Tips for a Healthy Christmas..

The lead up to Christmas can be hectic, between shopping, preparations, social events, pressures at work, catching colds and perhaps travel. Christmas day can feel like the finish line in a hectic race and an opportunity to down tools, forget about rules, relax, overindulge for the holiday and deal with the fallout in January. And I’m not criticising that approach, but for those who don’t want to have a healthy-ish Christmas, here are a few tips.

1. Prioritise sleep. Try not to throw your normal sleep routine out the window. While a sleep in can be bliss (I realise for people with small folk to look after it might be something to look forward to in years to come), but getting to bed at a reasonable hour most nights and aiming to get around 7-8 hours will help maintain energy levels, support our immune system and help keep our mood and stress levels on an even keel.

2. Get out for a walk, or a cycle or some kind of exercise. Go on your own, with the dog, the family or use it as a way to catch up with friends. Again it will boost the energy, mood and feel like an accomplishment. I’m keen on the early morning ones. Getting out into the early morning light can help reset the circadian rhythm and help you get a better night’s sleep.

3. Mindful Eating. Picture this, you’re on the sofa watching a Christmas movie, there’s a box of Roses / Celebrations / Heroes / or if you’re posh, those Lindt balls, open beside you. By the end of the movie you reach for a sweet and can only find wrappers. What the?! Choose your choccie(s) before the movie and put the tub in another room. Ask yourself, ‘am I actually hungry?’ Recognise hunger v appetite. Hunger is the need for food, appetite is the desire for food. At mealtimes - get those lovely colouredy veggies into you and eat slowly, even take a two minute break in the middle of dinner and give your stomach time to let your brain know where it’s at!

4. Booze. Match your glass of wine or whatever your tipple is with water. It will help you pace yourself, stay hydrated and you’ll be going to the loo so often you won’t have time to drink as much.

5. Stress management - Christmas can be a hectic time. Delegating tasks, saying a nice ‘no’, not aiming for perfection, and taking some time out - maybe read a book, meditate or just screaming into a pillow, can help. We can’t control everything but what we can control is our reaction.

Happy Christmas peeps.

How much water do we really need?

How often have you heard the advice, we should ‘aim to drink 8 glasses of water a day’?  I think I’ve included this in my new year’s resolution list every year since I was a teenager and spent the rest of each year berating myself because I never seemed to achieve it.   Increasingly I’ve come across interviews with medical experts including kidney specialists who have been speaking out against the 8x8 directive, there’s even a hashtag ‘#hydrationbollocks’ doing the rounds.  They claim you don’t actually need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to stay hydrated.  It’s a myth.  

I’m trying to remember when it became a thing and perhaps it was the supermodels who started it – looking fabulous while lugging around giant bottles of water at fashions shows, along with marketing campaigns from bottled water companies and water bottle companies and the oft-repeated 8x8 advice has fuelled our thirst for of optimum hydration.

I asked my mum and my aunt who were teenagers in the ‘60s if they had any memories of living in fear of dehydration, there was a resounding ‘no’, they don’t remember any advice around water intake, apart from sticking it in the kettle for a cuppa.  My Mum was wondering if it all kicked off when people started going to gyms – maybe?

 In recent years so obsessed are we with hydrating, there has been a rise in the number of cases of hyponatremia (drinking too much water), particularly amongst amateur marathon runners.

It’s not entirely certain where the 8 x 8 advice originally came from – it’s a toss-up between a report from the Food and Nutrition Board of America’s National Research council in 1945 suggesting the body needs one millilitre of water for each calorie of food or nutritionist Frederick J. Stare in the US in the mid ‘70s who recommended an equivalent of 8 x 8oz glasses of water a day to function properly, what his report actually stated though was “For the average adult, somewhere around 6 to 8 glasses per 24 hours and this can be in the form of coffee, tea, milk…fruit and vegetables are also a good source of water."  Like Chinese whispers, the message has been distorted. 

We don’t need an additional 8 glasses of water on top of everything else we’re taking in – to varying degrees water is in almost everything we eat apart from oils and sugar, and the body is adept at removing fluid from the food and beverages we consume. Based on a regular diet, we actually get around 20% of our daily fluid requirement from our food.  For example, milk – full or skimmed – contains around 99% water and as it’s a source of protein too, serves as an excellent post-workout drink.  

Contrary to popular belief tea and coffee are not dehydrating – now obviously too much caffeine isn’t good for you and people process it differently, but yes even these beverages contribute to your hydration levels (woohoo!).

According to Prof. Neil Turner, kidney consultant at Edinburgh university, for the regular healthy individual, even the pee colour chart is bunkum. Speaking of pee, Stuart Galloway, professor or exercise physiology of Exeter at the university of Stirling reckons 5-7 times a day is about normal, more than 8 and you’re probably drinking too much.

