Stress and The Moving Target of Wealth

Like every other country in these exciting and demanding times, India too is changing and changing fast. But with economic prosperity comes the danger of burn out or working yourself to illness or worse still- death. A recent report from the Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry in India ( ASSOCHAM)  says work related ailments like heart disease, strokes and diabetes will cost India as much as $ 160 billion between 2009 and 2015.

Filed under: Executive Coaching, Executive Health, Indian Economy , Career advice, Indian Economy, Stress

Owls More Productive Than Larks

I often use the old analogy of owls and larks when it comes to a discussion on how we manage ourselves- before we manage time. Some of us by inclination are larks- early morning people who are at our best and brightest early in the day but tend to fade away as the day becomes longer. Others are owls- night birds who are uncomfortable with too early a start in the mornings but can plug on until very late at night.

Filed under: Executive Health, Trends , Employee Productivity, executive fitness, time management

Bring on the Chocolates, Wine & Tea

As you grow older are there more ” Don’ts” taking over your life?  “Don’t have one more drink”  or ” No more chocolates for today” for example. The next time someone tells you not to reach out eagerly for the next slab of chocolate or the next glass of wine, tell them that you have it from an authoritative source that these can actually be good for you.

Filed under: Executive Health , cognitive performance, red wine, Research at Oxford

Posture Perfect

I decided to research a bit about postures when an executive friend recently confided in me about the excruciating back pain he was getting daily. The reasons were not far to find. Very limited exercise, slouching in his executive chair and at meetings for most of the day, more time watching TV or catching a movie later on with a poor sitting posture.

Posture is about the way we stand, the way we sit. Just how important is your posture? The differences between good posture and poor posture are graphically illustrated in the Washington Post. Without realizing it, we are causing unnecessary harm to our body through poor postures.

In an age when we spend huge amounts of time in sedentary work, posture can help or hinder our overall health.

The Cleaveland Clinic has useful information on the right postures while standing, driving, sitting etc. These are relatively small things but somehow we tend to overlook them until the problem becomes too much to bear.

I hope this post will help my groaning friend.

Filed under: Executive Health , Executive Health, postures

Lowering Cholesterol

A friend of mine had a routine medical examination recently. The results showed a high level of cholesterol.  No matter your age, this poses a big health risk. That’s because unhealthy cholesterol levels can boost your risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other problems.

To understand the issues involved, I liked the simple explanations given in WebMD by Morgan Griffin.

Stating with some basics. Cholesterol is a fat-like substance that circulates in your blood. Some of it is made naturally by your body, and the rest comes from foods you eat. There are two main types: HDL and LDL.

• LDL is “bad cholesterol.” It can clog your arteries, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. Optimal number: Less than 100mg/dL.
• HDL is “good cholesterol.” What’s good about it? HDL attaches to bad cholesterol and escorts it to the liver, which filters it out of the body. So HDL reduces the amount of bad cholesterol in your system. Desirable number: 60mg/dL or higher.
• Total cholesterol is the sum of all types of cholesterol in your blood. Although your doctor may still refer to this number, it’s less significant than your HDL and LDL levels. Desirable number: Less than 200 mg/dL.
• Triglycerides , while not cholesterol, are another type of fat floating in your blood. Just as with bad cholesterol, having a high level of triglycerides increases your risk of cardiovascular problems. Healthy number: Less than 150 mg/dL.

Experts maintain that there are 4 ways to get your cholesterol down to the desired levels:

1.  Lower Cholesterol by eating right: Cut down on fried food. Nuts like walnuts and almonds are recommended. Diet tends to help people lower triglycerides and raise good HDL cholesterol, but it’s less likely to have a big impact on bad LDL cholesterol.
2. Improving cholesterol with Exercise: Increased physical activity can have a modest effect on cholesterol, lowering triglycerides (and bad LDL cholesterol to a lesser extent), while boosting your good HDL cholesterol.
3. Lose Weight:Lower Cholesterol: Losing weight can lower your bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. It also can raise your good HDL cholesterol.
4. Controlling cholesterol with Medication:  Medication in combination with other measures can reduce your cholesterol levels. However, take medication only on the specific advice of your doctor.

