Posts Tagged → ideas
Emotional Eating: A Prime Ingredient for Obesity
Sandra found her weight ballooning 60 pounds after her separation from her husband. While part of the weight gain was apparently tied to the medication she was taking, the rest appeared to be the result of what can be described as emotional eating. In recent years, greater attention has been focused on the problem of emotional eating for both women and men. In fact, some experts have gone so far as to claim that most weight gain can be blamed on emotional eating. According to Women Today magazine, it has been estimated that as much as 75 percent of overeating is attributed to the emotions.
For a number of people, overeating stems from anxiety. For instance, if you find yourself consuming an entire bag of potato chips, it’s possible that anxiety is the cause. While many people realize that alcohol and illegal drugs are not an antidote to anxiety, they may not understand that indulging in comfort food in order to combat anxiety can be dangerous as well.
In other cases, overeating may be the result of depression. If you feel tired, hopeless, and have lost interest in your normal activities, you may be suffering from a depressive episode. In order to deal with these uncomfortable feelings, people may turn to food in an effort to cheer up. The problem is that the food can lead to weight gain, which can lead to further depression.
At times, overeating may be a symptom of boredom. An individual may figure that he or she has nothing better to do than overeat. This can be particularly true when one is watching television or surfing the Internet. Rather than trying to determine a cause for the boredom, an individual may just try to “fix” it by indulging in high-fat, high-calorie food.
How do you know if you are an emotional eater? Ask yourself some key questions: Do I tend to eat when I’m worried? Scared? Sad? Do I find that eating lifts my spirits? Am I spending more time eating than engaging in other activities I enjoy? Do my binges come after I’ve suffered disappointment? Am I turning to food in order to deal with the death of a loved one…a divorce…or the defeat of my favorite team? If the answers to any of these questions is “yes,” you may be overeating purely for emotional reasons.
After you’ve identified yourself as an emotional eater, you’ll need to take steps to correct your behavior. Perhaps the most effective technique is diversion. In other words, if you find yourself reaching for the cookie jar, find another activity to engage in. The answer could be taking a walk, kickboxing, or dancing. Or it could be something less physically demanding, such as needlepoint or crochet. The idea is to get your hands…and perhaps the rest of your body…moving. In time, you might find the urge to overeat subsides as you become involved with other activities.
Another effective step you can take is to identify the triggers for your emotional eating. Do you tend to binge in mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or right before bedtime? Are you snacking while watching television, while at the computer, or when you’re sitting in your favorite chair? By asking yourself these questions, you can identify the time of day when you overeat, as well as the location for your binging. With this information, you can learn to re-direct your behavior to less fattening pursuits.
Yet another helpful technique is to develop a support network to help you combat overeating. The members of your support team could include your spouse, children, parents, friends, or other over-eaters. You may even consider joining a support group which specializes in helping those who engage in binge eating. If you feel the need to overeat, contact a member of your support team. Talking through your emotions could provide you with the emotional release you need, making overeating unnecessary.
If your anxiety or depression persists, consider seeing a psychotherapist. He or she can help you develop more effective coping mechanisms. If you find it difficult to talk to friends or family about your overeating, a psychotherapist can provide you with the talk therapy you need to overcome your problem.
Cat behavior training
Learning cat behaviors before you start training them would be an good idea for anyone that is going to train a cat’s behavior.
A cat can jump and lands on its feet as this are a natural instinct for a cat. When a kitten is first born, the cushion in a kittens paws are not developed with the cushion to land on its feet. It takes about 7 wk to develop the cushion in a cats paw for landing. A cats bone structure is unique to other animals as the bones are flexible , cat has no collar bone, which enables them to be able to twist and bend their bones A cat can jump from short distant with out sustaining any injuries.
With this behavior, you will want to teach the cat to jump hoops, sticks, or off the scratching tree. Letting a cat jump from extreme heights will cause injury to the cat.
