#this may or may not have inspired me to take an appetite stimulant this morning heh

[ftm2bbw]

It'd be so hot to turn you into a cow without your knowing. At least, not at first. In the beginning it just seems like I'm being friendly. You're such a compulsive eater that you don't question why I'm bringing over snacks and junk food every time I come over to your place to hang out and yet I don't even touch the stuff. I just hand it to you and watch you scarf it down, getting off on how greedily you shovel it all down your throat, watching your belly bloat from being overly full. I'm just being nice, that's all!

From there, it's not a big leap to start bringing you full meals, sometimes bought, but often cooked myself. It's fine, I say. I like cooking! I just happened to have some extra ingredients laying around and didn't want them to go bad. By this point, you've gotten so conditioned to get hungry whenever I come over that you really aren't about to look a gift horse in the mouth, simply thanking me and digging in, trying not to think about how much fatter you've gotten recently.

It doesn't even occur to you to think about the ingredients, but I've chosen them very carefully. I've done the research, found ingredients that help encourage estrogen absorption and creation in the body, and loaded your food full of it. Sometimes, just for fun, I'll even grind up some lactation supplements and mix it in with the sauces, just to watch you suck them down with blissful ignorance.

I'm not sure exactly when I'd reveal my plan to you, tell you exactly what I've been doing to you and your body for weeks, possibly months. Telling you that so many of the changes in your body were done intentionally by me. But I know that, when the time comes, I'd reach out and grab your swollen udders, now visibly much larger than when I started, and wobble them in my grip, admiring my handiwork. And it's only just the beginning.

Hey, I’ve never been one to complain about more food - and if you’re not eating then that’s just more for me! I certainly wouldn’t question all the extra treats and meals, not like it’s easy to think straight with a stuffed belly anyway. And to think, it would all be in addition to everything I eat regularly on my own. All the deliveries and fast food that I can never seem to moderate.

Any changes I’d just chalk up to my weight gain, at least at first. Yeah, my ass is bigger and my tits are heavier and my hips seem to be spreading, but I’m sure the rest of my body will catch up in time. And I’m sure you wouldn’t stop at sneaking just lactation supplements into my food. Crushing up appetite stimulants, hormones, even things to keep me sleepy and lazy and sedentary. Can’t go burning off all those extra calories after all…

By the time you revealed your plan to me, I’m sure I’d be far too conditioned and complacent to care. Somewhere I’d be screaming in the back of my head, but it would pale in comparison to the hedonistic rapture of stuffing my face, having my belly rubbed, and getting my udders groped and milked. Not that I could fight you off at that point if I wanted, I’d be far, far too heavy and out of shape…

[tipsycad147]

Mercurial Wisdom: Peppermint Plant Profile

It’s been a minute since I shared a plant profile with all of you. I found I needed a bit of a break from writing plant profiles and just some more time out in the garden and making a mess in my kitchen trying out new recipes. However, I woke up this morning with an itch to talk plant nerd with you before I head off on my winter break (which is all very impulsively mercurial and therefore the herb I’ve chosen to talk about is quite appropriate).

I wanted to share with you more stories about one of my favorite herbs that I reach for in the depth of winter and the height of summer almost equally. Peppermint is just magickal like that when it comes to working its way into both my warming and cooling recipes. But we’ll get to that in a minute…

I’ve written about Peppermint a number of times already, but always in the context of a larger post, and it felt like the write time to get deep about our green companion. The following profile is from my course exploring the intersections of herbal wisdom and the tarot - The Tarot Apothecary. So you’ll see my correspondences for individual tarot cards listed below - why different cards are allied with different plants is something that I explore more in the course (as well as helping you find your own personal correspondences).

Do you use Peppermint (or any of the myriad varieties of Mint) in your practice? What’s you favorite way to work with the plant? Let me know in the comments.

Peppermint

(Mentha piperita)

Common + Folk Names : Brandy mint, lament Tarot Cards : The Fool, the Hermit, Justice, the Star, the World, the Messenger (Knight) of Swords, Four of Cups, Six of Wands. Element : Fire + Water Zodiac Signs : Gemini, Virgo, Libra Planets : Mercury, Venus, Jupiter Moon Phase : Full Moon Parts used : Ariel parts Habitat : Naturalized throughout the world Growing conditions : Full to partial sun with moderate to high amounts of water. Collection : Collect in the spring before flowering, but it can be gathered throughout the summer. Flavor : Pungent + sweet Temperature : Cool + warm Moisture : Dry Tissue State : Heat/Excitation, Cold/Depression Constituents : Beta-carotene, B-complex vitamins, vitamin C, potassium, flavonoids, essential oils, ketone, tannins, resin, rosmarinic acid, menthol.

Actions : Analgesic, anesthetic, anodyne, antibacterial, antiemetic, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-parasitic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, antiviral, aromatic, carminative, cholagogue, choleretic, diaphoretic, digestive, diuretic, emmenagogue, expectorant, immunomodulating, nervine, stimulant, stomachic, tonic, vasodilator.

Main Uses : Peppermint is a useful herb embodying the mercurial qualities of its Guardian Planet. It is able to relax when needed one day and to awaken and stimulate the next. To understand how a plant can be both relaxing and stimulating, try the following. Rub the top of your head with your fingers for a quick moment. Feel how that is both relaxing and stimulating? Such is the powers of Peppermint. So, it is a popular herb in the summer for its cooling qualities and it is found again during the winter as part of warming teas and cold-care remedies.

Peppermint is a tasty and popular digestive remedy. It relaxes cramping of the intestinal muscles and alleviates a number of digestive complaints including gas, indigestion, colic, IBS, hiccups, and heartburn. Peppermint also has tannins which help repair leaky guts by strengthening the lining of the intestines, promoting better digestion and proper assimilation of nutrients. The herb is used for a number of intestinal diseases including Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Peppermint is especially effective for digestive issues arising from stress and nervous conditions that lead to cramping. Look for signs of poor digestion, headaches from digestive tension, lack of appetite, and distention. Peppermint is excellent for when there is lack of pleasure around the process of eating food. Enjoy the tea a half hour before meals, but be mindful of over-relaxing the intestines with long term use (so no more than a few weeks daily and then take a break from use before restarting again). Peppermint is useful for car sickness and nausea as well as in pregnancy for morning sickness after the first trimester.

As a circulatory tonic, Peppermint regulates energy throughout our bodies. The herb relaxes peripheral blood vessels helping to release excess heat and damp due in part to its menthol content. It helps blood move effectively through the body which is one reason that it helps to relieve brain fog and clear the head. Peppermint also has an effect on the lymph system helping to stimulate lymphatic action and therefore improve circulation.

The herb dries excess damp as well as expels mucus in cases of colds, ‘flu, and sinus congestion. In general, Peppermint is good for heart palpitations (especially when associated with indigestion), inflammation and infection of the lungs, sinusitis and sinus headaches, asthma, bronchitis, laryngitis, and general sinus congestion. The herb is clearing and helps us to take a deep breath. For bronchitis and asthma is it especially effective as a steam, but can also be used as a hot tea to reduce spasms of the airways and clear excess mucus. Coughs and sore throats are also aided by Peppermint.

As a nervine, Peppermint is refreshing. It awakens the senses while reducing excess. If there is too much heat, Peppermint cools. If stagnation is a problem, Peppermint tones and stimulates. If overstimulation is present, Peppermint calms. I find the herb to be useful when mental dullness is present as Peppermint entices and excites the senses to movement. Along with drinking the tea, the essential oil burned or sprayed in a room can help shift the energy from dullness to inspired. Peppermint also assists with relieving anxiousness, nervous tension, and general anxiety. Again, Peppermint can help to stimulate where there is stagnation (which can lead to anxiety and depression because of lack of movement and tone) as well as help to relax tension (which can lead to a different sort of anxiousness and restless energy).

Peppermint is a classic cold care herb along with other herbs such as Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and Elder (Sambucus nigra). Since it is a warming and cooling herb, it is effective for colds and ‘flu with symptoms of fevers and chills. In addition to  strengthening the lymphatic system in regards to circulation, Peppermint also strengthens the lymphatic cleansing process, clearing the blood of old cells and promoting the production of white blood cells, thereby enhancing immunity. Peppermint has been shown to be effective against streptococcus, staphylococcus, e. coli, helicobacter pylori, candida, and other pathogens. Since Peppermint is moistening to connective tissues, look for signs of skin atrophy, aching and dried joints, and general dryness, when choosing it for compromised immunity.

Peppermint’s immunomodulating qualities are also tied to its improvement of the body’s ability to digest and absorb nutrients. A robust digestive system leads to a healthy immune system since the body is properly receiving all the building-blocks it needs from the food it is consuming. Additionally, early studies have shown that Peppermint may have chemoprotective qualities.

The herb assists with menstrual cramps and complaints due to uterine congestion. Look for signs of feeling heavy and bloated just before and during menstruation, along with mental fatigue and fog. The herb’s stimulating qualities are noted by Culpeper as he described the herb as stirring “up bodily lust.”

Historically, Peppermint has also been used for kidney and gallstones as well as clearing out a stagnant liver. There are warnings against using Peppermint too often for too long (as in daily for a few months) as it will become overly clearing and lead to weakening the blood, even stopping menstruation.

Use a poultice on the stomach for pains and on the chest for respiratory colds. A topical poultice is useful for muscle pain, including back pain, and spasm as well as arthritis and sore joints since Peppermint is anesthetic. Cold compresses can be applied to the forehead during fever and headache as well as rashes, bug bites, measles, and chicken box. Also, a topical herbal oil mixed with the essential oil can be used to alleviate headaches when massaged into the brow.

Internally, Peppermint will help to bring measles boils to the surface. Culpeper recommended washing the heads of young children with a Peppermint tea for the treatment of scabs and rashes. Use the tea as a gargle or spray for good breath and to clean the mouth. Chewing the mint will give the same effect.

As an antiseptic, antiviral, and anti-fungal herb, Peppermint is useful for such conditions as the herpes simplex virus, athlete’s foot, and other uncomfortable and infectious conditions.

Magickal Uses : Peppermint is an herb that can be used in magickal works of prosperity, abundance, and good fortune. Use in rituals of cleansing and consecration as well as in incense blends to clear a space of harmful energy. The sharp scent also ignites the senses, as discussed earlier, but also attributes itself to awakening the psychic senses. Use the herb in spells and charms of clear communication, negotiation, and business deals while invoking the powers of Mercury (invoke Jupiter, too, if business and the need for good fortune is involved). It was said that Peppermint would reduce dreams of a sexual nature by 17th century herbalist John Parkinson, so be mindful if you would rather keep those dreams as part of your nighttime experience and avoid taking the herb at night. The herb is excellent for wind magick as well as matters of justice and judicial process as it has some guardianship by Jupiter.  

The Peppermint Personality : There are two types of Peppermint personalities. The first tends towards a restless and nervous energy. Their thoughts spin and sometimes they struggle with silence. They possess the gift of gab, are prone to be on social media for one too many hours, tying their self-worth to the amount of positive attention they receive online. They have trouble settling down and being slow and still. They can exude a great deal of nervous energy and sometimes their anxious thoughts keep them up at night. What they feel like they need to accomplish every minute of every day feels dizzying and impossible. Peppermint will help them calm down and connect with their core strength and stillness. They will be especially served by Peppermint’s relaxing nervine qualities. The other type of Peppermint personality is nearly an opposite of the first. Slow and stagnant, they are uninspired. It is as if a heavy fog bank has rolled into their mind and they are unable to find their way out of the seaside soup. Sorrow for their lack of inspiration may have set in and a confusion around who they really are and what they are supposed to do with themselves. They will be best served by Peppermint’s stimulating nervine qualities.

Both Peppermint personality types will be served by Peppermint’s ability to provide clarity and help them overcome their shared fear of success (even they go about avoiding that fear in different ways). What is really important to you, the mint asks, what is really necessary? Ultimately, Peppermint helps both personalities figure out who they are in the world and what they are called to do.

Contraindications : Avoid large amounts during breastfeeding as mints may dry up the milk supply. Other sources recommend Peppermint for mastitis. Do not use the essential oil during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

Drug interactions : None known.

Dosage : Standard dosage.

http://www.wortsandcunning.com/blog/mercurial-wisdom-peppermint-plant-profile

[momcanada]

Order Durban Poison (Sativa) Online Canada

Order Durban Poison (Sativa) Online Canada - Excellent mood booster - Great for its focussing effect - Perfect for growing outdoors Order Durban Poison (Sativa) Online Canada. Durban Poison is a pure Sativa named after its city of origin: Durban, South Africa. Despite its name, it is a delightful strain that gives the user energy, joy, and creativity. The Durban Poison marijuana plant is especially known for its huge glands filled with resin. For people looking to extract cannabis concentrate, this is a dream come true. Durban Poison takes the cake when it comes to Sativas that everyone loves and wants for themselves. Its high is excellent, and its 100% Sativa purity greatly sought after. Its history goes back fairly far, at least as compared with other marijuana strains. Durban Poison goes back to the 1970s and has been popular ever since. If you don’t already know, you will soon find out why. Growing Durban Poison Strain Of Medical Marijuana When left to its own devices, this 100% Sativa plant can reach heights of up to 90 inches (7.5 feet)! Of course, indoor plants may be much shorter (which is likely a good thing, as there aren’t too many indoor growing areas that accommodate 8-foot plants). Durban Poison marijuana plants generally have an average yield when reduced to per square meter of plant, but when it is a huge plant that still results in quite a sizeable yield. When growing indoors, you can expect about 13 ounces per square meter of plant, and outdoor plants average about 16 ounces of product per plant. Harvest time for outdoor plants is usually the end of September or the beginning of October. If you are growing Durban Poison indoors, it is highly recommended to use a hydroponics setting rather than a soil or other solid growing medium in pots. The flowering period of Durban Poison generally lasts around 9 weeks, although it could be as little as 7 weeks as well. It is generally an easy plant to grow, although any hydroponics setup could prove tricky to someone who hasn’t tried it before. Durban Poison generally thrives best in an outdoor, sunny setting. Regular Seeds It is important to keep in mind that the version of Durban Poison discussed in this article is the regular strain. That means that, just like marijuana plants found in the wild, it is photosensitive and therefore goes into the flowering phase once the hours of uninterrupted darkness surpass a certain threshold, thus signaling the fact that the seasons are changing and becoming colder. Regular marijuana seeds are also not feminized, which means they could be male or female in equal parts. Since male plants should be removed from a marijuana crop as soon as they can be identified (so as not to fertilize the female plants), it is important to keep this in mind when purchasing Durban Poison seeds. It is best to buy and plant a few extras to make up for the inevitable losses to come. Origin Of Durban Poison (Sativa) Strain Durban Poison does not only have its origins in South Africa, but it is actually a pure landrace from Durban, South Africa. Although it has African roots, an American marijuana enthusiast found it and brought it over to the U.S. sometime during the 1970s. Because this is a pure, 100% Sativa landrace, it has certain quirks that distinguish it from other hybrid plants. For example, it can grow extremely tall, reaching heights of nearly 8 feet tall. Effects Of Durban Poison (Sativa) Strain Durban Poison is often used specifically to try and stimulate focus, meaning it can not only be enjoyable, but useful as well. Its high is clean, upbeat, and intense, focusing mainly on the head. Many people actually prefer to smoke Durban Poison at the beginning of the day rather than later in the evening, as it helps energize, clarify, and focus one’s thoughts. It even energizes your body, allowing for a productive and enjoyable day. Durban Poison is simply considered an excellent mood booster. Many people even prefer it over coffee or other forms of caffeine, as they are left with the positive (energizing and uplifting) effects without experiencing the negative side (the jitters). Therefore, Durban Poison is a great choice for someone who could use a pick me up in the morning. The positive effects of Durban Poison include: - Upliftedness - Energetics - Happiness - Euphoria - Creativity - Invigoration - Inspiration - Stimulation The negative effects of Durban Poison include: - Dry mouth - Dry eyes - Anxiety - Paranoia - Headache Medical Uses For Durban Poison (Sativa) Strain Durban Poison is well known for its focusing effects. Without a doubt, that makes it an excellent medicine for people with ADD or ADHD -- in other words, for people who struggle with focusing. It keeps thoughts crisp and clear but energized as well. This also has the effect of being helpful with mood disorders, including bipolar disorder, depression, or anxiety disorder. Durban Poison also helps with many aspects of stress: negative thoughts, sleepiness, pain, and so on. Durban Poison has also been used for cancer patients and others undergoing certain therapies such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. This is because these treatments often cause nausea and a lack of appetite, but Durban Poison does an excellent job of stimulating the appetite (therefore keeping the patient’s strength up). While Durban Poison may not heal cancer, it certainly can do its part in helping the patient stay as fit as possible during the treatment and healing process. Medical Uses For Physical Ailments - Fatigue - Pain - Nausea Medical Uses For Psychological Ailments - Bipolar disorder - Anxiety disorder - ADD/ADHD - Depression - Stress Taste And Aroma Of Durban Poison Strain The smell of Durban Poison is strong and easily identified. Its scent is known for being particularly sweet with pungent and piney undertones. Additional details mixed in include an earthy smell and even some spiciness cutting through all that sweetness. Once you smoke Durban Poison, your immediate thought will be pine trees. The flavor is extremely obvious right away, but then it calms into an earthy, herbal flavor. The aftertaste of Durban Poison is not too strong and generally tastes of sweetness and citrus. Taste And Aroma Of Durban Poison At-A-Glance - Earthy - Pine - Grapefruit - Citrus - Sweet - Pungent - Spicy Read the full article

[24hourchampagnediet-blog1]

Meghan Markle's war on scammers who claim she used diet pills after pregnancy

New Post has been published on https://bestrawfoodrecipes.com/meghan-markles-war-on-scammers-who-claim-she-used-diet-pills-after-pregnancy/

Meghan Markle's war on scammers who claim she used diet pills after pregnancy

Meghan Markle is fighting to stop scammers using her name to sell diet pills online.

