Guest Post: Why dieting isn’t sustainable
A diet is simply a way of eating. Some people diet with too much food, some people with too little food. But for most people, it’s just the wrong foods. However, one thing is for sure, diets don’t work. They never had and they never will. Just ask anyone who has been on any of the well-known, celebrity-endorsed diet plans for any length of time.
Note: Check out this guide to flexible dieting on how to escape the dieting life!
Dieters are often excited about the quick weight loss, but invariably, the diet doesn’t last forever and they quickly find that not only did they gain back all they lost, but they have taken on extra pounds too.
Dieting in the typical sense actually sets you up to fail in your attempt to lose those extra pounds. Immediately on any diet plan, your caloric intake is limited. That in itself isn’t a bad thing. Most meal portions have become unnecessarily large these days and actually need to be kept in check.
When you limit the number of calories consumed to get quick weight loss results on your diet plan, your body has to compensate for this loss. That’s when it begins to break down muscle tissue so as to maintain energy levels. The body also adjusts its requirements for energy and slows down its rate of metabolism.
But what happens when you go back to eating the way you did before? Well, your body is still functioning in diet mode. Your metabolism has slowed, so all that extra food is stored as fat. So you end up heavier than you were before you started dieting.
It’s also important to stress that activity can play a vital role in this too. If you can maintain your normal activity while dieting then you’re one of the few. Take a look at athletes for example. They follow a nutrition plan that that’s heavy in calories as activity like rugby training needs to be fueled. Dieting wouldn’t be an option for athletes and they do not put on unnecessary weight. The point here is that you need to also try and be active to help with your new lifestyle, dieting makes it even harder.
Aside from calorie restriction, here are other reasons why dieting isn’t sustainable for most people;
Too Restrictive – frankly speaking, diets are depressing. They take away all the fun foods and all of a sudden you can’t have chocolate anymore. Oh, now all you see is chocolate, it’s everywhere and everyone is having a bite… except you. Then, you cheat and go right back to square one.
Your Body Rejects It – your body likes eating and wants to eat. Denying your body means your body fights you to get more food. It forces you to cheat and go right back to square one.
The ‘fad diet of the week‘ is not right for your metabolism – your body needs certain nutrients. Your cravings match those nutrients. When you force your body to eat a way it doesn’t like, it slows downs, becomes clogged, and sick. You don’t even need to cheat and you’re worse now then you were at square one.
So how do you really lose fat and keep it off for good?
Getting down to your ideal weight and maintaining it means eating a balanced diet and getting plenty of exercise. It doesn’t mean a severe restriction in calories and spending hours at the gym. Simply pay more attention to the foods you eat and move around more.
Easy exercises like walking, cycling and swimming can go a long way to shaping a leaner, healthier you. Even walking 5 minutes per day is enough to get started. Then, work up to better and better exercises until you are exercising every day, alternating between strength training, cardio, and stretching.
Attaining and maintaining a healthy weight is as much about adjusting your self-concept and attitude as it is your lifestyle.
When you change the way you see yourself, it’s easy to make those necessary changes. In fact they often happen subconsciously. Your weight is governed by your self-concept. When you change the assumptions about yourself and your body, you change the results. That’s how you master weight loss forever.
4 Fun Mood-Boosters for Aging Parents (Guest Post)
If you are one of the over 40 million family caregivers in the U.S. providing care for an aging parent or relative, chances are you wear several hats including chauffeur, insurance wrangler, cook, housekeeper, pharmacist, nurse, and therapist. The truth is that many seniors struggle with feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression, and it falls to their care network to help them stay positive and seek help.
Everything from hearing loss to mobility impairment can strip a senior of their sense of independence and self-reliance, so finding creative and fun ways to boost their mood is a must. Check out these top ideas:
Give Their Mobility Aid a Makeover
If having to use a cane, walker, or wheelchair has your loved one feeling down in the pits, help them embrace the situation more positively by upgrading their mobility aid with some helpful add-ons. Personalize your wheelchair or your loved one’s with helpful accessories like bags, baskets, and hanging pockets that make toting around personal items easier. Decorate their cane or walker with a bright-colored paint job. Add padded grip covers and cushions for extra comfort or don their cane with a helpful wrist strap.
Volunteer Together
Few things fill the heart quite like helping others. Even if your aging parent isn’t able to get out of the house to help at the food pantry or join the walk-a-thon, they can still make a difference in the lives of others right from home. Online tutoring, making a meal for a local children’s shelter or neighbor in need, joining a local political group to make calls or do neighborhood canvassing, putting together bags of toiletries, water, socks, and snacks for homeless people . . . the ideas are endless. Serving others helps to re-instill a sense of purpose in your loved one’s life and can be just the silver lining they’re looking for.
Video Chat Faraway Friends and Family
Maintaining strong social connections and interacting with other people goes a long way to fighting depression in seniors as well as keeping their minds sharp. It’s not easy to make long trips to see faraway relatives and friends, and talking on the phone isn’t always the clearest experience. Set up a free, live video chat for your loved one instead with services like Skype or Google+ Hangout. You will need a webcam/mic if you don’t already have one installed on your computer, however, it’s super easy to video call someone over Wifi (for free!) and chat with them face to face.
Listen to Music
A growing body of research is pointing to more and more benefits when it comes to the idea of ‘music therapy’. Music has not only been shown to help thwart motor impairment associated with conditions like Parkinson’s disease, but it can also improve mood and help relieve stress. For older adults with dementia, listening to nostalgic music from their younger years may help stimulate stronger memory and cognitive functioning too. Free services like Spotify and Pandora let you create playlists of songs based on genres and artists your loved one enjoys, try them out today!
