FIVE RULES FOR HEALTHY SKIN

Eat a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. A fat high diet will spoil your skin. Supplement your diet with vitamins if you think you are stressed. Vitamin A and E, and zinc are skin vitamins and minerals. Drink 10 glasses of water a day.

Dramatic weight loss over the age of 40 is very aging to the skin. If you need to lose weight, do it slowly and get daily exercise to tone your skin to the change. Baggy skin or stretch marks are the result of rapid weight changes.

The best exercise for skin is outdoor brisk walking. It stimulates the circulation, builds up a light sweat to clear the pores and leaves the skin looking pink and

healthy. If it does not suit you to walk, try swimming or cycling.

Smoking is the worst thing for skin. It gives it a yellow or grey tone, decreases circulation, builds up smelly

toxins in the skin and ages you faster than any other thing you could do to your body. Compare a smoker to a non-smoker of the same age.

Sleep is a great skin restorer. Tired people look older. Go to bed every night at the same time and get a good eight hours sleep, nine if you need it.

Use a moisturiser every day. Apply it to the dry spots such as face, neck, hands, elbows.

Take care with the sun. It dries the skin and ages it rapidly. Wear a hat, use a sunscreen and do not sun-bake at all. A light dose of sun daily is important to health but keep it off the face and neck and do not spend more than 5 minutes sitting in the sun.

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CHILDREN’S HEALTH: FREQUENT ILLNESSES

Parents often become concerned that their children are ill too frequently. Sometimes the parents are right, and the child does have some underlying medical problem. But, normally, having many illnesses is not due to any particular problem in the child. Usually, how often a child becomes ill depends on the number of children in the family and the number of diseases each child is exposed to.

Except for accidents and allergies, 95 percent of all illnesses are caused by germs that live exclusively in humans. Most children’s illnesses are caught from other children. Whether a child will catch a disease depends on two factors: whether the child is exposed to the germ and how strong the child’s resistance is.

If your child is frequently ill with different minor illnesses, the illnesses are usually due simply to exposure to many people. As soon as a child begins going to daycare or school, the child is exposed to other children with illnesses. The number of children in a household also is a factor. Mathematically, a four-child family could have 16 times as many childhood illnesses as a one-child family.

A child frequently ill with the same illness may have a defect of local resistance (a lowered resistance to disease in one area of the body). For example, repeated pneumonia in the same part of a lung suggests an abnormality in that area.

A child with frequent major illnesses or frequent complications of minor sicknesses may have a general lack of resistance. This occurs with immune mechanism defects, which hinder the child’s ability to fight infectious diseases. For instance, colds that always end up as croup, bronchiolitis, bronchitis, or pneumonia may indicate an underlying allergy.

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DEFEATING DISEASE: FEEDING ON FAT

Exhibit number one: A high-fat meal at one of those ubiquitous burger stands. Before you can properly wash the grease off your hands-that is, within roughly two hours- much of the fat you’ve just gobbled down is already in your bloodstream, reducing the natural ability of your arteries to stay open, says Robert DiBianco, M.D., director of cardiology research, the Heart Failure Clinic, and the Risk Factor Reduction Center at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland.

If you infrequently indulge in such a high-fat feast, your liver will eventually clear your blood of that extra fat (also called triglycerides), and all is well. But if this is your standard fare, you have several potential problems. For one thing, women aren’t impressed if you’re on a first-name basis with the guy at the drive-up window. And for another, you may be on your way to heart disease.

Here’s why. Even when we’re young, fat, cholesterol, and others bits of bloodstream debris-called plaque-slowly begin to build along the lining of our blood vessels. In most cases, the accumulation is as subtle and gradual as beach erosion.

But as the years, Ring Dings, and Buffalo wings go by, plaque from those fattening foods continues to build, especially in areas where your arteries branch, such as those that supply blood to your legs, kidneys, neck, brain, and heart. “The actual physical force of blood on the lining probably damages the lining and allows plaque to form,” says Thomas Pickering, M.D., professor of medicine at the Hypertension Center at New York Hospital in Manhattan and author of Good News about High Blood Pressure.

And the higher your blood pressure-literally the pressure exerted as blood flows through your vascular system-the greater the damage to its lining (known by the guys with the cold stethoscopes as your endothelium). Further damaging this lining are smoking and diabetes. “When healthy, your endothelium tends to deflect things like platelets and little small packages of fibrin or clot or scar tissue and cholesterol so that, in fact, you don’t develop plaque as easily,” says Dr. DiBianco. “But damaged endothelium allows these molecules to find their way into the vessel wall. And once they’re in the wall, they build up (in the form of plaque) or irritate the blood vessel wall and cause inflammation.”