Buckingham Palace vowed to crack down on websites falsely claiming she used the tablets to get in shape.

Officials are set to act after a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed the scam.

The bogus online campaign for “Keto Weight Loss” tablets features YouTube images of Meghan before and after her pregnancy.

And a fake quote on a site called First Level Fitness says: “Post pregnancy my body had lost its shape. But, with keto body tone, I came back.”

A second site promoting the pills – branded as potentially dangerous by experts – even has Meghan claiming in an interview the Royal Family wanted to stop her “pursuing my own weight loss line”.

And cruelly one ad even has the Duchess posing with the Queen and calling the tablets her “passion project” – a phrase she actually used in a speech about the launch of her Grenfell disaster charity cookbook.

Last night a spokesman for Meghan thanked us for alerting her to the scam.

A royal source added: “This is obviously not true and an illegal use of the Duchess’ name for advertising purposes. We will follow our normal course of action.”

One advert claimed to show before and after photos of the Duchess

A Sunday Mirror investigation has revealed the scam using Meghan’s name (Image: Getty)

Read More

First Level Fitness – one of the diet pills’ main promoters – describes itself as a “one stop fitness site”. But many pages on the portal are dedicated to selling male sex drugs.

Sellers linked to it claim the “Meghan” pills “melt fat fast without diet or exercise”.

But yesterday experts warned against taking them.

Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told us: “Nobody, but nobody, should go near diet pills advertised on the web – even when your favourite celebrity ‘endorses’ them.

“If you want to diet, it should be mandatory to seek advice from regulated professionals and use what they recommend.”

The second website involved claims that Meghan gushed about the keto pills’ benefits to a US publication called Entertainment Today, which does not exist.

The Duchess is quoted as saying of the diet tablets, costing £19.99 for 60: “All my life I’ve been passionate about taking care of my weight due to the pressures of Hollywood to stay young and look fit.

One of the fake adverts using Meghan Markle’s name

Another of the fake adverts talks of ‘Meghan Markle keto pure diet’

Read More

  “For the last 10 years I’ve been travelling the world and sourcing organic ingredients and weight loss remedies.

“The culmination is the launch of my all-female-owned weight loss line which combines the world’s richest and most sought after ingredients at affordable and everyday prices.”

Bizarrely, the fake interview goes on: “The Royal Family is not happy with me splitting my time up.

“They made me decide on which direction I was going to focus on the future. Being so turned off by the reaction of their power move I have decided to pursue my new weight loss line and dream.”

In reality, the Duchess has not publicly discussed her weight since she began dating Prince Harry in 2016.

Before that she spoke about following a plant-based diet with plenty of yoga, inspired by her instructor mother Doria Ragland.

In 2014, Meghan told Australia’s news.au site she works out five times a week and enjoys hot yoga to keep her legs lean.

In 2013 she told Shape magazine how she loves green juice and Pilates, as well as following fitness guru Tracey Anderson’s DVDs.

She added: “I definitely try to eat as clean as possible… I avoid the things that are going to make me sluggish, but I’m also a foodie – so at the weekend all bets are off.

“If you deprive yourself of anything you’re going to crave it. So for me it’s finding that balance.”

Read More

Latest royal news

No mention of pills, but back in the scammers’ world we found claims Meghan told royals she was dedicated to profiting from the keto tablets.

One advert was illustrated by a picture of Meghan with the Queen.

A bogus quote from the Duchess said: “We were clear from the beginning keto would be my passion project.

“I wanted to have creative control and run a business that was women centric. I didn’t feel like it was my ­obligation to make them (the Royal Family) feel comfortable to pursue my ambition.

“They know how much I obsess over weight loss and I put my entire heart and soul into this product to make it perfect.”

Meghan’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, has also been used by scammers to plug the pills.

And similar online pages falsely link Cheryl Cole and Susanna Reid to the product. Gemma Collins also publicly denied her 3st loss was down to the tablets after her image was used on a Facebook page called Keto Pure, which has 2,000 followers.

The pills take their name from the keto diet – a low-carb and high-fat plan that puts the body into a state of ketosis, helping it burn fat rather than glucose.

Amanda Holden has also been linked to diet pills (Image: PA)

This state is said to boost leptin, a hormone that helps with feeling full, and decrease ghrelin, the “hunger hormone” which stimulates appetite.

Manufacturers of keto pills claim its product has this effect due to a combination of compound beta-hydroxy-butyrate and caffeine, which will speed up weight loss .

But nutritionist May Simpkins, of the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, warned: “They have latched on to the idea that ketosis can help you lose weight.

“Customers can’t be sure of the ingredients or who they are buying these pills from.

“Unless you are being very regimented with a keto diet alongside the pills you will still be taking in glucose so you won’t burn fat or lose weight.

“Suddenly plunging the body into a state of ketosis can shock it.

The digestive system can suffer and cause stomach cramps, constipation or diarrhoea.

“It also worries me this product contains caffeine as some people are intolerant and may experience headaches , weakness or anxiety.”

A disclaimer on a keto pill website admits the product is not approved by health authorities and says individual results “may vary”.

Celebs including Amanda Holden and Holly Willoughby have spoken out about their names being falsely linked to slimming pills.

And money expert Martin Lewis took Facebook to the High Court over scam adverts that had abused his name or image.

He dropped the lawsuit when Facebook agreed to launch a new bogus ads reporting tool and donate £3million to a new UK Scams Action project by Citizens Advice.

Last night First Level Fitness and other web outfits which uploaded the fake Meghan endorsements did not respond to requests for comment.

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A string of celebrities incensed at false links to diet pills

TOWIE star Gemma Collins threatened legal action after her name was linked to a supplement.

Gemma, 38, said at the time: “I will put my lawyers on to it straight away. Do not associate my name with your products when I am not behind them.”

Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden was similarly furious when scammers used her fame to push their product.

Amanda, 48, said this month: “I have been made aware that a company is using my name.

“I have not given consent for this and have no partnership with this company. This is a scam. So please be careful and do not sign up to this as they will take your money.”

Gladiator star Russel Crowe was asked by a fan: “I’ve just seen an advertorial for keto quoting you among its testimonials. Before I consider buying in, is it a legit testimonial?”

The furious 55-year-old Hollywood actor immediately replied: “No it’s not.”

Last May, pill endorsement posts appeared falsely saying This Morning’s Holly Willoughby, 38, had been worried that her weight was “getting a little out of hand”, implying she resorted to diet tablets.

BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood, 56, launched an on-screen broadside when her name was dragged into a similar con.

In a Breakfast report she looked at a bogus ad bearing her testimony and exclaimed: “This is utter garbage.”

US singer Kelly Clarkson, 37, cried “fake news” when a promo emerged with her name and picture.

Source link Keto Diet and Exercise

[fuckyeahtattoogirls-blog1]

Meghan Markle's war on scammers who claim she used diet pills after pregnancy

New Post has been published on https://bestrawfoodrecipes.com/meghan-markles-war-on-scammers-who-claim-she-used-diet-pills-after-pregnancy/

Meghan Markle's war on scammers who claim she used diet pills after pregnancy

Meghan Markle is fighting to stop scammers using her name to sell diet pills online.

Buckingham Palace vowed to crack down on websites falsely claiming she used the tablets to get in shape.

Officials are set to act after a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed the scam.

The bogus online campaign for “Keto Weight Loss” tablets features YouTube images of Meghan before and after her pregnancy.

And a fake quote on a site called First Level Fitness says: “Post pregnancy my body had lost its shape. But, with keto body tone, I came back.”

A second site promoting the pills – branded as potentially dangerous by experts – even has Meghan claiming in an interview the Royal Family wanted to stop her “pursuing my own weight loss line”.

And cruelly one ad even has the Duchess posing with the Queen and calling the tablets her “passion project” – a phrase she actually used in a speech about the launch of her Grenfell disaster charity cookbook.

Last night a spokesman for Meghan thanked us for alerting her to the scam.

A royal source added: “This is obviously not true and an illegal use of the Duchess’ name for advertising purposes. We will follow our normal course of action.”

One advert claimed to show before and after photos of the Duchess

A Sunday Mirror investigation has revealed the scam using Meghan’s name (Image: Getty)

Read More

First Level Fitness – one of the diet pills’ main promoters – describes itself as a “one stop fitness site”. But many pages on the portal are dedicated to selling male sex drugs.

Sellers linked to it claim the “Meghan” pills “melt fat fast without diet or exercise”.

But yesterday experts warned against taking them.

Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told us: “Nobody, but nobody, should go near diet pills advertised on the web – even when your favourite celebrity ‘endorses’ them.

“If you want to diet, it should be mandatory to seek advice from regulated professionals and use what they recommend.”

The second website involved claims that Meghan gushed about the keto pills’ benefits to a US publication called Entertainment Today, which does not exist.

The Duchess is quoted as saying of the diet tablets, costing £19.99 for 60: “All my life I’ve been passionate about taking care of my weight due to the pressures of Hollywood to stay young and look fit.

One of the fake adverts using Meghan Markle’s name

Another of the fake adverts talks of ‘Meghan Markle keto pure diet’

Read More

  “For the last 10 years I’ve been travelling the world and sourcing organic ingredients and weight loss remedies.

“The culmination is the launch of my all-female-owned weight loss line which combines the world’s richest and most sought after ingredients at affordable and everyday prices.”

Bizarrely, the fake interview goes on: “The Royal Family is not happy with me splitting my time up.

“They made me decide on which direction I was going to focus on the future. Being so turned off by the reaction of their power move I have decided to pursue my new weight loss line and dream.”

In reality, the Duchess has not publicly discussed her weight since she began dating Prince Harry in 2016.

Before that she spoke about following a plant-based diet with plenty of yoga, inspired by her instructor mother Doria Ragland.

In 2014, Meghan told Australia’s news.au site she works out five times a week and enjoys hot yoga to keep her legs lean.

In 2013 she told Shape magazine how she loves green juice and Pilates, as well as following fitness guru Tracey Anderson’s DVDs.

She added: “I definitely try to eat as clean as possible… I avoid the things that are going to make me sluggish, but I’m also a foodie – so at the weekend all bets are off.

“If you deprive yourself of anything you’re going to crave it. So for me it’s finding that balance.”

Read More

Latest royal news

No mention of pills, but back in the scammers’ world we found claims Meghan told royals she was dedicated to profiting from the keto tablets.

One advert was illustrated by a picture of Meghan with the Queen.

A bogus quote from the Duchess said: “We were clear from the beginning keto would be my passion project.

“I wanted to have creative control and run a business that was women centric. I didn’t feel like it was my ­obligation to make them (the Royal Family) feel comfortable to pursue my ambition.

“They know how much I obsess over weight loss and I put my entire heart and soul into this product to make it perfect.”

Meghan’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, has also been used by scammers to plug the pills.

And similar online pages falsely link Cheryl Cole and Susanna Reid to the product. Gemma Collins also publicly denied her 3st loss was down to the tablets after her image was used on a Facebook page called Keto Pure, which has 2,000 followers.

The pills take their name from the keto diet – a low-carb and high-fat plan that puts the body into a state of ketosis, helping it burn fat rather than glucose.

Amanda Holden has also been linked to diet pills (Image: PA)

This state is said to boost leptin, a hormone that helps with feeling full, and decrease ghrelin, the “hunger hormone” which stimulates appetite.

Manufacturers of keto pills claim its product has this effect due to a combination of compound beta-hydroxy-butyrate and caffeine, which will speed up weight loss .

But nutritionist May Simpkins, of the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, warned: “They have latched on to the idea that ketosis can help you lose weight.

“Customers can’t be sure of the ingredients or who they are buying these pills from.

“Unless you are being very regimented with a keto diet alongside the pills you will still be taking in glucose so you won’t burn fat or lose weight.

“Suddenly plunging the body into a state of ketosis can shock it.

The digestive system can suffer and cause stomach cramps, constipation or diarrhoea.

“It also worries me this product contains caffeine as some people are intolerant and may experience headaches , weakness or anxiety.”

A disclaimer on a keto pill website admits the product is not approved by health authorities and says individual results “may vary”.

Celebs including Amanda Holden and Holly Willoughby have spoken out about their names being falsely linked to slimming pills.

And money expert Martin Lewis took Facebook to the High Court over scam adverts that had abused his name or image.

He dropped the lawsuit when Facebook agreed to launch a new bogus ads reporting tool and donate £3million to a new UK Scams Action project by Citizens Advice.

Last night First Level Fitness and other web outfits which uploaded the fake Meghan endorsements did not respond to requests for comment.

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A string of celebrities incensed at false links to diet pills

TOWIE star Gemma Collins threatened legal action after her name was linked to a supplement.

Gemma, 38, said at the time: “I will put my lawyers on to it straight away. Do not associate my name with your products when I am not behind them.”

Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden was similarly furious when scammers used her fame to push their product.

Amanda, 48, said this month: “I have been made aware that a company is using my name.

“I have not given consent for this and have no partnership with this company. This is a scam. So please be careful and do not sign up to this as they will take your money.”

Gladiator star Russel Crowe was asked by a fan: “I’ve just seen an advertorial for keto quoting you among its testimonials. Before I consider buying in, is it a legit testimonial?”

The furious 55-year-old Hollywood actor immediately replied: “No it’s not.”

Last May, pill endorsement posts appeared falsely saying This Morning’s Holly Willoughby, 38, had been worried that her weight was “getting a little out of hand”, implying she resorted to diet tablets.

BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood, 56, launched an on-screen broadside when her name was dragged into a similar con.

In a Breakfast report she looked at a bogus ad bearing her testimony and exclaimed: “This is utter garbage.”

US singer Kelly Clarkson, 37, cried “fake news” when a promo emerged with her name and picture.

Source link Keto Diet and Exercise

[artificialanomaly]

Been a while since I did anything Sinday-related.

It’s funny how I’ll see things that super remind me of headcanons/brainstorming I’ve kept to myself, and lately a lot of it’s been on @bioxdroid (then again, they’re awesome)

One of them is this: my headcanons about Cell and mixed race reproduction.*

*Referencing recent implications in bioxdroid’s amazing RRA-verse (and I think there was a joke/crack thread a while back about people thinking Cell was pregnant?)

This has been on my mind for a long time, but it’s become more refined lately, and more tied specifically to the AU where Bulma adopts Present!Cell and its future directions, but I’ve been thinking this concept can apply to any AU (and closer-to-canon AU) I have for Cell.

A lot of science fantasy/sci fi liberties are taken with this a.k.a. none of this will be largely scientifically accurate.

So, Cell can do similar like Vegeta and Goku have done; have a form of sexual intercourse with another race, and produce a mixed-race child. This is pretty much just an unexpected mutation and side-effect of his mixed DNA. 

A lot of this is just to do with my own preference, because why not.  See, I’ve come to like more and more the idea that with Cell’s really unique/bizarre biology, if he has a form of sexual intercourse with another, he’s the one who gets knocked up. 

Granted, also thought of that since he essentially asexually reproduced the Cell Jr.’s--they came from solely him. Just thinking that even when reproducing through sexual intercourse with another, he’s the one who still bears the resulting offspring.

And he delivers the same way with the Cell Jr.’s--the mixed-race children will come from his expanding stinger. Though the whole process is slower than how Cell produced the Cell Jr.’s.

Backing up here--I keep saying a form of sexual intercourse. It’s different for Cell, because he’s different.

This part was super inspired by this headcanon on Namekian biology/reproduction:

http://agirlnameded.tumblr.com/post/150076587228/namekian-biologyreproductiongender-headcanons

I just like the thought of Present!Cell (any Cell and AU Cell) seriously making out with someone, and then realizing afterward he’s been knocked up.

Though the process also involves his ki having a strange reaction. With sexual reproduction concentrated in his mouth and chest, and when sexual stimulation and sexual action are focused there, Cell’s aroused, and his ki instinctively reacts, behaving differently--his ki essentially harvesting just enough genetic material from the sexual partner to mix with Cell’s, and doing this subtly enough without either party noticing. (This doesn’t happen all the time--like, Cell does not get knocked up each time he seriously makes out with someone. Right now a pattern/trend for when it’s likely happen hasn’t been determined, but there may be one, it may be a response to seasonal climate changes...like, say, he’s more likely to sexually reproduce in spring.)

