Category: 2019 Health

January 02, 2019 at 11:55AM Choosing a goal to strive toward (new year or not) is the easy part of the self-improvement equation. From there it only gets more difficult—days bleed into weeks while you struggle to remember whether or not you actually drank 8 cups of water each day last month. The solution for keeping track of whatever goal you’ve set for yourself couldn’t be simpler: a one-page calendar, totally stripped down and oh-so-satisfying to fill out. Print a one-page calendar by Hardi Design. Each day, when you complete whatever it is you’re trying to turn into a daily habit, put an X over the number (Jerry Seinfeld recommends using a red marker). As time goes by, row after row of Xs should provide a little motivation to keep going. More than one goal this year? Just print more than one calendar and write a title at the top of each! You can stick to the barebones approach or you can add a little flourish. (For instance, if 2019 is all about getting in a run each day, write your mileage over the date.) Even if your goal isn’t the type that requires a daily visual representation, glancing at a year in full makes it easy to judge your accomplishments. Are you sticking to your bedtime regularly enough? Are you on track to meet your pre-marathon training goals? Are you writing as much as you promised yourself you would? Simple and effective, it’s almost like the lazy girl’s version of bullet

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January 02, 2019 at 11:42AM Having a core group of friends is one of the most basic ingredients in the recipe for a healthy life. Maybe you have your yoga friend, your laugh-until-you-cry friend, and a handful of others. But diversifying your friend group with five specific relationship archetypes will set you on a trajectory toward total fulfillment. “People play five different roles,” says author Jonathan Fields in the most recent episode of The Good Life Project podcast. “Some of these people play multiple roles, but if we think about the people in success scaffolding, we’re looking at people to play five distinct roles.” After combing through a wealth of friendship-based research (of which there is a lot, y’all), Fields concluded that, yes, your friends, mentors, and colleagues absolutely have an influence when it comes to reaching your goals. Here are the five people you need in your life. Co-strivers: “Co-strivers or ‘parallel playmates’ are people who are working to achieve something similar to you along the way, going through a similar process of seeking, and struggling, and working,” says Fields. Look around at work: The person with whom you share a cubicle and the other who shares your affinity for idle chit-chat in the office kitchen both fall into this category. Your run club could also be considered your parallel playmates, since you’re all working toward the common goal of crossing that 10K finish line. Most importantly, these are the people you commiserate with, according to Fields. “It’s like, you get to grumble together, you

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January 02, 2019 at 11:09AM This morning at the Well + Good offices, we found ourselves in a heated debate: Are you supposed to do your entire skin-care routine before your workout, or afterwards? There are two camps here at W+G HQ: Some of us are adamant about going through a full cleanse-tone-moisturize pre-sweat sesh, while others are staunchly for doing their beauty routines immediately afterward. One thing we could agree on, though, is that it’s the sweat factor that makes things confusing: Do your products absorb enough that you don’t have to worry about sweating them out while you’re running on the treadmill, or do you need to do your full regimen from cleanse to finish after you’ve spent an hour soaked in your own perspiration? To clear things up, I decided to consult a pro. “It all depends on when you’re working out,” explains Purvisah Patel, MD, a board-certified dermatologist and founder of Visha Skincare. “Your skin-care products will do you more justice if applied to freshly clean skin and can be left on for the maximum amount of time. After workouts, you have more blood supply to the skin, and the products can work a little better.” So, yes—apply your beauty products post-sweat when your complexion’s more ready to absorb rather than melt off whatever’s put on top of it. “The products will sweat off and not get a chance to stay on the skin, so definitely do everything after,” says Dr. Patel. If you work out in the

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January 02, 2019 at 09:43AM I’ve always associated taking care of my skin with slathering a moisturizer and smattering of serums on my face. From the early days of ordering ProActiv via infomercials to my more recent approach of trying all the things the drugstore has to offer, I’m what you’d label a “skin-care junkie”. And while that’s great and all, my eyes have recentlybeen opened to an entirely different way to nix fine lines and obliterate acne. Enter: LED light masks. The technology, which uses light therapy to squelch pimples and reduce signs of aging, used to only be available at dermatologists’ offices. Now, though, innovations (and some seriously cool innovations) have made it accessible to those of us who prefer to treat our zits while watching The Great British Baking Show instead of hauling it to the doctor. And, bonus, they make for hilariously terrifying selfies. View this post on Instagram Is this a weird way to make friends at a new job or…. @drdennisgross A post shared by Zoe Weiner (@zoeweinerrr) on Dec 12, 2018 at 11:20am PST //www.instagram.com/embed.js So how exactly do these masks—which look like a cross between the Lite Brights you played with as a kid and Ghostface from Scream—actually work? “LED light therapy can stimulate collagen production, which reduces fine lines and wrinkles, as well as eliminate acne-causing bacteria, which improves skin clarity. There’s no pain or downtime, which is an added benefit,” says Dennis Gross, MD, a New York City dermatologist who launched a

