Once Chris and Cindy Burger of Whitney Point, NY, fill a brown paper trash bag, they will take it to the landfill. They have been filling the same bag for twenty years — and there is still room. Chris figures their family of four produces about 12 ounces of garbage per person per year. No joke.

More From Positive News:
Kids Pedal Their Own Bikes To School
German Grandmother Lives Without Money For 16 Years
Russian Babushkas Sing The Beatles

Chris’s personal philosophy, “If you take something into your life, you are responsible for it. If you don’t want the responsibility, don’t buy the item.” he adds, “And responsibility does not end when the trash is taken to the curb.”

But Chris is quick to point out that this reduction in garbage production did not happen overnight. He and his wife, Cindy, were affected by the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. As people around them commented on the government’s or business’s responsibilities, the Burgers thought about individual actions. They decided to look at two things — personal energy consumption and their waste production — and address both.

When they began recycling, there was no county recycling program. They took their cans to the scrap yard and their jars to a glass factory. Subsequently, they helped create and establish a recycling program in Broome County.

Chris’s tips include shopping with care. If you don’t compost, start now. Be aware of all packaging. And, pretend you don’t have garbage service. “Your choices will begin to change.” he assures. And if your county does not have an adequate recycling program, advocate for one, and volunteer to help out. Become part of the solution. Eventually you will be ready to pull the plug!

Inside the Burger’s trash bag, one would mostly find composite packaging, such as foil lined plastic tubes. When Chris accidentally buys anything with fused materials, he calls the 800 number invariably listed on the package and asks how he should dispose of their packaging, since he does not have trash service.

The partially filled paper bag is a testament to the Burger’s Earth Day commitment. Chris says, “Unlike most American homes, my children never had to take out the trash when they were growing up. Instead, they will probably inherit it!”

More Information:
Chris Burger
Tel: 607.692.3442
cwburger@frontiernet.net

Related Reading:

The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

An economic study of dairying on 149 farms in Broome County, New York

Historic Architecture In Broome County, New York and Vicinity

Falling In Love With The Earth, A Tale of Love and Strange Weather

The Heir

Renewable Rider Tom Weis has a no holds barred conversation with Karl Connell, a rancher from Newport, NE, who has much to say about TransCanada and Nebraska’s Legislature. Karl explains the threats posed to his land, livestock and family from contaminated runoff, oil spills, blowouts and explosions. He shares a Material Safety Data Sheet listing the dangerous chemical composition of tar sands crude oil. He also shares a photo documenting TransCanada’s pre-construction of a nearby pumping station, despite not having been granted permission to build. He says he has been treated “like shit” by the company, which is threatening to steal his private property through eminent domain. Calling the behavior of Nebraska Senators “disgusting,” he suggests some have been “bought and sold by TransCanada.”

Renewable Rider Tom Weis hears third generation rancher Susan Luebbe draw a line in the sand against Keystone XL, which would come within 200 yards of her home. Susan describes TransCanada’s land agents as “not friendly at all,” saying they lied to her right off the bat. She says she will not allow Canada to take away their land and will defend it “no matter what.”

Renewable Rider Tom Weis hears rancher Ernie Fellows from Mills, NE describe how Keystone XL, which would come within 300 yards of his home, violates amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He charges the company obtained illegal easements, saying land agents lied to him and are taking advantage of the elderly. Saying he never considered himself an “environmentalist” until now, Ernie recounts how Nebraska senators have disrespected citizens and how “this whole thing speaks of money, graft, corruption, under the table payments…”

Renewable Rider Tom Weis and Ron Seifert team up with Occupy Lincoln in Nebraska. After forming a human “line in the sand” against Keystone XL on the steps of the capitol, about 100 marchers and bikers snaked their way through downtown Lincoln. Recognizing that TransCanada is a poster child for how greedy, corrupt corporations are dominating the other 99%, the group made an exception to their general rule of no issue-specific politics by explicitly opposing the tar sands pipeline.

Renewable Rider Tom Weis listens to Alex Pourbaix, President of Energy and Oil Pipelines for TransCanada, talk about the company’s planned reroute around Nebraska’s Sandhills at a November press conference in Lincoln, NE. Contrary to numerous media accounts, Mr. Pourbaix clearly states the company’s proposed Keystone XL reroute is NOT designed to avoid the Ogallala Aquifer — the drinking water supply of millions of Americans and source of one-third of our nation’s farmland irrigation water — leaving this critical U.S. resource exposed to toxic tar sands pipeline leaks.

Renewable Rider Tom Weis talks with Ron Seifert after he races, and beats, a coal train. The two are biking the Jamaica North bike trail together, heading south out of Lincoln, NE, shortly after President Obama’s cynical decision to punt on Keystone XL. For more on that, check out: “Now Is the Time to Fight the Keystone Pipeline.”

Renewable Rider Tom Weis gets a tour of the green industrial revolution in action courtesy of Ruth Douglas Miller, Director of KSU’s Wind Application Center. “Resourceful Kansas” is a joint renewable energy efficiency project of KSU, Riley County and GBA Architects & Engineers, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Designed to save the taxpayers money, the project is a microcosm of the nascent green industrial revolution. Wind turbines, solar systems, geothermal heating, skylights, and high efficiency lighting and insulation are all display at the Riley County Public Works property on the outskirts of Manhattan, KS.

Related Reading:

Right Off the Bat: Baseball, Cricket, Literature, and Life

Liquid fuels from oil shale and tar sands, 1972 (Chemical process review)

Landowner's Guide to Conservation Easements

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl

Chemical Composition of Everyday Products

Here’s how my talk went:

I want to tell you a story of how a skinny Haitian chicken and a bowl of beet and cabbage soup turned my world upside down and helped me think differently about how we might deal with the crazy explosion of lifestyle-driven chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and obesity — what I like to call DIABESITY!

How can we even think about solving this problem that will cost the global economy $47 trillion over the next 20 years and by the end of this decade kill 50 million people a year, killing more than twice as many people as infectious disease?

How do we think about a world — where now there are more people who are overweight than are starving?

How do we think about a world where there soon will be half a billion diabetics and almost a billion pre-diabetics and only a fraction of doctors and health care workers needed to take care of them? These are not just diseases of affluence, but are exploding in the poorest countries on earth.

So what does a skinny Haitian chicken have to do with rethinking how we approach chronic lifestyle-driven diseases? My rethinking started on Jan. 1, 2010 — the first day of the first month of the first year of this new decade. I had just finished a book about Paul Farmer, who successfully tackled the worst diseases in the worst places on the planet.

Paul Farmer successfully treated TB and AIDS — which everyone thought were untreatable in the face of extreme poverty in places like Haiti, Lima or Rwanda.

Paul realized we didn’t need a new advance in science or a new medication but something very simple — to rebuild community and connection in broken communities.