Cats have a unique hearing ability; they are able to hear high tones and pitches, like opening a door or a can of food. Cats also have unique smelling abilities. The reason a cat will scratch or urinate on the floor , rub its self up against a door or furniture, is the cat is leaving their scent in that areas so they will be able to come back and know they were there, in other words marking its territory. In addition, if another cat or animal comes along in the area a cat will know this. Cats can also smell with their mouths. There is a gland call ‘Jacobson’s organ’, it is a sac in the cats upper mouth filled with blood, as the cat smells the scent and the slightly opens their mouth and upper lip, this allows the scent to be carried in and to the sac, which it will carry the scent goes to the cat brain. This mostly happen to male cats when a female has urinated.
With these natural instincts and behaviors this can give you some insight to help you train you cat. With behavior training you will want to make sure that you allow your cat the ability in some way to play out it natural instincts and behaviors.
When training a cat for behaviors here are some things that you need to look at and take in consideration when training. Aggression especially in older cats, this can be cause from illness, other cats in the home. This you may want to contact your vet to have the cat check out to see if it is all right at this time to train a cat.
Depression and anxiety could play another part with trying to train your cat. If a cat is separated by it recent owner the cat can become depressed. Stress on a cat can be common effect on a cat. If you think that your cat has depression or high anxiety, this would be a good time to take the cat to the vet. Vets can talk to you about some of the things that may be causing this and a help list to help the cat. There are medications that a vet can prescribe for the cat to help with depression and anxiety.
Never hit a cat for a punishment the cat will learn to fear you, and fearing will be a behavior you will not be able to control or retrain. When they do something that is not right. Ignore the problem or if you catch them right a way you can associate a noise with that behavior on what you do not like or just in a stern voice tell them “NO”.
If a behavior is becoming impossible you may have to resort to the baby proof home, all containers that have food in them have a lid on it. Make sure that the counters are clean and have nothing that a cat would want to play with.
The day that you get your cat or kitten, you will want to start training at this point. This will keep many unwanted behaviors away, and hopefully not let any new behaviors to start.
Healthy cats need healthy relationships with their owner.
Ideas For Working At Home
The cost of living is increasing day by day almost all over the world. Hence, both parents ought to go for a job. However it becomes difficult to spend time with the children. Work at home helps those who want to stay at home to look after their children and also want to stabilize their financial position.
You can get some work at home ideas from your friends or neighbors who might work from home. Look through the classifieds in local newspaper for some home based job opportunities. There are lots of proven ideas available on the internet.
However before selecting any idea, ensure that it really suits you. This is because any idea that benefits your neighbor or friend may not be suited for you.
There are some books and ebooks available in online that provides some successful work at home job or business ideas. These ideas can help you in your cash raising projects. The ideas are given to each and every person to suit his or her age and interest. Some books even provide step by step instructions to get success in work at home business and job.
Some work at home ideas:
1. Most of the home based workers find their work by asking their friends, relatives or neighbors whether they know some local employers who are looking for home based employees. You can also approach local companies nearby your residence to find out whether they use home based workers.
2. While you searching a work at home job online, try to find out a suitable job in a firm nearer to you so that you can collect and deliver work easily and can sort out any problems.
3. You can also get recommendations from other work at home employees who have worked and get payment from the company.
4. Before accepting a job, take some effort to find out that the company is a reliable one. This helps you avoid wasting your time, and that you get paid.
If you are looking for home based business that suits you and your lifestyle, then you can use some of the following work at home business ideas:
If you are a competent writer, then you can earn a good income as a ghost writer. In fact ghost writers are in high demand from website owners. You can also write an ebook or an old fashioned paper book. You can get lot of ideas from the internet to sell your ebook.
Kids’ oriented businesses are on the raise. Arranging children’s parties, running a kids’ day care, etc.
There are thousands of work at home jobs. However before going with any idea, ensure that you have real passion for that. Only then can you successfully achieve your goals.
Pocket Bike Safety Tips
Pocket bikes may look like toys, but they aren’t. They are designed for fun, but they can also be very dangerous if not handled properly. Never allow unsafe practices to take away the fun from riding pocket bikes. You can have fun, and still be safe, by following some simple common sense rules.
• Always wear the right equipment. Dress as though you were riding a big street bike. Leather is the best type of clothing, and helmets, knee pads, and elbow pads should be worn at all times. Eyes can be protected with goggles are safety glasses. Buckle the chin strap each and every time. Leather gloves are a great idea to protect your hands.
