The stay-at-home health challenges of the Corona epidemic

The Corona epidemic has shut us in our homes, some of us with no employment and livelihood, isolated from family and friends. We take less and less care of our precious health, less physical activity, less sleeping routine, more stress, and a lot more snacking!

Physical Activity

The physical activity that we have become accustomed to in the gyms, biking in the parks and walking in the streets, has been greatly reduced, taking down our physical fitness with it. This is the first goal, to resume adequate exercise and to improve physical fitness.

Exercise helps us to better cope with stress, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and helps in moderating the challenging caloric balance. Thanks to exercise, we can better maintain a caloric balance that will prevent weight gain, or alternatively, help maintain weight loss.

The Internet is full of online classes of all kinds: aerobics, Pilates, kickboxing, yoga, dances of all kinds - all good for the body and the mind.

We will note one exercise worth getting to know – the TABATA

This is a training method based on 4-minute cycles of 8 exercises - each exercise 20 seconds and then a 10 seconds rest. The principle is to create very short high-intensity workouts, effective for improving cardiovascular endurance, physical fitness, and a fat-burning effect that lasts for many hours after training. This workout is excellent for losing weight put on during the Corona period. Of course, everyone must check that they are indeed fit and capable of doing such training, starting gradually and adjusting the level of intensity to their physical fitness.

Healthy Diet

A healthy diet is first and foremost regular meals.

3 meals (not 6!) spread throughout the day with 4-5 hours of fasting between them and a long night fast, at least 12 hours, more if possible.

Meal Content: Healthy foods are whole foods, high in fiber, and most closely related to how they occur in nature. The less processed the better the food. The distribution of foods on the plate should be 50% vegetables, 25% protein, and 25% carbohydrates.

The food should be rich in dietary fiber. High-fiber foods improve satiety, improve blood sugar control, reduce diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk, improve digestive system activity, and have been linked to reduced cancer risk.

And when you get bored or feel like snacking, remember that the craving for a snack is like a wave at sea, initially it comes hard, almost irresistible, but, give it a few moments and it will crash to the shore and return as a tiny ripple wave. When you crave a snack hard, take a breath, or a glass of water, and let the wave pass over you, shatter, and become an insignificant noise in your life.

And remember, there are now many online entertainment options available, you can listen to lectures, watch some of the best music and ballet shows in the world, join virtual tours of museums, everything is available, everything is free and certainly better than boredom snacks.

Quality Sleep

The Corona period brought with it a serious disturbance to the day/night routine. People went to bed late because there was no binding schedule to stick to and disrupted their biological clock.

Quality sleep is critical for maintaining weight, preventing diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, and of course for cognitive function and performing high-level thinking and memory processes throughout the day.

Going to sleep at different and late hours is unhealthy, impairing optimal functioning during the next day, disrupting melatonin (sleep hormone) secretion, disrupting the circadian clock, causing obesity and associated morbidity.

The recommendation is to gradually go to bed earlier and earlier, restoring melatonin secretion, until you get the 7-8 hour night sleep you need, and then stick to that bedtime.