Paul’s genius was his insight that the key to solving insoluble health care problems was each other, was people helping people, or what some call peer support. Paul’s genius was the idea of accompaniment — accompanying each other to health, helping each other build back their communities with clean water, food, going to each other’s houses, making sure their sick neighbor knew how and knew when to take their medication.

And it wasn’t just a better delivery model for the right drug or the right information. The community was part of the medicine, part of the cure.

That was how I spent that first day in January of the new decade — an auspicious day. Thinking about how Paul’s insight about infectious disease might help us solve our epidemic of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

And as this idea was shaking up my world, disaster happened. On Jan. 12, 2010, just a few days later, that massive earthquake hit Haiti.

Two days after that, I arrived at sunset with Paul Farmer, who I just called out of the blue because I knew he would know where to go and asked him to come with us on a small plane with our small medical team. We arrived into chaos, devastation and overwhelming suffering. We unloaded our plane and went directly to the main public health hospital in Port au Prince.

After a week of 20-hour days amidst amputated limbs and amputated lives, I finally got to sit and eat a meal of rice and some skinny Haitian chicken with the director of the hospital — Dr. Alix Lassegue. As we had our first meal in days and tried to find some meat on that skinny chicken I asked Dr. Lassegue what was the most common admitting diagnosis here before the earthquake — here in the main public hospital in Haiti that served 8 million people!

I thought he would say TB, AIDS, or malaria. But here in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere in one of the poorest countries in the world it wasn’t TB or AIDS but diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure — 90 percent of which are preventable and often reversible through lifestyle.

Those chronic diseases have reached every corner of the globe and touch everyone on the planet — it is you or someone you know or love. Most of these conditions — heart disease, high blood pressure, many cancers, and stroke, even dementia — are caused by the same root problem.

Diabesity: the continuum from a little bit of belly fat to pre-diabetes to full-blown Type 2 diabetes.

I am thinking to myself while sitting in the crumbling hospital building in Haiti where diabetes was the main admitting diagnosis, “How do we deal with this crazy, overwhelming problem of obesity driven disease that’s getting worse and worse, and costing more and more despite our best efforts to treat it with medication and surgery?”

How do we deal with the fact that diabesity will soon affect 1 in 2 Americans — that’s every other person in America. And that full-blown Type 2 diabetes affects nearly 1 in 10 Americans and 1 in 5 African-Americans and 1 in 4 Medicare patients. And that 1 in 3 Medicare dollars is spent on diabetes. And that 1 in 3 children born today will have Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime.

And that 80 percent of the world’s diabetics are in poor countries, and that one-half all diabetes and almost all of pre-diabetics are not even diagnosed.

So it was in the aftermath of being up to my elbows in blood, pus and broken bones, broken lives and broken hearts that I first understood what I had completely neglected over the last 15 years of diving deep into systems biology and genomics.

I was so hyper-focused on biological networks and systems medicine or network medicine as the answer to solving the puzzle of chronic disease — on turning the dials on biology for individuals — that I missed something much more important.

That most chronic disease is very often a social disease and not just a problem of biology!

We know that you are more likely to be overweight if your friend’s friend is overweight than if your parents are overweight. That the genetic threads that connect us may be less important than the social threads — that our social connections and our ancient need to be part of a tribe may be a way out of our epidemic of chronic disease.

That just maybe sociogenomics — or how social networks influence health and disease and how social networks alter gene expression, are where we need to look for the solution.

In some places, gastric bypasses are being touted as a cure for diabetes. As if you could cut out a poor lifestyle like a wart. Is this really a solution for our 400 million diabetics at a cost of $30,000 per person — or $12 trillion?

We can’t medicate our way out of a bad diet. Taking a statin while downing a double cheeseburger, fries and a soda just doesn’t make any sense.

But there has been a new drug discovered that can beneficially modulate thousands of genes and enhance the function of dozen of hormones and regulate tens of thousands of protein networks and can prevent cure and even reverse most chronic disease. And it works faster, better and is cheaper than any other drug discovered and it is available to almost everyone on the planet right now.

It is food. We now know that food is information, not just calories, and that it can upgrade your biologic software. The majority of chronic disease is primarily a food-borne illness. We ate ourselves into this problem, and we have to eat ourselves out of it.

High cholesterol is not a statin deficiency, and diabetes is not an Avandia deficiency. It is not doing the same things better. What we are doing is not really working. It is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Statins increase the risk of diabetes by 48 percent in women. Avandia, the No. 1 blockbuster drug for diabetes, killed nearly 200,000 from heart attacks since it was introduced on the market in 1999.

So statins designed to prevent heart attacks causes diabetes and the drugs designed to treat diabetes cause heart attacks.

This is Pharmageddon.

Even if those approaches worked, we just don’t have enough doctors and hospitals and health care workers to deal with the massive number of chronically sick people on the planet.

After Haiti I realized that the answer had to be somewhere else. If social networks can promote unhealthy lifestyles, maybe we can use social networks to create health.

We know how to prevent, treat and even reverse diabetes and heart disease, so why don’t we do it, why have we failed so miserably at this?

We can eradicate Type 2 diabetes just like Larry Brilliant helped eradicate smallpox.

But people give up when they try to think about the obesity and chronic disease that’s killing most people on the planet.

It’s TOO overwhelming. It is TOO big. But I don’t think it is — I think it is a small problem, it’s a local problem, a community problem.

After I came back from Haiti I lay awake thinking about how are we REALLY going to deal with this; I thought maybe we need to decentralize and democratize health care.

I realized that if you were sick, the best place to create health might NOT be the doctor’s office or clinic but your own community with a little help from your friends.

I realized that getting healthy is a team sport! Click here for Part II of the story.

Let’s all do this together!

To help facilitate your journey to health, click here to join my online community.

Now I’d like to hear from you…

Do you think community is an effective cure for chronic illness?

Have you joined with friends or family to take back your health; how has that worked for you?

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.

For more by Mark Hyman, M.D., click here.

For more on personal health, click here.

Related Reading:

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

Lonely Planet Brazil (Country Travel Guide)

Diabetes Rising

The Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life

Be the Change: Transforming Health Care from the Inside Out

Which would you rather have: good sleep or good sex? This is the dilemma that many couples are facing when it comes time to buy a new mattress. It seems that sales of those super-plush mattresses are on the rise, and with good reason — we sleep better on them. But, according to a recent Barron’s report, they also have a serious downside — bad sex.

More from Blisstree:
6 Foods To Help You Sleep
When 5 Ingredients Or Less Isn’t Good For You
5 New Movies That Tackle Health

New York sex therapist Sari Eckler explained it best to Barron’s:

There’s a lack of resistance for the knees and feet. And whoever is on the bottom is sinking into the bed.

Or, as an owner of one of these plush mattresses wrote on an Internet message board:

It’s like trying to do it in quicksand.

Ah, point taken.

The type of mattresses, in particular, that are the culprit for bad sex are memory-foam mattresses. And regardless of what happens — or doesn’t happen — on them, they continue to be the fastest-growing segment of mattresses out there. In fact, their market share has gone from 14 percent to almost 20 percent in the past eight years.

