health
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Winter Sources of Vitamin D
Without sunlight, our skin can't create its own vitamin D. Keep your skin and bones healthy over the winter by eating sources of vitamin D such as lettuce, dates, eggs and cottage cheese.
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Oranges, Honey and Echinacea Tea
Can we really save ourselves from catching a cold? Day one back teaching and I’m in a stuffy room full of snuffles, smothered coughs, and startled sneezes. And that’s just the teacher training day. I make a mental note to pick up some echinacea tea on my way home to ward off the inevitable cold I’m going to catch. But my head fills with new deadlines and specification changes and I forget. A week later I’m snuffling with the rest of them. I curse myself for not taking more care to avoid getting ill so early in the term, but would it really have made any difference if I’d bought…
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Your Fitbit: Friend or Foe?
Wearable pieces of tech are motivational and fun, but there are issues of accuracy and privacy that we’d rather ignore. Writing is ultimately a desk job. Unless we install a treadmill in front of a stand-up desk, the only real movement we do on the job is slouching off downstairs to make tea or fetch a biscuit. Freelancers have an advantage: We can just decide to go for a run halfway through the morning if we feel like it. While writing full-time in a ‘real’ job these last few months, in an actual office with air-conditioning, it wasn’t so easy to maintain any kind of fitness routine. I walked to…
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Adventures in Mindfulness
I think have time-anxiety. That’s not a clinical term, if you’re wondering – I’m pretty sure I’ve just made it up. But it seems an accurate description. I always need to know how long things are going to take, and if I don’t know (or can’t make a good guess), I get anxious that I’m going to run out of time. I can trace this back to three years ago, after I had a big operation. I still had deadlines to meet, but everything took me twice as long as it had previously because I was still recovering. Then I had to return to my day job, which is teaching…
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This Week I’m Researching … Nutrition and Shakespeare
I like finding out stuff so I’m always researching something. And I love learning. If there was such a job as a Professional Learner (outside the upper echelons of academia), I would be doing that. Imagine my glee when I discovered FutureLearn. This is an online education site, globally accessible, with free courses delivered by real universities. Currently, I’m learning about nutrition and Shakespeare (the two topics are unconnected … so far). I’m also currently behind schedule in both courses, as I’ve taken on too much – kind of like piling a load of lovely food onto your plate then discovering your eyes are bigger than your stomach (figuratively, of…
