I think since before the shaving phase started (or maybe didn’t for some of you… although a 2008 study shows that at least 80-90% of women regularly remove unwanted body hair) many have heard that shaving causes your hair to grow in thicker, darker and faster than before. As No-Shave November approaches, I figured it would be interesting to find out if that’s actually true. 

Whether leg hair, underarm hair, or facial hair, according to Dr. Lawrence E. Gibson and many other researchers, the rumor is false. Shaving unwanted body hair does not change it’s thickness, color or even the rate of growth. This honestly came as a shock to me because I feel like as I have gotten older, the hair on my legs has started to grow back darker. Up close you can even see small, dark dots where the hair follicle grows even though my hair used to be bleach blonde. My high school track team used to have a competition for competing in No-Shave November and every girl would pay $5 to see who could go the longest without shaving their legs. The winner obviously won all the money. But looking back it’s funny how we would all “save up” the week right before the competition started and refuse to shave. Then the night before November 1st we all shaved our legs, thinking that this process would prevent our leg hair from growing back as quickly as when we shaved every or every-other day.

After explaining the many reasons why you should never skip breakfast in my last blog post, I will now go into what that breakfast you are making time for in the morning should consist of. There are so many options for breakfast foods and, personally, they are some of my favorite things to eat. Between cereals, yogurt, fruit, pop-tarts, oatmeal and omelets, what breakfast foods are best? 

Sticking with the topic of starting your day right (my previous two blogs explained the benefits of being an early bird and how you can become one), I’m going to explain why you should never skip breakfast. While I’m sure all of us have heard time and time again how supposedly beneficial eating breakfast every morning is, I can bet that probably over half of you still skip it. It’s sometimes hard, especially with early classes, to get a meal in, but so many companies have made eating breakfast such an easy thing with on-the-go products. Making it to the dining commons might not be an option but keeping things like fruit, oatmeal or wholegrain bread in your room aren’t so difficult. Here’s exactly why breakfast is the most important meal of the day:

-It provides you with necessary nutrients, vitamins and minerals to start your day off right and keep you satisfied until lunch rolls around. Without breakfast you’re skipping out on these necessities that are so easy to work into your diet through this single meal. 

-Your body fasts all through the night and eating breakfast is the perfect jumpstart to your metabolism.

 

-Breakfast gives you the strength and endurance to get through any physical activity in the morning and prevents you from succumbing to unhealthy snacks before lunch.

-People who eat breakfast have been proven to be leaner. A study done in 2003 and published in The American Journal of Epidemiology tracked 499 peoples’ diets over the course of a year. It showed that people who skip breakfast are 4.5 times more likely to be obese than those who don’t. They are also more likely to have good cholesterol and healthy blood sugar levels.

-Finally, breakfast helps you learn and remember things better. Breakfast helps provide the brain’s fuel – glucose. Researches used 4,000 elementary school students to research the effects of eating breakfast. They first tested short-term memory by reading aloud a series of numbers and having students recite them back. Next, they gave the kids a minute to name all the animals they could think of. In both tests, those who ate breakfast scored significantly better than the students who did not.

I think these results all show how crucial it is to eat breakfast, and I myself have been trying to do a better job of working it into my morning routine. For now it’s usually just a banana on the go or maybe some oatmeal if I have time to make it. The correlation between eating breakfast and obesity seems pretty legitimate but there are so many third variables that could factor into that. Also, since the study for memory was done on elementary school kids’ whose brains are still developing, does it have the same application to adults and older college students? My next question is what exactly is most beneficial to be eating in the morning? What do you all chose to eat? That is, who of us even chooses to make eating breakfast mandatory in the morning? Who is even awake for their first meal of the day to be considered breakfast… 

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5738848

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/health-benefits-breakfast_n_1968248.html#slide=1643897

http://www.jhsph.edu/offices-and-services/student-affairs/_documents/Breakfast

http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/many-benefits-breakfast

My most recent blog was on studies showing a correlation between students who wake up early and those who get good grades. You would think that whether you are a morning person or a night person just came with how you were born. Some people just naturally spring out of bed all chipper and ready to go at 7 in the morning, whereas other people can stay wide awake late into the night and sleep most of the day away. I was surprised by how easily I get up for my 8 AM’s now and even on the days when I don’t have class until late afternoon, my body wakes me up around the same time and I start my day productively. “There’s a genetic component to your circadian clock. But for many people, behavioral changes make a big difference,” says New York City psychiatrist Colette Haward, MD. So in other words, if you consider yourself to be a night owl but want to become an early bird (maybe to boost your grades and become more productive with your day), all it takes is a few weeks to form better habits and get on a beneficial sleep schedule. Not only could this help boost your grades but early birds have also been proven to be happier, healthier people. We as humans were designed to be awake when the sun is out and asleep when it’s dark out. So let’s see how making the change to an early riser can be done. 

For starters, so long as you do not have a sleep disorder, it is important to try and stay on the same schedule whether it is during the week or the weekend. Sleeping in an extra couple hours (or five…) throws off your internal clock and the schedule you’ve been working on all week. Our bodies regulate our sleep-wake cycle by use of the hormones cortisol and melatonin that help wake you up in the morning and calm you down at night.

 

Following the psychiatrist’s advice, it is important to test and find out exactly how many hours of sleep you need a night. While many of us in college don’t have time to spend a week testing out when we naturally go to sleep and wake up without an alarm clock, Haward says you should try out getting a strict 7-8 hours of sleep a night by making yourself go to bed say around 11:30 and waking up at 7:30. Since most of us don’t get near to 7 hours of sleep a night, it is important to give this schedule time to make up for lost sleep before you start feeling the benefits. I personally don’t see this as very practical especially because procrastinating is one of the things I am best at and staying up until 2 AM to finish homework has never been a problem for me. However, I still find it key to not let myself sleep in and keep on the same schedule for waking up so that it does not throw my whole day off.

