Benefits of hunger - Hunger is good for you

Hunger used to be a natural part of human life. In the wild, it is still a part of every animal's life. Our bodies are built to live and thrive in a natural environment. There are certain processes that occur during hunger. There are also processes can only occur during hunger. By giving our bodies time to go hungry, we allow them to do things that they can't always get done with a full belly. Here are some of the reasons why taking a little longer to eat your next meal might actually benefit you in the long run:

The benefits of being hungry

1) Hunger increases the release of ghrelin

Ghrelin is known as the hunger hormone. It is secreted by the stomach, small intestine, pancreas and the brain. Ghrelin is released to make you hungry. It signals the need for food. That feeling of hunger and craving for food that you feel before a meal is caused by ghrelin. This hormone might be secreted around meal times to remind you to eat, but it has a host of beneficial benefits of its own:

Ghrelin stimulates Human Growth Hormone (HGH) production

Human Growth Hormone (HGH for short) is extremely beneficial. It helps to build muscle, increases physical and mental recovery and improves fat metabolism. This is why HGH is often used as a steroid by bodybuilders. This is also the reason why GABA, the supplement that is used as a precursor to HGH, is so beneficial in promoting sleep and recovery, fat loss and muscle growth.

Ghrelin promotes a healthy cardiovascular system

Ghrelin has a protective effect on your cardiovascular system. In fact, its role on cardiovascular health has been studied as a treatment for cardiovascular disease. This study proves that ghrelin improves the circulatory system by opening up arteries and decreasing blood pressure. It also increases cardiac performance and reduces the amount of work that it takes the heart to pump blood.

Think about it this way: If an animal has not eaten, it would be beneficial to the animal's body to improve performance so that it can catch food or find it.

Ghrelin helps to control insulin

When we eat, sugar from food is poured into our bloodstream. Insulin is released to shuttle this sugar into the muscles and liver to be stored as glycogen. Excess sugar is stored as fat. When we eat more sugar, more insulin is released to bring blood sugar levels back to normal. When insulin is released too much and too often, our bodies start to build up a tolerance to insulin. This can lead to diabetes.

It would therefore make sense that eating less frequently can lead to fewer insulin secretions and therefore help to increase insulin sensitivity, but the hunger hormone ghrelin takes things one step further by reducing insulin on its own. This is done so that blood sugar does not drop too low, but it is also beneficial in the long term because lower insulin levels generally lead to increased insulin sensitivity. Increased insulin sensitivity improves the way that your body can handle the sugar that it gets from food.

2) Going without food gives your brain and nervous system a break

Medical Daily covered a study that proved that going without food reduces the amount of synapse activity between neurons and muscle cells. The decreased level of neurotransmitter activity allows the brain, along with the nervous system, to rest and recover.

It makes sense that our body would slow down when fasted, since it does not know when it will have access to nutrients again. Similar to the reasons why we sleep, the slowing down of neurotransmitter activity is supposed to be something that happens regularly. It is more natural to go through periods of increased and decreased activity: even on a neuro-cellular level.

These findings go so far as to demonstrate that fasting could possibly improve the symptoms of people with mental health issues like epilepsy.

3) Fasting boosts mental performance

Jordan Rosenfeld explains that hunger can clear up brain fog and re-energize the brain in the same way that exercise stimulates the body. It increases mental plasticity - The rate at which our brains can adapt to the demands that we place on it. Hunger therefore increases learning and memory. What's more, it will also increase recovery from brain injuries or strokes while having a preventative effect on mental illnesses like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Why does not eating have such a great effect on the brain? An organism is either fighting to adapt and survive or striving to reproduce. What it does is dependent on various conditions. A regular, controlled struggle forces us to adapt by means of homeostasis. Homeostasis is our body's ability to adapt to its surroundings by balancing itself out. Place the right amount of negative stress on your body and it will do the opposite in order to restore balance.

4) Calorie restriction makes you live longer

Calorie restriction leads to a longer lifespan. In this study, monkeys that were given 30% less nutrients than their control group since the ages of 7-14 years were found to exhibit the likeness of monkeys an average of 7 years younger than the control group at ages 22-30 years. The measuring of age-related likeliness was done via blood methylation measurement. This measurement compared genetic age with chronological age.

