Get Healthy is proud to introduce a redesign of its website. We’ve packed it full of all the great content you’re used to, plus the site will be the new home for engaging news stories about health care in Northwest Indiana.

Please bookmark our new URL here.

With access to the leading health experts right here in the region, Get Healthy offers readers a local perspective on what’s best for your health, including nutrition, fitness, mental health and environmental health. Along with the magazine, email newsletter and Facebook page, Get Healthy offers an array of valuable content that is both relevant and proactive.

The easy-to-navigate Get Healthy site will have even more beneficial content in the near future—including blogs and expert columns—so stay tuned. We’re here for you 24/7, so check it out, and let us hear from you!

After a night of tossing and turning, the next day is exhausting—and seemingly endless. Sleep specialists say you can feel a bit better, and improve your odds of a good sleep the next night, with these steps:

Don’t hit the caffeine hard. In fact, cut off all caffeine after 2 p.m. “Caffeine may increase irritability, make falling asleep at night difficult or cause frequent waking during the night,” says Dr. Martha Boulos, a neurologist at the Sleep Disorders Center at Sentara CarePlex Hospital in Hampton, Va. “Then you can fall into a bad cycle and mess up your whole week of sleep.”

For many of us, exhaustion is a fact of life. But for the rich and famous, it seems acute weariness can be so debilitating that it requires hospitalization and, in the case of Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti, a monthlong rest along Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Though eyes often roll when celebrities vanish to be treated for “exhaustion,” experts say it can be a valid medical condition, even for those who don’t have a publicist. Prolonged periods of physical stress and sleep deprivation can cause problems that shouldn’t be ignored, they say, though Americans may not want to admit it.

Attention, dieters: You can cut all the calories you want to lose weight—but without enough sleep, you won’t be losing the right kind.

According to a study published online last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, cutting your time in bed from 8.5 hours to 5.5 hours causes you to lose proportionally less fat. Ten overweight dieters who cut their caloric intake by 10 percent lost a comparable amount of weight—about 3 kilograms, or 6.6 pounds—but the type of weight they lost was very different, depending on how long they slept.

For dieters who had a full night’s worth, more than half of the weight they lost was fat. But when the researchers cut three hours off their bedtime, only a quarter of the weight the study participants lost was fat. That means the other 75 percent being burned was nonfat mass—such as protein, valuable building blocks of muscle and other body tissues.

We all know not getting enough shut-eye can cause all sorts of health and behavioral problems, but we’re pushing back bedtime to get in more work.

It’s midnight and Carolyn Donaldson is clacking away on her keyboard. Although she’s yawning, it might be another hour before Donaldson’s head hits the pillow. Of course, that’s if she forces herself to go to sleep before 2 a.m.

Meanwhile, Donaldson is zipping off emails to members of one of the three nonprofit boards she sits on. She’s coming up with new marketing strategies for her son’s fitness business and she’s working on projects for her own consulting clients. With only 24 hours in a day, she’s willing to give up sleep to get more done.

And, so it goes with American workers today. We push our bedtime back to fit in extra work. We get up early for a jump-start on the competition. Our disrespect for sleep has become a national epidemic and many of us have forgotten the feeling of being rested.

An experience with alternative medicine

I must admit, I walked in a skeptic. Sure, I believe that all things in the universe are connected, I do yoga, I drink green tea. However, I still take a pill when I have a headache, and I still see the doctor when I have an ailment, and I feel like my doctor knows what’s going on in my body better than I do. But I’ve battled insomnia for years. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried over-the-counter sleeping pills; they only make me more jittery. I’ve tried meditation; that only makes me think more, unable to shut off my brain. I’ve tried prescription sleeping pills, which only make me walk in my sleep, unaware of my refrigerator raids in the morning. Melatonin, chamomile, fuzzy blankets—nothing worked.

So I turned to Laura Moretton, owner of Holistic Healing Pathways in Kouts, a natural and holistic health care practitioner and a craniosacral therapist. Laura suggested that I experience a few sessions of craniosacral therapy. I was a bit skeptical, as is my nature, but after another bout of Tivo’d Judge Judy at 2 a.m. with a bag of cheddar cheese Sun Chips, I thought, what the heck?

