This post has been sponsored by TENA, but all thoughts are our own.

One in every two females experience light bladder weakness, in which they pass small amounts of urine involuntarily. The littlest things may cause it. In 62 percent of women, it comes right after a cough or sneeze. Others leak when they laugh.

How to prevent light bladder weakness is a burning question in the minds of thousands of women. The answer is often overlooked: a healthy pelvic floor.

Introducing the pelvic floor

Your pelvic floor props up the spine and supports the abdominal cavity. Picture it as a crib that bears the uterus, bowel, and other organs in the pelvic region. Its strength relies on a mass of muscles and ligaments, which interweave around the pelvic walls and closes in at the bottom to create the pelvic and urogenital diaphragms. The pelvic diaphragm surrounds an important trio of openings: the vagina, rectum, and bladder. As such, the pelvic floor is instrumental in childbirth, urination, defecation, orgasm, and sexual stimulation.

Yet the pelvic floor is very much susceptible to overstretching and tearing. A weakened pelvic floor may be attributed to:

• childbirth, especially by Cesarean section
• pregnancy
• smoking
• chronic coughing
• episiotomy
• large uterine fibroids
• excessive straining during defecation
• obesity
• menopause
• hysterectomy
• diet of processed food
• physical inactivity

Seven out of 10 women have conditions associated with disorders of the pelvic floor. Apart from light bladder weakness or full-blown urinary incontinence, a compromised pelvic floor could lead to the following conditions:

• constipation
• incomplete excretion of urine or stool
• painful copulation
• reduced sexual satisfaction
• inability to attain orgasm
• sagging uterus, rectum or bladder
• lower back pain
• lower abdomen pain

Avoiding pelvic floor conditions

Opt for a high-protein diet of natural food. Such is vital for building and healing the muscles on the pelvic floor, including those in the vagina.  If it’s tricky to obtain unprocessed food on a daily basis, include a safe, effective nutrition supplement in your diet. A nutritious diet can also protect the pelvic floor in a roundabout way, by preventing obesity, which exerts unnecessary pressure on it.

Quitting smoking also helps. One of the many causes of pelvic floor disorders, chronic coughing, is an upshot of frequent smoking.

Kegels exercises are traditionally held to be important for pelvic floor strengthening. Yoga and Pilates help too, considering their core-strengthening benefits. You may also like squatting or getting perineal massages.

Benefits of pelvic floor exercises

Doing pelvic floor exercises every day helps prevent light bladder weakness at least. If you do them long enough early in life, you would have fewer problems with your bladder as you age. But pelvic floor exercises do more than just preventing a leaky bladder. They enhance your sexual experiences and, if you’re pregnant, prepare your body for labor.

Not for nothing is the pelvic floor said to contain the ‘love muscles.’ The muscles that comprise the pelvic floor surround not only the vagina but also the clitoris. Your sexual responses therefore improve with the strength level of your pelvic floor muscles. Since it facilitates blood flow and nerve response around the vagina and clitoris, a strong pelvic floor ensures utmost sexual stimulation. Every touch would seem pleasurable. Research even shows that women with a strong pelvic floor achieve multiple orgasms, let alone an enhanced control of them.

Strengthening the pelvic floor is just as important to conceiving women. During pregnancy and delivery, the pelvic floor is under intense pressure, so it’s not unusual for you to leak upon laughing, coughing, sneezing, or overexerting. If you do enough pelvic floor routines, such leaks would be greatly lessened. Pelvic floor exercises also help restore your vaginal elasticity and shape after childbirth.

Pelvic floor exercising is all the more important when your maternal clock has stopped ticking. Estrogen levels dwindle significantly during menopause, weakening the pelvic floor. Fortifying your pelvic floor before and during this pivotal time strengthens your core; ensures gratifying sex; and reduces your vulnerability to stool/urinary incontinence over the years.

My PFF

For all their advantages, pelvic floor exercises are a stretch to remember, especially within a fast-paced lifestyle. A spanking-new application promises to put you on track.

Called my pelvic floor fitness or ‘my pff,’ this app helps you achieve just that. This Android/iPhone app provides expert advice on pelvic floor exercises. You’ll know when, where and how to exercise your pelvic floor with its professionally made tutorial videos.

