First Eat Right - Dietitian Nutritionist Dr. Nafeesa's Diet & Nutrition Clinic

Dedicating an hour or two for exercising alone every day is a dream for many individuals but this is neither an excuse to skip physical activity altogether nor grumble about your inability to engage yourself in workouts. Getting a solid 60-minutes to workout might be next to impossible but it is possible to find 10-15 minutes a couple of times in a day on at least 4-5 days in a week.
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You need not spend hours together at the gym but stay fit with short workout sessions- anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes of workout is great for your body. Do planks, squats and tricep dips that work on several muscle groups simultaneously and yoga (this can provide cardiovascular and flexibility benefits when you involve yourself in power yoga or active movements such as sun salutation).

Research studies too prove that short exercise durations are beneficial while short durations of high-intensity exercises improve blood pressure cholesterol and weight in people with Type 2 diabetes. Some simple tips that help you squeeze in even ten minutes of movement in a day include:

1. Walk or cycle to work. If your office is located very far away, drive to work and park your car farther away from the parking lot and walk to your office.
2. Utilize lunch breaks to go for short walks or workout at your office gym. Tag your friend to walk or gym along
3. While you are forced to wait to pick up your kid from his/her extracurricular class, get out of your car/bike and go for a short walk meanwhile.
4. Use your TV time to do some yoga, stretches or simple exercises with weights. You can even do spot running during commercials to improve heart rate.
5. Climb your way to your office. If your office is located on the 20th floor, get down at the 15th or 16th floor and climb the rest.

Every adult is recommended to do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or vigorous-intensity exercise weekly. This can be hour-long ones every day or include even short bouts of 10 minutes of exercise a couple of times every day. It is better to combine it with muscle-strengthening exercises at least twice a week to include all major muscle groups.

Just as your meeting schedules, set an alarm in your mobile or calendar to remind you of your exercise schedules. Only then will you be serious enough to workout and take it as a part of your everyday routine that can never be skipped on any basis. If you are interested in pursuing a healthy diet plan along with your workout plan, get in touch with a registered dietitian nutritionist at www.firsteatright.com. 

Summer is the season to show off your trendy wardrobe attire-sleeveless crop tops, mini skirts that reveal your toned legs and shorts that give you the sporty look gear up your entertainment quotient with family, friends or colleagues. Along with all the fun and frolic, you are attacked by an irritating skin problem, chafing, that might spoil your entire mood and offset your joy.
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Addressing Dressing Concerns
Chafing is a very common skin problem mainly due to skin surfaces rubbing against each other (for example, obese people find their thighs often rubbing against each other), irritating fabric or moisture. Repetitive or continuous rubbing on the skin can end up in a rash, burn or even lead to swelling, bleeding or crusting. Thighs are the most commonly affected sites of chaffing while groin, nipples, feet, armpits or buttocks are also vulnerable ones.
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Skin is the largest organ in the human body which plays a critical role in safeguarding our body against outside factors such as germs, dust, heat and physical harm. Our skin needs to be neat, clean and dry to protect us and prevent chafing. Skin is like every other organ in the human body whose cells breaks up after reaching its maximum limit. Despite protecting ourselves from dust, heat and chemicals, what more factors prevail which can harm our skin and cause chafing?

Excess Weight: Being overweight/obese increases the chances of skin-to-skin rubbing, especially very easy for your inner thighs to rub against each other. Reduce your weight and keep your body toned by meeting a registered dietitian nutritionist at www.firsteatright.com.

Nursing Infants: Breastfeeding increases the chances of chafed nipples due to bras or pads

Sports: Endurance sports such as biking or running are two of the most common sports activities that can cause chafing due to repeated movements, excess sweat or clothing. That’s because biking and running calls for speedy movement of our thighs either to pedal or run faster which creates enough chances for skin-to-skin rubbing.

Clothing such as skirts: Wearing dresses such as skirts or saree that do not have a protective layer of clothing that prevents thighs from rubbing against each other can cause chafing in humid weather.

Diapers: Babies usually suffer from chafing due to continuous use of diapers that can cause rashes. Urine or feces that are left for a prolonged period without removing the diaper can lead to chafing. This is also called as diaper rash.

