8 Actionable Tips To Help Prevent Hair Loss

If you are like me, you may suffer from thin hair or hair loss. It does get to me sometimes and I do get embarrassed, but I recently found some ways to achieve better hair growth. Of course, there are some really great shampoos for hair growth out there that include zinc, but before we get into that, let me explain some of the key reasons you might be experiencing hair loss.
These can include, but aren’t limited to:

• What you eat, like McDonald’s and other unhealthy foods
• Mineral deficiencies
• Different medication
• Stress
• Genetics

Around one third of the population suffers from hair loss. Of that third of the population, they are women. So women, listen up! Just like life, there are no guarantees you can completely avoid losing your hair, however, you can always help. In this post, I will give you some of the best ways to help with your hair loss or thinning.

Avoid Damaging Your Hair
It’s important to limit hair damage by minimizing habits that are bad for your hair. Try and avoid using your hair dryer when you don’t need to. If you take shower before bed, dry your hair with a towel instead. Overusing heat on your hair can cause damage to your hair proteins and make it dry to the point that it breaks off.
Continuously using a hair dryer can also permanently damage your hair follicles. That goes for your favorite curling irons and flat irons as well. Make sure you don’t brush too hard either. Pulling your hair out consistently can lead to a damaged scalp.

Don’t Pull Your Hair So Tight
This one might not be the most obvious method to help you avoid thinning hair. Some hairstyles like ponytails, tight braids, cornrows, and plaits cause heavy stress to your hair follicles. If you put your hair into heated rollers, you can also cause some unnecessary hair loss.
Not to say you should never do this, but roll your hair occasionally. I am a big fan of curly hair myself. And if you are used to frequently braiding your hair, place two week breaks in between braids and make sure they aren’t put in too tightly. If your head hurts, your braids are probably too tight.

Shampoo To Fight Hair Loss
Putting the right shampoos in your hair is important. Washing your hair with the right shampoos can help with keeping your scalp and hair clean. One of the reasons you clean your hair is to avoid any infections that could damage your follicles.
You don’t necessarily have to wash your hair everyday because the natural oils your scalp produces is actually healthy for your hair. If need be – wash your hair every other day. If you need help gaining back some thickness to your hair, check Amazon for some hair loss products. They are specially formulated to help strengthen and rebuild lost hair.
If nothing else, clean hair is always nicer than dirty, matted hair.

Be Aware Of The Ingredients
Researches have found that the use of shampoos containing 3% of peppermint oil is effective in 92% of hair loss cases. The oil promotes the conservation and vascularization of hair dermal papilla, and is a natural alternative for preventing hair loss.
Another great ingredient is ketoconazole, an ingredient that has been shown in clinical trials to act as an anti-inflammatory agent, effective for hair growth.
The daily use of at least 1% pyrithione zinc shampoo over a 26-week treatment period, for example, has a positive improvement in hair growth, according to one study done in 2003. You always want to avoid ingredients called parabens in all cosmetics. Parabens have been used in most cosmetics since the 1950’s to prevent the growth of bacteria.
But, in the early 90’s they were found to be agents that mimic estrogen in your body, and have been linked to breast cancer!

Start Eating Right
You know the saying, “you are what you eat.” That’s a powerful five-word mantra that every culture in every part of the world knows. Eating a healthy breakfast is important. When it comes to healthy hair, eating correctly can directly affect hair growth.
Proper nutrition can help prevent hair loss. This is a simple common sense approach to keeping you, your hair, and your scalp healthy. It is possible that hair loss can be slowed by a healthy diet, consisting of vegetables and fruits.

