All posts tagged: healthy living

Giving up Caffeine – one year on

I gave up caffeine last summer. Caffeine can have all sorts of effects on the body, both positive and negative. It can increase your alertness, give you an energy boost and even help your sporting performance. On the other hand it can make your heart race, give you heartburn and irritate your bladder. It’s addictive and without it you can find yourself feeling irritable, drowsy and with a banging headache. Personally I decided to give it up because I was getting a few symptoms that I thought might be caffeine related and I felt drinking it had become a habit that I just didn’t need. Since I started working from home, going to the kettle had become my break from my desk and I’d slowly increased up to five or six cups of tea a day. I only drink coffee once or twice a week. How much caffeine there is in tea varies according to the type of tea and how long you have brewed it for but there are about 70mg of caffeine in …

Why I Started Running

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

It’s fair to say that running changed my life. It’s not an over exaggeration. I went from someone who thought running wasn’t for her to someone who left her career to spend more time running, writing about running and helping others to find good health through running. I can honestly say when I started out, it was absolutely not my intention that any of that should happen. It wasn’t even on my radar. In trying to understand how to help other people to become active, I’ve been reflecting (as you know, I do a lot of this!) on why I started running twelve years ago. What was it that I was looking for? What did I need that I thought running could give me? And, in turn, how does that influence what I now say to people to encourage them to be active? I wanted to share it with you to see if you identify, if you are a runner or to see if it would encourage you if you were thinking about running. These …

Quick Question – How often should I examine my breasts?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

I was examining my breasts the other day and suddenly realised that I couldn’t remember the last time I had done it. Then I felt worried that if I found a lump it could have been there for several months. There’s nothing like the fear of breast cancer to invoke anxiety. Thankfully all was well but it served as a reminder to me of the importance of this quick, simple home check that we can all do. So, how often should you check your breasts? Should you examine yourself every time you get in the shower, once a month or is a quick feel every now and then when you remember enough? Cancer Research UK states, ‘When diagnosed at its earliest stage, almost all (98%) people with breast cancer will survive their disease for five years or more, compared with around 1 in 4 (26%) people when the disease is diagnosed at the latest stage.’ However, not all breast cancers can be detected by breast self-examination. Other methods such as breast screening through mammography are …

New IGTV Channel

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

Twitter has long been my favourite social media channel. It’s played a fundamental role in my change of career. So many connections, opportunities and even the job advert for the post I took as a PHE Physical Activity Clinical Champion have all come from Twitter. Real life friendships have resulted too which is wonderful. I never really ‘got’ Instagram. I posted pictures there, browsed and liked a few things but it was more of a personal photo album for me than anything else. I just didn’t have the time for the crafted posts that filled my feed and seemed to get the most attention, I always felt I might as well have written a blog. Over time however I’ve grown to love Instagram, I’ve found an increasing amount of support, pleasure and diversity. I understand it better and so I’m taking the plunge and embarking on a new challenge. I’ve launched an Instagram TV Channel. I’ve called the channel Active Health because that just really seems to sum up what my work is about. I …

Project Allotment

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

Keeping your children active is sometimes easier said than done. I’ve always found that it helps massively if you do things together as a family. You’re setting a great example to your kids by being active yourself, there’s an opportunity for family bonding and you’re making memories too. It’s important to remember that being active doesn’t just mean doing sport. There’s endless things you can do which all count as activity that don’t involve kicking a ball or chasing after your children. I thought I’d share our latest project designed to help us be active and healthier. We’ve tried to take as many positives from this period of lockdown as we can and one thing that has sparked our interest is food. Not just baking and trying out new recipes (although we’ve done PLENTY of that) but a desire to look after ourselves better through what we eat. We’ve been using our local butchers for our meat and our milkman has been bringing potatoes, eggs and fruit juice as well as our usual enormous fresh …

Quick Question – Can I exercise with varicose veins?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

Varicose veins, a common condition that you might have diagnosed yourself or seen your doctor about. What are varicose veins, why do they happen and how do they link with exercise? Can exercise prevent varicose veins and if you’ve already got them, will exercise make them better or worse? What do you need to be careful of when exercising with varicose veins? I thought I’d pick this for my latest #quickquestion. What are varicose veins? If you don’t have them yourself then I’m sure you’ve spotted varicose veins on other people, usually on their legs. They’re essentially swollen blood vessels seen at the surface of the skin. They’re dark blue in colour as they contain blood that has given away its oxygen (deoxygenated blood) and is on its way back to the heart to get some more. They can be small or large, straight or very wiggly. They might not cause any discomfort at all but it’s common for varicose veins to ache, throb, itch and even bleed. Why do varicose veins happen? Our blood …

Quick Question – How can I stop coughing?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

Last week’s question covered why and how we cough, now let’s consider how to stop coughing. What can you do to ease a cough when your ribs are aching and your sleep is disturbed? As we discovered, coughing is a reflex designed to protect us and it’s controlled by the coughing centre in the brain which receives messages from receptors in our airways. Because this happens automatically, without conscious thought, it makes it difficult to control. Find out what’s at the route of your cough? The key is to work out why you’re coughing. We usually associate coughing with respiratory infections such as colds, bronchitis or pneumonia but there are many other reasons people cough. Working out the cause helps to find the best way to make it stop. Here are some common causes of coughs which aren’t respiratory infections: Smoking – A major cause of a long term cough. Acid reflux – Stomach acids sometimes sneak past the sphincter that seals off the stomach. This acid can travel upwards and irritate your throat, this …

Quick Question – Why do we cough?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

A cough is one of the major symptoms of Covid-19 and a common feature of any respiratory infection but why do we cough and what actually happens in the body during a cough? Coughs are annoying and irritating, both for the person suffering and for those around them (I seem to be as intolerant of listening to coughing as I am of hearing people chew!) They are however a protective mechanism designed to remove foreign particles from the windpipe and lungs. Larger objects such as food that’s gone down the wrong way and smaller particles such as dust, germs and mucous are all expelled from the body through coughing. The lining of our airways contains specialised cells called goblet cells which produce mucous to keep our airways moist and to trap dirt and germs. Alongside them are ciliated cells which have hundreds of tiny, microscopic legs at their surface which wave, waft and move the mucous and trapped particles back up the airways. During an infection we may have a dry cough where little or …

Quick Question – What are oxygen sats?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

We seem to have developed a range of new vocabulary since the onset of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Suddenly words such as self-isolate, health modelling and social distancing have become the norm. Some of the medical terminology that’s now filling our social media feeds can be unknown and confusing. A question I’ve seen a few times is, ‘What are oxygen sats?’ so I thought I’d answer it in my #quickquestion series. Red blood cells carry oxygen around our body. They pick up oxygen molecules when they travel through the lungs and then transport it around the body attached to haemoglobin, which is a protein in the red cell. Our body’s organs and tissues need a steady supply of oxygen for them to function. Oxygen sats is the short form of oxygen saturation and is a measure of how close blood is to being completely saturated with oxygen. Sats are measured in per cent and the goal is 100 per cent. You might also see oxygen abbreviated to its chemical symbol O2. Healthy people will have …

Quick Question – Why does exercise make me need to poo?

Published by Dr Juliet McGrattan

Are you one of the many people who find that once they start doing some exercise, particularly vigorous stuff like running, you get a sudden urge to open your bowels? More often than not it’s a runny motion too. Why does exercise give you diarrhoea? Is there such a thing as exercise-induced poop? It’s so annoying, can be really inconvenient (think crouching in the bushes) and actually put you off being active in the first place. It’s a very common problem so I thought I’d answer it for my #QuickQuestion this week.