Eat healthy

Rituals of eating

Think of meals as sacrosanct times during the day when you stop and relax. Make sure you set aside enough time for food preparation, eating, and cleaning up. Eat sitting at the table to aid digestion and to allow you to savor the texture, color, and scent of food: enjoying food has as much to do with these sensations as with taste.

Setting the table

To give mealtimes a sense of occasion, clear from the table everything except food-related items. Put away work files, homework, and unpaid bills. Throw over a clean tablecloth, place some fresh flowers or a candle in the center, add a pitcher of water with ice and lemon, and set cutlery, glasses, and napkins. Choose coordinating plates and warm them before serving food.

Put down your fork

Between mouthfuls put down your knife and fork. If your fingers feel restless, place them on your lap, palms facing upward. Enjoy the sensation of chewing and appreciate the release of flavors. Chewing and savoring food not only aids digestion, it turns a meal from a period of processing, where speed is the focus, to a time of delight.

 more tips/info...

What Chronic Pain Feels Like

If you have chronic pain, at some point, you realized part of your body has been hurting way too long. Maybe you have ongoing pain in your hip, and you’re beginning to limp. When you first noticed the pain, you thought it was related to that day you fell on the ice in the driveway. But that was a year ago. Your bruised hip has long since healed, and yet the pain is still with you. You go to the doctor, who takes an X-ray and discovers that you have significant arthritis in your hip, which was probably irritated by the fall, but is a problem on its own.

In another example, your daughter, age 4, comes home from a Halloween party with a crushing headache. You attribute it to a sugar overdose. You take care of her, and she recovers. But a couple of weeks later, she has another severe headache. And three weeks after that, she has yet another one. Her pediatrician eventually diagnoses your child with chronic migraine headaches.

Chronic pain is not only persistent, resistant, and insistent, but it also seems ruthless. It’s always with you on some level. It either doesn’t give you a break, or it gives you very brief respites, fooling you into thinking you’re all better and then returning with a wallop — regardless of whether you have an important sales presentation that afternoon, it’s your son’s birthday, or your plane to the Caribbean is about to take off.

Sensations of chronic pain range from a small, constant ache to excruciating pain. Your chronic pain may feel like one or more of the following feelings: aching, burning, crushing pain, dull pain, electrical-like pain, flu-like symptoms, jabbing pain, mental fogginess, numbness, piercing, prickling, sharp pain, shooting pain, soreness, stiffness, stinging sensations, throbbing, tightness, tingling, or vise-like pain.

Most people with chronic pain experience more than one of these feelings. For example, many people with fibromyalgia have flu-like pain, aching, and stiffness. And people with rheumatoid arthritis struggle with aching, stiffness, weight loss, and mental fogginess (a term used to describe confusion and forgetfulness).

 more tips for managing chronic pain...

Adding Up Your Basic Cholesterol Numbers

Before you decide what to do about your cholesterol, you need to know how much cholesterol you actually have. So get up, march over to your doctor’s office, and hold out your arm so your doctor can stick a hollow needle into the vein in the crook of your elbow and draw about 20 milliliters (ml) of bright, red blood. Then when you go home, the little glass tube holding your blood goes off to a medical laboratory where a technician counts the cholesterol particles. The results you get back look like this: 225 mg/dL. Translation: You have 225 milligrams of total cholesterol in every decilitre (1⁄10 liter) of blood.

But these numbers don’t paint the whole picture. The figures for your low density lipoproteins (VLDLs, IDLs, LDLs) and high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) are still missing. Lipoproteins are fat-and-protein particles that carry cholesterol into your arteries (LDLs) or out of your body (HDLs), which is why HDLs are “good” and some of the LDLs are “bad.”

The problem with simple finger-stick tests such as those found in cholesterol home-testing kits is that they only measure total cholesterol levels — no HDLs and no LDLs. An incomplete result (total cholesterol alone) can scare you to death if it shows you have high total cholesterol without letting you know that you — lucky girl! lucky boy! — also have high HDLs. The fingerstick test can also provide false reassurance if it shows a low total cholesterol level without letting you know that your LDLs are also very low.

Now that you know all this and have an accurate, complete doctor’s report in hand, what do the results say about you? How can you tell if the numbers are high, low, or in-between?

 about cholesterol diet...

Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ

Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 3:10-18. 

And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" 

He said to them in reply, "Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise." 

Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, "Teacher, what should we do?" 

He answered them, "Stop collecting more than what is prescribed." 

Soldiers also asked him, "And what is it that we should do?" He told them, "Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages."

Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah. 

John answered them all, saying, "I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Exhorting them in many other ways, he preached good news to the people.