Iron Can Help With Hair Loss
Iron is an essential mineral that your body needs to survive. If you are not getting enough iron, this can lead to anemia. Anemia can actually disrupt the supply of healthy nutrients to your hair follicles, which in turn can lead to hair loss.
There are many sources of iron that you can acquire from healthy foods such as:

• Red meat
• Chicken
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Fish
• Spinach

Protein Can Help With Hair Loss
Protein is essential for healthy hair. If you are lacking protein, this can be the reason you have dry, weak hair. Getting enough protein will help manage the amount of amino acids strengthening your hair. Eating foods with high amounts of protein is not only good for muscles and other factors, but it is also great for improving the condition of your hair.
Some foods you can acquire adequate amounts of protein include:

• Seafood
• Poultry
• Cheese
• Yogurt
• Beans
• Pork
• Tofu
• Peanut butter
• Quinoa

Eat Foods Rich In Biotin
Biotin is a B vitamin and is important for your hair. If you are not getting enough biotin, your hair could begin to fall out and become brittle. Good sources of biotin include whole grains, liver, egg whites, soy flour, walnuts, and yeast.
Whole grains are a great source of zinc as well. Remember when I mentioned some of the best shampoos for hair loss contain zinc? Zinc helps aid with itchy scalp and hair loss. So be sure to eat enough whole grains to help with any issues you may be having with hair loss.

Conclusion
Overall, a healthy diet can help you avoid hair loss. It will help you gain more volume to your hair. Knowing what you put into your hair is important for future growth. Avoid any unnecessary damage as much as you can. Your hair is one of the first characteristics someone notices about you. Be sure to take care of it and treat it well.
What is your experience with ways to avoid hair loss?

Intermittent Fasting - The Ultimate Weight Loss Hack

Intermittent fasting is a type of diet that’s rapidly growing in popularity and becoming the way to lose weight. Last month alone there were over 246,000 searches for the phrase ‘intermittent fasting’ on Google alone. This search volume shows how popular it’s become.
Scientists and nutrition experts like it too and are saying it’s the way of the future for losing and keeping weight off and new books and articles on the topic are being published daily including best selling books like ‘Eat Stop Eat’ and ‘The 8 Hour Diet’. Intermittent fasting is also popular with followers of the Paleo diet since our ancestors appear to have eaten this way for thousands of years.
I’ve been following this type of diet myself for 2 years. Doing so helped me lose and keep off 70 pounds without ever having to count calories, carbohydrates, or eat 6-7 meals a day.
This article teaches you all about intermittent fasting and details why it is the greatest weight loss diet hack around. After reading it you will be able to implement into your diet and experience the benefits it offers almost immediately.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?
As you may have figured from its name, intermittent fasting is a diet plan where you fast for a set period of time during the day. This is usually between 16-20 consecutive hours. You eat during the other 4-8 hours of the day.
While fasting you can eat and drink low calorie or calorie-free foods. Think coffee, tea, water, and vegetables.
The more time you spend fasting every day, the better your results. You can do these fasts as often as you like. Again, the more often you do so, the better.

Getting Started With Intermittent Fasting
Following this diet plan is super simple. All you have to do is is choose a period of time during the day that you will fast. This should be between 16-20 hours. The longer you fast each day, the better. Don’t worry about counting calories or carbohydrates. Just focus on going about your day until it’s time to eat.
It’s best to choose a set period of time to conduct your fast. I like to fast from 8 o’clock at night to 4 the following afternoon. I’ll then have my first meal of the day and a snack or two a few hours later. Once 8 o’clock rolls around, it’s back to fasting.
My experience with intermittent fasting finds that’s it’s best to start with a 16 hour fast (i.e. 8PM one evening to 12PM the next day) for the first 1-2 weeks. Once you are comfortable with this schedule, you can increase the amount of time you spend fasting. Do this by adding 30 minutes to each fast until you get to where you are fasting for 20 hours at a time.
You don’t have to fast every day in the beginning either. You may be more comfortable breaking in slowly with 2-3 fasts a week at first. Add additional days of intermittent fasting as you become more comfortable with this style of eating.

