YOGA TIPS for Easing the Chill of Winter

YOGA TIPS for Easing the Chill of Winter

Anna Montage, Health and Wellness Editor

Extra Tips for Dressing Warmly

Legs are often neglected in our outdoor clothing. If you’re planning to be outside for more than a short while, it’s important to keep your legs protected from the cold and wind. Nylon athletic pants with zippers on the side can be easily slipped on over your regular pants and aren’t too expensive. If you live in a cold climate or spend a lot of time outdoors, it may be worth the investment to buy outer pants that also provide some extra insulation. A sporting goods store or outdoor store can help you with this.

In many climates, a fleece jacket provides plenty of warmth if you layer a wind-proof shell on top of it. Outdoor companies make specially treated fabrics that keep the wind at bay. You will be surprised at how warm this simple and comfortable combination will keep you! If it’s very cold outside, a warm hat and fleece neck gator or scarf are essential, otherwise your vital body heat may slip right out the top of your jacket

Brrrr! While the winter season brings fun outdoor sports, family gatherings and toasty fires, the chill of winter can really take a toll on your physical and even mental health. Some people are more vulnerable to the effects of cold weather than others, but everyone can benefit from some simple strategies to stay balanced and healthy during the chilly season.

Keep bundled up! It may seem obvious, but one of the best remedies for warding off the winter chills is dressing properly. Keeping your feet and head warm is an absolute must—whether you’re inside or outside. Don’t let fashion make you a slave to the cold! There’s plenty of attractive outdoor apparel that looks great and keeps you snuggly even in the chilliest of temperatures. Your shoes or boots are crucial to your warmth and comfort and are worth the investment for a top-quality brand. Don’t forget to make sure they are water-resistant as well! Wet feet will chill your whole body.

Keep munching on fresh fruits and veggies, but also add warming soups, teas and spices to your yoga diet. Warm soup on a cold winter day helps soothe the body and mind. It can also help you stay hydrated and nourished. Don’t neglect fresh raw fruits and vegetables, but try to accompany them with other foods that help to counteract the effects of winter, such as soups, casseroles and other cooked dishes.

Warm liquids also tend to make you feel full, helping ward off the tendency to eat too many sweets and other rich foods in the winter. For example, hot herb tea is another great way to stay warm and hydrated without adding too many calories. A little honey or other natural sweetener added to your tea can help stave off wintertime cravings for unhealthy sweets. Fresh juices, especially when jazzed up with some ginger or other warming spices, will speed up your metabolism and provide potent enzymes and antioxidants to help keep fatigue and sickness away. Check out Wai Lana’s Favorite Juices for recipe ideas.

In your cooking, focus on warming spices such as ginger, cumin, and cinnamon. The Indian spice blend garam masala is a tasty and very warming addition to many vegetable dishes. It can be used by itself or along with ginger, cumin, turmeric or other Indian spices.

Maintain a healthy weight by staying in balance and keeping warm. If your body becomes too imbalanced from the cold, you will crave rich, oily food to counteract the effects of the weather, thus sabotaging your weight loss or maintenance goals. The warming herbs and foods (along with warm clothing mentioned above) will help you avoid these health pitfalls. So stay warm with teas, soups and spices and you’ll enjoy the winter weather without gaining extra weight.

Get Plenty of Exercise! Don’t avoid the outdoors! Embrace the cold by dressing the way I describe above. By dressing properly, you can be comfortable outside in even the most frigid climates. It’s crucial for your physical and mental health to get plenty of outdoor time during the cold season. The crisp cold air will oxygenate your body and invigorate your mind and sense of well-being. A little sunshine (even through the clouds) helps to keep your biological clock in balance and produce necessary vitamin D for the body. Getting outdoors also helps stave off “cabin fever” from spending too much time indoors!

Practice Yoga. Yoga is the most ancient, time-tested method for keeping the body and mind healthy and balanced. Yoga brings fresh oxygen to your cells, helping keep your energy and spirits up. Yoga also helps improve muscle strength and flexibility. Yoga helps you stay in a peaceful state of mind so that you are happier and less affected by stress.