“Exercise and dietary changes have a lot of cardiovascular benefits that won’t show up on a cholesterol test,” says Jorge Plutzky MD, director of the Vascular Disease Prevention Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. ” Exercise, eating well, and losing weight can lower blood pressure, lower your heart rate, and decrease your risk of diabetes and other diseases. And remember that your real goal is not merely better cholesterol numbers, but a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.”

Filed under: Executive Health , Cholesterol management, reducing risk of heart disease

Tomatoes for a Healthy Heart

If you like tomatoes, you are on to a good thing. Apart from being tasty, tomatoes have long been considered a healthy food. More specifically, a new study in Britain suggests that a regular intake of tomatoes can significantly reduce heart disease.The scientists also advised people with high cholesterol to start taking tomatoes or drink tomato juice to help reduce the risk of heart attacks.

Researchers in the new study included 21 volunteers, aged between 20-49 and with normal cholesterol levels. Each volunteer spent three weeks without consuming tomato products. Then they spent three weeks taking either 30gm of tomato puree or drank 400ml of tomato juice everyday.

During the experiment, researchers took regular blood samples of the volunteers to check cholesterol levels and found that those who added a small quantity of tomato in their breakfast, lunch and tea, saw their Low-density lipoprotein -LDL- ( generally called “bad” cholesterol) levels drop significantly over a period of three weeks.

High cholesterol levels have a long association with many diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD), the cause of almost 50 per cent of deaths in Europe, and reported to cost the EU economy an estimated €169bn ($202bn) per year.

The secret in tomatoes may lie in lycopene, the chemical that makes tomatoes red, according to Dr. Edward Giovannucci, Harvard School of Public Health, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So the next time you want to top up your snack with some tomato ketchup, just reach out for it. It does you more good than you would have thought.

Filed under: Executive Health , Health, tomatoes

The Power of Honey

Minor ailments in the family – be it a cough or cold or mild fever- are a part of day to day life for the working mother.  Honey has been known to be useful to cure minor ailments for ages. Most Grandma’s  rough and ready homemade remedies include a spoonful of honey thrown in.

A teaspoon of honey before bed seems to calm children’s coughs and help them sleep better, according to a new study that relied on parents’ reports of their children’s symptoms.  “Many families are going to relate to these findings and say that grandma was right,” said lead author Dr Ian Paul of Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine.

The research appears in December’s Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.US health advisers have recently warned that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines should not be used in children younger than 6, and manufacturers are taking some products for babies off the market.

We derive our knowledge of the earliest use and importance of honey in historic times from archives of the ancient cultural states, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome. The oldest existing scripts corroborate the fact that bees were already domesticated creatures and honey was extensively used for food, drink, medicine and exclusively for sweetening purposes. Honey was an important commodity. Taxes and tributes were imposed in the form of payments of honey and wax. It was equivalent to currency.

Tickner Edwardes wrote about honey: “Honey is good for old and young. If mothers were wise they would never give their children any other sweet food. Pure ripe honey is sugar with the most difficult and most important part of digestion already accomplished by the bees. Moreover, it is a safe and very gentle laxative. And probably, before each comb-cell is sealed up, the bee injects a drop of acid from her sting. Anyway, honey has a distinct antiseptic property. That is why it is so good for sore throats or chafed skins.

Good honey is an ideal food, nutritious and easily digested. Professor Klemperer of Berlin claimed that a tablespoonful of honey is equivalent in nutritive value to the largest-sized hen egg. According to Professor von Bunge, 98% of the lime, iron, salt and grape sugar, of which honey contains 77%, are directly absorbed by the blood. Honey is six times richer in fuel value than milk and, in addition, it contains more inorganic substances. The flavor of honey has also a dietetic value as it induces the free flow of saliva which in itself promotes digestion.

