Source: http://tonygentilcore.com/2016/02/3-exercises-you-wont-believe-work-as-well-as-they-do/

If you’ve ever picked up a VHS off the shelf at Blockbuster—you still do that too, right?—you know that movies often aren’t what they appear to be at first glance.

The Deer Hunter isn’t about hunting deer.
The Neverending Story actually, you know, ends. There’s even a sequel.
50 Shades of Grey is not a coloring book.

Strength training is the same way. Plenty of movements look like a whole lot of weirdness—or a whole lot of nothing—when you see them in a 10-second YouTube clip without context. But with a little more context, they turn out to be just the thing you needed all along to build an epic overhead press or nail that first pull-up.

These three movements are all worthy of being performed without a shred of self-consciousness. Still, it’s a good idea to be prepared for the inevitable question: “What is that working?”

Continue Reading on BodyBuilding.com….

SPOILER ALERT: exercises discussed in the article are HBT (Hanging Band Training) Overhead Press, Lying Hollow Position, and the Spoto Press (pictured above).1.

The post 3 Exercises You Won’t Believe Work As Well As They Do appeared first on Tony Gentilcore.

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Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/02/the-strange-story-of-my-accepted-but-then-unpublished-commentary-on-a-disney-sponsored-study/

Last summer, Brian Wansink, a friend and Cornell colleague and the editor of the new Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, asked me to write a commentary on a paper to be published in its inaugural issue.

The paper turned out to be by a group of authors, among them John Peters and Jim Hill, both members of the ill-fated Global Energy Balance Network, the subject of an investigation by the New York Times last August.

Titled “Using Healthy Defaults in Walt Disney World Restaurants to Improve Nutritional Choices,” the paper described the benefits of improving the composition of kids’ meals at Disney World.

The healthy defaults reduced calories (21.4%), fat (43.9%) and sodium (43.4%) for kid’s meal sides and beverages sold in the park. These results suggest that healthy defaults can effectively shift food and beverage selection patterns toward healthier options.

The authors explain:

This work was supported by the Walt Disney Company and by the National Institutes of Health…The Walt Disney Company and the National Institutes of Health had no role in the design, analysis, or writing of this article. Full disclosure: JH is a consultant for the Walt Disney Company and for McDonalds; KA is a consultant for the Walt Disney Company.”

I thought Disney’s sponsorship of this research and its withholding of critical baseline and sales data on kids’ meals that the company considered proprietary did in…

Source: http://www.sonima.com/meditation/mindful-money/

I’m the first to admit it: I love shopping and I tend to live for the moment. I took a quiz recently that tested my financial know-how, and for the question, “What would be considered a long-term financial goal?,” I chose three to six months; the right answer is more than five years. Most of my spending isn’t exorbitant—thrift store finds, the occasional Zappos splurge, too much eating out—but, over time, it started weighing on my wallet as well as my mind.

The first time my domestic partner suggested putting together a budget, I fought back tooth and nail. To me, spending by the numbers felt stale, controlling, the diametric opposite of spontaneity and freedom. My worldview basically boils down to “Life is a vacation”—and everyone knows that you don’t watch your spending when you’re on vacation.

Our attitudes and actions around money can be significant indicators of the emotional and spiritual issues we’re grappling with—even, or perhaps particularly, those we haven’t fully acknowledged yet. It’s like a shark fin: If there’s a herd of credit cards cresting the waves, you can be pretty sure there’s something dangerous under the water.

Related: A Meditation for Making Positive Live Changes

The Kundalini Yoga teacher and entrepreneur Guru Jagat, who has three yoga centers, a record label, a forthcoming book with Harper Collins, and a…

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/16/459693979/no-place-for-discontent-a-history-of-the-family-dinner-in-america?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

A middle-class Victorian family at the dinner table, circa 1850. Victorian parents used family meal times to educate their children on religion, conversation and table manners.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In homes across the United States, families sit down around their dining tables to share a meal together known as the Family Dinner. This can be a joyous occasion or a contentious one. Whether you feel warm and fuzzy or grit your teeth at the thought, the family dinner is an opportunity for familial communication that didn’t always exist. As dining as a family became an institution in American life, it evolved from being a time for restraint to being a time for expression — an evolution visible in art and film.

Before the late 18th century, it was difficult for American families to dine together regularly, in part because dining roo…

Source: http://www.niashanks.com/challenge/

You are going to want to get in on this.

The primary goal of this website, and “Lifting Like a Girl” in general, is to equip you with information to become the best version of yourself. To improve your health and make your entire life better, and more awesome. It’s a way for you to discover the amazing things your body can do.

It’s about embracing the truth that numbers don’t define your self-worth.

Knowing that exercise is not punishment and you don’t have to earn your food.

It’s about using health and fitness as a tool for empowerment, to improve your self confidence, and achieve any goals you have (e.g., lose fat, build muscle, etc) in a fun, sustainable way. And, finally, health and fitness is meant to be part of your life; not consume it.

What Is The Lift Like a Girl Challenge?

As you see from above, it is a challenge that involves focusing exclusively on becoming the best version of yourself. Using health and fitness (e.g., how you eat and work out) to make you feel great about yourself.

Interested?

As you likely know too well, oftentimes health and fitness is about eating less, weighing less, and desperately trying to change the appearance of your body. So we diet. We avoid our favo…

Source: http://www.sonima.com/yoga/daily-yoga-practice/

After unfurling my trusty purple mat, I took a deep breath and a good look around the sun-drenched, Hudson River-side studio. As my fellow practitioners at Hoboken, New Jersey’s Devotion Yoga staked their claims to the rapidly disappearing spots on the hardwood floor, I searched the room for signs suggesting I was insane for what I was about to do. I soon found one.

There, in the last row, emblazoned in big block letters across a woman’s tank top, was my New Year’s resolution: Yoga Every Damn Day.

I wasn’t sure if it was meant as an empowered, euphoric exclamation—“Yoga Every Damn Day!”—or a statement muttered in sheer exhaustion after an eternity of overdosing on Downward-Facing Dogs. But as someone who was standing at the starting line of a 31-day-straight yoga marathon, I had a feeling I’d become familiar with both.

Of course, many yogis say a daily practice helps them stay balanced, and as an ADHD-afflicted inhabitant of our increasingly time-crunched and social media-saturated society, I hoped it would do the same for me. I got a taste of just how rejuvenating a yoga life could be last September, while attending my first yoga retreat in Ojai, California. During three fabulous and almost completely Facebook-less days there, I spent ample time with one of the organizers, Julie Hovespian, a co-founder of the LA-based retreat and wellness marketing company, Birds of a Feather. Julie …

Source: http://zenhabits.net/lover/

By Leo Babauta

You reject the limitations of being a romantic Cassanova, restricted to loving only those who fall for your seductions. You want to love every one. Every single living being. Everything in this miraculous universe.

You learn to love it all, in its majestic entirety.

You don’t discriminate between the aesthetically beautiful or the squalid, the dirty, the flawed. You don’t require near perfection for your love, nor do you need people to act the way you want them to for them to receive your love.

Your love is unconditional, limitless, all-pervasive. It cares not about political differences, ethnic differences, gender, wealth status, fame, achievement, body shape, education level, religious beliefs. It loves every person, because they are all deserving of love. Your love reaches every living being, including animals, because they deserve love. Your love spreads to plants, mountain ranges, galaxies, as all part of one ever-changing, fluid energy.

This doesn’t happen every second of every day. In fact, it happens in fleeting moments, and then you return to your self-centered concerns. But for that fleeting moment, you are the World’s Greatest Lover.

So what? Who cares about a title like that? The title doesn’t matter, but being able to love like that changes you. For that evanescent moment, you feel that love completely, and are therefore lifted out of your petty concerns about what people think of …

Source: http://summertomato.com/foodist-approved-sweet-pea-soup-with-parsley-and-chevre-recipe/

Sweet Pea Soup with Parsley and Chevre

Spring is just around the corner, but with the recent snowstorms across the country sunshine may feel hopelessly out of reach. Fear not.

Get into the kitchen and make soup to rejuvenate your soul. Plus, Souping is the New Juicing—the perfect way to squeeze more veggies into your life.

This pea soup only requires a 15-minute simmer, making it a front-runner for weeknight dinners. Add a little sautéed Italian sausage to transform it into a hearty meal and no other sides are needed.

Chèvre (goat’s cheese) is my go-to for adding creamy richness to soups without the use of heavy cream. Goat cheese is much easier to digest than cream, and it lends a tart, tangy, earthy flavor that turns this nourishing vegetable soup into a showstopper.

Get fancy and top each bowl with homemade croutons to add irresistible crunch.

Sweet Pea Soup with Parsley and Chèvre

Serves 6 as a side or 4 as a main

Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large yellow onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 teaspoon fine sea salt (leave out if broth is not low-sodium)
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 (32-ounce) box l…

Source: http://greatist.com/live/dating-advice-wait-to-text?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_http–greatistcom-

Say you’ve matched with someone on Tinder. You both had to swipe right, so it’s safe to say you find each other attractive or intriguing—or maybe one person’s hand slipped. Regardless, it gives you a boost of confidence when chatting with them. So when they send you a text, you reply almost immediately. (We all know how attached we are to our smartphones, so it’s silly to pretend you didn’t see their message.) Plus, we’re all big boys and girls here: No need for those petty, childish games where you wait 10 minutes or maybe an hour to text them back, right?

Actually, science would say you should wait, at least a little. Here’s the basic explanation, care of a quick excerpt from Aziz Ansari’s book Modern Romance:

In recent years behavioral scientists have shed some light on why waiting techniques can be powerful. Let’s first look at the notion that texting back right away makes you less appealing. Psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies in which they reward lab animals in different ways under different conditions. One of the most intriguing findings is that “reward uncertainty”—in which, for instance, animals cannot predict whether pushing a lever will get them food—can dramatically increase their interest in getting a reward, while also enhancing their dopamine levels so that they basically feel coked up.

If a text back from someone is considered a “reward,” consider the fact that lab animals who get rewarded …

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/16/466612148/study-program-to-protect-fish-is-saving-fishermens-lives-too?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

The captain and crew of the Moriah Lee pose with sablefish caught off the coast of Half Moon Bay, Calif. A new study found that fishermen in the West Coast sablefishery were much less likely to engage in risky behavior — like sailing out in stormy weather — after catch share quotas were implemented.

Courtesy of Ethan Righter

A program used in many U.S. fisheries to protect the marine environment and maintain healthy fish populations may have an immensely important added benefit: preserving the lives of American fishermen.

That’s according to a new study published Monday in the Pro…