Tips for How to Stay Healthy During the Holidays

Holiday season is getting near and everyone is preparing for it. It is, certainly a season when food is just about everywhere and it is challenging to stay healthy. Those who are on a diet will have to work on their willpower to stick to it during the holidays. One may think that holidays are hard for those who want to eat healthy; many people don’t realize that even though they find themselves indulging in the most delicious food, they can still eat healthy. Here are some tips how to do that.

1. Can you have one cheat day a year?

If you are on a low-carb diet, allow yourself to have one or two cheat days during the season. Let it be Thanksgiving and Christmas. And follow your low-carb diet during the days in between. When you allow your body to indulge during these cheat days, it is easier to stay truthful to your diet plan during the rest of the days. You are satisfied with the food you’ve craved for long, and it there will be no temptation to continue overeating. If you have constant food cravings, you are more likely that you have emotional issues you need to address.

2. Use your free days to relax

Holiday season is when you have some rest days. It is much more easier to stay healthy when you are not in work mode because you can give all the necessary time for preparation of the healthiest food choices you’ve always wanted but you didn’t have time to prepare them. Furthermore, there is more time to workout, go for a walk, and spend some time resting. All these are healthy habits you can stick to when the holidays are over. Therefore, staying healthy during the holidays is not a difficult task.

3. Healthy Chrismas treats

Sometimes you need to give your body your favorite Christmas treat without counting calories and feeling guilty. Staying healthy is not only about restraining from your favorite food and becoming a strict dieter without taking care of your soul. If you don’t take proper care of it, your brain makes it hard to lose weight. You need to nourish your soul as well as your body. If you let yourself indulge once a year, it wouldn’t do much harm to your health as long as you don’t overeat. A homemade pie and a good puzzle can be your brain’s annual reboot. Plus, you can find many healthy recipes for your favorite Christmas treats using healthy sugars, such as honey or stevia. Thus, you can enjoy your Thanksgiving or Christmas and stay healthy and refreshed after the holidays are over.

4. Outdoor activities

This holiday season is an excellent time for winter activities when you can burn all the extra calories. Skiing and snowboarding are one of the sport activities that you can burn a lot of calories and strengthen your legs and core muscles. Therefore, make this season the healthy one by spending some time doing winter outdoor activities to relieve stress and stay healthy.

5. Healthy socializing

Don’t get carried away with the overdrinking, overeating and extra partying that comes with the holidays. It is unnecessary and unhealthy. Socialize with your family and friends in other ways, like singing, playing the guitar or the piano, dancing, playing outdoor games, puzzles, etc. It is a fun way to build healthy relationships with your closed ones. Thus, you will never lose your willpower to follow your principles and be disciplined during the holidays.

 

Sources:

Success.com

MensFitness.com

Greatist.com

Tips for How to Stay Healthy During the Holidays

It’s the summer holidays – and children need time outside | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Is there any feeling on earth quite like that of a child on the first day of the summer holidays? The giddying sense of freedom and potential, after hours spent gazing longingly at browning grass and cloudless skies through classroom windows. At the beginning of the summer holidays, your gauzy days stretch out before you like chewing gum, waiting to be filled with adventure. If you were anything like me, most of them will have been spent outside; your life a procession of doing words: running, climbing, building (and wrecking), swimming, playing and paddling.

Related: Nearly one in four British children overweight or obese, claims study

The doing words of today’s children are somewhat different. There’s gaming, and sitting, and eating. Indeed, a report has found that children’s lazy summer holidays are responsible for wiping out children’s fitness levels. The study of 400 children in 14 schools found that fitness levels improved over the course of the academic year, only to be undone by the long summer holidays spent hunched over gadgets. In terms of physical activity, the bare minimum for children should be 60 minutes a day. This report indicates that children are failing to achieve even that.

Much of this can be blamed on the technology that was simply unavailable before now. As a society, we specialise in timewasting; another report released today found that we are now spending 25 hours a week on the internet, and most of that will be indoors. Many children I meet seem to have their time rigidly planned out in activity blocks – school, after-school activities, homework, bed – so slumping in front of a screen must seem like cosy respite in comparison. But you wonder if they’ll ever know the exquisite boredom of an empty summer day, where you’re booted out in the morning after your friends come to call, to return only at dusk when it’s time for tea?

