10 Signs That You Need To Lose Weight

Most of the time people are focused on losing weight because they want to look better. Although that’s a good enough reason for many people, there are other reasons that can benefit anyone who is carrying too much weight. There seems to be a never-ending series of medical research studies coming out that have found new ways our health is damaged by being overweight. There has been a desire to be thin in many societies for a very long time, but now we know there are many more benefits than just looking better. For some people, losing weight can actually prolong their lives. Be on the lookout for the following signs that may be telling you it is time to start thinking about dropping some weight.

1. Difficult Exercise

Image Credit

Anyone who really cares about their health should be exercising. There really is no replacement for it. if you have found it uncomfortable and difficult to complete your exercise routine because of your size, it’s definitely time to get serious about losing some weight. Exercising when you are overweight could put a greater strain on your heart and make it a bit more risky than it is for someone who is considered a normal weight.

2. Snoring

Image Credit

If you find that you are snoring a lot more and a lot louder than you used to, it definitely could be a sign that your weight is becoming a problem. Snoring can disrupt your sleep even when you are not aware of it, and chances are good that you’ll not feel fully rested when you wake up. Excess fat that tends to accumulate around the neck can make your airway smaller, which can lead to increased snoring and even sleep apnea, which can become life-threatening.

3. Soreness

Image Credit

In some cases, excess weight can cause various places to feel sensitive and more likely to become sore to the touch. Inflammation can affect the fatty tissues that are just below the skin’s surface which causes this condition. Losing some weight can help alleviate this problem.

4. Feeling Tired

Image Credit

Feeling worn out all the time is another thing excessive weight can cause. Inflammation is the culprit here again, and it happens due to all that excess weight. If you find yourself feeling exhausted when you are just doing things you have always done, like walking up stairs or walking your dog, it’s a sign that extra weight is putting too much strain on your body.

5. Always Hungry

Image Credit

This can certainly happen if you are going too heavy on the junk food, which is notoriously bad for keeping you feeling full, but it could also be a sign of type 2 diabetes, which is something that should surely get you to pay attention to your health. Other signs that diabetes may be developing are tingling, or numbness in your extremities, blurry vision and increased urination. Diabetes is a scary word to many people, but type 2 diabetes can often be reversed through weight loss and diet if someone is serious about improving their health.

6. High Cholesterol and High Blood Pressure

Image Credit

These are two potentially deadly problems that can have a very serious impact on your health. The good news is that both of these conditions can very often be reversed through lifestyle changes much like type 2 diabetes. Much of the time, even modest weight loss can improve upon or reverse these conditions.

7. The Bulge

Image Credit

If your waist is larger than 35 inches, there’s a good chance that you have too much belly fat, and recent research has found that to be a significant health risk. Using the “above 35” number doesn’t work for everyone, since people come in all different shapes and sizes, but it could be a hint that your weight is something you need to think more about. Excess weight around the midsection can contribute to your likelihood of having serious problems like heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.

8. Family History

Image Credit

Too much fat can lead to the production of more estrogen, which is believed to be linked to breast cancer. Having a parent or grandparent who had cancer increases your risk even without regard for excess weight. Losing weight is certainly no guarantee that your cancer risk will be reduced, but most experts believe that keeping your weight under control can be a benefit.

9. Pain

Image Credit

If you start experiencing pain in areas such as your knees, hips and back, it could be due to the strain excessive weight is causing on those areas. Forcing your joints to support extra weight can actually wear them down, and with time it could make treatments like hip or knee replacement necessary.

10. History of Weight Gain

Image Credit

While it’s certainly natural and expected for a person to gain weight as they develop from childhood, into their teens and then into adulthood, there should be a time in your life when your weight stabilizes, and does not continue to increase. if you have been steadily gaining weight every year even after reaching adulthood, there’s a good chance that you are overweight or soon will be.

Source:- http://thinkingabouthealth.com/healthy-eating/10-signs-that-you-need-to-lose-weight/

How Can I Learn To Dress Better?

Dear Lifehacker,
I admit that I'm not the snappiest dresser. I know how to keep my clothes clean and ironed and whatnot, but I don't always know what I should wear and I don't look quite as neat and professional as my friends and coworkers. How can I learn to dress better?

Sincerely,
Schlemiel in Seattle

Dear Schlemiel,
This is one of those things many people learn growing up, but if you missed out on that exposure, learning later in life isn't as easy and straightforward. The upside is that most of what you need to learn is observational, and you have hundreds of examples around you every day to learn from. Before you start looking at other people's clothing choices, start by looking at your own.

Perform a Wardrobe Audit

Before you go out to buy anything new, the first place you should go shopping is your own closet. If you're an adult with a job, you're probably covered for at least three situations: work, social outings, and lazy home clothes. Some of your clothes may serve multiple purposes (for example, the jeans you go out in may be comfortable enough to watch Netflix in), but you can probably put together outfits for at least these situations.