The study states that the only way known to increase lifespan is through restricting the total amount of calories eaten by an organism without causing malnutrition. Calorie restriction did more than merely reduce the onset of age-related illnesses like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and mental decline. It actually preserves cell integrity and the cell's ability to replicate itself.

To read more about how calorie restriction impacts our bodies on a cellular or genetic level, read Think Big's report on the above study.

Conclusion

When we eat, nutrients from food enter the bloodstream. The body quickly shuttles these nutrients into storage so that our blood composition can return to normal. This reduction leads us to get hungry again before our bodies have a chance to use up that stored energy. This may seem counter-intuitive from a biological standpoint, but this mechanism allows an organism to eat as much as possible when food is available. When food is no longer available, the body should turn to its nutrient storage to fulfill its energetic requirements.

When food is always available, the body never needs to dip into this storage. The other processes that occur while without food, as explained above, don't have a chance to have their positive effect on the body when we don't limit our food intake.

The first time you go without food, you will feel hungry and miserable. This negative feeling will cause your body to adapt. These adaptions are very beneficial. Too much of anything is a bad thing - even too much water can be bad for you. It seems like consuming too much nutrients (or always having the right nutrients) needs to be balanced out with restriction in order to keep as healthy as possible. Stay Strong!

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5 Ways to Reduce Eye Strain - And the Method that Actually Worked for Me

For the past few weeks, I have been struggling with eye strain. This led me to do a lot of research about what causes eye strain and how to solve it. I found 5 prominent ideas and tried them all - until I found the one that worked for me. I don't think that the one that worked for me will work for everybody, because the causes of your specific eye strain will be different to mine. If you can find out the reason why your eyes feel strained, you can take steps to deal with the problem at the cause and help your eyes to work at their best.

Here are the 5 best methods that I tried, the reasons why each one would work and the causes that they address, and the one that actually helped me (spoiler alert, the one that solved my issue is the last one: Method number 5).

How to help your eyes recover from eye strain

1) Use tea bags to help relax and restore your eyes

This method is quite simple. Simply brew two tea bags in hot water. Then put them on a plate so that they cool down. You want them to be warm enough to warm the eyes without burning them. You need to make sure that they are cool enough because your eyelids are very sensitive. Burning them will add pain to your eye area and make your problems even worse. Once they are at the right temperature, place them on your closed eyes while you lie down. Let them sit there for a few minutes until they cool down. After a while, they will become cold. The initial warmth will increase blood flow to your eyes, while the later cooling effect will ease inflammation. After a few minutes, place them back in the hot water to heat them up again and repeat the process. Do this for a few times until you feel like your eyes are completely relaxed.

I must admit that my eyes felt totally relaxed after doing this. I listened to music to keep myself busy during those few minute intervals and I placed a towel under my pillow so that the tea did not leak onto my bed.

How the teabag method will help with eye strain

This method will help with eye strain in a variety of ways. The heat and cold will bring fresh blood flow to your eyes while helping them to get rid of old blood that carries waste products. Your eyes have muscles that are used to focus and move the eyeball in different directions. The opposing temperatures help to heal these muscles. There are also nutrients in tea like vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that will nourish the eyes. This will help to reduce any swelling and inflammation, ease pain and discomfort, hydrate the eyes, and totally relax them.

If you have eye strain because your eyes do a lot of work like focusing or if your eyes have a lot of built up tension, this method will help them to relax and recover.

2) Focus on different distances

A lot of eye strain occurs because we tend to spend too much time focusing on a single length of distance. I have noticed that people who have a computer-related job often struggle to see long distance. I have also noticed that people who focus on more long-distance views (like drivers and people who work in the construction industry) tend to struggle to read papers or screens that are very close to their eyes.

Our eyes were made to focus on varying distances. By focusing too much on any particular distance, we lose our ability to focus well on other lengths. This happens due to homeostasis. In this case, homeostasis refers to your body's tendency to adapt to what it does regularly and reduce its ability to do what it doesn't need to do very often.