Leonardo da Vinci took them, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, Johannes Brahms and Winston Churchill. You could probably use one right now.

Midday naps have long been touted as a good thing, lowering blood pressure and driving down the risk of heart attack. And if you snooze long enough, researchers have now found, they also permit your memory banks to do their filing, leaving your brain cleared and ready to learn in the latter half of the day.

University of California at Berkeley psychology professor Matthew Walker and colleagues put 39 young adults through a demanding learning task and tested on it at noon. At 2 p.m., they divided the students into two groups and invited half of them to take a siesta for 90 minutes while asking the remainder to stay awake. At 6 p.m., both groups were returned to the day’s learning task and tested again.

Can’t sleep? Stressed? Need to focus? Need to relax? Instead of popping a pill, people can now put on headphones and literally take a dose of their own medicine: brain music.

Simply listening to the music, which is composed from an individual’s unique brain patterns, offers quick, natural relief with no side effects, according to Dr. Galina Mindlin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who introduced “brain music therapy” to the United States. Moscow University researchers invented the technology in 1993.

The treatment alleviates a variety of problems—including insomnia, anxiety, headaches, trauma and attention deficit disorder—and also effectively modifies mental states to increase focus or induce relaxation.

Bob Greene is on the phone to talk about heart health, but first we have to ask: Is he still Oprah’s personal trainer?

Well, yes, that’s what everyone calls him, although he doesn’t see her regularly during the TV season, when she’s in Chicago. But the two have homes next to each other in California and Hawaii. So, especially over the summer and the holidays, Greene still advises Winfrey on exercise and nutrition.

“She was the best person at my wedding, and she actually flew in for the birth of my daughter,” Greene says. “We’re extremely close. I kinda chuckle when someone says, ‘Oh, your client, Oprah.’ . . . I did start out being her trainer, but it’s just a much different relationship these days.”

Greene, 52, is a regular on Oprah’s show and in her mag O, but he also has built an empire around his Best Life brand—in The Best Life Diet and other books (seven so far) and on thebestlife.com. His Total Body Makeover is on DVD. And he has become a virtual personal trainer thanks to his EA Sports Active workout video game for Nintendo Wii.

Stress is a condition most commonly experienced by the female gender, but these days, both men and women alike are stressing more than ever. Whether you’re working round the clock to maintain job security, or you’re ignoring your health in order to take care of the ones you love most, you’re not doing your body any favors. We have some pointers on how to relax and make your health a priority again.

Check out all of the articles here: Workaholics Anonymous, When a Spouse Snores, Average Joe-ga, and Doctor-o-phobia.

This handout photo, taken in 2009, provided by Rensselaer’s Lighting Research Center, shows Zoe Caira wearing a personal light-measuring device, called a Daysimeter, to monitor her rest and activity patterns and the amount of circadian light—short-wavelength (blue) light—reaching her eye as part of a USGBC-funded research project at North Carolina’s Smith Middle School in 2009. LRC research scientists leading the study had her wear orange glasses to block the blue light, placing her in “circadian darkness,” to test whether the removal of morning light delays production of melatonin, the hormone that indicates to the body when it’s nighttime. (AP Photo/Rensselaer’s Lighting Research Center)

Sit by the window in school? Lack of the right light each morning to reset the body’s natural sleep clock might play a role in teenagers’ out-of-whack sleep, a small but provocative school experiment suggests.

Specialists say too few teens get the recommended nine hours of shut-eye a night. They’re often unable to fall asleep until late and struggle to awaken for early classes. Sleep patterns start changing in adolescence for numerous reasons, including hormonal changes and more school, work and social demands.

Researchers turned to a North Carolina school built for energy efficiency, with lots of skylights so classrooms could reduce use of electric lights yet still be brighter than usual indoors. That allowed testing of the effects when some eighth-graders at Smith Middle School in Chapel Hill suddenly lost exposure to a specific wavelength of light.