#at this pace which is a pace I can’t reliably sustain forever

[loptrcoptr]

My fanfic hit 50k (posted) today and I am just looking around like. …??

good thing Jesus died for everybody’s sins or what have you because I’m just sinful and neurotic and apparently glued to my slutty nerdyass keyboard now

[healthan]

Without further ado, here are 6 steps for successful weight-loss

1. Swap High-Calorie Foods with Low-Calorie Alternatives

When wanting to lose weight, we have to make some cuts. Just like going through your social media and deleting accounts that no longer serve you – we need to take the same approach with certain foods. Please, try not to overhaul your entire diet overnight. Chances are it won’t be sustainable, and you’ll fall back to your old habits.

Instead, swap your high-calorie food choices with equally enjoyable low-calorie options. Don’t rush, take your time. Go at the pace you are comfortable with.

For Example: If your morning routine is stopping by at a coffee shop and getting a muffin and latte for breakfast, maybe switch to black coffee with sweetener. (I have even had clients ask for coconut milk or almond milk / or bring there own to add in to the coffee). Once you are comfortable, swap out the muffin with something healthier – or make a homemade bar.

If your lunch is a burger, fries, and soda, you can switch to diet soda or fizzy water. Later, swap out the fries for roasted potatoes or fruit, turn the hamburger to a grilled chicken sandwich, get rid of the bun to make it a chicken salad. All at a pace you are comfortable with. You can get salad once a week to begin with. Then twice a week, and so on and so forth. Don’t do it all at once.

2. Focus on Adding Instead of Removing

Most diets feel restrictive. They tell you what you can’t eat. Which makes you crave it even more. Instead, focus on adding things to your diet.

For Example: Add more vegetables by ordering or preparing a side salad at each meal. (Be careful of the dressing and added extras). You will notice they will naturally push out the foods that are preventing you from losing weight. If you eat a salad beforehand, you likely won’t finish your fries. Maybe even not want them anymore. Eating a fruit salad after dinner will curb your appetite for dessert.

Increasing your protein intake will help you feel full and prevent muscle loss. Therefore, focus on eating at least 25–30 grams of protein with each meal. When my clients are trying to lose weight, I have this rule: “try to not eat anything unless you are getting at least 25 grams of protein.” This rule prevents you from mindlessly snacking. If you are hungry and need a snack, eat a high protein snack such as Greek yogurt.

Notice how the rule doesn’t forbid you from eating anything! You just have to make sure to get your 25-30 grams of protein. Once you eat that, you rarely feel the need to eat anything else.

3. Move With Purpose

Technology brought many conveniences to our lives. Today, we can commute to work, pay our bills, do grocery shopping, talk to family and friends, get food, and play games without leaving our house. There are days we take less than 2,000 steps. The human body is not designed for this kind of sedentary lifestyle.

That is why you need to be vigilant when it comes to moving. Park your car as far away as possible, take the stairs, walk to your mailbox, carry your groceries out instead of wheeling them in the cart. You need to take every opportunity to move more.

Sometimes it helps to use a step challenge. Most of us use smartwatches/phones these days, and they all come with a fitness tracker. Challenge yourself to take 10,000 steps every day. If you can’t get it, go for a walk after dinner.

The most significant difference between naturally lean and naturally overweight people is how much they move, not how much they eat or their metabolism. The basal metabolism among the population doesn’t vary much. However, NEAT (non-exercise-activity thermogenesis) can vary hundreds, even thousands of Calories. This is the number of calories you burn by activity that is not considered exercise.

4. Plan for Slip-Ups — How to Lose Weight and Live Your Life

There will be days that it will be impossible to maintain your new habits. Weddings, birthday parties, vacations, holidays, and celebrations will happen. You don’t need to avoid these things to lose weight or stay fit. You just need to plan for them.

If you have a dinner event that you know you are going to overeat, prepare for it by eating a little less throughout the day. When you have a big dinner coming up, just get your 25-30 grams of protein 3–4 times throughout the day and lower the calories from carbs and fat. This way, you will enjoy your dinner without any restriction and without going over my calories.

Sometimes you can end up going over your calories. It is not the end of the world. You didn’t ruin your progress. Just move on.

5. Set Small Goals – Celebrate Your Achievements

Who wants to be on a diet forever? We all want to reach our goal weight as soon as possible and be done with dieting. However, this usually causes problems. We either get on a very aggressive diet and be miserable or be disappointed with slow results. Either way, we bounce back and get on a diet roller-coaster.

Instead, the best thing to do is set small short-term goals, achieve them quickly, enjoy our success, rinse, and repeat.

