health

Dig Out Your Walking Boots – It’s National Walking Month

Let’s get walking! That’s the message this month, also known as National Walking Month!

And what a month to get walking! According to the met office, May boasts an average of 185.9 hours of sunshine and an breezy average temperature of 14.7 degrees in the UK. With recent temperatures already busting that average this is certainly the perfect month to give your legs a gentle work out.

We love this opportunity get fit and save ourselves some pennies. Even more motivating are the statistics included in a report last year. The report suggested that if people in England did the recommended 150 minutes exercising per week, we could be saving 37000 lives every year, preventing 6700 cases of breast cancer and reducing cases of type 2 diabetes by 300000.

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Fuelling Foods for Workouts

Hands up if you have a gym membership? That is most of us then! Unsurprisingly the fitness industry had grown into a £3.92bn industry last year, and no doubt has continued to grow this year too.

Whilst more gym memberships does not necessarily mean more of us are actually working out. Clearly more of us want to – or at least want the results working out can achieve. In particular, working out is supposed to make us look good.

The pressure to fit an image “ideal” has increased immensely over the past couple of decades.

It is commonly known that women and young girls feel a lot of pressure to look a certain way, thanks to media images and messages. However, men are increasingly under more pressure to fit into a perfect and ideal body image.Only recently there have been statistics about men being “under-diagnosed, under-treated and under- researched” when it comes to eating disorders. A sure sign that men are feeling desperate to control what they eat, particularly in combination with strict exercise regimes.

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IBS Awareness Month

This month is IBS awareness month. April is the month to encourage people who have IBS symptoms to seek medical help.

Given that up to 23% of people in the world suffer from IBS a lot of us will either be sufferers ourselves or know someone that suffers. Statistics show that IBS affects twice as many women than men. The cause of IBS is not clear. However, many people attribute worsened symptoms of IBS to stress. IBS is understood to be a sensitivity of the whole gut intensified by emotional tension.

There is a lot of stigma surrounding IBS as a condition. Often suffers feel embarrassed to talk about how it is affecting them. This awareness month gives us an opportunity to talk about it.

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