Pre- and post-natal exercise professional Liza Webb handles these easy-to-follow video classes with professional Pilates instructors. They would teach you how to correctly and effectively perform pelvic floor exercises for maximum results. my pff teachers would skillfully explain and guide you through each exercise.

my pff comes with a progress tracking feature, which keeps you aware of your gains in toning your pelvic muscles. The app also gives you the option of receiving reminders to perform the exercises every day, at a time you appoint.

my pff is as discreet as can be. You can perform its recommended exercises virtually anywhere. Nobody has to know.

Developed by lights by TENA, my pff is currently available for free via the Apple App Store and Android Market.

Last resort

Know that you have a choice not to come down with really serious pelvic floor conditions. Don’t wait until you are left with no choice but undergo surgery for a compromised pelvic floor. The simple, free things in life—such as downloading my pff and following a healthy diet—can preserve your wellbeing for the long term.

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External hard disks, tape units, zip drives, CDs, and DVDs are backup tools of the past. Today, nothing smacks of practicality and convenience more than online backup solutions.

Backing up online has manifold advantages, not least of which is relief from the intricacies attendant on manually making copies of files. From an application perspective, managing backup solutions is complicated enough of itself, especially if it involves tape cartridge devices. With tape backup, you need to bother with vaulting tapes offsite, at hours you certainly didn’t appoint.

Online backup fills a universal need of businesses to reduce capital and overhead. It also tremendously does away with risk, which is never more unwelcome among small- and medium-scale enterprises; remote offices; and mobile consumers.

Conventional backup solutions are a big mishmash in the market but many of them can’t guarantee effectiveness.  Entrust your precious files to the wrong backup company and you may lose them forever. Your best bet then is opting for online backup providers.

Five reasons why online backup is encouraged

1. Online backup is easier.

Unlike, say, tape backup, online backup is wholly automatic. You need not take backups home, switch tapes, and move files every hour on the hour. Simply decide on how often you want your data backed up in a day and the provider would do the rest.

On the contrary, traditional backup methods take so much of your energy and time. Since online backups are entirely automatic affairs, you can become more productive with work that needs to be done.

2. More data centers = less risk of data loss

Customarily, online backup providers rely on specially built data centers. These gargantuan repositories of information are located all across the world. What this means for you is negligible risk of data loss due to unstoppable circumstances, such as natural calamities. There simply are many copies of your data, retrievable from anywhere on earth to your system and back.

3. It puts you in charge.

With each backup, you are updated at length, via email, on which files have been changed, removed, or added. Online backup clearly puts you in control.

4. Utmost privacy  

Since online backups are encrypted—making your data accessible only through a password nominated by you—neither your closest loved one, let alone the service provider, can read your data.

5. Easy file restoration

Online backup has made file restoration easier than ever. You can do so by tapping the software or signing in the provider’s network. Either way, you can choose which files you want to recover or restore, anywhere, 24/7.

In recovering or restoring data, you have a choice of many older versions, e.g. yesterday, past week, last month, and beginning of time. You can revert to these versions in any location in your system or network.

Best Online Backup Sites

WPDesigner has pared down the best storage solutions online for your consideration. They have sorted them according to such criteria as ease-of-use, price, server security, reliability, control panel, and customer support. They also rated the providers by their repute and credibility.

Visit WPDesigner now so you can decide on whom to commend your treasured files and documents.

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This post has been sponsored by Macmillan, but all thoughts are our own.

Ficklest of all fickle diseases, cancer has a nasty way of recurring long after you’ve believed yourself to be free of the affliction. Physical activity may just stop it in its tracks however.

Mounting evidence has found a link between physical activity – any movement using muscles that improves fitness level – and reduced risk of cancer recurrence. In consequence then, physical activity may increase your cancer survival rate. If anything, ramping up physical activeness may help you cope with adverse effects attendant on cancer treatment, e.g. depression and fatigue. It may even reduce your risk for other conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

UK-based cancer organization Macmillan has recently enlisted the support of BAFTA-winning actress and comedian Jo Brand for Move More, its campaign to get cancer patients moving.

“People will look at me and go, why’s that fat, unfit, menopausal, middle-aged woman telling us what to do? She surely never takes any exercise. Well you’re wrong there, because I do!”