• Always inspect your bike before riding. This should become an automatic habit to check before each ride. Make sure your air pressure in the tires is right. Check the tension of the chain. Check the fuel. Check the frame of the bike. Tighten any loose nuts or bolts. If anything looks or sounds amiss, don’t ride! Most injuries from pocket bikes occur because something is wrong with the bike, and an individual rides it, anyway.
• Maintenance. This can not be stressed enough. Keep every part of your pocket bike well maintained and cared for. Don’t cut corners.
• Stay off public streets. Most states don’t allow pocket bikes on public streets, and many people have been hurt or even killed because they were hit by drivers who could not see them.
• Do not ride in undesirable conditions that impair your vision or your ability to control the bike. Fog, rain, darkness, and snow can be dangerous. Also, do not ride the pocket bike if you are impaired. You wouldn’t do it with a car, so don’t do it with a pocket bike.
• Never drive a pocket bike at night.
• Keep your pocket bike on smooth hard surfaces. These are not meant for off-road use.
• Don’t “double up.” Pocket bikes were designed for a single rider and should be used as such.
Follow these tips and your pocket bike will provide hours of safe fun and entertainment, exactly as you had hoped, and without the worry of senseless injury.
Get Your Book Done … Now!
I don’t believe in writer’s block. (I can hear the gasps of disbelief already.) Listen: If you hire a plumber to come to your house and fix a problem, do you expect him to say, “Sorry, I can’t figure out what your problem is. I think I have plumber’s block”? Probably not, and if he did, you’d toss him out and call another guy faster than you can say Drano. Not that plumbing can be compared to writing, but if we follow the proper steps to get the job done, I find that writer’s block melts away, the drains are unclogged, and the words start flowing like water from a faucet. But what are these “steps”? Well, a big part of my job as a book marketing specialist is to help people create something they can actually market: a finished book. Many of us have ideas aplenty but not a clue how to get them down on paper.
Unlike other professions, authors operate under a whole different set of rules. We often can’t just sit down and pound out a story, and those who do have created their own formula for doing so. We see this huge story with all sorts of directions we want to take it, we see the cover, we see the characters, we see the market potential. Then we see Katie Couric or Oprah smiling and holding up our book for the whole world to see. Then we glance back down at our monitor and see a tormenting blinking cursor and blank screen. And we are again reminded of what a failure we are. We have all these stories and nothing on paper. We are idea generators. We have zillions of them running through our minds, but none of them on paper. Unless you make your money in a think tank, operating this way probably isn’t getting you any closer to your goals.
When a project looms before us, it’s like this big elephant — huge, overwhelming and ready to stomp us flat any minute. There’s an old saying: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” The same is true for writing. You finish a book, one step at a time. But to create these steps, you first have to break down your book into manageable, bite-size pieces. This can be accomplished by creating a TOC (table of contents) that can guide you through the book. My reasoning behind this is as follows: You’d never think of driving from California to New York without a map, right? Well, how can you expect to finish your book without one? Your TOC is your roadmap, guiding you through your book. If your chapters don’t have individual headings, then write a 2-3 sentence description of what the chapter encompasses. Don’t get too elaborate on this. Remember, it’s not going in your book; it’s just a brief descriptor. Once the TOC is outlined, you’ll have a vision of your book from start to finish.
A few things that creating this TOC will do for you: It will show you any gaps in your story that might need to be fleshed out, and it will give you a sense of completion, of seeing the book or project actually done, and this is a serious psychological turn-on for most authors, because we often live in a world of half-completed projects. Sometimes this step alone can propel an author enough to get their book done, or at the very least give it a darned good kick-start.
Once you’ve developed your TOC, you’ll want to go through it and create a “to do” list. Regardless of what genre your book is, you will always have a to-do list. Whether it’s getting endorsements, doing research, or getting approvals for quotes or excerpts for your book, this to-do list will become yet another item that will help propel your book toward completion.
Once the to-do list is done, set it aside. Now you should have your completed TOC with a vision of the entire book and a growing list of items that will need to be handled for the book to get done. Now the real fun begins.
