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Category Archives: Mind Building
Jessamyn Stanley Just Posted a Fierce Half-Naked Photo to Promote Body Positivity
We can always count on Jessamyn Stanley to deliver the dose of body positivity we need to get through the day. Recently, she shared a side view, half-clothed shot of herself, captioning it with a reminder to her followers that she’s still on her self-love journey…just like the rest of us.
“Every day getting a little closer to accepting this side view,” Stanley wrote alongside a fierce-looking photo while she holds a red cosplay costume over the front of her body with fiery hair and lipstick to match.
Stanley shows us how she practices body-positivity on a regular basis on her Instagram. Just a week ago, she posted about adjusting her form during yoga to make her stomach more comfortable.
“Now, instead of working on ‘picture perfect alignment,’ I’m getting to a place of comfort with finding ‘alignment that feels picture perfect in MY body,’” she wrote.
RELATED: Jessamyn Stanley Just Posted the Most Candid Photo Revealing Her Scars From Chafing
By opening her thighs to give her midsection more space, Stanley seriously improved her posture, she said. But allowing herself to make that change wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
“I wouldn’t have gotten to this good shit without accepting my stomach as a legit part of my body. Instead of treating it as an unwanted guest,” she wrote.
When you find yourself being critical of your appearance, don’t get frustrated. Let the moment pass, and give yourself time to redirect your thoughts to something you love about yourself. And if you ever need extra inspiration, just look to Stanley’s page.
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What Is Mindfulness—and How Can It Help You?
The Zen-sounding buzzword midnfulness is everywhere these days, from Instagram hashtags and coffee mugs to medical schools and firefighter training.
But what is the definition of mindfulness, exactly? And why is practicing mindfulness good for you? We asked experts to explain what the term means and how you can incorporate it into your life.
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What is mindfulness?
“Mindfulness is a way of moving your focus and attention into the present moment without judgment,” explains Lara E. Fielding, PsyD, a psychologist in Beverly Hills, California who specializes in mindfulness-based therapies and is the author of Mastering Adulthood: Go Beyond Adulting to Become an Emotional Grown-Up.
Being mindful is more important and trickier than it sounds. “As humans, our minds are wired to time-travel,” Fielding tells Health. “We can imagine future outcomes and also go backward in time to remember, and try not to repeat, past mistakes.”
These are great abilities to have, sure, but “our mind can get stuck on both of these roads,” says Fielding. “Just like your car can get stuck in the mud.”
Practicing mindfulness gets you back on the present track, and it holds your mind there.
While you may think that sounds inefficient—don’t you have a million other things to think about?—“research shows we spend 47% of our day distracted and thinking about things other than where we are,” says Fielding. “Thinking too much about the future causes anxiety, worry, and stress. People who time-travel to the past tends toward depression.”
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What to know about mindfulness
First, it's not really a new trend. “Mindfulness has been practiced in the East for centuries and was systematically used in the West in the mid 1970s to help people with chronic pain,” Mónica M. Alzate, PhD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, tells Health.
There’s proof it works, too. “After several decades of research, we now know that the continuous practice of mindfulness affects changes in the brain areas responsible for emotional regulation, memory, concentration, and learning,” says Alzate. “It also decreases stimulus in the amygdala where responses of stress, fear, and anxiety are formed.”
Mindfulness itself is not the same as meditation, though some people think that practicing mindfulness and mindfulness meditation are synonyms. Confusing mindfulness with visualization and relaxation is common, too. “Mindfulness is not a relaxation technique,” says Fielding. “It’s not spacing out, it’s not just taking a break, it’s not self-soothing. It’s simply a cognitive skill.” In fact, she adds, “you can be mindful and uncomfortable.”
To practice it, you don’t have to sit like a monk or be in any special position. “People can benefit from infusing mindfulness practices into their daily routine: from taking a shower, how they drive, to how they talk or play with their children,” Alzate says. While you’ll see the most benefit from a regular, formal practice, “you can start with techniques that are weaved throughout your day,” she adds.
RELATED: 25 Surprising Ways Stress Affects Your Health
How to practice mindfulness
There’s more than one way to practice mindfulness training, so if you try one exercise and it doesn’t resonate with you, don’t give up. “Be open to learning and practicing different techniques,” Alzate says.
If you’re a beginner, Alzate recommends trying one of these:
Five senses exercise. Decide which of your senses you want to focus on for five minutes. For instance, if you choose “sight,” you’ll focus on five objects around you that you’ve never paid attention to before. Choose “hearing,” and you’ll hone in on five distinct sounds. You can do this exercise while practicing abdominal, or diaphragmatic, breathing, which helps your body relax. Inhale slowly through your nose, allowing both your chest and lower belly to rise. Exhale, and repeat.
