Are You Eating the Right Colours?

Are you balancing your carbohydrates with the calories and the fiber with the protein? Great!

Now, how about paying close attention to the colours of your diet? Surprised? Read on...

While having a balanced diet is important to keep a body nourished, you may also want to learn how colours can play an important role in the integration of your diet to your day-to-day life.

Colours act as visual and physical cues and can affect your daily mood, behaviour and goals.

How Do Food Colours Affect You?

Colours are nothing but frequencies. Each frequency has a different effect, physically and emotionally. Knowing the properties of colours can help you plan your meals accordingly. Incorporate these in your diet to help suit your personality, mood and goals.

For instance, eating something red as part of your meal each day can add to the digestive capability of your body. An apple or tomato salad would do the trick. The colour red acts as a cue for higher metabolism and activity.

On the other hand, greens in your food replenish natural health and vitality. Including a dose of beans or spinach or peas in your daily meal can ensure you stay hydrated (from a colour perspective) and healthy.

If you are on a weight loss program, it would help to drink plenty of yellow fruit juices (eg- sweet lime or pineapple). The colour yellow enhances physical activity and energy and helps burn the extra calories.

If you want to add on a few kilos, make sure you include adequate blue in your diet. This could be in the form of blueberries or healthy smoothies made of other blue fruits. And while blue may be tougher to find, you could include blue cheese (Roquefort) or blue cabbage in your salads.

Purple is a colour for stress relief and it helps relax the body. Purple cabbages, beetroot and brinjals can bring their calming purple influences to your hi-stress power lunches and dinners.

White food and drink act as cleansing agents. You can use white foods to help you get through tough times in your relationships or to help overcome negative issues. Choosing to include plenty of milk, cauliflowers and white mushrooms in your diet keeps you cleansed and happy.

Quick Tips

A Colour Balanced Healthy Meal in 10 Minutes

Pastas come in different colours. Throw together coloured pasta of your choice with fresh vegetables and olive oil. Garnish for a quick and healthy colour balanced meal in just 10 minutes.

Colour Your Cocktail Party

At your next cocktail party, try and use as many different coloured fruits and ingredients to colour your margaritas and long island ice teas. Label each drink with its characteristic colour property.

For instance, name your yellow mango margarita 'fitness freak' and your coconut pina-colada the 'cleansing potion'. Watch people choose their drinks. There may be a story behind their choice!

Long Work Hours Could Lead to Obesity

Messing with the Eye

Medical Director of Shroff Eye Hospital, Dr. Abha Shroff, says, "Staring at the computer for hours on end, might cause some very uncomfortable temporary eye problems."

When your eye has to constantly focus on something (the computer screen) in a closer range, the eye muscles tend to get tired very soon.

So, more often than not, you are straining your eyes, which could cause problems like eye dryness, neck pain, blurry near sight, headaches or difficulty changing focus.

Dry eyes can also occur because you tend to blink less while concentrate on the computer screen and keep our eyes wide open. This results in drying up of the tear film.

Slumber Facts

Sleep Specialist Dr. Jagdish Shah feels that if you are a workaholic, you are invariably inviting a silent killer into your life.

Age ---->Minimum Amount of Sleep Required Daily

50 and above ---->6 hours

35-50 ---->8hours

Below 35 ----> 9-10 hours

According to Dr. Shah, workaholics tend to have disturbed sleep or even sleeplessness. This is simply because the body functioning, especially the autonomic nervous system goes haywire.
On the other hand, he believes that workaholics can feel also extremely tired and sleepy even after having a night's rest.

…so, does working those extra hours still seem like fun to you?

Diet, Exercise Work for Older Obese Adults

It's never too late for obese adults to improve their heart risks through diet and exercise, the results of a new small study suggests.

The researchers, who enrolled 27 obese men and women age 65 or older, found that calorie cutting and exercise helped participants shed pounds and lower their blood pressure, bloodsugar and blood fats called triglycerides.

What's more, there was a sharp drop in the number with metabolic syndrome, a collection of conditions that raise a person's risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The findings appear in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Diet changes and exercise have been shown to improve heart disease risk factors in young and middle-aged obese adults, but less is known about the benefits for older adults. In fact, there's some controversy over advocating weight loss at older ages, according to the authors of the new study.

For one, a heavier weight is relatively less important in the health risks of an elderly person compared with a younger adult. In addition, many older adults are frail, which can make lifestyle changes difficult. But the new findings show that older obese adults can indeed alter their lifestyle, and benefit from it, according to Dr. Dennis T. Villareal of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

"We demonstrate that older adults can successfully lose weight and are compliant with interventions," he told Reuters Health. Beyond that, they can also reap the potential heart benefits seen in studies of younger obese adults, according to Villareal.
He and his colleagues based their findings on a 6-month study of sedentary, obese adults randomly assigned to follow diet and exercise therapy or to serve as a non-exercising comparison group.

All of them had mild to moderate physical limitations and nearly all had metabolic syndrome. The average body mass index was 30 or higher.

Those with metabolic syndrome had at least three conditions that increased the risk of heart disease, including high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high blood sugar and abdominal obesity.

Over six months, the treatment group cut calories and attended group exercise classes three days a week. In the end, they lost an average of 18 pounds, versus no weight change in the comparison group.

The number with metabolic syndrome fell by 59 percent, while the comparison group again showed no change.

More studies are needed to see if this translates into less heart disease and a longer life, according to the researchers. For now, older adults who want to make lifestyle changes should talk to their doctors about the best and safest ways to do so, Villareal said.