Cell’s bizarre biology mostly takes the lead in his case, if I can phrase it as such. Like he’ll carry and bear the children, they’ll resemble him more (that’ll get more elaboration later). So, just, if he’s making out with a human or half-human (or another mixed human) or relatively humanoid race, reproduction happens his way; however the sexual partner normally does it, Cell’s way takes over. As in, say, he’s with a man or a woman; with Cell’s sexual reproduction processes concentrated in his mouth and chest area, and the behavior of his ki triggered into like a genetic harvesting form, his biology takes precedence in reproducing children, and does not require further biological interaction with his sexual partner beyond sexually stimulating him and engaging in the sexual act with him.

So, Cell’s knocked up. There is a gestation period within his body, but shorter than a human’s. He doesn’t experience any changes in physical appearance, but does experience an increase in *appetite and mood swings.

*When Bulma realized Present!Cell had been created with the specific need and hunger for human bio-extract, she altered him so that his Saiyan appetite could compensate. (Bulma found Namekian, human, and Frieza race appetite couldn’t compensate as well as the Saiyan appetite, due to the power and energy needed to support his body, and the great Saiyan hunger could meet that demand. Though she also found the Saiyan appetite already played a factor in the originally large appetite for human bio-extract...anyway, she just essentially switched things around on a genetic level, and even connected things that perhaps should’ve connected in the first place. Again, sci fi liberties taken here.) So, while with child, Cell’s Saiyan appetite just grows. (Without Bulma’s alterations...actually his Saiyan appetite would’ve kicked in anyway and he could find sustenance from things other than human bio-extract--but he still would’ve had a hunger for human bio-extract, and that would’ve increased too. Just his appetite increasing enough that it would trigger his Saiyan appetite literally.)

Along with increase in appetite and mood swings, Cell’s ki reacts differently again; his ki fluctuates while with child, going up and down. Cell does experience periods of weakness and illness, even something like morning sickness. (Nothing close to lethal, but draining.) The gestation period is not uniformly pleasant. It is far more strenuous and far less instantaneous than asexually reproducing the Cell Jr.’s. The gestation period requires more energy and time from Cell.

Cell’s ki will significantly shoot up the moment he delivers, ejecting his new mixed race offspring from his expanding stinger. Promptly Cell’s ki will plummet and he will revert to his larval state, due to the large amount of energy that had been needed for final delivery. He reverts to his most advanced larval state--that is, the larval state that is large enough for his next transformation to Imperfect form. But, that will happen later, for now, he’ll need more time to recover.

Cell will have enough energy to tend to his offspring--twin bio-androids in their larval state, but far smaller than him, and not green--one’s colored blue (firstborn), the other purple (secondborn). 

What follows is perhaps more animal-like behavior, larval Cell cleaning them off with his own mouth and drawing them close, to warm them. Bulma is there to lend a hand, tending to the three of them and giving the new twins a customized formula to drink and generally help clean them off and wrap them in blankets, and give Cell a break and time to rest.

It’s not long before larval Cell can change back into his Imperfect form. His twins are at first freaked out by the whole process, and stick close to his discarded skin and eye his Imperfect body fearfully, confused and not immediately realizing it’s still their father. This doesn’t last long either, as they realize this is still their father. Cell can also now transform back to his Perfect form, his power has recovered relatively quickly and he feels back to normal, how he was before the gestation period...but he tests this privately and then stays in his Imperfect form longer. It’s his base form anyway, and though the twins had gotten over their fear when he’d first transformed, maybe best not to transform anymore in front of them until they were older.

Present!Cell and Gohan are friends in this AU. (That will be its own post someday.) Frustrated with his own ideas for names, and not caring for what the others have said (Bulma and their circle), he finally goes to Gohan for his opinion. Gohan--gleefully--suggests Mito and Chondria; Cell just goes “F*ck it, fine,” but names the younger twin Mito and the older twin Chondria. (And will never tell Gohan or another living soul that he had thought of Mito and Chondria before, and instinctively did like it, but then talked himself out of it; and now he just chalks it up to Gohan’s stupid genes making him think of those names in the first place.)

Present!Cell’s first instinct is to refer to his twins as “she/her/daughters.” He doesn’t know if that already trained them to respond to that first, before it occurred to him to try testing out which pronouns they responded to better. Until further notice, they’re “she/her/daughters” to him unless they decide differently. (This instinct is partially influenced by Present!Cell’s deep attachment to and respect for his adoptive mother-figure, Bulma. To be honest, he was this close to naming one of the twins Phyla in honor of her.)

The twins remain in their larval forms, growing to about a toddler’s size around four years of age, until they shed their own skins and resemble more humanoid half-saiyan toddlers: small children with alabaster white skin, wide pink eyes, purple markings on their cheeks, dark wild hair (due to Saiyan/human DNA), and spotted reptilian tails with stingers like their father, but still different colors--blue tail, purple tail.

By this point, Cell has fallen into the habit of calling Chondria just “Connie” sometimes. He’ll still call her by her full name. He definitely uses it when he’s cross with her. 

Mito got jealous of this once. Cell’s response was that her name was already succinct and short enough, like his. They even had the exact same amount of letters. He did teasingly try “Mitty” with her, and was amused when she responded with immediate disgust to that nickname and a quick “nevermind.”

Though wondering if they would physically age faster like their father or even Piccolo, Chondria and Mito age at essentially a human’s pace. They largely stay as humanoid creatures with strange colors and strange tails and wild dark hair, maturing in that form. They do find that they can change form, into bodies with armor that more resemble their father (and when smaller, can resemble the Cell Jr’s more); they can revert back to their larval forms like him. When full grown, Chondria and Mito are as tall as Cell.

Mito and Chondria’s voices sound traditionally feminine by human/saiyan standards, and their unarmored bodies resemble a traditionally female body by those same standards. They continue to identify as “she/her.”

The twins do literally look identical; only differences are the colors of their tails (and armor when transformed in their other forms; the colors of their larval states). Other differences have to be made, i.e. different haircuts.

(I multi-ship, but have grown to enjoy these Cell’s-twin-mixed-race-bioandroid-daughters OCs quite a bit; so anyone I ship Cell with and imagine hypothetical kids for, Chondria and Mito will remain his first mixed-race kids, they stay with their dad.)

...So that went from sexual reproduction headcanons to OC-fan-kids talk, ah ha. XD I do like Chondria and Mito a lot though, may do more headcanon posts about them and Cell another time.

[jesseneufeld]

Are You Doing Microworkouts? Here’s Why You Should.

The fitness industry is in the midst of a renaissance. Flawed and dated strategies like sedentary recovery practices or overly stressful HIIT workouts are being replaced with cutting-edge practices that offer more efficiency and return on investment. Today I’m covering one emerging fitness strategy: performing brief feats of strength in the routine course of a day. Let’s call them microworkouts.

I’m talking here about dropping for a single set of deep squats in the office, hitting a set of max effort pull-ups whenever you pass under a bar in a closet doorway, or stocking your backyard with a hex deadlift bar or bench press and busting out a single set every time you pass by while taking out the garbage.

Banking Benefits With Less Stress

Micro-workouts deliver two distinct and awesome benefits: First, when you add up the energy expenditure of these brief but frequent efforts, you obtain an incredible cumulative training effect. In essence, you are banking a lot of strength/power/explosiveness “mileage” without disturbing the necessary stress/rest balance of your official workout schedule or prompting the stress hormone production and cellular depletion that occurs from an extreme weekend warrior-type session. That is, a set of pull-ups, or even three sets over the course of 12 hours on a typical day, is not going to mess up the next day’s CrossFit session or even an ambitious arms and chest session. Rather, these micro sessions (Dr. Phil Maffetone calls the concept, “slow weights”) will raise the baseline from which you launch you ambitious full-scale workouts.

Think about it: If you do a single set of six deadlifts with 200 pounds on the bar every time you take out the garbage, that’s 1,200 pounds of work accomplished. Perhaps you can find your way to doing that 1-2 times a day, five or six days a week? That’s lifting an extra 10,000 pounds a week! When it’s time to perform a formal session, such as the popular 5 x 5 protocol (where you complete five sets of five reps, and perhaps add an upper body exercise to each set), you’re poised for fitness breakthroughs as well as faster recovery times. An “official” workout is no longer this tremendous athletic performance vastly outside the normal pattern of your largely sedentary life, but instead an upgrade of what you do every day to some extent. Does this concept ring a bell? Yes, micro-workouts are modeling the behavior patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors! Grok and company likely had some harsh days that might rival today’s CrossFit WOD or obstacle course race, but they also likely had routine daily chores entailing lifting heavy things or scrambling up steep embankments in between their legendary leisure time.

Interrupting Prolonged Inactivity

The second benefit of micro-workouts is perhaps even more profound: these short efforts help you combat the extreme health hazard of prolonged periods of stillness that characterize hyperconnected modern life. The adverse health consequences of stillness have been well-chronicled, and you’ve heard me talk about them for years. Studies show that even a few days of inactivity can generate a significant decline in glucose tolerance and increase in insulin resistance. In Primal Endurance, I quote Nutritious Movement queen Katy Bowman on the destruction of cellular health caused by stillness: “When you use a single position repetitively, such as curling your body into a comfortable work chair for hours every day, muscles, joints, and arteries will adapt to this repetitive positioning by changing their cellular makeup and becoming literally ‘stiff,’ with reduced ranges of motion and an actual hardening of the arterial walls in those areas.”

Strange as it may seem, it’s now becoming clear that increasing all forms of general everyday movement is a greater health priority than conducting ambitious workouts. Microworkouts, along with continued devotion to JFW (Just F—ing Walk) takes on increasing importance as daily life gets more effortless. Even if you’re a devoted gym rat, those few hours a week when you’re pushing weight around isn’t enough to combat a lifestyle of commuting, office work, and digital entertainment leisure time. The active couch potato syndrome is a scientifically validated concept revealing that devoted workout enthusiasts who lead otherwise sedentary lifestyles are subject to the same level of disease risk as inactive folks.

Optimizing Movement For the Most Advantageous Genetic Signaling

But none of this is new. A decade ago now Time magazine offered a memorable title, “The Myth Of Exercise.” The story detailed how a strenuous workout (particularly the common workout patterns and strategies of today that can become chronically stressful) depletes cellular energy and prompts a compensatory response in the form of an increased appetite along with decreased activity for the rest of the day. More recently, I wrote about the constrained model of energy expenditure as well as the amazing study of the Hadza that’s helping us reframe the purpose and intended benefits of exercise.

As I’ve been saying since the introduction of the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws over a decade ago, it’s not about the calories but about the movement and the genetic signaling that movement prompts. The Myth of Exercise concept aligns with my longtime assertion that 80% of your body composition success is dependent on your diet—specifically, minimizing the wildly excessive insulin production that happens from a grain-based, high carbohydrate diet and prevents you from burning stored body fat.

How To Incorporate Microworkouts

Armed with the insight to no workout is too short, and any kind of movement delivers a health and fitness benefit, you can elevate micro-workouts to the forefront of your fitness plan. Reject the all or nothing mentality that causes you to fail with fitness commitments because you get too busy with work and life. We all have time for a set or two or three of deep squats during the workday or during leisure time.

Look for opportunities over the course of every day to put your body under some kind of brief resistance load. Even if you only work hard for one minute (or less) at a time but are relatively faithful incorporating these “micro” opportunities into your daily routine, the cumulative effect will still be incredible.

Word of Caution: Going from a prolonged inactive state to a performing a heavy lift carries an obvious risk factor. Truth be told, I generally precede my random sets of pull-ups, deadlifts or even cords by a minute of walking, a few dynamic stretches, or some specific warm-up moves like doing a set with a much lighter weight, followed by a “real” set with a respectable weight. It’s not a lot of time or effort, but it’s a good habit to add the resistance after you’ve been up and doing something for a few minutes (e.g. taking out the garbage, bringing in groceries, finishing an indoor/outdoor chore).

Beyond that, also realize that when you make micro-workouts a daily habit, you’ll discover that you’re much more adaptable to brief explosive efforts without a long warm-up. You’ll be able to pop up from your work desk to hustle down a flight of stairs at work without hearing the creaks and cracks that are so familiar, especially to aging jocks. My longtime writing partner Brad Kearns (our next book will be a comprehensive education and action plan on the topics of longevity—due out in December) swears that his brief morning flexibility/mobility routine. He says it’s transformed his recovery from sprint workouts. No more next-day stiffness and soreness and occasional minor injuries—just because he spends 12 minutes every morning working on drills specific to sprinting that challenge the glutes, hamstrings and core.

Dr. Art DeVany, Ph.D., author of The New Evolution Diet and one of my earliest and greatest inspirations for Primal-inspired health practices, says that the lion never has to stretch before a workout, and we shouldn’t have to either. No, our modern creakiness can be attributed to overtraining patterns (in the case of morning issues) or extended stillness without a movement break when you get up and hobble during the day. Our ancestors most certainly had to run for their lives with zero warning on a routine basis. It’s a good Primal skill to have still.

Micro workouts are also applicable to cardiovascular fitness. A few minutes here and a few minutes there have a similar cumulative effect. Dr. Phil Maffetone explains that any stimulation of the aerobic system, even really low intensity stuff that a hard-core athlete might not choose to count as an official workout, helps improve your cardiovascular health and fitness. There’s really no lower limit to the aerobic exercise zone.

Anytime you get up from a chair and walk, you’re getting an aerobic benefit. A couple minutes recruiting major muscle groups with Stretch Cordz confers a new advantage. A cruise ship analogy works well here. When the floating city is out on the open ocean, cruising at 20 knots en route to the next port, all twelve turbine engines are cranking at full throttle. When it’s cruising in the harbor at two knots in preparation for docking, only a couple turbines are operating at half power. However, the two turbines operating at half speed in the harbor are still being “trained” to perform when they’re called up on in the open ocean. Note: I’ve revised my position on this concept over the years as research filled in the picture. Early on, I used to designate an aerobic zone of 55-75% of maximum heart rate. I’m not saying abandon time in that range, but know that anything outside of it also counts for something, and that should be good news.

If you so much as jump up from your desk, scramble down the stairs and out to your vehicle, then return with a few floors of ascent and back to your desk—total time five minutes and eight seconds. You’ll be turbocharging fat burning, increasing oxygen delivery and blood circulation to the brain, and flooding the bloodstream with neurotransmitters that elevate mood and improve cognitive focus. Similarly, anytime you haul off a set of pushups or squats, you’re making a meaningful contribution to your fitness and longevity.

Every effort, however modest, can be a small win. How does that shift your mindset? How does it open up possibilities for you? Let me know down below, and share any questions you have while you’re at it. Have a great week, everybody.

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Are You Doing Microworkouts? Here’s Why You Should. published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[lauramalchowblog]

Are You Doing Microworkouts? Here’s Why You Should.

The fitness industry is in the midst of a renaissance. Flawed and dated strategies like sedentary recovery practices or overly stressful HIIT workouts are being replaced with cutting-edge practices that offer more efficiency and return on investment. Today I’m covering one emerging fitness strategy: performing brief feats of strength in the routine course of a day. Let’s call them microworkouts.

I’m talking here about dropping for a single set of deep squats in the office, hitting a set of max effort pull-ups whenever you pass under a bar in a closet doorway, or stocking your backyard with a hex deadlift bar or bench press and busting out a single set every time you pass by while taking out the garbage.

Banking Benefits With Less Stress

Micro-workouts deliver two distinct and awesome benefits: First, when you add up the energy expenditure of these brief but frequent efforts, you obtain an incredible cumulative training effect. In essence, you are banking a lot of strength/power/explosiveness “mileage” without disturbing the necessary stress/rest balance of your official workout schedule or prompting the stress hormone production and cellular depletion that occurs from an extreme weekend warrior-type session. That is, a set of pull-ups, or even three sets over the course of 12 hours on a typical day, is not going to mess up the next day’s CrossFit session or even an ambitious arms and chest session. Rather, these micro sessions (Dr. Phil Maffetone calls the concept, “slow weights”) will raise the baseline from which you launch you ambitious full-scale workouts.

Think about it: If you do a single set of six deadlifts with 200 pounds on the bar every time you take out the garbage, that’s 1,200 pounds of work accomplished. Perhaps you can find your way to doing that 1-2 times a day, five or six days a week? That’s lifting an extra 10,000 pounds a week! When it’s time to perform a formal session, such as the popular 5 x 5 protocol (where you complete five sets of five reps, and perhaps add an upper body exercise to each set), you’re poised for fitness breakthroughs as well as faster recovery times. An “official” workout is no longer this tremendous athletic performance vastly outside the normal pattern of your largely sedentary life, but instead an upgrade of what you do every day to some extent. Does this concept ring a bell? Yes, micro-workouts are modeling the behavior patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors! Grok and company likely had some harsh days that might rival today’s CrossFit WOD or obstacle course race, but they also likely had routine daily chores entailing lifting heavy things or scrambling up steep embankments in between their legendary leisure time.

Interrupting Prolonged Inactivity

The second benefit of micro-workouts is perhaps even more profound: these short efforts help you combat the extreme health hazard of prolonged periods of stillness that characterize hyperconnected modern life. The adverse health consequences of stillness have been well-chronicled, and you’ve heard me talk about them for years. Studies show that even a few days of inactivity can generate a significant decline in glucose tolerance and increase in insulin resistance. In Primal Endurance, I quote Nutritious Movement queen Katy Bowman on the destruction of cellular health caused by stillness: “When you use a single position repetitively, such as curling your body into a comfortable work chair for hours every day, muscles, joints, and arteries will adapt to this repetitive positioning by changing their cellular makeup and becoming literally ‘stiff,’ with reduced ranges of motion and an actual hardening of the arterial walls in those areas.”