Some guys living the high-fat life won’t have seemed to have any symptoms until their arteries narrow by about 50 percent. Then things really get ugly. “Clearly, if you have an obstruction to one of the arteries of your heart, anything that increases your need for oxygen-whether it’s exercise or emotional upset, intercourse or a meal-will cause angina or chest discomfort,” Dr. DiBianco says.

From there, all it takes is one soft plaque to dislodge and clog one of the narrowed arteries to bring on a heart attack. “Although these plaques would make up a minority of plaques in our blood vessels, they’re the ones most likely to cause these sudden events that require hospitalization or surgery or can cause death,” says Dr. DiBianco.

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SALT MASSAGE; HAND BATH

This energizing technique tones tissues, relieves stress and fatigue…and can help you ward off a cold.

Sit on the edge of a tub filled with warm water. Pour salt into a cupped hand. Slowly add water to the salt until you make a thick paste.

Using firm, circular motions, rub the paste over your body. Then rinse off the paste with a soak in the tub… or sponge it off with cold water. Be careful not to rub salt onto sores, cuts, etc.

To ease writer’s cramp, soak hands in hot water. To warm cold hands, soak them alternately in hot water (three minutes) and cold water (30 seconds). Repeat several times, ending with cold water.

caution: Don’t leave hands in cold water for more than a few minutes at a time.

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MOTHER NATURE’S ALLERGY CURES

Pollen gets most of the blame for spring and summer allergies. What most people don’t realize is that pollen is only the trigger:

Most hay fever and other allergy sufferers have mucous membranes that are chronically irritated. This—along with a genetic predisposition to allergies—makes them hyperreactive to pollen, dust, animal dander, mold spores, etc.

Long-acting antihistamines, such as loratadine (Claritin) and fexofenadine (Allegra), and steroid nasal sprays, such as fluticasone (Flonase) and mometasone (Nasonex), have few side effects and treat short-term (four- to six-week) flare-ups. But they’re costly and don’t correct the underlying problem.

better: A holistic program that heals the mucous membranes. Once the irritation and inflammation are eliminated, most patients can stop taking drugs or reduce the dosages.

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WHAT YOUR DREAMS REALLY MEAN – NAKED IN PUBLIC; RUNAWAY VEHICLE

dream: You’re in a store, at the office or giving a speech when suddenly you realize that you’re not wearing any clothes. You make a desperate attempt to cover yourself while trying not to attract attention.

meaning: This dream usually comes to people who face unfamiliar circumstances that figuratively strip them of their normal defenses—such as a new job, a new romance or giving a speech.

what you can do: Don’t expect perfection. Allow yourself to make mistakes and to grow into your situation. The dream should go away once you have become accustomed to your new circumstances.

dream: Your car—or some other vehicle—is rolling down a hill with you in it or near it, but you can’t do anything to stop it.

meaning: The runaway vehicle represents a part of your life that feels out of control. This dream often comes to people who haven’t yet consciously become alarmed about an increasingly troubled part of their lives.

what you can do: Reflect on what the problem may be. Once you recognize what the cause is, you will be able to address it.

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HOW NOT TO PANIC; WHAT YOUR DREAMS REALLY MEAN

To get panic under control, stop what you are doing and tell yourself that the situation is not threatening.

Refocus on something else. Breathe deeply and regularly to change your body’s fight-or-flight response.

helpful: Keep a daily log of events that cause you to feel panic. Use the log to help you identify situations that you should avoid or plan for in advance so you can handle them. Planning can help whether you have a full-fledged panic disorder or a milder form, such as chronic anxiety.

In our dreams, we fly without airplanes, chase runaway and have romantic encounters with casual acquaintances. The images can be enthralling or they can be disturbing—but what, if anything, do they mean? here are some of the most

common dreams and what they mean…

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YOGA BREATHING

To help focus your attention inward, start with two minutes of “complete breath” exercises.

Sit cross-legged on a firm cushion on the floor, or find another seated position in which your back is straight but also relaxed.

Begin inhaling slowly and deeply through the nose. Relax your belly so that it expands with each incoming breath, and let your chest and rib cage expand. At the very “top” of each inhalation, your shoulders will lift slightly. At this point, exhale by relaxing your shoulders and then your ribs. Then tighten your belly to squeeze the air out. Relax and repeat.

important: When we breathe ordinarily, each inhalation lasts longer than each exhalation. With yoga breathing, inhalation and exhalation should take the same amount of time.

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