Body scan exercise. Close your eyes and scan how your body feels, starting from the crown of your head all the way to your toes. Long, slow exhales through your nose will help you relax you more. You can take 5 minutes to do this exercise, or as long as half an hour.
RELATED: 12 Signs You May Have an Anxiety Disorder
Get the most out of mindfulness
As you practice clearing your head, remember these pointers:
Actually do the practice. “We can read, listen to books, and watch videos about mindfulness all day long, but that’s not going to help if we don’t actually practice it,” Alzate says. And don’t save these exercises only for times of stress. This training can help your brain get used to how you’ll react in moments of high pressure, she explains. (Plus, who learns well in times of stress?)
Go easy on yourself. One of the principles of mindfulness is compassion. “This means we won’t judge ourselves when we don’t practice as we intended to, or as often, or as long,” Alzate adds. “Accept that it happened, accept that it may take longer, and try again next time."
RELATED: The Mindful Eating Hack That Helped Me Stop Obsessing About Food
This Is Why You Could Suffer When Celebs Are Fat-Shamed
It seems like every other day another celebrity is being shamed for something, and a lot of the time, it has to do with their weight. Think Kourtney Kardashian being fat-shamed by her then-husband Scott Disick in 2013 for not losing weight "fast enough" after having their third child. Or Jessica Simpson being called out for looking "noticeably fuller" after wearing a pair of high-waisted jeans at a performance in 2009.
Those are both examples studied in a new report published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that found when celebrities are fat-shamed, more than just the star who's being targeted feels the effects. It might actually make the general public feel worse about their own bodies too.
Psychologists from McGill University in Montreal compared 20 instances of celebrity fat-shaming with women's implicit attitudes about weight before and after the event. They found that instances of celebrity fat-shaming were associated with an increase in women's implicit negative attitudes towards weight.
RELATED: How Fat-Shaming Can Actually Make People Sick
They explain that implicit attitudes are people's split-second, gut-level reactions that something is inherently good or bad, while explicit attitudes are those that people are conscious of and are often influenced by concerns about being accepted socially or presenting oneself in a positive light.
"These cultural messages appeared to augment women's gut-level feeling that 'thin' is good and 'fat' is bad," Jennifer Bartz, one of the authors of the study, said in a press release. "These media messages can leave a private trace in peoples' minds."
The researchers used data from a Harvard study called Project Implicit, which had participants complete an online "Weight Implicit Association Test" between 2004 to 2015. The researchers then selected 20 celebrity fat-shaming events that were covered by the media within that timeframe. They analyzed over 93,000 female participant's implicit anti-fat attitudes two weeks before and two weeks after each celebrity fat-shaming event.
RELATED: Fat-Shaming by Doctors Happens Way More Often Than You Think
They found the fat-shaming events led to a spike in women's implicit anti-fat attitudes, meaning in the two weeks after a celebrity was publicly fat-shamed, women had more negative gut reactions to being heavier. Events that were more widely known also led to greater spikes in these negative reactions.
It's important to note that the researchers can't definitively link an increase in implicit weight bias to specific incidents in the real world with their data. However, previous research has proven how damaging society's thin ideal can be for women, and this research seems to add to that.
"Weight bias is recognized as one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination," Amanda Ravary, PhD student and lead author of the study, said in the press release. "These instances of fat-shaming are fairly widespread, not only in celebrity magazines but also on blogs and other forms of social media."
RELATED: How to Stop Fat-Shaming Yourself
Statins ‘don’t work well for one in two people’
Fresh research questions the merit of the cholesterol-lowering pills taken by millions of Britons.
Best in snow: New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall
UCLA researchers and colleagues have designed a new device that creates electricity from falling snow. The first of its kind, this device is inexpensive, small, thin and flexible like a sheet of plastic.
“The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner, who holds UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation. “It’s a very clever device — a weather station that can tell you how much snow is falling, the direction the snow is falling, and the direction and speed of the wind.”
The researchers call it a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG. A triboelectric nanogenerator, which generates charge through static electricity, produces energy from the exchange of electrons.
Findings about the device are published in the journal Nano Energy.
“Static electricity occurs from the interaction of one material that captures electrons and another that gives up electrons,” said Kaner, who is also a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and of materials science and engineering, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “You separate the charges and create electricity out of essentially nothing.”
Snow is positively charged and gives up electrons. Silicone — a synthetic rubber-like material that is composed of silicon atoms and oxygen atoms, combined with carbon, hydrogen and other elements — is negatively charged. When falling snow contacts the surface of silicone, that produces a charge that the device captures, creating electricity.