Strange as it may seem, it’s now becoming clear that increasing all forms of general everyday movement is a greater health priority than conducting ambitious workouts. Microworkouts, along with continued devotion to JFW (Just F—ing Walk) takes on increasing importance as daily life gets more effortless. Even if you’re a devoted gym rat, those few hours a week when you’re pushing weight around isn’t enough to combat a lifestyle of commuting, office work, and digital entertainment leisure time. The active couch potato syndrome is a scientifically validated concept revealing that devoted workout enthusiasts who lead otherwise sedentary lifestyles are subject to the same level of disease risk as inactive folks.

Optimizing Movement For the Most Advantageous Genetic Signaling

But none of this is new. A decade ago now Time magazine offered a memorable title, “The Myth Of Exercise.” The story detailed how a strenuous workout (particularly the common workout patterns and strategies of today that can become chronically stressful) depletes cellular energy and prompts a compensatory response in the form of an increased appetite along with decreased activity for the rest of the day. More recently, I wrote about the constrained model of energy expenditure as well as the amazing study of the Hadza that’s helping us reframe the purpose and intended benefits of exercise.

As I’ve been saying since the introduction of the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws over a decade ago, it’s not about the calories but about the movement and the genetic signaling that movement prompts. The Myth of Exercise concept aligns with my longtime assertion that 80% of your body composition success is dependent on your diet—specifically, minimizing the wildly excessive insulin production that happens from a grain-based, high carbohydrate diet and prevents you from burning stored body fat.

How To Incorporate Microworkouts

Armed with the insight to no workout is too short, and any kind of movement delivers a health and fitness benefit, you can elevate micro-workouts to the forefront of your fitness plan. Reject the all or nothing mentality that causes you to fail with fitness commitments because you get too busy with work and life. We all have time for a set or two or three of deep squats during the workday or during leisure time.

Look for opportunities over the course of every day to put your body under some kind of brief resistance load. Even if you only work hard for one minute (or less) at a time but are relatively faithful incorporating these “micro” opportunities into your daily routine, the cumulative effect will still be incredible.

Word of Caution: Going from a prolonged inactive state to a performing a heavy lift carries an obvious risk factor. Truth be told, I generally precede my random sets of pull-ups, deadlifts or even cords by a minute of walking, a few dynamic stretches, or some specific warm-up moves like doing a set with a much lighter weight, followed by a “real” set with a respectable weight. It’s not a lot of time or effort, but it’s a good habit to add the resistance after you’ve been up and doing something for a few minutes (e.g. taking out the garbage, bringing in groceries, finishing an indoor/outdoor chore).

Beyond that, also realize that when you make micro-workouts a daily habit, you’ll discover that you’re much more adaptable to brief explosive efforts without a long warm-up. You’ll be able to pop up from your work desk to hustle down a flight of stairs at work without hearing the creaks and cracks that are so familiar, especially to aging jocks. My longtime writing partner Brad Kearns (our next book will be a comprehensive education and action plan on the topics of longevity—due out in December) swears that his brief morning flexibility/mobility routine. He says it’s transformed his recovery from sprint workouts. No more next-day stiffness and soreness and occasional minor injuries—just because he spends 12 minutes every morning working on drills specific to sprinting that challenge the glutes, hamstrings and core.

Dr. Art DeVany, Ph.D., author of The New Evolution Diet and one of my earliest and greatest inspirations for Primal-inspired health practices, says that the lion never has to stretch before a workout, and we shouldn’t have to either. No, our modern creakiness can be attributed to overtraining patterns (in the case of morning issues) or extended stillness without a movement break when you get up and hobble during the day. Our ancestors most certainly had to run for their lives with zero warning on a routine basis. It’s a good Primal skill to have still.

Micro workouts are also applicable to cardiovascular fitness. A few minutes here and a few minutes there have a similar cumulative effect. Dr. Phil Maffetone explains that any stimulation of the aerobic system, even really low intensity stuff that a hard-core athlete might not choose to count as an official workout, helps improve your cardiovascular health and fitness. There’s really no lower limit to the aerobic exercise zone.

Anytime you get up from a chair and walk, you’re getting an aerobic benefit. A couple minutes recruiting major muscle groups with Stretch Cordz confers a new advantage. A cruise ship analogy works well here. When the floating city is out on the open ocean, cruising at 20 knots en route to the next port, all twelve turbine engines are cranking at full throttle. When it’s cruising in the harbor at two knots in preparation for docking, only a couple turbines are operating at half power. However, the two turbines operating at half speed in the harbor are still being “trained” to perform when they’re called up on in the open ocean. Note: I’ve revised my position on this concept over the years as research filled in the picture. Early on, I used to designate an aerobic zone of 55-75% of maximum heart rate. I’m not saying abandon time in that range, but know that anything outside of it also counts for something, and that should be good news.

If you so much as jump up from your desk, scramble down the stairs and out to your vehicle, then return with a few floors of ascent and back to your desk—total time five minutes and eight seconds. You’ll be turbocharging fat burning, increasing oxygen delivery and blood circulation to the brain, and flooding the bloodstream with neurotransmitters that elevate mood and improve cognitive focus. Similarly, anytime you haul off a set of pushups or squats, you’re making a meaningful contribution to your fitness and longevity.

Every effort, however modest, can be a small win. How does that shift your mindset? How does it open up possibilities for you? Let me know down below, and share any questions you have while you’re at it. Have a great week, everybody.

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[marcusssanderson]

73 Gratitude Quotes Celebrating Life, Love & Friends

Looking for an awesome list of inspirational gratitude quotes for a greater sense of appreciation and thanks for our life, family, and friends? Below you’ll our collection of gratitude quotes that will bring love in your heart.

We all want to be appreciated, but are we also expressing our appreciation in return?

This is such an important part of our relationships with others, and in both them and ourselves knowing what they mean to us, or how we mean to them.

These gratitude quotes on appreciation will motivate you to either express your appreciation for others or to identify what we have been lacking and need to hear often.

Let them inspire you to be thankful for life, love, family, and friends.

Below is our collection of inspirational, wise, and thoughtful gratitude quotes, gratitude sayings, and gratitude proverbs, collected from a variety of sources over the years.

Gratitude Quotes About Life

Here are some inspirational gratitude quotes about life.

1.) “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  2.)  “I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes gain.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

3.)  “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough” ― Oprah Winfrey

4.) “The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.” ― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

5.) “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

6.) “Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer.

On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” ― Hunter S. Thompson

7.) “At the end of the day, let there be no excuses, no explanations, no regrets.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

8.) “To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.” ― Mark Twain

9.) “Forget yesterday – it has already forgotten you. Don’t sweat tomorrow – you haven’t even met. Instead, open your eyes and your heart to a truly precious gift – today.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

  10.) “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!” ― Mae West

Inspirational Gratitude quotes about friends

11.) “What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

12.) “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love — then make that day count!” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being

13.) “Dance. Smile. Giggle. Marvel. TRUST. HOPE. LOVE. WISH. BELIEVE. Most of all, enjoy every moment of the journey, and appreciate where you are at this moment instead of always focusing on how far you have to go.” ― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

14.) “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” ― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

15.) “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.” [The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]” ― Stephen Hawking

16.) “Love is made up of three unconditional properties in equal measure:

Acceptance

Understanding

Appreciation

Remove any one of the three and the triangle falls apart. Which, by the way, is something highly inadvisable.

Think about it — do you really want to live in a world of only two dimensions? So, for the love of a triangle, please keep love whole.” ― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

17.) “It’s funny how, in this journey of life, even though we may begin at different times and places, our paths cross with others so that we may share our love, compassion, observations, and hope. This is a design of God that I appreciate and cherish.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

18.) “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” ― W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

19.) “It’s funny, but have you ever noticed that the more special something is, the more people seem to take it for granted? It’s like they think it won’t ever change.

Just like this house here. All it ever needed was a little attention, and it would never have ended up like this in the first place.” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

  20.) “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

21.) “This place was truly the highest and the lowest of all worlds – the most beautiful senses, the most exquisite emotions…the most malevolent desires, the darkest deeds. Perhaps it was meant to be so. Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached.” ― Stephenie Meyer, The Host

Gratitude Quotes About Appreciating Our Life

22.) “Just an observation: it is impossible to be both grateful and depressed. Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

23.) “In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued.”(From a speech read on video on August 31, 1995 before the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China)” ― Aung San Suu Kyi

  24.) “Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.”  ― H. Jackson Brown Jr., Life’s Little Instruction Book: 511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life

  25.) “The problem that we have with a victim mentality is that we forget to see the blessings of the day. Because of this, our spirit is poisoned instead of nourished.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

26.) “Every one of my fans is so special to me” ― Justin Bieber, First Step 2 Forever

27.) “Be happy with who you are and what you do, and you can do anything you want.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

28.) “If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation.

In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse.” ― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

29.) “Those who have the ability to be grateful are the ones who have the ability to achieve greatness.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Gratitude quotes about being thankful

Be inspired by these gratitude quotes about being thankful.

30.) “Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.” ― Ann Druyan

31.) “You are evidence of your mother’s strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy

32.) “Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.” ― Sarah Ban Breathnach

33.) “We can’t undo a single thing we have ever done, but we can make decisions today that propel us to the life we want and towards the healing we need.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

34.) “I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.” ― Elbert Hubbard

35.) “A very small percentage of the people in this world will actually experience and live today. So many people will be stuck on another day, another time that traumatized them and caused them to spiritually stutter so they miss out on this day.” ― Steve Maraboli

36.) “Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

37.) “The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out.

One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.” ― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

38.) “Finding happiness should not be seen as finding a needle in a haystack. Happiness is within. Each day is a blessing that brings an abundance of happiness. Therefore, finding happiness should be like finding a gift in a stack of gifts.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

39.) “A grateful mindset can set you free from the prison of disempowerment and the shackles of misery.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

40.) “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” ― Marcel Duchamp

Motivational Gratitude Quotes For Life and love

41.) “Sometimes we fight who we are, struggling against ourselves and our natures. But we must learn to accept who we are and appreciate who we become. We must love ourselves for what and who we are, and believe in our talents.” ― Harley King

42.) “Connecting with those you know you love, like and appreciate you restore the spirit and give you the energy to keep moving forward in this life.” ― Deborah Day, BE HAPPY NOW!

43.) “Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

44.) “For the yesterdays and today’s, and the tomorrows I can hardly wait for – Thank you.” ― Cecelia Ahern, The Book of Tomorrow

45.) “The honey doesn’t taste so good once it is being eaten; the goal doesn’t mean so much once it is reached; the reward is no so rewarding once it has been given. If we add up all the rewards in our lives, we won’t have very much.

But if we add up the spaces *between* the rewards, we’ll come up with quite a bit. And if we add up the rewards *and* the spaces, then we’ll have everything – every minute of the time that we spent.” ― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

46.) “Not having money to spend doesn’t mean we can’t have well-spent moments every day.” ― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Peace and Plenty: Finding Your Path to Financial Serenity

47.) “In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted.

It wasn’t until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her. ” ― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

48.) “Be thankful for your allotment in an imperfect world.  Though better circumstances can be imagined, far worse are nearer misses than you probably care to realize.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

49.) “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

50.) “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton

51.) “Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” —Zig Ziglar

52.) “ ‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.” —Alice Walker

53.) “Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.” — Henri Frederic Amiel

54.) “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” —Robert Brault

55.) “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” – Melody Beattie

56.) Sometimes we should express our gratitude for the small and simple things like the scent of the rain, the taste of your favorite food, or the sound of a loved one’s voice. – Joseph B. Wirthlin

57.)  “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward

58.) “The way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.” — Charles Schwab

Attitude of gratitude quotes

59.) “Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.” ―Doris Day

60.) “Appreciation can make a day—even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.” ―Margaret Cousins

61.) “There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.” ―Ralph H. Blum

62.) “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –  G.K. Chesterton

63.) “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero

64.) “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” ― Voltaire

65.) “Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.” – Brian Tracy

Other inspirational gratitude quotes and sayings

Here are some more inspirational gratitude quotes for you.

66.) “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” – Aesop (c.620-560 BC)

67.) “Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.” –

[ionecoffman]

Millennials Are Sick of Drinking

On January 20, 2017, Cassie Schoon rolled into work with a hangover. It was the morning of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, and Schoon, who doesn’t count herself among the president’s fans, had gone out for drinks with friends the night before to take her mind off it. The evening’s distraction left her in pretty rough shape the next day. “I was in this meeting feeling absolutely miserable and I was like, you know, this is not what grownups do,” she says.

Since then, Schoon, who is 37 and lives in Denver, has cut way back on alcohol. “[Drinking] has to be more of an occasion for me now, like someone’s birthday or a girl’s night,” she says. “So it’s once every couple of weeks, instead of a weekly occurrence.” Drinking less wasn’t always simple for her: Denver is a young town with a vibrant brewery and bar scene, and Schoon’s social circle had long centered itself around meeting up for drinks. But avoiding booze has been worth it. “I started to realize there’s no reason I can’t see these people and go to museums or go out for waffles or something,” Schoon says.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from more than 100 Americans in their 20s and 30s who have begun to make similar changes in their drinking habits or who are contemplating ways to drink less. They have good company: Public-health efforts have helped drive down adolescent drinking rates, and American beverage manufacturers are beginning to hedge their bets on alcohol’s future. Media, too, has noticed that change is afoot. Recent months have seen a flurry of trend stories about millennials—currently about 22 to 38 years old—getting sober.

But sobriety, a term that generally refers to the total abstention practiced by people in recovery from substance-abuse problems, doesn’t quite tell the story. What some have been quick to characterize as an interest in being sober might actually be more like a search for moderation in a culture that has long treated alcohol as a dichotomy: You either drink whenever the opportunity presents itself, or you don’t drink at all. Many millennials—and especially the urban, college-educated consumers prized by marketers—might just be tired of drinking so much.

There isn’t any great statistical evidence yet that young adults have altered their drinking habits on a grand scale. Changes in habit often lag behind changes in attitude, and national survey data on drinking habits reflect only small declines in heavy alcohol use. (For men, that’s drinking five alcoholic beverages in a short period of time five or more times in a month; for women, it’s four drinks under the same conditions.) From 2015 through 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the rate of millennials who report that they have consumed any amount of alcohol in the past month has remained pretty steady, at more than 60 percent.

But there are limitations to this data that would make it difficult to capture the types of changes that people described to me. Someone who has cut back from regularly having two or three glasses of wine with dinner to only having a glass once a week, for example, would still fall into the same statistical category, eliding shifts that might make a huge difference on a personal level. And a desire to drink less doesn’t mean that people no longer enjoy drinking. Instead, it might be that alcohol-centric socializing has crept into more parts of people’s lives and stuck around for longer than previous generations had to contend with it.

For young Americans, drinking is very social. “I drank pretty regularly in my 20s, especially in social situations,” says Leanne Vanderbyl, who lives in San Francisco. “It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I realized that alcohol was no longer my friend.” A few decades ago, marriage and children might have moved urban, college-educated young adults away from social drinking naturally, but fewer millennials are taking part in traditional family-building, and the ones doing it are waiting longer than their parents did. Now, the structure of social life isn’t that different for many people in their mid-30s than it was in their early 20s, which provides plenty of time spent drinking on dates and with friends for them to start to get a little tired of it.

For a generation that’s also behind its forebears when it comes to wealth accumulation, whether or not it’s a good idea to buy a bunch of beer or several $13 cocktails three nights a week can come down to practical concerns. Alex Belfiori, a 30-year-old IT professional in Pittsburgh, decided recently to stop keeping beer in the house. “I’ve already calculated how much I’m saving by not drinking, and I’m thinking about where I can put that money now,” he says. Nina Serven, a 24-year-old brand manager living in Brooklyn, is similarly over it. “Drinking just feels boring and needlessly expensive,” she says, even though she feels social pressure to drink. “I just started a medication that shouldn't be mixed with alcohol, and I'm relieved that I have an easy out.”

Britta Starke, an addictions therapist and the program director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center at the University of North Carolina, sees a similar malaise in those seeking guidance from in her practice. “There does come a time when there has to be some introspection,” she says. “Folks in the millennial generation have maybe a better sense of balance. Some do yoga or meditation or are physically active, so they don’t need to find stimulation and stress-reduction in substances.” That mirrors the generation’s general interest in maintaining its health, and for those questioning their habits, realizing that a healthier relationship with alcohol doesn’t require most people to give up drinking might ease people’s social concerns.

Still, Starke has noticed some worrying attitudinal trends toward alcohol among her younger patients. Millennials who haven’t developed their generation’s signature coping skills often use alcohol heavily. Starke sees an alarming number of people under 35 with advanced liver disease or alcohol hepatitis. As attitudes may be moderating for many young adults, plenty of others are struggling: Nearly 90,000 people still die from alcohol-related causes in America every year, and that number hasn’t started to meaningfully improve.

Moreover, drinking doesn’t exist in a substance-use vacuum. All the other things millennials are well-known for ingesting play a role in its shifting popularity. “It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever-more-common legalization of cannabis plays a big role in that.

