I respect that attitude but I will always enjoy the little goodies, chocolates, cakes and snacks that come with the Christmas spirit. It’s impossible for me to ignore and pretend it isn’t there. Why do that? I will never pretend those luscious chocolates and cakes don’t exist; I accept them with open arms. That being said, I hate gaining a huge amount of weight because of my own gluttony. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable but I DO have some willpower and I like to keep in (relative) shape.

If a balance is maintained, meaning, indulging in fattening foods mixed with exercise and healthful meals, I believe that everyone can win with this equation. A common problem of participating in activities during the winter, is winter! It’s snowing or plain miserable outside, not very inspiring for a workout. It makes it even difficult to get out to go to the gym in horrible weather. Where is this all leading?

Having a Nautilus Commercial Series Elliptical Trainer at home in your basement or extra room of your house is a perfect solution to keeping fit not just during the winter but also all year long but particularly during the holiday months where eating is practically done all day long, at least where I come from! Whether they’re treats brought into the office or sent there by clients or the snowflake cookies and fudge sitting around the house, well, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Temptation is hard to resist. Face it.

So wouldn’t it be ideal to have the Nautilus Elliptical Trainer so you can workout at home? Maybe you know the person who would absolutely love (and need) this. And the whole family can use this, too. I think it’s a wonderful gift albeit extravagant. Sure, some people would rather have a $6,000 necklace or something luxurious and beautiful, but the Nautilus Commercial Series Elliptical Trainer is useful and the bodies of those who are going to benefit from it, will be beautiful. Want it for yourself? Then get it!

About the Elliptical Trainer - The patented four-bar linkage system, built into each foot pedal, follows the natural movement of the feet during the entire elliptical motion. Because users will feel more comfortable, their workouts will be more challenging, leading to better results. The articulating foot pedals also keep hips, knees, and ankles properly aligned. Features:
* Remote Operation Control built into arm handles for easy operation
* Articulating foot pedals keep your hips, knees, and ankles properly aligned
* 400-pound capacity; measures 20 x 62 x 82 inches (W x H x D); 15-year frame warranty
* Commercial-quality cordless elliptical trainer with innovative My Stride system
* Dynamically calculates your stride length and adjusts speed and intensity

Save $300 if you purchase it at Amazon (restrictions apply).

More information or get it now

1. Wear something (or everything!) pink!
2. Use a pink font in emails or wrap gifts with pink ribbon.
3. Go to thebreastcancersite.com/clicktogive — just by clicking you are helping women get free mammograms! If you have a Facebook, become a fan — you get extra perks!
4. Savethetatas.com uses humor to get their point across. Also a portion of every sale is donated to the fight against breast cancer. YTD total: $339,000! YAY!
5. Susan G. Komen for the Cure shows you how to get involved with a race near you. http://ww5.komen.org/findarace.aspx
6 Every year Yoplait Yogurt partners up with Susan G. Komen for the cure. Every lid that you save (and wash!) and send in, they will donate 10 cents to the cure. Every lid counts.
7. Ever heard of a Pink Ribbon Breakfast? Australia has! This will be Australia’s 7th year hosting this campaign and they have raised over $10 million for breast cancer research. Anyone in Australia can host a Pink Ribbon Breakfast event at their workplace, home, park, etc. With breakfast being the most important meal of the day, how can you go wrong? They provide you with all the information here: www.pinkribbonbreakfast.org.au/
8. If you want to support breast cancer, but hate the color of pink, Ann Taylor has a beautiful bracelet for only $24. It has a deep purple ribbon which is fashionably woven into a gold chain. $5 of every purchase is donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
9. 3 words: Pink Ribbon Bagels. YES! In spirit of the month, Panera Bread will be making pink ribbon bagels. They are made with dried cherries and cranberries, vanilla, honey, brown sugar and cherry chips. You can pre-order them here: http://www.panerabread.com/pinkribbonbagel/
10. Listen to someone’s story. Just by listening to their struggles and accomplishments helps in more ways than you know.

October 26, 2009 is Pink Ribbon Day. Don’t forget to show your support!

Ok. It’s expensive but it is one of the best blenders you will ever have and it’s made to last.

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“A lot of Americans think they’re eating a healthy diet these days. But it’s easy to be fooled by our assumptions and the ways that food manufacturers play on them.

