Tag: Health

In the hustle and bustle of the modern workplace, maintaining a healthy weight can often be a challenge. People spend long hours sitting at office desks working and snacking on convenient but often unhealthy foods. Weight gain can become a significant concern for many individuals. However, with some mindful changes to your daily routine, it’s possible to maintain a healthy weight and avoid gaining weight while still being actively productive at work. Here are some easy and effective strategies to help you avoid gaining weight while on the job:
Healthy Meals and Snacks
One of the easiest ways to avoid unhealthy eating habits at work is to prepare healthy meals and snacks at home. This allows you to control portion sizes and choose nutritious options like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins. By avoiding the temptation of vending machines or fast food, you’ll be less likely to consume excess calories and unhealthy fats. Stock up on healthy snacks like nuts, yoghurt, hummus with veggies, or whole-grain crackers. Having these alternatives on hand will satisfy your hunger and provide lasting energy without the added calories and sugar.
Stay Hydrated
Drinking plenty of water throughout the day not only keeps you hydrated but can also help curb cravings for sugary beverages and snacks. Keep a refillable water bottle at your desk and aim to drink at least eight glasses of water daily. If you struggle with plain water, try infusing it with fruits or herbs for added flavor without the calories.
Take A Small Break And Walk
Another is walking. Combat the effects of sitting for long periods by incorporating regular movement breaks into your workday. Set reminders to stand up, stretch, and walk around for sometime. Consider taking the stairs instead of the elevator. One can also go for a short walk after the lunch break. These small bursts of activity can boost your metabolism and improve blood circulation.
Careful Eating
Mindful eating involves paying attention to your food choices and eating habits without distractions. When it’s time to eat, step away from your desk, and focus on enjoying your meal or snack. Chew slowly, savour the flavours, and listen to your body’s hunger cues. By being more mindful of what and how you eat, you’ll be less likely to overindulge or make impulsive food choices.
Manage Stress Levels
Stress can often lead to a bad mood, being distracted at work or emotional eating. Therefore, finding healthy ways to manage stress at work, such as deep breathing exercises, meditation, or taking short breaks to relax. Engaging in activities you enjoy outside of work, such as hobbies or spending time with loved ones, can also help alleviate stress.
Prioritise Sleep
Office going individuals often deal with the problem of lack of sleep. Lack of sleep can disrupt the body’s hunger hormones. Aim for at least eight hours of quality sleep to support healthy metabolism and weight management. This will keep you fresh and active in the office. Establish a bedtime routine, create a restful sleep environment, and prioritise sleep as an essential component of your overall health.

A team of scientists in China detected a whopping 80 per cent of microplastics from blood clots that may have contributed to stroke, heart attack, and deep vein thrombosis.
Microplastics—any type of plastic less than 5 mm long—have long been known as a significant environmental and health concern worldwide.
The new study, published in the journal eBioMedicine, showed that the blood clot samples were found in the cerebral arteries in the brain, coronary arteries in the heart, and deep veins in the lower extremities of 30 patients.
“Microplastics found in 80 per cent of clots retrieved from blood vessels after heart attack, stroke, or deep venous thrombosis. This is really bad news. Plastics are everywhere in modern life,” Tatiana Prowell, Associate Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University in the US, wrote in a post on X.
The study stressed the need to accurately investigate the impact of microplastics on human health. It showed that the presence of microplastics may increase the severity of heart attack, stroke, or deep venous thrombosis.
“Our findings suggest that microplastics of different concentrations, polymer types, and physical properties are present in human thrombi (blood clots) and that higher levels of microplastics may be associated with disease severity,” said the researchers from the First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College in China.
“Future research with a larger sample size is urgently needed to identify the sources of exposure and validate the observed trends in the study,” they added.

So, you got your eyesight tested and found out you need your first pair of glasses. Or you found out you need a stronger pair than the ones you have. You put them on and everything looks crystal clear. But after a few weeks things look blurrier without them than they did before your eye test. What’s going on?
Some people start to wear spectacles for the first time and perceive their vision is “bad” when they take their glasses off. They incorrectly interpret this as the glasses making their vision worse. Fear of this might make them less likely to wear their glasses.
But what they are noticing is how much better the world appears through the glasses. They become less tolerant of a blurry world when they remove them.
Here are some other things you might notice about eyesight and wearing glasses.
Lazy eyes?
Some people sense an increasing reliance on glasses and wonder if their eyes have become “lazy”.
Our eyes work in much the same way as an auto-focus camera. A flexible lens inside each eye is controlled by muscles that let us focus on objects in the distance (such as a footy scoreboard) by relaxing the muscle to flatten the lens. When the muscle contracts it makes the lens steeper and more powerful to see things that are much closer to us (such as a text message). From the age of about 40, the lens in our eye progressively hardens and loses its ability to change shape. Gradually, we lose our capacity to focus on near objects. This is called “presbyopia” and at the moment there are no treatments for this lens hardening. Optometrists correct this with prescription glasses that take the load of your natural lens. The lenses allow you to see those up-close images clearly by providing extra refractive power. Once we are used to seeing clearly, our tolerance for blurry vision will be lower and we will reach for the glasses to see well again.
The wrong glasses?
Wearing old glasses, the wrong prescription (or even someone else’s glasses) won’t allow you to see as well as possible for day-to-day tasks. It could also cause eyestrain and headaches.
Incorrectly prescribed or dispensed prescription glasses can lead to vision impairment in children as their visual system is still in development.
But it is more common for kids to develop long-term vision problems as a result of not wearing glasses when they need them.
By the time children are about 10–12 years of age, wearing incorrect spectacles is less likely to cause their eyes to become lazy or damage vision in the long term, but it is likely to result in blurry or uncomfortable vision during daily wear.
Registered optometrists in Australia are trained to assess refractive error (whether the eye focuses light into the retina) as well as the different aspects of ocular function (including how the eyes work together, change focus, move around to see objects). All of these help us see clearly and comfortably.
What about dirty glasses?
Dirty or scratched glasses can give you the impression your vision is worse than it actually is. Just like a window, the dirtier your glasses are, the more difficult it is to see clearly through them. Cleaning glasses regularly with a microfibre lens cloth will help.
While dirty glasses are not commonly associated with eye infections, some research suggests dirty glasses can harbour bacteria with the remote but theoretical potential to cause eye infection.
Source: PTI