Others suggest to just gradually start waking up 15-30 minutes earlier than usual, adjust to this for the next few days, and then follow the pattern of cutting back another 15 minutes until you reach your goal wakeup time.

 

Always key in every article I have read, though, is to get to bed earlier. This is a no-brainer. Turn off electronics an hour before going to bed instead of staying up reloading your twitter timeline and checking Instagram until nothing new comes up for a solid 5 minutes… that’s when you know it’s late. If you really feel like you will not be tired going to bed earlier, read a book instead and you might find yourself asleep quicker than you expected.

 

Put your alarm clock far from your bed so that you have to get up to turn it off. DON’T HIT SNOOZE. Hitting snooze and falling back asleep for another few minutes only leaves you more drowsy when you actually get up. Turn on the lights and walk away from your bed so that you can’t even rationalize falling back asleep. 

Reward yourself with something like the accomplished feeling after an early morning workout or a nice, big breakfast to start your day right. 

So there are some simple and not so easy steps to becoming a morning person. Even if you think you’re forever destined to be a night owl, you’d be surprised at what a decent sleep schedule and some healthy habits can do for you. Also, in the long run it looks like your grades will be better and you’ll be a happier, healthier person overall. 

As I was sitting on the Blue Loop bus, I noticed a sign sitting above the row across from me saying that studies show, students who get up earlier on a regular basis get better grades. I don’t know about you, but this was a surprise to me so I decided to look further into it. I guess I just assumed that getting lots of sleep by not waking up until the late afternoon was far more beneficial than me listening to my 8 AM lectures while half asleep.

Music means a lot to most people whether you play an instrument, sing or just listen to it. While I am not musically talented, you will find me with earbuds in my ears as I walk around campus or music playing in my dorm room most of the time. While pop and rock music is only recently being discovered as beneficial while studying, classical music and the Mozart Effect were recognized years ago. 

When the study began in 1993 at a university in California, scientist Francis Rauscher made 36 students listen to either Mozart’s double piano sonata, a relaxation tape made to lower stress, or silence for 10 minutes. They then took an spatial temporal IQ test that showed subjects who listened to music for 10 minutes scored about 8 or 9 points higher than those who listened to the relaxation instructions or nothing at all. The belief is that Mozart’s music helps to improve spacial temporal reasoning. This was further researched by use of rats. They created four groups which either listened to Mozart, Philip Glass’ minimalist music  (which I can only handle listening to for less than a minute…), white noise or silence. They then had to navigate a maze and found that the group that listened to Mozart completed the maze faster and with less errors.   

Reasoning for this has to do with the part of the brain that is activated by classical music and how this region overlaps with the part of the brain used for spatial temporal tasks. Scientists say that listening to classical music would “prime the activation” of these regions of your brain. 

So while classical music has been proven to help with spatial temporal tasks, it has also been found helpful when studying math because it can aid in retaining more information and concentrating for longer. Pop is best for science and foreign language studying while rock and pop, which are typically more upbeat and emotion evoking, are helpful for english and the arts because it activates the creative, right side of your brain. 

While the effects of music are not guaranteed to be long-lasting, it’s worth a shot in using it to help you study. I know for me it helps to at least relieve some stress and make doing school work a bit more enjoyable. So long as it is not a distraction, might as well try it out!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281386/

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130807-can-music-make-you-smarter

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50155076n

While I know it is a habit for many (including myself), it’s easy to finish a drink and just start biting on the ice left in your cup for fun. Chewing on ice seems harmless, however, this is unfortunately not the case. It can harm your teeth or even cause gum injury. By chewing on ice, you put pressure on your teeth which can cause your enamel to wear down. This makes it a lot easier for cracks and chips to occur and sensitivity often follows with the exposure of dentin in your teeth. If you have braces or just had dental work done, absolutely stay away from chewing ice. According to OralAnswers.com, it is also dangerous to create “a repetitive hot and cold cycle in your mouth, which can cause small cracks in the enamel.” It weakens your teeth and may even cause fillings to expand faster. 

All of us choose different ways of getting around Penn State’s huge campus. While our feet are the most common mode of transportation here, bikes and runners are absolutely everywhere too. So I really wanted to know, what’s the best form of exercise? While all provide great health benefits and a good way to get out there and get your heart pumping, in the end it comes down to what you truly enjoy, along with what you want to get out of your exercise.

There is no doubt about it, shoes change the way we walk. Which is why everyone’s concern is arch support and cushioning and, of course, style (usually). Many people are even willing to jeopardize comfort for looks. As a runner and a sales associate at a sneaker store back home, I know the importance of a good quality shoe. It can make the difference for shin splints and tendonitis and feeling good knowing your shoes complete your outfit. But what if the shoes are the root of all these problems in the first place? 

Although summer is long gone, the sun and its powerful rays are still around and we can at least have something to think about for next summer while lounging on the beach. Even though sunscreen has not been around long enough for us to fully know and understand its longterm effects, there is an ongoing debate as to whether sunscreen is actually good or bad for you. While I would not recommend one of my pale best friend’s theories that “you shouldn’t wear sunscreen ever because the chemicals are bad for you and in a few years scientists will realize it’s killing us instead of helping” as she gets FRIED every time she lays out, I did decide to do some research to try and get to the bottom of this.