Take chicken. The average American eats about 90 pounds of it a year, more than twice as much as in the 1970s, part of the switch to lower-fat, lower-cholesterol meat proteins. But roughly one-third of the fresh chicken sold in the U.S. is “plumped” with water, salt and sometimes a seaweed extract called carrageenan that helps it retain the added water. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says chicken processed this way can still be labeled “all natural” or “100% natural” because those are all natural ingredients, even though they aren’t naturally found in chicken.

Producers must mention the added ingredients on the package — but the lettering can be small: just one-third the size of the largest letter in the product’s name. If you’re trying to watch your sodium to cut your risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke, it pays to check the Nutrition Facts label. Untreated chicken has about 45 to 60 mgs of sodium per four-ounce serving. So-called enhanced or “plumped” chicken has between 200 and 400 mgs of sodium per serving, almost as much as a serving of fast-food french fries.

Adding salt water became widespread when big discount stores began selling groceries and wanted to sell chicken at uniform weights and prices. Plumping packaged chicken helps even out the weight. But that means consumers are paying for added salt water at chicken prices — an estimated $2 billion worth every year, according to the Truthful Labeling Coalition, a group of chicken producers that don’t enhance their products….”

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Scientists now know enough about the long-term consequences of ingesting these powerful chemicals to advise that we minimize our consumption of pesticides.

What’s the Difference?
EWG research has found that people who eat the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables consume an average of 10 pesticides a day. Those who eat the 15 least contaminated conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables ingest fewer than 2 pesticides daily. The Guide helps consumers make informed choices to lower their dietary pesticide load.

Will Washing and Peeling Help?
Nearly all the studies used to create these lists assume that people rinse or peel fresh produce. Rinsing reduces but does not eliminate pesticides. Peeling helps, but valuable nutrients often go down the drain with the skin. The best approach: eat a varied diet, rinse all produce and buy organic when possible.

How Was This Guide Developed?
EWG analysts have developed the Guide based on data from nearly
87,000 tests for pesticide residues in produce conducted between
2000 and 2007 and collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. You can find a detailed
description of the criteria EWG used to develop these rankings and
the complete list of fruits and vegetables tested at our dedicated
website, www.foodnews.org.

Save $100 at checkout and get FREE Super Saver Shipping when you purchase select Schwinn Fitness, Precor, Life Fitness, Sole, Bowflex, Star Trac, Diamondback, Smooth Fitness, Kettler, Nautilus, Quantum Fitness, and Stamina products sold and shipped by Amazon.com. To take advantage of this offer, purchase eligible fitness equipment sold by Amazon.com and $100 will automatically be deducted at the final page of checkout. This offer applies only to Amazon.com purchases made between February 1, 2009 and February 28, 2009. Applies only to products sold by Amazon.com.

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Get Fit and Have Fun at the Same Time!

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You didn’t think all you could do on your Nintendo DS Lite was to play Yoshi’s Island and Mario Kart all day long, did you? Or are you more of a Dr. Kawashima kind of DS game player? Whatever the case, get with the program; you can cook up a storm with Personal Trainer: Cooking on your trusty DS. It’s so wonderful because the DS is small and will fit on your counter while you cook and remind you about what you need to do to prepare some of the most tastiest dishes on earth. Check it out.

First things first: select a recipe. With 245+ to choose from, Personal Trainer: Cooking makes it easy to find what you’re looking for by helping you browse by country, ingredients, difficulty, cooking time, cooking technique or even calorie count.

Once you’ve found something that looks yummy, take a look at the ingredients. Out of butter or need to buy some cumin? Just tap them with the stylus to automatically add the ingredients to your Shopping List. Making several dishes tonight? Just keep tapping ingredients – your Shopping List keeps it all in one place for you. Now that you’ve got your ingredients, it’s time to start cooking. The DS Chef is there with you, talking you through every step along the way. Don’t know how to fillet a trout? Watch the demonstration video when you get to that step. Didn’t quite catch the last step? Just say “Repeat,” and the Chef will explain it again. You can pause the recipe at any time to consult the Cooking A-Z guide, and prompts will appear within recipes for specific terms you might need more information about.

Click below to get one now.

Personal Trainer: Cooking

“Out of the thousands of new releases that came into our cubicles this year, we’ve chosen our 100 favorites, from an elegant pop-up alphabet and a deliciously dishy guide to fragance to an enthralling biography of an iconic leader and an encyclopedic history of a sport and the world that plays it. Here they are, so click below.”

Best Books of 2008

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

It’s funny how most of the world wants Obama to win, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that American wants him to win. It seems the educated, rational and hopeful people of the world who would vote for Obama if they could, are far from sharing the same sentiments as middle America.

