Employee Health and Wellness

Achieving a state of good health and wellness means living a higher quality of life and experiencing a peace that goes beyond what material wealth and external situations can offer. The state of health and wellness is priceless yet available to rich and poor alike. Health and wellness is the food for a complete life. Only materialistic gains don’t determine peace and consistency in life. A proper health and wellness is attained when you relinquish all your needless qualms and achieve serenity. Wellness cannot be achieved superficially neither can it be tagged. A healthy life helps human to achieve wellness which is the real wealth of life. Good health and wellness inspires you to lead a hale and hearty life and thereby encourages you to leave all your anxiety, tragedy and disease behind you. Health and wellness encourages you to get geared up to accept every altercation sportingly that our prolific life offers. Achieve presence and peace of mind with a good cognitive and mind-body health. Take care of your health with natural diet, exercise, prevention, natural remedies, soothing sleep and other relaxation tools.

The main criterion to accomplish a good health is to have a balanced diet. An alarming survey has shown that in America, obesity is rampant, diabetes is epidemic and chronic disease is sky rocketing. This is caused due to excess intake of calorie consuming food like soft drinks, desserts, sweets, alcoholic beverages and salty snacks. Americans get plenty of calories but less of nutrition. No magic formula will trim away the extra pounds and keep them off. A balanced healthy diet can only do the wonder. Think smart, eat right and move more- these are the three plans of actions to be emulated if you wish to maintain a fitness regime. A healthy diet which means eating right recommends substituting fat-free or low fat milk with whole milk and save about 65 calories for each 8 ounce serving. Sometimes products labeled low fat can be high in calories. For example, low fat yoghurt can be high in calories. You can opt for fat free, low sugar added yoghurt instead for a fraction of calories. Don’t forget including high fiber food in your diet. Eating right will not only keep your health sculpted like a star but will also ingrain oodles of vigor in you. All of us today had to undergo heaps of anxiety in our professional as well as personal life and this inevitable stress eventually trims down our health thereby affecting our mind. To lead a healthy life and acquire wellness, a good health which comes from an impeccable diet is the basic requirement. High fiber foods such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables take some time to digest but this makes you feel fuller for long and will combat you from indulging into any unhealthy junk food. Include plenty of fruits in your diet since they add volumes to your health and also prevents you from taking any other calorie consuming drinks. Cut your favorite candy bar into bite-sized pieces. Buy that candy bar, slice it into pieces and then freeze it for sometime before you eat. This will dilute the surfeit sugar consumed by those candies and will make it a healthy food. While eating out, consider having two low calorie appetizers instead of an entrée. Eating right will help you feel contented and occupied without splurging on calories. Make your own diet chart and keep those palatable items in individual fresh packs. It is a time saving as well as a handy formula to keep up a good health.

Good health determines a balanced mind, body and soul. Foods those are rich in fiber throws in to a good health ardently. It helps your colon work better, reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer and it is associated with low cholesterol levels. Men over 50 years of age should intake 30 grams of fiber per day and women above 50 years should have 21 grams per day. Good health is not always about eating right. It has a wider meaning. To endorse good health, you need to coddle into some healthy physical exercises along with a proper diet. Exercising not only rejuvenates you inside out but also has a cleansing effect both physically and ethereally. All the waste matters and toxins in our body get eliminated through sweating when we do the exercises. Besides, blood circulation and respiratory system are greatly improved by regular exercises. Yoga, dancing, martial arts, sports, jogging, mountaineering or brisk walking if practiced regularly, will add immense value to your health and wellness. Good health also includes combustion of ill addictions such as tobacco, powerful liquor or any other drugs that can be life-taxing. Certain places are known to be superficially grimy like hospitals, funeral parlors, cemeteries, etc and weak persons are advised to take a shower after they pay a visit to such places. Visiting sea beaches confer a sedative effect on mind which is a significant factor in good health as sea water has a natural cleansing effect on the energy body. Emotional and mental hygiene is also a vital stipulation of good health. An emotional and mental hygiene mean having positive feelings like kindness, happiness, joy and enthusiasm which has a beneficiary impact on one’s emotions and thereby contributes a lot to health. Negative thoughts on the other hand lead to some acute health problems like migraine headache, acute sinusitis, hyperthyroidism, cholesterol, infected kidneys, constipation and many more such diseases. Thus, to gain a good health, not only you have to keep up a healthy diet but also a proper health and wellness regime along with good thoughts to keep yourself all geared up to enjoy life freely.