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January 02, 2019 at 09:06AM Move over, Bikram: There’s a hot new workout trend (yes, I went there) that’s about to be everywhere in 2019, and some of your favorite celebs are already on board. Enter: Hot Pilates. The new-ish class has been popping up on the schedules of some trendy studios of late, from Flex Studios in New York to the aptly named Hot Pilates in LA. It’s exactly what it sounds like: Pilates, but in a hot room, and offers a myriad of benefits that can help you take your core-busting practice to the next level. “Just like with Bikram, the heat will get your heart rate up,” explains instructor Kate Davies, who offers a hot Pilates class at her studio, YO BK. “It also warms up the muscles and releases lactic acid so that your joints and your muscles are a little bit more pliable. I like using the analogy of a welder heating up a piece of metal before bending it—the human body is really similar. When people who practice hot yoga and hot Pilates go to a class that’s not heated, they’re like, ‘Whoa, this is such a different range of motion.’” And it’s true, considering the different level of flexibility that you feel in those high temps. She also points out the detox benefits of sweating, noting that her students “love to feel that ‘rinsed-clean’ feeling you get from sweating until your hair is completely wet.” Davies’ class, which is considered “Inferno Style,” combines floor

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January 02, 2019 at 08:23AM Things that are the worst: your fav coffee shop running out of oat milk, missing your flight because the security line was so long, and painful periods. And if the cramping, bleeding, and mood shifts weren’t enough to make us all dread that time of the month, some of us are blessed with an additional fun period side effect: PMS back pain. According to the Virginia Spine Institute, back pain that comes on during menstruation is generally caused by the same thing that causes your cramps: overactive muscles. Thank the chemical prostaglandin, which tells your uterine muscles to contract (and thus shed the built-up uterine lining) during your period. If your body goes overboard making prostaglandin, those contracting muscles can cause some major cramping—creating pain that can radiate to your lower back. (Hello, back pain.) However, Adrienne Potts, MD, FACOG, an obstetrician-gynecologist specializing in family planning and preventative care, says that there are some other factors that can cause PMS back pain. For example, she says having a retroverted (aka tilted) uterus may make some women experience cramping in the lower back instead of (or in addition to) the abdomen. And there are other health conditions, like endometriosis or uterine fibroids, that can also contribute to cramping and lower back pain during menstruation. “It can be hard to disentangle the cause without a more in-depth examination, particularly in separating the more ‘typical’ pain that women commonly experience from pain that could suggest a secondary condition,” Dr. Potts says. She

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January 02, 2019 at 07:48AM I’ll go ahead and confess that any time I hear an esthetician or dermatologist talk about “balanced skin,” I’m left wondering what the heck that even means. pH as it relates to skin care is complicated, confusing, and without fail, whisks me back to high school chemistry class, where we’d go over the difference between beakers full of alkaline and acidic solutions. Now, as more-and-more tubes and bottles in my skin-care regimen tout pH-balance as a key perk, I wondered why I need to care about it in the first place. First thing first: Let’s break down what all this science-y stuff actually means. In case you don’t remember from high school—which, I’m going to be honest, I definitely needed a refresher—the pH scale runs from 0 (acidic) to 14 (basic). Healthy skin has a natural pH level of between 4 and 5.5, so your skin operates on the slightly acidic side of things and the goal is to use products that will help keep it that way. That’s exactly why so many key ingredients and actives are acids. Need to moisturize? Slather on a hyaluronic acid. Want to brighten? Get to work with the L-ascorbic acid. Feeling like you want to resurface skin? Try an alpha-hydroxy or beta-hydroxy acid. That retinol? Yep, it’s retinoic acid. And the list goes on and on (and on). Despite this, we tend to start our skin-care regimens by sending our complexions to the opposite end of the pH scale. “Most

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January 02, 2019 at 06:00AM There’s nothing like the start of the New Year to make us take stock in who we’ve been and who we want to be. Often, at the core of regrets and goals alike are certain behavioral habits. So it stands to reason that our habits have a large influence are on who are. And we all know that there are good and bad habits: Some, like taking the stairs rather than the escalator, clearly lean toward the positive, while a less-than-stellar habit might be drinking six cups of coffee every morning. But what about the less obvious habits, like the ones we create at work? Some may keep us stuck in roles that don’t quite fit while others allow us to outperform and reach heights of success we didn’t know were possible. The key to understanding how to make and break habits is understanding the anatomy of them: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, I work out five days a week, and the cue is my calendar. The routine is going into my gym, changing my clothes, and starting to exercise. The reward? I get a huge energy boost that lasts for more than an hour. This loop has happened for so long, I don’t think about it at all, I just do it. That’s the power of habits. Simply put, we’re often not even aware that we’re at the mercy of our own bad work habits. So how can this power negatively

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