Found a nice article on Medhelp newsletter, must read, copied from the link
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People think that they gain weight over the holidays just because there is so much good food around. That’s only part of the truth. The more important factor is that weight gain happens because the stress of the holidays leaves many people “emotionally” hungry, and they eat too much to make themselves feel better. Holiday weight gain is the result of a seasonable exaggeration of the everyday bad habit of “emotional eating,” the fundamental cause of obesity.
It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, but for many people the holidays are a time that accentuate loss, highlight financial strains, heighten family tension and simply put people under stress when there is just too much to do and not enough time or money to do it all.
Here’s how it works: We all know that food provides a bit of relief from all the stress and strain. You’re overwhelmed at work because you know everything that still needs to be done at home--no problem, you grab a cookie from that big platter on the receptionist’s desk. You’re anxious at a holiday party so you hide out at the buffet table. And when you’re at a family meal and someone says something hurtful, you keep shoving food in your mouth so you don’t say what’s really on your mind.
The food soothes you. It calms you down. You do feel better. Now food is a medication, a tranquilizer, or an antidepressant. Everyone uses food in this way sometimes. Where it becomes a problem is when you use food this way too much or too often. So how do you know if you are overusing comfort food? Are you heavier than you want to be? Do you always gain weight during the holidays? If so, you are overusing comfort food.
You might be wondering what else you can do. You can do what I have been able to help 11,000 emotional eaters do already. You can break the emotional eating habit. There are three steps that you can start practicing today.
1. OBSERVE: WHEN an emotional eating urge is starting.
2. You can then pause and EXPLORE: WHY you are really hungry (What is the emotional hunger that sends you looking for the comfort of food).
3. You can DECIDE: HOW you can handle that emotional hunger in a better way than turning off your mind by over-eating.
Since the holidays are only a few days away, use this year to observe yourself and your eating patterns. I believe that observation is the first step to achieving lifelong weight loss. When I say to observe yourself, I mean: notice the times when you’re reaching for a second dessert or find yourself hiding out in the kitchen eating the leftovers from the platters. In those moments, what else is going on? Are you lonely? Disappointed? Angry? Bored? Are you worried about being perfect? Are you insecure? Do you feel criticized, ignored, unappreciated?
Noticing the triggers that send you looking for food is the necessary first step towards losing weight. It’s the thing that the dieting world never tells you. The more you learn how to address feelings without the use of food, the less you find yourself turning to food. It’s that simple. But it doesn’t happen over night.
On our website, we offer a Holiday Survival Guide that you can use to arm yourself against some of the stress of the season. It contains FREE interactive tools that focus on the underlying psychological causes of holiday weight gain, such as family dynamics, and provides personalized solutions to minimize holiday tension. Customized for each individual, the tools pinpoint potential issues and challenges triggered by holiday related stress and provide you with personalized reports containing tips and insights you need to manage the stress in your family and to insure that you don’t let anyone spoil your holiday season. With less holiday stress, you’ll be less hungry.
This year, observe yourself. Then, rather than make a New Year’s will power and good intent resolution to eat perfectly starting on January 2nd, make a different resolution. Resolve to end the bad habit of emotional eating. Learn how to manage your stress, your relationships, and your feelings without using food to turn off your mind. If you do that, and stick to it, by next holiday season you’ll have recovered your power over your eating patterns, put an absolute end to yo-yo dieting, and as an added bonus you will have opened up your mind in new ways by finding a powerful problem-solver in yourself that can make your life even better than it is now. If you want help doing that, go to www.ShrinkYourself.com, and learn more about how to break the emotional eating habit.
Yesterday afternoon I got a call from GeekSquad that my laptop is ready to be shipped to local BestBuy store and they replaced the motherboard and hard drive. I am really not sure what is the relation between motherboard and turning power on and hard drive. But anyways I am happy that I am gonna see my laptop again. I got to do some testing once I receive it.
Ciao
S3
Update: Well I received my laptop from BestBuy yesterday. They replaced motherboard and HardDrive. As per my initial tests, power is turning on, I installed all the basic stuff needed Firefox and some basic plugins, Spybot, VLC player, Pidgin for me, Yahoo Messenger for my wife, 7Zip, Gimp, Open office etc. I removed the bloated software from my laptop, I really hate to see too many processes running on my machine. As of now my laptop works and I am extremly happy to have it back up and running.
Meanwhile Dell has shipped my new laptop and will receive it on 28th Dec 2007. I am waiting for that now.
Been inactive for few days, my daughter poured water on my Toshiba A105 S361 laptop, I cleaned it in time, and it worked for few hours, and suddenly encountered hal.dll file missing. I tried to run the recovery CD which I got when I bought the laptop, it ran for an hour or two but couldn't recover my laptop.
