Back in skinny jeans

Wild: Demi Moore uses Leech Therapy for Detox

Yes, that is leeches like blood sucking worms. Demi is really into cutting edge health & wellness treatments, and she told Letterman that she went to Austria to try some blood detox that involved leech therapy. Besides feeling a bit creeped out, I wondered what the real health benefits of this kind of detox are, and I couldn't find much online. If any of you know, please share! Leeches were typically used for bloodletting in old world medical practices.

I'm pretty open to cutting edge health & wellness treatments as well, but this one, I think I'll pass. Celebrities really are an odd bunch sometimes. To see Demi explain in more detail her leech therapy, skip the video to the 3:30 mark. That's where Demi starts talking about her blood sucking detox.

Theory: A man is happier in marriage if his wife is better looking than him

According to some lab coat experiment at the University of Tennessee on attractiveness and marital bliss:

"Men who married attractive women were happy to bask in the glory of their partner's beauty. Men who were more attractive than their partner demonstrated a tendency to offer less emotional and practical support to their wives...Attractive men have available to them more short-term mating opportunities. This may make them less satisfied and less committed to the marital relationship."

So, if I got this correct in simple mathematical terms:

• Hot Wife + Average Joe = Happy Marriage

• Average Jane + Hot Husband = Unhappy Cheating Bastard (because he can get hot chicks)

This story stood out to me because it relates to the back in skinny jeans fantasy, "When I'm thin, men will love me, adore me, and never leave me." So, scientifically these lab coats are thus proving that fantasy to be true on some level. It also speaks to the notion that men are happier in marriage when they have the trophy wife, so following this logic it explains why so many wives will spend tons of money to stay thin and young so they can keep their husbands.

But is that really a marriage but on solid ground? I think not, and that is what this study is missing, data on long term marital bliss because after awhile it doesn't matter who's better looking than whom. At the end of the day, you are two humans trying to make a marriage work over the years. Being a team is what matters.

I have had guy friends who had the trophy wife or girlfriend and ended up leaving more because the woman became way to high maintenance and was not supportive of him or their relationship, and same thing where the woman had a trophy guy. According to the book, The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley, millionaire men who married women based more on the content of her character stayed married to that woman for an average of 30 years or more (basically a lifetime) and the key qualities of their wife were: honest, responsible, loving, intelligent, and supportive. Millionaire men who married women based more on her looks and image tended to have a higher rate of divorce and more stress in their lives due to marital issues.

At the end of the day, you know you have a keeper when you come home after having a rotten failure of a day, and your sweetie sees this, takes you in their arms and says to you, "Everything is going to be okay. You're going to be okay. You're wonderful in my eyes, and I love you."

"Two Tiny Changes": 5 sugar tips + update

It's no shocker that the average American eats a great deal of sugar or sugar derivatives and substitutes like artificial sweeteners. As an example, one can of Coke or Pepsi has the equivalent of about 2.75 tablespoons of sugar. Yikes!

Reducing the amount of sugar you take in will help you with a myriad of health related issues like weight gain, Candida, and preventing diabetes if it runs in your family. Yes, the Inner Resistance Monster just loves the sweets, so going cold turkey is not such a good idea because we all know what happens when that sweet tooth craving starts roaring. Here are some tips to help you start weaning from too much sugary goodness.

• When going to Starbucks or a cafe, put one less packet of sugar than you normally do into your tea or coffee.

• For one week, food journal and see just how much sugar you are eating. You may be shocked to discover that you are eating more sugar than you realized. This includes sugar from fresh fruits.

• Try a natural sweetener like agave nectar, stevia, or honey. Play with using these ingredients in your baking recipes.

• Try raw sugar or organic raw sugar over white processed sugars.

• There is a good debate on whether artificial sweeteners are good or bad for you. Personally, I have noticed a huge improvement in my overall well being after cutting out AIs completely. I noticed the biggest difference in easier fat loss from my stubborn gut area. Here is an interesting article from Medicine Net on the pros and cons of certain artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose.

Here's what I did last week:

• I've been dealing with some wretched insomnia, and it has now permeated almost all of my life. I've never had insomnia issues ever in my life, so it's been something new for me to deal with. I've been focusing right now on getting back to some kind of normal bedtime routine again. Hopefully, I can get back to normal sleep very soon. I've never understood the importance of sleep until now. I'm learning plenty!

Quote on surprise

In Japan, they are now measuring waistlines at work to cut down soaring medical bills

This is just mind boggling. Can you imagine walking into work one day to be told that if you are over 40-years-old, you will be subjected to "flab checks" to see if you are at risk for "metabolic syndrome - symptoms associated with being overweight that, if left unchecked, increase the risk of strokes, heart disease and diabetes." Well, the health ministry in Japan is now making corporations do this as an effort to reduce soaring medical bills due to an increase of obesity in middle-aged people, about 56 million in Japan.