A healthy weight loss diet should last anywhere between 8 to 12 weeks. This is enough time to lose a meaningful amount of weight without experiencing the side effects of weight loss, such as lethargy, food cravings, and mental exhaustion.

You can lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight in this timeframe.

For Example: If you are 200 pounds, and your ultimate goal weight is 150 pounds, don’t set a goal to lose 50 pounds. It will take you too long to lose 50 pounds, and you won’t be able to keep your focus on your goal for that long. Instead, set a goal to lose 10 pounds. Lose the 10 pounds in 8 to 12 weeks, celebrate your success, enjoy your new low weight for a few weeks, and start again.

6. The supplement is also recommended for people with an excessive appetite

Keto Actives is a dietary supplement that facilitates weight loss, especially recommended for people on a ketogenic diet . It contains 8 ingredients concentrated in a reliable product, which  helps to reduce the mass of fatty tissue and fight against its accumulation . In addition, Keto Actives  makes it easier to keep cholesterol and blood glucose levels at an adequate level . The supplement is also recommended for people with an excessive appetite, since  the extracts and minerals included in the product reduce appetite .

Keto Actives provides energy, increases efficiency and focus , due to which it is extremely helpful in adjusting to the state of ketosis. Taking the tablets while following a diet allows the first effects to be observed within a few weeks. It is undoubtedly the dietary supplement that was lacking in the dietary supplement market

Order Now

This way, you will see yourself as a successful person who keeps achieving their goals and reach your ultimate goal in 6 cycles. Who knows, maybe you will find yourself more comfortable, attractive, and happy at a higher weight than 150 pounds

By following these 6 steps, you will notice pounds melt off your body and staying fit will be effortless. Instead of following restrictive diets only to gain the weight back, enjoy your journey to a slimmer body forever.

[asmasheikh]

An Event Business Owner’s Guide to Surviving the Pandemic

Let’s set the scene. You’re the owner of an event business. It’s the end of December, 2019, and you’re toasting to another fantastic year. Another record year. Business is good, and it’s been good for a while now. Your biggest problem, in fact, has been keeping up with the increasing flow of RFPs and new inquiries, on top of all the repeat event work.

Fast forward to March of 2020. Everything has ground to a halt. Everything. You’ve never seen anything like this before. No one has. Sure, there are a number of wildly optimistic industry cheerleaders who continue to insist that all is well. You’re desperate to believe them, but deep down you know they’re ignoring the tsunami slamming into the industry, like the Kevin Bacon character at the end of Animal House shouting “Remain calm! All is well!” while the homecoming parade has disintegrated into chaos. A more mainstream view, however, is that this is temporary, that things will be back to normal in the summer, the fall at the latest. You hang your hopes on this view, as you stare at your revised budget projections, which now have zeros–ZEROS!–in the revenue line for the next four to six months.

Coping Strategies

In mid-March I pulled together a closed-door group of around two dozen owners of event agencies from across the U.S., U.K. and Canada to provide a forum to share how they were handling the pandemic, exchange ideas and resources, brainstorm solutions and generally offer peer-level support for each other. The group met weekly through the end of June, and ranged in size from small to large companies, provided diverse service offerings, and served different client types, but everyone was facing the same brutal business climate.

Here are some of the key strategies that emerged from those group calls, which business owners would be wise to embrace.

1.

Big Picture: The Come-To-Jesus Moment

The Sooner You Face Reality, the Better. Without question, business owners who accept the new reality are faring far better than those clinging to rosy but unrealistic assumptions, like predictions of a return to normal in the winter, spring, etc. If the rosy predictions turn out to be right, the worst-case scenario is you’ve tightened your belt and will emerge a leaner and more focused business. If they’re wrong, however, you’re dead in the water. You need to be brutally honest with yourself so you can plan accordingly. And the brutal truth is…

There Will Be No ‘Return to Normal’. The event industry of 2019 is never coming back. Yes, face-to-face events will return eventually, in greater and greater numbers, but it will likely take several years, and when it does, the landscape will have been altered dramatically. The biggest transformation is that organizations have seen what they can accomplish with virtual events, and that genie is not going back in the bottle. But in-person events will also usher in significant changes, such as much shorter lead times, lower guest guarantees, smaller deposits, more client-friendly cancellation terms, to name a few. Most importantly, there will be no “all clear” signal; in-person events will return in fits and starts, as businesses adapt to the unpredictability of the pandemic.

2. Finance: Cash Is King

This has been a key tenet of business management forever, but the consequences of not having adequate cash have never been more stark than when the pandemic literally zeroed out revenue for months on end. Many small businesses have never had to weather a downturn, and a flush economy can cover up sloppy cash management. This has been especially hard on companies with challenging payment models, like venue sourcing firms who often don’t get paid for their work until months after the event, even though that work was performed months if not years prior. Business owners need to build a realistic cash cushion to weather the storm, such as 6-9 months of operating expenses, in the bank.