Among the people I spoke with in detail, several mentioned replacing their evening wine with an evening bowl. “I smoke weed to unwind—thank you, California,” says Vanderbyl. For her, cannabis lacks the lingering effects that drove her away from alcohol: “I can wake up in the morning feeling ready for the day.” She’s not alone in making that switch. A 2017 study found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared to similar counties without weed. Recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible.

Millennials have also shown what Starke says is worrisome interest in other drugs, the abuse of which may be diverting some of their attention from alcohol. She sees many patients looking for help with opioids, as well as benzodiazepines like Xanax. Just because young people want to drink less often doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better off: Suicide rates are up among young adults, and prescription abuse is a problem the country is only beginning to address.

The beverage industry does seem to see the writing on the wall. Over the past decade, a tide of artisanal alcohol businesses met the swelling millennial market for booze-based socializing, including innumerable microbreweries and distilleries, as well as high-end cocktail bars and wine shops targeting younger clientele. Now, 2018 Nielsen data shows that sales growth across alcohol categories is slowing. Bon Appetit estimates that the market for low- or no-alcohol beverages could grow by almost a third in just the next three years.

If he spaces in which alcohol is consumed will also have to change to meet shifting consumer demands. It’s become notably easier in recent years to find alcohol-free cocktails in urban bars across America. In New York City, a few young entrepreneurs are opening up new kinds of spaces to serve the tastes of their peers. Listen Bar, a clubby pop-up that gives patrons a chance to party without alcohol, is crowdfunding to lease its first permanent location. In Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, Getaway, a bar so dedicated to being booze-free that it won’t even use bitters that contain alcohol, is opening in a few weeks.

Getaway’s owners, Sam Thonis and Regina Dellea, left careers in media to open the bar, which was an idea inspired by Thonis’s brother’s recovery from alcoholism. So far, the reception the pair has received bears out the broader generational shift they’re anticipating. “It feels to me like the older people are, the more they see [our bar] as a thing for sober people. They see it as black or white—you drink or you don’t drink,” says Thonis. “With younger people, there’s a lot more receptiveness to just not drinking sometimes.”

Instead of being the tipping point of any grand trend in alcohol consumption themselves, millennials might simply be the canaries in the coal mine. Statistically, it’s Gen Z, the age group currently in high school and college, that may force a sea change in America’s relationship with alcohol. They’re drinking at lower rates than adolescents have in generations, and so much about a person’s lifetime relationship to substance abuse and consumption is set by usage in early life.

For now, many young adults seem relieved that pressure they’ve internalized to drink is easing and more options are opening up. Drinking’s spot in people’s lives doesn’t have to be as all-or-nothing as American culture has long regarded it. “For many people, when they’re honest with their friends [about wanting to skip out on drinks], their friends are like, ‘Oh my god, I was thinking about that too,’” says UNC’s Starke. “I don’t know too many people who have gotten a negative response.”

Dellea has also noticed a mix of excitement and relief among her bar’s prospective patrons. “An Instagram account put up a picture of the bar,” she says. “A lot of the comments were just people tagging their friends.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[tipsycad147]

It’s been a minute since I shared a plant profile with all of you. I found I needed a bit of a break from writing plant profiles and just some more time out in the garden and making a mess in my kitchen trying out new recipes. However, I woke up this morning with an itch to talk plant nerd with you before I head off on my winter break (which is all very impulsively mercurial and therefore the herb I’ve chosen to talk about is quite appropriate).

I wanted to share with you more stories about one of my favourite herbs that I reach for in the depth of winter and the height of summer almost equally. Peppermint is just magickal like that when it comes to working its way into both my warming and cooling recipes. But we’ll get to that in a minute…

I’ve written about Peppermint a number of times already, but always in the context of a larger post, and it felt like the write time to get deep about our green companion. The following profile is from my course exploring the intersections of herbal wisdom and the tarot - The Tarot Apothecary. So you’ll see my correspondences for individual tarot cards listed below - why different cards are allied with different plants is something that I explore more in the course (as well as helping you find your own personal correspondences).

Do you use Peppermint (or any of the myriad varieties of Mint) in your practice? What’s you favourite way to work with the plant? Let me know in the comments.

Peppermint

(Mentha piperita)

Common + Folk Names : Brandy mint, lament Tarot Cards : The Fool, the Hermit, Justice, the Star, the World, the Messenger (Knight) of Swords, Four of Cups, Six of Wands. Element : Fire + Water Zodiac Signs : Gemini, Virgo, Libra Planets : Mercury, Venus, Jupiter Moon Phase : Full Moon Parts used : Ariel parts Habitat : Naturalised throughout the world Growing conditions : Full to partial sun with moderate to high amounts of water. Collection : Collect in the spring before flowering, but it can be gathered throughout the summer. Flavor : Pungent + sweet Temperature : Cool + warm Moisture : Dry Tissue State : Heat/Excitation, Cold/Depression Constituents : Beta-carotene, B-complex vitamins, vitamin C, potassium, flavonoids, essential oils, ketone, tannins, resin, rosmarinic acid, menthol.

Actions : Analgesic, anesthetic, anodyne, antibacterial, antiemetic, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-parasitic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, antiviral, aromatic, carminative, cholagogue, choleretic, diaphoretic, digestive, diuretic, emmenagogue, expectorant, immunomodulating, nervine, stimulant, stomachic, tonic, vasodilator.

Main Uses : Peppermint is a useful herb embodying the mercurial qualities of its Guardian Planet. It is able to relax when needed one day and to awaken and stimulate the next. To understand how a plant can be both relaxing and stimulating, try the following. Rub the top of your head with your fingers for a quick moment. Feel how that is both relaxing and stimulating? Such is the powers of Peppermint. So, it is a popular herb in the summer for its cooling qualities and it is found again during the winter as part of warming teas and cold-care remedies.

Peppermint is a tasty and popular digestive remedy. It relaxes cramping of the intestinal muscles and alleviates a number of digestive complaints including gas, indigestion, colic, IBS, hiccups, and heartburn. Peppermint also has tannins which help repair leaky guts by strengthening the lining of the intestines, promoting better digestion and proper assimilation of nutrients. The herb is used for a number of intestinal diseases including Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Peppermint is especially effective for digestive issues arising from stress and nervous conditions that lead to cramping. Look for signs of poor digestion, headaches from digestive tension, lack of appetite, and distention. Peppermint is excellent for when there is lack of pleasure around the process of eating food. Enjoy the tea a half hour before meals, but be mindful of over-relaxing the intestines with long term use (so no more than a few weeks daily and then take a break from use before restarting again). Peppermint is useful for car sickness and nausea as well as in pregnancy for morning sickness after the first trimester.

As a circulatory tonic, Peppermint regulates energy throughout our bodies. The herb relaxes peripheral blood vessels helping to release excess heat and damp due in part to its menthol content. It helps blood move effectively through the body which is one reason that it helps to relieve brain fog and clear the head. Peppermint also has an effect on the lymph system helping to stimulate lymphatic action and therefore improve circulation.

The herb dries excess damp as well as expels mucus in cases of colds, ‘flu, and sinus congestion. In general, Peppermint is good for heart palpitations (especially when associated with indigestion), inflammation and infection of the lungs, sinusitis and sinus headaches, asthma, bronchitis, laryngitis, and general sinus congestion. The herb is clearing and helps us to take a deep breath. For bronchitis and asthma is it especially effective as a steam, but can also be used as a hot tea to reduce spasms of the airways and clear excess mucus. Coughs and sore throats are also aided by Peppermint.

As a nervine, Peppermint is refreshing. It awakens the senses while reducing excess. If there is too much heat, Peppermint cools. If stagnation is a problem, Peppermint tones and stimulates. If overstimulation is present, Peppermint calms. I find the herb to be useful when mental dullness is present as Peppermint entices and excites the senses to movement. Along with drinking the tea, the essential oil burned or sprayed in a room can help shift the energy from dullness to inspired. Peppermint also assists with relieving anxiousness, nervous tension, and general anxiety. Again, Peppermint can help to stimulate where there is stagnation (which can lead to anxiety and depression because of lack of movement and tone) as well as help to relax tension (which can lead to a different sort of anxiousness and restless energy).

Peppermint is a classic cold care herb along with other herbs such as Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and Elder (Sambucus nigra). Since it is a warming and cooling herb, it is effective for colds and ‘flu with symptoms of fevers and chills. In addition to  strengthening the lymphatic system in regards to circulation, Peppermint also strengthens the lymphatic cleansing process, clearing the blood of old cells and promoting the production of white blood cells, thereby enhancing immunity. Peppermint has been shown to be effective against streptococcus, staphylococcus, e. coli, helicobacter pylori, candida, and other pathogens. Since Peppermint is moistening to connective tissues, look for signs of skin atrophy, aching and dried joints, and general dryness, when choosing it for compromised immunity.

Peppermint’s immunomodulating qualities are also tied to its improvement of the body’s ability to digest and absorb nutrients. A robust digestive system leads to a healthy immune system since the body is properly receiving all the building-blocks it needs from the food it is consuming. Additionally, early studies have shown that Peppermint may have chemoprotective qualities.

The herb assists with menstrual cramps and complaints due to uterine congestion. Look for signs of feeling heavy and bloated just before and during menstruation, along with mental fatigue and fog. The herb’s stimulating qualities are noted by Culpeper as he described the herb as stirring “up bodily lust.”

Historically, Peppermint has also been used for kidney and gallstones as well as clearing out a stagnant liver. There are warnings against using Peppermint too often for too long (as in daily for a few months) as it will become overly clearing and lead to weakening the blood, even stopping menstruation.

Use a poultice on the stomach for pains and on the chest for respiratory colds. A topical poultice is useful for muscle pain, including back pain, and spasm as well as arthritis and sore joints since Peppermint is anesthetic. Cold compresses can be applied to the forehead during fever and headache as well as rashes, bug bites, measles, and chicken box. Also, a topical herbal oil mixed with the essential oil can be used to alleviate headaches when massaged into the brow.

Internally, Peppermint will help to bring measles boils to the surface. Culpeper recommended washing the heads of young children with a Peppermint tea for the treatment of scabs and rashes. Use the tea as a gargle or spray for good breath and to clean the mouth. Chewing the mint will give the same effect.

As an antiseptic, antiviral, and anti-fungal herb, Peppermint is useful for such conditions as the herpes simplex virus, athlete’s foot, and other uncomfortable and infectious conditions.

Magickal Uses : Peppermint is an herb that can be used in magickal works of prosperity, abundance, and good fortune. Use in rituals of cleansing and consecration as well as in incense blends to clear a space of harmful energy. The sharp scent also ignites the senses, as discussed earlier, but also attributes itself to awakening the psychic senses. Use the herb in spells and charms of clear communication, negotiation, and business deals while invoking the powers of Mercury (invoke Jupiter, too, if business and the need for good fortune is involved). It was said that Peppermint would reduce dreams of a sexual nature by 17th century herbalist John Parkinson, so be mindful if you would rather keep those dreams as part of your nighttime experience and avoid taking the herb at night. The herb is excellent for wind magick as well as matters of justice and judicial process as it has some guardianship by Jupiter.  

The Peppermint Personality : There are two types of Peppermint personalities. The first tends towards a restless and nervous energy. Their thoughts spin and sometimes they struggle with silence. They possess the gift of gab, are prone to be on social media for one too many hours, tying their self-worth to the amount of positive attention they receive online. They have trouble settling down and being slow and still. They can exude a great deal of nervous energy and sometimes their anxious thoughts keep them up at night. What they feel like they need to accomplish every minute of every day feels dizzying and impossible. Peppermint will help them calm down and connect with their core strength and stillness. They will be especially served by Peppermint’s relaxing nervine qualities. The other type of Peppermint personality is nearly an opposite of the first. Slow and stagnant, they are uninspired. It is as if a heavy fog bank has rolled into their mind and they are unable to find their way out of the seaside soup. Sorrow for their lack of inspiration may have set in and a confusion around who they really are and what they are supposed to do with themselves. They will be best served by Peppermint’s stimulating nervine qualities.

Both Peppermint personality types will be served by Peppermint’s ability to provide clarity and help them overcome their shared fear of success (even they go about avoiding that fear in different ways). What is really important to you, the mint asks, what is really necessary? Ultimately, Peppermint helps both personalities figure out who they are in the world and what they are called to do.

Contraindications : Avoid large amounts during breastfeeding as mints may dry up the milk supply. Other sources recommend Peppermint for mastitis. Do not use the essential oil during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

Drug interactions : None known.

Dosage : Standard dosage.

http://www.wortsandcunning.com/blog/mercurial-wisdom-peppermint-plant-profile

[nancygduarteus]

Millennials Are Sick of Drinking

On January 20, 2017, Cassie Schoon rolled into work with a hangover. It was the morning of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, and Schoon, who doesn’t count herself among the president’s fans, had gone out for drinks with friends the night before to take her mind off it. The evening’s distraction left her in pretty rough shape the next day. “I was in this meeting feeling absolutely miserable and I was like, you know, this is not what grownups do,” she says.

Since then, Schoon, who is 37 and lives in Denver, has cut way back on alcohol. “[Drinking] has to be more of an occasion for me now, like someone’s birthday or a girl’s night,” she says. “So it’s once every couple of weeks, instead of a weekly occurrence.” Drinking less wasn’t always simple for her: Denver is a young town with a vibrant brewery and bar scene, and Schoon’s social circle had long centered itself around meeting up for drinks. But avoiding booze has been worth it. “I started to realize there’s no reason I can’t see these people and go to museums or go out for waffles or something,” Schoon says.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from more than 100 Americans in their 20s and 30s who have begun to make similar changes in their drinking habits or who are contemplating ways to drink less. They have good company: Public-health efforts have helped drive down adolescent drinking rates, and American beverage manufacturers are beginning to hedge their bets on alcohol’s future. Media, too, has noticed that change is afoot. Recent months have seen a flurry of trend stories about millennials—currently about 22 to 38 years old—getting sober.

But sobriety, a term that generally refers to the total abstention practiced by people in recovery from substance-abuse problems, doesn’t quite tell the story. What some have been quick to characterize as an interest in being sober might actually be more like a search for moderation in a culture that has long treated alcohol as a dichotomy: You either drink whenever the opportunity presents itself, or you don’t drink at all. Many millennials—and especially the urban, college-educated consumers prized by marketers—might just be tired of drinking so much.

There isn’t any great statistical evidence yet that young adults have altered their drinking habits on a grand scale. Changes in habit often lag behind changes in attitude, and national survey data on drinking habits reflect only small declines in heavy alcohol use. (For men, that’s drinking five alcoholic beverages in a short period of time five or more times in a month; for women, it’s four drinks under the same conditions.) From 2015 through 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the rate of millennials who report that they have consumed any amount of alcohol in the past month has remained pretty steady, at more than 60 percent.

But there are limitations to this data that would make it difficult to capture the types of changes that people described to me. Someone who has cut back from regularly having two or three glasses of wine with dinner to only having a glass once a week, for example, would still fall into the same statistical category, eliding shifts that might make a huge difference on a personal level. And a desire to drink less doesn’t mean that people no longer enjoy drinking. Instead, it might be that alcohol-centric socializing has crept into more parts of people’s lives and stuck around for longer than previous generations had to contend with it.

For young Americans, drinking is very social. “I drank pretty regularly in my 20s, especially in social situations,” says Leanne Vanderbyl, who lives in San Francisco. “It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I realized that alcohol was no longer my friend.” A few decades ago, marriage and children might have moved urban, college-educated young adults away from social drinking naturally, but fewer millennials are taking part in traditional family-building, and the ones doing it are waiting longer than their parents did. Now, the structure of social life isn’t that different for many people in their mid-30s than it was in their early 20s, which provides plenty of time spent drinking on dates and with friends for them to start to get a little tired of it.

For a generation that’s also behind its forebears when it comes to wealth accumulation, whether or not it’s a good idea to buy a bunch of beer or several $13 cocktails three nights a week can come down to practical concerns. Alex Belfiori, a 30-year-old IT professional in Pittsburgh, decided recently to stop keeping beer in the house. “I’ve already calculated how much I’m saving by not drinking, and I’m thinking about where I can put that money now,” he says. Nina Serven, a 24-year-old brand manager living in Brooklyn, is similarly over it. “Drinking just feels boring and needlessly expensive,” she says, even though she feels social pressure to drink. “I just started a medication that shouldn't be mixed with alcohol, and I'm relieved that I have an easy out.”

Britta Starke, an addictions therapist and the program director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center at the University of North Carolina, sees a similar malaise in those seeking guidance from in her practice. “There does come a time when there has to be some introspection,” she says. “Folks in the millennial generation have maybe a better sense of balance. Some do yoga or meditation or are physically active, so they don’t need to find stimulation and stress-reduction in substances.” That mirrors the generation’s general interest in maintaining its health, and for those questioning their habits, realizing that a healthier relationship with alcohol doesn’t require most people to give up drinking might ease people’s social concerns.

