webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border: 0px none; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; orphans: auto; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 1em; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> This graceful form of martial exercise is being touted as the more effective option to yoga.

After years of being exalted as an exotic form of martial arts, Tai chi is now seen by the medic world has an answer to most physical grievances. Week after week, researches are bringing to light the many healing benefits of this form, which includes it being beneficial to people suffering from osteoarthritis, diabetes, musculoskeletial pain triggered from working on computers. It is also being looked upon as an alternative option to yoga.

Tai chi is a series of bodily movements that’s performed in a slow and graceful manner, each movement flows to the next without a pause. The technique was first introduced by a Taoist monk who got his inspiration from watching a crane and snake at war. Says Sensei Sandeep Desai, “Tai chi is largely under-utilised here! I’ve been teaching Tai chi for more than two decades, and I see only those who are spiritually inclined trying to learn this form. But Tai chi is more than just a form that helps you spiritually or helps you attain flexibility. It’s an internal form of martial arts, deep and profound. It is not meant for instant gratification or instantaneous results.”

Purnima Shah feels that Tai chi helped to bring an attitudinal change in her when dealing with chronic back problems. “It instilled a more positive attitude, and helped me divert my mind from the pain. The pain has reduced to large extend, and my body is no longer stiff, ” she shares.

About Tai chi being seen as a better form of yoga. “I have specialised in both tai chi and hathyoga. The stretch in tai chi is not done at the cost of causing discomfort. This is significant, as when you stretch beyond a certain point, the body goes into a shock and recoil state, this is bad in the long run. Tai chi does not encourage that, and usually follows the movements of a cat. Sleep and stretch just enough to be able to spring back into action,” explains Desai.

With varied benefits like efficient breathing, flexibility, balance, calm and reduction of stress hormones with minimum effort, it’s not surprising that tai chi is taking over yoga.

Types of Tai Chi

Chen Style Tai Chi

Chen style Tai Chi Chuan is the oldest form of Tai Chi from which all the other styles derived. Chen style is known for its lower stances, silk reeling, jumps, stamps and Fa Jing encapsulated within a smooth flowing powerful form.

Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan

Yang Style Tai Chi are arge and relatively simplified movements and is the most popular styles practiced in the world today.

Sun Style Tai Chi Chuan

Sun-style Tai Chi is recognised by its small high postures with flowing movements forwards and backwards accompanied by connected arms movements.

Lee Style Tai Chi

Lee Family Tai Chi can be traced back to Ho-Hsieh. His teachings looked at all aspects of Chinese health and martial arts.

Guang Ping Tai Chi

This form incorporates a solid differentiation between yin and yang, as well as a number of well-defined silk drawing movements. Made up of 64 movements which relate to the sixty four hexagrams of the I Ching.

8 Diamond Form Tai Chi Chuan (8 Energies)

8 Diamond Form Tai Chi Chuan Form is based on the foundations of the eight key energies: peng, lu, ji, an, leigh, tsai, kao, zhao. These energies are fundamental to the practice and development of any Tai Chi Chuan Form and any Tai Chi Chuan practitioner. This form is short, simple and has a lot of depth. Source –Times of India

CLick here to visit our site for more on this category.

Learn more »

New online fashion, beauty & lifestyle magazine has launched around 2 months ago.
Oftrend -http://oftrend.com



We are offering the following categories of posts.

• Beauty (29)
  • Fragrance (8)
  • Hair Style (5)
  • Makup (7)
  • Skin Care (9)
• Fashion (16)
  • Accessories (2)
  • Designers Files (13)
  • Trends (2)
• Health (32)
  • Diet (10)
  • Fitness (15)
  • Prescription (1)
  • Spa's (6)
• Life (27)
  • Love (7)
  • Recreation (3)
  • Relationship (11)
  • Sex (6)
• News (81)
  • Celebs (53)
  • Entertainment (26)
  • Events (2)
  • Foods (1)
  • Tabloid (23)
  • Tours & Travels (5)
• Other (1)

Subscribe yourself to get latest news, stories and updates on above mentioned categories. Learn more »

With symptoms including headaches, nausea, rashes, and fatigue, Caitlin Shetterly visited doctor after doctor searching for a cure for what ailed her. What she found, after years of misery and bafflement, was as unlikely as it was utterly common

The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean.

