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Tag: Nutrition

Take Your Vitamins

Take Your Vitamins

take-your-vitaminsNobody is happy when they’re sick. It seems like no matter how much you try, sometimes you still inevitably get sick. However there’s things you can do to help prevent yourself from getting sick, or at least from getting sick enough to have it interfere with your life.

Taking the right vitamins and herbal supplements can have a very positive effect on your health. They are available at just about every store, but the problem is that there are so many different kinds that trying to find the right ones can be overwhelming.

To make it easier to work your way through the maze of vitamins, here is a list of common health problems, and the vitamins and supplements you can take to help these conditions:

Upset Stomach-
Acidophilus/Probiotics (If you have problems with dairy, make sure to get ones without milk proteins, or this could complicate rather than help your condition)

Ginger Tea/Juice/Root/Pills (If plain ginger is too strong for your taste, I would highly recommend lemon ginger tea. It tastes like hot lemon cake!)

Detox Tea (Mostly for use when you have been eating a lot of junk, or have been feeling ill for several days and anything else you have tried to combat your stomach problems has failed. *WARNING* It do not take for more than recommended, as this can cause you to become more sick, and possibly develop other problems.)

Headache/Runny Nose/Cough/General Cold Symptoms-
Echinacea Tea/Pills (This is probably one of the single greatest supplements I have come across! I swear by this stuff during cold and flu season. I also believe it is probably the reason I hardly ever cough, and haven’t gotten fully sick in quite some time)

Vitamin C Packets (Available in a wide variety of flavors. Vitamin packets are also available in formulas to help everything from heart health to sore joints.)

Sore Joints/Chronic Joint Pain/Muscle Aches-
Calcium/Magnesium Supplements – This is sometimes recommended for women help prevent osteoporosis-weakening and eventually fracturing of bones with age.

Glucosamine Chondroitin Juice/Pills – This can be beneficial for muscle/joint pain.

These vitamins and supplements are just a starting point, and can be safe to take everyday to help improve your overall health. However, if you are having these problems regularly, and you have not seen a doctor about it, you probably should. Some of these mild problems could be early indicators of a more serious condition.

Food Journaling

Food Journaling

Its easy to read random news stories about the latest health foods and find differing opinions on the same subject. One week you read about how you shouldn’t drink coffee because of how bad the caffeine in it is, then the next week you read about its great antioxidant properties. How do you know which answer is right? Or better yet, how do you know which answer is right for you? Maybe your extra sensitive to caffeine. Or maybe it doesn’t bother you much, and you would be benefited by the antioxidants.

One way to sort of test the waters with new ideas for what to eat is to keep a food journal. In your journal, you can write down what you eat, drink, and any vitamins or herbs that you might ingest during the day.

So what should be on this journal?
You can adjust the details of your journal to fit your personal level of commitment and interests. For example, you may or may not want to include things like amount, calorie count, protein, etc.

The food journal can also include many things that may be related to the foods you eat. For example, you can include your mood on a scale of 1 to 10. Maybe you’ll find that different foods can affect your mood in different ways.

Okay, but what do I use to keep track of this stuff?
Here is what I believe to be an good way to keep an accurate and effective journal.
First, you will need a small notebook, and pen that you can carry around with you. You can use this to write down things you want in your journal as you eat/drink them. This is useful since it can be easy to forget to record something if you don’t do it right away.
Next, you will need some kind of spreadsheet program. There are many free and paid options for this. Open office has a very nice spreadsheet program called Calc. After selecting a spreadsheet program, you will then need to set up your field headings for the various things you want in your journal.

Here are a few example headings you can include to get you started…

food journal sample

This format is assuming you are going to do daily entries and only keep one row of data for each day. If you want, you can use many rows of data for each day.

Here is an example of a multiple row per day version of the above example.

foodjournal2

Note that there was only one field added in this example. In this format, you record your details for the date and time specified. You can keep a record for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks by using this format. This way you get more details, but it is also more work. So there is a trade off.

Once you have your fields set up, you can begin recording your journal entries in your notebook, and transferring them to your spreadsheet when it is convenient. Depending on your spreadsheet software, you may eventually be able to make charts and graphs of the fields for easier interpretation.

Although journaling can give you a great amount of information, it is important to keep in mind that you should not necessarily use the results as absolute truth. You may notice a spike in energy or mood on your journal when eating certain foods… but that doesn’t mean that it is good idea to do the things with the highest gains every day. The gains might not even be related to the things you think they are. It could be that the things you ate the day before are related to the advantages. Or it could be that there is no relation at all.

Opinionated Eating

Opinionated Eating

opioninated-eatingThere are many different opinions on what types of food are considered healthy.   The entire topic of health food in itself can be very subjective.  Each person probably has their own idea on what a healthy food actually is.

For example, lets consider a typical sandwich with some sort of meat and cheese.  Depending on who you ask, this may or may not be considered healthy.  Someone may look at the type of bread being used and decide that it does not have enough fiber to be considered healthy, while others may consider bread in general to be a good dietary choice.   The cheese may also lead to some controversy on whether not the particular type is good for you, or even if any type is good for you.    Then there is the meat.  Most of you are probably already at least somewhat aware of the various controversies surrounding meat and its varying types.

There is such a large amount of controversy and debate on just about everything that is edible.  With all this conflicting information, how are you ever supposed to figure out what information is right,  and what isn’t?  One way is to make the decision to stay informed about any current health food information which interests you.

Even if I could give you the single most important food you should eat today according to the most current research, who’s to say that next week some other study wont find that the same food isn’t quite as good as originally thought?  Current research may be able to give you an idea of what our current level of knowledge is on a particular food, but really it is your responsibility to keep yourself informed on the subject because you never know what might change.

On top of reading about the latest research, another great method of finding out what foods are right for you is to listen to your own body and use a bit of common sense.  Sometimes you can tell when a specific type of food does not agree with you.  Finding what does and does not work for you can take time and effort to figure out, but eventually if you put your mind to it, you might be able to get a better picture of what you should be eating.

A good sense of what you should and should not eat can be gained and maintained by applying a combination of common sense, and knowledge you have obtained. If you notice an improvement in yourself, it will reinforce your knowledge with experience. If you notice the opposite, it will also reinforce that new knowledge and give you reason to avoid certain things.  Likewise, if you read up on a particular food and experience consistently good results from wherever you read it, eventually you can get a good list of places you can look for useful information.

Just keep in mind that research and knowledge are a great starting point, but it is also just as important to listen to your body to know if you are really being benefited. What works in a book or web article, may not always work for you.