The Black Intel » Health

10 Ways to exercise using your couch ( or chair)

Nourbese — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:35:40 +0000

Well it’s that time of year again, when everyone is looking for ways to keep in shape and get it right and tight for the summer. However if you live in one of the northern parts of the country like I do, trying to find your way to the gym in snow is not looking too good. Luckily I’ve found several tips to keep you in shape without leaving your couch/bed or well warmth. With all health advice, if you have any health issues you should consult your doctor before trying any of these exercises. Also if hurts ( not just kind of burns but actually hurt, and or head spinning) stop and talk to your health care provider, there might be something else pretty serious going on.

Upper Body

1) Push Up

There is two way to do this using your couch…

1) Face towards your couch and put hands at slightly shoulder length a part on the edge of the seat of your couch. Do not lock your elbows. Align your feet about shoulder length apart from one another. Your body should be in a slanted line shape. Hold in those abs and butt while you bend your arms at the elbow bringing your chest to the couch. Do this about 10 times and take a 45 second rest and repeat whole process 3 times.

2) Reverse push up

Sit at the end of your couch and put your arms down on each side of you at the edge. Scoot a bit off the couch so your butt and hips are hanging off the side. Use your arms to lower your body towards the floor and bring it back up to your starting position.

3) Leg lifts

Lay on your couch on your back so your are complete flat. Put your hands behind your head and hold your legs straight out. Slight lift your legs off the couch so that your lower leg knees and half way up your thigh is off the couch. Hold this position for 5 seconds and then bring you legs slowly down back to the couch. Remember to use your abs as you lift and lower your legs. Repeat 10 times

4) Reverse Crunches

Lay on your back length wise of your couch. Sit up so that your back is at a 90 degree angle with your feet straight in front of you. Take your feet lay them flat on the couch, so that you are in a cannonball shape. Once in this position, put your hands on your chest or head, and lean back to about a 45 degree angle hold for 2 second and then come back to your starting position. Remember to hold you stomach in and use your ab muscles to go back and forth

Health Care Reform

Joel Bridgeman — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:34:07 +0000

Many analysts claim that President Obama has caved on health care reform because he refuses to steamroll Senator Lieberman and the Republican obstructionists to include the public option in the Senate health care bill. While I understand the frustration of progressives, I believe that the president is working as best he can to achieve the reforms he promised during the campaign.

Let’s not forget that six months ago no one expected us to have gotten this far toward reform in the first place. The insurance companies claimed that offering health care -in any form- to those with pre-existing conditions, removing caps on coverage and covering preventive care would bankrupt their industry and further devastate our ailing economy. If they succeed in assassinating any form of the public option, they are agreeing that covering these conditions is not only doable, but is preferable to competing with a government plan crafted for these purposes alone.

President Obama can’t propose using reconciliation, which was repeatedly used by the Republican majority to pass the Bush tax cuts, because he also promised during the campaign to change the dangerous trajectory of our political discourse from the destructive, decisive, hyper partisan path we’ve been on since the Reagan Administration.

Governor Dean and many of the progressives in the House now want to scrap the progress we’ve made thus far to start from scratch in hopes that this will give way to a public health care plan. Following this plan will send Congress home for winter recess having been defeated once again by the partisanship that the American people voted to end with the election of President Obama and allow the opponents of reform to develop a strategy to derail any chance of providing care to those who need it most.

Since the focus of the right has been concentrated on opposing any type of public option, dropping these provisions will defuse the basis for their argument against reform and open the pathway for our president to deliver health care reform covering millions of uninsured Americans during the first year of his term, provide political cover for moderate democrats up for reelection in purple districts and allow us to move on to dealing with other drastically important national priorities. The public option may be the best way to achieve comprehensive reform, but we can’t let the opportunity to deliver reform die with it.

Successful Black women less likely to get married

Nourbese — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:43:24 +0000

From MSNBC website

By Brian Alexander

Michelle Obama may have become an archetypal African-American female success career, strong marriage, happy children — but the reality is often very different for other highly educated black women.