Meaning, those of us in the market for a new mattress value sleep over sex. Or at least sex under the sheets. But who can blame us? Insomnia sucks, and roughly 60 million Americans suffer from it.

As Gayle Greene, author of “Insomniac”, explained to NPR, few people realize just how debilitating sleep deprivation can be:

Sleep is the fuel of life. It’s nourishing; it’s restorative. And when you are deprived of it, you are really deprived of a basic kind of sustenance.

She went on to explain that people who suffer from insomnia or any sleep disruptions will do whatever it takes to keep it away:

I don’t manage this beast. I live with it. I live around it. I bed down with it every night, gingerly, cautiously, careful not to provoke it. I do my best to placate it, domesticate it, dull its claws, avoid its fangs, knowing that at any moment it can pounce on me and tear me to bits.

And for many of us, that means choosing a plush mattress. Even if that means sex needs to take place elsewhere. Kitchen table, anyone?

Related Reading:

Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Urban and Industrial Environments)

Naughty Black Therapist: An Erotic Story (Interracial Sex Black Woman and White Man)

Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet

April Showers (multiple partners / public sex / bi-sexual) (Consequences)

Routledge Library Editions: Women, Feminism and Literature: Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism (RLE: Women, Feminism and Literature) (Volume 8)

There are phrases using fear as an acronym, such as: F*ck Everything And Run, or False Evidence Appearing Real, or Failure Expected And Received. I like some of those, but over the years I have developed a FEAR strategy kit designed to help me live… well, if not fearlessly, at least without the constant threat of fear fogging my vision. These are the things I’ve found help the most.

Admit I’m feeling fearful. I must “out” it. Say it out loud. I cannot allow it to sit, twisting and churning in my gut, while pretending it isn’t there. Pretending it isn’t there doesn’t help and never makes it go away. On the other hand, allowing myself to describe it in intricate detail often makes it worse, like feeding a dragon, or adding fuel to a fire (pick a cliché), so it seems there’s a balance needed. It’s about feeling the fear, acknowledging it, and then trying to trudge along anyway. One of the sayings regarding fear advises, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” The “it” is often a moving target, particularly as this morning’s fear was all around future thinking involving Emma.

Which leads me to the two most detrimental things that propel me into fear and despair faster than anything else when it comes to my daughter: future thinking and comparing her to others. “Compare and despair,” they say. It is deadly, and it doesn’t matter whether I am comparing her to another autistic child or to a neuro-typical child. It is deadly.

Recently, I came upon a blog written by a mother of two autistic boys whom she described as being “on the severe end of the spectrum.” As I continued reading, I found myself saying silently, “But Emma cannot do that. Emma doesn’t read at that level, Emma doesn’t… Emma can’t….”

I finally had to stop reading. I felt a surge of anger, and then after my anger had abated, I felt tremendous sadness. What did this mean for Emma? If these two boys were severe, Emma was barely maintaining a foothold on the severe end of the spectrum.

Compare and despair. The insidiousness of comparing is that it feels so right, so reasonable, and yet is based on very little actual fact. We cannot know what anyone else’s life is really like. We get snippets and snapshots, but that is all. It’s not a complete picture. It’s one small part of something. Yet when comparing I am basing my assumptions on that one tiny piece while convinced I’m seeing the whole person.

On the heels of comparing comes future thinking. If Emma isn’t able to tell time by X age, isn’t able to understand the concept of money by X, isn’t able to shower and wash her own hair by X, then A, B, and C will happen. The future, far from holding the promise of subject matter that will transport and engage her, deepening friendships and career opportunities, instead becomes a wasteland of frightening scenarios, one more horrific than the next.

Fear has a way of sliding in through the back door, oozing between my thoughts, thrusting itself into any and all thinking if I allow it to. So I’ve learned I have to cut it off at the pass. If I see it coming I try to turn my back. “Don’t go there,” I tell myself. Sometimes I have to sit and hope the fear will wash over me and leave. I hope I’ll be able to stay upright. I hope I’ll be strong enough not to cave under the weight.

That’s the thing about fear: It can be so all-encompassing, so random, so… sprawling.

Make a list. This is the step I take when I feel as though I can’t breathe. Make a list. Prioritize. What needs to be done? This past month I have not been as diligent with Emma’s reading and writing, and as a result, she has not been progressing as rapidly as she had been. I’ll need to figure out how to manage my time better to get back to that. Emma’s literacy program is one that continues to fill me with hope and gives me energy. Seeing her progress has been the single most helpful thing in keeping the fear at bay.

I make a list of the things she’s done showing tremendous forward movement. I print out her drawings, samples of her writing. These are the things I cling to like so many scraps of wood in the middle of an ocean of fear. Just keep my head above the water, just hold on, keep treading, keep breathing, it will be okay. It will be okay.

Make a list. Check.

Don’t pretend I’m not feeling the fear. Out it. Check.

Feel it. Check.

Keep moving forward. Check.

I know these things won’t completely eradicate the fear, but they are the things I know to do that will help, if not in this next moment, then in the next few hours, the next few days. The fear will dissipate. It always does.

Take a deep breath.

FEAR = Feel Everything And Remain.

For more by Ariane Zurcher, click here.

For more on autism, click here.

For more on becoming fearless, click here.

For more on Emma’s journey through a childhood of autism, go to Emma’s Hope Book.
Emma’s Hope Book has been nominated as one of the Top Autism Blogs, vote for it by clicking this ‘link‘ and clicking on the “like” button opposite Emma’s Hope Book.

Related Reading:

Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases

Spectrum 17: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art

Time-Saver Details for Exterior Wall Design

Don't trudge it, Rudge it (A Foulis motorcycling book)

The Social Skills Picture Book Teaching play, emotion, and communication to children with autism

Officials said the blaze that scorched 12 square miles was 85 percent contained late Saturday night, compared with the previous report of 45 percent containment.

The fire, which started Monday about 20 miles northwest of Fort Collins, had prompted officials to evacuate about 80 homes, but all residents were allowed to return by Friday night. No buildings have been damaged, and the blaze was about 45 percent contained Saturday afternoon.

Reghan Cloudman with the U.S. Forest Service said the area received about 0.15 inches of rain Saturday morning, which “is better than nothing.” Scattered rain storms moved through the area in the afternoon, and temperatures were in the 50s – more than a 20-degree drop from highs during the previous three days.

“The rain is definitely helping firefighters out there,” Cloudman said. “It’s good news, but we don’t want people to let their guard down.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said a camper started the fire with an outdoor stove in the Roosevelt National Forest and was unable to stamp it out.

The Colorado blaze, which has required the resources of more than 500 firefighters, two planes and five helicopters, was one of several burning in the West.

Firefighters have been able to slightly tame fires in Arizona thanks to slowing winds.

