How do you prevent fatigue and depression?

Eat well balanced nutritious foods (see 35 year old Chicken Rice and sea salt anyone?)

Do Aerobic exercises – 3 to 5 times a week (see Aerobic and Anaerobic). Exercise releases endorphins, which is our body’s natural feel good drug. Studies have shown that it is as potent and addictive as any other artificial or illegal drug. It helps create a good addiction – to exercise.

One thing I’ve found is that I tend to be more cautious about my food and I control my alcohol intake the moment I began exercising and saw the results. So it has multiple effects.

Take a broad spectrum, nutritional supplement,
One I highly recommend is Essentials by USANA Health Sciences. It is a broad spectrum supplement i.e. it contains all the necessary vitamins, anti-oxidants and trace minerals necessary to maintain good health; it is also Potency Guaranteed and is a Pharmaceutical Grade supplement.

Spend time in the sun
Vitamin D is necessary for the body to produce Calcium, for our bones and helps us relax. Sun exposure will also help alleviate depression. The Swedes for example are given 3 months vacation in summer, to go spend time in the sun.

Sleep and Rest
At least 7 hours; as our bodies need time for to complete the repair process. Even the machines in the office need down time for servicing and repair and that’s what sleep is. Sleep depravation increases blood pressure and (as new research seem to indicate) even diabetes.

Reduce Mental Stress
Focus on a hobby or read a good book or listen to healing music. Meditate or do something that allows you to be in your own space away from your work, spouse and children. Learn to be in the present. Check out Steven Halpern’s music. It’s extremely soothing and will help you relax.

Increase your self esteem
Learn to accept and love yourself. Join a gym to get fit and feel good. Pamper yourself by rewarding yourself with a good massage or spa treatment every month. Buy a new dress or tie, get a good haircut. Do something that you’ve always wanted to do but never got down to doing. Feel the pleasure of and joy being yourself or finding yourself again.

Minimize watching or listening to the daily news; it’s full of same bad news and advertisements that seem to imply you’re bald, fat and ugly, need credit, bigger breast and a firmer butt.

One caution about spending however – Budget and use cash. Leave your Credit Cards at home. Depressed people can go overboard giving themselves ‘retail therapy’ sometimes and end up in greater depression when the banks come a-calling at the end of the month.

Fatigue and Depression

Stress is a natural occurrence that actually keeps us alive.

At the onset of stress our body immediately releases adrenaline, for ‘flight or fight’ reflexes, and switches our body from burning fat to leaching the ready but limited supply of glycogen in our muscles.

This allows us to be extremely alert, full of energy to defend our lives (or lives of our children) and not feel pain long enough either to win the fight or get to a safe distance before we feel the pain from our injuries.

You’ve probably heard of women and mothers who are able to lift cars many times their weight to free their trapped children; the result of adrenaline and glycogen.

After a certain time the body releases another set of chemicals (serotonin, endorphins and anti-oxidants) to help the body ‘calm down’ and recover – stress creates free radical that damage our cells.

But prolonged stress (work, spousal and financial challenges) leaves no room for our body to recover. To make things worse it creates a vicious cycle that ultimately leads to fatigue and depression and inadvertently, mental and physical diseases.

How do you know that you’re depressed?

Well see if you suffer from a series of these, then you probably are:

• Mood Swings


• Weight gain – Excessive appetite


• Weight loss or anorexia


• Unexplained exhaustion


• Lack of physical and mental energy


• Agitation


• Excessive sensitivity to rejection


• Insomnia
• Daytime sleepiness or grogginess

What’s Aerobic and what’s Anaerobic?

There are basically 2 sources of energy that the body utilises.

Under normal circumstances your body will burn fat. In fact that is what the body prefers to do – burn fat. Fat takes a longer time to covert into usable energy for the body. It provides prolonged, sustainable and clean energy, coming from the liver and the fat cells in our body. It’s also less stressful for the body.

If you are exercising somewhat hard, where you can speak 5 words – My name is Vasu Dev – before having you gasp for air again, then you’re probably exercising at an aerobic rate. Your heart is beating between 60% and 70% of your maximum heart rate and your body is using oxygen to burn fat for energy.

Under stressful circumstances however, the body requires instant energy. For example, when you are being pursued by a lion. You need instant energy to get away from the threat. The body will shut down the fat burning process and use the glycogen (stored sugar) in your muscles. It shifts to what’s called an anaerobic rate. Your heart is beating between 80% and 100% of your maximum heart rate and does not use oxygen.

In this state, the body shuts down the fat burning process. It converts glycogen into energy and produces, as a by-product, lactic acid, which creates the painful ‘burn’ in muscles. So when you’re running real hard, and are panting like mad, YOU ARE NOT BURNING FAT and NOT USING OXYGEN! You are stressing your body and producing lots painful lactic acid and a lot more free radicals in the process. Result – no immediate fat loss and free radical damage.

(I shall write about the importance of nutritional supplements soon)

Getting Started

Yes, how do you start on an exercise program without feeling overwhelmed with the ‘what to’ and ‘how to’?

Let’s assume you want to lose weight. So here’s what you can do.

Begin an aerobic program.
Exercise at a pace that makes you work at a somewhat hard rate but not until you are panting, producing painful lactic acid and 3 minutes away from a heart attack.