They face a series of challenges in navigating education, career, marriage and child-bearing, dilemmas that often leave them single and childless even when they’d prefer marriage and family, according to a research study recently presented at the American Sociological Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Yale researchers Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brueckner argued that “marriage chances for highly educated black women have declined over time relative to white women.” Women of both races with postgraduate educations “face particularly hard choices between career and motherhood,” they said, “but especially in the absence of a reliable partner.”

And there’s the rub. As noted in a recent Sexploration column, contrary to old media reports, most educated, professional women who want to marry can and do marry. But the picture is less bright for high-achieving black women because “marriage markets” for them have deteriorated to the point that many remain unmarried, the researchers found. Since these women also feel pressured not to become single mothers, they often go childless as well, the researchers found.In the study, Nitsche and Brueckner used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey of 50,000 households dating back to the 1970s to tease out data points on race, gender, education, marriage and fertility.

Among black women with postgraduate educations born between 1956 and 1960, the median age at which they gave birth for the first time was 34 years old. This was about the same as it was for white women in the same demographic. But once white women reached their 30s, many more of them did give birth, often more than once. Many black women did not. The rate of childlessness among this group of black women rose from 30 percent for those born between 1950 and 1955, to 45 percent for those born between 1956 and 1960.

The rate of childlessness does moderate somewhat in highly educated black women born between 1961 and 1970. In this group, 38 percent have remained childless.

Beyond the personal interests of individual women, the trend is significant because “in terms of American society, this is one additional obstacle” to the broadening of the black middle class, Brueckner said. Fewer highly educated black people having children means that they cannot pass on those advantages and knowledge.”

This defeats the goal of affirmative action, argue some demographers. The idea behind assuring that blacks had access to higher education and graduate school was that after a generation or so, African-Americans would reach a kind of achievement parity after generations of suffering educational and career restriction. But if black women, who comprise 71 percent of black graduate students, according to the census data, do not have children, the rate of achievement reaches a kind of familial dead end.

Another Yale sociologist, Averil Clarke, who has written a soon-to-be-published book called “Love Inequality: Black Women, College Degrees, and the Family We Can’t Have,” sees the impact of this demographic trend in a slightly different, and more romantic, light. It’s not about passing on economic and educational advantages, though these concerns are valid, she said. It’s about love.

“I think this inequality can be construed around outcomes in love,” she said. “We are very caught up right now in [the controversy] over gay marriage. Well, what are we arguing about? Whether people can have these kinds of emotionally satisfying experiences and if not, if that is unequal.” She also believes that these demographic facts, and the reasons for them, constrain the sexuality of some African-American women. She has found that many more are celibate than are white women with similar education levels. “So for me it matters because love matters.”

Declining marriage chances
One big reason why these women remained childless is, as one might expect, that they go unmarried, experts say. Among highly educated women of both races, about 22 percent between the ages of 20 and 45 were single in the 1970s. But then that number diverged. It has remained the same for white women, but now 38 percent of black women have never been married.

“Their marriage chances have declined,” Brueckner explained. “This may sound trivial but one reason is that they outnumber men in this education group.” The disparity in education is important because Americans have a strong tendency to marry those with equal levels of education, a trend that has only grown stronger since World War II. “So since there are fewer men with the same education,” Brueckner continued, “you either have to find another group you can marry or you are out of luck. You have nowhere to go.”

Highly educated black men tend to “outmarry” (marry outside race, religion or ethnicity) at a higher rate than black women, researchers say. Think of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Both married white women.

Black women are either much more reluctant to marry outside their race, or do not have the opportunity to do so. The answer is both, Clarke said.

In interviews with a large number of black women, she found that community pressures on black women to marry black men can be more intense than the reverse.“A greater negative reaction falls on them,” Clarke said. “Some women in my sample told stories of African-American men on college campuses getting upset if they dated outside the race. There seems to be a sense of some policing of women’s sexuality. I think women are more controlled by these community and family pressures around who they should date. Men have greater freedom.”

