How is your mood today? How is your wellbeing? Could you be a wellbeing winner? Take our daily mood index to find out more about yourself and your wellbeing. It may not be what you think!
Our moods change daily and our overall wellbeing is affected by many factors. Click on the link below to receive your wellbeing score for today!
http://www.yearofwellbeing.com/moods/
BEAT THE BELLY BULGE AND MAKE YOUR
BODY A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE - May
As we get older we tend to notice a little extra fat developing around our middles. Where we store fat (surplus calories) is largely a combination of gender, age and genetic inheritance. Men tend to store fat around their middle (apple shape), whereas women typically store fat around the pelvic region, hips, bottom and thighs (pear shape). However, women are prone to develop an apple shape in mid-life, after menopause. This is because the female hormones are present in smaller amounts and so their shape tends to become more 'male'.
What you may not know is how dangerous the fat around your middle really is (more so than fat on your thighs or bottom
According to the British Nutrition Foundation, having fat deposited around the waist (‘apple shaped’), rather than the hips and thighs, is an important risk factor for poor heart health. A simple way to measure whether you are ‘apple shaped’ or not, is to measure your waist circumference. It should be less than 37 inches (94 cm) in men and less than 32 inches (80 cm) in women.”
If you are prone to store fat around your middle, the healthiest solution is to try and match your calorie intake to your calorie needs to help promote a healthier weight.
However, if you already have a bit of a tum, the best option is to follow a healthy weight loss diet, combined with fitness exercises such as aerobics (to burn extra calories) and a stomach-toning workout to help tighten and strengthen abdominal muscles.
One website that may help you ‘beat the bulge’ is www.weightwise.com and for more helpful hints stay tuned to the Year of Wellbeing for more tips! Click here to request our brochure - healthy eating for a healthy body shape.
Wellbeing research - March
Everyone likes feeling happy. But is happiness actually good for you? Many researchers believe that it could be and there is an emerging body of evidence that health and happiness are directly linked. It is easy enough to see how feeling in top physical condition is likely to enhance your psychological wellbeing – and on the other hand, it is equally apparent that being in poor health is likely to be detrimental to your happiness.
Interestingly, however, it seems that causation may operate in both directions. Frequency of happy feelings have been shown to predict working days lost through illness five years later, the likelihood of stroke six years later, and of cardio-vascular disease ten years later. One recent review of literature on physical health and wellbeing concluded that subjective wellbeing in healthy populations is an extremely strong predictor of longevity, with an effect size comparable to that associated with smoking. In one famous longitudinal study, nearly 700 Catholic nuns in Minnesota wrote short autobiographical stories on entering the convent in their early 20s. Astonishingly, the amount of positive emotional content in these stories was strongly associated with significantly decreased risk of mortality between the age of 75 and 95 - six decades later.
The implication of these results for health policy is striking, to say the least. They strongly suggest that raising levels of mental wellbeing across the population would have a very large pay-off in terms of physical health outcomes in later life.
We will continue to explore further topics of wellbeing in future newsletters. Be on the lookout for our next newsletter focused on nutrition and advice to help you to shape up for summer!