Eight fun and fuss-free ways to Maintain A Healthy Living
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - Posted by SunnyHealth - 0 comments

The Health Promotion Board’s "Make Active Lifestyle Your Way of Life" is in full swing. You are now seeing more people jogging around your estate or working out at the gyms. You want to be as active and trim as them, but you just feel too tired, busy and lazy to move! Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Do you envy the fitness freaks who seem to enjoy exercise while you consider it a chore? What about people who eat healthfully and still enjoy their meal? Why is it so easy for them and such a struggle for you? One common reason is adaptation. If you have been leading a sedentary lifestyle, or eating rich foods and snacking on tidbits on a daily basis, it is going to require time and effort to adapt.

Trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle may be difficult in the beginning, but the longer you adopt healthy behaviours, the easier they become, and the best part is, you will actually start to enjoy them as part and parcel of your life. Your first step in getting to that happy place is to change your attitude.

What is it like leading a healthy lifestyle? Those who dislike exercise may consider it a burden and a bore. You have to slog through boring workouts, avoid having your favourite meals at the fastfood restaurants and force yourself to eat an apple a day when you hate fruits.

In truth, there are other options if you are just starting to get into a healthy lifestyle. The trick to healthy living is making small changes, taking small simple steps like adding fruit to your favourite cereal or having an extra glass of water per day. Leave the drastic changes to later when you are accustomed to your healthier lifestyle. By then, you will probably consider them natural transitions, rather than drastic changes!

First steps to a Happier Healthy You!

1. Use the stairs instead of the elevator: You need to get up there anyway. Why not kill two birds with one stone and lose some calories while at it? Climbing stairs improves cardiovascular function. It also helps to strengthen and tone the leg muscles.

2. Stretch in the morning when you get out of bed: It helps to relax your muscles while increasing blood flow. It is a great and refreshing way to start the morning! You might feel more inclined to go out for a morning walk or jog.

3. Grab a friend or anyone to exercise with you: Exercising with a friend is a lot more fun. You can motivate each other, while maintaining and improving your relationship.

4. Slowly reduce consumption of unhealthy food: Gradually cut down on eating fried, oily foods and snacks. You do not have to cut out all oily food and snacks out of your diet immediately. Start slowly, for example, by limiting the number of times you consume them and the amounts. Constantly remind yourself that unhealthy food may give you temporary pleasure, but the outcomes – obesity and obesity-related diseases, are there to stay. If you feel hungry, snack on a fruit. If you don’t like apples, there are always other delicious alternatives, like pears, strawberries, bananas etc.

5. Eat breakfast everyday: Research indicates that eating breakfast helps you to lose weight. It boosts your metabolism, giving you more energy and motivation for activities. You also tend to feel less hungry, reducing the urge to eat snacks or pig out during lunch.

6. Drink healthier beverages instead of soft drinks: Soft drinks are high in sugar content and regular consumption can lead to obesity and diabetes. Go for healthier and tasty alternatives, such as iced tea, milk, soya bean milk and fruit juice.

7. Do chores at home: Housework is a form of exercise that keeps you active . Cleaning and cloth-rinsing strengthens your arm muscles. Ironing is a good way to put your shoulder, neck and upper body muscles into use. Just be sure to adopt comfortable postures and not to stand in one position for too long or you may end up with vascular problems. By doing your own housework, you safe money from hiring a maid, and you are also exercising filial piety duties by relieving your parents of strenuous chores!

8. Whenever possible and safe, take the scenic route for a walk or jog: Compared to jogging on a running track, jogging past pleasant greenery, the romantic seaside, the group of hot babes or hunks at the basketball court, is guaranteed to make your walk or jog more fun, and keep you coming back for more! Do also keep altering your routes to prevent monotony from setting in.
Once you partake in these regularly, you will find that they will integrate naturally into your lives. You'll even derive joy from doing them!


To exercise or not? That's a hazy situation!
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - Posted by SunnyHealth - 0 comments
Recently, our island has once again been blanketed by haze that resulted from forest fires from a neighbouring country. While the haze levels are not at health endangering levels, a person who is exposed to hazy environment for a long time can suffer from health problems. When you inhale air which is affected by haze, the particles along with the haze will be deposited in the lungs. The situation will be worse for someone who has a history of respiratory problems such as asthma and chronic lung diseases.

Coincidentally, HPB has recently started a campaign to champion for a healthier lifestyle with at least 150 minutes of physical exercise per week! What a bummer! Just when we finally convinced ourselves to take out those dusty running shoes, we worry about whether exercising in the haze is a health hazard itself!

