Vision Eyecare Lasik Health and Medical News/Updates

THURSDAY, Aug. 25 (HealthDay News) — Rheumatoid arthritis
patients who believe in their ability to achieve physical activity
goals — called self-efficacy — are more likely to reach those
objectives, researchers have found.

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World powers are moving slowly toward an accord on the strategy to be embraced at a looming United Nations summit aiming to get the lofty Millennium Development Goals back on track.

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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Saturday the world must devote the same resources to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as it did to tackling the global economic crisis.

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We all strive to be healthy, however unless it is right at the top of your list of priorities you will always give in to temptation, whether that is a slice of mud cake or sleeping in and missing your morning fitness session. So first of all we must make health and fitness a goal that has priority in out lives. How?

First of all let’s define, what exactly is a goal? The word goal is defined as a purpose to which your energies are directed toward a specific outcome. Whew! How about this a goal is an intention you have to create a specific result within a particular time frame. Goals can either short term, or long term and the time frame you set needs to be in direct proportion to the goal set. There is no point setting a goal to lose 20 kilos in a week, as this is near impossible and if it is, it just might kill you.

Setting a goal with intention gives you direction, clarity and a quantified outcome. Think of it as dangling a carrot in front of you – and for this reason goals need to be something you really want or the payoff will not be enough to keep you motivated and on track. You have to want it. One way to do this is to make your end result clear; it must also be reachable and very importantly exciting for you. So if the idea of being healthy doesn’t light you up, what will that gives you the same result?

Could you give yourself the goal of being fit and healthy enough to run your local annual marathon? Or to play soccer on the beach with your kids? What about being able to run to the top of your stairs without puffing, or dance the night away without feeling completely washed out and sore the next day, or fit into your favourite sexy jeans?

Find something that is exciting to you as your goal that represents the more mundane goal you really have in mind. Remember, all goals need to have a payoff, something you want enough to keep you motivated and a way for you to reward yourself at the end.

Let’s get some clarity on each of the facets of good goal setting:

- Your health goal must be clear State your goal clearly. If your goal is to lose weight, in which part of your body do you particularly want to lose weight and how many kilos do you want to lose and by when? Clarity prods you on your path to create a strategy.

- Make your goal reachable Our goals also have to feel and be reachable for us because if we don’t meet up, we run the risk of tripping up and beating ourselves up. And we lose momentum, could end up as couch potatoes and run far from the goal. So, start with the end in mind and work back from there giving yourself smaller steps until you are back to now. You will now have a calendar of events to reach for that makes it seem so much easier to do.

- Be focused Be clearly focused on the goal you want to achieve, know exactly what you want and why you want it and then know what your reward is for hanging in there. Lack of focus or too many choices leads to indecision and poor results.

- Make your goal exciting If the goal doesn’t motivate you to get up, energise you to get into action and get into momentum, then I don’t think it will take you a long way. You’ve got to want it so much you can imagine it happening and how great your going to feel when you achieve it.

Now you know this, go out and set your goal. Write it down. Stick it on your wall, put it on your computer. Be reminded of your goal and most importantly, take action on the strategy to achieve your goal. Most of all spend 5 minutes morning and night imagining your end result in every detail to keep your motivation high.