A 10-mph breeze helped firefighters get a wildfire that forced the evacuation of some small mountain towns about 85 miles north of Phoenix below 13,000 acres. Officials say the fire was about 10 percent contained, about the same the night before, and had nearly 900 firefighters battling the blaze.

It’s one of four raging fires in a state that has been hit hard by drought.

Wildfires also have charred terrain in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah.

_ In Nevada, a fire grew to 27 square miles and threatened sage grouse and mule deer habitat. No homes were in danger, and no injuries were reported. The blaze was about 50 percent contained Saturday and remains under investigation.

_ In New Mexico, crews battled a lightning-caused fire that has scorched 545 acres in the Gila National Forest in the southwestern part of the state. No structures were at risk, and no injuries were reported. About seven trails remained closed in the forest and more than 110 firefighters around the state were helping battle the blaze Saturday.

_ In Utah, rain and cooler temperatures helped slow a wildfire that burned nearly 2 square miles in the western part of the state. Firefighters contained the blaze late Friday. No structures were threatened, and no injuries were reported. Authorities say the fire was sparked accidentally Thursday by a passing car.

_ Meanwhile, in Southern Oregon, crews worked Saturday to extinguish a 462-acre wildfire near the California and Nevada borders. The fire eight miles east of Lakeview, Ore., near Highway 140 was not immediately threatening people or property, but firefighters said they were concerned hot spots could ignite later in the fire season. The fire is believed to be human-caused and is burning on private land and in the Fremont-Winema National Forest.

___

Associated Press writers Russell Contreras, Martin Griffith, Nigel Duara and Dan Elliott contributed to this report.

Related Reading:

Cool hand Mike.(Mike Dombeck, former chief of U.S. Forest Service): An article from: OnEarth

Drop...Dead: The DJ Murders

Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words

Wildfires

The Smoke Eaters: The Story Of A Fire Crew (1905)

A 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association showed that less than 10 percent of participants looked at the calorie content of a nutrition label. Understandably so. There are so many confusing terms; who can be expected to keep up? In this article, I’ve provided you with a dictionary of the top seven common nutrition terms and exactly what they mean. Print this out and take it with you next time you’re out shopping. You’ll never second guess your choices again!

High

In order for a food label to claim that their product is high in a nutrient (e.g., high in fiber) one serving must provide 20 percent of the Daily Value. If the food contains 10-19 percent, then it’s considered a good source.

Low Carb

Surprisingly, there are no set guidelines for this claim. FDA? This leaves a lot of room for misleading labeling and frivolous purchasing. Often, when a high carbohydrate food is modified to become a low-carb food, the fat and calorie content goes up. It’s better to choose foods that are naturally low in carbohydrates such as nuts (in moderation), tofu and of course, vegetables.

Low Sodium

Foods that claim to be low sodium must contain 140 milligrams or less per serving. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend fewer than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day to prevent hypertension and risk for stroke. Needless to say, this is an important label to pay attention to!

BPA-free

BPA-free products have become a hot topic right now. BPA stands for bisphenol A, which is an industrial chemical used to make certain plastics, particularly those used in the food industry. The American Chemistry Council stands by their claim that products that contain BPA pose no risk to consumers, yet other associations feel differently. There are various products that are BPA-free including cans, baby products and beverage containers. I’m addicted to my Bobble, which is a completely green, self-filtering water bottle free of BPA! You’ll need to replace the filter from time to time, but one filter is equal to 300 single-serve bottles.

Non-GMO

Genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) are crops that have been modified in a lab to remain resistant to herbicides and increase nutritional content. Often referred to as Franken-food, this experimental farming practice represents 80 percent of the North American crops, yet 53 percent of consumers claim they wouldn’t buy something that’s been genetically modified. To be absolutely certain about the status of your favorite food, check out the Non-GMO Project, which provides a complete list of foods that have gone through their rigorous verification process. Large food companies are also taking the guesswork out of GMOs. Recently, Kashi released a promise that by 2014 all of their existing cereal products will be non-GMO verified if they are not already.

Enriched

Not to be confused with fortified, enriched means that the nutrients have been added back into a food that may have lost them during the refining process. People often think that this means the food has additional vitamins and minerals, but that’s not the case. Food companies simply put back what was once there. The most common example of this is enriched flour. During the refining process, essential B vitamins and iron are lost; therefore, they are added back in.

Fortified

The fortification process means that an item has added vitamins and minerals in addition to the ones that are naturally-occurring. Plenty of foods are fortified to ensure adequate nutrition for the general population. For instance, milk is fortified with Vitamin A and D and pasta and bread with folic acid, an essential nutrient in preventing neural tube defects in infants.

My belief is that healthful, wholesome products belong in your kitchen cabinets as much as they belong in mine. That’s why I created Bestowed, a monthly membership service designed to introduce you to the best, most healthy products on the market. Each month, my team and I select five products that we love and send them to you by mail. Find out more on bestowed.com.

For more by Heather Bauer, RD, CDN, click here.

For more on diet and nutrition, click here.

Related Reading:

Nutrition labels, round 2.(Center for Science in the Public Interest)(Column): An article from: Nutrition Action Healthletter

Beating Cancer with Nutrition, book with CD

The Anthem Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)

American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide

A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: For The Use Of Students (1916)

Week One
Love yourself. Every morning tell yourself how great you are. Really lay it on thick. Say, “I love you,” out loud in the mirror while smiling.

Week Two
Switch to eating only real food. Yes, factory food is everywhere, but I have been in the most horribly toxic food environments and have managed to find something real, or close to it. Many diet books such as mine, Weight Loss Made Easy, have several weeks of breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes. Cook a bunch of things at once. Pick the recipes you like and can whip together.

Week Three
Start exercising. All you have to do is break a sweat every day. You can exercise for 10 minutes before you take a shower. If you can do more, great, but if that’s all you can do then be consistent. You can jump rope, do sit-ups, get some free weights and learn how to use them. Do a little yoga.

Week Four
Commit to getting enough sleep. Don’t stay up till all hours. Your body needs repair time.

Week Five
Be mindful. If you can’t formally meditate, then tie a red string around your wrist. Every time you notice it, remind yourself to be in the present moment.

Week Six
Find and an enlightened hormone doctor and make an appointment to see where you are hormonally. I believe bioidentical hormones have saved me. I have been on them for 16 years and would never, ever give them up.

Week Seven
Now it’s time to start weeding toxins out of your life. Get rid of all chemical self and home care products. Buy chemical-free cosmetics. Toss out weirdly coated pots and pans (you can buy affordably-priced stainless steel at TJ Maxx), get rid of your microwave, have a water purification system put in (reverse osmosis, not the cheapie counter ones — they don’t filter much). Be mindful of the toxins you expose yourself too. Toxins age you!

Week Eight
Face off with your addictions: smoking and caffeine (sodas, coffee, tea, energy drinks) are two biggies.