If you focus too much on one particular distance, your eyes will adapt by reducing their ability to focus on other lengths of distance. This will cause them to strain whenever you look at distances that are not the same as the distance you spend most of your time looking at. Your eyes, just like the rest of your body, need regular exercise to stay in good shape.

The 20/20/20 method and how it works

Every 20 minutes, look up from your computer screen and focus on something at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. This will help to maintain your eye's ability to focus on more than one particular distance. If you can, take a regular walk away from your desk and try to focus on longer distances so that your eyes stay fit and strong. This will also give them a break from too much of the same line of focus.

This method is great for people who spend too much time in focusing on one type of distance and need to vary their lines of sight.

3) Give your eyes time to rest and recover

Your eyes might simply be overworked. Given the demanding nature of our daily jobs and the fact that we spend most of our waking life doing work-related activities, eye strain from too much stimulus is an extremely likely possibility.

Taking time off from work might not be plausible every time that you experience eye strain, but there are certainly things that you can do to give your eyes a break. If you focus on a computer screen for the majority of your working life, give your eyes a break by reducing your screen time when you are not at work. Try finding other relaxing activities that you can do like interacting with friends and family, spending more time doing sports, exercise and hobbies, or enjoying life beyond your house.

This will help with your eye strain if it is caused by being overloaded with too much stimulation of the same, repetitive nature.

4) Blinking

This method is just as important as the others. All About Vision explains that we naturally blink between 10 and 15 times a minute. When we focus on the computer, our phones or a TV screen; we can blink less than half of that amount. We also tend to blink less completely. This reduces the eye's ability to lubricate itself. Reduced blinking rates can lead to dry eyes and manifest in the form of eye degeneration and eye strain.

I struggled to remember to blink more whenever I was using a screen. Some sites recommend placing a bright sticky note on the side of your screen to remind yourself to blink. This wouldn't work for me because the sticky note will be too distracting. As a health and fitness writer, I need to constantly focus on my existing train of thought and write it down before it stops making sense. The slightest distraction could throw me off.

I was able to remind myself to blink more by making it into a little game. Depending on what I was doing, I had to blink in smaller intervals of whatever the task was. For example, when I edit my sites I need to blink with every click that I make on the mouse. When I am using my phone, I blink whenever I tap the screen. When I am writing content, I need to blink whenever I hit the space bar. 

This, along with drinking more water, will help to alleviate dry eyes that can hurt the normal functioning of your eyes.

5) Get the right lighting

It was through trial and error that I finally came to the cause (and solution) for why my eyes were strained. I typically work in a dark room. In this room, I spend a lot of time in front to the computer. My eyes adjusted to the overall dark lighting by increasing my sensitivity to light. This helped me to see throughout the entire room. My increased light sensitivity, met with the fact that I spend the majority of my time staring into the direct light of my computer screen, overloaded my eyes with a contradiction of low light and direct light. I spent a day brightening the room where I work. I also reduced the brightness of my screen to its lowest level. That same day, I did not experience any eye strain. I have not struggled with eye strain since.

We know how damaging it is to look into the sun. We can tell because it painful when we try and it takes a few seconds for our vision to return to normal afterwards. Although less severe, we also know not to look directly at welding sticks when they are being used because they can damage your eyes. Looking into a flash light will also cause discomfort for your eyes. Screens that emit light are the least severe of these comparisons, but affect the eyes in a similar way. By the way, have you ever noticed that it is easier to look into a flash light when you do it in the bright of the day? It is easier because the contraction between light and dark is not so heavy on your eyes. Your eyes will re-adjust its 'lighting settings' according to the overall lighting of your surroundings. This is why it takes your eyes a few seconds to re-adjust if you switch on a bright light in the middle of the night. 

Staring at a bright light in a dark room can hurt your eyes because they have adjusted to their overall surroundings, but need to function at a different light frequency. If lighting is the reason why your eyes are strained, try adjusting the lighting of your environment and the brightness settings of your screens until it is easier for your eyes.

I hope that this article will help you on your mission to conquer eye strain in the same way that it helped me. Stay Strong!

