Author: thompson stephen

I was out recently with some friends and we stopped at a fast food joint. I hate fast food joints, but sometimes everybody else wants to go there, so you just have to make the best of it and find something at least somewhat healthy. If you're forced to eat fast-food, here's a tip to make sure that you're not doing much damage to your body...ALWAYS AVOID the soda and anything deep fried including french fries, hash browns, and anything breaded like chicken nuggets, chicken patties, or breaded fish sandwiches. These are all absolutely soaked in deadly trans fats from the industrial hydrogenated vegetable oils they use to fry all of these items.

Remember, as I've said before, I've seen studies indicating that as little as 1 gram of trans fat per day can have serious degenerative internal effects in your body such as inflammation, clogging and hardening of the arteries, heart disease, various forms of cancer...not to mention packing on the ab flab. That's as little as 1 gram! Consider that a typical fast-food meal of a breaded chicken sandwich (or fish sandwich), along with an order of fries can contain as much as 10 grams of trans fat! Add on a cookie or small piece of pie for dessert (which are usually made with deadly margarine or shortening), and now you're up to about 13 grams of trans fat with that entire meal. If 1 gram a day is slowly killing you, imagine what 13 grams is doing! And that was only one meal that you ate. Some people are consuming 20-30 grams of trans fat per day, and not even realizing what they're doing to themselves internally. Please realize that nobody, I mean NOBODY, is looking out for your health, except for YOU.

Anyway, back to the topic of how to avoid this stuff and eat a reasonably healthy meal on the rare occasion that you're forced to eat fast-food. As for drinks, avoid the sodas...they're nothing but heavily processed high fructose corn syrup which will surely end up as extra belly fat. Water is always the best drink, but if you need something with flavor, try unsweetened or lightly sweetened iced tea. At breakfast, the best choice is an egg, ham, and cheese on an english muffin (not on a croissant, which is full of nasty trans!), or a fruit & nut salad. At lunch or dinner, the best choices are a grilled chicken sandwich, the chili, a grilled chicken salad without croutons (again...croutons = more trans), or even just a plain cheeseburger. The main take-away point from this little fast-food article is that the nastiest stuff at these fast food joints are the sodas and fries, and any other deep fried items.

For any of you that have seen the movie "Super-Size Me", you saw how eating fast food every day absolutely destroyed that guy's health, but did you happen to notice the one guy that was the king of eating big macs (or some kind of burger)? I don't remember what kind of burger it was, but basically this guy has eaten these fast food burgers almost every day of his life for the past 30 years or something like that. Did you notice that he stated that he almost never eats the fries or soda, even though he eats the burgers every day? And he's not necessarily overweight. Now I'm not saying that fast-food burgers made with their refined white bread and low quality beef and cheese are the healthiest thing, but the point is...it's the fries and sodas that are the real health disaster.

Alright, so next time you're out at one of these places, remember these tips and choose smart!
Thompson Stephen is dedicated to helping people stay informed about health and fitness.For more information and in-depth,unbiased reviews,please visit

http://dailytruthaboutabs.blogspot.com.Send a blank email to teejegs02@yahoo.com so as to receive a free e-book on How to Lose Weight in 2 Weeks.

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Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_731468_28.html

Author: Elizabeth Ruby

Increasing collagen is necessary if we want to keep our skin smooth and free from wrinkles and fine lines. It has been scientifically proven that by the age of 25 we start losing collagen levels.

Collagen is a protein that is in all connective tissues. Besides seeing the effects of aging collagen loss to our skin we also can start feeling the effects of arthritis and other diseases from the loss of collagen.

Increasing collagen is vital to good health, and also for young smooth looking skin. If we begin to experience a decrease at the young age of 25, imagine how essential it is the older we get to find ways to prevent the effects from decreasing aging collagen.

There are numerous products available for increasing collagen. Don’t be fooled by the manufacturers that tell you to apply a product with collagen in it and expect to see an increase in your aging collagen. It doesn’t work that way. It is biologically impossible for collagen molecules to be absorbed into your skin, because they are too big.

Also when you use those products, which are mostly made of animal collagen, they can irritate your skin and cause redness. So they are not doing you any good, and they can possibly harm your skin instead of helping it look younger.

So you may be asking what is the best way of increasing collagen? The best and safest way is by applying a cream that will stimulate the body to produce more collagen.

Products like Cynergy TK, Nano-Lipobelle H-EQ10, and active manuka honey. You can find these ingredients in day creams, night creams, body lotions, eye gels, hydrating masks and cleansing masks. I like to use all of them listed, because they work together all day and all night to give me more protection against the fact of aging collagen decrease.

Cynergy TK is the closest thing to a miracle ingredient in skin care products. It reverses the damaging effects of poor skin. It contains Functional Keratin, which is like the protein in our skin. It is powerfully effective in regenerating the skin’s cells, forming new ones. It is also a wonderful moisturizer because it does not clog the pores and it penetrates deeply into the skin helping to heal damaged cells. It works with the body increasing collagen production by stimulating the body to produce more.

Decreasing collagen levels is one of the main reasons we wrinkle as we age. We can firm up the effects of aging collagen by producing more when we apply creams with the above listed ingredients. My website has more information about maintaining healthy skin.

