Sleep

I often suffer from insomnia. Here are some tips that have helped me get to sleep:

• Don't spend all day on your bed. Your brain will get mixed up, thinking it's a daytime area and won't associate it with sleep.
• Sleep with the window open if at all you can. Sleeping in a cool room is much healthier, and you feel much cozier if you snuggle into a warm blanket. The fresh air also helps.
• Taking savasana, or corpse pose, is very beneficial. Lie on your back without a pillow, arms at your sides at an angle, palms up, fingers slack and not touching, legs angled out, feet slack and flopping out. Some yoga teachers put bolsters under your knees and even blocks under your feet, but I prefer savasana flat. With a blanket. Never underestimate how cozy and warm a blanket can make you feel.
• Concentrating on your breathing can be very helpful in emptying your mind so that your daily worries don't creep in and keep you awake. But don't concentrate on breathing evenly (don't count how many seconds it takes you to inhale and exhale) and don't even concentrate on breathing deeply. Instead, with your eyes closed, concentrate on your belly button. Visualize it moving up and down as you breathe, just a slight movement. This will give the mind something to focus on. You will breathe deeply naturally once your mind slows down.
• I have fallen asleep in savasana at the end of a yoga practice numerous times, so I can definitely recommend doing a few yoga poses before going to bed.
• Shower or bathe. Some people are too tired to do it at night. (In which case you fall right asleep and don't have to worry about insomnia!) But I like to go cleanly into a clean bed. That makes me feel good. (Cozy again!)
• You know the old saying about counting sheep. Well, I'm not good at visualizing sheep jumping over a fence, and I get distracted and lose count anyway. Instead, if the belly button observing really isn't kicking in and putting me to sleep, I say the multiplication tables in my head. It is very monotonous, but also very methodical (boring) and does take concentration, so it tires me out until I can fall asleep.
• Absolutely stay away from going over your to-to list, mentally writing a shopping list or stressing about something you absolutely mustn't forget the next day. This is too stressful and won't help you unwind. If you absolutely can't stay away from this type of thing, you are only allowed to visualize yourself going through your day the next day and visualize everything going perfectly.
• Warm milk with honey helps.
• Keeping to a regular bedtime helps your body get used to going to sleep. "It's time! Zzzzz..."

Try any or all of these and see what works for you. Don't give up if something doesn't work the first time. 

Good luck!:o)

Cucumbers!

Since it has been so hot outside lately and summer is nearly on my doorstep, I've started eating lots of cucumbers. I like to slice them in sticks and eat them cold out of the fridge. They are a great healthy snack and if you have a little craving mid-morning or mid-afternoon, they are an excellent source of vitamin B and actually contain carbs to give you energy.

In fact, cucumbers are a very good source of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6 and folic acid. Not to mention vitamin C, calcium, IRON (very important for me!), magnesium, phosphorous, potassium and zinc. Betcha didn't know that, did you? (Neither did I! A friend emailed me information about cucumbers that I think it is important to pass on. Plus, I translated it to English for you. That'll be $20. ;)

I plan on eating lots of cucumbers to hopefully keep my anemia at bay... or at least under control.

Vitamin E - Is Yours Legit?

I was reading about vitamin E the other day, about how good it is for the skin and all, when I stumbled across this: did you know that the vitamin E you buy may be artificial? It's true, and when I checked mine I was shocked to see that mine wasn't natural. How to tell? Read the label.

If your vitamin capsule contains d-alpha-trocopheryl, it's natural.

If it contains dl-alpha-trocopheryl, it's synthetic. It's that one little l in the name that makes all the difference.

I'm not just being an organic snob here, either. What I read was that the synthetic vitamin isn't as effective.

When in doubt, of course, one can always go to the source: vitamin E can be found in walnuts, peanuts, almonds, fish oil, sunflower oil, avocado, wheat germ and sweet potato.

Now that you know, eat one of these foods today.

I'm off to eat some almonds. :o)

A New Beginning

I came up with The Scatterbrain Health Minder a little while ago and, while it has been working pretty well for me in paper-and-box format, I think it would work quite nicely in the virtual realm also. So, I have been toying with the idea for this blog for a while now and I think it's time for action.

The Scatterbrain Health Minder is for people like me, who would like to do things to better their health, but are easily overwhelmed by all the information out there, some of it contradictory, and by everything that you're supposed to do. The idea is to do one single thing each day that is good for your health. Some of the items rotate more often than others, and by repeating them  it will help to form a habit, but I don't concentrate on any one thing for long because my idea is that I want to touch as many bases as possible without going overboard in any one direction.

So, today I will share my first health tip. It's a simple one, to start off slow and easy.

DRINK WATER!

Our organism needs it for so many things, but do you know how much water you are supposed to drink? 

Some people say 3 liters, which is the equivalent of eight 8-ounce glasses. I also heard recently that some scientists are now saying that any liquid you drink counts, even the liquid in soup. This is different from what I used to hear, that the eight glasses had to be water. But it's good news because it makes drinking enough that much easier. Herbal tea counts too and so does juice. (I don't think coffee or caffeinated teas do, though. Sorry!)

I have done a couple of spring cleanses at my yoga center, and what they recommend is to base your water intake on your height and weight. For example, I am 5'3" and 190 lbs. (Yes, I'm a fat girl. :p lol) My yoga studio recommended that I drink 2.8 liters of water per day. When I did the cleanse, they did the calculations for me, but I have searched online and found a formula that gives me the same result without factoring my height into it. Go ahead and try it for yourself to see how much water YOU need. :o)

Here is an example of how to calculate how much water you need, using my information:

First you need to know your weight in kilograms by dividing your weight by 2.2. For me, 190 lbs. divided by 2.2 lbs./kg gives: 86 kg

Divide your weight in kilos (86) by 8 (ounces) to get the number of glasses you need to drink: 11 glasses (I rounded up.)

If you want to know how many liters that is, one 8 oz. glass is equivalent to a cup and it takes 4 cups to make a liter, so 11 divided by 4 is 2.75 L or 2 and 3/4 liters. (Rounded up to the tenth this would give the same answer as my yoga studio: 2.8 L)

Hope that helps. :o)

Another thing that I would like to add is that you aren't supposed to drink all of your water for the day all at once. I know that I was guilty of this when I was teaching because I was afraid I'd have to go to the washroom while I was supposed to be in class, so I drank all my water at night. But if there is any way you can spread it out, you really should. One of my friends told me that you should drink 200 mL every hour. That's a bit less than a cup so it shouldn't upset your bladder too much. Try to go to the washroom before class, before your important meeting or before whatever activity you do. That way, you start with an empty bladder and have plenty of room for that little glass of water that you sip from throughout the hour.

As I am on sick leave right now, I can measure out my water in the morning so I don't have to keep track during the day. I don't know how you all feel about it, but I don't like the taste of water that's been sitting in a plastic jug, and I find it tastes like plastic from a plastic cup too, so I like a glass jug and drinking glass. If I'm on the go, I have a stainless steel water bottle that I take with me. Some people prefer to check off the number of glasses they drink every day in a drinking diary or on a wipe-off white board. Find what works best for you.

Good luck! :o)