Meditation

Healthy lifestyle means we are fit physically and emotionally. To be fit physically, exercise is very important in our daily life. We should spend at least 15-20 minutes daily to do exercise. This can helps to keep us healthy and energetic.

 

Healthy emotions is as important as getting enough exercise. With all the problems in daily life, to reach a healthy emotions is quite a challenge. If we fails to handle this emotions, it turns out to be a disease that would kills us eventually. Many of us have heard of stories that someone commited suicide due to depression and stress.

 

Handling stress wisely is very important to prevent any health issues. There are many ways that we could do to release the tension and stress. For girls, one of it would be shopping and spending money. However, excessive spending will actually causes more stress at the end of the day - credit card debt, unable to meet month end, etc.

 

Meditation is about focusing our mind and deep thinking to provide relaxation and thoughts of an issue. When I'm in reall
y frustrating and stress moment, meditation would helps to provide peace of mind. For me, meditation is simply talking to God and listening to what He wants to tell us.

 

To start meditation, we must find a quiet place - best is in our room where no one would disturb. First, just sit down comfortably and close our eyes. Take a deep breath and stay focus with the breathing.

 

When the mind is calm, think of what is the issue that causes us to feel stress, frustrated or angry. I would normally ask myself few question:

1. What causes me to feel angry/frustrated/sad/stress/annoyed?
2. Is it within my control?
3. If yes, what can it be done to solve?
4. If its beyond my control, how should I tackle it?
5. Is it worth to be bad because of what had already happen or going to happen?

When there's no solution from the deep thoughts, try to focus the mind on happy things which related to the issues. For example: if we are unhappy at work and there's no solution to it at the moment. We can think of the happy gathering/party that we enjoyed. Or receiving bonuses/increment/promotions. Or anyone that brightens our day at work.

The most important of all is to learn to let go. While meditating, talk to God and listen to His tender voice within our hearts. When we open up our ears and listen, we will hear His voice gently comforting us.

Breaking the Plateau

When I start my weight lost program, losing the weight seems easy. Averagely, I lost 3KG per month for the first year. After that, losing weight is so dissapointing. No matter how I try, the weight just doesn't moved on.

One of the possibilities is that I've gain more muscle than before. As we all know, muscle is heavier than fats. I can feel that my body is firmer and I feel stronger. If you are wondering whether your body stops losing that fats, try to see if you have lost some inches in your body.

When neither did we lose the KGs nor inches, this status is called plateau. I have tried all sorts of ways to break plateau but all the work just doesn't seems to bear any fruits.

I came across an article about plateau and some suggestions on how to break it. One of the many ways is to change your routine workout. If the normal workout is aerobics, perhaps its time to switch from aerobics to yoga (or any other form of exercise).

Determination too is another factor to helps in reaching our key goals. Set our goals, reach for it and find solutions. Nothing is impossible.

10,000 Steps A Day Keeps A Healthy Heart

Have you ever count how many steps did you take everyday? During the ancient time, walking is the only way for a person to gets from one place to another. Regardless of the distance, our ancestors spends most of their time walking. As technology begins to advance, we human began to forget about walking. Now, we can get from one place to another within minutes.

 

Nowadays, we try to avoid walking too much by replacing them with cars, bikes, elevator and even prefered online activities to get things done. Walking is actually the best form of exercise for everyone regardless of age. It helps to trim up the tummy, keeps our heart healthy and refresh our mind with the nature of the earth.

If you are in Kuching, you can try to have a good walk at Friendship Garden. While walking along the garden, you would be amazed with the surroundings too.

 

Fishes at Friendahip Garden Park

Anyway, regardless of where it is, we should have the mindset to encourage walking in our daily life to keep us healthy and a step further from sickness. Here's some suggestion of how we can practice walking in our busy working life:

 

• Avoid lift, instead use staircase
• Park your car a bit further from the office entrance and walk your way to the office!
• If there's an urgent issue to settle with another colleague, walk up to her/his place instead of calling their extension
• If there's public transport to get to your workplace, make use of them instead of driving

Happiness Comes from a Healthy Lifestyle

Chakra Asanas or the Wheel Pose

One of my resolution for this year is to attend at least 40 classes of yoga as a self motivation for myself.

On the sixth class that I attended this year, I began to like it more especially the posture chakra asanas. This posture is very good for us mentally and emotionally.

Although wheel posture is good for us, we should also be cautious of what it can do to our body if we don't practice it properly. Some of the impacts would be headache, back injury and heart related problems. So, make sure that you have a qualified teacher to teach you before trying out this posture!

So what is the steps to do chakra asanas?

1. First, you must lie flat on the back
2. Bring the knees close to the buttock while exhaling out. The feet must be flat on the ground
3. Then, bend the arms at the elbow and place the palms flat on the floor (under each shoulder). Fingers pointing towards the back.
4. Take a deep breath, then raise the head, back and buttocks off the floor.
5. Press downward on the hands and feet while raising the hips and stomach as high as possible.

In my googling research, there are few major benefits from wheel posture:
- it stretches the chest and lung
- stengthen the arms, wrists, legs, buttocks abdomen and most important of all, the spine
- also stimulates the tyroid and pituitary
- increase our energy level and helps release depression
- a therapy for asthma, back pain, infertility and osteoporosis

For more details, you can get from this website which for me, contains a lot of useful information

Yoga definitely challenge ourselves on what we can or can't do. However, nothing is impossible. If we can't do it now, doesn't mean we will fail forever. For those who can't do this, don't give up!

Calculate Your Body Fat

Recently I'm stuck in a plateau stage where my weight doesn't seems to decrease. This has really de-motivating me in doing any dietary plan.

Then I realize that weight measurement is not only based on scale measurement but also on how much percentage of body fat in our body. Averagely, an Asian women will have the range of 25% of body fat and 75% lean muscle.

Some equipment in the gym have the formulas of calculating total body fat and total lean muscle that a person have. As I did not have the habits of going to gym, I've tried an alternatives way of finding whether my body fat is healthy or bad.

I found this website that tells us how much body fat is good and how much is bad. In average, women with 20% to 27% of body fat is consider as normal while men would have 13% to 17% of body fat. Slim or skinny doesn't mean that the body fat is lower. The body do have probability of having high percentage of body weight.

These website helps me to know my own body fat. In one sources, my body fat is 22% while another shows a lower body fat of 18%. After few tryout of the body fat calculation website, I found two website which gives more information and is nearer to each other than the others.

**The website is at the bottom of the picture.

This website gives more information. Other than the body fat percentage, it gives the ratio of waist to height and BMI.


So, what are you waiting for? Checkout your own body fat. Remember: Slim doesn't mean fit. And fit doesn't mean you must be skinny!!