Let us start by getting the blame out of the way, so that we can focus on the true problem. It’s all the fault of the parents, the fast food companies, the television corporations, the grocery stores, the schools, the government, the fashion industry, the makers of video games, the criminals that roam our streets, the economy that forces dual incomes just to survive, day care, society in general, and don’t forget the kids. There I think I covered every layer of blame. And Yep, it’s all true, each of these groups/dynamics have contributed in some way to our kids being obese, or overweight, while also being malnourished (lack of the essential vitamins and minerals needed to produce optimal health). NO, No Bad People.

Now we can get back to basics. The USDA produces a food pyramid if you haven’t seen one, type food pyramid in the search bar and take a look at it. This nifty little graph tells you what a body needs nutrition wise to be healthy. (You can also check out the USDA’s sister site, MyPyramid.gov for a menu planner along with dietary information to benefit you and your kids.) Now look at your child’s diet… Does it in anyway resemble the pyramid? I thought not. You will notice that things like soda, cool-aid, snack cakes, and cheese curls aren’t on it. It uses terms like fruits, vegetables, meats and beans, grains, milk, oils, discretionary calories and physical activity. There is actually one other thing that should be on the pyramid that they didn’t include and that is water.

The food pyramid and its guidelines is a great start to getting your children off the obese list and back to happy healthy kids. It isn’t easy to incorporate into a diet that has been mediocre to lousy though. It will take time, patience and extra work on your part to begin increasing the good and garbage canning the bad.

Tip’s for a gradual but steady change:

Grains – most kids get their grains from white bread, white rice, noodles/pasta, frozen waffles, cereal, corn chips, snack cakes and cookies. I can hear you now, I bought whole wheat bread and they wouldn’t eat it. Yes I know. But there are alternatives. Try the whole grain white bread, while not as good as whole grain it is better than the processed to death white bread they’ve been eating. The same is true with noodles/pasta, waffles, cereal, and cookies look for a variety that has whole grains. Cereal is easiest of all since on of the major manufactures has made all their cereal whole grain (just watch the sugar content). For rice, try adding a handful of brown or wild rice to the pot about 15 minutes before the white rice, then cook as usual. Call it confetti rice and let them try it, you’ll have converts before long.

Vegetables – First, gradually wean your child off the notion that to eat a vegetable you have to drown it in ranch dressing or any similar condiment of choice. When they can once again taste the vegetable in its pure form. Let them pick out the ones they want to try. Buying just one to sample, is easiest. Encourage them to pick a variety of different colored vegetables. Please never tell them its gross, never say yuck, or you won’t like it, they might actually enjoy rutabagas or kohlrabi, they may have a hankering for radicchio its ok to experiment with your food.

Fruits – For the most part look at vegetables, but I have a word about bananas. They are wonderful, but a steady diet of them isn’t, they are a high calorie fruit and should be regarded as such. Buy the baby bananas (cool and small) or just give them a piece of the large banana, with other fruits!

Oils – As difficult as it is, stay away from fired foods. Incorporate raw nuts into your kids diet, and read labels. If it has a high fat content put it back on the shelf. Look for leaner options. Yes fat is a flavor enhancer, but if the food is good to begin with it doesn’t need that much enhancement. Again look at the condiments your child is eating, that ranch dressing can have 9 to 15% fat….OUCH!

Milk – Like fats you need to be aware of the percentage of fat you are giving your kids. Look for low fat varieties not fat free. Why, because usually fat free, especially in yogurt, ice cream and cheeses has extra sugar and or salt, which the kids don’t need. And the low fat ones just taste better.

Meats and beans – a hamburger is a hamburger, and chicken is chicken right? Not quite. Once again read the labels, lean hamburger with 7% or less of fat, cooked so that the fat runs off, way better than 20% fat, sizzled in its own juices. As for chicken, look at the added fat that they put in those chicken nuggets or strips before you buy them. A good choice is making your own, out of lean chicken, breaded with bread crumbs or cereal crumbs, then lightly sprayed with cooking oil and baked. They taste good too! Now for beans… Did you know that you don’t need to eat meat every day. Beans are an excellent source of protein, and fiber. Eat up, twice a week and it will be easier on your wallet, too.

