Zazzle Shop

Screen printing

Saturday, June 7, 2008

10 Ways You Can Stop Dieting and Change Your Lifestyle Eating Habits

June 6th, 2008 Posted in Diet, Healthy Lifestyle

Red AppleWhen you look into the mirror what do you see? Perhaps you see a cupcake. Perhaps you see a pear that can talk. An apple maybe? A watermelon? Or perhaps you see walking toothpick. No matter your aesthetic malady, if it can be fixed with diet and exercise.

So often I’ve seen folks try to diet by immersing themselves in fad diet strategies. They use Atkins, Weight Watchers, South Beach, The Zone, Hollywood diets, Low-Carb, Low-Fat, the list goes on and on. Read some reviews of a couple fad diets. The problem is that when dieters go off fad diets, 90% of them gain back whatever they lost and sometimes more! I want to address that issue and provide some tips on how you can generally eat healthier for the rest of your life, rather than abusing fad diet after fad diet.

Starting a new diet or exercise program should not be taken lightly. If you are severely overweight, severely underweight, and/or have any medical conditions, you should always consult your physician prior to drastically changing your eating habits and performing significant weight bearing tasks. Now I would like to outline a number of basic rules for building the foundation of your new dietary plan.

Rule #1 - Permanent Changes

I avoided using “The Diet” as a subtitle of this section for a reason; this is not a diet. I repeat, we are NOT starting a new diet here. These are the permanent changes that need to be made to your lifestyle eating habits. From now on when I use the word “diet” I am referring to your lifestyle eating habits. For example, right now you might say that your diet consists of Coca-Cola, donuts, cheeseburgers, and ice cream. In the future you will say that your diet consists of Crystal Lite, beef jerky, lean beef and chicken, and a protein bar.

Rule #2 - You Are What You Eat From Your Head Down to Your Feet

Your diet will be responsible for 70% of your total results, with physical exercise and lifestyle comprising the additional 30%. You can not escape this rule. If you eat french fries and drink beer, you will be either a) fat or b) skinny but soft and unhealthy. Cows and pigs are fat. Chickens and fish are not. Therefore each chickens and fish instead of pigs and cows. Vegetables are crisp, healthy, and full of nutrients; candy bars and desserts are full of fat and high fructose sugars. Guess which one to choose.

Rule #3 - No Cheating

No, it is not OK to cheat. Even the term cheat carries negative connotations. The Weight Watchers and Jenny Craigs of the world will tell you that you can eat what you want in moderation. To most people that means it is OK to have donuts in moderation, then it is also OK to have ice cream in moderation, which must mean it is OK to have soda in moderation. Soon you are eating everything that you shouldn’t be eating in moderation, but the end result is that you are just eating little servings of a whole bunch of different junk foods! You can develop a system of goals and rewards that you can follow to achieve the success you want and enjoy the foods that taste best.

Rule #4 - Set Those Goals and Rewards

Set milestones along the way so that you have something to look forward to. When you hit a certain body weight you can treat yourself to something nice. Maybe a professional massage, a free cheat meal on a Saturday night, a night at the hot tubs, invest $40 or so into supplements to help you hit the next milestone, new workout equipment, be creative. Put up sticky notes, pictures, and other reminders about your rewards. Setting those goals will keep you on track.

Rule #5 - No Fad Diets

There is no fad diet out there that works for everyone. Atkins can work for some, but can lead to binging and kidney failure. Low fat can work for some, but can lead to diabetes. Juice diets might work for a couple weeks, but you will end up nutrient deficient and likely very sick. Our plan is to take the best of all worlds and create one all-encompassing philosophy for changing your diet forever.

Rule #6 - Eat Breakfast Silly

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you skip breakfast you might as well forget about maximizing your progress. Skipping breakfast means that your body will continue to eat up precious muscle tissue (catabolism) in a prolonged state of fasting. Your metabolism will slow down to accommodate the lack of nutrients, and will store each successive calorie that you consume in efficient little adipose cells (fat tissue) for later use. Even if you start with a glass of milk or a piece of toast an hour after you wake up, you will be better off than if you wait until lunch to eat your first meal.

Rule #7 - Then Eat 5 More Evenly Spaced Snack-Meals

Starting with breakfast, space your meals throughout the day in 3 hour intervals. This might mean you get 5-6 meals in any one day. Each meal should consist of 200-400 calories, depending on how the rest of your meals are constructed and on how many calories you are supposed to be eating each day. Each meal should contain about 15-25 grams of protein. Drink a glass of ice water before each meal to both curb appetite and also to force your body to burn extra calories by increasing the temperature of the water. You see how many little tips and tricks there are?

Rule #8 - Choosing the Right Calories

A calorie is not a calorie. Fat should not be combined with carbohydrates period. General guidelines are: any meal with more than 10 grams of carbs should have less than 8 grams of fat; any meal with more than 8 grams of fat should have less than 10 grams of carbs, and absolutely NO sugar. Yes, this means high-fat sandwiches are out, steak and potatoes are gone, no more juice and toast with your eggs, and nix that full-fat butter on everything except for vegetables.