Ill-fitting Clothing: Wearing clothes that don’t fit properly on your body can rub repeatedly and irritate the skin. For example, your sleeves, bra straps or waistbands are some clothes that often irritate all of us sometime in life.

Sweating: All of us sweat but some of us sweat badly. Dried sweat can leave a layer of salt on the skin that can irritate us and worsen chafing.

Lend A Helping Hand to End Friction
Every problem has a solution. You cannot prevent sweating, stop feeding or end your sports practice to prevent chafing. All you can do is take preventive measures to safeguard yourself and decrease the severity/frequency:

1. Wear the right type of clothing while exercising. This includes properly fitting, fast-drying fabrics (preferably nylon, spandex or polyester) that help your skin to breathe. It is always better to wear compression shorts to prevent inner-thigh chafing while exercising.
2. Moisture triggers chafing and it’s up to you to stay dry using powder and antiperspirant deodorants on areas that are most common victim of chafing. Ensure to get out of wet/sweaty clothes as quickly as possible.
3. Keep areas that are prone to chafing lubricated to minimize friction and to ensure that surfaces glide against each other smoothly. Petroleum jelly, oils and lotions are the commonly used lubricants.
4. Add a second-skin layer using a soft bandage to prevent chafing, especially on your inner thighs, nipples and feet.
5. Nursing women must take extra care to keep their nipples clean, dry and avoid wearing fabric that can cause irritation. Breast-feeding bras come along with soft pads that ease discomfort. You can even use disposable pads to reduce moisture.
6. Plan your schedule according to the weather outside. During summer, plan your exercise schedules either early in the morning or late evenings to avoid excess sweat.
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Despite all these preventive steps if you find no relief or the areas show signs of infection, it is better to meet your physician who can prescribe a topical antibiotic or corticosteroid. 

Many of us voice out the case of President Obama when we speak about greying hair as his hair color turned dark brown to grey during his tenure as the President. But, one needs to also remember that he aged from 47 to 55 during this tenure, a time when many people’s hair turns grey. Though we introduce stress as the primary factor for change in hair color, the evidences are still inconclusive and it is only our strong gut feeling that supports stress.
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Stress does not turn hair grey. In fact, hair does not turn grey at all! Hair follicles produce hair and once done, the color sets. If the color sets as brown, black, red or blond, it is never going to become gray. The logic is that hair follicles produce less color as we age. When hair goes through the repeated process of dying and re-growing, it is likelier that the color sets as gray after the age of 35. The age at which the color sets is determined by genetics too! Stress might not turn your hair grey, but it can cause a condition called telogen effluvium that makes the hair shed out at a 3-times higher pace than normal. While hair growth happens in some time safeguarding you from balding, it is possible that hair grows gray in color (due to less production of color as we age) instead of our natural brown, red or blond color when the person is above middle-age.

History of Hair Color
Surprisingly our hair is initially white in color and gets its natural color from a pigment called melanin whose formation happens even before we are born. The darkness and intensity of our hair color depends on the distribution of the melanin pigment in the middle layer of the hair shaft or cortex. Melanin is composed of specialized pigment cells called melanocytes which inject melanin into cells containing keratin (protein that makes our nails, hair and skin). This process keeps repeating through our years maintaining our hair color. As we age, the melanin production reduces and the hair turn grey/white finally. Certain other factors that contribute to hair pigmentation making it lighter or darker include hormones, genetic defects, body distribution, age, climate, pollutants, toxins and chemical exposure. Apart from these, some people have graying hair due to certain illnesses such as:

• Vitamin B12 deficiency. Read more on the food varieties that are rich in this vitamin from the website www.firsteatright.com and nurture yourself to become replete with vitamin B12.
• Neurofibromatosis which is a group of inherited diseases that cause tumors to grow along nerves and abnormal development of bones and skin
• Tuberous sclerosis, an inherited condition that causes benign tumors in multiple organs such as brain, kidney, eyes, lungs and skin
• Thyroid deficiency
• Vitiligo-a condition that causes loss or destruction of melanocytes due to misinterpretation of the immune system
• Alopecia areata which causes hair loss, especially of the color hair, in patches. This can make the head look more greyish as colored hair is lost and grey hair becomes more obvious. The growing hair is white or grey in color, but colored hair too eventually occurs.
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When and how your hair turns grey depends on your genes that you inherit rather than stress levels or other conditions. Getting a detailed history of greying hair of your previous generations might help you figure out how much time you have to enjoy your colored hair. The logic remains the same for the President of a country or for someone involved in a less stressful job.