Throughout your transformation, express gratitude. Research has demonstrated that gratitude is a powerful force that can radically alter your life in a good way. Be sure to direct some of that gratitude to your physical self for all of your efforts. You deserve it!

For more by Nancy Deville, click here.

For more on wellness, click here.

Related Reading:

Kristen Suzanne's ULTIMATE Raw Vegan Hemp Recipes: Fast & Easy Raw Food Hemp Recipes for Delicious Soups, Salads, Dressings, Bread, Crackers, Butter, Spreads, Dips, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Desserts

Secrets about Bioidentical Hormones to Lose Fat and Prevent Cancer, Heart Disease, Menopause, and Andropause, by Optimizing Adrenals, Thyroid, Estrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone, and Growth Hormone!

Bioidentical Hormones Made Easy!

20 Quick and Easy Dinner Recipes (Quick and Easy Recipes)

30 Minute Meals Recipes includes Easy Dinner Recipes, Healthy Dinner Ideas and Simple Recipes that can be made in 30 Minutes or Less for Busy Moms, ... Discover 30 minute meals for busy families!

She smiled, took a sip of beer, and said, “If you figure out how, pass the secret on to me.” Accepting our bodies — and meaning it — is harder than it seems. I don’t want to live my life always five or 10 or 30 pounds away from being okay with myself. I’m 5’5″, 155 pounds, and as I’ve been informed numerous times by men on the street, I have a motor in the back of my Honda (though this is conveyed to me less frequently now that I’m 32 and nearly always walking with a kid hanging from each of my arms). Intellectually, I know there’s nothing wrong with me or my body, but I can’t shake the idea that I would be a better person if I were thinner.

I am roughly the same weight that I’ve been since I was a teenager, though I’ve been significantly lighter twice before. The first time was during a phase in college when I mistook crystal meth for a study drug. The second was during a period of crippling depression. Both times I was delighted by my thinness, but the way I got there was so inauspicious that I cringed when people complimented me. Likewise, after every bout with stomach flu someone will tell me, “You look great! Have you been dieting?” So deeply do we cling to the idea that people who are thin look better than people who are not that we can overlook the dead eyes and yellow skin of a woman who hasn’t digested food in three days.

Though I carry a fair amount of fat, I’m quite fit. I work out most days of the week, dropping my two toddlers off at the YMCA’s childcare and exercising like a beast. I’m happy for the exertion and the break from being a stay-at-home mom to two tiny people who cannot yet wipe their own heinies. Even better, it helps me work out the underlying anxiety that has resulted in me being the kind of person who used to use crystal meth to study. I do studio cycling, Pilates, gravity strength training, any and everything. But I never lose weight. I just get stronger and hungrier.

I’m not an idiot. I understand that if I ate less I would slim down. I’ve dropped five or 10 pounds here and there before, but eventually my weight inevitably creeps back to 155 and I have to decide if I’m going to diet again, go the rest of my life without eating food I enjoy, or just learn to deal with having a big butt. I choose my butt. I eat well, and prepare healthy meals for my kids (or just as likely, reheat a healthy prepared meal from Trader Joe’s). Soda is strictly forbidden in my house. I go to the farmer’s market to load up on fruits and veggies. I refrain from shoving entire wedges of cheese into my mouth despite the occasional desire to do just that.

Then again, I like to dig into a plate of fries when I go to the zoo with my kids. Beer tastes decisively better than skinny feels. I will never drink a Skinnygirl margarita. So I remain a decisively pear-shaped woman in a beanpole’s world. I am strong, healthy and could probably hold my own in a bar fight should the necessity arise, but in no way do I resemble typical depictions of a healthy woman. I am fine with that. Really, I am. Except for when I see my reflection in a shop window, a full-body photograph of me, or have to go to a wedding. The rest of the time is cool. Oh wait. Also dressing rooms. Dressing rooms are the worst! Also, whenever “Fat Bottomed Girls” is playing in my vicinity, I worry that someone is sending me a message. But still, I love that song. I even have a soft spot for Sir Mix-a-Lot. However, I will probably always feel a twinge of failure when I look at my body.

The next time I got together with my friend over beers, I told her my new method for accepting my size. Every time I grumble to myself about a perceived flaw, I say to myself, This is my body. I have gestated and birthed two wild children and now I manage to keep up with them. I eat yummy food, laugh hard every day, have a sexy husband and am rocking the hell out of this haircut. I am intensely, frantically, fantastically alive. Keep up the good work, me, and stay awesome. It’s a sort of mantra for someone who doesn’t usually go in for mantras. Maybe if I say it enough I won’t need it anymore, but in the meantime, it does the trick.

For more by JJ Keith, click here.

For more on becoming fearless, click here.

Related Reading:

Taming the Beast

The Whole-Food Guide to Overcoming Irritable Bowel Syndrome: Strategies and Recipes for Eating Well With IBS, Indigestion, and Other Digestive Disorders (The New Harbinger Whole-Body Healing Series)

Affronts, Insults & Indignities

Dr. Nev's Look and Learn Beginner Books: 3 Books on Colors, Days of the Week, and Fun Words (Picture Books for Young Children)

The Healthy Gut Workbook: Whole-Body Healing for Heartburn, Ulcers, Constipation, IBS, Diverticulosis, and More (The New Harbinger Whole-Body Healing Series)

Often, my spring-cleaning list becomes my fall list and then my winter list. Sometimes an item stays on my list for years, recurring like a garden perennial, only less lovely, its blooms scented with failure. See, it’s already mid-May, more than halfway through spring, and I’m only just getting around to writing about this.

Where does this human passion for the list come from? And why isn’t it accompanied by a passion for execution? Is it simply that we have much to do and not enough time to do it in, or is the cause more psychologically and spiritually complex?

Likely it’s both. Since I’m not a psychologist or a priest, I won’t theorize. But I’d like to share how I’m approaching spring cleaning this year with the hope that you might find it helpful — and that declaring this approach publicly will help me keep my word. This year, my list looks similar to prior year’s lists, but keeping in mind the words of a wise man who said, “I don’t just listen to the words you say. I listen to why you speak, and why I listen,” I’m resolving to see the reason I make my list in the first place.

I’m a natural list-maker. Lists help me manage time. They provide a structure, a reference point, each item a bell sounding my priorities. But like anything, lists can be taken too far. Certain things are not so conducive to being enumerated. Love, for example, despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous poetic counting of its ways.

It would be useful to order my bookshelves — poetry with poetry, novels with novels — so that when I go looking for something, I have a chance of finding it. My neighbors would probably appreciate if I tamed my backyard. But this year, instead of just getting right down to these tasks, or putting them off, I’m going to pause as I put each job on the list, note why I’m putting it there, and — this is important — let go of my attachment to seeing it done.