But it may also be true that even highly educated black women who are willing and able to pursue a relationship with a man of another race won’t have the opportunity. A sociological line of inquiry called “exchange theory” suggests that in the piggy bank of goods each of us brings to a possible relationship — money, smarts, sense of humor, looks, family background, education, gender — African heritage is devalued compared with European or Asian heritage. African-American females, even with lots of education, do not fetch as much “value” in the marriage market.

That may be a cold way to look at love, romance, and sex, but studies dating back to the 1980s support it.

Of course if highly educated black women felt free to have children outside of marriage, they could still have a family. When some white women make that choice it is often seen as a kind of liberal empowerment.

But according to Clarke, black women are concerned about looking “ghetto.” Public interpretation of our actions matter for everyone, but especially for black women, Clarke explained. “When it comes to the issue of black women and should or should they not make a choice to have a child alone, these women are very much aware that the decision to do it makes people question their class status. We associate single unwed child bearing with poor African-American women.”

Not all women who remain unmarried and childless are unhappy about it. But for a set of sometimes complex social reasons, some high-achieving black women find themselves disappointed. “That this is something being denied to people is important in and of itself,” Clarke said.

The truth about black people and AIDS

Nourbese — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:01:21 +0000

The Facts

HIV/AIDS and young blacks

In 2005, the rate of AIDS diagnoses in black adults and adolescents was 10 times the rate for whites and nearly
three times the rate for Hispanics.
In 2004, African Americans were disproportionately affected by HIV infection, accounting for 55 percent of all
HIV infections reported among people ages 13–24.
Of the estimated 18,849 people under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was made during 2001–2004
in the 33 states with HIV reporting, 11,554 (61 percent) were black.
In 2007, nearly 20 percent of people infected with HIV residing in the District of Columbia were between the age 13-29 at the time of their diagnosis.
In Georgia, the rate of adult/adolescent HIV/AIDS cases was 81.2 per 100,000 for African-Americans in 2005 and 8.7 per 100,000 for whites.
Of the 68 U.S. children (younger than 13 years of age) who had a new AIDS diagnosis in 2005, 46 were black.
Of the estimated 141 infants perinatally infected with HIV in 2005, 91 or 65 percent were black.

HIV/AIDS and black women

One in 30 black women will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their lifetime.
The rate of AIDS diagnoses for black women was nearly 23 times the rate for white women in 2005.
AIDS was the leading cause of death in 2006 for black women 25 to 34.
Of the 126,964 women living with HIV/AIDS in 2005, 64 percent were black, 19 percent were white, 15 percent were Hispanic, one percent were Asian or Pacific Islander, and less than one percent were American Indian or Alaskan Native.
Of 40,608 AIDS diagnoses in the 50 states and the District of Columbia for 2005, 10,774 (26 percent) were women.

HIV/AIDS and black men

One in 16 black men will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their lifetime.
The rate of AIDS diagnoses for black men was eight times the rate for white men in 2005.
AIDS was the second leading cause of death in 2006 for black men ages 35 to 44.
Of the Washington, D.C., residents living with HIV/AIDS in 2008, 76.3 percent were black and 71.7 percent were male.
The rate of adult/adolescent AIDS cases for African-American males (118.7 per 100,000) was eight times that of white males (14 per 100,000) in Georgia in 2005.

The cost of HIV/AIDS

The total lifetime cost of illness for Americans newly diagnosed with HIV in 2002 is approximately $36.4 billion.
While whites incur more direct medical costs than blacks for HIV treatment, blacks suffer greater financial damage from loss of productivity.
In 2007, over half of the 900,000 Americans living with HIV died from the virus.
HIV/AIDS is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
The U.S. Agency for International Development for funding HIV/AIDS in the region is expected to increase its funds to $30 billion by 2010.

For more information please check out this website where these facts are from the loop