Brand is joined by no less than the National Cancer Institute in America and the American College of Sports Medicine in promoting physical activeness during and after cancer treatment. Whereas in the past doctors would tell you to rest in excess following treatment, times have changed. Lately, the two organizations have advocated the resumption of daily activities as soon as possible after treatment and slowly increasing to recommended levels of physical activity.

“I’m just trying to spread the word and upturn the myth that actually you should be resting after cancer treatment. You shouldn’t, you should be getting out and doing any kind of exercise you can. You don’t have to run a marathon, but you just have to up your activity levels,” Brand said.

Some evidence suggested that taking up physical activity and retaining a leaner body may cut the risk of a cancer returning after remission. In the US, a study showed that breast cancer patients who walked for 3-5 hours on a weekly average cut their risk for recurrence. In another research, brisk walking for a minimum of three hours weekly has been shown to cut the risk of developing early-stage prostate cancer.

These researches are inconclusive and wanting of more duplicable evidence however. Even so, there are some telling indicators that physical activity has an unsubtle effect on cancer. Even the smallest raise in your physical activity can make all the difference.

Benefits of physical activity

Latching on to physical activity may compel cancer to remit and help you recover from its oft-stressful treatments. Physical activity holds significant health corollaries against cancer, many of which you may hitherto have not heard of. If you knew about these benefits, you would truly be motivated to move more like Jo Brand.

Done regularly, physical activity can help manage, if not thwart, adverse effects that may arise from cancer treatment. It is just as recommended thereafter, seeing as some side effects emerge as late as years following treatment. Some side effects are even permanent.

Cancer therapy is notorious, among others, for leaving you fatigued for months after treatment. Moderate or even just light physical activity, e.g. short walks, yoga, and tai chi, can help you pick up energy. However, start slow and slowly increase intensity, lest you end up tiring yourself even more.

Physical activity can also help control stress, anxiety, and depression: ever-present problems resulting from cancer therapy. It does so by compelling the secretion of mood-enhancing hormones, i.e. endorphins, in the body. At the same time, it helps hold back the body’s stress hormones, making for a better night’s sleep, if anything.

Endorphins also help alleviate joint pain caused by certain hormonal treatments prescribed with chemotherapy. Physical activity of itself can help relieve joint pain by strengthening your muscles and improving your range of movement, which may be limited by certain kinds of cancer surgery. The more flexible joints are, the less likely they are to be painful.

Walking, dancing, resistance training, and other weight-bearing activities can help strengthen your bones, especially when they’re at their frailest. Osteoporosis or bone thinning is known to result from hormonal treatments for prostate and breast cancer as well as chemotherapy-induced menopause.

Resistance training, on the other hand, is the solution to making your muscles stronger during and after cancer treatment. Muscle strength declines during this period because of longer hours of bed rest and steroids given with chemotherapy.

Steroids in chemotherapy can conspire with your sedentary lifestyle to make you gain weight, exacerbating the situation. Obesity and overweight heightens your risk for breast, bowel and womb cancers. In light of this, being more physically active can decrease your risk of developing a new type of cancer, while maintaining a healthy weight can slash the possibility of a cancer coming back.

Being more physically activity may help you regain your pre-treatment appetite too. Take short walks every day, and you would see for yourself. In addition, physical activity alongside a high-fiber diet helps counter constipation caused by particular chemotherapy drugs.

Regular exercise, particularly aerobic activities, may hold positive dividends for your heart. It preempts the risk of developing heart-related conditions, usually brought about by chemotherapy agents (e.g. epirubicin and doxorubicin) and radiotherapy administered too close to the heart. Furthermore, regular physical activity can decrease your susceptibility to other deadly conditions like high blood pressure, kidney disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

Taking up physical activity today

Should you choose to become more physically active during or after treatment, you should be the arbiter of the amount of activity you can realistically do. Talk to a cancer specialist about appropriate physical activities for you concurrent with and subsequent to treatment.

An activity may simply be a question of lessening periods of rest. You may choose from a range of activities involving anything from walking to gardening to weightlifting. It is up to you how much of these you should do. Take into account your likes, fitness level, and other circumstances.

You may consider taking up physical activity with other individuals, e.g. family members and exercise group mates.  Also consider being active outside an enclosed space, as in a park or a forest trail.

