America's obesity problem

I recently started a series on health and weight issues. Here is a portion of the first article in this series...

Obesity has become a major player in the war on America's health. As a whole the nation is suffering from an over abundance of everything we ever wanted. For those of us who do not have hundreds of dollars of toys we often entertain ourselves with food. In fact, we entertain others with food as well. Food has become not only a way for us to sustain our lives; food has become an integral part of our lives. We use food to entertain, we use food to comfort others as well as ourselves, we use food to make us feel better and in the end we have used so much food that it makes us feel bad about ourselves. This love hate relationship we have with food needs to be brought into check if we stand a chance of fighting this war of weight we have been fighting as a nation. Click Here to read the rest of this article.

Dangers of smoking

I haven't had time to sit down and type up what happened yet. On the 29th of August I was sitting at my desk working on a set of articles for a client when a neighbor opened my back door. This in itself was odd since I didn't know this neighbor but her words would not only shake up my day, they saved my family's lives!

She said to me, "There is a fire in the apartment next door and you should get out."

She didn't seem concerned and since the girl next door is quite young I invisioned a grease fire on the stove and a young girl panicking. Within seconds I had told my 11 year old to wake the kids upstairs (of course we were babysitting and not only had my other 3 children upstairs but the neighbor's 2 were up there as well) and all of the sudden this calm neighbor started yelling at me to get out of my house right away.

Still, I didn't smell the smoke and had no idea what danger we were in. I got out of my chair and went upstairs to get the cleeping children. Immediately I knew something was wrong. My smoke detectors weren't going off but the smoke was fililng the upstairs of my apartment and breathing was painful causing a burning feeling in my nose and throat.

I hate to cut a story short, but I'll revisit this story again in a couple days when I have time to put it to words. Let it suffice to say at this point that we made it out and only have holes in our walls from the firemen's axe used to get to the burning insulation in our walls. The neighbor's house only had a couple pit bulls in it along with a smouldering cigarette in the sofa. The people hadn't been home in over 2 hours. She lost everything! The dogs made it out with minor injuries.

Now my 3 year old is terrified of fire and even terrified of policemen and firemen because he soedn't want to have another fire.

I'll write more about the reprecussions of a fire in blogs to come.

What to do with that winter weight

I had surgery in December and since then I have put on a few extra pounds. I have had no luck with any diet but Atkins thus far so I figured I would go back on Atkins again.

I ran across an article about a variation of the Atkins diet that takes off weight faster and keeps it off better. Kimkins diet is featured on the cover of Woman's World magazine this week. This variation keeps the dieter at a lower carb intake that the regular Atkins diet starts at until the weight loss wanted is achieved.

I found when I was on Atkins I did much better at a really low carb count, I didn't lose any weight at all if I went over 30 net grams of carbs a day (and that isn't many!). If a person keeps their carb intake around 20 net carbs a day their body is forced to burn body fat for energy, this results in weight loss.

I am going to try the Kimkins diet. Anyone who wants to join me on the Kimkins diet can join
here.