When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I’d been sick for three and a half years.

During that time, when I wasn’t working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn’t have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I’d joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they’d been “Kathy Batesed,” à la the movie Misery); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia—my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who’d see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class—you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal.

In late 2010, after a long and unhappy antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, my newest GP (who’s still my doctor today), Chuck de Sieyes, MD, announced that he was referring me to Mansmann: “Because I have no idea what’s going on with you, and he’s one of the smartest guys around. And frankly, I’ve had it!”

Mansmann had moved to Yarmouth with his wife and kids to be close to his parents, who’d retired in Maine. A third-generation allergist, he worked in his father’s allergy clinic, at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, during high school. While in college at Saint Joseph’s University, also in Philadelphia, he helped his dad develop two asthma drugs. Later, he headed an allergy and immunology clinic at a West Virginia hospital for 10 years.

Mansmann has a helmet of thick, graying hair and an intensely serious air. After escorting me into an exam room, he sat down across from me and promptly pushed aside my thick medical file. He’d read through it all, he said, but he wanted to hear the story from me. He listened patiently, asking questions every so often: When did my rashes flare? Was the pain an ache in my muscles, or did it feel deeper? Was I worse after I slept or at the end of the day? He seemed, as we spoke, to have all the time in the world. Then, with no pyrotechnics, he offered his theory: “I think it’s possible you’ve developed a reaction to genetically modified corn.”

Genetically modified corn? Everyone’s heard of GMO corn, but I realized I didn’t know what it actually was. Mansmann explained that starting in the mid-1980s, the biotechnology giant Monsanto began to genetically alter corn to withstand its herbicide Roundup—the goal being to eradicate weeds but not crops—as well as to resist a pest called the corn borer. These small changes in the DNA of the corn are expressed by the plant as proteins. It’s those proteins, Mansmann believes, that can act as allergens, provoking a multisystemic disorder marked by the overproduction of a type of white blood cell called an eosinophil.

He swabbed inside my nose with a Q-tip, then placed the results under a microscope. “Take a look,” Mansmann said. “See all those pink cells? Those are eosinophils.” My nose, it seemed, was chock-full of them. When the immune system is working properly, eosinophils swarm certain invading substances, be they parasites or viruses, and work to eliminate them. Sometimes, however, an allergenic protein may prompt the immune system to release eosinophils. Then, it’s as if a faucet gets turned on but can’t be turned off—eosinophils just keep coming. Eventually they begin to leave the bloodstream and may infiltrate and damage the GI tract, esophagus, mucous membranes, lungs, the fascial system (the layer of connective tissue that surrounds the muscles, blood vessels, and nerves), and the skin—hence, the avalanche of symptoms. (Some allergists say that the best way to test for a true eosinophilic disorder is to look for the cells in the esophagus and GI tract with an endoscopy. But Mansmann thinks that once you have a preponderance of them in your nasal mucus, they’re likely to be elsewhere.)

Mansmann’s advice was to strip all corn, even that marked organic, from my diet. “It’s almost impossible to find a corn source in the United States that doesn’t have the [protein] in it,” he said. The U.S. government started approving GMO corn and soybeans for sale in the mid-1990s, and today, 88 percent of corn, and 93 percent of soybeans, are the transgenic varieties. Moreover, Mansmann and others contend that due to cross-pollination via winds, birds, and bees, there’s no such thing anymore as a GMO-free corn crop. He estimated that it would take from two to four months of living without corn for the eosinophils to cycle out of my body, and 
almost a year before I’d feel entirely like myself. Source-Elle

  Learn more »

High cholesterol is a big threat to healthy living. Hence, if you are diagnosed with high cholesterol, it is imperitive to change your eating habits, in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

As with other lifestyle-related diseases, certain foods are good and bad for people with high cholesterol. Today, we bring you some foods that can actually lower down your cholesterol level. Mrs. Eileen Canday - Chief Dietician at Breach Candy Hospital, gives us a list of the 20 best foods to lower cholesterol.