“Snow is already charged, so we thought, why not bring another material with the opposite charge and extract the charge to create electricity?” said co-author Maher El-Kady, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher of chemistry and biochemistry.
“While snow likes to give up electrons, the performance of the device depends on the efficiency of the other material at extracting these electrons,” he added. “After testing a large number of materials including aluminum foils and Teflon, we found that silicone produces more charge than any other material.”
About 30 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by snow each winter, during which time solar panels often fail to operate, El-Kady noted. The accumulation of snow reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the solar array, limiting the panels’ power output and rendering them less effective. The new device could be integrated into solar panels to provide a continuous power supply when it snows, he said.
The device can be used for monitoring winter sports, such as skiing, to more precisely assess and improve an athlete’s performance when running, walking or jumping, Kaner said. It also has the potential for identifying the main movement patterns used in cross-country skiing, which cannot be detected with a smart watch.
It could usher in a new generation of self-powered wearable devices for tracking athletes and their performances.
It can also send signals, indicating whether a person is moving. It can tell when a person is walking, running, jumping or marching.
The research team used 3-D printing to design the device, which has a layer of silicone and an electrode to capture the charge. The team believes the device could be produced at low cost given “the ease of fabrication and the availability of silicone,” Kaner said. Silicone is widely used in industry, in products such as lubricants, electrical wire insulation and biomedical implants, and it now has the potential for energy harvesting.
Measles cases triple globally in 2019, says UN
The World Health Organization says the latest figures paint “an alarming picture”.
Predictability limit: Scientists find bounds of weather forecasting
In the future, weather forecasts that provide storm warnings and help us plan our daily lives could come up to five days sooner before reaching the limits of numerical weather prediction, scientists said.
“The obvious question that has been raised from the very beginning of our whole field is, what’s the ultimate limit at which we can predict day-to-day weather in the future,” said Fuqing Zhang, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of the Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques at Penn State. “We believe we have found that limit and on average, that it’s about two weeks.”
Reliable forecasts are now possible nine to 10 days out for daily weather in the mid-latitudes, where most of Earth’s population lives. New technology could add another four to five days over the coming decades, according to research published online in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
The research confirms a long-hypothesized predictability limit for weather prediction, first proposed in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, meteorologist and pioneer of the chaos theory, scientists said.
“Edward Lorenz proved that one cannot predict the weather beyond some time horizon, even in principle,” said Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT and coauthor of the study. “Our research shows that this weather predictability horizon is around two weeks, remarkable close to Lorenz’s estimate.”
Unpredictability in how weather develops means that even with perfect models and understanding of initial conditions, there is a limit to how far in advance accurate forecasts are possible, scientists said.
“We used state-of-the-art models to answer this most fundamental question,” said Zhang, lead author on the study. “I think in the future we’ll refine this answer, but our study demonstrates conclusively there is a limit, though we still have considerable room to improve forecast before reaching the limit.”
To test the limit, Zhang and his team used the world’s two most advanced numerical weather prediction modeling systems — The European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and the U.S. next generation global prediction system.
They provided a near-perfect picture of initial conditions and tested how the models could recreate two real-world weather events, a cold surge in northern Europe and flood-inducing rains in China. The simulations were able to predict the weather patterns with reasonable accuracy up to about two weeks, the scientists said.
Improvements in day-to-day weather forecasting have implications for things like storm evacuations, energy supply, agriculture and wild fires.
“We have made significant advances in weather forecasting for the past few decades, and we’re able to predict weather five days in advance with high confidence now,” Zhang said. “If in the future we can predict additional days with high confidence, that would have a huge economic and social benefit.”
Researchers said better data collection, algorithms to integrate data into models and improved computing power to run experiments are all needed to further improve our understanding of initial conditions.
“Achieving this additional predictability limit will require coordinated efforts by the entire community to design better numerical weather models, to improve observations, and to make better use of observations with advanced data assimilation and computing techniques,” Zhang said.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Matthew Carroll. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Low-calorie sweetener derived from lactose gets manufacturing boost from yeast
The quest to satisfy the sweet tooth without adding to the waistline has a new weapon in its arsenal: a strain of yeast that can metabolize lactose, the sugar in dairy products, into tagatose, a natural sweetener with less than half the calories of table sugar.
Yong-Su Jin, a University of Illinois professor of food science and human nutrition, led the research team that engineered the yeast strain, which produces tagatose in much larger quantities than traditional enzymatic manufacturing techniques and could help make tagatose a cost-effective alternative to sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.