I was so pissed off in that heat of the moment, I installed Ubuntu erasing complete windows and formatting the drive. It worked for few hours, but then I got into some linux issues, like sound was not working, encountered Error 16, inconsistent file system stuff quite a few times whenever I would reboot my laptop.
I downloaded Open Suse distro of linux, I installed it erasing complete Ubuntu, it worked for and hour or so, but when I rebooted to check if it works, I seen same error which I encountered with Ubuntu. Well this is not getting any funny, I became so serious after frequent pesterings from my wife that the laptop became useless and that I shouldnt spend much time on it instead buy a new one. Well how can I leave my one and half year old kid like laptop, and being a geek sort of person how can I leave the job in between, I skipped going to gym, I was adamant that I could fix the laptop tried re-installing Ubuntu again and faced the same problem, spent rest of the night googling the web, raising questions in the Ubuntu forums, couldnt find a solution which fixes this issue. I retired to bed in the early hours to spend at least couple of hours before I resume the job. Even in my sleep I could just see the beautiful features of Ubuntu and dreamt about using them. I told myself in sleep that I would do it somehow, I will do it, I can do it like "Batti Vikramarka".
Next day I took the laptop to my office so that I can escape the frequent pestering' s and disappointments of my wife that I am not spending time with the family. Well as any married geek is, I am married twice, first to my job, and then to my wife. And I always partial to my first wife more :). Well in the office I could re-install Ubuntu again and this time not using my brain too much, I just followed the installation instructions on the ubuntu site, I could see the screen and after one fine solution to fix the sound issue from the ubuntu forums. I was happy. Like anyone would I rebooted few times to see if I again face the Error 16 or any new kind of issues, I didnt. Then I wanted to take one step further in installing KDE desktop Kubuntu. Well I again read the installation instructions and then followed the same. I really enjoyed the look and feel of Kubuntu. It did work and I tested it rebooting it quite a few times. I was thrilled and was extremely anxious to show my wife that I did it, I did it this time. I showed her the KDE version of desktop to impress her by the look and feel of it. She felt happy and gave a smile surprisingly.
I wanted to hit the gym and make up for the lost time the day before, I was wearing my gym clothes and heard my wife shouting that laptop stopped suddenly. And then when I saw it myself I couldnt believe, I couldnt turn the power on of my laptop.................
So the moral of the story is I could have easily solved the hal.dll file missing issue by just taking my laptop to the experienced technician or to BestBuy where I had an extended warranty. Its just that I dont want to handover my laptop to BB after I read horrible stories on the net about their GeekSquad. In the end I tried with an experienced technician, he took $40 to diagnose and spent and hour on it just cleaning the dust inside the laptop which accumulated by our kind of use. I ordered a new Dell Vostro 1500 laptop on dell site, took my old laptop to Bestbuy and handed over it to them expecting nothing much from them.
By the way I just remembered this " A stitch in time saves nine". I could have saved not nine but $700 :). I could have bought Canon Rebel Xti which I been planning to own for quite sometime.
It has become the most difficult task to choose a PreSchool for the kid. Its understandable that we always want the best for our kids. We would even strive hard put in extra effort and earn sufficient money, but just fail to understand that spending higher amounts and doing the best for our kids would make them highly talented. No.
Of all the PreSchools we visited in our area private schools were awesome, just like a 5 star hotel. Clean facilities, lots of activities for the kid. We saw that they are giving laptops to those tiny tots, teaching them C as young as 1st grader or 2nd grader. Director of the school proudly told us that 1st grader would be taught 2nd graders curriculum, and 2nd graders would be taught 3rd graders and so on. Mind boggling, does that mean kids already know much more. May be yes. Kids are by birth smarter today than we were. My kid atleast was born with a laptop(not with a silver spoon), I bought her a toy laptop and she hates that, she wants to use regular laptop. She already know how to type, say mouse and even how to start and shutdown a system. Simple toggle blue glowing button :).
Coming to the point private schools were so expensive $14000 per year fee for kid as young as 3 and with the facilities of 5 star grade. Its the amount my father might have spent for whole of my schooling and graduation.
And then the second one is public school, decent enough, not very big facility, comparatively less activities compared to private one, there is no laptops for the kids, not even a computer. Just old conventional kind of school. Just 2 days a week and 3 hours a day unlike 5 day week and full day classes in private school.
Third was Montessori school which is also private one, and it is also 5 star. Classes are filled with kids of different ages so that young kids would learn good stuff from old ones (and old ones would learn how to be naughty from young ones :) ). Class has rules and all kids are expected to follow them. They can choose what they want to do. Not a bad idea, than force the kid to learn what is taught. Have got good reviews from parents who have had their kids in them. Oh forgot when we visited little older kids did some architecture display, we were so impressed by it. Really those items on display would make any top notch architects very proud and see the kind competition he would face in coming years. Children are taught all kinds of practical things. Simply great.