Any animation or superhero fan would have not missed the Incredibles 2 movie that was released this month. So, how was your experience? Nowadays, wishing for a theater experience is no joke as people are forced to spend hundreds or even thousands of rupees to enjoy the luxuries of plush seats, buttery popcorns, Dolby sound effect and of course the movie (hoping that it’s good!). After paying so much, how would you like to be affected by health problems instead of an enjoyable movie experience? The new Disney-Pixar movie contains scenes that have strobe lights flashing continuously for anywhere between a few seconds to a more than a minute which might seriously affect people with photosensitive epilepsy and cause seizures.
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Warning
Fans worldwide have posted warnings on their social media accounts cautioning people about the flashing light scenes. It would have been better if Disney could have released the movie with a warning tag on all its digital releases and social media channels. As a response to theatre-goers’ concerns, most theatres displayed notices warning audiences about the movie’s visual effects. Before these precautionary steps, an unlucky few experienced seizures while some of them sat through the movie either closing their eyes or simply wishing for it to end despite its remarkable plot and screenplay.

Parents and all individuals alike have the right to make decisions of watching/not watching the movie based on warning notes. It is unfair to shock the audience in between the screening of the movie with such effects. It is mandatory that the movie should have carried the warning sign at the ticket window.

Epilepsy
Almost 50 million people living across the world suffer from epilepsy, a common neurological disease, according to the World Health Organization. A chronic disorder of the brain, it is characterized by repeated seizures involving a part of the body or the entire body. A seizure is a sudden increase in electrical activity in the brain which can change the way a person feels or behaves. This is only a symptom of a disease and not a disease by itself. For more details on epilepsy, please visit the website www.firsteatright.com. Photosensitive epilepsy is when people are affected by seizures due to flashing lights/interchanging light and dark patterns. Almost 1 in 100 people has epilepsy and of these individuals, 3% suffer from photosensitive epilepsy. It is mostly children and young people who suffer from this condition and it is less common among those aged 20 and above. This more strongly emphasizes on the need for a warning note about the strong flashing lights as Incredibles 2 is a movie loved more by children and young adults. Also, even people without epilepsy can be sensitive to such flashy strobe lights that can even cause migraine or headache.
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Photosensitive Epilepsy
Most people can realize that they suffer from photosensitive epilepsy when they suffer from seizures on exposure to flashing lights or patterns. An EEG can also help to diagnose the disease. Here, a technician flashes lights at different speeds and looks for changes in brain activities. If there are clues of any deviations from normal activities, he/she stops the test before seizure strikes the patient.

A simple light flash will not trigger a seizure and the rates should be anywhere between 3 and 30 hertz (flashes per second) to trigger one. But, these rates too vary from person to person-some people might be sensitive at frequencies up to 60 hertz but we mostly don’t find people going below the minimum frequency limit, that is below 3 hertz to experience a seizure.

What Kind of Light Triggers A Seizure?
Very strong lights, repeated flashing, flickering or patterned effects can make anyone feel uncomfortable, disoriented or unwell. Hence, we cannot conclude that all these people suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.
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Tiredness, stress or excitement increase the risk of photosensitive epilepsy. Playing video games continuously, sunlight through curtain blinds, structures that create repetitive patterns as you move past them (for example, escalators and railings), screens that constantly show flickering light, fireworks that can cause flashing images, cameras that have multiple flashes and strobe lights at parties or nightclubs enhance the risk of photosensitive epilepsy. It is always better to sit far away from TV screens, avoid playing video games continuously and take breaks from the screen to reduce the risk of photosensitive epilepsy.

It is necessary to note that this is not the first time that children-content videos contained potential threat to cause seizures. In 1997, one of the episodes of ‘Pokemon’ aired with flashing lights sent almost 700 children who were suffering from nausea, vomiting, convulsions and headaches to hospitals.

Whatever it is, if you are a superhero fan who is not troubled by any of the things mentioned above, you can surely watch the movie which even has Bollywood actress Kajol lending her voice for Elasticgirl, the superhero mum.