What’s the point of making the list, you might ask, if you don’t plan to follow through? It’s not that I don’t hope to follow through, or plan to. I love that cleared-out, fresh-cut-grass feeling that comes from completion, from putting things in their proper places and liberating forgotten, unused objects to a new life. I’m the one who purges in our house — ask my husband, who believes that the minute we give something away, we’re going to need it. Sometimes he’s right. But I still believe in the ultimate value of getting rid of stuff we could do without.

This year, the backyard is on my list, as it usually is, a perennial item for various reasons, one of them being that it is hidden from view. The grass is long and weedy. Ivy and blackberries encroach. Mint has taken over along the fence. Plans for new landscaping, a writing shed, and a wood-burning sauna remain just plans, something my husband and I talk about from time to time, like we talk about riding bikes in Asia.

Today, as I write down “backyard cleanup,” I pause. I remember how last month my sweet orange tabby Jai lay in the grass, scooping up the scents in the air with his nose and purring, the week he died. I remember the beautiful, twisted-bark juniper tree that used to shade a section of the yard before a fungus killed it and we had to cut it down. I picture the mother deer and her two fawns who made their beds in the long grass and stared solemnly at us as we peered back at them from the bedroom window. I think of planting lettuce seedlings in the bed now occupied by the mint, pulling off a few tender leaves for a dinner salad.

The words themselves, “backyard cleanup,” don’t evoke the feelings these memories and images do — and thus, it’s easy to forget why I really do want to spend a day or two in the yard as the season tilts into summer. This is the list behind the list: mourning my cat, connecting with the natural world, tasting its gifts. These are good reasons to get out in the yard and work, reasons my body can get behind. And if my body gets behind it, my heart and mind are also behind it, and I can do what I actually want to do.

It’s not about crossing “backyard cleanup” off the list, though there is satisfaction in that. It’s not what I do — the item on the list — that ultimately matters. What matters is why I put the task on the list in the first place. That’s the energy that drives intention. Once I find that, I’m in my work clothes, pulling on a sun hat and gloves.

That said, if the job doesn’t get done — if life has other plans and I’m diverted from my backyard cleanup project, that’s all right too. Jai was as content in the long grass as a lion on the African savannah. The deer will enjoy the blackberries. And in the meantime, I won’t indulge guilt or feel deficient. Those are things I can definitely do without.

For more by Colleen Morton Busch, click here.

For more on mindfulness, click here.

Related Reading:

The Georgia Review Volume LI, Number 1: Spring 1997

Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn

Around the Year: Once Upon a Time Saints

Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance

Four Phases of Love

I should be used to that word by now. After all, life is a dizzying array of exits. We say goodbye to childhood pals when they move, mom and dad when we set off for college and beloved grandparents and devoted pets when they pass. We reluctantly leave comfort zones, old boyfriends and girlfriends, cities we love, friends we’ve outgrown and years gone by. And we say good riddance to unhealthy habits, tired trends, bad jobs and worse bosses.

But regardless of the experience or the preparation, it never gets easier. Whether it’s your first or your hundredth goodbye, a stale relationship or a lackluster work life, whether you’re thrilled or sad to depart, it’s often tougher than it seems. It’s difficult because, most likely, it started (and perhaps ended) well. At one point or another, it was promising; there was hope, for a better life, for something beautiful. Usually, there were good times, lessons learned and dreams fulfilled. And, then, somewhere, somehow it changed. It’s complicated because, if you’re like me, you associate yourself with that role. Too often, we define ourselves by our jobs in this world: “I work at X,” “I’m so and so’s mother, ____’s wife.” But when those relationships have expired, matured or evaporated, what’s left?

I had been talking about it for years, planning it for months yet, still, when it happened, it was jarring. It was time to leave Us Weekly. At seven years, it was longer than any romantic relationship I’ve had, almost double my stint at college and two-thirds of my New York experience. I sacrificed weddings, holidays, birthdays and personal relationships, and compromised being witness to loved ones’ lives, and living my own, for my profession. But, I received much in return. With the extra hours, long nights and exhausting weekends came a wealth of experience, knowledge and confidence, not to mention some invaluable friendships.

And while I made a conscious effort to stay out of the scene, remain grounded and maintain my non-industry-based relationships, to some extent, I got caught up in it all. I became used to the clout and the VIP treatment. No longer did I wait in lines, eat at average restaurants or pay for designer duds. I was offered coveted tickets, went to sought-after events and made to feel like I was part of the “in” crowd. Until, I wasn’t.

No sooner had my key card expired than the attention waned. People who I considered friends and mentors, individuals I assumed would be there for me, vanished. When “Natalie from Us Weekly” became just Natalie, to many, including myself during particularly low moments, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. If I could no longer get them in the magazine, provide scoop, be their ally, source of information or gateway to the goods, if they no longer had to suck up to me to get into parties or out of assignments, I was, apparently, not worth the effort. My value had a number and it was up.

When I went from 500 to two emails a day, my phone no longer rang, the expense account dried up and people forgot my address and my name, the days were quiet, really quiet. I alternated from waking with a smile, elated to be free from the stress, pressure and drama, liberated from the absence of favor requests, excited about no appointments or deadlines, only my whims (Morning yoga or afternoon Pilates? Volunteer or veg?), and not wanting to wake, dreading the endlessly isolating day ahead, laying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

To be clear, I made the conscious decision, after working 24/7 for the better part of a decade and saving money, to take some considerable time off. I could have pounded the pavement and most likely secured some sort of job but I opted not to. I realize I’m extremely fortunate to be able to make that choice and count my blessings. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle with a bit of an identity crisis, as I imagine anyone who lost or left their job, went through a breakup or loss of a loved one, or experienced an empty nest would grapple with too.

When you become one with your profession or your label, when you’ve allowed it to define you and your place in this world, it’s a mighty far fall when it’s no longer there to provide you purpose, excuses or a false sense of self. The question is, for a career-driven, relationship seeking, check-the-box society like ours, who are we at the end of the day without our qualifiers?

I’m happy to reveal that after months of stillness, self-discovery, tough questions and, yes, plenty of sleep and pity parties, I’ve come to find what remains is what I knew all along. Without the job, sans the title, I’m still the same girl: full of hope, driven to succeed and a believer in goodness, it was just clouded temporarily by the noise of the industry, allure of the freebies and opinions of others. Sometimes, it seems, you need the exits. For it’s there that you rediscover all you were meant to be.

For more by Natalie Thomas, click here.

For more on emotional wellness, click here.

Related Reading:

Small Changes for a Better Life: Daily Steps to Living Gods Plan for You

Goodbye America: A Great-Grandmother's Personal Childhood Story

How To Beat The Energy Thieves And Make Your Life Better

The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays

TIME for Kids BIG Book of Why: 1,001 Facts Kids Want to Know (Time for Kids Magazine)

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one getting ignored because of my inexperience, and the rejections can be downright vicious. Just last week, Kate called me in tears after attending a media conference with well-known industry bigwigs. After spending months anxiously anticipating meeting her professional heroes, she couldn’t have been more disheartened on the day of the event. Noting that she had been working in the industry for less than a year, most executives simply refused to engage in conversation with her, and the ones that did spoke to her in a condescending, suspicious manner that made her “feel like a kid who was inconveniencing a gathering of distinguished adults.” She flew home categorically disillusioned.

