Healthy Eating Pyramid

The healthy eating pyramid is an essential tool that guides us towards eating nutritious food. This pyramid lets you know about basic foods that help your body grow. Since the need and taste of every individual is different, the food pyramid gives details of foods that one can combine or cook in various flavors to give you better taste and health. Developed in Sweden in 1970, this special pyramid has guided many people to understand the various food items required to stay fit and healthy.

The healthy eating pyramid is an easy and small model that gives details about various foodstuffs, so, when it comes to selecting your diet, it is very important that you go for healthy and nutritional food. Many people fail to understand the importance of good food in development and growth. As per the pyramid, there is no need to stick to a particular diet to stay healthy. Any food that can be taken in moderate amount can prove healthy for you. The pyramid talks about quality food and not quantity. It categorizes food by their energy content, and nutrient values that they offer.

One level of food in the pyramids is “Eat most” as this group consists of food derived from plants. This group is at the base of the pyramid. Another level is “Eat moderate” group that consist of animal derived food and the “Eat in small amount” group has sugar and fats on the tip of the pyramid. The pyramid plays an important role, when it comes to educating you regarding healthy eating, since it helps you to understand the role of every food item, and what benefits your body the most. Once you have a clear understanding about the food that you eat, you will be able to alter it to lead a healthy life.

The healthy eating pyramid is the best guide for people of all age groups and can help them live a better life. Today the importance of healthy eating is consciously growing in people’s minds, and people are taking initiative to understand the value of good food. The pyramid is what you can look upon as a guide for a healthy diet. It is possible to alter the healthy eating pyramid, as the amount of nutrients required may vary depending upon changing lifestyles and physical structures.

The Health Department has worked hard to come up with this simple guide for healthy eating. Many nutritionist and doctors are taking great efforts to make this pyramid reach out to everyone, so that they can keep a check on their diet. It is never too late to alter any diet. You can start from any day and feel the difference. Healthy eating can save your life from fatal diseases. It strengthens your immune system, and fight against the health problems. With the healthy eating pyramid, healthy eating is made easy to understand, and easy to follow for a better life.

Exercising Your Face

Your face is almost certainly a part of your body that you have never considered exercising.

But it does need it, especially is you want to open up your features, remove the lines from your skin and give yourself a clearer and younger looking expression.

Exercising your face is all about using the facial muscles that you use the least in your everyday life, because this strengthens these muscles and therefore your face becomes more flexible and expressive.

Before starting these exercises, you should take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror to decide which exercises you should focus on personally. If, for example, you are by nature a frowner, then do not bother with the frowning exercise. Instead, focus on smiling or winking, for example.

Here are four extremely easy and painless facial exercises that you can start putting into practice right now:

* Smiling: To paraphrase a line from Casablanca, ‘you know how to smile, don’t cha?’ If not, here is how you do so to gain maximum exercise benefit from smiling.

With your head in an upright but relaxed pose, clench your cheeks upwards while drawing your lips wide over your teeth at the same time.

Hold the position for a few seconds, then relax and repeat the process. Do this 15-20 times per session, and try to do it at least once every day.

Try smiling at other people more often as well. You might be surprised how much better it makes you feel spiritually, and the responses that you get will more than likely justify making the small effort involved.

* Frowning: In this exercise, you start with your head upright but relaxed, only this time you tense up the muscles in your forehead and draw your eyebrows down by doing so. Hold the resultant frown for a few seconds and then release, and do the exercise 15-20 times per session.

This is an exercise that you should only do in moderation, as overusing these muscles by doing this exercise too regularly or often can lead to the development of unwanted facial lines and wrinkles.

* Winking: With your head in the (by now) traditional upright and relaxed position, turn your head slightly to one side so that one eye is pushed slightly forward. Close the more prominent eye, and hold it closed for a second or two. Open the eye again, and repeat the operation 15-20 times with the same eye.

Then, turn your head the other way so that the opposite eye is to the fore, and repeat the whole process with that eye.