Water – again, not on that pyramid, but very necessary. 8 to 10 glasses per day, of pure water, no additives, no colorings, no flavorings. And while I’m talking beverages, please begin cutting down on their soda (pop) intake. No more than 1 per day, they may revolt in the process, but in the long run at least their stomach will thank you!

Physical activities – That means off the sofa, floor or recliner and moving. Walks, bike rides, playing at the park or in the back yard. At the very minimum a half hour per day. Make sure they are safe. Be sure to put sunscreen on them. But get them moving. If necessary hide the darned video game. Their heart will adore you for it even if they are throwing a fit in the process!

No more obese children - ‘Nuf said!

Its something I have known for quite a while, I am a work-a-holic, I love working and once I get going it becomes very hard to pull me away from my project until its finished. I think I must have overlooked that or maybe thought I could change once I setup headquarters at home, but I didn’t. The reality is that I found myself working more hours than ever before, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I wanted to sit in front of this computer and type up articles, manage numerous websites and so on, I love it and thats why I do it to this day, but it was effecting my family and I couldn’t even see it.

I felt like it was a blessing for my family, I was home and they could see me or talk to me whenever they wanted, but I realized that I wasn’t really there, it was kind of a shell they were talking to. I mean sure I was sitting there, but I was so engrossed in the work that I couldn’t fully devote my attention to the conversation. It had got to the point where we would go out and I was always in a hurry to get home, I had to see if I missed anything important, maybe an email I was waiting on came through, or worse yet maybe one of sites were down and would often ruin the outing because I cut it short to be with my work. I hate to say it, but it was almost as if I were having an affair with the Internet.

It took me over a year to finally realize this myself, that even though I was technically spending time with my family, I really wasn’t spending time with them at all. Once I was able to see that I knew I had to make a change, but how do you stop doing something that you love? The easiest way is to think about which you love the most, because after a while you will have to choose one so it had better be the one you want. The one I wanted was my family, I love them with all of my heart, they are the reason I decided to work from home in the first place, to spend time with them.

The strange thing is, that even though I had began to sacrifice time from my work to spend with my loved ones, my business actually began to flourish, more so than it was before my insight. Now that I look back, I can see that sure I was spending 18 hours a day working, but most of the time I was so burnt out that the work just wasn’t good, it was hurting me more than doing good. So once I pulled away from the work a bit, I again was able to enjoy what I was doing with the added benefit of more free time to do what I really wanted to do.

The Moral of the Story

Whether you’re poor, rich, working or out of work you have to stop and realize what truly is number one in the grander scheme of things. You always have to put your family first, everything else can fall into place in a close second, but family has to come first. Once you put family first, everything else has this weird way of working itself out.

If you can do all of this, your life will be better, fuller and more enriched than it ever has been before, I promise. Just do what comes naturally and let your family know just how much you love them.

Around our house, recycling plays a very large roll in our lives. We attempt to recycle anything and everything we can get our hands on including plastic(sorted by numbers), aluminum, glass and even food which we turn dinner scraps into compost for our plants. Old cellphones are shipped off to Cell Phones for Soldiers and other electronics are either donated or recycled in the proper manner.

I will be the first to admit that this recycling “craze” we have takes a fair amount of our time, but I also believe that it is well worth the effort if for nothing more than we are doing our part to protect the planet. We have spent a lot of time teaching our kids to recycle and the benefits of doing so, in hopes that when they are older and move out on their own, they will make the choice to recycle as well. All of our friends have been converted to savvy recyclers along with family members and neighbors.