While acknowledging the wonder of my summer holidays, I’m mindful of indulging in that blinkered editing that we are so prone to when reminiscing about our childhoods. The idealisation of Britain’s supposed golden days – which we are told were beacons of comfort, safety and liberty – has been an unpleasant undercurrent throughout the referendum debate and can be most adequately summed up in the peculiar form what I call “Daily Mail slum nostalgia”, wherein childhood suffering, whether through poverty, safeguarding failures or poor housing, is conveniently ignored.

A survey earlier this year found that three-quarters of children spend less time outside than US prison inmates

But we all indulge in the temptation to glorify bygone childhoods from time to time. I would read Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories and marvel that these kids were allowed to ride bicycles freely across the whole of England, despite constantly bumping into dodgy blokes with criminal intentions. I was only allowed out from morning until twilight. Still, I realise how privileged that lifestyle was and, when I look back, it does have to be said that very few of my classmates were fat.

Britain’s childhood obesity epidemic renders children’s lazy summer holidays all the more concerning. 9.1% of children in year 6 (aged 10 to 11) are obese and a further 14.2% are overweight. Of children in reception (aged four to five), 9.1% are obese and another 12.8% are overweight. This means a third of 10- to 11-year-olds and over a fifth of four- to five-year-olds are overweight or obese, according to Public Health England. And this isn’t just about physical health; it’s estimated that in every school classroom in the UK, at least three children are suffering from a mental health issue. There’s no doubt that less time spent outdoors will likely compound this crisis.

A survey earlier this year found that three-quarters of children spend less time outside than US prison inmates. The National Trust has long spoken of “nature deficit disorder” as screen time increases and the so-called “radius of activity” shrinks (the area around a child’s home where they are allowed to roam unsupervised has shrunk by over 90% since 1970). There is a mental health epidemic in adults that stems partly from the health system’s failure to adequately deal with issues in childhood. We are constantly being hawked mindfulness apps and techniques as a way of supposedly dealing with this.

Why? Because many of us have forgotten how to exist in the moment, as this sad news about school breaks demonstrates. There is no one more mindful than a child on their summer holidays, when the return to school is a distant concept. In the moment, all that matters is the rock pool you’re in, the squidge of sand between your toes, the crumble of bark beneath your fingernails, the echoing bounce of the ball on tarmac or the brittle crackle of the bracken you’re tunnelling in. Are you ever more connected with your senses that when you are in nature? Even if that nature is a patch of grass at the end of your street, in your imagination it can become a jungle.

I’m not saying that kicking children out of the house each summer will solve a public health crisis that is the result of a complex combination of factors, or that my childhood was flawless. But I can say that I spent much of it doing what our bodies have evolved to do: moving. And I’m all the better for it.

It’s the summer holidays – and children need time outside | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Seaside holidays: Of course it is secure to go back in the water

The barrel species aside, jellyfish are considered accountable for far more stings than any other marine animal in Britain. Stinging species commonly identified here consist of the striking compass jellyfish, so named due to the fact of its V-shaped markings the substantial lion’s mane, which, located on our a lot more northerly shores, has “very strong toxins and is best avoided”, according to Harrington and the minuscule mauve stinger, which has brought on the wholesale closure of some Mediterranean beaches.

Jellyfish stings can be painful but rarely pose a serious risk, says Harrington, who adds that they shouldn’t prevent individuals going into the sea (the NHS guidance is to avoid hugely infested waters). “Our suggestions is in no way to touch them, no matter whether in the sea or stranded on the seashore. They are usually really visible.”

Stings are very best treated with seawater – the salt is believed to deactivate the tiny darts, named nematocysts, inside cells that “fire off” the venom. Peeing on a sting could have worked for Monica from Friends (Chandler did the deed when she was stung) but it is not recommended.

Some scientists consider becoming overrun by jellyfish is a signal of sea pollution, other individuals say it is portion of a natural cycle. “Jellyfish have always been with us,” says Harrington. “Studies above the last 7 or eight many years propose the numbers have risen, but it’s as well early to say for particular.”

Other marine life

The lesser weever fish lies buried in sandy shallows and has sharp spines laced with venom along its dorsal fin stepping on a single can consequence in excruciating discomfort and, sometimes, allergic shock.

