HOW TO EASE BLOATING

Sure ways to reduce bloating Bloating is the condition of your belly feeling swollen after eating. It is usually caused by excess gas production, and /or disturbances in the movement of the muscles of the digestive system. This can cause increased pressure and discomfort, and can sometimes make the stomach look bigger. The effect can be quite extreme in certain cases, and some have even used the term “food baby.” Put simply, bloating involves excessive amounts of solids, liquids or gas in your digestive system. However, in some people, bloating is caused mostly by increased sensitivity. It just feels as if there is increased pressure in the abdomen, even though there isn’t. About 16-30 percent of people report that they regularly experience bloating, so this is very common. Bloating can often cause pain, discomfort and a “stuffed” feeling, but it can also make you look heavier and give the perception of large amounts of belly fat. Although bloating is sometimes caused by serious medical conditions, it is most often caused by the diet and some foods or ingredients you are intolerant to. Here are proven ways to reduce or eliminate bloating. Don’t eat too much at a time Being stuffed can feel like being bloated, but the problem is that you simply ate too much. If you’re eating big meals and tend to feel uncomfortable afterwards, then try smaller portions. Add another daily meal if necessary. Subsets of people who experience bloating don’t really have an enlarged stomach or increased pressure in the abdomen. The issue is mostly sensory. A person with a tendency to be bloated will experience discomfort from a smaller amount of food than a person who really feels bloated.

GOOD SLEEPING CONDITION AND NIGHT TIME

Getting a Good night sleep (1) If you are one of these women aged 40 and over who find it difficult to sleep, knows you are not alone. Many women wake up every night between 12 mid night and 4 am and start prowling around the house. In frustration you may begin pacing the house, cleaning the kitchen floor, surfing the internet or watching CNN or movies on late night TV. Getting good nights sleep becomes more and more difficult as we age, but women in menopause find it particularly difficult to get good sleep. In many cases this inability to sleep is due to too much estrogen in your system that is not balanced by progesterone. Before menopause, estrogen is the dominant hormone for about the first two weeks in the menstrual cycle and progesterone is dominant in the last two weeks of the cycle. When menopause occurs naturally these two hormones should continue to balance each other, but if you are a woman at menopause leading a stressful lifestyle, you may find that your production of progesterone is suppressed and or converted to stress hormones and you will have a dominance of estrogen in your system leading to sleeplessness and other unpleasant menopausal symptoms. Using a little progesterone cream made from natural bio identical plant sources may help you easily solve this problem. The right way to use progesterone cream or oil is to use about 1/8 to ¼ of a teaspoon daily for three weeks out of the month, with a week off each month to maintain sensitivity of the progesterone receptors. Natural progesterone cream made from bio identical plant sources is not the same as the synthetic hormone progestin, which is made from animal sources. I know of some women who have not slept for longer than four hours since they started menopause. When they were given some progesterone cream they reported that they were able to sleep for eight hours. This was a major turning point in their recovery from a long list of menopausal and health problems. If it’s not hormones, what is it? If after taking progesterone cream you still cannot sleep, then you need to look for other causes. Of sleeplessness is food intolerance or allergies. Most people will have a high spike in blood sugar levels after eating or drinking something sweet. This is fine during the day but eating sugary foods at bedtime will lead to a hypoglycemia episode 90 minutes later that will result in a surge of adrenaline that will keep you awake for several hours. Eating cheese close to the time of going to bed may also keep some people awake. Many cheeses have high amounts of tyrosine, which is used to make noradrenalin which is used to make noradrenalin which is a stimulant made by our adrenal gland. If you after from chronic insomnia it is a good idea to keep a food diary of the food you eat so that you can correlate foods eaten and the quality of your sleep each night. This way you can begin to have a better sense of foods that help you to sleep and those that pump up your system to keep you tossing and turning all night. The liver does its job of digesting your food between 1am and 3am. If you eat anything that it finds difficult to digest then you will likely be waking up around this time. Eating late may also cause insomnia for this reason. Try to eat not later than 6pm so that your food would have had time to digest before you sleep. Drugs are not the answer to insomnia and may be the cause Have you noticed that when you have a cold or cough and you take cold and allergy medications at night you are unable to sleep? Many of these drugs can cause insomnia even when they claim to be nighttime brands, with a sleeping aid designed to help you sleep. Many prescription and over the –counter drugs can also cause sleeplessness. These include antidepressants, asthma medications, painkillers, some of the heart drugs, and thyroid medication. You need these medications so you cannot stop taking them, however, you can change the time you take them. Try taking these medications in the morning and early afternoon and see if that helps you to sleep better. If you have high blood pressure and you have been put on diuretic drugs twice a day, you might be up and down all night to urinate. Reducing the dose and changing the dosage times to avoid taking it in the evening might also help you considerably. If you’re tossing and turning at night, visit your pharmacist and ask for the information inserts for any drugs you’re taking, buy a magnifying glass, and read them. If insomnia is listed as a possible side effect, talk to your doctor, and don’t accept a sleeping pill as a solution! Taking the drug at a different time during the day, or taking a lower dose, will often solve the problem. Taking sleeping pills bought over the counter or from a doctor on prescription and other anti-anxiety drugs will make you develop an unhealthy dependency on the drugs, and make you feel woozy and tired during the day. Taking sleeping pills are almost never the answer to insomnia. If you must take them make sure they are taken only temporarily and are a stopgap measure. The best thing to do is to find out what is causing your sleepless nights.

