Sunday, July 29, 2012

10 ways to tackle Diabetes


  1. Follow your Diabetes food plan. If you do not have one, ask your health care team about it.
  2. Eat the right portions of health foods such as fruits and vegetables (5 to 9 Servings a day), fish, lean meats, dry beans, whole grains, and low- fat or skim milk and cheese.
  3. Eat foods that have less salt and fat.
  4. Get 30 - 60 minutes of activity on most days of the week.
  5. Stay at healthy weight- by being active and eating the right amount of healthy foods.
  6. Stop smoking- seek help to quit.
  7. Take medicines the way your doctor tells you. Ask if you need Aspirin to prevent Heart Attack of stroke.
  8. Check your feet everyday for cuts, blisters, red spots, and swelling. Call your health care team right away about any sores that won't heal.
  9. Brush your teeth and floss everyday to avoid problems with your mouth, teeth or gums.
  10. Check your Blood Glucose the way your doctor tells you to.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Use check boxes to select multiple files in Windows

Microsoft Windows allows users to have checkboxes next to each of the files in Windows Explorer. This can make it easier and faster to select, copy, cut, and delete multiple files. Follow the below steps to enable this feature on your computer.

1.     Open Windows Explorer by pressing the Windows Key + E.
2.     In Windows Explorer click Tools and then Folder Options.
3.     In Folder Options click the View tab.
4.     In the View tab, scroll down and check the "Use check boxes to select items" option, as shown in the below picture.
5.     Click Apply and then Ok to save the change.

Windows file checkbox 

Once this option has been enabled, in Windows Explorer you'll have the option to check each file or folder by moving your mouse to the left of the name and selecting the check box. Below is an example of this feature enabled in Windows Explorer and a few of the check boxes checked.

Windows Explorer checkboxes checked

Monday, July 23, 2012

Homemade Fruit Teeth Cleaner

Homemade Fruit Teeth Cleaners:

 

1.     Rub a lemon rind on your teeth to remove brown stains. Rinse your mouth thoroughly afterward.

2.     Clean your teeth with a fresh strawberry. Rub it over and between your teeth.

3.     A very simple homemade mouthwash: Wash your mouth with half a glass of warm water containing a teaspoon of table salt.


Breathe Fresheners:

 

·          Chew fresh parsley to sweeten the breath.

·          Chew fennel seeds to freshen the breath.

·          Chew anise seeds to freshen the breath.

·          Chew a few peppermint or spearmint leaves or drink a cup of peppermint tea.

·          Add 1 drop of myrrh oil to 1 cup of cooled, boiled water. Use as gargle/mouthwash.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

EXERCISE AND FITNESS: STAMINA EXERCISES

Walking: Excellent cardiovascular benefits for the advanced age groups.. Should be done briskly with swinging of the arms. Comfortable shoes must be worn. May be done morning or evening for 30-60 minutes.

Jogging: Suitable for younger age group below 50 years. 30 minutes is all that is required and may be done continuously, or jog and walk in between when fatigued. The pace of jogging is equal to that of a brisk walkrun on soft or grassy surface. Wear comfortable clothes and breathe freely.

Swimming: For those who know how to swim, 20 minutes of continuous swimming is sufficient. Alternately swim the length of a pool 10-20 metres, rest at the end for 30 seconds, swim back. 10 such lengths is good. Use any stroke you know. They are all of almost equal cardiovascular and muscular benefit.

Cycling: For any age group. Minimum time 45-60 minutes of continuous controlled fast cycling. Cycling up slopes gives added benefit. Ordinary cycles are good enough and indoor stationary exercycles may also be used at low resistance for 45 minutes.

Games: For the fitter younger age group. Get fit first before playing games such as squash, badminton, tennis, handball, basketball, football etc.. Warm up before the games. 30-45 minutes of the game is sufficient. Weekend or once a week games must be avoided unless other fitness programmes are done on other days. Play within your capacity.

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Monday, July 16, 2012

Carbohydrates: How carbs fit into a healthy diet

Carbohydrates aren't bad, but some may be healthier than others. See why carbs are important for your health and which ones to choose.

Carbohydrates often get a bad rap, especially when it comes to weight gain. But carbohydrates aren't all bad. Because of their numerous health benefits, carbohydrates have a rightful place in your diet. In fact, your body needs carbohydrates to function well. But some carbohydrates may be better for you than others. Understand more about carbohydrates and how to choose healthy carbohydrates.