For those of us who need to speak a lot, honey is soothing for the throat. It gives you the energy you need. Its benefits extend from the young to the old.

So next time you or your kids have a minor ailment and you look for a home made remedy, reach out for that jar of honey.

Filed under: Executive Health , Health, Honey

Walk Faster to Live Longer

Do you amble along or do you walk fast? Here’s some news for those who amble along. Walking faster may actually help you live longer!

A study presented at a conference of the Gerontological Society of America found that those who walked more quickly were less likely to die over the course of the study. Researchers had followed the health of nearly 500 older people for almost a decade.

They added that gait speed may be a good predictor of long-term survival, even in people who otherwise appear basically healthy.

In a related study, in the November issue of The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the researchers found that people whose walking speed had improved, reduced their risk of death.

To calculate your walking speed, all you need to do is count the number of steps you walk per minute. The motive for walking differs from person to person. Some people go about walking, so as to ensure health fitness. For them, the right walking pace would be 3 miles per hour, which means about 120 steps in a minute.

But if you are walking, to shape up your body, then walking 120 steps won’t be adequate. You need to increase it to 135 steps per minute. You would need to walk 4 miles per hour to ensure good results in weight loss program. The target walking speed for aerobic fitness is about 150 steps per minute.

Depending on your goal, work on your walking speed to achieve the desired results. In any case, it’s faster the better.

Filed under: Executive Health , , Walking

Living Hard or Hardly Living?

The names are disguised but you recognize the man. There could be many like him in your office or your neighbourhood.

Living a hectic life was exhilarating for Arun. He liked to say that he worked hard and played hard. He enjoyed the tension in his work especially when he took on assignments that involved risk and living on the edge. He put in his usual 12-14 hours per day. Included in his day was a nerve jarring, tension-filled commute where he had to drive like a skilled cross- country driver even in the city roads. He spent the rest of the day ( or what was left of it) partying with his cronies – and there were many of them.

He was pushy at work encouraged by the initial successes given to him by his aggressive nature. Time to unwind meant parties and drinks with his friends. There was no time to relax. Besides, relaxing was for people who had nothing better to do.

The shooting pain caught him one afternoon at work just as he was leaving a meeting in which he had been a vociferous and excited participant. He had suffered a heart attack. Like thousands do every day. He was rushed to the hospital and because of the timely attention given to him he was lucky to survive. Otherwise he would not have lived to see his 31st birthday which followed a few days later.

Suggestions for the Aruns of this world: To succeed in today’s go-getting dog- eat- dog world, you need to be physically and mentally fit. Frenetic, unceasing activity puts a strain on your physiology and burn out results from this “overheating” of your system.

Set aside time for physical activity appropriate to your age and body condition. Use relaxation techniques to help you cool off amidst the hustle and bustle of every day life.
Success comes through living a full life.

Without interests other than work, without time for your family, without attention to your health, aren’ t you living hard – but hardly living?

Don’t waste time identifying this man. He could be anybody- just make sure it isn’t you.!

Filed under: Executive Health , Health, living hard, tension at work

Active Parents Raise Active Children

If you tend to blame your kids for being couch potatoes, ask yourself how active you were during pregnancy ! Recent research from the University of Bristol covering more than 5000 kids of age 10 and 11 found that children whose mothers were more active during pregnancy were more active themselves. They say this is unlikely to be due to factors in the womb but is more likely that women who are active during pregnancy are more likely to be active post-pregnancy, and this in turn influences children’s physical activity.
As well as the link to more active children, the season in which children were born had an effect on how active they were.  The research also indicated that children born during summer to winter were more active than those born in spring.

If the results are anything to go by, it’s all the more reason executives in the course of pregnancy have appropriate amounts of physical activity – not only for their well being but also for that of their to-be-born children !

Filed under: Executive Health , Parenting, Pregnancy