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Health Benefits of Spinach

I am amazed at how many nutritional benefits spinach has to offer. I have discovered so many new benefits to this super-food that I am making it my new personal healthiest food to eat daily. I currently believe it to be even healthier than lemon juice, apple cider vinegar or green tea.

Health benefits of spinach

You might be wondering why I've grown to love spinach so much. Here's why:

1. Spinach is low in calories

Spinach has only 23 calories per 100 grams (or 3.5 ounces). That's about 2.3 calories per leaf. Compare that to 265 calories in 100 grams of white bread. Despite being so dense in micronutrients, spinach is more than 90% water.

2. High in Fiber

The low calorie count of spinach is not the only weight-loss benefit that it offers. It's also very high in fiber. Most of us don't consume enough sources of good fiber. Here is why fiber is so important:

1) Fiber cleans out the gut

Fiber is the part of plant foods that your body cannot break down. This makes it extremely useful to gut health because it gives your digestive system something to attach its waste products to. Eating enough fiber is one of the most important ways that you need to detoxify your system - along with sweating, drinking enough water, exercising and breathing. 

If you don't eat enough fiber your gut can get cluttered with toxins and waste products that are essentially waiting in line to be eliminated. This can create a variety of problems in the gut and eventually lead to digestive illnesses. Fiber consumption can help to alleviate constipation. Good gut bacteria also need fiber to thrive and create a healthy internal environment.

2) It slows down the rate of absorption

Since fiber cannot be broken down, the nutrients that are attached to it are a lot harder to absorb. This is actually good for your digestive system because it stimulates it to increases digestive ability. It also slows down the rate at which nutrients enter into the blood stream. 

This point is very important because foods that contain fiber will curb spikes in blood sugar. This is why the sugar that is found in fruit is not to be treated in the same way as the sugar that we find in processed foods.

Many people deny their bodies the fiber and micronutrients that their bodies need because of their fear of the sugar content of fruits or vegetables. This is not only unhealthy and will damage the body, but will inhibit the body's natural functions and therefore its ability to function normally. Your body needs micronutrients to regulate functions like metabolism, energy production, recovery and immunity.

3) Fiber reduces appetite by keeping you fuller for longer

Since fiber sticks around in your gut for longer than refined food, your body will not signal the need for more food for a longer period of time. The slow release of nutrients also feed your body with fewer nutrients - but for longer time. This increases the amount of nutrients that are used up versus the amount that is stored away.

3. High in minerals

Spinach contains calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, zinc, copper, manganese and selenium. All of the minerals are imperative for optimal health. Calcium is needed for cell signalling. Iron allows for the transfer of oxygen. Magnesium helps with muscle recovery. Phosphorus forms part of our DNA. Potassium balances out the other minerals. Sodium allows the body to hold onto water stores. Zinc is needed for cell division. Copper makes collagen. Manganese protects the body against free radicals. Selenium is needed by hormones and the immune system. For these reasons, you will often find spinach listed as one of the natural ways to deal with many health issues.

4. Great for your eyes

Spinach contains the two very potent antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin. These antioxidants are often found in multivitamins that claim to help with eye problems. These two nutrients help to combat macular degeneration and cataracts. Other nutrients found in Spinach that support eye health include Omega 3, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and Zinc.

5. Great source of vitamins and other nutrients

The best sources of vitamins will always be the ones that are found in food naturally. For some reason, isolating a nutrient and putting it into pill or supplement form reduces the body's ability to recognize it and use as well as when it is found in real food. This might be because these nutrients are found alongside other nutrients that help with absorption.

Vitamin Content of spinach

Spinach contains Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Folate, Choline and Betaine.

Other nutrients

• About 2.9% of spinach is protein (not bad, considering that spinach is more than 90% water)
• Spinach is also relatively high in Omega 3 - which is important for physical performance and testosterone production
• Phytosterols in spinach help to reduce blood cholesterol levels.

Foods that have a lot of micronutrients while having fewer calories are known as nutrient dense foods. Foods that are high in calories but don't provide much micronutrient value are not nutrient dense. This is where the term 'empty calories' comes from. Spinach is one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet.

I would like to congratulate myself for writing an entire article about spinach without making a single Popeye reference. Stay Strong!

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