Cooking at home

Cooking is not just about food. It is a creative process that provides an opportunity for self-expression and boosts self-esteem. It makes you feel good about yourself when family and friends eat food prepared by you. The Internet provides a variety of cuisines and recipes to experiment with while cooking at home, and Internet giant Google has added a 'Recipe View' tab to its web search page. About.com's 'Food and Cooking Study' in 2010 found that people who cook at home using online cooking recipes, find online food and product advertisements that include printable coupons and product information, ingredients list, and nutritional value the most appealing. On average, they prepare a variety of foods, ranging from quick and easy meals to comfort foods to healthy and nutritious foods from scratch five times a week.

From being creative and boosting self-esteem, people cooking at home take online guidance for these reasons:

1. Budget considerations: saving money while eating tasty meals. People look up online not just at recipes, but also at ingredients and tips on where to buy them cheap and in bulk.
2. Health and nutrition: one main reason to look up recipes online is to find healthy and nutritious alternatives to processed brands.
3. Dietary restrictions: what if you're allergic to one ingredient in a delicious recipe? In the online world you can almost always find someone else with that particular allergy, along with advice on a safe alternative.
4. Sense of community: immigrants who have lost touch with their homeland, people seeking to learn more about their roots, all can find the particular cuisine or traditional diets of their community online.

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Fun ways of cooking vegetables

Vegetables are a neglected part of modern eating habits, but they contain essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that keep us safe from dangerous diseases like cancer. And we eat so much processed food stuffed with artificial tastes, that the subtle tastes of natural food don't appeal to our palette. Salads can get boring but there are fun ways of eating more vegetables: like making soup and adding them to smoothies. The Red Bluff Daily News lists some other fun ways of cooking vegetables:
1) Add shredded carrots to muffins or bread while baking.
2) Instead of cheese and meat, pile your morning omelet with onions, mushrooms, and red and green peppers.
3) Add chopped spinach to meat when preparing meatballs or hamburgers.
4) Try mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes.
5) Make a pasta' dish with spaghetti squash instead of noodles.

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Strength training won't make you bulky

Strength training is important for women as they get older. It increases bone strength and density, helps in fighting the bone-thinning disease of osteoporosis that creeps up on most women. Strength training also gives the general benefits of exercise: burning excess fat, shaping the body, increasing metabolism, and lifting spirits. Luckily, we get these benefits by just using light dumbbells, and don't have to worry about becoming bulky. Strength training with heavier weights also won't make women bulky, because they don't have the required levels of testosterone to increase muscle mass.

There is a very tiny community of females, in the performance sport of bodybuilding, who take testosterone and other steroids to bulk up. But over the years there has been greater stress on toned athletes than on muscular women even in body building. Way back in 1998, Jim Manion president of the National Physique Committee (NPC), said, "The difference between the two sports is right there in the name. Body builders build their bodies. In fitness we are looking for fit, toned bodies with good muscle shape, but not a lot of size." An article this month by Lisa White in the Examiner reports that over the years, the NPC and IFBB (International Federation of Body Builders) have favored smoother, softer builds on women, rather than hard physiques: "Not only are female bodybuilders paid less but many female bodybuilders have spent years perfecting physiques with the use of performance drugs and have lost much of their femininity." It is rumored that the NPC will eliminate female bodybuilding altogether in 2012 and replace it with a 'Women's Physique' contest, which will have a more natural, feminine look.

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Education, abstinence, protection: what prevents teen pregancy?

A study in England published in the Journal of Health Economics, found that handing out free morning-after pills (MAPs) to teenage girls did nothing to reduce teen pregnancies. Study authors Professor David Paton and Professor Sourafel Girma also found that the availability of a free pill encouraged girls to not use protection during sex, leading to an increase in sexually transmitted infections (STI): "The morning-after pill free of charge didn't have the intended effect of cutting teenage pregnancies but did have the unfortunate side effect of increasing sexually transmitted infections."

Brenda Almond, Emeritus Professor at the University of Hull, says, "Instead of accepting its mistake and trying a different approach, the Government continues to cling to its discredited strategy of dishing out sex advice, pills, and condoms." There is a backlash against sex education in many other countries, like the US where they hope that abstinence will prevent teen pregnancy. But sex education is vital for girls who have a lot of other problems, other than just having sex with a boy, like getting answers for questions on their menstrual periods, lumps in their breasts, or unexplained rashes and discharges!

The other thing is that it takes two people to make a baby! So much advice is given to girls to prevent teen pregnancy, but what about boys?? One of the wrong reasons girls have sex is because they hope to get love and commitment from boys, and that almost never happens because boys are just not as mature as girls. Total abstinence and total promiscuity are the two extremes and most of us are in the middle. People with low self-esteem, living in an unstable family environment, or using drugs and alcohol, are more likely to have sex without thinking through about the consequences, or using basic protection.

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Sarah Shahi workout shape

Beautiful Sarah Shahi in a promotional photo from her new TV series Fairly Legal. The Texas born actress, of Iranian and Spanish origin, was formerly a NFL cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys after which she took up acting. Sarah Shahi told USA today: "Cheerleading was my way in. It was one of the most rigorous audition processes ever. It definitely groomed me for Hollywood. I'd never been a cheerleader, but I'd danced. And I was captain of the volleyball team and the basketball team, and I ran track."

