How to Maintain your Hearing Aid

If you want your hearing aids to run at optimal levels, it stands to reason you’ll have to give them a once over every now and then. With careful maintenance, you can keep your hearing aids looking and sounding like the day they freshly emerged from their plastic casing. Adopt a daily routine to keep your equipment in pristine condition. Here’s how:

Step One

Before you go to bed, always take out your hearing aids. Although some nights, you may stumble home drunk and forget to take them out, make an effort to remove the ear mould from the hook.

When objects are stuck in our ears, the body tends to respond with wax. A wax eradicator can clear away any build-up of this gunky stuff, so make sure you get your hearing aid sparkling clean.

Step Two

Moisture isn’t good for hearing aids. So, next you should check for any moisture in your ear hooks or ear mould tube. Condensation could potentially block out all sound.

Are there any water droplets inside the ear mould? If there’s any condensation at all, go at your hearing aid with the air blower. Just place the nozzle into the tubing of the ear mould and blast the air blower between five and ten times. This should make the condensation evaporate. Repeat with ear hooks, if there’s a build-up of moisture too.

Step Three

Remove the batteries from inside of your hearing aids. This will help prevent the energy life from plummeting. Sometimes, battery compartments get rusty when humidity gets trapped within. If this is the case, place a q-tip into rubbing alcohol and then clean away the rust. If you don’t, the corrosion will affect how well you can pick up sounds and can even create strange sounds.

Step Four

Store your hearing aid in the correct box, provided by a health specialist. Check your batteries with a hearing aid battery tester. The last thing you want is to be carrying out the day as usual and for your energy to go flat…then, silence! If your batteries need changing or charging, do so now.

Step Five

Check your hearing aids every day, to ensure they’re in perfect working order. Perform a sound test in the morning, before you place them into your ears. Gauge the response through your specialised stethoscope for hearing aids and make a variety of sounds. If everything is coming through clearly, feel free to get ready for your day ahead!

Keep your hearing aids away from water and steam. This means no taking them into the swimming pool. Exposure to moisture can ruin hearing aids with time, so keep them as dry as possible. Hearing aid prices are high after all, so replacements can be costly.

Sometimes, you’ll want to wash the ear mould clean, as it has had high exposure to wax. Once you’ve thoroughly cleaned it, make sure that the components are completely dry before reassembly. If you find any damage in your hearing aid, contact your local Audiology department for expert advice.

Can Women Drink Protein Shakes?

If you want the short answer, it’s YES, however if you would like to know why then read on.

I hear it all the time, “protein shakes are to bulk up, right?” This myth of protein being used to “bulk up” really gets on my nerves. Protein is just a macro nutrient which can come from chicken, tuna, eggs, milk etc. It is true that high protein diets aid in muscle growth and recovery but it is also true that protein is important when dieting or going through a “fat loss” phase.

Benefits

Personally, I recommend whey protein to everyone, this is because whey protein powder is just that – protein powder, none of the added simple carbohydrates and filler ingredients which are found in meal replacement shakes are in it. Secondly, mixing up your whey protein with different fruit (fresh or frozen) makes it taste amazing and also has the added benefits of iron, zinc, B and E vitamins. Adding the fruits to shakes will also add more dietary fibre which supports weight management.

When I asked Puneet of Reflexions Of A Personal Trainer, he had the following to say:

“As women get older they become prone to osteoporosis and weight gain around the stomach area. Adding in a regular protein drink can help reduce the chances of this affecting them. Shakes by themselves cannot help you build muscle or lose fat but when combining this with a good workout regime it can help you reach your end goal.”

He also suggested that as long as there’s a sufficient amount of protein in your diet, from quality sources like lean meat, fatty fish and eggs, there isn’t a need to supplement with whey protein. If however, you struggle to fit in varied sources of protein in your diet, a shake will do just fine!

 Try This!

 

1 Scoop Whey Protein (flavour of your choice)

200-300ml of Almond Milk (or water)

1 Tablespoon Greek Yoghurt

Handful of Spinach

½ Teaspoon of Peanut Butter

Handful of Blueberries

½ Frozen Banana

You will not be disappointed!

    

Celebrity Diets

There is always controversy over any new diet that celebrities are trying out. The media usually brand these diets as ineffective as they are usually extreme and people generally put the weight straight back on. This is what caught my eye about the reasonably new Dukan 100 foods diet from France. Although the creator, Pierre Dukan has been working as a nutritionist for over thirty years, his interactive guidance website is a mere two years old. It is very much concentrated on the time frame after you reach your ideal weight, teaching you the skills you need to maintain a good size and become comfortable with yourself.

The 100 foods are made up of 72 animal-based ingredients and 28 plant-based ingredients which you are introduced to throughout the four phases. These phases help you learn how to lose weight with Dukan and are supposed to get easier as you progress through the programme, with more food types being involved later on and of course your body becoming used to the exercise. The first phase involves extreme workouts and a high-protein diet to kick-start the course and by the end of the second phase you will have reached your ideal weight.