Still, Starke has noticed some worrying attitudinal trends toward alcohol among her younger patients. Millennials who haven’t developed their generation’s signature coping skills often use alcohol heavily. Starke sees an alarming number of people under 35 with advanced liver disease or alcohol hepatitis. As attitudes may be moderating for many young adults, plenty of others are struggling: Nearly 90,000 people still die from alcohol-related causes in America every year, and that number hasn’t started to meaningfully improve.

Moreover, drinking doesn’t exist in a substance-use vacuum. All the other things millennials are well-known for ingesting play a role in its shifting popularity. “It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever-more-common legalization of cannabis plays a big role in that.

Among the people I spoke with in detail, several mentioned replacing their evening wine with an evening bowl. “I smoke weed to unwind—thank you, California,” says Vanderbyl. For her, cannabis lacks the lingering effects that drove her away from alcohol: “I can wake up in the morning feeling ready for the day.” She’s not alone in making that switch. A 2017 study found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared to similar counties without weed. Recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible.

Millennials have also shown what Starke says is worrisome interest in other drugs, the abuse of which may be diverting some of their attention from alcohol. She sees many patients looking for help with opioids, as well as benzodiazepines like Xanax. Just because young people want to drink less often doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better off: Suicide rates are up among young adults, and prescription abuse is a problem the country is only beginning to address.

The beverage industry does seem to see the writing on the wall. Over the past decade, a tide of artisanal alcohol businesses met the swelling millennial market for booze-based socializing, including innumerable microbreweries and distilleries, as well as high-end cocktail bars and wine shops targeting younger clientele. Now, 2018 Nielsen data shows that sales growth across alcohol categories is slowing. Bon Appetit estimates that the market for low- or no-alcohol beverages could grow by almost a third in just the next three years.

If he spaces in which alcohol is consumed will also have to change to meet shifting consumer demands. It’s become notably easier in recent years to find alcohol-free cocktails in urban bars across America. In New York City, a few young entrepreneurs are opening up new kinds of spaces to serve the tastes of their peers. Listen Bar, a clubby pop-up that gives patrons a chance to party without alcohol, is crowdfunding to lease its first permanent location. In Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, Getaway, a bar so dedicated to being booze-free that it won’t even use bitters that contain alcohol, is opening in a few weeks.

Getaway’s owners, Sam Thonis and Regina Dellea, left careers in media to open the bar, which was an idea inspired by Thonis’s brother’s recovery from alcoholism. So far, the reception the pair has received bears out the broader generational shift they’re anticipating. “It feels to me like the older people are, the more they see [our bar] as a thing for sober people. They see it as black or white—you drink or you don’t drink,” says Thonis. “With younger people, there’s a lot more receptiveness to just not drinking sometimes.”

Instead of being the tipping point of any grand trend in alcohol consumption themselves, millennials might simply be the canaries in the coal mine. Statistically, it’s Gen Z, the age group currently in high school and college, that may force a sea change in America’s relationship with alcohol. They’re drinking at lower rates than adolescents have in generations, and so much about a person’s lifetime relationship to substance abuse and consumption is set by usage in early life.

For now, many young adults seem relieved that pressure they’ve internalized to drink is easing and more options are opening up. Drinking’s spot in people’s lives doesn’t have to be as all-or-nothing as American culture has long regarded it. “For many people, when they’re honest with their friends [about wanting to skip out on drinks], their friends are like, ‘Oh my god, I was thinking about that too,’” says UNC’s Starke. “I don’t know too many people who have gotten a negative response.”

Dellea has also noticed a mix of excitement and relief among her bar’s prospective patrons. “An Instagram account put up a picture of the bar,” she says. “A lot of the comments were just people tagging their friends.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/millennials-sober-sick-of-drinking/586186/?utm_source=feed

[ianmkeenan]

Purple Bush

Information about Purple Bush:

Effects

Fragrance

Flavors

Adverse reactions

Medical

Growing

Flowering time

Purple Bush takes its name from the striking hues of its flowers. Adding to its appeal is its incredible density which give weight to the buds when placed in the palm of one’s hand. And, like many purple-tinted strains, it tastes heavily like grapes and berries in a cocktail of fruits.

Sadly, its genetics remain unknown to this day. Still, many appreciate Purple Bush’s delicious scent handpicked by Snoop Dogg for his cannabis brand Leafs by Snoop. It also boasts potent THC levels of up to 21%, making it an undoubtedly powerful addition to one’s list of favorites.

Living up to its reputation, Purple Bush induces a relaxing and sedating high. Sinking to the couch and drowsing off to dreamland is, in fact, quite inevitable. Still, its mental effects allow users to ruminate or review before ending a long day. Although, it would be better if the day’s schedules were cleared ahead of time.

Information about Purple Bush:

ORIGINUnknownEFFECTSRelaxed - 10 Sleepy - 5 Creative - 5 Euphoric - 4 Uplifted - 3ADVERSE REACTIONS (NEGATIVE)Dry mouth - 10 Dry eyes - 5FRAGRANCESweet, berry, grape, kush, earthyFLAVORSSweet, grape, berry, floral, lavender, earthyMEDICALStress - 10 Depression - 5 Insomnia - 5 Lack of appetite - 3 Pain - 3FLOWERING TIME INDOORS7 to 9 weeksFLOWERING TIME OUTDOORSLate September to mid-OctoberTHC CONTENT %18% to 21%INDICA / SATIVA %70%/30%INDOOR YIELD10 to 12 ounces per square meterOUTDOOR YIELD12 ounces or more per plantCLIMATEWarm climate

* 10 is the highest * 1 is the lowest

Effects

Purple Bush’s effects begin with a euphoric cerebral head high. It enhances the mood and leaves users feeling quite free spirit. Apart from an upbeat disposition, the mental clarity also results surge in creativity. As thoughts flow smoothly, it creates a path for new ideas and innovative solutions.

TIP: Looking to buy Purple Bush seeds? Visit the ILGM weed seed shop

In spite of its inspiring head high, it is still not advisable to use the Indic-dominant bud in the morning before work. This is because the mental effects are followed by a powerful body buzz with the potential to keep users from moving out of the couch.

Purple Bush Effects - Image powered by Allbud.com

Indeed, a few hours after the first puff, an uplifting sensation trickles down from the temples and envelops the body in deep relaxation. Most likely, users will want to lounge around or take a break from whatever task. A drowsiness sets in and, as the eyelids become heavy, it becomes almost next to impossible to say no to sleep.

Fragrance

Even before opening a bag of Purple Bush, one can already smell the sweet scent of mixed berries and grapes. With inspection, the ever-so-familiar scent of kush reveals itself. Crushing and burning the buds will release its rich earthy aroma.

Flavors

Purple Bush tastes very much like biting into a sweet, grape-flavored cake with berries decorated at the top. Enhancing it is a subtle, barely noticeable floral note reminiscent of lavender. On the exhale, a pleasant earthy aftertaste lingers in the mouth.

Adverse Reaction

It is best to have a drink in hand while using Purple Bush or any strain for that matter. Not alcohol though as it can exacerbate the dryness one feels after cannabinoids interfere with the production of moisture. The symptoms are mild but continue for hours, especially in areas like the eyes and the mouth. In case of discomfort, one should stay hydrated throughout the day.

Purple Bush Adverse Reaction - Image powered by Thechillbud.com

Medical

Purple Bush has immense therapeutic value. Its ability to ease both mental and physical afflictions makes it an indispensable strain in the medical marijuana community.

TIP: Looking to buy Purple Bush seeds? Visit the ILGM weed seed shop

Its happy high, for instance, helps manage stress by positively affecting behaviors. In calming the mind and stabilizing moods, it also addresses symptoms of depression and other mental health issues.

Purple Bush Medical - Image powered by Thecannabist.co

One of the best times to use Purple Bush is a few hours before a meal. This is because it soothes pangs in the stomach that often interfere with one’s ability to down food. For this reason, it is an effective appetite stimulant that patients with eating disorders such as anorexia or those with cachexia may use.

A natural painkiller, the Indica-dominant bud has a powerful relaxing body high that banishes tension in the muscles. Feeling free of aches, it is not astonishing for users to feel a little drowsy. As sleep beckons, users drift off to dreamland fully relieved of pain.

Growing

Just like other medical strains, Purple Bush seeds are not available in the market. Leafs by Snoop maintains a proprietary hold on its products. And, while it may seem disappointing to growers, it protects users from being sold with a mediocre strain.

With that said, it is easy to determine Purple Bush’s growth patterns based on its structure and classification. As an Indica-dominant strain, it is likely that the plant has a short stature with sturdy stalks. Its branches, too, are hardy and do not break off at the weight of its dense purple buds which are quite heavy.

Classified as a medical strain, Purple Bush is likely cultivated in controlled environments where growers can easily adjust factors such as lighting, temperature, and humidity. The stability also helps reach target cannabinoids with each batch.

Flowering Time

Indoors Purple Bush has an indoor flowering period of 7 to 9 weeks. Once ready for harvest, it gifts growers with at least 10 to 12 ounces of buds per square meter

Outdoors Garden grown Purple Bush flowers from the last week of September to the second or third week of October. It produces a minimum of 12 ounces of buds per plant with room for more under the expert care of a seasoned grower.

Have you ever smoked or grown your own Purple Bush? Please let me know what you think about this marijuana strain in the comments below.

Robert

The post Purple Bush appeared first on I Love Growing Marijuana.

[allsortsotings]

Peñella y Pandenis

It’s been about three weeks now since I last updated. Perhaps because the pace of life has been more fast, but arguably because it has slowed down. I feel the need more to write when stressed, frantic or in waves of mania than when calm and relaxed. It’s said that the greatest art comes from depression, which might account for the radio silence in times of peace.

After Andreas’ we found a workaway in a tiny village called Peñella. We got the train from Novellana which had a quaint old waiting house and a big field of grass and daisies which allowed me to do yoga for half an hour whilst Nik went to buy lunch of pan, plátanos y naranjas. The train cost about €7 each and was an excursion in itself. Ubiquitous sights of mountains, rivers, fields and farms passed us as we headed to Infiesto.

On arrival we were greeted by the curly headed Maya; a delightful five year old with a wobbly tooth and a love of attention. Maybe I recognised some of my younger self in her which is why I often enjoyed playing with her more than partaking in the serious grown up chats/ ‘adult moments of silence’. We talked truffles over a litre of sidra and some crisps: Adam has started a truffle plantation in some flattish land - as flat as you can find on a foothill - and needs them to be constantly weeded in order to grow and produce.

It’s a big plan: the truffle trees will act as a working farm, in order to get planning permission for a barn in which Adam and his family can live. They currently reside in a beautiful self built house on the hillside with lots of crafted wood and amazing views. But! You say. Cultivating truffle trees? Impossible!

Yea, but nay. Adam’s trees came from a man in Barcelona who impregnates other tree types, in this case the ‘holly oak’ with truffle inoculations, then ships them out to customers. It’s surprisingly consistent work, due to the rapidity of the weeds’ growth. The trees however, are relatively low maintenance, almost cactus-like in their ability to withstand drought and lack of water for up to one year. With the all-sun or all-rain weather in Asturias, it’s perfect.

At Adam and Naomi’s we stayed in their old festival truck which was used for the Tiny Tea Tent (holla Glastonbury, WOMAD, etc), until he four children came and the new, improved Tiny Tea Truck was born. Complete with bunk beds, bath and pull-down bed.

The truck we stayed in was parked permanently on the truffle field, with a balcony built around the front and covered by eight year old willow trees. The view of the mist and the mountains at sunrise was quite mystical. We loved staying there. It had a gas stove, wood burner, sink, shelving, storage, dining area, and could still be opened up at the back so one could watch the sunset whilst hanging off the rear eating dinner, if one so wished.

Our cupboards were reasonably filled as part of the volunteering agreement which sparked the idea of masterchef style invention tests using what we were given. Arancini balls, aubergine parmigiana, fishcakes, hummus, kidney bean curry, peaches with granola and homemade yoghurt were some of the plates produced under the restrictions (in the loosest sense of the word).

On this note, we got really into food whilst there, even though we are always into food, but more so. On a special level. Something seemed to provoke an excitement in me to create and experiment with different dishes and tastes.

I say ‘something’ when knowing without a doubt that it was our celebratory trip to Los Llaureles; the gourmet ten course restaurant experience we went to for our anniversary (!!!). This was my first ever anniversary in life and I was greatly pleased to be spending it eating ten courses of food on the mountainside.

The dishes were (as named by us):

Honey Spoon Agave, mascarpone, almond cinnamon crisp

Laksa Miso broth, vermicelli, seafood

Mushrooms Date paste, creamy shrooms, salmon, cheese

Foetus Chicken shaped dough ball in an eggshell filled with clear garlic soup

Bao Bun Fish, apple gel, mayo

Croquette Brûléed whipped goats cheese stuffed date

Bitter Salad Mango, spinach, peanut sauce

Merluza Con mayo, rosemary, black sesame

Chia Seed Vanilla soy, mango, papaya, almond cinnamon crisp

Woman in a Gold Dress Wallflower: sponge, creme Catalan, Valencian meringue helado. Needed a ruby goji berry twist!!

So to sum up the food was fantastic.

During this time I was also awakened to the incomprehensible stress of being a full-time Mother: where is the time?

Seeing another person constantly so dutiful and aware and organised was slightly mind blowing. It’s clear to see that the children are unaware of any stress effects of this, and it made me realise how much you can take for granted as a child. I tried to help out and play with the kids and ask them stimulating questions, etc, but its nothing compared to the generally under-awarded gallantry of getting kids up in the morning; taking them to school; making food that everyone eats; keeping up with homework; cleaning; nurturing and getting again to bed at a reasonable time to do it all over again tomorrow. Life runs away quickly when it’s paced like this.

We were lucky to finish weeding at 2pm, amble up to the house for lunch, and amble back down for a leisurely dinner or stroll into Torazo. It’s not unusual to finish work at this time in Spain, which is definitely something I love. Work hard in the morning with high brain activity, eat slowly and generously during lunch, then relax into a siesta, a walk or reading for the rest of the evening. It feels like there’s more time in the day, and that its use is efficient.

We drank beer, sidra or wine most days with food. One Thursday after a smaller lunch we paired Asturian cheeses with Rioja, become progressively merrier as the mealtime went on. Food feels so good after manual labour, so much so that I’ve come to lose the same appetite without it.

Tea breaks feel like real, restorative rests. I’ve come to appreciate a range of biscuits and their dunking abilities. The pleasure of a black tea with milk is something inextricably linked with outdoor work. Read: builder’s brew.

We spent just under two weeks at the truffle plantation, it was a lovely time for reading and cooking. I finished 1984 which was one that has been on my list for virtually ever. So poignant. May save interpretations for another time.

Adam & Naomi know a small network of fellow ecoprojects and helpex/workaway hosts, so on our last Sunday we made a convenient switchover to El Toral with Liz & Steve via a barbecue. It was one of those moments where you’re glad of however life brought you to that moment. More mountains, hills, wooden decking overlooking a sheep field, delicious food and interesting people.

There was a man named Klas who makes stone masonry fires - they’re this amazing way of making the most out of heat energy by sending all the stuff through big metal pipes which are covered usually with clay. It’s a thousand+ year old technique but for whatever reason they’re relatively uncommon in Europe despite being incredibly efficient. They take a long time to build and are reasonably expensive but they last pretty much forever. Traditionally a family home will be built around one as the main pole of the house. Steve is reading a lot about their construction and kicking himself for not building one originally, as wood collection is a constant job here.

At the BBQ we also some girls doing English teaching in Coruna which which seems like a good thing/idea. Sort of considered it but the year is quite a commitment and after speaking to Liz freelance teaching seems like a good option. A one-to-one thing with locals for an hour or so.

Liz & Steve’s is a place currently focussed on hosting guests in la cabana (the guesthouse) and the blue rainbow caravan. We sleep in a little box attached to their old caravan, wher Hugo currently resides, in a field shared with some lovely orange cows. Hugo is a talented guitarist from Madrid who has been here for half a month.

We met on the Sunday and quite quickly entered inspiring philosophical conversation. We talk about literature, ideas, music and feelings. Nik and I were immediately pleased to be chilling with him for the duration of the stay. We take it in turns to cook dinner and eat overlooking the field, the stars above us and the moon sometimes hidden by the clouds.

No topic is bounded and the other day we did a creative activity which involved taking ten minutes to draw what we visualised when imagining the superego. All three were distinct and different. And of course, in true Freudian style, in some way interpretable as phallic.

The week here has fast gone by. Starting with cleaning the chicken coop and laying down straw and manure to enrich the garden soil, ending by cooking a banquet of roast sumac cauliflower with squash, red onion, apricot and black olive tagine, spicy onion rice, mustard leaf zhoug, tahini sauce and walnut tzatziki. We eat really well here. Liz is a fantastic cook and Steve goes by the ‘Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall approach’, which is nothing to complain about.

Always a bowl piled with fresh garden greens, a hot pasta or salad and fresh bread with olive oil. Food is something they may endeavour to move onto when more comfortably in the swing of bnb work. Yesterday there was a double booking which meant convincing one party to sleep in the Mongolian yurt. As a team we somehow went from empty field to fully furnished round sleeping house with wooden steps and concrete paving (Nik’s toil). Everything inside is painted and embossed beautifully, with purple curtains behind the bed and various fabrics from Steve’s travels to Turkey and Tibet sparkling around the walls and floor. Luckily, we may have to sleep in it next Wednesday to make room for a new volunteer.