Unfortunately she didn't know much about the game of football, telling Maxim magazine: "There were times when I cheered for the wrong team. Anytime there was a touchdown, they'd play a certain song and we'd dance. But sometimes the other team would score and they'd play that song, and ....well, I just had to start paying more attention to the game." Today as the Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XLV, Sarah Shahi, though part of the many Super Bowl events in Texas, remains blissfully ignorant about the game. Just before attending the Super Bowl Party hosted by DIRECTV and Mark Cuban's HDNet in Dallas, Texas, Sarah Shahi wrote on her Twitter: "Help. I know nothing about football. What can I say to sound impressive tomorrow?"



Left, Sarah Shahi working out at Equinox Fitness Club for Shape magazine, and right, using resistance bands at a park in Beverly Hills on February 4. For Shape, Sarah Shahi is doing the "Tabata" workout, which is like circuit training. A set of exercises done one after the other with 10-second rest intervals, including both cardio and strength training, and using things like kettle-bells, heavy ropes, and steps. After the workout, 5'4" tall Sarah told Shape: "The heavy ropes exercises were new to me and put my upper body strength to the test. My shoulders and arms were so sore the next day!"



Basketball, volleyball, and cheerleading are not all there is from the energetic youth of Sarah Shahi....she also has a brown belt in Karate! Sarah told Maxim: "I did karate for about three years. When I was going into Miss Texas, my mom said, 'Let's not do karate this year. Let's not have any knocked-out teeth on the stage.' It comes in handy when you're wrestling around with the boyfriend, and you 'accidentally' knee him in the balls." For her own fitness regimen nowadays, 30-year old Sarah Shahi says: "I work out six days a week with a trainer."

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Hilary Rhoda - year of the brunette?

American model Hilary Rhoda strokes her lush brunette hair in an ad for the Estée Lauder fragrance "Pleasures Bloom" last year. The Estée Lauder spokesmodel also fronts the advertising campaign for their latest fragrance "Adventurous", which will be available worldwide from March. But anticipation is building up this month around another international brand: the 2011 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. For the past three years blonde models have won the magazine cover....could this be the year of the brunette?



Hilary Rhoda's swimsuit pic posted on the official SI twitter. Do they choose the model or the best photo to put on the cover? It's hard to believe that there are no other considerations for choosing the cover girl....her popularity, her nationality? Last year's cover girl, Brooklyn Decker, was American and her choice for the cover came as a surprise to some people. SI insists that the best photo always gets the cover.



Russian model Irina Shayk with Hilary Rhoda at the launch party of designer Kinder Aggugini's Impluse Only at Macy's collection inside the Grammercy Park Hotel, in New York, on 26 January, 2011. Both brunette girls are wearing Kinder Aggugini outfits, including the skinny leather pants, with Irina Shayk in Christian Louboutin boots and Hilary Rhoda in Burberry Fall 2010 ankle boots. The two brunettes are in the running for the cover of this year's swimsuit issue; Irina beats Hilary in the popularity stakes, while Hilary is more athletic looking. But if it's all down to the best photo, then any of the Sports Illustrated bikini girls could make the cover!

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Walking in deep snow strains the heart

February is Heart Health Awareness Month in the US, and deep snow covers most parts of that country this winter. Walking in snow that is several feet deep, soft or slushy, can be strenuous on the heart if you don't use proper equipment like snowshoes or ski poles. Cold dry air makes breathing more difficult, repeatedly sinking and pulling out of deep snow causes exertion, which strains the heart. Snowshoes spread the weight of the body more evenly and keep your feet from sinking.

With snowshoes, walking in snow becomes an excellent fat burning exercise; a 150-pound adult can easily burn 450 calories in an hour. Proper clothing is all-important to prevent the strain of hypothermia in the chill of winter; the American Medical Association recommends wearing layers of clothing, which form protective insulation for the body. Some kind of headgear preserves body warmth and protects the ears from frostbite.

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Go Red For Women - heart health

February is Heart Health Awareness Month and the American Heart Association's "Go Red For Women" campaign with the red dress is a symbol of that awareness. In the above photo, actress and model Lydia Hearst dyes her hair red and wears a playful red party frock with Swarovski cuffs, earrings, and cocktail rings. The red dress is part of the Heart Truth's Red Dress Collection 2011 and is presented by Diet Coke with national sponsor Swarovski, partnering Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and AOL. The Heart Truth's Red Dress Collection 2011 will kick off the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week this month on February 9.

The color red reminds women that heart disease is the No. 1 killer of American women. Women, more often than men, get subtler, less recognizable symptoms for heart disease, such as abdominal pain, unexplained aches in the jaw or the back, nausea and shortness of breath. According to the AHA, the Go Red Heart CheckUp program has helped more than 2 million women learn about their own risk of heart disease. The funds raised by Go Red For Women activities also help support research into heart health, which ultimately provides tools that women can use to support their own heart health.

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