Some books on writing will tell you to set aside a day or two a week, or an evening here and there to get your book completed. I disagree with this theory, and here’s why: You need to stay dialed into your topic. When I was working on an upcoming book, I would often put the project aside for days or weeks at a time, promising myself to schedule time “as soon as I could.” Well, that rarely happened. What I found is that if I set aside some time every day to do something on the book, I got it completed a lot quicker.
The more you keep your hands in your project, the more it will stay at the front of your mind and on your radar screen, and the more energy you will invest to finish it. I won’t tell you to set aside hours of your time each day — in fact, you don’t even have to set aside an hour. Take 15 minutes, or even five — whatever your schedule permits. If this seems like a ridiculously short amount of time, consider this: You now have your to-do list and your outlined TOC! . If you are short on time one day, pick a quickie item from your to-do list and get it done. If you have more time, then pound out a chapter or two. The idea behind creating the to-do lists and a TOC is to not only give your project a structure, but to also eliminate any and all excuses for getting it done. Don’t feel like writing today? No problem. There’s probably a mountain of research just waiting to be traversed. Get the picture?
But let’s say you can’t even get through the TOC. “My book has too many layers,” you lament. “Too many back stories, tons of stuff going on. I can’t possibly be expected to filter it down into a neat little TOC.” Yes, you can, and you must. If your book has no focus, your book will have no focus. It’s as simple as that. But it doesn’t stop there — if your book is all over the place and you do actually manage to get it done, you’ll never be able to keep a reader interested because you will be the only one who will get it, and what’s the point of that? What you’ll need to do in this case is find the “core” of your book or the focus of your story. Ask yourself this: What’s the one thing this book cannot do without? What’s the one thing this story circles around? That’s your core. If you’re still coming up with three or four things that your story circles around, you aren’t focused enough and neither is your book. Find that one thing and build your story or book around it.
If you follow these steps, your book will get finished quicker than you could have ever imagined. And the once-dreaded writer’s block will go from a stumbling block to a building block.
Marriage and Taxes
Getting married is the greatest day for 50 percent of couples. The other 50 percent get divorced. Perhaps the marriage tax penalty has something to do with it.
Family Values – Hardly
For all the chatter from politicians about family values, it is ironic that the tax code actually penalizes people for getting married. At its heart, the tax code is designed to modify behavior. Deductions and credits are given in areas the politicians wish to promote and taken away in areas considered less positive. Home ownership is viewed as a good thing, so mortgage interest is deductible. Cigarettes are bad, so they are taxed like no tomorrow. If you buy this argument, one must wonder why married couples suffer under the tax code.
A recent study found that by getting married, couples are forced to pay roughly $1,500 in additional taxes. Known as the marriage penalty, one must wonder what the government is up to. Is it trying to promote family values or not? The numbers would seem to indicate not.
The marriage penalty is a nasty little development for newlyweds. The penalty occurs because married couples must pool their earnings when they report taxes. Typically, this means their pooled earnings move them into a higher tax bracket and they pay more taxes. For instance, assume husband makes $45,000 a year as does wife. As a married couple, their pooled income is $90,000 with the accompanying tax consequences. For really doomed couples, the combined income will actually kick in the alternative minimum tax. The AMT more or less voids many major deductions. In the tax industry, there is a nickname for this situation – the divorce tax.
The marriage penalty has existed for years, yet the politicians have failed to find a fix. They pay lip service to the idea, but no major changes have been made to fix the problem. The best they have come up with is doubling the standard deduction for married couples, but this has had little impact since most couples itemize their deductions.
It appears the marriage tax penalty is here to stay for the foreseeable future. One has to wonder why our family values President didn’t include a fix in his tax cuts.
Making Genius
In his excellent book: “Scientific Genius, Dean Keith Simonton of the USC-Davis, suggests that genuises are forming more novel combinations than the merely talented. His theory has etymology behind it: Cogito- “I think”- orginally connoted “shake together”. Intelligo, the root of intelligence, means to “select among”. This is a clear early indication about the utility of permitting ideas and thoughts to randomly combine with each other and selecting from the many the few to retain.
Like the highly intelligent child with a case of Legos, the genius is constantly combining and re-combining ideas, images, thoughts into different combinations on both the conscious and unconscious levels.