PLATAIN DIET

DIET Plantain: Sweet and Healthy super food Plantain, a staple food in Nigeria and arguably, across Africa can be consumed cooked, fried or roasted. Most of us (special ones) have eaten raw plantain before and some of us still do especially when we have slices in front of us waiting to get into the frying pan. It’s that tasty! According to research by hellofood.com, Jollof rice and plantain is the most ordered food in Nigeria. This is not surprising because if you will agree with me, just like the saying goes about a woman being behind every successful man, rice served without being accompanied by plantain is incomplete as plantain compliments Jollof/fried/white rice and a majority of other dishes as well. Asides from being tasty, plantains are extremely rich in nutrients, vitamins and have health benefits, some of which are: Digestion: because plantains enhance phosphorus, calcium and nitrogen retention, they help in the regeneration of healthy tissues Healthy pregnancy: plantains contain folic acid which is one of the acids essential for healthy pregnancy. Eases menstrual cramps: plantain contains properties which help to ease the discomfort that comes with the monthly menstrual cycle. Eyesight support: plantains contain an essential vitamin- vitamin A which helps support the eyesight and prevent certain eye conditions. Strong Bone: plantains are rich in calcium and calcium is essential for strong bone. They also provide adequate levels of magnesium which is essential for strengthening the bones as well.