If people had a sense of reason, and could just put their partisan role aside, the obvious person who will turn the U.S. around (from its horrible and colossal downward spiral), would be Obama.

He would not only be good for America, but he’d make the world a better place.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

Get Costumes EARLY

Is a chicken labeled “free range” good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about “grass fed” beef?

What form of soy is best for you — soy milk or tofu?

About milk: I’ll bet most of you voted for reduced or non-fat. But if you’ll turn to page 153 of “In Defense of Food,” you’ll read that processors don’t make low-fat dairy products just by removing the fat. To restore the texture — to make the drink “milky” — they must add stuff, usually powdered milk. Did you know powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, said to be worse for your arteries than plain old cholesterol? And that removing the fat makes it harder for your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins that make milk a valuable food in the first place?

About chicken and beef: Readers of Pollan’s previous book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“, know that “free range” refers to the chicken’s access to grass, not whether it actually ventures out of its coop. And all cattle are “grass fed” until they get to the feedlot. The magic words for delightful beef are “grass finished” or “100% grass fed”.

And about soy…but I dare to hope I have your attention by now. And that you don’t want to be among the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight and the third of our citizens who are likely to develop type 2 diabetes before 2050. And maybe, while I have your eyes, you might be mightily agitated to learn that America spends $250 billion — that’s a quarter of the costs of the Iraq war — each year in diet-related health care costs. And that our health care professionals seem far more interested in building an industry to treat diet-related diseases than they do in preventing them. And that the punch line of this story is as sick as it is simple: preventing diet-related disease is easy.

In just 200 pages (and 22 pages of notes and sources), “In Defense of Food” gives you a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of “nutritionism” in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. And then it steps up to the reason most readers will buy it — and if you care for your health and the health of your loved ones, this is a no-brainer one-click — and presents a commonsense shopping-and-eating guide.

If you are up on your Pollan and your Nina Planck and your Barbara Kingsolver, you know the major points of the “real food” movement. But if you’re new to this information or are disinclined to buy or read this book, let me lay Pollan’s argument out for you:

– High-fructose corn syrup is the devil’s brew. Do yourself a favor and remove it from your diet. (If you have kids, here’s a place to start: Heinz smartly offers an “organic” ketchup, made with sugar.)

– Avoid any food product that makes health claims — they mean it’s probably not really food.

– In a supermarket, don’t shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can’t rot, anything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce.

– “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”

– “You are what you eat eats too.” Most cows end their days on a diet of corn, unsold candy, their pulverized brothers and sisters — yeah, you read that right — and a pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics. And they bestow that to you. Consider that the next time there’s a sale on sirloin.

– “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served (and not because she was so wise, but because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting). Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.

In short: Kiss the Western diet as we know it goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Ignore the faddists and experts. Trust your gut. Literally.

In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. And he makes a good case why. Our government, he says, is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of our processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another — calories that provide “virtually nothing but energy.” Our representatives are almost uniformly terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when “doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital” — don’t hold your breath.

“You want to live, follow me.” I loved it when Schwarzenegger said that in “Terminator.” It matters much more when, in so many words, Michael Pollan delivers that same message in “In Defense of Food.” [review by J.Kornbluth]

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Get real rice now

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UPDATE: This item is no longer available but check out this Elliptical Trainer. It’s even better.

There are 22 chapters, each one dealing with an important element of success such as green manures, tillage, direct seeding, transplanting, weeds, pests, harvest, marketing, season extension. In addition there are three appendices on tools, the major vegetable crops and a one-page schematic outline of biological agriculture. If you plan to buy just one book on organic growing, you will find it difficult to beat this book.

[source: amazon]

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In general, you remove poisons your body, and at the same time, you get your body to unwind, which most people absolutely need. Otherwise, you end up with complicated health issues and well, you just don’t need to deal with that if you have a choice, do you?

About the Sauna
Detoxify, speed up the healing process, and purify the skin in the comfort of your own home with the Ironman Carbon Tech two-person sauna. Made of elegant hemlock, the Carbon Tech distributes heat far more evenly than most ceramic units, with a warmup time that’s roughly twice as fast as traditional units (15 to 20 minutes vs. 35 to 40 minutes). The sauna also requires less energy than ceramic saunas, with an ultra-thin heating unit that takes up a minimum of space without sacrificing temperature (the sauna reaches a maximum of 140 degrees F). And because of the even heat distribution and lack of hot spots, users can sit in the sauna for longer periods without burning. Now you can nourish your skin, cleanse your immune system, and relieve nasal congestion without driving to the gym or visiting a spa.

