Ideally you want to be able to stand on one foot with your eyes closed and balance for fifteen seconds or more without falling over or having to put the other foot down. And ideally you should be able to do this with either foot.
The reason this is good for you is because balance is critical to healthy movement, and this also makes you more body aware so you are less clumsy. Most people take this completely for granted and their ability to balance erodes because they don’t do anything to retain it and strengthen it. The result is that after many years falls become a serious hazard. Canes and walkers become a feature of the last years, and even avoiding going out for fear of a fall.
I practice balancing on very rare occassions and am able to manage the fifteen seconds on either foot thing. The hardest part is accurately estimating fifteen seconds with my eyes closed! Probably the reason I am okay at this is that I like to dance, which I suspect is good balance exercise, and because whenever nobody is looking I like to walk on the top of flat railings and concrete curbs. 2 years ago
Dark chocolate contains a large number of antioxidants, so it is good for helping reduce your cancer risk. It will also help lower your blood pressure and help lower your bad cholesterol.
Chocolate also contains theobromine and other substances that can help with the natural production of the brain chemicals which make you happy.
Of course it is important to eat a type of chocolate that is at least 65% cocoa. There are lots of bad types of chocolate that are full of sugar, bad fats and not much of anything good for your health. Cocoa, of the powdered kind that comes in cannisters for baking – not the sweetend chocolate powder for making chocolate milk or hot chocolate mix – is also good for you. The trick is to only use it in a recipe that isn’t loaded with bad fat and sugar.
They sell dark chocolate in bars that are 100 grams. That’s about 3.5 ounces. One or two ounces a day is the recommended amount.
I eat dark chocolate pretty often. I don’t eat it every day but it is one sort of candy I find that makes me content when I only eat part of a bar. I like 80 or 85% chocolate. It would make me healthier to choose this kind of candy all the time. 2 years ago
The idea of this goal is to get me to focus on healthy things I can do to improve my wellbeing, and the healthy things that I am already doing which are make me feel so good.
Ideally I’d be on here every day listing a new one with a note about what it is and why it works and how, and then go on to say what impact it is having or could have on my own health. However I don’t work that way. Daily doesn’t happen in my life, so the goal I shoot for is to remember a project and keep working on it as often as I can. It doesn’t matter how often I forget or for how long. The goal is to go on with it as soon as there is room for it.
This could be a lot of fun, as I find health practices and the physiology behind them intriguing. 2 years ago