Moody and Sluggish? Blame your sugary diet

Moody and Sluggish? Blame your sugary diet On the average, a healthy person is not only active, he also has sunny attitude towards life. This is because, as mental health experts say, being healthy isn’t just the absence of diseases, it is also about being stable emotionally and psychologically. However, physicians say many people report being moody and sluggish, even when they don’t mean to. The culprit, they contend, has to do with their diets which clinicians say, is rather too sugary for comfort. Family physician, Dr. Mary Ogbe, says sugary diets leave harmful effects on metabolism and contribute to all sorts of diseases, hence the admonition for people to go easy on sweet foods that are so common these days. Indeed, scientists say the human brain secrets a chemical known as orexin, which helps you to be awake when you should. They warn that when you eat sugar, this chemical is inhibited and that is when you feel sluggish, sleepy or moody. Nutritionists say in order to counter this effect in your body, make sure you balance your sugar consumption with protein-rich food that will tackle the effects that the sugar you eat would have had on you. “This is not to say that you have the open cheque to eat all the sugar you want; but since we take sugar anyway, it is also good to know how to counter its likely effect by eating healthy food that will level off sugar’s effect as the body digests it. “if, for instance, you are taking a cup of sugar-containing tea with your food, it’s advisable that you complement it with protein-rich foods such as eggs, beans or any beans-based foods and suck like. Your mood will be the better for it,” Ogbe says. She expresses concern that most health-conscious adults actually want to avoid taking sugar altogether, but they fall victim to merchants’ lies, which give them the so-called alternatives to sugar. “These alternatives are, much of the time, not only sweeter that the sugars they try to avoid but do more harm because they are laboratory grown!” Ogbe notes. Such laboratory-grown sugar substitutes include demerara sugar, dextrose, agave nectar, corn syrup, beet sugar, barley malt syrup, galactose, lactose, malt syrup, etc. Stress plays a part in moodiness and sluggishness, physicians says. When you’re undergoing a stressful situation, your stress hormone levels rise. The same chemicals also affect you when your blood sugar is low, researchers say. Experts at atkins.com explained that, for instance, when you eat a piece of cake, your blood sugar will rise, and stress hormones such as adrenalin, cortisol or epinephrine are released.“One of the main things these hormones do is to raise blood sugar, providing the body with a quick energy boost. The problem is, these helpful hormones can make us feel anxious, irritable and shaky,” Ogbe adds. And that’s when you become moody and sluggish, even when you wish to feel otherwise. Beyond mood swing Beyond its effects on our moods, nutritionists say sugary foods do worse stuffs to human body. A nutritionist, Dr. Dayo Umoh, says before sugar enters the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it is broken down into glucose and fructose both of which are simple sugars. “It is easy to get glucose in our diet, even though the human body also produces it. Indeed, glucose is present in every living cell. This is not the case with fructose, because the human body doesn’t produce it in any significant amount. That tells you humans don’t have any physiological need for it.” Expert say the main issue with fructose is that it can only be metabolized by the liver. In lay man’s language, the river processes the fructose you eat. “This is not a problem if you eat a little bit as found in fruit, for instance. But when you eat too much of fructose, you’re giving your liver extra load of work to do, and when this happens, it will make the liver to turn the fructose into fat. “When you repeatedly eat huge quantity of sugary foods, you can develop Fatty liver and myriad of other serious health issues. By the way, fatty liver disease is a fore runner of liver failure, so you need to watch it. However, if your fructose is simply from fruits, you are on safe grounds, as you cannot overdose on fruits. “That is why we also counsel our clients to eat organic fruits. This has become imperative in view of the fact that we import fruits these days and you can find assorted and esoteric fruits in high end supermarkets. “If you’re wondering what ‘organic’ fruits look alike, the way to recognize them, usually, is by their size. We are familiar with the size of guavas, for instance; but when you buy these inorganic fruits that have been modified genetically, they are bigger than their natural size as we knew them to be. Avoid such fruit,” Umoh submits. Susceptibility to infection Many people find themselves being susceptible to bacterial infections and they wonder why. The probable answer to this, Ogbe says, is that you eat too much sugar. “Eating or drinking too much sugary foods inhibit the optimal functioning of immune system cells that otherwise defends the body against bacteria. Instead, eat more fruits and vegetables, because they are rich in nutrients such as vitamins c and e, beta-carotene and zinc, all of which work to strengthen your immune system and thus protect you from bacterial infection,” the physician counsels. In conclusion, experts add that it is not necessary to cut off sugar from our diet entirely, unless otherwise advised by a physician for health reasons. Rather, they advise, those who feast regularly on sugary foods to reduce their sugar intake, while moderate users of sugar are still counseled to reduce it to the barest minimum. “Sugar contains no nutrients, no protein, no healthy fats and no enzymes. This being the case, why should it kill you?” Ogbe asks rhetorically.