Other details include a double-thick (8 mm) tempered glass door that lets in outside light, an interior light, and a control panel for the built-in CD player and AM/FM tuner. The Carbon Tech, which comfortably seats up to two people, measures 47 by 41 by 75 inches.

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This excellent mixer is for the serious home baker and features a 575-watt motor with heavy-duty transmission and a 6 quart bowl combined to give you the power and capacity to mix 13 dozen cookies, 8 pounds of mashed potatoes, or over 8 loaves of bread.

I didn’t make my own bread before but now I only make it at home with the Kitchen Aid and it is so incredibly easy. Much better tastewise and healthwise for you too, instead of buying premade, packaged icky bread in the market.

KitchenAid’s unique planetary mixing action provides faster, more thorough blending of ingredients all the way to the edge of the bowl, without ever rotating it. The rugged, all-metal quality construction and Commercial-style motor protection assure a long life of trouble-free, dependable and quiet operation.

Other features include a professional style bowl-lift that makes it easy to lift the bowl into the mixing position, 10-speed slide control ranges from a very fast whip to a very slow stir and a power hub for optional attachments. Included with the Stand Mixer, a burnished aluminum flat beater, PowerKnead spiral dough hook (designed to replicate hand-kneading to handle 20% more dough than previous models), a professional wire whip and pouring shield.

Find out more and get one now

Get Weeds Season 3

Not familiar with Weeds? Get Weeds Season 1 and while you’re at it, Get Weeds Season 2

I don’t think you’ll regret it. It’s perfect for when you have a free moment and want to escape the world to watch a wacky fun, comedy on television.

See samples from the book

For approximately 2000 years maca was (and still is) an important traditional food and medicinal plant in this high altitude growing region. It is seen and considered as a highly nutritious food and as a medicine that enhances strength and endurance. It’s very known purpose, which is why it has become extremely popularly lately is because it’s regarded also as acting as a powerful aphrodisiac.

Maca has traversed the world over and it is not just available in South America anymore, but also it is available practically everywhere.

Some people prefer to take capsules of maca, but other can use the powder form and mix it with drinks or add it to baked goods.

Most people focus on the following qualities maca gives them:

- increased energy levels

- decrease problems associated with PMS, fewer cramps, a gradual decrease in bleeding and fatigue

- increased ability to function under stress

- increased libido

Men have reported increased libido function and stamina. A man’s sexual desire & potency increases with continued use of mac as does a women’s.

Men and women all over the world take Maca on a regularly to enhance their sexual desire and performance as well as to increase their energy levels.

Order organic maca powder now or Order organic maca capsules now

It’s never too late to start a garden even though we are getting ready for fall. What am I talking about, you ask? Grow food indoors. Why not? If you have a spare room, or better yet a basement, you can grow many things indoors. How?

Get a Turbo Grow Room or a 36 Plant Dual Chamber Hydroponic Grow Cabinet!

These allow you to easily grow vegetables and herbs indoors. The latter looks like a regular cabinet so you can even put it in your living room. No one would even know there are living plants inside the cabinet. Closed, that is!

Eating chocolate or cocoa increased a measure called flow-mediated dilation, which is a good indication of blood flow in the veins. It also reduced blood pressure, both systolic (the upper number, reflecting the maximum pressure exerted when the heart contracts) by about 6 points, and diastolic (the bottom number, reflecting the maximum pressure when the heart is at rest), by about 3.3 points. But it didn’t seem to have an effect on so-called “bad” LDL cholesterol.
Soy protein reduced diastolic blood pressure by almost 2 points of mercury and improved bad cholesterol but didn’t improve so-called good HDL cholesterol. But those effects were found just for isolated soy protein, not for other soy products.
A habit of green tea drinking reduced bad cholesterol levels, but drinking black tea boosted both systolic and diastolic pressure — by 5.6 points for systolic and 2.5 for diastolic.

Ok. Calm down. This isn’t license to jump in a chocolate filled pool. No, no. It means stick with foods high in flavanoids and antioxidants: lots of fruit, small amounts of a good dark chocolate (at least 70 percent cocoa), plus the basics like onions and green tea and an occasional glass of red wine. Be reasonable about this. And don’t just eat any ole chocolate. Some are so terrible they could kill you, so stay with high quality and you can’t go wrong, normally.

Here’s a chocolate sugggestion – with mouth-watering photo. Don’t eat it all at once!!!

[via]