Next week we’re heading to Bilbao to get some respite before embarking on a new adventure: Classroom Alive. It’s a one week boot camp in Barcelona with the aim to plan a journey from 2 - 6 months by foot with rucksacks and tents, learning in a classroom-style format for half the day, then walking for the rest of it to the next destination. It sounds crazy and I’m excited to see what it will bring. If anyone is interested, let me know!

For now, it’s raining, but we’re not going to let that deter us from our Easter Saturday trip to Nava’s sidra museum. Hopefully there will be samples.

[allenmendezsr]

The Sugar Freedom Diet

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The Sugar Freedom Diet

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    12 years ago, I quit sugar, cut the starchy carbs and processed oils, and got the health and energy I needed to live life to the fullest.

The Sugar Freedom Program is the exact eating plan I used to overcome overeating, sugar addiction, and the pain and feelings of unworthiness that were the price I paid for every binge. 

                                 Scroll Down To Order Now!

I quit sugar in 2008, and my health transformed in such a wonderful way, that I knew I had to share my discovery with the world. I began reading every book I could get my hands on about how sugar, grains, and processed seed oils can drive overeating.

When friends and family members saw the results of the changes I made, they all asked,

I answered: “Eat For Yourself.”

By 2013, I knew I had to write this program to share my solution to the hunger, cravings, and sadness that were the result of my old eating habits. I am forever grateful to the doctors and researchers like Dr. Eric Westman and Gary Taubes who inspired my new way of eating. I am a theatre professional, not a doctor or registered dietitian, so I can’t tell you how to eat, but I can share exactly what I ate in order to quit sugar and gain the health, happiness, and energy I always wanted, and to maintain my healthy lifestyle for over 10 years. 

Back when I struggled with sugar addiction,

my episodes of out of control overeating would  start with a food as innocent as a ripe banana. But seconds later, after taking the first bite, the overwhelming urge to to consume more sweet and creamy foods would take control of me, and I would enter an unstoppable feeding frenzy.

My Binges Lead to A Decades Long Addiction.

I would inhale the banana, and move on to cereal. Handful by handful I’d try to satisfy my hunger. But it wasn’t enough.  I’d work my way trough the freezer, kitchen, and pantry consuming all of the “Treats,” I could find.  Thirty minutes, even sixty minutes would pass.

Full to the point of feeling sick, I’d finally stop because the snack food had run out, ashamed of what I had done. I would do my best to leave enough snacks behind so that my roommates, and later my son and husband wouldn’t  wonder where all of their food had gone.

But I knew. It caused me decades of embarrassment and social isolation.

I can only hope you’ve never experienced anything like this…but if you have…you can relate. You know the powerlessness of the being in “binge mode.” You know the post-binge shame. You know the highs and utter despair found in the lows of sugar addiction.

How can I describe the devastating power of that first bite to someone that has never experienced it?

One small bite of a glazed donut, and my taste buds would demand more as my heart would be sinking at the same time. And every single time, I would tell myself, “Oh no Catherine, you’re doing it again. Stop, just please stop,” my rational mind would cry out.

But it was no match for the demons, the addiction, the powerful forces behind the binge. Nothing could beat them – or so I thought, until I discovered one powerful secret solution…

At the time though, I did everything I could to avoid detection.

It’s bad enough to be caught in the middle of yet another binge by your sugar addiction, but it’s even worse when someone catches you taking THEIR food, even AFTER they specifically warned you again and again.

To this very day, the expression on my friend and roommate Beth’s face as she asked me to stop eating her cereal when she was out of the apartment haunts me. She looked puzzled, and so disappointed in me. I was supposed to be her friend, yet I was stealing her food to feed my addiction.

It was so devastatingly embarrassing.

I was a grown woman, for crying out loud. I was working as an actor, singer, and dancer in Los Angeles, so a healthy body was essential for my work.  I was independent, on the verge of success, and yet I couldn’t even control myself around children’s breakfast snacks.

That afternoon confrontation with Beth was one of the most humiliating moments of my adult life.

Every binge brought on a terrible aftermath.

Shame was the consequence of my sugar addiction, and the morning after was the worst. My throbbing head, aching joints, and puffy face were obvious symptoms of my sugar hangover.

I was always depressed after those episodes (that were repeated over and over), and it wasn’t just because I was disappointed in myself.

The depression was also a physical reaction to food that was like a poison to me.

If you’ve never felt the compulsion to keep eating long after a food stops tasting good, you probably won’t understand my helplessness.

If you can stop eating after 2 Oreos or a handful of  potato chips, you might think I’m exaggerating, and making excuses for overeating.

That’s fine, I understand that some people can enjoy sugar and starchy foods in a rational amount and stop eating them when they want. I can’t.  Parts of my brain love certain foods just a little too much.

I’ve cried over that a lot.  Thankfully, I found understanding from the women and men who have felt what I feel whenever I eat the sugar, flour, and fake fat combination that is my drug, my poison, my kryptonite.

Why did I steal and eat those foods? The momentary rush they gave me was so overwhelming, so powerful, that I was willing to give up my dignity for it.

So how did I finally break this miserable addiction that kept me from having the body, the energy, and the self respect I needed to eat for health and happiness?

I found a way to eat something else.

And I’ll get to that, but first, let’s face the facts…

70% of Americans are overweight.

35% are considered obese.

But I’m not shocked, nor will you be when you learn just how pervasive this highly toxic and addictive ingredient is in North American food today.

You see, it’s everywhere…

Get in your car to go to work or take the kids to school, and you can’t avoid it. There are fast food joints on every corner, ice cream and yogurt shops in every strip mall, candy and snack stores at every gas station, there are even candy and chip racks at the hardware store!

Go to the grocery store, where you expect to find nutritious, satisfying food to make at home, and this food is hidden in places you would never expect.

It’s in salad dressings, condiments like mayonnaise, whole grain bread and cereals. Even in a healthy snack like yogurt there can be as many as 5 teaspoons of this addictive substance that acts just like a drug in in the pleasure centers of the brain.

Once you start eating it, it triggers the release of the fat storing hormone insulin, while it blocks the brain’s ability to recognize signals from leptin, the hormone that tells you when you’re full.

You would stop eating it if you could, but there’s just one problem.

It’s so over-stimulating to your hunger and appetite, that it’s the only food you crave!

What Do You Do when the only Food You Want to Eat is the Food That’s Keeping You Fat

Before we get to that, I want to tell you why it’s my mission and my passion to bring you a solution to the pain of being overweight.

My name is Catherine Gordon, and I will never forget the day I was put on my first diet by my pediatrician.

I was eight years old and I remember him vividly, because he was very handsome, and he had these really great, big, brown eyes.

I was horribly embarrassed as I sat there on the examining table, at eight years old, in my rolls of fat.

The Doctor looked me in the eye and he said, “So, Cathy, how would you like to count calories?” And I said, “Okay!”

Like I thought counting calories was going to be the most fun thing in the world.

The doctor didn’t even send me home with a food plan or a diet. He just sent me home with the idea that I was more than 20% overweight for my age and height, and that I needed to count calories.

At eight years old I started counting calories, and I was hungry for the next 35 years.

Now you may think I’m exaggerating a little bit, and yes there were times when I wasn’t hungry, but it seemed like the only time I wasn’t hungry was for a few hours right after a binge.

At that point, I was miserable… and ashamed.

So, for the next 35 years I cut calories, I watched what I ate, and I did my best to eat low fat.

I tried every diet that came along, and sometimes I would succeed for a little while. I could be “good” for three days in a row, then I would just freak out and eat everything in sight.

I’m sure you’ve been there, and that you know how much it hurts to fail at fat loss.

So I am going to reveal to you an approach to permanent weight loss that is so simple, you may even have a hard time believing it. After all, I know what that’s like.

The truth is that staying on a diet is nearly impossible in a world where billions of dollars are being made every year on the foods that make and keep us fat. I did everything I could to limit how much I ate so that I could get over being fat and get on with really living, and then, finally, as middle aged Mom, everything changed.

In 2008, I found a solution to my hunger problem, my fat problem, and my diet problem.

This solution worked so well, that even in my 40’s, I was able to win the second Turbulence Training Transformation Contest, even with thousands of people all over the world voting.

In just four months, I went from borderline obese, to a normal, healthy bodyweight.

Back in 2008, I was telling everyone about the great new exercise plan that was transforming my body, but I kept the most important fat loss secret to myself:

I started eating in a completely new and different way.

I didn’t tell anybody how I was eating. I kept how I was eating to myself. In many ways I felt like a fake.

I was getting support from friends and family, but I wasn’t telling them the truth.

Why? Because the truth about what I was eating was the absolute opposite of what all of the experts, diet programs, and weight loss gurus had been saying since I started my first diet in 1972!

I think it’s time… no, I know that it’s time, to share the truth with you about what I really did to finally lose fat for good.

I remember I how desperate I was to lose weight in in high school. I wanted to be popular, and get asked to dances, but I was the chubby girl with the good sense of humor. Not the girl you ask on dates. So I started cutting calories really hard.

I did everything I could think of to eat fewer calories: low fat, one salad a day, even eating nothing but fruit. It simply didn’t work, and I knew that I had to find a better way.

Later, when I was in college, I tried a commercial diet that cut my calories to 950 a day, and that required daily weigh-ins.

I remember feeling weak, and unable to concentrate.

Hello hunger- and binges that would hit just about every ten days when I couldn’t take my crazy-strict diets any more.

After that I headed off to Hollywood to break into the acting business, but my weight got in the way.

If I was really strict with my eating- and my new weight loss tools were diet pills, smoking, and caffeine, I could force my weight down for a few weeks at a time.

I had success on the stage, and I could get work in commercials, but I absolutely had to starve myself to get thin enough to work on camera.

I wanted to be thin so badly, and I was so determined to succeed at finally getting to my goal weight.

Still, no matter what I tried, I would always end up binging or over-eating.

I tried other diet plans – the big commercial programs where they sell you nearly all of the pre-packaged the food you are supposed to eat, but the problem was this: I would buy a box of their special low-calorie breakfast bars…

…but because of this ONE addictive ingredient, I would eat the whole box before I even got home from my weekly weigh-in!

It was crazy. I thought I was nuts. I thought there was something really, really, seriously wrong with me.

I kept putting on weight… year after year. At my top non-pregnancy weight , I weighed 185 pounds at 5’1’ tall. Yes, clinically obese at a BMI of 35.

After 35 years of cutting fat and counting calories, I had literally dieted my way to obesity.

But then, it struck me… almost like a bolt of lightning. What if I did the exact opposite of what the “experts” had been telling me to do?

What if I didn’t use the breakfast bars or the boxed meals? I asked myself…

What Would Happen if You Eliminated This One Ingredient, and the foods that rapidly break down to this ingredient in the body, and That’s the Only Thing You Had to Focus On?

For 12 weeks, I used this approach. I didn’t use any magic pills or consume any boxed dinners.

I simply eliminated this ONE ingredient and here’s what happened…

I got down to my normal BMI and went from 155 to 117 pounds.

Note: These results are not typical, but they do reflect my experience. 

It was my dream weight, which for years before, was not achievable, and certainly not maintainable.

 it’s been more than 10 years since the contest. I’ve not only kept it off, but my physical transformation led to an emotional transformation as well.

My mindset changed… and yours will, too. It’s much simpler than you think, too.

Please understand, some of my most powerful eating strategies aren’t exactly politically correct, but I know it’s time to share what finally helped me get the health I needed, for good. 

You Eat This Toxin Every Day and You Don’t Even Know It

This is exactly why 35% of Americans are obese and almost 70% are overweight.

The experts tell us it is all about making better choices.

All we have to do is take personal responsibility and our battle against belly fat would be over.

They also tell us that the key to our success is “moderation,” as well as being told to exercise more and more every day.

It’s these ideas that are holding us hostage, and keeping us from achieving the simple goal of losing fat!

Sugar, the ONE ingredient, that when removed, will put your body into optimal fat-burning mode (and unlocks your full potential to burn fat) is hidden in your kitchen as you’re reading this.

So even if you’ve been on a “sugar-free” diet, you’re still consuming this addictive toxin, and it doesn’t stop there.

It’s pretty simple to cut sugary sodas and candy bars out of your eating plan, but what about the foods that break down into sugar as soon as you eat them?

Yes, the bagels, muffins, cereals, and pastas that the USDA claims should be the foundation of our diet turn right into sugar in the bloodstream.

In fact, new research shows that industrial food full of processed sugars, fats, salt, and chemicals are powerfully addictive. And sugar is the worst culprit.

It’s these foods that drive our desire to eat more of it.

It’s Time To Take Control and Take Back Your Body from This Addiction

But how do we stop eating it?

To put it as simply as I can, when my students at my fitness studio ask, “How do I get off of sugar?” I answer, “Eat something else.”

What is that “Something else?” It’s real, unprocessed food that will satisfy your hunger, end your cravings, and allow you to stop obsessing over fat-storing foods.

Obviously, eating real food will “reset” your cravings, as well as your hormones to optimize fat burning. .

However, if it was just a matter of turning on a switch and choosing these foods, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

And how would you know you’re eating foods without these hidden sugars?

After 35 years of addiction, 12 years of healing, and five years of research, I’ve put the most vital information and methods for quitting sugar into the system that’s available here: 

The Sugar Freedom Diet…

With this simple approach, you can learn how to replace addictive foods, and discover a NEW freedom you’ve never experienced.

On the Sugar Freedom Diet, you can replace sugar and the foods that break down quickly to sugar, and you can lose your cravings once and for all.

It really is simple when you know how to shop for and prepare the fat burning foods that will satisfy your hunger at last. I’ll also show you what to order at restaurants, and even what you can eat when you’re on the road for business or on vacation in order to stay off of sugar, without hunger and cravings. 

So here’s what you get with the Sugar Freedom Diet.

Why is it simple?

1. The menus are already written for you, including easy recipes that show you exactly how to put together the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks that will have you ending cravings, burning fat, getting rid of bloat, and losing weight starting in just days.

2. You get strategic emergency foods to eat instead of the typical snack foods that have been keeping the fat on your body.

3. In as little as 24 hours you will feel your cravings, food obsessions, and overwhelming appetite disappear. You will become satisfied on real nutritious food, and thank heaven we’re not talking about cabbage and melba toast! Your menus are full of simple, tasty dishes you will recognize, and actually want to eat!

If you’re committed (and I set it up so that you will be), you’ll have an amazing 3-day start on your new body.

Yes, these are the exact meal plans that will get you off of sugar by showing you exactly what to eat instead.

I know Sugar Freedom works. I have maintained my weight long enough that I was able to become a member of the National Weight Control Registry. Members of the NWCR are studied by researchers worldwide because we have been able to document a weight loss of at least 30 pounds, and keep it off for at least one year.

The amazing discovery that I am sharing with with you is that there are foods that you can buy and prepare that will satisfy your hunger, and give you the energy and vitality you need in order to lose weight for good. I promise to show you exactly what they are so that you can get rid of the huger and cravings that are blocking your fat loss- guaranteed!

You’ll get instant access and can start within minutes for …

Try Sugar Freedom Risk Free for a full 60 days

I want you to feel 100% confident in your decision to purchase Sugar Freedom so I’m going to back your purchase today with my try it, you’ll love it, or you’ll get every penny of your purchase price back money back guarantee.

I don’t think there’s a more risk free way of making you this offer. If for any reason you decide that Sugar Freedom is not right for you and your family then simply email me using the contact link at the bottom of the page any time during the first 60 days of your purchase and I’ll give you a full refund – no questions asked.

Now imagine doing this for just 3 days.

Imagine your life 72 hours from now without the burden of cravings and obsessing about food…

…suddenly, you see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Imagine yourself enjoying your day without the constant hunger that’s caused by typical dieting. How much weight will you lose when the fattening foods that used to call your name completely lose their power to entice you?

This is what you get with Sugar Freedom.

You are going to take some of the momentary pleasure that you were getting from the food that was driving you crazy, and you’re going to learn to put that pleasure into your life and your lifestyle.

When you are satisfied on “Freedom Foods” you will get so much more enjoyment out of exercising, dancing, gardening, drawing, or spending time with friends and family.

You’re going to become aware of how much easier it is to enjoy your life when you aren’t obsessing about food. This is the greatest gift of the Sugar Freedom Program.

So you’re going to get the Sugar Freedom Plan. You’re going to get the shopping list for the Three-Day Sugar Strike, and you’re also going to get the shopping list for the four-week Sugar Freedom Diet. Plus, you’re going to get my best recipes and tips for preparing Sugar Freedom meals that are tasty, super satisfying, and easy to make… without the cravings!

It’s all here, because I’ve been there: Trapped in The Dieting/Overeating Cycle, and The Sugar Freedom Plan is exactly what made me break out at last.

You’ll finally discover the simplicity of losing weight when the foods that help you shed fat are the very foods you actually want to eat.

You’ll discover how simple it is to walk away from sugary, starchy junk food when your hunger is completely satisfied.

This isn’t a “eat less and move more” system like you find everywhere else. In other words, you can’t change what you eat, or how much you eat- until you can manage your appetite!