Almonds
Opt for a fistful of almonds as a daily snack, when diagnosed with high cholesterol.

Almonds are filled with vitamin E and flavonoids, which help cut bad cholesterol by almost 10 percent and also decreases the development of artery blockage.

Oats
Oats contain soluble fibre called beta-glucan, which helps in lowering your body's ability to absorb cholesterol.

Hence, eat oats daily for breakfast, to lower your cholesterol level and stay healthy.

Avocados
Avocados have cholesterol-lowering properties because they contain beta-sitosterol, which can lower cholesterol levels by nearly 15 percent.

Olive oil
Use extra-virgin oil for cooking, instead of normal cooking oil.

Olive oil is a good heart-healthy choice, because it contains antioxidants and polyunsaturated fats that can lower bad levels of cholesterol.

Omega-3 fatty acids
Include fishes like mackerel, salmon and tuna at least twice in a week.

Fishes that are rich in omega-3 can lower cholesterol levels and aid in boosting good cholesterol. For vegetarians, choose foods like flaxseeds and rajma.

Beans and lentils
Again beans and lentils are a good source of soluble fibre, which aids in lowering cholesterol levels.

They are also high in protein and low in fat, which is a complete package for healthy hearts.

Soybean
The protein present in soybean protects against various heart ailments. Soybean helps in lowering bad cholesterol and simultaneously increases good cholesterol.

Eggplants and okra
These two vegetables are great agents for lowering cholesterol, because they are good sources of soluble fibre. But avoid frying these, as that would diminish their nutritional properties.

Garlic
Garlic helps lower cholesterol and fights plaque that clogs your arteries.

Eat not more than 3-4 garlic cloves each day, to obtain maximum heart benefits.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are rich in lycopene, vitamin C, potassium and fibre, which help in cutting cholesterol levels.

Prefer eating tomatoes which are cooked or sun-dried tomatoes.

Green tea
Results may vary from individual to individual, but some studies suggest that drinking green tea early in the morning may fight high cholesterol.

Blueberries
Compounds present in blueberries are good for your heart. Eating blueberries regularly can sharpen your mind as well as lower bad cholesterol level.

Apples
Apples contain soluble fiber called pectin, which helps in lowering bad cholesterol.

Carrots
Raw carrots contain pectin, which helps in lowering cholesterol levels. Besides, carrots are also good for your eyes and skin.

Barley
Barley has unique health promoting properties, especially for heart health.

Like oats, barley too contains beta-glucan, which helps in lowering cholesterol and prevents artery blockage.

Red wine
We all know about red wine's health benefits. Consuming red wine helps heart health as well.

The fibre called tempranillo, found in red wine, is great in lowering cholesterol.

Plant sterol
Consuming fortified foods like orange juice and yoghurt, which have high levels of plant compounds, is good for heart health.

They help prevent cholesterol absorption and lower the level of cholesterol.

Dark chocolate
Eating dark chocolate is very beneficial for your health. It helps lower cholesterol levels by almost 10 percent.

Sesame seeds
Sesame seeds are rich in a fibre called phytosterols. This fibre helps in preventing artery blockages and lowers cholesterol levels.

Spinach
Besides spinach being Popeye's secret for quick power, it is also good for cardiovascular health.

Green leafy vegetables like spinach contain lutein, which helps guard against blockages in arteries and lowers cholesterol. Source-Online Learn more »