When asked how he was able to come to E=MC2, Einstein called it “combinatory play”. He hadn’t, after all, invented energy, mass or speed but he was able to look at the same world as everybody else and come up with something different. In fact, he considerd this combinatory play to be essential to his thinking.
In my book: “The Secret Creator Within”- 23 Ways To Awaken Your Creative Genius, I actually start my treatise with this important idea by presenting my first ‘Creative Pop’ after a much quoted line from Linus Pauling, the great chemist:
“The best way to get a good idea
is to get lots of ideas.”
To illustrate this concept let’s take Tony Bennet. It has been said of him: “Tony Bennet never sings the same song—once.”
When he was asked if he ever got tired of singing “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” his answer was revealing.
“Do you ever get tired of making love?”
When I heard him say this I wondered how could a man who has performed the same song thousands of times, surely on every occassion he’s had to do a concert in a very long career, still find it so new , so fresh, so exciting that he could compare it to making love?
It’s because he has found the magic in our ‘Creative Pop’— each time he goes on stage he’s looking for ALL the ways this song can be expressed. And after these many years, the countless perfomances of this, his biggest hit, he’s still searching for the next best answer.
It’s amazing when you think about it—he hasn’t exhausted the possibilities—after some fifty years.
The lyrics never changed, “the city by the bay” never went anywhere new, the “cable cars still flew half-way to the stars” each time. The basic melody never changed. But this mastersinger could vary the nuance, the phrasing, the tempo, or the scale each time into a myriad of exciting new combinations.
It’s true Tony Bennet never sings the same song—once!
Did TV producer Lorne Michaels stay with the same cast of Saturday Night Live? No, he constantly looked for new talent, skits, and ways to present humor. He too, always on the quest for the next answer.
Did writer/producer Norman Lear stop creating TV sitcoms when All In The Family was a blow out success? No, he went ‘Uptown’ and everywhere else in his creative search because he kept generating the next idea.
Did Bill Gates stop growing his tiny company in 1975 or stop with his first successful idea, a prototype software package, and halt with the name Microsoft? No.
Mr. Gates went on to the next ideas, and still hasn’t finished finding all of them. He eventually became the richest man in the world.
One way of looking at a problem just doens’t cut it and certainly doesn’t generate genius.
So, how is this done? How can we start to ‘awaken’ creative genius? To explore this I lean heavily on a theory I’ve developed based on a comment by Charles DuBois. He said:
“The important thing is this:
to be able
at any moment to scarifice
that which we are for
that which we could become.”
If we ponder these words carefully, and then ask ourselves: what stops us from creating more ideas and solutions, what makes us so satisfied with the one answer we usually can find? We discover a key in the above quotation from Dubois.
Very often its because we cherish our current state, that immidiate solution, so much that we become too afraid or too timid in changing or discarding it. We’ve been taught, through education and experience, to be afraid of change.
Make no mistake about it, generating the next answer requires a change in your thinking and motivation. It takes courage, too. You must sacrifice what you’ve already found as soon as you find it. Who would want to do that? No one does. No one except ‘original thinkers’ and creative geniuses.
To them this is second nature. They are so content in combining ideas and shuffling together one position against another that they hardly find much sacrifice in losing a single solution shortly after its discovery. There is a sort of inner converstation that is constantly pulsing— which they heed— because it leads to real breakthrough, what I call ‘original’ thinking.
Is Homeschooling legal?
Without a doubt, homeschooling is legal in all the 50 States of
the U.s. But, that is just about where the similarity ends. Laws
and regulations regarding homeschooling vary from state to state.
Interpretations of these laws can vary from scholl district to
school district. Additionally, these laws may change every year.
The National Home Education network is a wonderful resource when
it comes to the legalities of homeschooling. It has a listing of
the actual state laws for each state in the U.S. Reading the laws
that pertain to your state is perhaps the best way to get accurate
information about these laws. But, most people need to get the
laws interpreted by a qualified attorney. You can get valuable
information from the support group at your locality. Additionally,
many state education departments have online resources that will
help you in interpreting the state requirements for homeschooling.
The internet is also a good source of information.
It is a good idea to check out your state laws regarding
homeschooling before you start educating your child at home. This
will prevent any nasty surprises on the way. If you have to move,
you will need to be aware of any tests or exams that your child
may need to take.