Facts about garbage and the benefits of recycling

• Americans throw away on average 694 plastic bottles every second in this country. At this rate, over the course of a single day 59,961,600 plastic bottles will be thrown out.
• The average American will produce 4.6 pounds of garbage every single day, which means there is 1,679 pounds of garbage produced annually by a single person. If you live in a typical 4 person household, your family alone is producing 6,716 pounds of garbage each year.
• The U.S. is home to a mere 6% of the worlds population, yet we produce half of the worlds garbage.
• Waste paper is New Yorks single largest export. If a single ton of that paper had been recycled, they would have saved 17 trees.
• Approx. 25 - 30 percent of Americans garbage is plant matter and could easily be composted.
• It takes only six weeks for the average aluminum can to be recycled, remelted and back on the shelves of your local grocery store.
• The U.S. throws away 40 million tons of paper each year rather than recycling it and saving trees.
• Recycling can reduce the amount of waste that enters landfills and incinerators by 25% - 50%.
• Manufacturing aluminum cans from recycled aluminum requires 90% less energy than making new ones.
• If you were to recycle 1 ton of cardboard, it would save over 9 cubic yards of landfill space.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture yet? There are a lot of benefits to recycling your waste and as you can see above a lot of negative side affects if you don’t. There are numerous ways to reduce your carbon footprint, don’t you think its at least worth a shot.

The History of Tarot Cards

According to Wikipedia:

The tarot (also known as tarocchi, tarock or similar names) is a set of cards typically featuring twenty one trump cards, the fool, and an extra face card per suit, in addition to the usual suit (face and pip) cards found in ordinary playing cards. Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play Tarot card games.^[1] In English-speaking countries, where the games are largely unknown, Tarot cards are utilized primarily for divinatory purposes^[1][2] with the trump cards plus the Fool card comprising the twenty two major arcana cards and the pip and four face cards the fifty six minor arcana.

Evidence shows that the first Tarot playing cards entered Europe between 1410 and 1430, though Tarot readers would argue that these cards were created much earlier. These new Tarot cards were originally called carte da trionfi or triumph cards. As of current, the oldest known surviving Tarot cards are fifteen hand-painted decks, created in the mid 15th Century for the Visconti-Sforza family, which at the time were the rulers of Milan.

No documented examples exist prior to the 18th century of the tarot being used for divination. However, divination using similar cards is in evidence as early as 1540; a book entitled The Oracles of Francesco Marcolino da Forli shows a simple method of divination using the coin suit of a regular playing card deck. Manuscripts from 1735 (The Square of Sevens) and 1750 (Pratesi Cartomancer) document rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the tarot, as well as a system for laying out the cards. In 1765, Giacomo Casanova wrote in his diary that his Russian mistress frequently used a deck of playing cards for divination. -Source

Learning to Read Tarot Cards

You can find plenty of great books on the subject of learning to read tarot cards at your local bookstore, but I also found the video below very helpful to understand the meaning of each card and how they each play such a significant role in a tarot card reading.

Tarot card reading guide

So to better understand why we dream, we first have to understand what happens when we dream. According to Brady Riedner, a researcher with the UW-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness, “What we do know is that during dreaming sleep, the brain is just as active as it is during waking, but in a different way.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison followed up on Brady Riedner’s research by saying,

He explains that because the sleeping brain is mostly disconnected from the rest of the world, its activity can be more spontaneous, bouncing around to any number and combination of thoughts, in no apparent logical order. That’s why dreams – though seemingly very real – tend to progress in weird and unpredictable ways.

At the same time, dreams aren’t totally random. They often relate to events and thoughts from waking life. Why? Scientists know the brain’s structure is shaped by the stimuli it takes in while awake; for example, thoughts and experiences are known to strengthen the connections between certain neurons. Dreams, therefore, might merely be echoes of these daytime changes.

In reality, all of this makes sense. Dreams may simply be a reflection of the thoughts and activities we experience throughout the day, although many people would disagree with this completely. Consider the people that believe in spirituality and higher powers, may argue that dreams are a method of transporting our minds outside of our bodies or even a window into the past and/or future, which would also make sense from their prospective.

The problem with what I say above, is that it again brings us back to theory, nothing more. There is no evidence that would back up or coincide with what was said, they are only peoples thoughts on the subject. Which leads to me to the next portion of this article, theories on why we dream. Read over the theories below and decide which one you may be inclined to believe and let me know.