We all are wisely aware of our health and wellness and also how a little vigilance can avert us from getting infected to some malignant diseases like Aids, breast cancer and diabetes. Various health and wellness campaigns are held to make us sentient of the various safety measures to be taken to shun such maladies. Among all these diseases, breast cancer is one of the scariest diseases. It’s a malignant tumor in breast. Several breast cancer awareness campaigns are being set up every year to pass on the note of different prevention procedures of breast cancer to women so that they can combat it on the preliminary stage itself. For more than 20 years, National breast cancer awareness month has educated women about early breast cancer detection, diagnosis and treatment. 1st October to 31st October is the national breast cancer awareness month. Mammography screenings are a women’s best chance to detect breast cancer early. Combined with a few treatment options, mammography can actually help bring down this virus to a great extent, thereby affirming a healthy life and these issues are elucidated clearly and elaborately in the breast cancer awareness campaigns.

AIDS stands for “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”. AIDS destroy the whole immune system in the body of an individual which helps us fight back the ailments that our health endures. But if the immune system is eradicated then it will not kill the individual at the first shot but will make his body nil in resistant power. AIDS usually roots out from physical intimacy if the other person is infected with it, it might get transmitted from sharing similar needles and also any kind of blood transfusion. AIDS awareness campaigns are being set every year to deliver a range of safety measures that should be taken in order to thwart it. All these AIDS awareness campaigns actually notify you as to how you should go about these prevention procedures and claim for a healthy life. Besides, there are many AIDS awareness hotline that help you to fight with all these malignant diseases and save your health and wellness. 1st December is recognized as World’s Aids Day.

Other health awareness issues also include lung cancer awareness, vegetarian awareness, diabetic awareness and hypertension awareness series. Separate awareness programs are held to combat all these malignant diseases and with your little endeavor towards your health and wellness, you can keep yourself far away from these nerve wracking maladies and claim for a healthy life along with wellness.

Health and wellness determines the entity of your life. We offer the maximum part of our life to our job, career, family and other attributes but hardly do we confer a good amount of time to ourselves which includes our health and wellness at the result of which we tend to get into this pool of diseases recklessly. And again, apart from taking care of our health and wellness by eating right and maintaining a balanced diet, it is very essential to take care of all this dreadful diseases and it’s our liability to obtain our prevention measures. Health and wellness is the food for life and we human cannot actually afford to grant negligence on such matters if we aspire to live a healthy and successful life.

Thousands of men and women all over the world have reduced their chance of getting stress-related diseases through wellness programs and general health and wellness. Corporations in the Western world have been recently implementing voluntary wellness programs in order to create healthier happier employees. This may mean providing facilities where employees can practice their fitness regimes as well as providing wellness tips through trained professionals and tailoring routines for all of the individual employees. The benefits of reducing the stress in our every day lives is endless.

Health and wellness is so important because it affects all aspects of our lives. Information is available through the Internet, media, and of course the references of our friends and family. Wellness programs suggest we use whole food supplements, Chinese herbs and the ayurvedic medicine of India. Wellness tips are a great way to start experimenting on what best works for you. This is a free guide to all alternative healing products and information so you can find exactly what you are searching for.

We provide a guide that allows you to find many qualified alternative healing providers as well as an abundance of wellness tips. You will be able to create wellness programs that are specially customized for you and your entire family. Remember, balance, health and wellness can drastically improve all areas of your life. Imagine living completely pain free and stress free, the possibility is there and available to you.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gregg_Makarowski

The guidelines that follow should help facilitate a discriminating search for correct health information.

Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

Most health misinformation is actually based on facts, not lies. The problem is that facts get exaggerated and sometimes lead people to wrong conclusions. The phrase “risk factor” is a good example. Numerous studies report that certain habits increase the risk of getting certain diseases. This might be helpful information but by itself doesn’t mean much. If you were told that the risk of death from bungee jumping increased 100% last year, whereas deaths caused by driving to school increased by 25%, you would likely, and incorrectly, conclude that bungee jumping is four times more risky.

What is missing is information about actual baseline risk. If the baseline risk of death from bungee jumping is 1 in 1000, a 100% increase would raise it to 2 in 1000. On the other hand if the baseline risk for driving to school is 400 in 1000, then a 25% increase would increase the risk of death by 100 cases, to 500 in 1000. Although this example is hypothetical, it serves as a reminder of the importance of inquiring about the chances of getting a disease in the first place before drawing conclusions regarding risk factors, diseases, and death.

