OMG! I Met a Cute Guy, Let's Check My Horoscope!

                “Oh my god look at my horoscope!  It’s so right today!”  I giggled as my friend passed me the paper reveal the secrets of the universe to us all.  “You know I never want to believe these are real, but they are so dead on right all the time!”  I giggled reading the paper myself.  They did seem accurate, but wait, I wasn’t reading my own horoscope I was reading hers.  Maybe we are connected by the stars?  I had to go home and look it up!

http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/horoscope-sign-profile-cancer.html

                I looked through pages of how fortune predictions worked.  Throwing out tiny pieces of meaningless information to see how you react to it and then building from it.  Like in the Wizard of Oz when the fortuneteller looked at the picture in Dorothy’s basket, real fortunetellers also use the context clues we bring in with us to start to develop a story of our “fortune” for us.  To me, that is almost just as worthy as a real fortune, a person letting you know exactly the kinds of signals you send out to the world is extremely useful.  However, where does a newspaper get its clues about my own personal life.

                The fact is, horoscope predictions are actually written in such a way that most people will see them as applying to their life most of the time.  An excellent experiment performed by the professor Richard Dawkins gave out just one of the daily horoscopes telling everyone it was the prediction for their sign.  A majority of the people agreed that the fortune was accurate, except, ironically enough, a woman who happened to actually have the sign used as her actual sign. 

At any given point in our lives, we are nervous about expectations and changes in our lives, we are hoping to find love and happiness, and we are preparing for great adventures in our own minds.   As humans we are naturally prone to facing stresses at work or school, we change friends, meet new people, and help old friends through difficult times, and we look forward to new things on the horizon for ourselves and hope for success and even see it amongst failure.  Horoscopes take these aspects of our lives and give us general overriding advice on them.  The advice can apply to such a vast majority, the odds of it applying to you are strong.

But what about my personal solidified description that describes me wonderfully and that doesn’t change… Well, the thing about those are that they often include very positive wording which people tend to want to agree with in the first place.  I may not actually be the deepest thinker, but if a horoscope tells me I am, I’m not going to disagree with it.  If you read through all the horoscope descriptions, you would find in general most of them feel as though they apply to you as well!

Sources:
http://www.cracked.com/funny-6269-horoscopes/

Organics, Mathematics, and Other Problems We are Loosing the Ability to Solve

“And then there are some things, that you are just wasting your money on, like organics!  People have lived for thousands of years without organics, and now this whole organics craze has got me paying double when my wife goes to the grocery store.”  My mouth hung open, I couldn’t believe that my well-educated college professor was saying this.  Living without organics for thousands of years? No actually its only very recently you could get things non-organic.  Its only in the past 50 years that un-natural chemicals have been used in the production of our foods.  Since then, we (Americans) have found ourselves becoming increasingly unhealthy.  That professor is not alone in his thinking, so many of my friends agree whenever we talk on the issue of health “Its just soooo expensive, I want to do it, but I just can’t afford it!”  “Going to a drive through is just so much cheaper and easier.”  It doesn’t stop with organic foods either.  Constantly we hear parents complain about how much effort it takes to organize children into doing physical activity and it is “just easier to put them in front of the TV’

We constantly say that we don’t have the time or money to eat the way we should, but is that really it? Or is it simply the big companies who gave us drive through lanes, video games, and cable TV want us to believe that buying into their unhealthy products makes life easier and cheaper.  When you buy organically yes you’re paying more, on average it is about a 20%-40% markup, however, when you go through that easy drive through you are paying 3X as much for the low quality food that you are getting.  Not to mention the cost of the gas to drive to the drive through for every meal as opposed to the one trip to the grocery store a week.

If you order off the breakfast dollar menu, you will probably spend about $3 per person.  Seems cheap enough, until you consider the actual math of the situation;  at home my organic eggs cost $2.50 per dozen, that is about 20 cents per egg, I eat my eggs with toast which is the most expensive bread you can buy (100% Whole grain, Whole wheat) at $7 for 16 slices, that’s 44 cents per slice.  So, if I ate two slices of bread and two eggs, which is much more food than the dollar menu meal provided I will spend $1.28, less than half what I spent on breakfast for far more.  The time you spend making an egg into whatever way you want (except for hard boil but you can make those in advanced while doing other things) is about the same if not less time than you will spend in the drive through on their quickest days.  The same formulas can be used for any meal and for all of them you can come up with simple, more filling, cheaper, quicker, and healthier meals every single time.

Eating Healthy foods is only half the equation, exercise is also part of it.  We always hear parents complaining that it is easier to put their child in front of the television than to have to go through the time and money it takes to organize them into sports.  However, they are forgetting that, it cost quite a bit of money for all the electronic equipment, the monthly cable fee, and that lovely air conditioning you have blowing through your child’s climate controlled environment.  To send them outside to play, is well, free!  Yep, that’s right the most you as a parent have to do is stick your child on the front porch and lock the door, and guess what within 5 minutes, they have come up with their own game to entertain themselves with for free!  I’m not saying don’t keep an eye on them, but children can actually manage themselves when left to their own devices, and first and foremost, they will find a way to entertain themselves.  Often they find entertainment, not by sitting down and lethargically staring at rocks, but by running around, playing tag, chasing birds, and getting physical activity.