As a proud supporter of the young, I was disgusted at the extent to which she was repeatedly shunned for, essentially, being too inexperienced. Yes, young and ambitious people with bright eyes and open hearts need to learn to accept the cold shoulder of established industry gatekeepers, even when it seems like the only goal of the latter is to prevent new ideas and innovation bubbling to the surface of their tired companies and low-growth industries. But a line needs to be drawn between not fully engaging with the inexperienced (painful, but understandable) and making them feel like they’ve committed a crime with their lack of knowledge and years under their belt (not okay, ever).

More importantly, though, I’m disheartened at the response — at how those with limited experience beef up resumes, wear expensive suits, use industry jargon liberally, name-drop awkwardly, and generally try to paper over cracks in an effort to mask inexperience and appeal more to bosses, investors, or interviewers. Why are we playing dancing bear in the circus of the experienced? Everyone knows that you don’t have “deep expertise in retail” when you’re only three years out of grad school. Trying to sound more experienced than you are is a flawed strategy, so you need to change the way you compete.

Instead of forging the impression of experience, I’d rather we turn the tables and use our inexperience as an advantage in the organizations we work for and the companies we start. In other words, we need to start playing to our strengths.

Being inexperienced means you’re not shackled with decades of service in a narrow vertical and the accompanying entrenched biases and relationships. You have natural qualities to offer that companies spend millions of dollars per year in training budgets trying to replicate in their most senior executives. You question long-held assumptions, cross-pollinating your projects with outside ideas. You don’t have to pander to the person who did you a favor all those years ago, and more generally, you don’t have social capital within your organization to protect. This means you’re pretty free from some huge barriers to innovation: sunk costs, self-interest, and bias. That sense of freedom and independence leads you to think that hitting that stretch goal is possible, which makes achieving it more likely. You tend to think of new solutions quickly, refuse to compromise yourself out of existence, and are a native end-user of technologies that could blow existing business models to bits. All this amounts to at least two things: 1) The best organizations should wage wars for people like you, and 2) you can stop looking for opportunities to appear to be adding value. Instead, you can actually add value.

If those nagging self-doubts return, don’t look up to role models for inspiration; look around at your peers for evidence. Writing Passion & Purpose showed me how countless young people have impacted the world in incredible ways, and how they’re doing this in public, private, and nonprofit sectors, across industries, within established organizations and in their own companies. Most importantly, they’re making a difference in industries that they haven’t spent the better part of their lives in. You can join them.

Inexperience doesn’t equal ineptitude, and we need to stop treating young professionals like second-class citizens. To those of you who think that your inexperience is a chronic disadvantage, stop. Don’t let anyone confuse your inexperience in performing a task with an inability to perform it. Instead, be encouraged and seize the opportunity to remain humble, play to your advantages, and show the world you can do better.

This post was originally published on HBR.org.

For more by Daniel Gulati, click here.

For more on emotional intelligence, click here.

Related Reading:

How To Enjoy Your Life And Your Job

Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress

Bright Eyes; The Story of Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian

Heroes

101 Ultimate Adult Drinking Games : Simple Instructions for Easy Party Games with Shots, Beer, Cards and More - Just Add Alcohol!

Whatever one may think of The Biggest Loser‘s “reality-TV editing” or competitive format, one thing I personally appreciate is that the show acknowledges that the factors contributing to obesity, food addiction, and weight gain go deeper than the surface. Contestants are encouraged to uncover and understand the psychological and emotional roots and implications of their struggle with their weight. When it comes to our relationship with food, there is much more going on than we would often assume. Like any addictive substance, food is often used to cover over or subdue emotional pain. It is used to numb us or soothe us, yet it is also used to torment us or cause us anxiety.

Struggles with eating and weight gain usually start early, when our relationship with food is first established. One contestant on The Biggest Loser described how the physical abuse he experienced throughout his childhood left him with a desire to somehow shield himself, both physically and emotionally. Growing up with a violent and erratic stepfather and a fearful mother who failed to protect him, he used food to “feel bigger,” safer, and comforted. It’s easy to see how such an extreme example of physical abuse could lead a child to start to use food as consolation and weight as armor. However, it is far more difficult to identify how more subtle forms of mistreatment, mis-attunement, and abuse can lead to issues with eating.

As children, we all experience varying degrees of emotional pain. The love, care, and nurturance we get from our caregivers lead us to form a positive sense of self and helps us to create our identity. Yet, no parent or person is perfect. Even the best parents are only attuned to their child’s needs about 30 percent of the time. This means that, as children, each of us was inevitably left lacking certain things we needed. We may have felt rejected, isolated, unseen, or unheard. Conversely, we may have felt intruded on, overly controlled, or intimidated by our parents. All of these factors could have impacted our relationship with food. We literally and figuratively learned how to “feed” ourselves from how we were nurtured by our parents and influential caretakers.

Many of us eat for reasons other than to nourish our bodies or even to enjoy one of life’s pleasures. To understand why we overeat, it’s valuable to identify what the emotions are that lead us to mindlessly snack, overindulge, or binge. Are these feelings familiar? Do they bring up any memories or remind us of ways we felt in our past? Do our patterns of eating remind us of ways we saw our parents use food or other substances? Or conversely, might our actions seem like a reaction to ways we saw our parents use food or other substances?

A woman I know tells a story of her 30-year struggle with her weight. One of her earliest memories is of being barely over a year old and crying through the night for her bottle, while neither her mother nor her father woke to feed her. Night after night, hungry and alone, she would wait, but no one came. Finally, one morning when her mother brought her bottle, the child took the bottle and, even though she was starving, she refused it and threw it on the floor. She recalls that something shut down in her, and she never wanted food from her mother again. As she grew up, her relationship with food was further complicated by her mother’s own struggle with weight and consistent focus on her young daughter’s figure. As a result, the woman grew up suffering from binge eating, over-feeding herself with a desperation that indicated a disconnectedness from her body. She had trouble distinguishing her real feelings of hunger from a desire to fill herself up.

People with eating disorders, both overeaters and anorexics, disregard their own values and personal goals in relation to their health, looks, and lifestyle. They use food to feel bad about themselves, to punish themselves, or to gain a sense of control. Instead of using it to fuel their bodies, they use food to fuel a cycle of self-hatred and self-protection. All of us have an inner coach, or “critical inner voice,” that lures us into destructive behavior then pounces on us the minute we mess up. The critical inner voice is a driving force behind an eating disorder, and to challenge an unhealthy relationship with food, a person must deal with this internal enemy.