The MCS advises sporting jelly shoes in the water – and shuffling your feet whilst strolling by way of the sand to scare away any waiting weevers. If stung, the standard treatment administered by lifeguards is to immerse the foot in water “as hot as you can bear” to deactivate the toxin.

Other stinging species contain stingrays, sea urchins and the Portuguese guy o’ war (not a jellyfish but a floating colony of small creatures known as hydrozoans), which visits our waters only seldom, and usually in south-west Cornwall. Most stings are not severe and can be taken care of with simple initial help (such as ice packs) and tweezers, if any spines are in the skin. Seek out healthcare aid if signs are severe.

Rocks and pools

The hazards posed by marine life are as nothing at all compared to the risks of falls and slips on the rocks. “In some regions where seawater meets freshwater, you get an algae growing on rocks and slipways, which provides them this very slippery surface – like ice,” says Andy Horton, director of the British Marine Life Study Society. “People who dwell by the sea know about this but most other folks do not.

“Kids enjoy rock climbing but dad and mom should be watchful,” he adds.

Sewage

^{Sea pollution in Porthleven, Cornwall (Alamy)}

Sewage straight discharged into the sea can typically lead to infections of the ear, nose and throat, and gastroenteritis, whilst in a case reported in the Isle of Guy last week, a single victim mentioned he had to get 6 months off perform soon after harm to the intestines brought on by coming into get in touch with with raw sewage. Laura Foster, pollution expert at the MCS, says the last 10 to twenty years have noticed large improvements in the quality of British bathing water, with the newest survey designating 73 per cent of our beaches as “excellent”. However, stricter requirements are due to exchange the recent ones, primarily based on an EU bathing water directive from 1976, subsequent 12 months, and might see some beaches downgraded.

To minimise the threat of swimming in polluted water, select a Blue Flag beach or consult the MCS Good Beach Manual, available on the internet (www.mcsuk.org).

Quick-term pollution soon after hefty rain, triggered by run-offs from streets and farmland, as properly as stormwater overflows, is even now a issue in many regions. “As a basic rule we advise towards going in the sea for a excellent 24 hrs soon after hefty rainfall,” says Harrington.

Troubles in water

This is the most severe chance posed by the sea, with seven,000 folks acquiring into difficulty yearly. Dickon Berriman, a lifeguard manager on the Cornish coast, says the most widespread cause of difficulties are rip currents – robust bodies of water working out to sea that sweep swimmers out beyond their depth.

“You can typically see a dark ribbon of water indicating where rip currents are, or discoloured water where the sand is churned up,” he says. “The best way to keep secure is to swim on a lifeguarded beach between the flags indicated, obey security indications and by no means swim alone. If you get into difficulties, remain calm, stick your hand in the air and shout for help.”

It is also crucial to be conscious of the tide, which can come in surprisingly speedily. The site of the Royal Nationwide Lifeboat Institution (rnli.org) also has security suggestions on waves, inflatables, surfing and bodyboarding. Of tombstoning (jumping in feet-first from a height), Berriman says: “It is not new children have often carried out it. But it’s hazardous simply because you do not know what’s beneath the surface or if the water is shallow. If you are interested do it securely with an organised business.”

He adds that final winter’s storms will have modified the make-up of several seashores in the South West, which can catch out the unwary. “Some sand dunes have been washed away, leaving great sand cliffs which are at danger of collapsing, so dad and mom must hold their kids away.”

Also considerably sun

A survey final 12 months showed that when the sun does come out in Britain, we are less likely to apply sunscreen than when abroad – and beachgoers could be much more vulnerable than most to the sun’s dangerous rays. “Shade can be hard to locate on the seaside, individuals are keen to get their garments off, and sunscreen washes off in the sea,” says Greg Jones from Cancer Research Uk.

On the seashore or off, the advice is the identical: commit time in the shade or cover up among 11am and 3pm, and reapply sunscreen (with a minimum factor 15) often.

Insect bites and stings

If a wasp is interested in your ice cream, really don’t try out to swat it – move calmly out of its way. Wasps and other stinging insects like bright colors, so dress in neutrals and keep away from using robust scents. Insect repellent can avert bites from mosquitoes and horseflies, which are found in some coastal places. If you do get stung or bitten, ice packs and painkillers can assist a bee sting demands getting rid of. Wasp stings lead to much more allergic reactions than individuals of any other insect and might require immediate medical aid.

