The Quality of Healthy Aging

From the day we are all born, we age everyday. As a young person, we don’t think about the later years in our life. We live in a very fast pace world today and it causes a lot of stress in our lives and as time goes on, the stress will affect us increasingly.

Everyone young and old, we all need to take care of our bodies and minds. By taking care of ourselves, it keeps us thinking, moving and helps prevent major illnesses such and cancer and many other diseases. We all have to work at keeping ourselves healthy and there is no better time than right now. The younger you start taking care of yourself the better it is; by starting early your catching things before they have time to progress.

So right now, start of by eating healthy. Keep an eye on that diet and make sure your not overeating, but eat enough to get vitamins you need to have. A good multivitamin is a good way to start adding supplements to what you don’t get in your food. 

Food doesn’t always have the amount of vitamins anymore like they use to, and that starts at the farmer’s level. Don’t blame the farmer for this because they are just doing their jobs the same way we all go to ours everyday. The farmer has to add fertilizer, chemicals and even water to their crops to make them grow bigger, faster and for beauty too. Adding all these chemicals eat up all the natural vitamins that you need. Water has chemicals in it too; one reason why your water needs to be tested at least once a year especially if you have well water. Once the food is grown and ready to be shipped it is polished, coated to keep it nice and fresh looking during shipment, which is why this will take away some of the vitamins as well. Try to eat as much, homegrown food as you can and not processed foods. Fresh homegrown food is the best, since you get natural vitamins.  You can find some good products like underberg at smallflower.

A good multivitamin isn’t going to hurt anyone. It is known that people who take a multivitamin everyday is in better health than someone who doesn’t. Sometimes your doctor may want you to take extra vitamin, as we grow older because our bodies change and sometimes require more of something. In addition, as we grow older our eating habits change and we don’t eat as much or we want to lose weight and don’t eat the right foods.  Nevertheless, remember you can lose weight and still eat right.

As we grow older our bodies and mind change. All the stress we had growing up and continue through out our lives. Relieve that stress as much as possible because it can do a lot of harm to us. Stress is known to be a major factor for poor heart conditions, strokes, and it will lower our immune system, as we grow older. 

A regular exercise program is good for all ages and helps relieve stress at the early ages as well.  If only families took time out maybe as a family with their children and made it a part of their lives that would help relieve it during the younger years. 

A person who learns and enjoys exercising on a daily basis will keep during it, as they grow older as well.  

Exercising will help the older person to keep those bones more flexible so they don’t get stiff and weak. The heart gets benefit from exercising too. Exercise will cause the heart to produce naturally, by working it harder to keep it highly flavored. Exercising helps to keep our bodies toned up and helps us to lose weight, or at most keeping the weight maintained. 

Remember starting early can help later in years to make your life healthier and more contented.

Know How To Practice Guitar

If desire is the most important part of learning guitar(without it you wouldn’t have even started), then concentration is the most important part of practicing guitar.

I often say to people that 20 minutes of focused practice can beat, hands down, 2 hours of ‘normal’ practice, or just goofing about.

Many people are discouraged when they are told how much time they must put into practice. The truth is, you don’t have to practice all the time to be a good guitarist.

(I’m not saying you shouldn’t have time to goof off and play around. But if you want to improve quickly, you must keep playing guitar and practicing guitar separate.)

Let me tell you now…

It isn’t how much time you put into practice, it’s the quality of the practice that matters.

When I play guitar, I play to have fun, I play to perform for people, and I play for the fun of playing! That’s why I started learning guitar in the first place.

But when I practice guitar, I focus and concentrate on what I’m trying to achieve, and I work on the goals that I want to complete.

You see, if you completely focus on one thing you are more likely to do it well.

This may sound simple too to some. Some of you may be thinking “this is great, I only need to practice 20 minutes a day and ill improve more than I would if I practicing 2 hours a day”.

Well that’s not exactly true.

Its how focused your practice is that counts, not how long you practice. Can you really focus for 2 hours?

Let me give you this small example to illustrate my point.

Picture a red triangle inside a black box.

Close your eyes, and keep that image in your mind for 5 seconds without letting a single thing distract you – no other thought must enter your mind for that 5 seconds…

How well did you do? Be honest with yourself.

This isn’t an easy thing to do. Most people find this difficult at first. Its difficult to keep a focused mind like this.

I hope this example has shown you that it’s not that easy to keep focused attention & concentration for look periods of time.

But still, you must always remember that its quality and not quantity of practice that makes the difference between a great player and an average player.

This is a perfect time to tell you that you shouldn’t be spending hours and hours ‘practicing’, because you simply can’t focus for that amount of time.

If you are practicing for a solid 2 hours or more you are probably not helping your development as a guitarist that much.

A much better way of using this time is to practice in bursts.

A good idea would be to practice in bursts of 20 minutes or so. You can vary it depending on what you feel like doing, but try not to practice for long periods of time in one go. It’s not helping as much as you think it might be.

Also, it’s important to take breaks from what you’re practicing. You can do something else for awhile, go for a walk, watch TV, or maybe just play around and have fun with your guitar and loosen up a bit before you start focusing on practice again.

It is important for you to have a definition in your own mind of ‘practicing guitar’ and ‘playing guitar’.

This will keep you more focused and allow you to reach your goals as a guitarist much easier.

An exercise for you to try to help you further develop concentration is to sit silently and count slowly from one to ten in your mind.

If anything should interrupt your counting, whether it is a noise, a stray thought, or the awareness of your own breathing, you must start over from one.

Again, it’s unlikely you will be able to achieve this straight-away. It’s a hard thing to do. However how out and 'Zen' this exercise may seem, it will re-focus your mind on the task in hand, and it’ll help you learn faster if you can stay focused on what you’re practicing. And oh, choose light guitar picks. 

You should try this exercise whenever you start to feel like you’re loosing your focus.

Recipe: Papaitang Kambing/Baka

Today, my brother gave me some innards to cook. He wanted to have papaitan for dinner. Hence, this recipe.

Papaitan Kambing “Pinapaitan nga kalding”or Goat Innard Stew (Bitter Goat Stew) is a unique Ilocano cuisine that has a main ingredient of goat’s tripe, intestines, lungs, kidney, liver and papait (bile liquid).

Ingredients:

2 kgs. goat’s tripe, lungs, intestines, & kidney – boiled until slightly tender then sliced into tidbits

1/4 kg. boiled goat’s blood – boiled and sliced into cubes

10 pcs. siling haba (banana peppers/chili fingers)

3 tbsp. patis (fish sauce)

4 pcs. medium sized red onion – finely sliced

6 cloves garlic – crushed and minced

4 fingers of ginger crushed

2-3 tbsp. rock salt

1 tsp. magic sarap

1/4 cup pure papait (bile liquid)

2 liters of water

Instructions:

1) Saute garlic until light brown, followed by the onion and the sliced and boiled goat’s intestines.

2) Add the ginger, patis and magic sarap and continue sauteing until liquid is reduced or until intestines turn to light brown.

4) Add the boiled goat’s blood, water and salt, let it boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes.

5) Add the papait and siling haba then simmer for 2-5 minutes. Taste it and add salt if necessary.

6) Ready to serve with steamed rice. This is best to eat when it’s hot.

I hope you guys like it! Please don't forget to leave some feedback.