You’ll discover how to do this and much more.

This is your “Get Out of Sugar Jail” card. You just have to play it.

So if you’re ready to destroy your cravings once and for all and finally get the body you deserve on YOUR terms… Let’s get started, Catherine Gordon, A.C.E., CTT, Member: National Weight Control Registry Author, The Sugar Freedom Diet

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The Sugar Freedom Diet

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The Sugar Freedom Diet

 Buy Now

    12 years ago, I quit sugar, cut the starchy carbs and processed oils, and got the health and energy I needed to live life to the fullest.

The Sugar Freedom Program is the exact eating plan I used to overcome overeating, sugar addiction, and the pain and feelings of unworthiness that were the price I paid for every binge. 

                                 Scroll Down To Order Now!

I quit sugar in 2008, and my health transformed in such a wonderful way, that I knew I had to share my discovery with the world. I began reading every book I could get my hands on about how sugar, grains, and processed seed oils can drive overeating.

When friends and family members saw the results of the changes I made, they all asked,

I answered: “Eat For Yourself.”

By 2013, I knew I had to write this program to share my solution to the hunger, cravings, and sadness that were the result of my old eating habits. I am forever grateful to the doctors and researchers like Dr. Eric Westman and Gary Taubes who inspired my new way of eating. I am a theatre professional, not a doctor or registered dietitian, so I can’t tell you how to eat, but I can share exactly what I ate in order to quit sugar and gain the health, happiness, and energy I always wanted, and to maintain my healthy lifestyle for over 10 years. 

Back when I struggled with sugar addiction,

my episodes of out of control overeating would  start with a food as innocent as a ripe banana. But seconds later, after taking the first bite, the overwhelming urge to to consume more sweet and creamy foods would take control of me, and I would enter an unstoppable feeding frenzy.

My Binges Lead to A Decades Long Addiction.

I would inhale the banana, and move on to cereal. Handful by handful I’d try to satisfy my hunger. But it wasn’t enough.  I’d work my way trough the freezer, kitchen, and pantry consuming all of the “Treats,” I could find.  Thirty minutes, even sixty minutes would pass.

Full to the point of feeling sick, I’d finally stop because the snack food had run out, ashamed of what I had done. I would do my best to leave enough snacks behind so that my roommates, and later my son and husband wouldn’t  wonder where all of their food had gone.

But I knew. It caused me decades of embarrassment and social isolation.

I can only hope you’ve never experienced anything like this…but if you have…you can relate. You know the powerlessness of the being in “binge mode.” You know the post-binge shame. You know the highs and utter despair found in the lows of sugar addiction.

How can I describe the devastating power of that first bite to someone that has never experienced it?

One small bite of a glazed donut, and my taste buds would demand more as my heart would be sinking at the same time. And every single time, I would tell myself, “Oh no Catherine, you’re doing it again. Stop, just please stop,” my rational mind would cry out.

But it was no match for the demons, the addiction, the powerful forces behind the binge. Nothing could beat them – or so I thought, until I discovered one powerful secret solution…

At the time though, I did everything I could to avoid detection.

It’s bad enough to be caught in the middle of yet another binge by your sugar addiction, but it’s even worse when someone catches you taking THEIR food, even AFTER they specifically warned you again and again.

To this very day, the expression on my friend and roommate Beth’s face as she asked me to stop eating her cereal when she was out of the apartment haunts me. She looked puzzled, and so disappointed in me. I was supposed to be her friend, yet I was stealing her food to feed my addiction.

It was so devastatingly embarrassing.

I was a grown woman, for crying out loud. I was working as an actor, singer, and dancer in Los Angeles, so a healthy body was essential for my work.  I was independent, on the verge of success, and yet I couldn’t even control myself around children’s breakfast snacks.

That afternoon confrontation with Beth was one of the most humiliating moments of my adult life.

Every binge brought on a terrible aftermath.

Shame was the consequence of my sugar addiction, and the morning after was the worst. My throbbing head, aching joints, and puffy face were obvious symptoms of my sugar hangover.

I was always depressed after those episodes (that were repeated over and over), and it wasn’t just because I was disappointed in myself.

The depression was also a physical reaction to food that was like a poison to me.

If you’ve never felt the compulsion to keep eating long after a food stops tasting good, you probably won’t understand my helplessness.

If you can stop eating after 2 Oreos or a handful of  potato chips, you might think I’m exaggerating, and making excuses for overeating.

That’s fine, I understand that some people can enjoy sugar and starchy foods in a rational amount and stop eating them when they want. I can’t.  Parts of my brain love certain foods just a little too much.

I’ve cried over that a lot.  Thankfully, I found understanding from the women and men who have felt what I feel whenever I eat the sugar, flour, and fake fat combination that is my drug, my poison, my kryptonite.

Why did I steal and eat those foods? The momentary rush they gave me was so overwhelming, so powerful, that I was willing to give up my dignity for it.

So how did I finally break this miserable addiction that kept me from having the body, the energy, and the self respect I needed to eat for health and happiness?

I found a way to eat something else.

And I’ll get to that, but first, let’s face the facts…

70% of Americans are overweight.

35% are considered obese.

But I’m not shocked, nor will you be when you learn just how pervasive this highly toxic and addictive ingredient is in North American food today.

You see, it’s everywhere…

Get in your car to go to work or take the kids to school, and you can’t avoid it. There are fast food joints on every corner, ice cream and yogurt shops in every strip mall, candy and snack stores at every gas station, there are even candy and chip racks at the hardware store!

Go to the grocery store, where you expect to find nutritious, satisfying food to make at home, and this food is hidden in places you would never expect.

It’s in salad dressings, condiments like mayonnaise, whole grain bread and cereals. Even in a healthy snack like yogurt there can be as many as 5 teaspoons of this addictive substance that acts just like a drug in in the pleasure centers of the brain.

Once you start eating it, it triggers the release of the fat storing hormone insulin, while it blocks the brain’s ability to recognize signals from leptin, the hormone that tells you when you’re full.

You would stop eating it if you could, but there’s just one problem.

It’s so over-stimulating to your hunger and appetite, that it’s the only food you crave!

What Do You Do when the only Food You Want to Eat is the Food That’s Keeping You Fat

Before we get to that, I want to tell you why it’s my mission and my passion to bring you a solution to the pain of being overweight.

My name is Catherine Gordon, and I will never forget the day I was put on my first diet by my pediatrician.

I was eight years old and I remember him vividly, because he was very handsome, and he had these really great, big, brown eyes.

I was horribly embarrassed as I sat there on the examining table, at eight years old, in my rolls of fat.

The Doctor looked me in the eye and he said, “So, Cathy, how would you like to count calories?” And I said, “Okay!”

Like I thought counting calories was going to be the most fun thing in the world.

The doctor didn’t even send me home with a food plan or a diet. He just sent me home with the idea that I was more than 20% overweight for my age and height, and that I needed to count calories.

At eight years old I started counting calories, and I was hungry for the next 35 years.

Now you may think I’m exaggerating a little bit, and yes there were times when I wasn’t hungry, but it seemed like the only time I wasn’t hungry was for a few hours right after a binge.

At that point, I was miserable… and ashamed.

So, for the next 35 years I cut calories, I watched what I ate, and I did my best to eat low fat.

I tried every diet that came along, and sometimes I would succeed for a little while. I could be “good” for three days in a row, then I would just freak out and eat everything in sight.

I’m sure you’ve been there, and that you know how much it hurts to fail at fat loss.

So I am going to reveal to you an approach to permanent weight loss that is so simple, you may even have a hard time believing it. After all, I know what that’s like.

The truth is that staying on a diet is nearly impossible in a world where billions of dollars are being made every year on the foods that make and keep us fat. I did everything I could to limit how much I ate so that I could get over being fat and get on with really living, and then, finally, as middle aged Mom, everything changed.

In 2008, I found a solution to my hunger problem, my fat problem, and my diet problem.

This solution worked so well, that even in my 40’s, I was able to win the second Turbulence Training Transformation Contest, even with thousands of people all over the world voting.

In just four months, I went from borderline obese, to a normal, healthy bodyweight.

Back in 2008, I was telling everyone about the great new exercise plan that was transforming my body, but I kept the most important fat loss secret to myself:

I started eating in a completely new and different way.

I didn’t tell anybody how I was eating. I kept how I was eating to myself. In many ways I felt like a fake.

I was getting support from friends and family, but I wasn’t telling them the truth.

Why? Because the truth about what I was eating was the absolute opposite of what all of the experts, diet programs, and weight loss gurus had been saying since I started my first diet in 1972!

I think it’s time… no, I know that it’s time, to share the truth with you about what I really did to finally lose fat for good.

I remember I how desperate I was to lose weight in in high school. I wanted to be popular, and get asked to dances, but I was the chubby girl with the good sense of humor. Not the girl you ask on dates. So I started cutting calories really hard.

I did everything I could think of to eat fewer calories: low fat, one salad a day, even eating nothing but fruit. It simply didn’t work, and I knew that I had to find a better way.

Later, when I was in college, I tried a commercial diet that cut my calories to 950 a day, and that required daily weigh-ins.

I remember feeling weak, and unable to concentrate.

Hello hunger- and binges that would hit just about every ten days when I couldn’t take my crazy-strict diets any more.

After that I headed off to Hollywood to break into the acting business, but my weight got in the way.

If I was really strict with my eating- and my new weight loss tools were diet pills, smoking, and caffeine, I could force my weight down for a few weeks at a time.

I had success on the stage, and I could get work in commercials, but I absolutely had to starve myself to get thin enough to work on camera.

I wanted to be thin so badly, and I was so determined to succeed at finally getting to my goal weight.

Still, no matter what I tried, I would always end up binging or over-eating.

I tried other diet plans – the big commercial programs where they sell you nearly all of the pre-packaged the food you are supposed to eat, but the problem was this: I would buy a box of their special low-calorie breakfast bars…

…but because of this ONE addictive ingredient, I would eat the whole box before I even got home from my weekly weigh-in!

It was crazy. I thought I was nuts. I thought there was something really, really, seriously wrong with me.

I kept putting on weight… year after year. At my top non-pregnancy weight , I weighed 185 pounds at 5’1’ tall. Yes, clinically obese at a BMI of 35.

After 35 years of cutting fat and counting calories, I had literally dieted my way to obesity.

But then, it struck me… almost like a bolt of lightning. What if I did the exact opposite of what the “experts” had been telling me to do?

What if I didn’t use the breakfast bars or the boxed meals? I asked myself…

What Would Happen if You Eliminated This One Ingredient, and the foods that rapidly break down to this ingredient in the body, and That’s the Only Thing You Had to Focus On?

For 12 weeks, I used this approach. I didn’t use any magic pills or consume any boxed dinners.

I simply eliminated this ONE ingredient and here’s what happened…

I got down to my normal BMI and went from 155 to 117 pounds.

Note: These results are not typical, but they do reflect my experience. 

It was my dream weight, which for years before, was not achievable, and certainly not maintainable.

 it’s been more than 10 years since the contest. I’ve not only kept it off, but my physical transformation led to an emotional transformation as well.

My mindset changed… and yours will, too. It’s much simpler than you think, too.

Please understand, some of my most powerful eating strategies aren’t exactly politically correct, but I know it’s time to share what finally helped me get the health I needed, for good. 

You Eat This Toxin Every Day and You Don’t Even Know It

This is exactly why 35% of Americans are obese and almost 70% are overweight.

The experts tell us it is all about making better choices.

All we have to do is take personal responsibility and our battle against belly fat would be over.

They also tell us that the key to our success is “moderation,” as well as being told to exercise more and more every day.

It’s these ideas that are holding us hostage, and keeping us from achieving the simple goal of losing fat!

Sugar, the ONE ingredient, that when removed, will put your body into optimal fat-burning mode (and unlocks your full potential to burn fat) is hidden in your kitchen as you’re reading this.

So even if you’ve been on a “sugar-free” diet, you’re still consuming this addictive toxin, and it doesn’t stop there.

It’s pretty simple to cut sugary sodas and candy bars out of your eating plan, but what about the foods that break down into sugar as soon as you eat them?

Yes, the bagels, muffins, cereals, and pastas that the USDA claims should be the foundation of our diet turn right into sugar in the bloodstream.

In fact, new research shows that industrial food full of processed sugars, fats, salt, and chemicals are powerfully addictive. And sugar is the worst culprit.

It’s these foods that drive our desire to eat more of it.

It’s Time To Take Control and Take Back Your Body from This Addiction

But how do we stop eating it?

To put it as simply as I can, when my students at my fitness studio ask, “How do I get off of sugar?” I answer, “Eat something else.”

What is that “Something else?” It’s real, unprocessed food that will satisfy your hunger, end your cravings, and allow you to stop obsessing over fat-storing foods.

Obviously, eating real food will “reset” your cravings, as well as your hormones to optimize fat burning. .

However, if it was just a matter of turning on a switch and choosing these foods, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

And how would you know you’re eating foods without these hidden sugars?

After 35 years of addiction, 12 years of healing, and five years of research, I’ve put the most vital information and methods for quitting sugar into the system that’s available here: 

The Sugar Freedom Diet…

With this simple approach, you can learn how to replace addictive foods, and discover a NEW freedom you’ve never experienced.

On the Sugar Freedom Diet, you can replace sugar and the foods that break down quickly to sugar, and you can lose your cravings once and for all.

It really is simple when you know how to shop for and prepare the fat burning foods that will satisfy your hunger at last. I’ll also show you what to order at restaurants, and even what you can eat when you’re on the road for business or on vacation in order to stay off of sugar, without hunger and cravings. 

So here’s what you get with the Sugar Freedom Diet.

Why is it simple?

1. The menus are already written for you, including easy recipes that show you exactly how to put together the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks that will have you ending cravings, burning fat, getting rid of bloat, and losing weight starting in just days.

2. You get strategic emergency foods to eat instead of the typical snack foods that have been keeping the fat on your body.

3. In as little as 24 hours you will feel your cravings, food obsessions, and overwhelming appetite disappear. You will become satisfied on real nutritious food, and thank heaven we’re not talking about cabbage and melba toast! Your menus are full of simple, tasty dishes you will recognize, and actually want to eat!

If you’re committed (and I set it up so that you will be), you’ll have an amazing 3-day start on your new body.

Yes, these are the exact meal plans that will get you off of sugar by showing you exactly what to eat instead.

I know Sugar Freedom works. I have maintained my weight long enough that I was able to become a member of the National Weight Control Registry. Members of the NWCR are studied by researchers worldwide because we have been able to document a weight loss of at least 30 pounds, and keep it off for at least one year.

The amazing discovery that I am sharing with with you is that there are foods that you can buy and prepare that will satisfy your hunger, and give you the energy and vitality you need in order to lose weight for good. I promise to show you exactly what they are so that you can get rid of the huger and cravings that are blocking your fat loss- guaranteed!

You’ll get instant access and can start within minutes for …

Try Sugar Freedom Risk Free for a full 60 days

I want you to feel 100% confident in your decision to purchase Sugar Freedom so I’m going to back your purchase today with my try it, you’ll love it, or you’ll get every penny of your purchase price back money back guarantee.

I don’t think there’s a more risk free way of making you this offer. If for any reason you decide that Sugar Freedom is not right for you and your family then simply email me using the contact link at the bottom of the page any time during the first 60 days of your purchase and I’ll give you a full refund – no questions asked.

Now imagine doing this for just 3 days.

Imagine your life 72 hours from now without the burden of cravings and obsessing about food…

…suddenly, you see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Imagine yourself enjoying your day without the constant hunger that’s caused by typical dieting. How much weight will you lose when the fattening foods that used to call your name completely lose their power to entice you?

This is what you get with Sugar Freedom.

You are going to take some of the momentary pleasure that you were getting from the food that was driving you crazy, and you’re going to learn to put that pleasure into your life and your lifestyle.

When you are satisfied on “Freedom Foods” you will get so much more enjoyment out of exercising, dancing, gardening, drawing, or spending time with friends and family.

You’re going to become aware of how much easier it is to enjoy your life when you aren’t obsessing about food. This is the greatest gift of the Sugar Freedom Program.

So you’re going to get the Sugar Freedom Plan. You’re going to get the shopping list for the Three-Day Sugar Strike, and you’re also going to get the shopping list for the four-week Sugar Freedom Diet. Plus, you’re going to get my best recipes and tips for preparing Sugar Freedom meals that are tasty, super satisfying, and easy to make… without the cravings!

It’s all here, because I’ve been there: Trapped in The Dieting/Overeating Cycle, and The Sugar Freedom Plan is exactly what made me break out at last.

You’ll finally discover the simplicity of losing weight when the foods that help you shed fat are the very foods you actually want to eat.

You’ll discover how simple it is to walk away from sugary, starchy junk food when your hunger is completely satisfied.

This isn’t a “eat less and move more” system like you find everywhere else. In other words, you can’t change what you eat, or how much you eat- until you can manage your appetite!

You’ll discover how to do this and much more.

This is your “Get Out of Sugar Jail” card. You just have to play it.

So if you’re ready to destroy your cravings once and for all and finally get the body you deserve on YOUR terms… Let’s get started, Catherine Gordon, A.C.E., CTT, Member: National Weight Control Registry Author, The Sugar Freedom Diet