There are times of course when drinking water may be advised by your medical professional, for example, if someone has had a bout of vomiting/diarrhoea or kidney stones or urinary infections.  Also, elderly people may need a reminder to drink.  

In his ‘Just One thing’ podcast, Dr. Michael Mosley suggests a glass of water with each meal is sufficient, but for the most part, it seems whoever the marketeer was that came up with the tagline ‘obey your thirst’ was right.  Drink when you're thirsty.

And just in case you’ve heard the advice against drinking water with a meal because it affects the digestive juices – again there’s no scientific basis to this either, water aids our digestion.

PS I absolutely admit this is slightly contradicting my previous blog re hydration BUT we learn as we go, in truth I will no doubt continue to sip water while I’m sitting at my laptop and at the gym, but I am going to be more mindful of my thirst and let that direct me.

6 Simple Tips for a Healthier Working Day

We spend most of our week working, so why not take advantage of this time to help optimise our health. Here are some simple tips to show you how.

Stand up

We’ve all been in this situation – we’re madly busy at our desk or just engrossed in a task and all of a sudden we realise we’ve been sitting for a couple of hours hunched over our computers.

 Sitting for long uninterrupted bouts can have a detrimental effect on our metabolism, circulation and even bone health.  Being in a seated position for extended lengths of time can create muscle imbalances – our posture and back health can be impacted and over the long term it can leave us more susceptible to uncommunicable diseases such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes.

Office workers in particular will spend 70-80% of waking hours seated.  

The good news is standing and moving around for 2-3 minutes every hour can help remedy long hours at our desks.  My issue here is wandering off for half an hour and not being able to remember what I was doing when I come back.

There’s an app that can help us – of course there is, in fact there are a number of them.  I use ‘Stand up’.  It’s free, you can set the hours you want to work within and how often you want it to go off to remind you to stand up and move around.

Another option of course is standing  / walking for your phone calls or standing for your zoom or in person (ACTUAL IN PERSON!) meetings.  In fact holding ‘standing meetings’ has another advantage – they tend to get wrapped up a lot quicker.  Standing more often burns more calories and can have a positive impact on our sleep. 

Introduce some house plants

Indoor air pollution can be caused by VOCs – volatile organic compounds, are tiny chemical particles in the air from the likes of aerosols, cleaning productions, plastic, furniture as well as carbon dioxide.

Plants can improve air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen through photosynthesis, they increase humidity by transpiring water vapor through their leaf pores, and they can absorb pollutants like the aforementioned VOCs, on the external surfaces of leaves and on the plant root-soil system.

In the past studies have shown adding plants to office space to can help employees improve their mood, memory and concentration and possibly contributing to a reduction in headaches, coughs and other chest related illnesses.

In a small room with high levels of natural light, 5-6 plants can have a positive impact. The fast growing, thirsty plants work best e.g. Peace lillies and devil’s ivy.

Mobilise Your Hands!

 Reduce the wrist of carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain injury by the some simple hand and wrist exercises during the day.  Shake out your hands, interlace your hands roll your wrists, make a fist and then stretch your fingers out as far away from each other as you can.  Interlace your hands and push your palms away.  Try ‘spiders doing push ups against a mirror’ touching your finger tips to each other and splay them in and out.  

Exercise your eyes

There’s nothing like staring at a screen for to make your peepers feel tired.  Exercise those ocular muscles with the 20-20-20 rule.  Look at an object 20 metres away from your screen for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.  I was delighted to find out that eye rolls are also beneficial, I’m pretty sure I’d get into the medals in the eye-rolling competition.

Make the most of your lunch hour

Sometimes it’s easier to stay at your desk and work, get a bit of online shopping done, some life admin or just have a rummage around on social media.  But if you can, get moving.  Get out for a walk.  If the weather isn’t lending itself to outdoor activities, get some stretches or even a few strength moves at your desk.  Try some seated cat cows, side stretches, some gentle twists, a seated (on your chair) forward fold where you rest your trunk onto your thighs and enjoy that yummy back stretch.  Or if you’d like to get a little more energetic, some squats to your chair, single leg squats, tricep dips against your chair or push ups off your chair or desk.  

Stay Hydrated

You don’t need to guzzle gallons of water to stay hydrated but keeping a bottle of water on your desk serves as a nice reminder.  We need water to hydrate the brain (it’s 90% water!), digest food and flush out our kidneys and to replace the water we lose through exhaling and sweating.  Try drinking a glass of water before a meal, which can not only hydrate us but can also stop us overeating.  Staying hydrated can help can help reduce headaches and fatigue as well as support our cognition and overall performance.

Men need about 2l of water a day women about 1.6l, if you’re exercising / sweating profusely, you may need more. Herbal teas and milk are also hydrating.   Peeing around 5-7 times a day is about the norm – and it’s another way of getting us up and moving.