As expected Montessori and Private schools are expensive and the Public School was not. We feel so bad that we are talking education in monetory terms. But its the fact, people with higher incomes can buy good education for their kids and it is a bad statement.We dont want to buy my kid education, we want to give education.
We are really confused as any parent can be. Whether to make our kid join the private, montessori or public school. May be we are stupid and did'nt study in a Private school :)
S3
Blogged with Flock
Just downloaded Flock ver 1.0 web browser. It is build upon Firefox engine, but looks like they overcame Firefox's eternal memory leak issues. Hope Firefox 3.0 doesnt live upto its infamous expectations. Meanwhile this browser looks good, infact I am even typing this blog post even without actually opening the blog. It has got a cool blog editor. Anyways will keep checking this one extensively. I have plans to test my current application on this browser till then you guys can check it @ FLOCK
Ciao
S3
Blogged with Flock
Try using www.nonoh.net. 3 Euro Cents a minute. Couldnt find the difference of call quality between relianceindiacall, airtel and nonoh.net. So guys staying abroad enjoy calling home and call more.
Very simple just sign in. Buy credits i.e to get minutes to call home you need to buy the minutes needed for your calls using Visa Credit card. And select your phone where you need to receive call initiation i.e your personal mobile or your landline, and enter your destination number and click call, there you go, your call is conferenced by www.nonoh.net.
S3
Bad boys bad boys whatya gonna do... Whatya gonna do when nothing works for you...
---Open a new party is the answer.
We want this blog to have all sorts of stories(personal, entertainment, sports and last but not the least politics), and these days one of the hot story doing the rounds in my state capital Hyderabad that another icon all set to have a new party. This is none other than the recently projected infamous personality Chiranjeevi. So another family is going to inherit the state.
I sometime fail to understand how many party does a state/country need to get things going in the right way. Do we really need so many small parties, can't we have something like 2 party democratic system something like the west has. All the parties have their own manifestoes, one for general public and one for their own self and only one is implemented all the time....... you got what I mean..... well you seem to have the same kind of corrupt mind like me. You did guessed it right.... they are corrupt. Take for example the TRS when it was initiated I saw a tremendous response when I was in Hyderabad that time, but when they actually got their positions everyone's clear how corrupt and how mean they are to the Telangana people. Congress will never let their share of power shared with such kind of people. Both deceived people and are still doing that with perfection very difficult for any humans with conscience.
OK on driving to the point Chiranjeevi's entry into politics and creating a new party. Why does he invent a new party and promise to clean the corruption( not yet heard from him, but everyone does they will. So I am confident on this), why cant he join some existing party and help the state getting into coalition government. Atleast people can then put the blame very easily on one party. All parties are same and do the samething. Eventhough they are from different schools of thinking their motive is same. So my dear Chiranjeevi whom I grew up watching, whom I idolized in my growing days I dont want another party. Join some party which closely reflects your kind of ideas, and atleast try to influence and be useful for the state. When you have thouands of new parties it becomes difficult to run the government best example recent Karnataka's Gowda episode, and last but not the least our own Central Government which is facing daunting task in getting the nuclear deal going through with comrades CPI(M) being their coalition partners.
Yes my intention of writing this column is pretty clear by now, No new parties please.... We have enough.
Thanks for your patience, I am really annoyed with whats going on there....
Hello all,
Just to make your lives comfortable I made this blog RSS compatible. So you can subscribe to RSS and its easy to keep tracking latest scrap we might start posting.
A small tutorial on RSS if you are a newbie
http://www.whatisrss.com/
Grazie
Scube
I grew up eating delicious mangoes down south of India in the state of Andhra Pradesh, known for its high quality, juicy & delicious mangoes. Its called the KING OF FRUITS and by every means it is. Do you know its the National Fruit of not only India but Philippines also(I just came to know about it -:( ).
Well title of this post is so deceiving and I do not have the credentials to discuss types of mangoes and how to grow them. I stumbled upon a very good language learning site called Try Mango. Very useful for people who travel different places but do not have much time to attend classes and also for the people who just cant keep their mouth shut from speaking one language -:). I wish I am atleast one of them.
Start learning, next time you are on phone with me I can atleast say Ciao.
Grazie
Scube
Hello,
My dear family and friends and other accidental visitors, this is our first time blogging, although active participants in commenting on other interesting ones. From now on we would try to keep it active and upto date.
Appreciate your time in visiting and would love your comments, suggestions if you have any.
Thanks
Scube