Tips To Make Intermittent Fasting Easier
1. During your fast you’ll want to drink plenty of water. Squeeze a little lemon or lime juice into your water to help get rid of any cravings you experience. You can also drink coffee, tea, or other calorie free beverages. After a few weeks you will find that intermittent fasting keeps you from craving sugar entirely.
2. If you can handle it, take in a little caffeine in the morning and early afternoon. The caffeine in coffee and tea may actually make intermittent fasting a little easier to fast since it’s good for curbing your appetite. Be careful not to overindulge as this may lead to you feeling a little too wired. I also recommend these natural energy boosting tips to keep you going during the day.
3. Avoid artificially flavored drinks. One type of calorie free drink that should be avoided are diet sodas and other beverages that use artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Sweet & Low. Studies show that the can actually stimulate your appetite like a drink that contains sugar and cause you to overeat.
4. Don’t gorge at your first meal. The first meal after your fast should be the amount of food you typically eat. Binging will only make you feel awful and diminish the benefits you get from the fast.
5. Minimize foods rich in processed carbohydrates and sugars. While intermittent fasting does make it possible to eat a little looser than normal, you should still eat as little bread, pasta, rice, etc. as possible.
Focus instead on eating protein from beef, fish, or pork, carbohydrates from vegetables, fruit, and sweet potatoes, and healthy fats from foods like almonds, avocados, fish, and olive oil.

How Intermittent Fasting Will Help You Lose Weight
Eating this way has many benefits with regard to weight loss. The first is that when you’re fasting, your body will be forced to use its stored body fat for energy. Burning calories this way, instead of from the food you’re eating throughout the day, will help you not only lose weight but weight from any excess body fat you’re carrying. This means that you won’t just be thinner but will also look better and be much healthier than if you lose weight the old-fashioned way.
Intermittent fasting is that it can help optimize the release of the key fat burning hormones in your body. The is especially true for the two most important hormones: human growth hormone (HGH) and insulin.
Human growth hormone plays a key role in turning on your bodies fat burning furnace so it gets the calories you need to work and play from stored body fat. Studies show that fasting can increase your body’s production of growth hormone by 1,300% in women and 2,000% in men!
The influence intermittent fasting has on insulin is just as impressive and possibly more important. Keeping your insulin levels low and steady is key to losing excess fat and keeping it off. Diets that are rich in processed carbohydrates (bread, pasta, rice) and simple sugars (candy, cookies, and soda) have the opposite effect. They cause your insulin levels to rapidly spike and then crash every time you eat one of these foods. The net result of this phenomenon is that your body will store more of what you eat as excess body fat instead of burning it off as energy.
Chronically elevating your insulin levels like this can also lead to the development of type II diabetes, obesity, and other chronic health problems. Intermittent fasting easily solves this problem.
Following an intermittent fasting style of diet for 15 days is shown in clinical studies to help ‘balance’ your insulin levels. This will help your body stay in a calorie and fat burning state. You’ll also find that it gives you more energy throughout the day.
Another great weight loss benefit of intermittent fasting is that hunger pangs and cravings that may normally plague you throughout the day will be reduced, if not altogether eliminated. This is probably due to its ability to balance your insulin and blood sugar levels and, in turn help correct other hormonal imbalances.
Now that you know what intermittent fasting is and how to get started, it’s time to answer your other questions. Below are answers to the questions frequently asked about intermittent fasting. These answers should help you too and make getting started a lot easier.

How Much Weight Will I Lose?
The amount of weight you lose with fasting is determined by how often and long your fasts are, what you eat afterward, and other factors. Fasting for 16-20 hours a day can help you safely lose 2-3 pounds of fat every week.
While losing this much weight every week is great, it’s how it makes it happen that’s really cool. Losing weight with intermittent fasting means that you will never have to count calories or plan and prepare several meals a day.