Cut Expenses Early & Aggressively: Many owners tried to hold on to as many of their employees as possible, for as long as they could, only to have to shutter the company later when things didn’t improve. While this may seem compassionate and well-intentioned, it’s really not in anyone’s best interests. If the business dies, there are no jobs for anybody, now or when things recover. And it doesn’t necessarily mean firing or furloughing people; you can institute salary reductions. While labor is usually the biggest cost in our industry, owners should also be looking to renegotiate their lease—or eliminate the office altogether—which is often the second biggest expense.

Tap Your Full Credit Line Before the Bank Can Call/Pull It. Many businesses have lines of credit that are usually not fully tapped. Most agreements allow the banks to “call” those credit lines at any time, so in a crisis like the current one, business owners should tap the full amount available to them, before the bank has a chance to change its mind, especially with interest rates being at historic lows.

Talk to Your Clients About Better Payment Terms. Convince them to keep the money they’ve paid you as a credit for other/future services, rather than having to refund any deposits. Many client businesses are doing fine and have a vested interest in making sure a reliable vendor like yourself, who knows them well, survives.

Cancel Your Company Credit Card. Then get a new one. This prevents vendors who have your credit card info on file from charging it without your specific approval. You don’t want to be caught in a situation where a client has cancelled an event but your vendor proceeds to charge you for services related to that event.

Negotiate More Favorable Payment Terms with Suppliers. With little to no revenue coming in, you need to take control of outbound payments, and slow the pace of money going out the door.

3. Personnel: Leading Your Team

Be Brutally Honest and Transparent with Your Team. Winston Churchill is famously credited with his outstanding leadership of Britain during World War II, particularly during the daily German bombings of London. His secret boils down to two parts, the first of which is frequent and honest updates with his constituents. Following this approach with the remaining team will go a long way toward easing their fears of sudden, unexpected layoffs. This is a unique situation because the entire industry is in the same boat, so it’s no reflection on your company. These are extenuating, unpredictable circumstances, not the result of mismanagement.

But Offer Realistic Hope and Inspiration. The second part of Churchill’s brilliance was providing realistic reasons for hope, giving staff something to believe in. In a crisis, people want to be soldiers, not victims. This approach basically says, “I’m not going to sugar-coat it: we’re in for a tough fight. But we’re going to get through this together and emerge stronger. Here’s how and why.”

4. Strategy

Pivot: Find Out What Your Clients Need. Reimagine What You Can Provide. This is a good time to explore pivoting your business offerings, the most obvious of which is to virtual events. Most event agencies—particularly those involved in production, sponsor cultivation, attendee engagement, content development, etc.—are well-suited to migrate those services to virtual events. And meeting pros are racing to get upskilled in virtual to do just that, evidenced by the 2,000 event professionals who got certified in our Virtual Event & Meeting Management since April.

But don’t blindly follow the crowd there; make sure it fits with your core strengths. Perhaps the most underappreciated assets event businesses have are their client relationships, and you should reach out to as many as possible to see what their new needs are; you might be surprised at what you find.

A good example is Wendy Ferber and Andy Nadel’s swag business, Pride Products, which had built a loyal corporate clientele over the years, particularly with the recruiting and HR departments. When the promotional products side of the business dried up, they called over 80 clients and found a glaring need they had: team building and maintaining culture when people can’t physically be together. So they created an entirely new business: Connect R Central, providing a variety of virtual team building activities.

Rebalance Your Pricing Model. Many event companies use pricing models that don’t sync up with when they perform the work. If your pricing is tied to the event budget in some way (e.g. using a markup, percent of budget, commission, etc.) and the event is cancelled, you may get nothing, or much less than the work you’ve performed to date would warrant. Much of the work being done takes place way before the event, so consider shifting to a consulting-type pricing model, where you’re compensated for the work you do, as you do it.

Use This Time to Up-Skill Your Staff and Hone Internal Processes. Once you’ve tightened your belt and gotten your costs down to a sustainable level, now is a great time to do all the things you always wanted to do, or should’ve done, but never made time for. Things like fine-tuning your internal processes and onboarding protocols, updating your website, etc. and training and education courses to add new skills for yourself and your team, such as mastering Technical Meeting & Event Production, Venue Sales, Social Media Marketing, Accounting for Event Businesses, or Pivot Tables in Excel, to name but a few. We’ve been hearing about the need for lifelong learning in today’s economy; it’s time to go beyond lip service and put those plans into action.

Courtesy: Event Planner & Organizer in Lahore