What is the benefit of a health and fitness plan? When you are healthy and fit, you have better mental alertness, you respond quicker, you relax more under pressure, and you are able to wind down out of stressful situations by getting exercise.
Some people when they relate exercise to the idea of going to a gym or going to a sport and working out so hard after the training that it actually hurts. That’s not the kind of health and fitness I am talking about. Some people do that and every now and again they will go to training, but in general the idea is to get enough exercise that is actually enjoyable without going to the absolute limit all the time.
I can relate this pretty well to the way that you look after a motor vehicle. If you always drive your motor vehicle to its absolute maximum performance, right up to the red line and then change, what you find is that your maintenance costs start dramatically going up.
I remember when I was a teen-ager we used to take out our cars into the forest around Canberra, and go rally-driving with our street cars, and what we found was that all of a sudden you get all these loose bolts and things falling off and all sorts of things start breaking, simply because the cars were never really designed for that sort of punishment, and the people who have race cars, that are rally cars, once they bring them back from the bush, they go through all the bolts and tighten them all up and put lock-tight on the bolts and get rid of all the dirt out of the joints, and so on, and yet here we were, packing the vehicles out, wrapping them around, and then trying to go to and from work the next day. Guess what happened, sooner or later things started to break, usually sooner.
If you treat your body in the same way that we were treating our cars, that is, taking it to the absolute limit all the time, you will start breaking things, hurting muscles, hurting bones, you need to make sure that your body has time to recover from minor injuries. On the other hand, if you work so lightly that you don’t even get a decent work-out; you are totally wasting your time.
We know that going to the gym is not going to be every one’s cup of tea; doing marshal arts is not going to be every one’s favourite activity – some people might like to play baseball or basket ball , or walking down the street, or walking through the park. A lot of people say “I can’t afford a sport”, and that may be true but you cannot afford not to exercise.
The process of exercise makes the body subtle; actually before I started doing marshal arts I had to go and see a chiropractor every week or couple of weeks, because I was having back problems, and what I found was that after I started exercising regularly, I didn’t get anywhere as near as the amount of problems I was getting before.
Heart attacks are caused typically by cholesterol, and healthy exercise will actually help, but it doesn’t actually eliminate the risk of a heart attack. Let’s say that you happen to be blessed with a metabolism that is really high or you work out 18 hours a week and you are really fit, it doesn’t really mean that you won’t have a heart attack, because if you still have high cholesterol or LDL from animal products in a large degree, you can still have a heart attack. It is as simple as that because it is not the fat that gives you a heart attack but the cholesterol.
So don’t you think if I work out and I’ve got this really good-looking body, I really don’t need to worry about cholesterol because I am not fat. I am not saying to overly worry about it but keep it in mind that you need to keep a good balance between the types of food that you eat.
There are some interesting aspects about health and fitness. One is that bone strength is improved by doing resistance training, whether it is lifting weight or doing some sort of exercise where you put resistance against your bones even playing games such as baseball or basket ball.
When you start exercising your bones, you actually strengthen them and managing your bone density or bone strength is partly achieved. Both bone strength, muscle strength adds flexibility. The health of your spine is important so that it is exercised in such a way that the joints get moved and they don’t calcify. If you don’t do any sort of exercise, what happens is that your back stiffens up, the joints calcify and you are more susceptible to pain.
In my job as a computer programmer, I had a stage where because my arms were always stretched out, I had a problem starting to appear in my back; I went to a personal trainer who did a little bit of work on my posture and strengthening the right muscles and I’ve never had a problem since. If I tried to manage that, without doing some remedial exercise or maintenance type of exercise, I would have so much pain that I couldn’t work.
Some of you probably have jobs where you get plenty of exercise, that’s fine.
What sort of goals should you set in health and fitness?
After consulting a health and fitness professional, perhaps go to the gym three times a week. You will be able to measure how much you have done by looking at your score card, and/or setting up a reminder notice in whatever calendar tool you happen to use.

About four years ago I discovered the many benefits of setting targets and goals. I thought about what I wanted to be and which course I wanted my life to take. I wrote out three different lists of my aims for the future.

The first list included what I wanted to achieve within the next twelve months. The second list contained what I wanted to achieve within five years and the third list was my lifetime goals.

One of my goals was to do with my composite front doors business. I wanted to ensure that the world would get to know about the fact that I offer affordable composite doors.

I had read that it of benefit to write any goals or targets down to ensure that one can keep focused.

Invest time and money to reach your goals

I now had a determination to succeed and was willing to work hard to achieve my goals. I was very much aware that I would have to work very hard to achieve anything in life. One of my aims was to overcome stuttering. To achieve success I had to leave no stone unturned and I had to believe in my ability to kill my demons. I decided to ease up on myself and to even have monthly treats to keep me and my body happy. I went to see a refloxologist and a few weeks later I went to see an aromatherapist. The stutter which had affected my life since I had been a young child was eventually eradicated but only after a lot of hard work.

Avoid negative people

There are people out there who try to bring me down. They attempt to do this by off the cuff comments they make or just by the way they seem to look down on me. They look at me as If I am worthless and some kind of loser. These type of people have caused me many sleepless nights and have had a negative affect on my self-confidence.

Life is now good and my business career has now taken off and I am now working with a company who offer a cost reduction strategy which I have to say is very enjoyable.

I hope that you have found this article interesting and of benefit.