 

Understanding carbohydrates:

 

Carbohydrates are a type of macronutrient found in many foods and beverages. Most carbohydrates are naturally occurring in plant-based foods, such as grains. Food manufacturers also add carbohydrates to processed foods in the form of starch or added sugar. The most basic carbohydrate is a sugar molecule, which joins together one or two units of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Other carbohydrates contain three or more units of the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen trio.

 

Common sources of naturally occurring carbohydrates include:

 

·          Fruits

·          Vegetables

·          Milk

·          Nuts

·          Grains

·          Seeds

·          Legumes

 

Types of carbohydrates

 

There are three main types of carbohydrates:

 

·          Sugar. Sugar is the simplest forms of carbohydrates. Sugar occurs naturally in some foods, including fruits, vegetables, milk and milk products. Sugars include fruit sugar (fructose), table sugar (sucrose) and milk sugar (lactose).

·          Starch. Starch is made of sugar units bonded together. Starch occurs naturally in vegetables, grains, and cooked dry beans and peas.

·          Fiber. Fiber also is made of sugar units bonded together. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and cooked dry beans and peas are among foods that are naturally rich in fiber.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Laughter - better than a massage

What common human activity relaxes tense muscles; reduces blood pressure and heart rate; exercises the muscles of the face, diaphragm and abdomen; boosts the immune system; and causes the body to release pain-fighting hormones? The answer: laughter. Sound impressive? And those are just the physical benefits. Laughter also helps you get some emotional distance from a distressing situation and see the humor in it.

Researchers have shown that laughter increases relaxation. Muscle tension remains low for up to 45 minutes after a session of vigorous laughter. Real belly laughter can relax the muscles more than a vigorous massage.
  
If you haven't exercised your humor muscles lately you may benefit from these tips on getting them in shape:

·          Find things that make you laugh and do them. See a funny movie, read a funny book memorize a joke and tell it to friends.

·          The next time you're in a distressing situation, mentally put yourself in the shoes of your favorite comedian. Humor depends on being able to see the humor where others only see aggravation. It's the difference between tragedy and comedy.

·          Allow a feeling of playfulness to creep into your life. Let your mind be open to silly and uncensored thoughts. What if everyone came to work wearing Groucho Marx glasses and a fake moustache?

·          Amuse yourself by indulging in humorous exaggeration. Stuck in traffic? Think of cobwebs forming between your car and the next; continental drift passing you by, snails overtaking you on the shoulder.

·          Share cartoons, jokes and other funny material at work. Put cartoons up on the bulletin board. By helping others reduce stress you make your own job easier. And people will just be more relaxed around you if they know you have a sense of humor.

·          Get in the habit of laughing at life's contradictions. You can bet your Groucho Marx glasses you'll never run out of material.

·          Finally, practice laughing at yourself. You just can't help becoming more accepting of your own shortcomings, and that's a sure-fire stress-buster.

 

Keep It Light
People will feel safe and comfortable around you if they know you can laugh - but not if you laugh at them. Humor that is cruel or sarcastic breeds a negative attitude in both the humorist and the audience. Stay on the light side. Life is funny enough without resorting to vicious humor.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Insert background picture to Excel 2007 spreadsheet

It's quite easy to get a picture added in Word, PowerPoint or even in Excel 2007. It's considerably easier and quite a common practice to insert a picture in Excel 2007 spreadsheet but many doesn't know the way to add background picture to Excel 2007 spreadsheet. Its known to us, Excel 2007 spreadsheets generally comprises of numbers, charts, tables etc. But you can also add your personal creative touch to your Excel 2007 by adding a background picture to Excel 2007 spreadsheet. Having a background picture added to Excel 2007 spreadsheet it will get a fresh new and interesting look.

Just follow the below mentioned computer tips for adding background picture to Excel 2007 spreadsheet:

 

 

·          Open the Excel spreadsheet where the background picture will be added

·          From the ribbon select the "Page Layout " option

·          Now click on "Background"

·          Next the "Sheet Background" window pane displays.

·          Select the graphics or image to be added as the background

·          Finally click on the option "Insert" at the bottom

 

The background image gets successfully inserted to your Excel 2007 spreadsheet. You can customize the background picture by changing the colors and fonts to suit it. It is duly suggested that one should select a very light or a very dark colored image to make the data on the foreground prominent.