Guest Blog: How Long-Term Care Facilities Can Reduce Hospital Readmissions
Reducing hospital readmissions is a noble goal for any long-term care facility, wound care practice, or other medical professional to work towards. Going up through the supply chain of medical care, we even find this shared vision amongst the professionals and companies which ensure that necessary prescriptions, medical products, and other shipped goods, land in the right hands at the right time. In short, reducing hospital readmissions represents a major community responsibility, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
However, in long-term and wound care, this goal isn’t always so easy to achieve.
Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and other medical care-adjacent companies can greatly help themselves and their communities’ health infrastructures by adopting practices which reduce the number of residents who have to be readmitted to hospitals and other healthcare facilities. This phenomenon is known as re-hospitalization, or sometimes less formally as bounce-backs.
Hospital readmission is a very real and significant problem in America today. Studies have shown that one in five elderly patients are readmitted to their healthcare facility within 30 days after departing, and one-third of patients 65 or older are readmitted within three months. This results in Medicare costs that exceed $17 billion total every year.
In response, some insurers are adopting harsh penalties on patients with high readmission rates. As a result, healthcare providers are reassessing their relationships with long-term care providers in an attempt to address this issue. Beyond the issue of the need to improve patient care, this comes with very real consequences for home care agencies. The ratings awarded to such agencies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are also affected by readmission rates, and an agency with poor ratings in this area can dramatically decrease its reimbursement levels.
Greater Attention to Patients with High Risk of Re-Hospitalization
An effective method for dealing with this problem is for caregivers in long-term care facilities to develop ways of identifying those patients who are most likely to experience difficulties, and to enact measures to help them before these situations develop into crisis situations. A few specific techniques for achieving this are outlined below.
When patients first return home after a stay in a healthcare facility, they may have difficulties readjusting to their surroundings. This, in turn, increases the risk of falls and other injuries that may result from mobility issues. Caregivers can reduce these risks by looking for ways to simplify the spaces that recently-returned residents have to navigate. Similarly, caregivers should ensure that a resident has readjusted to life at home before undertaking physical therapy or other activities that may be overly-taxing for them.
Research has indicated that over 30% of bounce-backs among elderly patients result from the mismanagement of medications. Facilities can address this by reconciling medications often, and by providing reminders to their residents regarding the use of their medications.
Language barriers between a patient and staff at a long-term care facility, or patients whose cognitive condition makes it difficult for them to understand instructions, may leave them unwilling or incapable of following their caregivers’ guidance. This can be circumvented by asking the resident to repeat any instructions they are given, so that the caregiver can be certain that they were properly heard and understood.
Practical Techniques to Avoid Re-Hospitalization
The installation of sensor technology in residents’ rooms can also allow staff to react more quickly in an emergency, thus reducing the likelihood that minor incidents may develop into more serious issues. Data suggests that equipping residents’ homes with sensors can reduce bounce-backs by nearly 50%. Facilities can also make it easier for residents to receive non-emergency visits from healthcare providers within the facility itself, rather than going to a hospital.
Caregivers at a facility should also be provided with clear lines of communication with other staff members to ensure that everyone is getting the information they need to address the needs of patients who are more acutely at risk. These communications should be well-documented, both to ensure the accuracy of the information exchanged, and to place responsibility where it belongs when something does go wrong. This can also be aided by establishing electronic health record protocols for the residents in a facility. These methods can also help to guarantee strong clinical oversight, which further ensures success in at-home treatment.
When re-hospitalization does occur, facilities should be prepared to examine the reasons why it happened in order to figure out what changes might have led to a better outcome for the patient. Statistics suggest that approximately 75% of hospital readmissions could have been avoided with better procedures in place.
Lastly, care facilities need to ensure that all of their staff are adequately trained to deal with a range of medical issues. Facilities who trained their caregivers in CPR and infection control, for example, saw 24% fewer readmissions in the first year after training and 41% during the second year.
Benefits of Treating Patients within a Long-Term Care Facility
Besides avoiding penalties, long-term care facilities have much to gain by addressing the problem of re-hospitalization among their residents.
Patients who spend less time outside the facility have more opportunities to participate in scheduled activities such as hobbies, physical therapy, and social interactions. A routine visit by a healthcare provider at a facility can be as brief as 15 minutes, leaving the patient free to go about his or her life as normal. This is as opposed to in-hospital treatment, which can often take an entire day or more.
Secondly, if residents are seen by healthcare providers in their homes, they can usually be accompanied by their regular facility nurse. This can greatly aid communication and ensure that the provider receives as much information as possible when planning treatments for a patient. This also reduces the time it takes to identify wound-related complications. In some cases, the patient may not be able to communicate at all with the healthcare facility, so the nurse may be the only person with necessary information about their needs.
Additionally, allowing healthcare providers to see their patients in a facility greatly reduces the transportation costs they would otherwise incur by taking the resident to a clinic and back. If this is the case, the facility must then undertake the fees associated with the wound care visit, as well as the cost of seeing the healthcare provider. When healthcare professionals can see their patients at a facility, it eliminates all costs apart from the price of the professionals’ services. It also greatly reduces the amount of time that a patient must wait before he or she can receive treatment for an injury.
These are just some examples of the steps that long-term care facilities can take to prevent and decrease hospitalizations, improve the level of service they provide to their residents, and reduce their own risks and costs. Developing better strategies for preventing rehospitalization and allowing healthcare professionals to see residents in their homes are both a win-win for everyone involved.