Theories on Why We Dream

Alfred Adler believed: “Dreams attempt to solve problems according to the individual style of life and they are not to be interpreted as common sense. It has been shown that the ancients always considered dreams in connection with a problem of life. That they were right in doing this is shown by the fact that the more satisfied a person becomes, that is, the less his problem disturbs him, the less he will dream. It has also been shown by Individual Psychology that in dreams we attempt to ‘fool’ ourselves. The two ideas are not contradictory. We fool ourselves into an inadequate solution of a problem, inadequate from the standpoint of common sense but adequate from the standpoint of the style of life. We do this by dismissing important facts and leaving only a small part of the problem which can, if everything is put into figurative form, be solved easily.”

Ernest Hartman believes: “Activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis for our minds. There is a whole continuum in the making of connections that we subsequently experience as mental functioning. At one end of the continuum is focused waking activity, such as when we are doing an arithmetic problem or chasing down a fly ball in the outfield. Here our mental functioning is focused, linear and well-bounded. When we move from focused waking to looser waking thought–reverie, daydreaming and finally dreaming–mental activity becomes less focused, looser, more global and more imagistic. Dreaming is the far end of this continuum: the state in which we make connections most loosely.”

Sigmund Freud wrote in his book, “The Interpretation of Dreams” that: “Dreams are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.” “He also described two different components of dreams: manifest content and latent content. Manifest content is the actual images, thoughts and content contained within the dream, while the latent content is the hidden psychological meaning of the dream.”

Jung: “believed that archetypes such as the animus, the anima, the shadow and others manifested themselves in dreams, as dream symbols or figures. Such figures could take the form of an old man, a young maiden or a giant spider as the case may be. Each represents an unconscious attitude that is largely hidden to the conscious mind. Although an integral part of the dreamers psyche, these manifestations were largely autonomous and were perceived by the dreamer to be external personages. Acquaintance with the archetypes as manifested by these symbols serve to increase one’s awareness of unconscious attitudes, integrating seemingly disparate parts of the psyche and contributing to the process of holistic self understanding he considered paramount.”

“Jung also believed that material repressed by the conscious mind, postulated by Freud to comprise the unconscious, was similar to his own concept of the shadow, which in itself is only a small part of the unconscious.”

By now you should be able to see just how widely these dream theories tend to vary from expert to expert, which makes sense as to why no single person has the ability to point to a direct cause for dreaming. So what are your theories on why we dream, or which one of these theories do you lean more towards believing?

Well not any more! It appears that hula hooping is making a come back, but more interestingly with the adult crowd. Women around the country have dropped some of those boring exercises and picked up their hoops for a fun workout, and they even learn a little dancing as well. Check out the video below for a few fantastic hula hooping pointers:

So just what are the health benefits of hula hooping? Well as you can see in the video above hula hooping really can be a great full body workout. However, the main concentration is in your mid or abdominal section, helping to strengthen your abs, tighten your stomach and lose weight. Should you get good enough to pull off some of the tricks in the video, you can really tone your whole body with this very fun and exciting old way to exercise.

Aside from the health benefits of hula hooping, it is also a fun activity for the whole family, maybe you should get your hula hoop today!  If you want more fun exercise ideas for you and your family check out these fun family fitness plans.

Can Your Family Help You Get Out of Debt?

Believe me I know how difficult it is to ask your family for money, I have been there before. But the fact is that this is one of most affordable methods to consolidate your debt. Often times a family member will not charge you interest on your payments, which will allow you to pay off the loan a lot faster than more traditional methods. The problem that many people run into here is re-paying the family member. Many people figure that since “Uncle Bob” loaned you the money he doesn’t really need a monthly payment, you can just pay him when you have some extra cash. Don’t do this! Aside from destroying any relationship you have with your family, its just bad practice. If you decide to turn to family for help, setup a monthly payment plan that will work for both parties involved.

Do You Currently Have any Equity in Your Home?

