Category: Comments, Rants, Raves & Musings

Got Milk Full of Sugar?

You might be unknowingly giving your kids 3 teaspoons of sugar regularly if you’re giving them flavored milk drinks. Find out more here.

Health Tip of the Week: Take Timed Breaths to Stop Cravings

This week, we will begin a new feature, “Health Tip of the Week.”
Specifically, today’s pointer is to help those of you who tend to battle but often cave into overpowering cravings — for sugar, coffee,cigarettes or other unhealthy behavior.
This tip will help you if you:
* Are a sugar addict
* Are overweight or obese
* Have type 2 diabetes
* Have an annoying habit of consuming refined carbohydrates
* Are going through sugar detox
* Need or desire to stay away from high fructose corn syrup-filled candies and pastries
* Want to get more healthy (just about everyone!)
So let’s pretend you’re in the throes of a yen for chocolate-covered peanuts, donuts or a sugary coffee from one of those specialty stores.
Or perhaps you’re near a bakery, vending machines or newspaper stand that sells candy bars.
Here’s how to quickly stop that craving so you don’t go into unpleasant sugar shock:
*

Connecting: How to Win Friends, Clients & More — Learn on Nov. 10

MaribethKuzmeski_med_000 Join us Tuesday, November 10 at 2 pm EST when marketing consultant Maribeth Kuzmeski, appears as my guest on the Gab With the Gurus Radio Show.
Maribeth, author of The Connectors: How the World’s Most Successful Businesspeople Build Relationships and Win Clients for Life, will tell you about the power of connecting with others to achieve dramatic results.
Learn more here or listen on the Gab With the Gurus Blog.
Remember, as always, you can listen live or later to my radio shows.

Facebook Disabled My Account: Too Friendly too Fast?

Facebook has disabled both my regular account, (www.Facebook.com/ConnieBennett), and my public page, www.Facebook.com/SmartHabitsFans. (Although I can’t post to the latter, I believe you can still join and post comments to previous posts.)
Suffice it to say that I was shocked upon being told:
Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.
I finally discovered my offense after carefully reviewing Facebook’s Warnings and reading such helpful blog posts as “13 Reasons Your Facebook Acount Will be Disabled” (from Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction) and “Facebook Account Deactivation, Can It Be Avoided” from Facebook guru Mari Smith.
Apparently, my violation is that I wrote too quickly to people who’d requested to be my friends before accepting them.
You see, I did what I thought was a great time- saver — I simply cut and pasted innocuous messages such as “Wow! Lots of friends in common. Look forward to your posts.” You see, I was just seeking to conserve my precious time.)
I guess you could say that a fun, apt way to describe my Facebook violation is this: I was too friendly too quickly for Facebook!
And the speed of my friendliness, along with the cutting and pasting of messages, was interpreted as being potentially “annoying or abusive.” (As far as I know, no one complained.)
Facebook, I’ve now learned, limits the number of times a user can send the same message or make the same post. (So much for saving time!)
Guy Clearly, Facebook needs to set limits to protect users from spam, but unfortunately in its zeal to do so, many of us innocents are tossed out of the site.
If you’re on Facebook, I would strongly advise reading all of Rights & Responsibilities so you don’t suffer similarly.
Anyhow, I hope to be back on Facebook soon to connect with you, but in the meantime, here’s what I discovered about the unsettling experience of being booted off the social networking site.
Every day, thousands of people are banned for a variety of reasons. Just do a Google search for “Facebook account disabled, and you turn up a whopping 38,100,000 hits.
Among those who’ve been disabled are Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, and actress Lindsay Lohan, who vented about it on MySpace.

Wolfing Down Your Food Can Trigger Weight Gain

Are you someone who’s a fast eater? Well, it’s time to slow down, savor your food and take lots of bites. That’s advice you can glean from this intriguing new study from the Journal of Clinical Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Essentially, eating quickly may trigger weight gain, because it curtails the release of hormones (you need) that help regulate your appetite, which could cause you to overeat, according to the researchers, headed up by Alexander Kokkinos, MD, PhD, of Laiko General Hospital in Athens, Greece.
As MedPage reveals, patients who ate a meal in 30 minutes had higher levels of two peptides that signal satiety — peptide YY (PYY) and glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) — than those who wolfed down their food in five minutes.
In nother words, this study suggests that there’s truth to the “old wives’ tale” that eating quickly leads to weight gain.
“Our findings give some insight into an aspect of modern-day food overconsumption, namely the fact that many people, pressed by demanding working and living conditions, eat faster and in greater amounts than in the past,” Kokkinos says in the news release.
“The warning we were given as children that ‘wolfing down your food will make you fat’ may in fact have a physiological explanation.”

CLA May Speed Reduce Stubborn Fat Around the Middle

CLA Frequently, clients ask me what they can do to reduce reduce stubborn fat around their mid-section other than quit sugar and refined carbs and regularly exercise.
My friend Jonny Bowden — one of the most knowledgeable nutritionists in America today — just wrote a fascinating post on his blog that touts the virtues of CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), noting its effectiveness in losing body fat, especially around the tummy.
While “losing pounds is CLA’s most notable claim to fame,” Jonny points out, its benefits also have been known to also include “slowing the spread of cancer cells, help stop bone loss in postmenopausal women and interestingly, calming of inflammation linked to asthma and a host of other things.”
Jonny writes about CLA, because a study in the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that CLA is effective at reducing body mass index (BMI) and total fat tissue without altering lean body mass among obese, postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes.

Halloween Tricks Kids Into Sugar Overload: Op Ed Piece

Are you re planning on passing out sugar-filled candies for Halloween tomorrow night?
If so, you should know that every time you hand out candies, you’re tricking kids into sugar overload.
Halloween isn’t just one night. It paves the way for bad eating habits year-round.
Read more about this in our opinion piece in today’s Newark Star-Ledger.

Halloween: Prevent Sugar Shock

Halloween can be a harrowing time for both kids and their parents, because on this holiday and the days or even weeks that follow, kids will often face major blood sugar highs and lows after pigging out on dozens of sugar-laden candies.
In other words, they’ll be hurled into sugar shock.
Let’s face it, no matter what kind of limits their parents may try to place on their children’s candy consumption, youngsters will often overdose on sweets, even if they have to do it in secret.
Unfortunately, that’s what Halloween means these days. It’s a nationally sanctioned “Sugar Overload Day.”
So how can you help your young trick-or-treaters not get wiped out, cranky, depressed, headachy or charged up from having too many candies?
The way to soften the blood-sugar-bouncing whammy and lessen sugar shock is to make sure that your children eat a healthy meal before they cavort aroundthe neighborhood trick-or-treating for candies.
For instance, before they head for the streets, give your children: