JillFlorio

New York City - the Board of Health decides to nearly eliminate transfats in restaurant food.

NYC is a progressive city. In a brilliant move, the City Board of health decided to embargo transfats in restaurant food.

The Washingtonpost.com reports, within six months all New York City eateries will be required to switch to healthier cooking oils, and to reduce total transfatty grams to newly set limits by 18 months.

This is a real boon for travelers, who are forced to eat out most of the time. In my own home, we have banned all transfats - AKA partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - those deadly free-radical inducing toxic chemicals so prevalent in food products.

When you’re traveling, though, you are pretty much at the mercy of whatever bulk fat bins the restaurant taps in its kitchen.

So rejoice if your business trips take you to NYC, soon-to-be land of low bad fats. The rest of your trip might be expensive, but your health won’t get any worse.

More on New York and the tran-fatty acids ban.

DAN WRITES: I almost always use hotel fitness centers, unless I am totally exhausted from travel or working, or from both. A gym of sorts is a must-have hotel amenity, for me.

Exercise machines I want in a hotel fitness center…

What do I like in the fitness center? I usually use a pull-down bar, lats press, leg press and butterfly machine. So a nautilus-type gym with multiple options is great for me.

A handful of free weights is a plus, too.

I also use a treadmill or elliptical trainer, preferably. Lacking those I will use a stair stepper or cycle, but those can be really tough on your knees.

What else? I like a mat to stretch on, a water cooler for bottle refills…and most of all, a TV. I will even plan my workouts around watching the game.

What game? Football or basketball, please. And I live for the Lakers. Go Wildcats! Yeah, Cowboys!

…Okay, don’t get me started…

As I am on a low carb diet, I am always looking for ways to increase my daily fiber intake. Studies show that ingesting 25-30 mg of fiber daily will decrease gastrointestinal disorders and the possibility of colon cancers. I had heard the FiberSure powder mixes in clear, has no adverse taste, and comes with a reasonable price tag.

I didn’t want to use Metamucil, which apparently has an orange flavor (and I suspect might be gritty). And as I checked the fiber powder options on the shelves at Rite Aid, it seemed that most products were much more expensive than this one. A friend had recommended FiberSure so I wanted to give it a try.

At this point I’ve been using this for several weeks and have found the product is everything I was seeking. I can add a teaspoon to just about anything - there is no taste or texture change. I’ve added this with good results to coffee, red and white wine, salad dressing, eggs, oatmeal, soup, Crystal Light drink mix and yogurt. The package said you can add it to baking products, but I have not tried that myself.

The product offers 5 grams of soluble fiber per heaping teaspoon of product. It’s gluten-free, contains no net carbs and is made from vegetable products.

I was impressed that the container has an ergonomic feel in the hand and is easy to pour. I usually don’t bother to measure it out in a spoon - I guesstimate out a teaspoons’ worth and it seems to work fine.

I noticed that I had to increase my fiber dose slowly, which by the way *is* recommended on the label. I actually did notice a difference in my GI tract shortly after starting to take the product. Nothing uncomfortable, but a definite change in the bowels. I do recommend either gradually increasing the fiber dosage over a week or two, or increasing your hydration when you do take the supplement. Either way, this helps everything even out.

Very recommended for anyone interested in easily adding fiber to their diet. This is a super easy way to eat better and be proactive about your health.

Metamucil Fiber-sure Fiber Supplement - 11.7 oz

Drinking tea is an age-old way to pamper yourself. Simple Pleasures of Tea is a delightful book about one of life’s most cozy and comforting activities. The book’s introduction sets up the lovely premise of using teas to enjoy a simpler lifestyle.

Many wonderful ideas for infusions, types of honey and recipes for cooking wonderful baked goods that go well with tea follow. I love the quietly festive recipes, like Red Velvet Cake, Mexican Wedding Cookies, Lemon Tea Bread, Buttermilk Biscuits, Rhubard-Strawberry Crisp, Pumpkin Bread and Raisin Scones. Yum - comfort foods for chilly afternoons with tea. There also are recipes for homemade teas, sun teas and steaming tea facials.

The Simple Pleasures of Tea book also FEELS good. The pages have a nice clay coating and really gorgeous pictures. Great quotes from Emily Post, the Wind in the Willows and Thoreau spice up the content. It’s a pretty lovely little kitchen, breakfast nook, or tea shelf book.