Can I Work Out While Fasting?
Yes, you can. In fact, doing the right type of workout while fasting will help you lose weight faster and even build muscle.
The best workouts to do while fasting for weight loss are 3-4 intense strength training workouts weekly. This means anything from standard strength training to kettlebell or body weight workouts.
Focus on doing 3-4 total body exercises per workout with as little rest as possible between sets. Doing this will help you burn more calories during and after your workout. You’ll build muscle too which will help you look and feel better as the weight comes off.
One workout that I’ve found to be very effective for weight loss when combined with intermittent fasting is the 10 Minute Workout plan which can be done at home or the gym.

Won’t I Lose Muscle When I Fast?
I wouldn’t sweat this at all. First of all, you aren’t fasting long enough for your body to start breaking down muscle for energy. You have perhaps hundreds of thousands of calories from your stored body fat to use before that will begin to happen. Studies actually show that even after fasting for 3 days, no muscle is lost.

Is Fasting Safe?
As long as you are healthy, not pregnant, and aren’t taking medications, fasting is safe. Like all diets you should discuss it with your doctor before beginning an intermittent fasting style of dieting.
I also feel that it may not be smart to follow this type of diet when you’re especially stressed. Since this diet can be a little stress-inducing at first, doing so when your ability to be relatively stress-free and rested probably isn’t a good idea.

Are There Any Supplements I Can Take To Make Fasting Easier?
As with any other weight loss plan, it’s a good idea to take a few nutritional supplements to ensure that your daily requirements are met. This includes a once or twice daily multi-vitamin, fish oil, and vitamin D.
I’ve also found taking 10 grams of branch chain amino acids before and after my workouts really helps too. They’re great for giving you more energy during your workout and really decreasing post-workout muscle soreness.
You can also use a BCAA supplement during your fast to help reduce the risk of crashing or suffering from a bad mood during the day.

Conclusion
Now you know what intermittent fasting is and how it can help you lose weight quickly, safely, and pretty much effortlessly. Give it a try yourself and let me know what you think in the comments section below.

What Too Much Salt Actually Does To Your Body

Food is one of the major things that cuts across cultures, languages and people and this is so majorly because we need to satisfy the pangs of hunger any time they come calling. The most important sense organ when it comes to food is the sense of taste which is controlled by the tongue. Beyond this sense of taste, the food only completes the task of filling our stomach and nourishing our body. Although most food items come with their natural salt, we most times need to add salt so that these food can taste better.

What we used to believe about too much salt intake 
Humans are wired differently and this difference applies to our sense organs too. While a person’s taste buds may be highly sensitive, the next person’s taste buds might be less sensitive and because of this disparities mostly, the level of salt intake varies for most of us. With several research carried out on the subject, we have been told that high level of salt content in food has negative effects especially because it heightens the risks of high blood pressure, liver and kidney diseases. Adhering to this directives will mean that we eat less salty food and sometimes food lacking in salt. Any price to pay for healthy living right?

The latest findings about salty food 
Acclaimed Nutrition Diva, Monica Reinagel lays the premises for her claims in this article. She announced that salty foods can actually make one hungrier and also burn calories as implied by a new study. The study according to Reinagel was conducted on a small group of Russian cosmonauts who were being prepared for a space exhibition. She explained that researchers regularly tweaked the amount of salt in their food with ranges between 2300-4800 mg of sodium daily, but maintained the calorie levels. What the researchers noticed was however contrary to the perceived notion about too much salt intake. They found that with an increase in salt, the cosmonauts became hungrier. Reinagel also detailed a counter experiment performed on mice and she explained that in both man and mice, an increase in the amount of salt in food resulted to an increase in urine output even with less water intake owing to the fact that their bodies got rid of the excess salt through urine.

Helping the body’s defence
This research shows that the body is its own strongest defender. The defence mechanism in the body works but relies on the healthy habits we cultivate to keep it working. Therefore, it is not about whether research has shown that too much salt intake does no harm to the body or otherwise, we need to apply moderation to whatever we do especially as it concerns what we eat. The body’s defence system may be strong but much harm can be done before the body kicks out the unnecessary things.
Essentially, this is not a charge for you to know what too much salt does to the body but to live with moderation. Anything done in excess usually has an unpleasant repercussion, so take heed.