Creating a Watermark in Excel

To add a watermark at the top of your Microsoft Office Excel worksheet:

 

·          In your Excel file, click Insert, and then in the Text section, click Header & Footer.

·          With your pointer in the center section of the header, click Picture in the Header & Footer Elements section of the Design tab, browse your hard disk drive to find the picture you want, and then click OK.

·          You may need to press ENTER several times to center the watermark on the page.

Format Elegant Spreadsheets Without Formulas

Unless you were a math whiz in college, you probably have no great love for Excel. Manipulating Excel formulas can be challenging, but the payoff (like elegantly formatted tables that identify important stuff like key performance indicators) can be worth it. But did you know that you can get Excel to identify important values -- like the top ten numbers in a list, values that are greater than certain threshold, or numbers that are below the average -- automatically? It's a feature called Conditional Formatting.

 

Conditional formatting has been around in Excel a long time, but it seems like most people don't know about it or never remember to use it. In Excel 2010, Microsoft moved it front and center --right into the Home tab -- to encourage you to try it out. Here's what you need to do:

Start by selecting a range of values, such as a column of numbers that represent the most important data on your spreadsheet.

In the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting. Now just choose the item you want to format your data.

 

 

Highlight Cell Rules flags certain cells that match any criteria you like. If you want to see any cells that exceed 100, for example, choose Greater Than and enter 100. You can also use this to warn yourself if a field has a certain text string or is a duplicate of another cell.

 

Top/Bottom Rules lets you rely on Excel to automatically call out the best or worst values in the set. Use this to mark the top ten values in blue or the lowest ten in red.

 

Data Bars, Color Scales, and Icon Sets are all different ways to format your data to call attention to outliers. Use these commands to color code best and worst values, or add an icon to indicate relatively better and worse numbers. The best part is that you don't have to specify how Excel does this; it figures it out relative to the best and worst numbers in the range you specify.

How to suppress your appetite naturally


There are healthy methods of keeping your appetite in check that will also help you lose weight.

Overeating and eating the wrong foods are the main reasons behind weight-gain. Many people struggle with nutrition because they do not understand the holistic nature of the concept. They generally do not have the desire nor the discipline to eat healthy food. As a result, they end up establishing unhealthy eating habits. Many of these unhealthy habits include emotional eating and indulging food cravings.

Many people adopt dieting as a form of weight-loss. However, eventually the fitness plan goes for a toss as the food cravings and the hunger pangs set in. It is very difficult to control hunger, especially when you are surrounded by appetizing delicacies at mealtimes. But if you managed to remove hunger pangs and food cravings from the equation, wouldn't dieting be so much simpler? That is where 'appetite suppression' comes into the picture.

Appetite is both a mental and a physical phenomenon. One of the simplest ways of controlling your body fat is to curb your appetite. By eliminating hunger and the desire for food, your daily calorie intake will drop below your maintenance level. This allows you to drop those excess pounds or to maintain your existing weight.

There are many strategies that help reduce hunger. In the following pages are a few things you can do to decrease your appetite naturally.

 

Kick the junk food habit

 

The easiest thing to do when you get hunger pangs is to reach for a bag of chips. Sometimes you might just get a food craving because your fridge is full of chocolate and ice cream. So do your body a favour and get rid all those snacks, candies, doughnuts and other bad foods that are making you gain weight. Just say 'no' to junk food

 

Start your day with fiber and protein

 

Fiber, when mixed with water, forms a bulk in your stomach that makes you feel less hungry. It also kills all your sugar cravings.

Protein, on the other hand, is a slow digesting food, which keeps you going for a longer period of time. Also, studies have shown that when protein is eaten at breakfast, it keeps you satisfied longer than when eaten at other meal times.

Thus, the best way to start your day is with oatmeal and some milk. Oatmeal will keep you fuller for longer

 

Drink lots of water

 

Water is calorie-free and an easy way to suppress your appetite.

Drinking water throughout the day and anytime you start to feel hungry deceives the brain into thinking the stomach is full. A recent study of people following a low-calorie diet found that people who drank two cups of water prior to their meals lost about 7 kgs in 12 weeks, as compared to the 5 kgs lost by those who did not.