Simple Pleasures Of Tea (Simple Pleasures)

This is an outstanding sunscreen and may even be what I have been waiting for my whole life. That might sound extreme, but I might actually be in love with this product.

Doctors and skin care professionals tell us we need to wear sunscreen every day - rain, snow or shine - to prevent skin wrinkles, skin cancer and hyper-pigmentation. Sunscreen is an essential skin care element, and actually, the most important cosmetic you wear.

I have been searching for a sunscreen that doesn’t feel gloppy on, won’t make me break out, is easy to reapply and pleasant to use. This sunscreen wins on all counts!

First off, Neutrogena Fresh Cooling Body Mist Sunblock comes in a spray container. You press the nozzle and a very fine mist comes out. The mist dries instantly, leaving no sticky residue. No need to rub anything in: you totally forget you have this on.

You can stick this can of sunscreen by the door to spray on your arms, neck and face on your way out each morning. There is no longer any excuse to *not* wear sunscreen every day.

My husband, who has a skin condition and needs to wear sunscreen daily, will actually wear this product without making a face. That’s worth a lot to us right there.

Secondly, this spray is very pleasant to use. There is a clean subtle scent, and you feel a lovely cooling sensation as the mist touches your skin. On hot days it feels great!

Thirdly, with this sunscreen you can actually get sun protection into the cracks and crevices normally missed, like around the ears, the back of the neck, the bald spot on top of someone’s head.

The directions do NOT encourage spraying this product on your face. This is probably because the manufacturers don’t want anyone breathing in the sunscreen or getting it into their eyes. They instead suggest spraying it on your hands and then rubbing it on your face.

I have found it works just fine if you close your eyes, hold your breath, and lean into a burst of mist you spray into the air in front of your face. This feels nice with the cooling effect, and makes a nice even layer of sunscreen over my entire face.

Putting the sunscreen on in this manner is a GREAT way to make sure you have sunscreen on every day, even if you are already wearing makeup. You can do your daily morning “face” with a moisturizing facial sunscreen, then makeup, then a spritz of this sunscreen to “set” and protect your face. You can even reapply the sunscreen throughout the day, without needing to remove and re-apply makeup!

While I have nothing but raves about this sunscreen, I wonder about the cooling sensation *after* summertime. In the dead of winter, I am not sure I’ll want a cooling mist.

But this is really a minor quibble in a dream-come-true cosmetic. I believe I will actually be able to wear sunscreen *every day* for once!

Neutrogena Fresh Cooling Body Mist Sunblock with Patented HelioplexTM Technology , SPF 45, 5 Oz

This book strikes me as a labor of love - immense and incredible detail pours forth on every fully illustrated page.

Serious yoga practitioners will glean useful insights on joint actions, breathing, and the precise inner workings of their bodies, in poses from savasana to scorpion. Excellent color drawings show where your intestines curl up to in poses like shoulderstand (they take up a lot more room in the torso than we realize), what parts of the body hold up weight in inverted poses, and even what our illustrated musculature looks like from underneath, in, for example, turtle pose (the publishers photographed yogis underneath suspended glass slabs). There is a lot of neat stuff here.

• The “Joint Action,” “Working” and “Lengthening” paragraphs detail what parts of the body are under stress or responding to gravity. The arms, legs and spine are given extra attention.

• “Obstacles and Notes” includes where one might feel restrictions, try variations or deal with bodily congestion.

• “Breathing” offers tips on how the breath might be restricted and how to align each pose to more comfortably/fully breathe.

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION -

Beginners won’t really know what to make of this book. Besides the “oh, cool!” factor, it’s difficult to figure out what beginners could do with this information. It’s not a pose book per se. It’s not causal reading. It’s a serious texbook for serious yogis.

While the top of each page provides both Sanskrit and English pose names, the text refers to the Sanskrit, forcing yoga beginners to fumble around between pages to catch what the references are.

Proper names of muscles, bones and tendons are used: if reading about adductors, flexors, rotators, erector spinae, multifidi and rhomboids that “work eccentrically” are confusing, this book might not be altogether helpful.

That said, this book is a must-have for the libraries of yoga instructors and yoga therapists. Doctors and medical professionals endorsing yoga for health/fitness will likely enjoy this reference tool.

Intermediate to advanced practitioners with a working knowledge of anatomy and Sanskrit names should find exploring Yoga Anatomy an - ahem - *illuminating* experience.