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Relax into Yoga

I find that relaxing into yoga is one of the most important things that Wai lana has taught me. Being able to relax into it has just helped my life have a complete turn around. I'm able to relax more in so many ways. I am much more relaxed as a person, and the people I live with can testify for this!

Relax into Yoga
Want to make your asana session more enjoyable and more beneficial? Then relax as you practice. Whether you do yoga for exercise, to relieve stress, or both, you'll get more out of it if you relax. Don't stress about how stiff you are; don't strain to get into a pose. Just do your best and enjoy it.

If you're always thinking about where you "should" be, you'll miss what's going on in your body at the moment. But that awareness is the key to practicing asanas correctly. So instead of worrying about how inflexible you are, just notice your tight spots. Watch your breath; notice how it affects your body, and let it help you open and release into the pose. Observe your mind—keep it focused on the pose and the breath. Don't let it bully you into pushing too far. It's best to hold a pose just this side of your limit. As you breathe and relax into the pose, you'll be able to hold it longer and gradually extend your boundaries.

You can even relax in strengthening poses. While contracting certain muscles, relax those that don't need to work. Don't hold unnecessary tension in your face or jaw, in your neck or shoulders. This tension blocks the flow of energy in the body that yoga is designed to enhance. And it's that free-flowing energy that makes you feel good. So relax into yoga and yoga will help you relax.

Wai lana's Weekly Message

Watch your sugar, for baby's sake

Do your yoga and drink to health with Wai Lana's Juice Book through pregnancy to keep problems like this far away!

Watch your sugar, for baby's sake

When 33-year-old Anita conceived, she was overjoyed. But the joy was tempered when, in the seventh month of pregnancy, diagnostic tests revealed
that she had diabetes. Both her parents were diabetic but this had not prepared her for her own condition.

“When I was carrying, I felt weak and heavy. That is when doctors discovered I had gestational diabetes,” she says.

Anita is hardly unusual. The incidence of gestational diabetes, caused by the hormones produced during pregnancy, has shot up in India from a mere 2% in 1980 to 17% today. This diabetes usually occurs between the 24th and 27th weeks. The pregnancy hormones reduce a woman’s sensitivity to insulin, sending blood sugar levels soaring.

What’s particularly alarming is that babies of affected mothers are more likely to be obese, both as children and adults. They are also more prone to diabetes later in life. The mother is at risk too because 30% of women who get gestational diabetes also develop maturity-onset or Type 2 diabetes seven to 10 years after the pregnancy.

Experts say that the spike in gestational diabetes parallels the recent rise in diabetes cases. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that India may see a rise in diabetes from 135 million cases in 1995 to 300 million in 2025 — a whopping 120% increase.

Asians are already regarded a high-risk group and have 11% more prevalence of gestational diabetes than the rest of the world, say experts. The global average is between 4-8%; in the US, it is 6%.
The rise of gestational diabetes cases in India was confirmed during a diabetes and pregnancy awareness project by Apollo Hospital, Chennai, in 2004.

The four-year project, which screened some 13,000 people in Tamil Nadu, revealed startling statistics, says Dr V Balaji, senior diabetologist at Apollo Hospitals. The results led to mandatory screening for glucose intolerance in pregnant women at all state government centres.

So what happens to a woman with gestational diabetes? Doctors say it affects the mother in late pregnancy. It could strike earlier if a woman has a family history of diabetes, polycystic ovarian disease or obesity. The mother’s increased blood sugar levels are transferred to the baby.

This, in turn, causes the baby’s pancreas, which start working within 11 weeks of conception, to produce extra insulin to get rid of this sugar.

“Insulin, incidentally, is a growth hormone. As the baby starts getting more energy than it needs, this gets stored as fat, leading to an abnormal weight gain, usually over 3.5 kg,” says Dr Ambrish Mithal, president-elect, Endocrine Society of India. “This may require delivery by caesarean section and cause breathing and shoulder problems at birth for the baby.”

Although gestational diabetes is only a temporary phase and it disappears after pregnancy, there is a 65-70% chance of it recurring. Therefore, it is vital for the mother to control her sugar intake and monitor blood sugar levels.

Mithal says gestational diabetes is often treated with insulin and dietary control rather than drugs. If treated in time, no complications ensue. Mithal says that many people don’t know that pregnant women have lower blood sugar levels than those who aren’t.