The same goes for us as well, we say we don’t have the time to exercise, and then take every available moment to sit down, after spending full days sitting.  The key to our problem is that we have taken unhealthy treats such as fast food, cable, and video games, and tried to turn them into our lifestyles.  As a result, we have seen extraordinary obesity and diabetes in our world.  Our bodies are revolting against our own treats and failed attempts to spoil it!   Our bodies need healthy foods and they crave exercise.  So why not be lazy, and give in to the healthy lifestyle, because at the end of the day it’s actually easier!

Sources:

http://eartheasy.com/article_high_cost_organic_food.htm

http://jennifer.hubpages.com/hub/Is-it-Cheaper-to-Eat-Fast-Food-or-Real-Food

http://www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/nutrition_policy.html

It was Love at First...?

            “Do you believe in love at first sight?”  It seems such a simple question on first sight, but as soon as my friend posted it, she saw a flood of emotional responses fighting for possibilities and defending the honor of loves past and current.  However, as we all debated we realized one profound truth that we all forgotten in the simple question.  That love, itself, is not simple, love is complex.  Love is not a black or white fact, but a flexible emotion that we feel.  We cannot know if someone loves the way we can see if someone blinks, instead we must sense it the way we sense if someone breaths, we must assume by the warmth in the air and the signs of their motions to know if someone is breathing.  There are also different types of love we can feel and different levels and stages of love with in those types.

            Before I begin, I must pause to note that I am not talking about lust.  Although lust and love are similar and can be often confused, as they both are based in a combination of passion and desire, lust is a completely different emotion based upon innate animal instincts with the intention of continuously populating the earth.  We also must recognize that love is not something we can judge about other people.  We do not know how someone else feels love, and it is not possible for us to truly know.  All we know is what we feel ourselves.

            Love is an emotion based upon caring about someone or something else.  Therefore, like any other emotion, it can felt in a second.  Like anger, joy, and sadness, your emotion can change in a moment.  Of course, like all emotions, the more bases and more time put into developing that emotion, the longer it is felt.  You may feel love for something in a moment and immediately stop moments later because you don’t put the time into developing that emotion, or you realize that your original emotion was unfound.  It happens all the time with the emotion of fear, one moment we are shocked into fear, only to realize moments later that we had nothing to be afraid of.  We react to love in just the same way.

            Obviously, there are certain types of love that cannot be gained in an instant.  Although all types of love can come over time, storge love is they type of love that comes from slowly develops from friendship.  By the very definition, storge cannot be found in an instant.  Euros, on the other hand, are based upon aesthetic enjoyment and can easily be felt the moment you notice something.  Ludus, which is love played like a game of chess, is entered into the moment the players start to play the game.

            The key to love as most wish to experience it is in the recognition that love is an emotion that must be nurtured.  You may have had that initial feeling of care towards that other person, but you must develop it more in order to make it last over the years in the form of friendship, romantic relationship, or any other form.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_styles

Diet or Just Plain Die...

http://kimslightfoods.com/

            I was trying to be healthy, but at times life amongst the brightly colored boxes of a grocery store can be a rough road.  “Stick to the outside. Stick to the outside. Stick to the outside, but wait I need juice, V8 V-Fusion juice is good for you.  Ok, really quick in and out.”  I dodged into the juice aisle and grabbed my healthy beverage, and managed my way out of the grocery store without falling to my own temptations.   I was already unpacking my grocery bag before I realized I had failed.  By accident, I had grabbed the wrong bottle of juice.  I had grabbed the Light V8.

            I know what you are thinking, this is better for you right?  Light is better for a healthy life.  At least that’s what we are raised to believe, but throw that out now, because it is probably those light foods that are keeping you off the road to healthy living. For years, food companies have used these “Diet”, “Light”, and “Fat Free” labels to get us to buy things that should never enter our body in the first place.  At first glance, the “Light” label on my V8 juice seems accurate, after all it contains only 50 calories as opposed to the 170 of the regular V8.  However,  if you continue to read down, you will see that you are giving up all of the protein in V8 when you drink the light version.  That little cheat chart of nutrition facts is only the tip of the ice-burg.   Located not too far, hiding in plain view on the ingredients list is the true perpetrator.

            Sucralose, more commonly known as splenda, is written on the list of ingredients.  We also think of splenda as a health food, because it replaces sugar.  However, the truth is that eliminating sugar won’t help you lose weight.  In fact sucralose has been shown in studies to not only make you gain weight, but also negatively affect your body’s ability to utilize those few nutrients V8 light didn’t eliminate.

            It doesn’t end with just V8, almost all light and diet labeled foods have something in them to make them worse than if you ate the actual product.  The conception of aspartame, used in Diet Coke, can lead to not only to seizures, but also death.  Saccharin, sweet’n lo, greatly raises the risk of some forms of cancers and tumors.  Besides these health risks, these replacement chemicals are highly addictive making you want to eat more of them and, in the end           

            So what can you do to eat healthier now that “diet” foods are off the table.  Stick to the natural.  If you buy it the way you can find it in the wild than it is generally good to eat.  Of course, a variety is best.  Your body needs protein and iron in meets, the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, and yes even the fat found in milk and other dairy products.  The goal, is to aim for as little processing as possible.  The amount of sugar found in one processed item is often more than what is enough fruit for you to care to eat.

            Keep healthy, keep it natural, and do your research.

Sources:

http://www.campbellfoodservice.com/details.aspx?Code=1022

http://www.anh-usa.org/how-sweet-it-isnt-cutting-through-the-hype-and-deception/

http://www.foodrenegade.com/when-sugar-is-still-sugar/

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403942n&tag=contentBody%3BstoryMediaBox%3Ftag%3Dfacebook