and doing the right amount of exercise aren’t the only things to consider when you’re planning to lose weight. You will need to have some sort of strategy to cope with the psychological aspects of your diet plan. Fortunately, there are many ways to do this without relying purely on your innate willpower.

An Easy Way

Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to join a fit camp. It’s been proven that weight loss programs tend to be more effective when done in groups. The spirit of competition often gives participants the motivation they need to keep working towards their goals and to maintaining their target weights afterward. A fitness or weight loss camp takes this concept to a whole different level by pushing the concepts of fitness camp into higher gear. Read more…

Have you ever noticed that after finishing your usual exercise routine you somehow felt more calm, serene, relaxed and even euphoric? Evidence stemming from recent research shows a correlation between exercise and improved mental health.

Norwegian researchers recently published survey results announcing that those engaging in even small amounts of exercise report improved mental health compared to fellow survey takers who almost never got out and exercised.

A separate study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine showed that six weeks of bike riding or weight training eased the symptoms of anxiety disorder in women participants. The study further showed that weight training was particularly effective at reducing the feeling of irritability.

While the studies above have mentioned the cause and effect between exercise and mental health, it has not gone into an in-depth explanation of this relationship into the cellular level. Read more…

From the early 1960s towards the early 1980s, dieting was considered to be only a woman’s concern and preoccupation. Weight loss and reduction were synonymous with women’s fashion and was part of a beauty regimen.

This outlook however changed in the late 1980s when men suddenly started to be more health conscious. In fact, weight loss became a major concern for men as there were more health and workout centers that started to cater for their requirements for weight reduction.

Before the 1990s, liposuction has slowly emerged as an option that men took if they wanted to lose weight fast, and reduce their bulging bellies.

But behind the glamour and fads, there was an urgent need for men to start taking their health seriously. Diet and weight loss then became a common term among men like cars and sports.
According to Laurence Beeken of Weightlossresources.co.uk, “dieting should be easier for men: they have a higher metabolic rate than women and a lower propensity to store fat.” Read more…

Some common reasons people aren’t able to exercise are a) they’re too tired from work or school or b) they’re too sad to get up and do aerobics, Zumba or just a few rounds of shadow boxing. But some people believe that those excuses just don’t hold up because, apparently, exercise improves your mood. Read more…

Do you sometimes find that you’re getting winded just climbing up the stairs? Or that, as you get older, and dare we say it, a little wider around the waist, some activities just get harder? Or have you heard y our grandparents or parents complain that it’s harder to do simple things like dressing up or bathing?

This just goes to show that NOW is as good a time as any to start thinking about getting some exercise.

According to some recent reports from Reuters Health, older adults with excess weight will tend to find even daily tasks, well, tasking. But the report was quick to say, taking its cues from the study’s author, Dr. Christina Wee, that being overweight doesn’t really mean that someone’s more predisposed to being a fatality -except in the more extreme cases.

Dr. Wee, who’s from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston says, that some experts believe that there are hardly any benefits from losing weight -if any - in the elderly. In addition, losing weight might be dangerous, if not checked, because it might cause malnutrition or bone problems. Read more…

Looking for that short burst of explosiveness in your game? Why not try the latest trend in performance-enhancing exercise equipment – vibrating platforms?

Gimmick or not it seems vibrating platforms have slowly garnered the interest of not only regular gym buffs but world-class athletes like tennis star Serena Williams and Justin Morneau of the Minnesota Twins.

Interest in vibrating platforms has even drawn the kinesiology professors and exercise physiologists into researching how these equipment improves athletic performance and how they should fit within the scheme of a person’s workout routine.

Basically the idea behind it is that a person stands on top of a plate vibrating not more than 50 times per second, experiencing what can “feel like the vibration in a seat over the wheel hub on a bus,” describes Dr. Hugh Lamont, a sports biomechanist at East Tennessee State University.

According to a report from the New York Times, researchers, while still wary of the potentials and benefits of vibrating platforms, have seen marked improvement in short-term performance of its users.

Some examples the story cites include subjects becoming slightly improved sprinters and jumpers after standing on the vibrating platform. This spike in performance however is short lived and cannot be sustained in the long term – good for a short distance dash but unsuitable for a 90-minute soccer match.

Beyond that however, researchers have been seeing how vibrating platforms can be integrated into an individual’s fitness regimen – such as during the warm-up process which is important for starting any effective exercise session.

If you want to know more about research into how vibrating platforms can improve athletic performance, the article “Would You Like a Shake With That Workout”, from the New York Times might be an intriguing read.

Are your kids healthy and fit? We sure hope so! However, many of their peers aren’t, according to an article at the MSNBC Health blog. It states that a big number of American kids aren’t getting the right amount of benefits from physical activities simply because many parents aren’t able to help them prioritize their health.

The research results quoted in the blog was done by the YMCA following a survey of more than a thousand American parents of children aged 5 to 10 years. It states that more than half of them had children who spent more time indoors, playing video games and watching television. In some ways, one can easily understand why this is happening. After all, it’s easier to keep track of your kids when they’re indoors where you are and it might feel safer that way. Also, if they’re working or playing on the computer they’re probably learning.

In fact, the YMCA’s US Director of Chronic Disease Prevention, Dr. Matt Longjohn said in that same article that, “There are many small things that make it very difficult for families to get an hour of physical activity a day. Among the factors you could blame are technology, time and money.”

However, he also stresses that it doesn’t really have to cost so much money to get your kids active. Simple things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator or taking a walk. The article goes on to say that you don’t even have to wait for a chunk of time, some physical fitness activities can be inserted into daily activities. “It can be smaller opportunities, minutes that can add up to preventing a disease,” the doctor added.

To learn more about the whys and hows of helping your kids get more active, please visit the article “Many children not getting enough exercise: study” at Health on MSNBC.

Editorial credits to Thomson Reuters.