Even if you are only in your mid twenties, it is not too early to be increasing your collagen levels. I wish I had been educated with this information when I was in my twenties and thirties, but even if you are like me and in your fifties or later, there is still help available. Check out my web site and find out where you can order these great products to begin increasing collagen levels and to have younger looking skin.

Elizabeth Ruby is passionate about good health and using healthy products on her skin. She does extensive research on the best products to use and what products to avoid. Visit her website at http://www.your-best-skin-care-site.com/ to find out what products she recommends.

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Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_732078_28.html

It’s holiday time and it’s fun time! Eating, sleeping, playing, partying - we have lots of things to do. But unfortunately, every holiday season brings not only joy, but extra pounds too, and we so don’t need them, do we?

So, in order to shed off a couple of pounds, or at least not to put on any new ones, all we need to do is to use a couple of tips listed below. They are the 13 simple ways I usually use to keep my weight under control and I am sure they will work for you too during this Holiday season:

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While ponytails are often considered the “go-to” hairstyle for many women on a bad hair day, ponytail can be a very versatile style that will suit a wide variety of occasions and events - from a Backyard BBQ on the weekends to the Red Carpet!

From sporty to elegant – there’s a ponytail for you! Here are seven secrets that will take your every day pony to perfection…

Secret 1

Wash and shampoo your hair. Unlike other updoes, a perfect ponytail requires perfectly clean hair. Also, slightly damp hair holds tighter around the side trapping shorter layers in as it dries.

Secret 2

Straight hair works best for ponytail, so blow dry your hair straight with a blow dryer that comes with a concentrator attachment. For naturally wavy or curly hair, apply straitening balm to damp strands.

Secret 3

Left, right and center… decide on whether you want to part your hair in the middle or if you’d rather wear side ponies. Badgley Mischka designers prefer to style their models with a side ponies with side-swept bangs; while Jill Sanders, Ralph Lauren and Versace prefers ponytail with middle part for their runway models.

Secret 4

High or low ponies. Try experimenting with higher or lower ponytails to achieve different looks. High ponies are famous for providing women with “mini” facelifts by putting tension on the face and emphasizing on the cheekbones while low phonies tend to be more sophisticated, modern and sleeker style.

For High Ponytail:

Put your fingers at the crown of your head

Gather up a large section of hair (about 3 inches wide by 2 inches deep)

Tease it on the underneath to give it volume

Run your hairbrush over this section lightly

Pull hair into a ponytail just above the middle point at the back of your head

Secure with a hair-covered elastic or wrap a strand of your hair around the elastic itself

Pin the end of the strand underneath the ponytail with a bobby pin

Finish with some hairspray on the sides and back of the hair

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I tend to watch daytime talk shows at night en masse. Sometimes they make me feel so normal. Sometimes they give me good ideas for writing. And sometimes they just freak me out. Like the show I saw recently (I think it was Oprah) where a father of teenaged kids admitted he couldn't give his wife oral sex because he'd watched the birth of his first daughter.Um.

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When it comes to the web industry (or computer industry for that matter) men generally rule the roost. In 2007 A List Apart published their web design survey results and found that out of nearly 33,000 professionals who participated, 82.8% were male while only 16.1% were female (1.1% gave no answer).

However, as I browse the web today I’m finding more and more inspirational and creative websites from females across the globe. Just because there are more men involved in the web community doesn’t mean that the best stuff comes from us. There’s a certain elegance, beauty and tone that the female touch can add to a design.

I’ve compiled a list of 25 26 female web designers who I believe are hot at web design and whose designs are an inspiration to the whole of the web design community.

Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

33,000 responses is a lot of data. To make sense of it, An Event Apart commissioned statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to translate raw data into meaningful findings. Here we present what they found.

Like many aspects of web design itself, our research process took the form of a dialog and included multiple stages of discovery. Preliminary findings answered some questions and raised others requiring additional study. The more we unearthed, the deeper we dug.

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find.

We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys.

The findings we present here have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession. This report is not the last word on web work; it is only the beginning of a long conversation. Read, reflect, and let us hear from you.

By :- Chicago Website Design

Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service
Dec 22, 2008 10:00 am

Shanghai police have detained a woman for allegedly filming herself having sex and then posting the video on the Internet, where it became a sensation among Chinese Internet users.

"Huang was detained by police on suspicion of disseminating pornographic materials," the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB) said in a statement (in Chinese) that identified the woman only by her surname, Huang.

Pornography is illegal in China, but remains widely accessible on the Internet. The PSB statement, released Friday, did not say when Huang was detained.

Shanghai police said Huang's video, called 'East Building Kappa Girl,' first appeared online sometime before the end of October and spread quickly among Chinese Internet users. The name of the video is an apparent reference to the sportswear section of a Shanghai department store where Huang worked.

"Based on incomplete statistics, in November alone tens of thousands of Internet users searched on Baidu for information about Kappa Girl every day," the PSB statement said, referring to China's most popular Internet search engine.

Huang hoped to capitalize on her notoriety by selling interviews and advertising space on her blog, the official China Daily newspaper reported on its Web site. On her blog, Huang offered to give interviews for 30,000 yuan (US$4,364), the report said.

Source: PC World