The baby absorbs nutrition from the mother, causing blood sugar levels to fall. So the pre-diabetic phase in a normal person becomes gestational diabetes in a pregnant woman. Testing is done an hour after fasting in pregnant women as sugar levels are highest at the time. Normally, this would be done two hours after fasting.

One of the important tests to get mean glucose value for the last 90-120 days of pregnancy is the HbA1c test. A woman with an HbA1c level lower than 5.3 does not indicate gestational diabetes, while one above 6 would.

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Eating Meat Boosts Risk of Prostate Cancer by 40 Percent

Eating Meat Boosts Risk of Prostate Cancer by 40 Percent

Eating a diet higher in meat and dairy products may significantly boost a man's risk of prostate cancer, researchers have discovered.

"There is a need to identify risk factors for prostate cancer, especially those which can be targeted by therapy and/or lifestyle changes," said lead researcher Andrew Roddam of Oxford University. "Now we know this factor is associated with the disease we can start to examine how diet and lifestyle factors can affect its levels and whether changes could reduce a man's risk."

In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Roddam and colleagues compiled the results of 12 prior studies on the connection between prostate cancer and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), including a total of 3,700 men with prostate cancer and 5,200 without it.

Prior research has shown a strong relationship between meat and dairy consumption and levels of IGF-1, and strict vegetarians are known to have far lower levels of the hormone circulating in their blood.

In the current study, the researchers divided participants into five groups, based on their blood levels of IGF-1. The average participant age was 62 at the time of testing, and the average age of cancer diagnosis was 67.

Men in the group with the highest IGF-1 levels were 40 percent more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than men with the lowest levels. Among men who did develop cancer, higher IGF-1 levels were also associated with a significantly greater rate of tumor spread.

These relationships were independent of age, weight, alcohol consumption or smoking status. There did appear to be a stronger relationship between IGF-1 levels and cancer risk among men who developed less aggressive cancers, but the researchers noted that this could be a statistical fluke.

Roddam noted that a diet high in meat and dairy could probably increase IGF-1 levels by as much as 15 percent.

Researchers have suspected for some time that IGF-1 might be linked to the development of prostate cancer, but this is one of the first studies to supply convincing evidence. The hormone plays a critical role in cell growth and death, regulating child growth and development in particular. In adults, researchers have found that it can sometimes inhibit regular programmed cell death, leading to the abnormal cascade of cell reproduction without death that is characteristic of cancer. Laboratory studies have also found that cells grow more quickly when dosed with IGF-1.

Roddam cautioned that IGF-1 levels cannot currently be used as a tool for cancer screening, however, since all 3,700 men who developed cancer still had IGF-1 levels in the normal range. The prostate specific antigen (PSA) test currently used, he said, is much more effective.

Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK greeted the study as a welcome addition to the fight to prevent prostate cancer.

"While there are established risk factors associated with prostate cancer of age, family history, and ethnicity, there are no clear data on modifiable risk factors," Walker said. "Research like this is vital to further the work on prevention and treatment of the disease."

Prostate cancer is the second most lethal cancer among men in both the United States and United Kingdom. An estimated 186,320 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, leading to approximately 28,660 fatalities annually. It is the most common cancer among men in the United States, which has the highest prostate cancer rates in the world.

Evidence continues to emerge that diet may play a significant role in the development of prostate cancer. A recent study from researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard University, published in The Lancet Oncology, for example, found that men who were overweight or obese at the time of prostate cancer diagnosis were significantly more likely to die from the disease than men with normal body weight. Men with higher insulin levels were also more likely to die than men with normal levels. The combination of high insulin and high body mass index led to a fourfold increase in the risk of dying from the disease. These correlations were found to be independent of any other risk factors, including the stage at which cancer was diagnosed.

Many prostate cancers are slow growing and detected so late in life that there is not much point in treating them, while others can be aggressive and highly lethal. It increasingly appears as if diet may play a role in this distinction.

"Roughly about 10 percent of [diagnosed] men will eventually die of the cancer," researcher Jing Ma said. "The crucial question now facing urologists, oncologists and prostate cancer patients is 'what are the risk factors that can predict the bad cancers?'"

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