Real Issues - Alternative Health

Alternative Therapies and Self-help techniques are a key part to restoring your health and maintaining your health.

Take an active role in your health care!

You are what you eat, think and do!

Health Benefits of Walking:A recent Harvard study shows that walking at a moderate pace (3 mph) for up to 3 hours a week—or 30 minutes a day--can cut the risk of heart disease in women by as much as 40%. This is the same benefit you would get from aerobics, jogging, or other vigorous exercise. The benefits to men are comparable.

Along with its benefits to the heart, walking:

improves circulation
helps breathing
combats depression
bolsters the immune system
helps prevent osteoporosis
helps prevent and control diabetes
helps control weight (see below)

Studies have also shown that people are most likely to stick to exercise when it is part of their daily lives.

The Health Benefits of Swimming:

Low impact — Less pressure on your joints, bones and muscles. With swimming, the buoyancy of water acts cushions your body and is no harsh pounding to stress your joints and muscles.
Anyone can do it — No matter your age, weight, skill level, or fitness level, swimming is an excellent choice for anyone including overweight people, people with disabilities , pregnant women and seniors.
Weight loss — You burn around three calories a mile per pound of body weight. So if you weigh 150 pounds and you swim one mile in 30 minutes, then you will burn 900 calories per hour.
Physical health benefits — Swimming builds flexibility, endurance, muscle strength and cardiovascular health. Water adds 12 times more resistance than air, so it takes more work to move through water than air. Swimming not only helps strengthen muscles, it also helps builds lean, flexible muscles.
Mental benefits — For many swimmers, swimming is like a form of mediation. This is because swimming is a focused activity that cannot be combined with distractions like reading or watching television. Swimming forces you to regulate your breathing, and allows you to focus on nothing but the rhythm of your stroke. It reduces stress and leaves you feel relaxed and refreshed.
Recreation — Swimming is a lot of fun and can be a great way to socialize.

The Health Benefits of Relaxation:The human body is an incredible, interactive vehicle, and it needs careful nurturing to keep it in peak condition. Exercise is one important way to do just that, but so is observing and managing stress By learning to de-stress and relax, you allow your body to rest and regenerate itself. Stress often arises because we ignore the persistent signals our body is giving us about our environment. Relaxation is essential for physical and mental well-being. When we are more relaxed, our bodies simply function better. We may notice decreased muscle tension, improved sleep, and more efficient digestion. We are also often able to think more clearly, enjoy better moods, and be more creative. When we reduce stress, the nervous system has more resources available for healing and repairing tissues, and rebuilding energy.
Over the past 40 years, dozens of universities in the United States, Europe and India have conducted hundreds of studies on the effects of meditation on human physiology and behavior. The research (link to noetic sciences, noetic.org) results point to meditation as producing benefits on many levels of life simultaneously – body, emotions, mental functioning, and relationships. Greater Orderliness of Brain Functioning· Improved Ability to Focus· Increased Creativity·Deeper Level of Relaxation· Improved Perception and Memory· Natural Change in Breathing· Decrease in Stress Hormone· Lower Blood Pressure· Reversal of Aging Process· Reduced Need for Medical Care· Reduction in Cholesterol· Increased Self-Actualization· Increased Strength of Self-Concept· Decreased Cigarette, Alcohol, and Drug Abuse· Increased Productivity·· Increased Relaxation and Decreased Stress· Improved Health and More Positive Health Habits.
he Health Benefits of Yoga:At the physical level, yoga and its cleansing practices have proven to be extremely effective for various disorders.

Increasing Flexibility –yoga has positions that act upon the various joints of the body including those joints that are never really on the ‘radar screen’ let alone exercised.

Increasing lubrication of the joints, ligaments and tendons – likewise, the well-researched yoga positions exercise the different tendons and ligaments of the body. Surprisingly it has been found that the body which may have been quite rigid starts experiencing a remarkable flexibility in even those parts which have not been consciously work upon. Why? It is here that the remarkable research behind yoga positions proves its mettle. Seemingly unrelated “non strenuous” yoga positions act upon certain parts of the body in an interrelated manner. When done together, they work in harmony to create a situation where flexibility is attained relatively easily.

Massaging of ALL Organs of the Body– Yoga is perhaps the only form of activity which massages all the internal glands and organs of the body in a thorough manner, including those – such as the prostate - that hardly get externally stimulated during our entire lifetime. Yoga acts in a wholesome manner on the various body parts. This stimulation and massage of the organs in turn benefits us by keeping away disease and providing a forewarning at the first possible instance of a likely onset of disease or disorder.

Complete Detoxification – By gently stretching muscles and joints as well as massaging the various organs, yoga ensures the optimum blood supply to various parts of the body. This helps in the flushing out of toxins from every nook and cranny as well as providing nourishment up to the last point. This leads to benefits such as delayed aging, energy and a remarkable zest for life.

Excellent toning of the muscles –Muscles that have become flaccid, weak or slothy are stimulated repeatedly to shed excess flab and flaccidity.

The Health Benefits of Self-Massage:

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