Whether you are living with or are in convalescence from cancer, physical activity is relatively safe. At first, you may feel testy about taking your physical activeness to another level, especially if you have been leading a sedentary lifestyle for a long time. You may feel overwhelmed, with not so much an idea as how to start.

Remember that any amount of physical activity is light years better than not moving at all. Physical activity offers infinite, hitherto-unknown opportunities for cancer recovery. If Jo Brand can do it, her pounds and all, so can you.

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Eating grains is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Most people are blessed with bodies that can well handle them.

But others do not have that luxury. They have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the digestive tract that virtually disallows them from eating foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. When they eat gluten, celiac disease sufferers experience an immune reaction that can damage the small intestine, thereby undermining nutrient absorption.

This reaction specifically destroys the villi, the nutrient-absorbing protrusions within the small intestine. When enough villi have been destroyed or injured, the body is incapacitated to absorb nutrients from any quantity of food.  Malnourishment ensues.

One in 133 Americans is afflicted by this condition, also known as gluten intolerance, gluten sensitive enteropathy (GSE), celiac sprue and nontropical sprue. Worse yet, many sufferers go undiagnosed. According to the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, people easily mistake celiac disease for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Indeed, around 10 percent of IBS sufferers do not know they have celiac disease.

Celiac disease tends to run in families. Fifteen percent of sufferers have siblings and children who also have the condition. In light of this, physicians recommend all members of a household to test for gluten intolerance.

You may not know it but you may have celiac disease. The most common symptoms of this condition are weight loss, vitamin/mineral deficits, depression, and physical complaints, e.g. diarrhea, stomach cramps, constipation, skin irritations, arthritis, fatigue, moodiness, canker sores, irregular menstruation, and seizures. In children, celiac disease manifests mostly as weight loss plus digestive complaints, such as abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and pale stools.

Left untreated, celiac disease can progress to osteoporosis, mental problems, infertility, and worst, cancer. In infants and toddlers, this condition may hamper growth and development and cause defects in teeth enamel.

If you are diagnosed with celiac disease, you should know better than ingest gluten-containing fare. Apart from foods made from wheat, barley and rye, gluten may also be found in a wide range of products, running the gamut from catsup to lip balms to ice cream.

In short, gluten may hide in the unlikeliest foods; you could be unwittingly eating them. To be safe, you need to research the long list of foods in which gluten may lie in wait.

Or you could just depend on Free from Gluten’s line of gluten-free foods. Free from Gluten is your one-stop shop online for all your gluten-free diet needs. It carries products from some of the premier brands in gluten-free living such as Pacific Natural Foods, Schar, Bob’s Red Mill, Glutino, and Pamela’s Products.

Gluten-free breads, pastas, flour, frozen goods – Free from Gluten has it all for you. With over 1600 products at your disposal, this online store has been called the biggest retailer of gluten-free food in the world.

This is good news for those of you forced to buy the slim pickings of gluten-free products in grocery stores and health shops. Free from Gluten gives plenty of options to consumers suffering from celiac disease, especially those who reside in remote communities.

Better yet, Free from Gluten’s gluten-free selections are far more affordable than those they sell in physical stores. Its products often come in discounted prices too.

From its base in Texas, Free from Gluten utilizes a network of respected suppliers and wholesalers to give you a universal access to natural, oft-organic foods free of gluten. You never have to suffer in silence again just because your local store does not stock up on affordable gluten-free foods. At just a click of the mouse, Free from Gluten would liberate your health.

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An increasing number of men are suffering from Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH), an enlargement of the prostate which can cause painful, inconvenient and often embarrassing symptoms. A general neglect of the prostate and the development of BPH can be identified by incontinence, painful and incomplete emptying of the bladder, waking several times in the night to urinate, reduced libido and sexual dysfunction. Prostate Secure addresses poor prostate health and potentially reduces the risk of developing BPH and other related prostate problems. Science has proved that adjusting diet and consuming prostate friendly ingredients, like saw palmetto will provide increased protection from prostate disorders and related health issues. And this is where Prostate Secure is set to change the life-course of men, globally. Prostate Secure not only harnesses the vital ingredients required to maintain a healthy prostate but causes no known bodily side effects for the user.

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