Guess what your waist measurement needs to be...

Nosh bites: Need help recovering from your Easter candy sugar overload

Over at Noshopia, here is some skinny on sugar to help you on your quest for eating wellness:

Ate too many of those yummy Peeps, chocolate bunnies, and malted eggs yesterday? Here are 5 tips to help you today to recoup after a day of sugary extravagance.

Trying to cut back on sugars, or watch your sugar intake? Here are some other names for sugary type ingredients which you might not recognize right away.

Tiny inspiring signs: Don't Give Up

This week's theme is "Don't Give Up." When life seems hard and daunting, this is the time when you need to stay focused and steadfast. Yes, I know it's hard and it would be so much easier to give up, but any movement forward even if it is a tiny baby step is better than stopping. Sometimes you may even still be ahead even though you may feel like you're going backwards.

One thing that separates those who achieve their goals and dreams from those who don't is perseverance despite the desire to give up.

These signs are business card size, so print them and put them anywhere you need a little reminder to help uplift you.

A 200-word review of Vogue's April "Shape Issue"

The April issue of Vogue, on stands now, is their "Shape Issue" featuring cover dream team Gisele Bundchen and LeBron James. FYI, LeBron is only the 3rd man in Vogue history to be on the cover joining George Clooney and Richard Gere. Notice how men are always fully clothed on the women's magazines unlike what GQ did with Adriana Lima.

Before spending your coinage for 100 pages of ads plus some articles, here's my 200-word review of the Vogue "Shape Issue":

• Vogue’s idea of 5 different body types: tall-skinny, pregnant-skinny, waif-skinny, short-skinny, and curvy is a size 6.

• Exercise fiend quits the gym for 6-weeks, loses 3 lbs. and then goes back to her voracious ways.

• Vogue puts 2 perfectly happy sister designers on a diet and exercise plan because heaven forbid we have a couple of zaftigs designing dresses for Keira Knightley.

• You’re obese because of your genes.

• Vogue is happy to point out that they are blameless in contributing to the $40 billion Americans spend a year trying to diet back into their skinny jeans. (p. 362 they put it in the back so maybe no one notices.)

• If you read magazines on the elliptical, you’ll never get skinny.

• Secrets of the best bodies: Men workout and eat. Women have skinny genes.

• Vogue smokes their own crack, “Fashion is not a size, not a number on a scale, never a tape measure. It’s about the only possible perfect…the perfect you.”

• Let’s throw in some female Olympic athletes to say we actually had women with muscle, and Jill Scott to say we did have someone a size 16 but mostly we’ll talk about her shiny purses.

Nosh bites: The calorie low down on fast food salads

Over at Noshtopia, for your noshing delight:

To help you make better choices, I created a nutritional breakdown for salads at fast food joints: Arbys, Burger King, Carl'sJr, Jack in the Box, McDonalds, Subway, and Wendys. I also included tips on how to help trim some of the calories, and fat from the higher caloric salads.

Yummy nosh idea: Dolmas. So dee-lish!

Here are some benefits of pre-cut and packaged fresh fruits and vegetables. I think this is one of the greatest inventions ever for those of us who have limited time to prep and cook yet really want to eat healthier and cleaner.

Can Adriana Lima get any more naked on the GQ cover?

Here's the April cover for GQ and all I could think was, "Damn! You can practically see Adriana Lima's va-jay-jay?" And in the video of the shooting of this cover, you can see even more of Adriana in the buff on some beach with her leaf and a loin cloth. I also thought it even more suggestive that the line next to Adriana's head is "Turn over a new leaf." Well, if girlfriend turns that leaf literally we'll get an eyeful.

Now granted this is GQ's sex & love issue, but can you see how different a men's fashion magazine and a woman's magazine do the covers of their sex & love issues. When can we see a Glamour or Vogue sex & love issue with a provocative looking David Beckham or Gerard Butler? Where's the equal opportunity? Thinking off hand, when is the last time we saw any guy clothed or not on the cover of a woman's magazine? Anyone know?

And I'm sorry, Adriana just looks like an objectified sex object which I suppose is what GQ wanted or thinks that their audience wants. *ugh!* Stuff like this concerns me because GQ is a mainstream magazine and it is displayed on racks where young kids can see it. Again, how do you answer a 6-year-old who innocently asks, "Why is that lady naked?" As well, teenage girls see this and start to think that they need to look and act like this in order to be desired by men. It's an impossible standard. And teenage boys and young men see this, and think that this is the  kind of girl they need to have in order to be cool.

The cover could have been more tastefully done yet still be sexy, had she at least had a bikini bottom on or some slinky summer dress. Am I the only one who thinks this? I'd especially like to know what the guys think of this cover. Is it hot or too much?