Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques

Archive for November, 2009

Following the food pyramid is a good place to start and maybe it’s a good place to end for some people. If you take all the food somebody eats at the end of the week and then add them all up and how much variety there was, you will find that there really wasn’t that much variety.

People generally have a dozen foods they like to eat and they will end up eating the same foods day after day for most of their life and that are where you run into problems. You get stuck in a rut and fail to incorporate a vast variety into your diet and fail to get the nutritional balance that you should be getting. If you know nothing about food but incorporate a lot of variety into your diet the chances of your being malnourished because you don’t get the right nutrients goes down hill.

I like fresh fruits and vegetables especially in the summer time. My wife does the grocery shopping and she and I like fresh fruit and vegetables. We will just take a big salad bowl and fill it like the diet

out there called the Rainbow diet. It’s based on all the different colors of fruits and vegetables. So I will take purple grapes and onions and garlic and sprinkle some lettuce and if we have fresh strawberries I will add those cantaloupe and really your imagination is your only limitation. You know, just basically add all your favorite fruits and vegetables and throw in a couple of tablespoons of your favorite dressing and season it to taste. Mix it all up and you have an incorporation of all of that variety. You get all of the vitamins and the nutrients and the minerals that you need in just one meal instead of just ingesting one kind of food.

My point is the more variety you can get in your diet the greater the possibility that if you are lacking in something that you are going to get it. I am an advocate of getting variety in your diet. It all comes down to looking at your budget and having some knowledge of getting what you need and looking at the food labels.

With just a little bit of knowledge of how to read food labels and what you need you can make the right choices with the money that you have to work with.

Even the restaurants and the fast food chains are starting to offer

more nutritious choices, likes salads. Subway is one that has really jumped on the bandwagon. You know the one with Jared standing there saying this deep fat fried sandwich contains 45 plus grams of fat I wonder how they got all that fat in there to begin with and compare it to the subway sandwich.

I saw an interview where they were talking with the producer of Sesame Street and they were talking about the cookie monster and how it was presented in a way to get kids to eat more junk food and more cookies. Now they have repositioned that whole program to where they are starting to teach kids more about nutrition. I am hoping that one of the things that are happening is that there is awareness about nutrition and this obesity epidemic. Some people are just succumbing to obesity and the things that come with it like cancer and heart disease and diabetes. It’s good to see some positive changes taking place.

People who may be suffering from depression or manic disorders actually exhibit or show each and every kind of symptom of depression that doctors will tell you that depressed people have. Sometimes it’s actually quite easy to overlook such symptoms and not be able to help one’s self or others who are suffering from depression for that matter.

There are actually a lot of symptoms of depression that depressed people may actually posses but they don’t have to suffer from each and every one of them before you actually help them get diagnosed and be treated for this illness. Also, since symptoms of depression actually vary, the time of their “attacks” varies as well.

Here are some common examples of symptoms of depression:

Prolonged period of sadness or not feeling “up to it,”  people who are always feeling not in the mood, who’d rather mope around the house and feel sorry for one’s self is the best example for this symptom of depression.

Feels hopeless, perennial pessimist: speaking of feeling sorry for one’s self, another common symptom of depression is when a person actually feels like he/she has nothing to look forward to in his or her life. As for being the perennial pessimist, those who show this symptom of depression are usually very negative about things, again, the feeling of hopelessness comes in to mind.

Guilt-driven, loss of self-worth and helplessness: other symptoms of depression that can be easily seen on people who prefer to mope around all day long are these. Whenever a person feels so guilty over something, that actually makes one a very sad person who feels like he or she doesn’t deserve to be happy. Thus, the loss of self-worth, if that person feels like he or she isn’t worthy of being happy or enjoying one’s self then that’s clear tell-tale symptom of depression. Helplessness also contribute to being depressed, when assuming that things won’t simply go your way, it’s already a clear saying that you have absolutely no hope in your body at all.

Isn’t interested in finding or taking pleasure; just dropping the hobbies as well as the other things that one used to enjoy: this tell-tale symptom of depression just shows how depressed a person can be, if one is actually too sad to take pleasure even in the very things that one loves then that person is seriously lacking something, rather, that person might well have caught the depression bug.

Fatigue, always tired: people suffering from depression, since they’ve lost whatever interest in life that they may have had before are actually lacking of physical energy at all times, if one would prefer to just mope around, probably won’t even eat not get enough sleep, a depressed person may well be on their way to not just a mental illness but depression can actually be terrible for one’s physical health as well.

Having trouble concentrating, having bad memory and is indecisive: a person who is suffering from depression easily gives away this tell-tale symptom of depression. Wherein one’s lack of interest with regards to the outside world or for just about anything for that matter can lead to that person’s inability to lose track of things and actually not be able to remember things that happened or what other people said. Lack of interest actually makes depressed people very inattentive.

There are actually more symptoms of depression that can actually help you see if a person (or you) needs to be brought to the doctor to get some help when it comes to depression: lacking sleep, sleeping too much or waking up at wee hours of the morning are all symptoms of depression (if it happens on a daily basis), appetite loss as well as eating too much may show one’s lack of enthusiasm for life. Be weary of sudden weight loss or weight gain in those around you. Being suicidal, talking about death, about wanting to die is another clear indication that that person is depressed. Being restless and irritable and physical symptoms that are usually brought about by poor mental health such as headaches, digestive disorders and various body pains.