Obviously, in order to have equity in a home you have to first own one, do you? If you do currently own your own home, it may have built up some equity over the years which would allow to get a home equity loan and pay off your debt. By choosing this method, you would be able to then consolidate all of your debt into one easy loan, the home equity loan. Home equity loans are usually inexpensive, the interest rates are often fairly low and for the most part they are easily obtainable. Should you decide to go with this option, you must remember that your house will be used as collateral for the re-payment of the loan, you don’t pay, you don’t have a house any more. So make sure that it is within your budget to make the monthly payments on the equity loan.

Can You Obtain a Loan from the Bank?

If you have access to a low-interest loan through your local bank you may be able to use that to consolidate your debt into one monthly payment. This would eliminate the need to make multiple payments each month, begin to clear up your credit record and save you money by paying everything under the single low-interest payment.

Do You Already Have, or Can You Obtain a Low-Interest Credit Card?

You can use a low-interest credit card to consolidate all of your debts into one easy monthly payment without the need to risk loosing your home. However, the credit card would need to have a high enough limit that it would cover all of your accrued debt, and still have an affordable monthly payment. If your current credit card has a very high interest rate, paying this amount off would be very difficult at best, so you may consider looking into a card with a lower APR. Check with local banks and other financial institutions in your area to find a card with a low interest rate that will work for you.

Which Option Works Best for You?

As you can see by some of the ideas I have given you above, there are a lot of options that will help with your debt consolidation financing. Since what may work for one family may not work for another, you need to sit down and decide which option is best for you, before jumping in head first and losing everything.

The majority of you that have a hard time with this, are probably experiencing the very same problem I had. Something in my head told me that I could do the given task better, faster and with less worries than if I were to delegate that to someone else, even if it meant that I had to work myself to the bone to get everything finished. However, that’s the problem. When you begin taking on to many tasks in the course of a day, you begin to rapidly lose the valuable time needed to accomplish your days work, which coincidently makes you less efficient than you would have been had you just let someone else do the job in the first place.

So in an attempt to combat the evil that resides in all of us, I decided to share some of the tips that I used when learning how to delegate tasks.

Tips for Learning How to Delegate Tasks:

Get over yourself: Yes, you are probably very good at everything you do or have been trained to do, but that doesn’t mean that no one else is just as good at the same thing. Even if another person does a given task in a different manner, doesn’t mean that they are doing it wrong or don’t know what they are doing. Everyone does stuff differently and what works well for one person may not work so well for you. So try not to be quite so impressed with your own abilities and allow others to show you theirs.

Organize yourself and your schedule: Before you can even consider which tasks to delegate, you have to know which ones will free up the most time for you. Simply choosing the easiest tasks, sometimes known as “busy work”, and passing those off to someone else is not properly delegating. The tasks should be chosen very strategically so that you can get the most out of your day, while completing the most important jobs yourself.

Choose your helpers wisely: This where a lot of people go wrong, though it sounds like common sense. When delegating any task be sure that the person you are delegating it to knows what they are doing. Handing out jobs carelessly to anyone you see will only get you in trouble, because chances are they might just make matters worse. So choose wisely and be sure that you have given the job to the most capable candidate.

Explain the task thoroughly: I don’t think it can get any clearer that that. Anytime you are delegating tasks be absolutely sure that the person in question completely understands what it is that (s)he should be doing. This will avoid any confusion and problems that arise from lack of communication.

Be sure to follow up: Anytime you have gone through the process of delegating tasks to family members, co-workers or whom ever else it may be, make sure to follow up at the days end. Ask questions, how did it go, were there any problems with the given task, did you complete the task and so on. If there was a problem, this is a perfect opportunity to discover why the problem arose, was it on their end, your end or out of everyones control? You should also take this opportunity to offer a little praise if all went well, everyone loves to hear thanks or great job once in a while.

So what do you think? Can you delegate tasks or are you a do it yourselfer? Share your tips for learning how to delegate tasks in the comment section below.