We live in a society that supports being slim, sometimes to the extreme. This unrealistic ideal can be used in the service of our inner critic to put ourselves down, to feel inadequate , or to isolate us from the world around us. Failing to identify our critical voices as they come up, leaves us more at risk for falling off the wagon. However, we can challenge our voices by not engaging in the behaviors they are supporting. And even though they may initially become louder, enticing us and telling us we will fail, the more we ignore them, the more they lose their hold on us, and the stronger we become.

To have a healthy body, it is necessary for us to take action on a physical level with diet and exercise; but to have a healthy relationship with food, it is necessary for us to understand ourselves on a deeper emotional level, or to uncover why we eat the way we eat. If we challenge the behaviors alone through diet and exercise, the emotions we were using eating to cover up won’t just go away. Once we identify the feelings and inner voices that perpetuate the cycle of self-hatred and the insensitivity to our body, we can gain control of self-destructive eating habits and not react adversely to pressure and triggers that lead us to abuse food. By taking action on a physical level and taking interest on an emotional level, we can re-establish our relationship with food, with our bodies, with our past, and with ourselves as a whole. We can uncover who we really are, our real wants, desires, and goals, and we can stop engaging in the patterns that get in our way.

Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at PsychAlive.org

For more by Lisa Firestone, click here.

For more on emotional wellness, click here.

Related Reading:

One-Hour Workouts: 50 Swim, Bike, and Run Workouts for Busy Athletes

The Biggest Loser Calorie Counter: The Quick and Easy Guide to Thousands of Foods from Grocery Stores and Popular Restaurants--As Seen on NBC's Hit Show!

Understanding Nutrition

Stop Overeating Today!

Integrative Nutrition

The magnitude-6.0 temblor struck at 4:04 a.m., with its epicenter about 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Bologna at a relatively shallow depth of 5 kilometers (3.2 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Civil defense agency official Adriano Gumina said the quake was the worst in the region since the 1300s. It left bell towers cracked, chunks of church facades lying in the streets, and roofs caved in.

Agency chief Franco Gabrielli put the death toll from quake damage at four – all overnight-shift factory workers who died as buildings collapsed in three separate locations. In addition, he said, two women died – apparently of heart attacks possibly sparked by fear, shortly after the quake rocked the area.

Sky TG24 TV reported one of them was about 100 years old.

Gabrielli said `’dozens” were injured, although it was too soon for a definitive count.

Two of the dead were workers at a ceramics factory in the town of Sant’Agostino di Ferrara, who died when the cavernous building collapsed into a pile of rubble, leaving twisted metal supports jutting out at odd angles amid the mangled roof.

“This is immense damage but the worst part is we lost two people,” said fellow worker Stefano Zeni. News reports said one of the dead had worked the shift of an ill colleague. Elsewhere in the town, another worker was found dead under factory rubble.

In the town of Ponte Rodoni di Bondeno, a worker also died as his factory collapsed, news reports said, citing emergency workers.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his traditional Sunday appearance from his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, said he was `’spiritually close” to those affected by the quake, and asked people to join him in prayers to God for mercy for the dead and relief for the wounded.

Emilio Bianco, receptionist at Modena’s Canalgrande hotel – housed in an ornate 18th century palazzo – said the quake “was a strong one, and it lasted quite a long time.” The hotel suffered no damage and Modena itself was spared, but guests spilled into the streets as soon as the quake hit, he said.

Many people were still awake at 4 a.m. and milling about town since stores and restaurants were open all night. Museums were supposed to have remained open as well, but closed following the bombing Saturday of a school in southern Italy that killed one person.

The epicenter was between the towns of Finale Emilia, San Felice sul Panaro and Sermide but felt as far away as Tuscany and northern Alto Adige. One woman in Finale Emilia told Sky a child had been trapped in her bedroom by falling rubble for two hours before she was rescued.

The initial quake was followed around an hour later by a 5.1-magnitude temblor, USGS said. And it was preceded by a 4.1-temblor.

In 2009, a temblor killed more than 300 people in the central city of L’Aquila, where the historic center is still largely uninhabited and in ruins.

Related Reading:

Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and the Signs Of The Times

Friendship with Jesus: Pope Benedict XVI Talks to Children on Their First Holy Communion

Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER

The Ghost in the Bell Tower (Sweet Valley Twins Super Chiller)

Summary of Information on Synthetic Organic Compounds and Trace Elements in Tissue of Aquatic Biota, Clark Fork-Pend Oreille and Spokane River Basins, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, 1974-96

The research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, incorporated the results of several experiments carried out by the researchers. For one of the experiments, the researchers had study participants come up with specific plans to accomplish either one goal or six goals over a five-day period.

The researchers found that for people with just one goal, having a plan in place helped them to accomplish it. But that planning didn’t help the people who had to accomplish six goals.

This may be because people become overwhelmed when they think of all that has to go in to accomplishing several goals, as well as the applicable obstacles.

“The present findings suggest that when people form specific plans for multiple goals, the difficulty of goal execution becomes more salient, commitment falters, and people fail to follow through on their good intentions,” the researchers wrote in the study.

However, they did find that people were more likely to think it was doable to accomplish multiple goals if they kept in mind that other people have even more goals to accomplish.

Recently, a study in the Journal of Communication showed that even though doing multiple things at once leads to lower quality of work and added stress, we do it because it makes us feel better emotionally.

In that study, researchers found that people were more likely to multitask if they needed to work, study or complete a habitual task. But the researchers found that multitasking wasn’t actually effective in terms of fulfilling those needs.

Related Reading:

GulfPines takes new technology to underserved markets.(GulfPines Communications ): An article from: Mississippi Business Journal

The Prayers of Jesus Participant's Guide: Six In-depth Studies Connecting the Bible to Life (Deeper Connections)

Disciple Short Term Bible Study - Invitation to the New Testament - Participant Book (Disciple Short Term Studies)

First detection of night flight calls by Pine Siskins.(SHORT COMMUNICATIONS)(Report): An article from: The Wilson Journal of Ornithology

Disciple Short Term Bible Study - Invitation to Genesis - Participant Book (Short-Term Disciple Studies)

A park release Saturday says the climber fell about 1,100-feet Friday, while following the West Buttress route to the summit. Witnesses say the climber fell at about 16,200-feet. He was trying to recover a backpack that had started to slide downhill.

A park service mountaineering patrol was behind the climber’s three-person team and called for a helicopter. The victim’s body was flown to Talkeetna, Alaska, after rangers confirmed that the climber had died of injuries.

The victim’s identity has not been released pending notification of family members overseas.

Mount McKinley is North America’s highest mountain.

Friday’s fatal fall is the first serious incident on McKinley during the 2012 mountaineering season.

Related Reading:

The Icebound Land (Ranger's Apprentice, Book 3)

Creating Passion-Driven Teams: How to Stop Micromanaging and Motivate People to Top Performance

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into National Parks

Denali: The Complete Guide

Hunting for Gold in Alaska's Talkeetna Mountains 1897-1951: With a Background Sketch of Alaska's Great Gold-Lode Camps