It is always difficult to tell between fact and fiction when it comes to people talking and writing about healthy diet plans and it has been said that there is no science behind the diet. It has also been said that although the Duchess of Cambridge got on well with Dukan, her mother found it ineffective and that the likes of Gisele Bundchen, Penelope Cruz and Jennifer Lopez have all tried it out. With diets like these that cut out whole food groups, of course it won’t be suitable for everyone. Some people need to eat an incredibly balanced diet which this diet just isn’t capable of giving since all carbohydrates are cut out amongst other things. As with all diets, you should check with your doctor before you begin in order to ensure you will be able to see it from start to finish. There is also online support available throughout.

Can Your Dietary Habits Affect Your Sleep Habits?

Falling asleep and staying asleep are components of a natural and essential process that we all encounter on a daily basis, and most people usually do not have a problem doing either. These people typically have harnessed and nurtured certain lifestyle and dietary habits that promote sound sleep. People who have problems either falling or staying asleep, however, are often missing out on a critical dietary habit or practicing bad dietary habits that directly interfere with sleep. Some dietary habits have beneficial effects on sleep. Do you know which is which?

What you eat and drink can have a significant impact on your ability to fall or stay asleep. Numerous foods can make you feel sleepy, while others can cause trouble sleeping. So what exactly is the link between food and sleep? We know that some foods and drinks will absolutely have an effect on your level of alertness.

One of the ways to achieve a healthy night’s sleep is to keep the brain calm rather than alert and agitated. And strikingly, research has shown that what you eat a few hours before bed can dramatically affect your alertness or calmness, thus impacting your sleep patterns. For example, tryptophan, an amino acid, helps produce serotonin and melatonin which are important neurotransmitters that help relax your mind and body. Tryptophan is famously prominent in turkey, and that is why so many people feel very, very sleepy after a Thanksgiving meal.

But sometimes it’s not just the content of the food we eat that affects the way we sleep; the quantity and timing can also have a huge impact. For example it is best to avoid eating a large meal prior to bed time. This may seem counter intuitive at first, because we often feel tired after eating a big meal during our active hours. You might think, “if a big meal gets me this tired during the day, surely it will help me feel tired when it’s time for bed.” However, the process of digestion, with all its muscle contractions and acidic processes, disrupts sleep and can in fact prevent you from falling into a deep sleep entirely.

Of equal but opposite importance, you should take care never to go to bed hungry. you need to strike a harmony between eating too much, and not eating enough. Being hungry in bed will keep you awake, no doubt fantasizing about food, but more importantly it will put your digestive system into a position where it begins consuming your own body’s fat reserves for sustenance. This is why we feel “hunger pangs,” and hunger pangs keep us awake. One suggestion is to eat a very small, light snack shortly before going to bed.

As we all know, several kinds of food, such as milk, can help with sleeping. But we do not know that some foods actually bring sleeping difficulties to people. First of all, food like sweet potatoes, corns and peas may produce lots of gas (and, yes, consequential flatulence) during the digestion process. As a result, if people eat such starch-heavy foods before sleeping, they would feel way too full to actually get any real sleep in. Secondly, in a manner similar to caffeine-heavy foods and drinks such as coffee and tea, spicy foods and salty foods excite your nerves and the alertness centers in your brain as well as your tastebuds and make sleeping even more difficult. Furthermore, these kinds of food make stomachs uncomfortable and consume the substances which are helpful to sleeping. Finally, fatty food influences sleeping quality, too. Such food burdens the digestion system and induces the nerve system so that the human body works all the time; deep sleep, on the other hand, requires that your muscles go into a state of stasis and atrophy. What is even worse, it delays the whole process of sleep entirely.

To enhance the quality of sleep and prevent insomnia, people are advised to eat some food that can help with sleeping instead of eating the foods mentioned above. The following foods are a great choice:

· Almonds. These nuts contain tryptophan, which stimulates sleep.

· Turkey. Contains high levels of tryptophan. Think about a tiny turkey sandwich, hold the cheese though. Cheese can be harder to digest and cause gas.

· Oatmeal. Basic and hearty, oatmeal contains plenty of carbohydrates and will fill you up without forcing your digestive system to work too hard.

 ·Warm milk. The somniferous powers of a glass of warm milk have been touted for years. The power of a small glass of milk is familiar to most people. Scientific research has found that there exists two major chemicals which make people sleepy. One chemical is tryptophan, which prompts the brain to produce a certain neurotransmitter called hydroxide. It is this neurotransmitter that makes people sleep easily. The other chemical is a peptide that is similar to opium; this chemical is pretty prominent in milk. It mixes with the central nervous system to calm and relax the body. 

If you eat some of the above-mentioned items in small quantities shortly before going to bed, you might see very noticeable improvements in your sleep habits and a reduction in insomnia!

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Mike is a freelance writer who is fascinated by incredible design; whether he is analyzing the delicate elegance of the human muscular system, the efficiency and foreward-thinkingness of Roman architectural columns, or the rich and strong wooden frames of modern teak platform beds – he always finds something to be excited about in the world of design and engineering. He wrote this article for PlatformBedsOnline.com, a furniture retailer that also designs some of its own unique reclaimed-wood low-profile beds that are built to last a lifetime.

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