Teens are busy people, between dating, school, sports and having some fun with friends, finding time for a part-time job can be difficult at best and worse yet, the job usually takes away from their schoolwork. It doesn’t have to be that way, there are plenty of ways for teens to make money, you just have to be a little creative and willing to do a little work. I know to a teen “work” is a bad word, but it can be fun too!

Here are Some Teens Making Big Money

Teen, Ashley Qualls launched her MySpace resource site, Whateverlife.com, at the young age of fourteen only two years later she reportedly received an offer for $1.5 million from an interested buyer. These days her website is still around and running strong making Ashley quite an impressive young entrepreneur.

Cameron Johnson started his own greeting cards business at the age of 9 and by the age of 11 he had managed to save up several thousand dollars. After running several successful websites and selling merchandise on eBay, Johnson, now 15 was making $300,000 plus per month in his ventures. He was total assets were worth over $1 million before his highschool graduation.

Fraser Doherty began making jams and selling them out of the kitchen at the age of 14, by the young age of 16, he had quit school and began making jams full-time to keep up with orders. After stocking the shelves of high-end markets throughout the UK, his company Superjam hit $750,000 in sales last year.

Ways for Teens to Make Money Offline

Not so surprisingly, there are a lot of ways for teens to make money offline if you just put your mind to it. Teens can pretty much do anything anyone else can, they just have to want to because that’s where most teens fail, is in the motivation department. I was a teen once, I remember not wanting to get out of bed until noon, or even later. But if a teen has the drive to succeed in life and many of them do they can make a very good living before they are out of highschool.

Here are some different ideas that teens can use to make money offline:

Mowing Lawns/Landscaping

Computer Repair/Training

Dog Walking

Gift Baskets

Babysitting

Ways for Teens to Make Money Online

Niche Blogging

Freelance Writing

Build a Social Network(Teens know what teens want)

Web Design

Build a MySpace Resource Site

Affiliate Marketing

Virtual Assistant

Now obviously these are only some ideas to get teens started thinking about different ways to make money, but with a little creativity the possibilities are endless. Try thinking about what other teenagers are interested in right now, whats in style at the moment? Mix ideas together and see what you can come up with, often times the strangest ideas are the most successful.

What other ways for teens to make money do you know about or have you done yourself? Share your thoughts with everyone below.

Maybe its time to step out from behind that cloud of smoke and join the rest of us, so if you need a little incentive to kick the habit, these smoking facts should do the trick.

Smoking Facts:

• For each person that dies from a smoking related disease, at least twenty more people will have at least one serious illness from smoking.

• Smoking not only harms the person smoking, but also his or her family members, coworkers and anyone else that might breathe the cigarette smoke. This is called secondhand smoke.

• Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death in the U.S.

• The health care costs that are associated with exposure to secondhand smoke average $10 billion annually.

• In the U.S. alone, smoking is responsible for approximately one in five deaths each year. That equals about 438,000 deaths per year just from smoking.

• Throughout the World, smoking causes more than five million deaths each and every year.

• Plain and simple, smoking is an addiction and it can be far worse than any other drug simply because tobacco is readily available. Cigarettes contain nicotine which is a very addictive drug that can make it very difficult, but not impossible, to quit smoking.

• A teenager with parents that smoke is twice as likely to become a smoker than one who’s parents are non-smokers.

• On average, many smokers will die thirteen to fourteen years earlier than non-smokers.

• The current smoking trends show that tobacco use alone will cause more than eight million deaths annually by the year 2030.

• The Nicotine from a cigarette reaches the brain in about eight seconds, while injecting many street drugs such as Heroin takes twelve seconds.

• Each time a person smokes a cigarette, their heart speeds up from 10 to 20 beats per minute.

• On average, a person that smokes one pack a day will spend around $1500 each year on cigarettes alone, what could you do with the extra money?

• Smoking is responsible for around 25% of deaths from residential fires, causing nearly 1,000 fire-related deaths and 3,300 injuries each year. Those numbers are in addition to the amount of deaths caused by smoking related illnesses.

Well, do you feel like quitting yet? Listen, the truth is it will be difficult to quit smoking but I really hope that these smoking facts have had an impact on you to make the right decision.