Do the following 3 to 4 times a week at an aerobic rate:
1. Start with brisk walking or jogging (not running, yet) ideally on a treadmill where you can monitor your heart rate, your pace and the difficulty factor
2. For 20 to 25 minutes
3. You could near the end of the session exercise slightly harder and push your heart rate into the anaerobic range, but jus for a minute or so.
4. Cool down and end the session with light stretches.

Go Aerobic, and you’ll end up looking real good and feeling real great in a real short time.

NOTE:
Err... please do not give yourself the excuse to eat any more than what you normally eat, just because you exercised.

Why lose weight?

Well yeah, there’s lots of stuff that’ll run thru your mind with this one. How fast can I lose these kilos, for how long will I have to sacrifice my favourite lontong, mee siam or char kuay teow; “You mean I’ll have to exercise? Really?”

Well here’s the low down.

If you’re losing weight for cosmetic sake alone, forget it. You’ll put it all back on after that party. I suspect you know what I mean.

You buy this beautiful, slinky, black dress for next week’s dinner and dance, one size smaller. Then you starve yourself for the week so that you’ll fit into the dress, just in time for the party.

Note: if you’re a guy you may want to get the biggest dress size. All that beer will cause your waistline to expand during the party.

If you’ve done this before, you’d probably have also experienced putting all the weight back on – and MORE.

If you can understand the health benefits of losing weight, you’ll have a better chance of keeping it off. And the sacrifices you make by way of your food and life style change will be worth your efforts.

And the benefits of long term weight loss??

Lifelong HEALTH! – Errrr HALO!

Longevity. Being able to see your sons or daughters get married and holding your grand child in your arms! If that’s not as important, then think about being able to live long enough to cash out your CPF and actually touching the cash, finally!

Freedom. Being able to enjoy something as basic as strolling along the beach with a loved one or playing golf – without labouring under all that weight. The last thing the next flight needs is someone clutching his chest and rolling around on the 9th hole.

Make sure that your doctor would only be able to afford to drive a Geely. You’ll not have pay hefty hospital bills or pop handfuls of expensive medicine daily to control your blood pressure or blood sugar.

Look and feel great. The fitter you are the better you carry yourself, the greater your self esteem – you’ll even look more attractive to your spouse.

You smell better too really. I know that it’s a mean thing, to say but the fatter you are the greater the chance for bacteria to have a party and multiply in the many folds of your skin.

Ensure that you get that promotion at work. Studies have shown that to a great extent, employers tend to associate fitness with being able to handle greater responsibilities – hence the promotion.

Lower life insurance premiums. If the insurance companies charge you more for being overweight don’t be mad or feel offended. It’s your fault in the first place.

Better Sex. Hey all your plumbing will be in good working order anyway, so might as well make good use of it, right?

35 year old Chicken Rice Anyone?

I had a realisation this morning when my mum asked, “Why did you buy sea salt; isn’t the salt I’ve been using, from the sea?”
That’s when I realised that we’ve slowly been going through a transformation in our diets, without realising it. And it’s a transformation from a nutritious diet to one that’s practically starving us from vitamins and minerals. What do I mean?

Take the Chicken Rice you ate for lunch. Is it the same chicken rice it was 35 years ago? “Of course not,” you’ll say. “I’ll get sick eating 35 year old chicken rice!”

That’s not what I mean. Does it contain the same amount of nutrients found in a plate of chicken rice 30 years ago? Sadly, it does not.

Rice 35 years ago was probably not processed. I remember helping my mum pick tiny weevil larvae and weevils themselves from uncooked rice, before she coked the rice. This does not happen today. You can be sure of this because nothing living is present in white rice nowadays.

Why? Because the rice has been processed!

Every nutrition bearing and life supporting rice germ has been removed form the rice so that it does not easily rot, increasing shelf-life and hence profits. As a result the rice today consists of very little nutrition and lots of high glycemic, diabetes causing starch. It is so devoid of any nutrition that even the weevil avoids it!

And the chicken?

It’s not the free range chicken that the chicken farmers use to rear 35 years ago. Those take at least 4 months to reach maturity. In that time the chicken would have built immunity against diseases, absorbed all the good nutrition from the grains and the worms it feeds on and had enough space to run around in to produce lean, healthy and nutritious meat.

The chicken we eat today, (yes the $2.50 ones) takes 21 days to grow to maturity. They’re fed processed foods packed with antibiotics to ward off diseases and other artificial additives to make them gain weight to look big and fat. They are kept in crammed conditions with hardly any freedom of movement. And all to increase the profits of, not the farmers, but of the large ‘franchisors’ who own these farms.

21 days is hardly enough time for the bird to absorb nutrients or build immunity against diseases. So when a disease strikes (which probably was caused by the low natural immunity of the birds, and the antibiotics becoming less and less effective against newer strains), whole farms are culled.

The cucumber’s probably genetically modified with an animal gene to confuse the bugs and weevils that would otherwise invade it. Hence even the cucumber may not really be a vegetable nowadays.

So you see how we’ve slowly been going thru a nutritional transformation without realising it? And we’re getting a bad deal from it; low nutritional value, genetically modified, antibiotic filled, high glycemic index…stuff.

It’s ironical really that at a time where food seems to be in abundance, we are actually starving ourselves from a lack of good nutritious food.