However, being well-dressed starts with being prepared for a situation. Few people you see who look great in their outfits started by hitting the store right before they arrived. Do a review of your closet. Ask yourself if you would be ready, right now, to dress for the following type of events:

• Weddings
• Funerals
• Job interviews
• Black tie events
• Dressy restaurant outings
• Birthday/graduation/anniversary parties

This list is by no means comprehensive, but as an adult (particularly if you're young), you can probably expect to be invited to at least a couple of the things on this list—if not all of them—in a given year. Do you have clothing appropriate for each of the events? If not, start picking out specific events you want or need to be prepared for and start there.

Learn the Basics For Specific Situations

There are certain basics that apply to any situation. Here is a non-comprehensive list of the basics you should cover:

• Buy clothes that fit. Often, it can feel better to wear clothes that are a bit bigger on you than you would normally wear. However, if you wear pants with a 36" waist and you get something with a 38", it will look loose and frumpy.
• Wear things that you're comfortable with. Part of the reason you wear nicer clothes, aside from fitting in with your current event, is to boost confidence. If you can't enjoy how you look, or your clothes don't feel natural, you'll fidget, squirm, and grimace your way to undoing all your hard work.
• Never wear white after Labor Day. Or do. Either way. As you learn more, you'll soon discover that there are rules that are made to be broken.

Once you've narrowed down which occasions you want to focus on first, you can start tracking down outfits for specific events. Is a suit overkill for a job interview? What type of dress should you wear to a wedding? How much do you have to spend on dinner before jeans are no longer okay? Ask these questions on a case by case basis.

Once you narrow down which situations you want to dress for, you can start searching for appropriate looks. The sources for these won't always be the same. For example, you can find advice on how to dress for work right here on Lifehacker, but you may have to turn to other sites for the perfect dress to wear to the club.

Over time, the skills and tricks you learn for one outfit will carry over to other situations. Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to buy hundreds of dollars worth of clothes for every possible event that you don't even know you're going to yet. Get clothes for the dinner date you're going on next week and the experience you get there will inform what type of shoes you should wear to the office.

Find a Mentor or Group of People to Provide Feedback

No amount of Googling will tell you that you look good. Your body is unique and there are dozens of factors that can make an outfit that looks fantastic on one person look horrible on another (or vice versa). Your best shot at looking great is to have someone personally look at how clothes fit you. The more experience that person has with making fashion decisions, the better.

If you can't find someone to help coach you, there are still options. Reddit has dedicated subreddits devoted to helping both men and women get their questions answered, as well as post pictures to ask for feedback. There are also apps and sites like Fashism that exist solely to share outfits and get opinions or inspiration.

If you're not comfortable with sharing pictures of yourself online (and have some cash to spare), you can hire a personal shopper. In some cases, their whole job is to find the clothes you're looking for and bring them to you, but others will walk you through the process and provide feedback. Alternatively, if you want to save that money, you can ask employees at clothing stores for feedback. Don't take up all their time—most of them have plenty of other duties to tend to—but if you go to any type of dedicated outlets, many employees are not only inclined to have an eye for what looks good, but some of them are there specifically to help you find something that works for you.

Read Fashion Sites (and Keep Reading)

Once you've got the basics down, you can start getting into the nuance of your wardrobe. This is where specialized sites and publications for men andwomen can be useful in keeping up to date on style changes over time. While you may have been able to get with wearing overalls with one strap unbuckled in the 90s, you couldn't pull that off today. Fashion evolves over time. Keeping up with current trends—to a certain extent, at least—is just another part of the process.

Also keep in mind that every publication you subscribe to will have its own particular style. Check out a few magazines and sites and see how much their style relates to your own. Don't just dive in to the first publication with Robert Downey Jr. on the cover (mostly because you can't pull off what he can...he's Iron Man), but instead find something that offers tips in the style you're looking for.

More importantly, though, find resources for a style you like and can be comfortable in and continue in that vein. Don't just grab the first copy of GQ you can find and buy whatever Bryan Cranston is wearing. Your wardrobe needs to be a reflection of your personal style, as well as being something that you can feel good in.

Also, remember the cardinal rules in any kind of etiquette: follow the host and don't deviate too much from the crowd. If you're looking to dress for work, find out how your boss dresses (as well as seasoned coworkers who are on your level). If you're going to a wedding, you don't want to upstage the bride and groom, but you should fit in with most of the guests. When you've got that down, and you can be happy with what you see in the mirror, you're already ahead of the curve.

Sincerely,
Lifehacker

Photos by Magnus D, bpsusf, and Will.

Source:- http://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-learn-to-dress-better-1215111190

10 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Incredibly Happy

It's easy to think of happiness as a result, but happiness is also a driver.

One example: While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst, or a lifetime, or things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people accomplish more.

Easier said than done though, right?

Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper, Content Crafter at Buffer, the social media management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social media updates.

Here's Beth:

1. Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough

Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the  7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.

Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:

The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent.

You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.

We've explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.

A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they saw no physical changes:

Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 × 40 minutes exercising and 6 × 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before.

Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.

2. Sleep More: You'll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions

We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.

In NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:

Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like "cancer." But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like "sunshine" or "basket."

The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.

Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions.

Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.

Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire work day.

Researchers found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods.

And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.

3. Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can't Buy You Happiness

Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying.

If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.

Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we feel.