The Temples of Cambodia

Angkor is a region in Cambodia that served as the seat of the Khmer Empire, the largest empire of Southeast Asia that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries. This ancient and revered Cambodian province is home to astonishing and enduring architectural evidence of the Khmer Empire's Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist beliefs; the temples of Angkor are awe-inspiring reminders of what was the largest preindustrial urban center in the world, larger than modern day New York.

Angkor Wat
While there are over 100 stone temples scattered throughout the Angkor region, the 5 listed here are the definite must-sees. Unquestionably topping this list is the temple at Angkor Wat, built by Suryavaram II to honor the Hindu god Vishnu. The enormous temple consists of 5 concentric rectangular walls and moats, symbolizing a cosmic chain of mountains and ocean. Angkor Wat is the best-preserved temple in Angkor; it appears on the country's national flag and is the prime attraction for tourists.

The construction of Angkor Wat lasted at least 37 years. The main tower of the central temple represents the mountain Meru, the center of the Hindu and Buddhist universe. When touring Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples and religious monuments, it's also possible to visit nearby Siem Reap, a small colonial town just north of Southeast Asia's largest lake, Tonle Sap. If you'd like to stay a day or 2 to bask in the Angkor's spiritual sanctity, Siem Reap has many hotels offering reasonable prices.

Banteay Srei
Banteay Srei, or the Temple of Women, has been called a jewel of Khmer art. Its great reliefs depict many mythological Hindu events including the duel between the monkey princes, Bali and Sugreeva; Narasimha's slaying of the demon Hiranyakasipu; and the burning of Khandava Forest.

Banteay Srei is unique among Angkor's noble temples because it was built by a wealthy courtier and scholar who served as an advisor to the Cambodian king, and not the monarch himself. Banteay Srei was dedicated to the Hindu god, Siva in 967; the temple is therefore considerably older than the other Angkor sites.

The grounds, buildings and layout at Banteay Srei are small, contrasting with the monumental scale of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. While the buildings may be compact, they don't feel crowded, and the structural layout enhances the narrative relief carvings covering Banteay Srei's red sandstone walls and passageways.

Preah Khan
Preah Khan is another of King Jayavarman's creations and an inscription on the temple suggests he built it on the site where he defeated invaders from Champa, a region that is now Southern Vietnam. The successive rectangular galleries surrounding the Buddhist sanctuary have largely been left untouched.

This large complex not only functioned as a monastic house of worship, it was also a university including elements of Buddhist, Vaishnava and Shaiva worship. When visiting this hallowed ground, make sure to explore the Prasat Preah Stung, a central tower with 4 ornate Bayon-like carvings. Once inside, meander through the galleries and 2 libraries.

This is another Angkor site you can explore while staying in Siem Reap. The Preah Khan hotel takes its name from the site and offers guests modern luxuries near this enduring cultural landmark.

Ta Prohm
The Khmer monarch completed the construction of this royal monastery in the 12th century and dedicated the grounds both to his mother and the goddess of wisdom, Prajnaparamita. The central stone pillar, called a foundational stele, chronicles the dedication and urges successors to protect the revered site.

The location of the temple, set amidst the lush Cambodian jungle, makes it extremely popular for tourists. Ta Prohm was home to more than 12,500 people, and the temple served as a place of worship for thousands of souls in surrounding villages. Now this peaceful town stands as a reminder of Cambodia's early spirituality and religious beliefs.

Bayon
Another of Angkor's sacred temple sites is Bayon is a walled capital city known especially for its jungle of face towers. These towers bear massive stone carvings depicting the face of the king and a message of spiritual worship. This is a place where the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism exist in a unique spiritual balance, most visibly evident in the massive stone faces carved into Bayon's many towers.

To explore these sacred Cambodian sites, it's possible to book a temple tour. History and spirituality combine in this ancient land where mythology and religion share the same stone face, and cultural customs wait to be discovered at every turn.