This can be determined by the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI), the smoke levels of haze measured every three hours.

PSI Value PSI Descriptor
0 – 50 Good
51 – 100 Moderate
101 – 200 Unhealthy
201 – 300 Very unhealthy
Above 300 Hazardous

Outdoors exercise should be avoided when the PSI Value is above 100. Hit the gym, work out at home or sweat it out at the community centres and indoor sports facilities instead.

What happens when you exercise outdoors on a hazy day?

Typically, when pollutants are inhaled, the main effects are on the respiratory tract. The nose hairs serve as filters and remove large particles and highly soluble gases very effectively, but smaller particles and agents with low solubility pass easily. During exercise, when mouth breathing plays an important role, this air filtration process is much less efficient, and more pollutants reach the lungs.

This can cause irritation of the upper respiratory tract, respiratory discomfort and reduction in the oxygen transport capacity of the blood.

Smoke inhalation can result in bronchoconstriction (tightening of airways). Penetration of particles into the upper respiratory tract may cause inflammation, congestion or ulceration. As you breathe deeper, harder and more frequently during exercise, such conditions can be triggered.

Research has found that a combination of high temperature, humidity and air pollution is the worst combination to increase health risks – which makes Singapore a little incubator for problems as we tick all of these boxes.

You should pay close attention to health warnings issued by all advisory boards and follow them as. Before you exercise, tune in to the news, visit http://weather.nea.gov.sg/ForecastToday.aspx or call up the weather station at 6542 7788 to get the latest update on the PSI value. If you have iPhone, you can also get your daily weather forecast, including haze conditions, from the myENV iPhone app.

That said, the current PSI levels which are hovering in the 50s and 60s are still safe for outdoor exercise. You do not have to lay off outdoor exercise completely, and you absolutely have no excuse to hole up at home. Obesity is as much a major health problem as air pollution is!

Other things you can do to battle the haze:
• When outdoors, nose breathing strongly reduces the amount of inhaled pollution compared with mouth breathing.
• If you are asthmatic, you should avoid exercising in pollution.
• Avoid exercising in peak/rush hours to avoid too many pollutants in the air.
• Avoid cigarette smoking
• Keep the amount of time spent in high pollution areas (like the heavy industrial areas) to a minimum as the side effects are dose dependent

A special reminder to all smokers: Smoking 20 cigarettes per day is about the same as an average 24 hour PSI of 24,000!

Information sources: NEA, Haze A Threat to Your Health,


More Good Doctors Please
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - Posted by SunnyHealth - 0 comments
In the surprising major reshuffling of the Singapore cabinet last week, Mr Gan Kim Yong takes over Mr Khaw Boon Wan as Health Minister and has made a blog post to the official MOH blog yesterday.

He pinpoints 3 areas of concern with regards to health care in Singapore - supply of healthcare professionals and workers, healthcare costs and aging-related health issues. Correctly identifying the mistakes is always a good start, so that's half the battle won. Let's hope he perseveres with practical issues to solve them.

The short supply of healthcare professionals has always been a sore point among many locals. In the past, it was incredibly difficult to get into the medical courses in the local universities because requirements were so stringent, doctors-to-be had to literally be perfect to gain entry, and then subsequently be charged exorbitantly high tuition fees. One practically had to be rich, intelligent, have a great attitude, a good heart, ability to keep calm in a crisis, among many other things.


Probably like the doctors from ER. Haha.

Now, we face a shortage of doctors and nurses and hospitals are importing them from foreign countries. Apart from numerous complaints about communication breakdown between patient and health care staff due to language barriers, doctors (both local and foreign) are making headlines for lack of professionalism and poor ethics. What happened to the perfect doctors we were in pursuit of?

Importing doctors and nurses may be a short term solution, but in the long run, there are still many thorns in the flesh, for differences in work culture and ethics, language and and understanding of local issues cannot be overcome by a few technical courses. Furthermore,truly good doctors and nurses are supposed to help troubled patients feel at home and at ease, and there's little chance of that happening if the patient and medical staff can't even communicate effectively with each other.

MOH should work with the local universities, reduce entry requirements, but increase requirements and demands in the course of study (after all, skills and ethics can be improved more quickly during full-time study), so that in the years to come, we will enjoy the care of homegrown medical professionals who truly comprehend the healthcare needs of Singaporeans.