Once again, you probably do not want to overdo this particular exercise, as doing so can lead to the formation (or acceleration) of the fine creases and wrinkles at the corners of the eyes that are commonly known as ‘laughter lines’.

Also, I would recommend that this is an exercise that you do in a private place, because doing this in public or with people that you do not know around you might give them completely the wrong idea!

* Tongue pulling: This is an exercise that you should only do in private or with people that you know. While winking at strangers could get you a lot of unwanted attention, this one is far more likely to get you a smack in the face or a punch on the nose, so do be careful where and when you choose to practice this exercise!

Start from the relaxed but upright head position and purse your lips slightly. Then, push your tongue out of your mouth (yes, exactly like you used to do when you were a kid) and then retract it.

Assuming that you do not regularly go around pulling your tongue out at people, this is an action that the muscles at the back of your tongue will rarely undertake. While your tongue is used to moving up and down and from side to side inside your mouth while you are eating or talking, this ‘pushing back to front’ is using the muscles in a way to which they are not accustomed.

Repeat this exercise 15-20 times per session.

Skipping To Stay Fit

Skipping is another excellent form of aerobic exercise that you can do literally anytime, anywhere.

It helps to improve both your heart and lungs, as well as improving your flexibility, co-ordination and of course your fitness.

Skipping may at first seem like it will be an easy option but you might find that it can be a lot tougher than you think if you decide to keep skipping for any length of time. Remember that boxers use skipping as an integral part of their training programs between matches, and they are not generally known for doing things the easy way, so that you should tell you how effective skipping is as a form of exercise work-out.

Skipping also represents a pretty high intensity workout, as indicated by the fact that twenty minutes of skipping will burn off 250 kilocalories of energy. It is great for helping to shape and tone the lower part of the body, especially the calves, hips, thighs and bottom.

In fact, skipping is directly comparable to jogging at 12kph in terms of the energy that is burned, but because it is an activity that carries a lower impact level than running, it is far gentler on the joints and is less likely to cause injury than pounding the sidewalks or using a running machine.

Nevertheless, skipping does obviously entail jumping up and down, and there is therefore some impact to be considered. Some basic sensible precautions are accordingly necessary.

For example, you should make sure that you have a rope that is of the right length for your height.

In order to test this, stand on rope at the middle point and lift the handles at either end. If the rope is the right length, then the point where rope and handles join should be on a level with your armpits.

If it is too short, then you need a longer rope. If, however, it is too long, all you need to do is artificially shorten it by tying knots in the rope as near to the handles as you can manage. This is a particularly good idea if more than one person will use the same rope.

When you are skipping, you can also reduce the potentially adverse effects of the ‘landing’ impact by wearing cushioned soled shoes, and trying to skip on surfaces that have some ‘give’ in them.

For example, skipping on a wooden floor (that has some ‘flex’ in it) will be better than skipping on a tiled floor or concrete.

For most of us, the last time we skipped was probably a good many years ago, so, in case you have forgotten, here are the basics of how to skip for maximum exercise benefits:

* Stand upright but relax while doing so, and try to breathe normally;

* Keep your elbows level with your waist, but your arms should be extended sideways at an angle of approximately 90 degrees to the body;

* You need to perfect a circular wrist motion in order to turn the skipping rope;

* Hold the rope handles loosely, and use your thumbs and index fingers as a means of controlling the rope;

* Jump from the balls of your feet and try to cushion your landing (which should be back on the balls of your feet) by flexing your knees;

* This is not the Olympic high jump competition! You only need to jump high enough to allow the rope to pass beneath your feet. If you can do this successfully, then making around 60 turns per minute (i.e. one per second) should be an achievable starting target.

It will take a bit of practice, but once you have mastered these basics, then you might want to start doing a few tricks and skipping ‘stunts’, both as a way of making your session a little bit more interesting and also to show off your new found talents!

You can get some ideas from International Rope Skipping Federation’s website. There are over one hundred single rope tricks that you can learn, including such favorites as the ‘double bounce’, the ‘skier’ and the ‘bell’.