Sharks

^{Very unlikely: ‘Jaws’ (Moviestore/Rex)}

Overlook the Jaws films: few of the 30-odd species of shark identified off Britain are interested in humans, with only two unprovoked shark attacks recorded in England since 1847. Nevertheless, adds Ali Hood from the Shark Believe in, if you spot a single, “these are large, powerful animals and you ought to hold a respectful distance”.

But really do not be put off…

Richard Harrington says that, regardless of the hazards, British beaches are amongst the most lovely in the globe. “We advise that as several folks as attainable make use of our splendid coastline.”

Seaside holidays: Of course it is secure to go back in the water

Schools warned more than FGM risk to girls for the duration of summer time holidays

The Division for Training (DfE) has urged colleges to be vigilant in guarding against the dangers of female genital mutilation ahead of the summer holidays – recognized to be a notably dangerous time for at-risk girls.

The division has sent out an electronic mail to all schools in England and Wales drawing interest to up to date recommendations created to preserve ladies secure before the begin of the summertime break, at times referred to as the “cutting season” for ladies at chance of mutilation.

Michael Gove previously wrote to all headteachers warning them of the dangers of the practice, which entails the elimination of a girl’s outer sexual organs and can lead to lifelong trauma and physical issues, following a Guardian-backed campaign to increase awareness of the practice attracted far more than 234,000 signatures on Alter.org.

An estimated 66,000 ladies and women in the United kingdom have been victims of FGM, with up to 24,000 girls beneath the age of 15 believed to be at danger.

The campaign – led by 17-yr-old Bristolian pupil Fahma Mohamed – acquired the assistance of the UN secretary standard, Ban Ki-moon, and Pakistani schoolgirl and schooling activist Malala Yousafzai. It also inspired 24-12 months-outdated American mother-of-three Jaha Dukureh to launch a comparable campaign in the US on Modify.org, calling for the government to collect more data about the practice, which professionals warn is happening to US citizens on American soil.

The DoE’s electronic mail to colleges states: “On three April 2014 the government published new statutory safeguarding guidance for all colleges, Maintaining Young children Secure in Schooling. The guidance specifically addresses female genital mutilation (FGM) and offers a hyperlink to multi-agency tips on that problem.”

The electronic mail goes on to urge teachers to “be vigilant, notably in the summer season phrase, as ladies may be at chance for the duration of the summertime holidays”.

Efua Dorkenoo, senior FGM advisor at Equality Now, welcomed the move but called for additional action from the DoE. “It is wonderful that the Department for Schooling has let teachers know that they must be alert to achievable indicators of FGM prior to the summer time holidays,” she explained.

“Nonetheless, teachers must be skilled as well on reporting and sharing information and on exact particulars of which warning signs to appear out for – and they should be held accountable. It is also crucial that youthful FGM survivors are given care and help.”

Schools warned more than FGM risk to girls for the duration of summer time holidays

Skin cancer prices soar thanks to sunbeds and low-cost holidays

“We know overexposure to UV (ultraviolet) rays from the sun or sunbeds is the major result in of skin cancer. This indicates, in a lot of cases, the condition can be prevented, and is why it is essential to get into excellent sun-safety routines, no matter whether at residence or abroad. The very good information for those who are diagnosed is that survival for the disease is amongst the highest for any cancer more than eight in ten people will now survive it.’’

Cancer Investigation United kingdom is campaigning for the third 12 months to inspire people to appreciate the sun safely, in partnership with Nivea Sun.

Aside from steering clear of sunburn, other suggestions contains paying time in the shade, covering up and making use of a minimal element 15 sunscreen.

Amanda Crosland, 43, from Leeds, a red-haired and honest skinned mother of two, was diagnosed with malignant melanoma in 2001, despite covering up in the sun. She said: “When I observed a new mole on my left calf, I knew it was safest to get it checked out by the physician. Spotting it early meant I had a profitable operation to eliminate the cancer before it spread.

“I’ve always been cautious to appear after my skin, but I do bear in mind receiving sunburnt as a woman. I nevertheless get pleasure from obtaining out in the sun, but now make positive the children and I are properly protected: hats, T-shirts, and sunscreen.’’

Skin cancer prices soar thanks to sunbeds and low-cost holidays