Much health literature is based on research involving statistical relationships, or associations among two or more events. Relationships are helpful clues to health, but they cannot and do not establish cause-and-effect relationships. The mistake many people make is to read or hear about a new health finding and erroneously conclude that one event causes the other. One of the areas most commonly abused by reference to cause-and-effect relationships is cancer.

A good example is tea, the most widely consumed beverage in the world after water. Researchers are interested in tea because an increase in tea consumption has been associated with a decrease in cancer and heart disease. Supposedly something in tea interferes with the ability of cancer-causing substances to bind to DNA. That’s important because DNA is where cancer cell initiation begins. Also, tea contains antioxidants. Population studies of the Japanese, who smoke nearly twice as many cigarettes as Americans but far surpass Americans in tea consumption, have only about one-half as much lung cancer.

The question is: does tea consumption actually cause a change in cell physiology that prevents cancer. So far, cause and effect have not been demonstrated. The 100 studies that show an association between tea consumption and lower cancer rates are epidemiological studies. Epidemiological studies are population studies (rather than scientifically controlled experimental studies of individuals) that observe large numbers of people to see if there is a link between lifestyle habits and disease.

Because the studies observe people’s behavior, it’s always possible that unknown factors can influence findings. For example, people might not accurately remember or report their tea consumption over decades. Even if they do, it still doesn’t prove that tea rather than something else about their lifestyles affected their risk of cancer. Because epidemiological studies don’t establish cause and effect, researchers turn to experimental studies with animals or humans to build a stronger case.

Relationships are based on statistical procedures. Although these relationships may provide a basis for better understanding health concerns, they usually fall short of supporting many of the sweeping generalizations and conclusions that make headlines.

“75% of health care spending pays for illnesses which are preventable”.- Centers for Disease Control

Four of the leading causes of death in the nation—heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease —are directly linked to unhealthy lifestyles and tobacco use. Encouraging individuals to adopt healthy habits and practices may reduce the burden of chronic disease in communities throughout the United States. Public and private efforts and programs are increasingly designed to promote these healthy behaviors and lifestyles. Employers are becoming more aware that obesity, lack of physical activity, and tobacco use are adversely affecting the health and productivity
of their employees and ultimately, the businesses’ bottom line. As a result, innovative employers are providing their employees with a variety of work-site-based health promotion and disease prevention programs using health coaches and the “trans- theoretical theory of change” approach to wellness. These programs have been shown to improve employee health, increase productivity and yield a significant return on investment for the employer.

What is a Health Coaching Program?

Health coaching programs help people make smart choices about health behaviors through education, motivation and reinforcement of healthy options. Taking the time to build a rapport, assess readiness to change, identify areas of need and to create an action plan, leads to a healthier outcome. Research proves that this personalized, collaborative approach is more effective than the cookie-cutter method that often leaves those most at risk far behind.

Health Coaches typically are licensed, degreed healthcare professionals that have made the choice to work one-on-one with their clients, outside of the typical “medical model”; empowering them to make long-term healthy changes by building solid skills that will last a lifetime.

Wellness Promotion

Employee wellness education is the starting point of prevention. It is about encouraging individuals who have demonstrated the behaviors of healthy living and providing them with the tools and support they need to stay fit, manage stress and continue to make good health decisions. Programs often include initiatives such as health risk assessments, on-site screenings, preventive care reminders, health club memberships, and financial incentives.

By promoting healthy behaviors, employers can reduce overall healthcare costs and absenteeism as well as support a “culture of health” and wellness.

Health Improvement Plans

Health improvement plans are about identifying high-risk factors, and preventing or slowing disease progression and encouraging individuals through education and one-on-one behavioral health coaching to begin altering their risky actions.

The types of behavioral-related high-risk factors addressed by health improvement programs include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, tobacco cessation, and weight management. Individuals with known or potential health conditions may be aware of elevated risks but have not found the motivation to change. They haven’t experienced any major hospitalization or serious complications – yet. However, without some form of intervention, their conditions will likely progress to a much higher-cost, productivity-limiting chronic disease.

Disease Management

The goal of disease management is to empower individuals to effectively manage disease and prevent complications through adherence to medication regimens, regular self-monitoring of vital signs and healthful diet, exercise and other lifestyle choices by education, support and encouragement of both the physician and the health coach.

For employers, the cost of chronic disease goes far beyond the direct costs of healthcare and medical expenses. Absenteeism due to lost wages amounts to $65 billion annually for American companies. This cost is compounded by the impact of lost productivity due to workers who are limited in the amount or kind of work they can do, which can be as high as 34% of the total workforce. Disease management programs have proven to not only control health benefit costs but also improve the overall health and productivity of workplace environments.

