My elixir

Not a day begins without me getting up and going right into the kitchen to use the microwave to make myself a cup of hot coffee. There is something about having coffee first thing in the morning other than the fact that it has caffeine to keep us going for the day. Whether you want to feel refreshed or want to rid of that headache you have because of your work or your spouse nagging you to go to Shenandoah or Williamsburg or want to cajole someone by being a personalized barista, a cup of Joe is all that takes to bring you back to life. In any work environment you can see a coffee pot going but you seldom see tea bags made available for tea drinkers. For example, go to any mechanic shop or office kitchen, you would see a coffee pot in place to be used. So you get the idea, coffee is the number one elixir you can have to get yourself going on with your activities in life.


Studies have proved that coffee improves memory, cures bad breath (no wonder all dates start with having a cup of coffee together - I remember my friend having countless coffee episodes in Starbucks while dating) and reverses memory problems. Research suggests that having five cups of coffee a day reverses memory problems seen in Alzheimer’s disease. I would take the choice of five cups a day to brain booster capsules to improve my memory. That would be like killing two birds in one shot - get wired and improve memory at the same time.


Fifty-five mice were researched on to see if the memory improves with the dose of caffeine. I can already see the smile on your face or nodding your head because you think that conducting tests on mice is funny. For those who scorn or joke on the fact that research for human betterness is done on mice - since they are found in plenty and no one would shed a tear if mice were killed in the process and also that it is medically acceptable to do research on mice for something a human will use on a later stage. Mice are the guinea pig for researchers. What is astounding is that an 18-19 month old mouse exhibits the same behavior as a 70-year old man in terms on memory capacity. So after the tests, it was proved that mice with caffeine had an improvement in their memory power, which draws a parallel that if humans start having caffeine (does that mean any caffeine or caffeine from coffee? Hmm… not clear there), it would improve their memory as well.


Don’t be too surprised when you come to know that you are either constipated or having weight problems after a couple of months of helping yourself with this caffeine dose. Anything in excess is converted to fat and is stored in the body for later use (what parts of the body it is stored, only your body decides that) and a known problem of having too much coffee is constipation. You do not need another research documenting what I said before about coffee’s effect. So have your five cups of coffee with no sugar and have more water during the day. If you have five cups, see to it that other intakes are equally compensated to avoid the weight problems. Follow the simple rule that “input is less than the output” for your body.

Sleeping Beauty

When it comes to sleeping, I would tell everyone that I have no trouble falling asleep anywhere, anytime; whether on a plane or in a car. I felt proud about this fact, as if I had an edge over those picky sleepers who have trouble falling asleep at night or wake up in the middle of the night and cannot go back to sleep; until I stomped on the article which I will discuss in a bit. It is ironic though that I came across this article, a couple of weeks later after I had the discussion on sleep and sleeping habits at night with my friends. We were discussing about how one cannot fall asleep at night or that they would go to sleep and be awakened by the slightest noise and would have trouble going back to sleep. I had suggested that they use prayer beads and keep repeating the prayers for every bead in the chain (similar to counting sheep) and that they eventually would fall asleep or they could pop in a couple of Tylenol, an hour before bedtime and that would knock them out. My friends were going to try and were going to get back to me on their sleeping pattern. But if one cannot go to sleep because of problems they are having in their lives or if they arouse because of nightmares of incidents, they should workout enough to tire themselves off, so the tiredness would knock them to sleep.


National Sleep Foundation had researched sleep patterns and has reported that more than 20 percent of Americans get less than six hours of sleep in a day. When you don’t get enough sleep, you have difficulty getting up the following day, you are tired and grumpy throughout the day, have hard time focusing on work and sometimes end up giving your boss weird excuses for not coming to work on time. But these are just mundane effects of not getting enough sleep. Chronic, inadequate sleep leads to cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, obesity and it affects metabolism, making people eat more and build up that belly fat. Knowing this, I resent all those people who come in my dreams giving me nightmares and disturbing my beauty sleep. Sleep deprivation also leads to majority of road accidents that we hear about in our daily news.