Rule #9 - Seriously… Choose the Right Calories

A calorie is still not a calorie. Every meal should have at least 20 grams of protein. This means a 6-meal day will contain a minimum of 120 grams of protein. I maintain that athletes should not eat less than 80% of their bodyweight (in lbs) in grams of protein. That means a 180 lb athlete will consume between 140-180 grams of protein in a day. This is not now, nor has it ever been, too much protein for an active human being.

Protein requires additional calories to process, similar to soluble fiber, and therefore creates a thermic effect in the body, thus speeding up your metabolism and actually burning additional calories. Read this article about how much protein you should eat in a day.

Rule #10 - Do Not Mix Carbs and Fat

Without getting into the science of it, this concept is simple. The reason we don’t consume carbs with fat is because when glycogen hits the blood stream it triggers an insulin response, which sends a message to the body to dump those fat molecules directly into adipose tissue. Furthermore, your body will use the carbs for energy because they are easier to process, and will just store all the fat for later. Feel free to combine protein with carbs and protein with fat, but never fat with carbs. And when I say carbs in this sense, I mean sugary or starchy carbs. Moderate fibrous carbs are OK since they don’t spike insulin levels.

Quick Tip #1

It is OK to eat a small healthy snack before bed.

Quick Tip #2

It is OK to drink as much water as you can comfortably consume, 64 oz minimum in any given day.

Quick Tip #3

You need carbohydrates for energy. Instead of avoiding them, we will time carb intake based around pre-planned activity levels. Eat some carbs before and during exercise for energy, and after exercise for recovery.

Browse back to this article on dieting and scroll down to the bottom section titled “The Healthy Living Diet”. This is where you can get some additional information about figuring out your calorie consumption.

Go ahead and start implementing these changes now. Adding in a couple changes at a time will make it easier to change your overall habits, and you won’t be able to actually pinpoint the exact date you started “dieting” because it will be a slow aggregate change. Good Luck!

Written by Steve Hanson

Caribbean monk seal is extinct


It's official & incredibly sad, the Caribbean monk seal has gone the way of the dodo. It is the only seal to go extinct due to human activity and two more species are at risk.

read more | digg story

TOTAL RECALL: Airports Install See-Through Body Scanners

10 airports install body scanners

BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport.

Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.

"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.

Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.

The TSA effort could encourage scanners' use in rail stations, arenas and office buildings, the American Civil Liberties Union said. "This may well set a precedent that others will follow," said Barry Steinhardt, head of the ACLU technology project.

Scanners are used in a few courthouses, jails and U.S. embassies, as well as overseas border crossings, military checkpoints and some foreign airports such as Amsterdam's Schiphol.

The scanners bounce harmless "millimeter waves" off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said.

The scanners aim to strengthen airport security by spotting plastic and ceramic weapons and explosives that evade metal detectors and are the biggest threat to aviation. Government audits have found that screeners miss a large number of weapons, bombs and bomb parts such as wires and timers that agents sneak through checkpoints.

"I'm delighted by this development," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former Homeland Security inspector general whose reports urged the use of body scanners. "This really is the ultimate answer to increasing screeners' ability to spot concealed weapons."

The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

"You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.

Passengers who went through a scanner at the Baltimore airport last week were intrigued, reassured and occasionally wary. The process took about 30 seconds on average.

Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. "Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it."

Scott Shafer of Phoenix didn't mind a screener looking at him underneath his shorts and polo shirt from a nearby room. The door is kept shut and blocked with floor screens. "I don't know that person back there. I'll never seem them," Shafer said. "Everything personal is taken out of the equation."

Steinhardt of the ACLU said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. "It all seems very clinical and non-threatening — you go through this portal and don't have any idea what's at the other end," he said.

Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth.

Magazine-size signs are posted around the checkpoint explaining the scanners, but passengers said they did not notice them.

Darin Scott of Miami was annoyed by the process.

"If you don't ask questions, they don't tell you anything," Scott said. When he asked a screener technical questions about the scanner, "he could not answer," Scott said.

TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said the agency is studying passenger reaction and could "get more creative" about informing passengers. "If passengers have questions," she said, "they need to ask the questions."

Passengers can decline to go through a scanner, but they will face a pat-down.

Schear, the Baltimore security director, said only 4% of passengers decline.

In Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where scanners have been tested since last year as an alternative to pat-downs, 90% of passengers choose to be scanned, the TSA says.

"Most passengers don't think it's any big deal," Schear said. "They think it's a piece of security they're willing to do."

New iPhone Images Leaked

Breaking: Exclusive leaked pics of the iPhone 2! Thinner design? Check! Different colors? Check! Video chatting? Check and check!

iphone2 1

It wasn’t long ago that my inbox was full of screen caps from an image editing program of a new iPod, it was a fat yet small iPod that we now know as the 3rd gen Nano. We posted the photos and were later told by Apple’s legal team to take them down.