The researchers published their work in the journal Nature Communications.
“Tagatose is a sweetener that exhibits almost identical tastes and textures of sucrose, or table sugar. However, tagatose has many fewer calories than sucrose — about 40% of sucrose,” Jin said. “In addition, it does not increase blood glucose levels as much as sucrose or fructose. The glycemic index of tagatose is 3, which is much lower than that of sucrose, 68, and fructose, 24. As such, tagatose carries a lower risk for developing Type 2 diabetes and other diseases caused by rapid and repeating glucose increases in blood.”
In spite of its benefits, tagatose has a high manufacturing cost that has kept it from wide commercial use, Jin said. Although it is naturally present in fruits and dairy products, the concentrations are too low to isolate tagatose effectively. The traditional manufacturing method involves a multi-step enzymatic process that turns galactose — a component of lactose — into tagatose.
Unfortunately, the enzyme reaction is so inefficient that only 30 percent of galactose is converted into tagatose, forcing manufacturers to use an expensive process to remove the tagatose from the galactose mixture.
Jin’s team used the internal machinery of yeast cells as tiny tagatose factories, much like how ethanol manufacturers use yeast to produce fuel from corn. The researchers engineered a strain of yeast that produces tagatose from lactose by making two genetic tweaks. First, they took out a gene that let the yeast use galactose as cellular fuel during lactose metabolism. Second, they added two genes that convert galactose into tagatose.
Thus, when the yeast is fed lactose, its own metabolism drives it to produce a solution that is 90 percent tagatose — much higher than the 30 percent yield from traditional manufacturing. Yeast reactors also operate on much larger scales than enzyme-based ones, which could allow for efficient mass production of tagatose, Jin said.
“Another advantage is that our yeast-based process can use whey indirectly. Whey is an inevitable byproduct of the cheese and Greek yogurt manufacturing processes as a raw material,” Jin said. “Due to the recent popularity of Greek yogurt, the disposal of whey is an issue in the dairy industry. We hope our process can be used to resolve the surplus whey problem. As our yeast fermentation-based approach allows a higher product ratio and the direct use of inexpensive dairy waste, we expect that the production cost of tagatose can be significantly reduced.”
Next, the researchers will explore using their yeast-based approach to manufacture other products from lactose.
“We showed that lactose can be efficiently and rapidly utilized by engineered yeast. With further metabolic engineering, we can produce other valuable products from the lactose abundant in whey, using our engineered yeast strain,” Jin said.
The Energy Biosciences Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy supported this work. Jin is a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Health24.com | Just a little more exercise can add years to your life
No matter your fitness level, adding just a little more exercise may prolong your life, new research suggests.
“People think they have to start going to the gym and exercising hard to get fitter,” said researcher Elin Ekblom-Bak, from the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences in Stockholm.
“But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. For most people, just being more active in daily life – taking the stairs, exiting the metro station early, cycling to work – is enough to benefit health since levels are so low to start with,” she said. “The more you do, the better.”
Ekblom-Bak and her colleagues looked at more than 316 000 adults in Sweden, aged 18 to 74, whose heart-lung (cardiorespiratory) fitness was assessed between 1995 and 2015.
Participants rode a stationary cycle to determine the maximum amount of oxygen the heart and lungs can provide the muscles during exercise, a measure called VO2 max.
Overall, the risk of all-cause death and death from cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke fell 2.8% to 3.2% for each millilitre increase in VO2 max. The benefits of increased activity were seen in men and women, in all age groups, and at all fitness levels.
The study is to be presented at a European Society of Cardiology meeting, in Lisbon, Portugal. Such research is considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
A public health priority
“It is particularly important to note that an increase in fitness was beneficial, regardless of the starting point,” Ekblom-Bak said in a meeting news release. “This suggests that people with lower levels of cardiorespiratory fitness have the most to gain from boosting their fitness.”
She said the findings are “more motivational than just telling people they need to do better. People in the lower range of VO2 max will reduce their risk even more [9%] while those at the upper end of VO2 max will reduce their risk by 1%,” she said.
Improving fitness should be a public health priority and doctors should assess patients’ fitness during health screening, according to Ekblom-Bak.
“Our previous research has shown that fitness levels in the general population have dropped by 10% in the last 25 years,” she noted.
“In 2016-2017, almost every second man and woman had a low fitness level, so this is a huge problem,” Ekblom-Bak added. “Poor fitness is as detrimental as smoking, obesity and diabetes, even in otherwise healthy adults, yet unlike these other risk factors it is not routinely measured.”
Image credit: iStock
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