Even if you sleep for six to eight hours after taking Tylenol or any sleeping pills, some complain that they are still tired or not satisfied with their sleep. That is because that they get poor-quality sleep. What I meant by that is, when you sleep, you have different phases of sleep during the night. Among them are REM, the Rapid Eye movement phase (where you get your sweet dreams about floating in a tub of ice cream or bad dreams about slapping the person you have been meaning to), and Deep or slow-wave sleep. REM phase is needed during sleep for consolidating memories, learning, creativity (Einstein figured out theory of relativity during this phase), problem-solving and emotional balance, whereas Deep phase is needed for the body to secrete human growth hormones for development and physical repair of wear and tear. That is why we let babies and young kids (but kids are supposed to be young – no?) to sleep a lot and we don’t disturb them while they are sleeping, no matter what time of the day, so their body can develop properly. But these phases get affected as we age and also because of caffeine and alcohol. That is why we are advised as to not drink coffee after evening sets. Also, if you have trouble waking up or feel like sleeping during daytime, it just means that you did not get enough restorative sleep. That “falling asleep anywhere, anytime” that I mentioned at the beginning is not to be so proud after all. Maybe it is due to the lack of restorative sleep.


One can monitor their sleep pattern either by admitting themselves in a hospital (expensive proposal) or get a new sleep-monitor device that is available in the market (Zeo Personal Sleep Coach). It has a head band that you wear and go to sleep as usual and the sleeping pattern, and brain waves are recorded in a clock radio like device. The monitor would display your actual sleep time and also the duration of REM and Deep sleep. The device costs about $400 and you get to upload your data from every night on to a web site which would analyze the data and send your coaching instructions for six months, to get better sleep or to improve sleeping habits. This would be a means to figure out your sleep pattern and really know why you wake up tired each morning. I think $400 is worth it for the enduring beauty sleep.

Healthy Street talks

When Mr. Obama is working to improve the Wall Street, Mrs. Obama made an appearance on the Sesame Street in New York this past week. Her mission was to inform the oblivious group about the importance of exercise and good healthy eating habits. She used Elmo as the media, asking him to exercise unless he wanted to turn himself into a fat, hairy alcoholic like Snuffeluffagus. She also insisted that parents should be the role models for their children to cultivate healthy eating habits and exercise routines. To be honest, I have not watched Sesame Street episodes like the kids do here in the US. I am glad that Mrs. Obama made this appearance to cultivate good eating habits and importance of exercise in the show that is most watched by growing kids these days.

I can reword the saying – ‘Good manners start at home’ to ‘Anything good starts at home’. It is true that kids learn from watching what the elders do. If the parents feed their kids from the beginning, with fruits and veggies, kids learn to make it a part of their meal. If the elders stack their kitchen with healthy snacks, that is what the kids get to eat, unless they see otherwise. Let us run the logic through – a kid comes to see what is there to eat in the pantry. He sees a bag of Oreos and a bag of Triscuits – what do you think he will pick up? Splurging once in a while on treats is good but not always.

Mrs. O (new nickname that I bestowed on her) also stressed on exercising habits. Seeing how Mr. President himself works out 6 times a week, plays basketball and sets himself up as a roll model to stay fit and Mrs. O works out 3-4 times a week (one health conscious First family), it is apparent that she would talk about exercising to keep one self healthy. I would not call myself a gym freak but I would end up at the gym at least 3 or 4 times a week for about an hour at the minimum. The days I am hooked onto the right music on my iPod or on the music channel at the gym, I would be on treadmill or elliptical for about an hour and then do weights for another half hour. But that still does not put me in the fit category. The day I would wear my swimsuit and not be evasive about it, I would consider myself fit.

Exercise is for everyone, both for men and women. I do see men workout to build their abs, biceps and triceps but I do think that they need to work on their chest to get rid of their man-boobs. Not all have them, but when they do, it looks ugly. I have seen some have that, and would still wear a tight fitting top without banyan (undershirt). They think that they are showing off their chest while it is actually making the people who see it, sick to their stomach. Maybe they should consider wearing a sports bra, like Homer wears it in ‘The Simpsons’ or try the Mansierre as shown in ‘Seinfeld’. Whether it is wearing tight fitting garments underneath or eating fat burning pills, they are all means to cover-up the parts of our body that are not right. Oldest method is till the best method we have so far – proper eating habits and working out to burn what was put inside our body.