The health and wellness business is one of the hottest business opportunities in the 21st century! It is simply all about capitalizing and taking advantage of the current trends, and when it comes to business, a health and wellness business is definitely more than a good idea. Aside from that, the health and wellness industry is showing no signs of getting weak as there are now more and more people getting concerned with their health!

There is a lot to be gained from a health and wellness business. If not, the industry would not be one of the hot topics discussed in magazines, newspapers, televisions, radios, and even in offices. The health and wellness industry is one explosive trend and you cannot afford to miss the opportunity to take advantage of it!

According to statistics, the health and wellness industry is at the moment an industry worth 200 billion dollars! If you pass up the chance to get even a small piece of that pie, then clearly business is not for you. However, if you are business minded, then you would definitely start a health and wellness business! If for some reason what the statistics are saying about the current value of the industry has not convinced you, know what these statistics have projected the industry to cost in the future. Apparently in the year 2010, the health and wellness industry will rise to become a $1 trillion industry! So if you are interested, start your own health and wellness business now and begin reaping the benefits!

One of the main reasons as to why the health and wellness industry is undergoing such an explosive growth is that more people are trying to delay the aging process. Baby boomers are continually becoming popular and their demand for medical care is ever increasing. A health and wellness business particularly in the baby boomers department can be the best decision you ever made in your life! Even if you do not go to the baby boomer market, you can still find lots of opportunities. There are many more products and services that are highly craved for by consumers.

Are you interested in a career in integrative health and wellness? Integrative health and wellness training and educational programs that are offered at holistic, traditional, and alternative medicine schools to practicing healthcare professionals may include but are not limited to a comprehensive curriculum including courses in acupuncture; chiropractic care; Chinese medicine; conventional medicine; nutritional counseling; and stress management classes.

Part of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM); integrative health and wellness educational courses offer learning platforms based on the whole person. Teaching mind-body medicine and disease prevention coursework, integrative health and wellness programs provide diverse treatment classes and training that combine alternative, complementary and conventional medicine that promote natural healing.

Integrative health and wellness training institutions may offer certification in graduate-level courses to health care professionals who wish to expand their medicine expertise. While integrative health and wellness courses vary in curriculum, length and cost, it is always best to check with specific educational institutions to find the learning program that best fits your particular needs.

DISCLAIMER: Above is a GENERAL OVERVIEW and may or may not reflect specific practices, courses and/or services associated with ANY ONE particular school(s) that is or is not advertised on SchoolsGalore.com

Copyright 2006 – All Rights Reserved

C. Bailey-Lloyd in association with Media Positive Communications, Inc. for SchoolsGalore.com

In the contemporary workplace human resources are highly valued. Employers understand, employees make or break the success of a company and therefore seek to ensure employees are able to maintain a consistent level of productivity. The health and well-being of employees is important to the modern employer. Wellness programs are becoming commonplace within working environments.

Wellness programs are implemented by a third party company that takes care of the health and well-being of employees within the company. Employee wellness programs vary from health screening and nutritional advice to fitness programs and education.

Companies employ these third party agencies to try to offset the cost of rising medical cover for their employees. Wellness programs are designed to ensure the physical well being of employees is being looked after however these kinds of programs have benefits for both the employer and the employee. Employer benefits include a reduction in sickness related absenteeism and a reduction in the time employees take off in general.

Other benefits for the company are reduced medical cover costs and a more educated and healthy work force. Ensuring the health of employees within a company is highly contusive to a happy and productive work place.

Employee wellness programs also have a lot of benefits for employees. Wellness programs often involve some form of education. From smoking cessation programs to weight loss to biometric testing and diabetes
screening these programs at the very least raise awareness around important health issues. This awareness can have a drastic effect on employee health and lifestyle. Employee wellness programs aim to improve family health in order to improve the overall wellness of the individual employee.

The basic idea behind employee wellness programs is to align the needs of the company with those of the individual in order to implement a more cost effective solution to health care. The programs education focuses on reducing the need for health care in the future by preventing health problems through education and training. This benefits both the employer and the employee as while the company reduces its outlay in medical cover the employee reaps the benefits of these programs.

There are many resources online that will greatly aid in your Wellness Program search. Employee Wellness Programs Quotes is a fast and easy way to get quotes from many of the nation’s largest, most reputable Wellness Programs.

While there has been no hard numerical evidence as to the value of employee wellness programs the qualitative substantiation is very apparent. Workplace wellness programs increase the productivity of the employee as well as contributing to their overall lifestyle. A happy and health workplace has proven to be a productive and effective one.