Researchers say that water may be so effective simply because it makes people feel fuller and they then eat less calorie-containing foods during meals.

Drinking water deceives the brain into thinking the stomach is full

 

Sip green tea through the day

 

Don't like water? Have some green tea. Green tea is rich in nutrients and has been shown to help reduce the appetite. Like water, it also fools the brain into thinking that your stomach is full.

Green tea helps reduce the appetite

 

Exercise

Get enough sleep

Drink your meals

Eat small but frequents meals

Brush your teeth or use mouthwash

Disgust yourself

Blue all the way

 

People think that exercising increases hunger pangs, but it not only helps you burn calories, it also helps you consume less of them. Both aerobics and weight-training alter your body's hormone levels in a way that temporarily suppresses appetite.

A study published in the American Journal of Physiology showed that 60 minutes of high-intensity cardio three times a week can reduce the appetite for up to two hours afterwards. The study found that aerobic exercise lowers ghrelin (appetite-stimulating hormone) levels and increases the peptide YY (appetite-suppressing hormone) levels in your body. Weight training, on the other hand, lowers only the ghrelin levels.

Aerobics can actually help control your appetite

 

Get enough sleep

 

A shortage of sleep lowers the level of leptin in your body, which makes you feel hungrier. Make sure you get eight to nine hours of sleep each night to keep your energy high.

The more adequate your sleep, the less you'll need to eat to stay energetic

 

Drink your meals

 

Research at Pennsylvania State University shows that men and women who consume their meals in the form of drinks like whey milkshakes, soy milkshakes or even soups are 50 percent less likely to suffer hunger pangs during the day, as compared to their counterparts who eat the same amount of calories in the form of snack food.

Pass up snacks for soups

 

Eat small but frequents meals

 

Instead of having huge meals three times a day, you should have smaller but more frequent meals. This way, hunger does not build up and cause you to eat excessively.

Piling up a heavy plate thrice a day is not a good idea

 

Brush your teeth or use mouthwash

 

A lot of people don't feel like eating once they have brushed their teeth. Brushing gives your teeth a fresh and clean feeling, deterring you from wanting to eat immediately after.

Also, certain foods (especially foods that contain citric acid) react with the flouride to create a bad taste in your mouth. This flavour change has been shown to help deter people from wanting to eat more.

You won't want to eat immediately after brushing

 

Disgust yourself

 

This is a bit extreme, but the last thing that will be on your mind when you are disgusted is food. So the next time you feel hungry, look at an image of something that is unattractive or gross. You can even think of or smell something gross!

The terrible smell of a stinkhorn mushroom is sure to leave you without an appetite!

 

Blue all the way

 

The colour blue naturally decreases the appetite. So the next time you want to purchase dinner plates, go for the blue ones.

There are various appetite-suppressing supplements available in the market that can modify your brain signals to reduce hunger, but these will have a negative impact on your health in the long run. You'd rather stick to the natural ways.

A blue dining set will ensure you eat less.

Hair Loss Prevention

·          Getting proper nutrition is essential for healthy hair.

·          Water, protien, biotin (part of the vitamin B complex), vitamins A, B6, B12, C, copper, iron, omega 3 fatty acids, zinc, calcium, folic acid, and magnesium all play a part in maintaining a healthy scalp, skin, and hair.

·          Using your fingertips to massage your scalp will increase circulation in your scalp which is important for hair growth.

·          Gentle combing or brushing of your hair will help break up hardened oils that clog your pores. It is recommended that you comb or brush 100-200 strokes in the morning and at night.

·          Avoid excessive wind, sun, and heat (such as from hair dryers, hot showers, and curling irons) on your hair.

·          Tight fitting caps and hats will cause poor circulation in your scalp and will also cause build-up of sweat and grime.

·          If you have live a high stressed life try reducing stress by taking some time out daily just to relax, excessive stress is believed to induce hair loss.

·          If you colour your hair, limit colouring it to once every 2 months. Hair colouring damages your hair and the less frequently you colour it the better.

·          Avoid putting too much physical stress on your hair; brush/comb your hair gently, don't pull your hair when you brush and avoid braids and ponytails if possible, they place constant stress on your hair.

·          Get enough sleep.

·          Use a conditioner and trim any split ends.

·          See your doctor or a dermatologist for advice if you have concerns about hair loss and want to seek treatment