A similar tipster tonight has very generously given us these pics of the iPhone 2, or iPhone 3G as some are calling it. Like the Fat Nano from last summer, the images come from Apple or AT&T promotional material that shows not just the new iPhone, but also gives away a couple secrets.

It’s thinner than the current model, for sure, with a more MacBook Air-like bezeling. It’s got stereo speakers on the back and what appears to be the same screen as the current generation. But the real news here isn’t the Exchange support, but the front facing camera for iChat AV.

Oh yes, it’s there. Not only is the new iPhone smaller and more capable, but it also comes in red as part of the Product (Red) campaign, like many iPods do.

Buy a 3G, video-chatting iPhone and fight AIDS. We like it. Hit the jump for the rest of the pics.

[UPDATE] After some painstaking image manipulation, the text of the iChat blurb reads as below:

Video just became a little more fun. Start a real time video chat with other AT&T subscribers via 3G networking, or with iChat buddies via WiFi. The video calling revolution has begun.

So you can do video chat with your iChat buddies, but only via WiFi. Otherwise it’s phone to phone. Interesting.

[UPDATE] 2 See that part about about Windows XP or Vista being needed? Many people are saying it’s proof these are fake. No, we think Apple’s launching iChat for Windows, just like they did Safari. You heard us.

IMG 0454

IMG 0462

IMG 0468

IMG 0473

IMG 0480

IMG 0481

IMG 0483

IMG 0453


Fitzy's Wicked Pissah Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals Preview

Sorry it was a few days late, I slacked..........

2009 Cadillac XLR revealed


DETROIT — Cadillac on Friday revealed its midcycle face-lift of the 2009 XLR, along with the news that it will no longer offer a base version of the roadster. For 2009, the cheapest version of the XLR will be the Platinum edition, which starts at $83,530, including an $840 destination charge.

The 2009 Cadillac XLR will go on sale in July.

The base price of a standard 2008 Cadillac XLR was $81,490, including shipping.

Cadillac spokesman David Caldwell points out to Inside Line that pricing on the 2009 XLR Platinum actually reflects a price cut of $2,120. The 2008 XLR Platinum was priced at $85,650; the 2009 XLR Platinum is priced at $83,530, including shipping. Caldwell said the pricing on the 2009 XLR-V remains unchanged at $100,000, including shipping.

Caldwell noted that the base 2008 Cadillac XLR accounted for a small amount of total sales. Without giving exact numbers, he said Cadillac sells about 2,000-3,000 XLRs a year. The XLR-V accounts for about 20 percent of sales, while the XLR Platinum is the best-seller, making up about 60 percent of sales. The base XLR accounted for approximately 20 percent of sales.

For 2009, the XLR gets such changes as a new front fascia, new rear fascia and new side fender vents, perhaps the most striking new design cue. Caldwell said that design cue "came from the [Cadillac] Sixteen concept.... It's not just like that on the XLR," he said, referring to the brightly colored chrome vents. "But it's similar. The overall idea is to put jewelry on the side of the car."

For 2009, both models get the hood with the raised center section that was previously exclusive to the V-Series. The 2009 XLR Platinum gets a revised rear fascia with "more pronounced" exhaust tips and a new 18-inch wheel design. The sole option on this version is a brighter chrome wheel finish for $1,000. Caldwell said there are no options on the 2009 XLR-V.

The 2009 XLR Platinum gets the 320-horsepower 4.6-liter Northstar engine; the XLR-V gets the 443-hp 4.4-liter supercharged Northstar V-8.

What this means to you: The entry-level Cadillac XLR bites the dust as the GM luxury brand aims for the elite with its restyled roadster. — Anita Lienert, Correspondent

Lamborghini LP560-4 The Price is up 20 grand & goes on sale late summer


SANTA MONICA, California — U.S. dealers should begin receiving the first deliveries of the new 2009 Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 in late summer. The new model will be priced starting at $201,000, not including shipping and the federal gas-guzzler tax.

The sticker represents a hefty bump from the $182,000 price tag on the base 2008 Gallardo. But the new LP560-4 has considerably more hardware and performance capability than its predecessor.

The all-wheel-drive Gallardo LP560-4 boasts a new direct-injection 5.2-liter V10 that makes 552 horsepower (560 PS in the European system, which accounts for its new label). Lambo claims a 0-60-mph time of less than 3.7 seconds and a top speed in excess of 200 mph.

Incidentally, Americans may think the LP560-4 is a bargain, compared with what some of their European counterparts will have to pay. The new Gallardo arrives later this month in the U.K., where the base price, including delivery, is £147,330 — about $290,000 in U.S. dollars.

What this means to you: More displacement, more power, more driven wheels. Let's put that price hike in proper perspective