Skipping is a very simple but extremely effective form of exercise that anyone can do anywhere. Do not underestimate its benefits just because you have not hopped over a rope once since the day you left school!

Working Out in the House and Garden

In the final analysis, exercise is nothing more than making your body work, burning energy using your muscles in order to achieve certain objectives that you set yourself.

In times gone by, when physical labor was much more common and important, man did not really need to worry about what is essentially an artificial requirement as a way of burning off energy.

Nowadays, the general Western lifestyle involves very little work-based physical labor, hence the need to think of ways to exercise.

Running a house and home does require work and effort, however, and so, whether you realize it or not, you are exercising every time you attempt any kind of task around the house.

For example, many women would find using the vacuum cleaner and dusting the house to be a tedious and tiresome chore. Cleaning the windows, ironing and doing the washing up would probably not come high on the list of enjoyable pastimes either!

Yet all these activities represent exercise that you do not even know you are doing, as evidenced by the fact that 15 minutes of vacuuming and dusting will burn an extra 40 kilocalories for a 40 year old woman who weighs 78 kilos and is 165 centimeters tall.

That is not a massive amount, but it does indicate that work is being done, and therefore exercise of a sort is being taken, even without realizing it.

Mowing the lawn, digging in the garden and pulling up the weeds will have a similarly beneficial effect, with fifteen minutes of doing this kind of activity burning off over fifty calories for the same lady.

Given that ‘gardening’ is an activity that many people enjoy and spend many hours involved in, there is the potential here for a serious work-out. I would suspect that most people would never consider this to be exercise, so that makes it far easier to do.

Is the car dirty? If so, forget the idea of taking it to the car wash, as hand washing it yourself has many benefits. Not only will you save the money that you would otherwise have spent on the car wash and do your bit to help the environment, you also get to stretch - you have to reach over the car roof - bend and work your muscles. These are muscles that you generally don’t use if you work in a sedentary office environment.

In the case of washing the car, even going at a nice, gentle pace - it is not a race, after all - you will still be burning 150 kilocalories per hour.

Do you have kids, or does a family member who lives relatively nearby have a family? Do them a favor by walking the kids to the park for a gentle game of whatever takes your fancy - soccer, baseball, cricket, tennis - it really does not matter a great deal what sport it is.

The point is that it is good for all of you on both a physical and a spiritual level, it costs nothing and it will give you a great appetite into the bargain.

How Much Walking Should I Do?

The answer to that question is, the more walking you can do, the better it is likely to be and the more your health will benefit.

At the beginning at least, take it reasonably easy with short ten minute periods of walking. Start each walk relatively slowly and gently, speeding up in the middle, and finish with a brief ‘cool down’ when you slow to a stroll.

Gradually (but not too gradually) build this up to walking at least 30 minutes a day at least five times a week, although it is not necessary that you exercise for the full thirty minutes in the one session. Three ten minute walks would, for example, be equally effective, so if that fits in better with your daily routine, then that is the way to go.

However, you should also appreciate that thirty minutes per day five times a week is the minimum time that you should aim to be walking, not your ultimate target. If you can manage an hour a day, that is even better!

If you are going to take your walking seriously (and remember that we are talking about your health and well-being here, so you should) then you might want to invest in a pedometer with which you can count the number of steps that you take every day.

Use this to establish how many steps you take in a normal ‘non-walking’ day, and then attempt to increase that number by at least 2,000 more steps as your initial target.

At a brisk walking pace, that represents a couple of extra kilometers a day, so it is a good start, but this should be considered to be a start only. Aim to increase this figure as much as you are able and your health will inevitably benefit from your efforts.

It is only natural that there will be times when you are less motivated than others to actually take your walk. This is when having a dog to exercise with can be a big motivator, or taking the kids out walking would serve a similar purpose.

Failing that, walking can be a very sociable form of exercise too, so how about trying to round up a group of friends or work colleagues to go walking together?

Some of those people are probably paying out hundreds of dollars in gym membership fees at this very moment, and if you can show them how they can get exactly the same exercise benefits for free, then they are more than likely to take you up on your challenge.