Yoga Anatomy

This enjoyable yogic chick-lit novel has three parts - the Pre-India, India and Post-India sections. The best part, and the bulk of the story, lies in protagonist’s India travels…in all their poverty-stricken, rotten-corpse-floating-in-the-Ganges glory.

Amanda, a part-time yoga instructor/part time guidebook author, is sent by her dragon-lady publisher to India in search of enlightenment. She ultimately finds the problem with packaging enlightenment into a “Dummies” book is that spiritual paths don’t run on deadlines.

Amanda jumps both feet first into India, fortunately befriended by an ex-pat, barefoot Sadhu (renunciate spiritual seeker). They travel across the Sub-Continent together, sleeping under mosquito netting on questionable mattresses, poling up the filthy Ganges and watching cows eat garbage in the streets. There’s an odd mix of the holy and the grotesque. The author’s voice seems genuine; she transports us with her to an honest view of India.

Amanda’s comic-desperate journey takes her from one promising enlightenment guru to the next. Each spiritual master takes a different tack on “The TRUTH”…hard core yoga, loss of individuality (who is the *you* who is asking about your truth?), strict ashram work schedules (her job is shoveling cow dung) and even ashrams with no leader (where the main activity, at least for Amanda, is sleeping in). Amanda finally backpacks in to an ascetic in a mountain cave who might actually possess the truth…and is suddenly, painfully sent home.

I found the India segment fascinating - I could have traveled with Amanda and Devi Das stumbling for enlightenment for years. Following her back to the states was a lot less fun.

The denouement was a bit of a let-down after all the colorful traveling and exotic misadventures. Back home, I sensed Amanda missed the sacred chaos and strange purity of her quest. I missed it too.

Amanda DID find what she was looking for, in a sense, and so did her publisher. And it’s really all we can hope for ourselves.

Overall, this was a fun read with some, ahem - enlightening moments, and a sort of “lite” version of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Recommended for chick lit fanciers who don’t mind a little meat in their beach reading.

Enlightenment for Idiots: A Novel

I am not sure if having fabric automatically light up in response to environmental changes will help me with my battle against Seasonal Affective Disorder. In the interest of science and my own well-being, I’m willing to try it.

An innovative European company developed a technique, which, according to Wired Magazine, features “light display[s] of floral designs whose patterns and movement are animated by changes in barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed“. Sounds like a study in Chaos/Complexity iteration for the home environment!

Heading to the company’s own website, I thought of those glowing stars I used to stick on my bedroom ceiling. The lighted swirls look like photo-reactive phosphorus cells simply embedded in textiles, but what do I know? Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl of Loop.pH present their gracefully looped techniques as new art forms; you can see their admittedly lovely designs in person at Amsterdam’s agressively innovative, think-tankoid Droog Design Gallery.

Loop.pH’s stated aim is, “to provide a more intuitive understanding of our natural environment, from day-night cycles to power consumption.”

Can this help sufferers of SAD? Maybe. They can arrange for blankets, pillows and curtains to emit gradually stronger rays of blue light, like a unique sort of dawn-simulator. The bedding is created with SAD-sufferers in mind, concludes CNN.com in their interview with London co-developer Rachel Wingfield.

Loop.pH’s “Light Sleeper” is very pretty, albeit surprisingly icy in tone. I suspect I’d wake wondering why the heck I slept in an ice cave, but it would probably help combat the effects of SAD, after all.

Steps towards a cleaner, safer, flu-free workplace:

Have you thought about how many people have touched that lightswitch, doorknob, keyboard and pen? How many folks have put their face up to the phone receiver? I’m not trying to scare you, but since viri and bacteria are commonly passed through touching common items (or by having someone cough on them), it’s way too easy for germs to gain the upper hand in an office environment.

The Canadian Health Website writes: “Viruses can live for up to 48 hours on the surfaces of toys, coffee makers, doorknobs, computer keyboards, and other hard surfaces. It can take up to a week for flu symptoms to appear, and in that time you can infect others. To reduce the risk of spreading the virus, it’s a good practice to wash your hands often with hot water and soap.”

I like to also carry an antibacterial hand gel in my purse, and use this frequently during the day - especially after shaking hands (don’t do this in their presence!). Lysol is nice to keep in your desk drawer for morning and post-lunch spray downs (someone might have used your phone, pen or computer while you were out).

Try to (quietly) keep a few feet of distance between you and your co-workers. Wash your hands after personal contact or using common items; use your own coffee mug and utensils. Use your own pen. Try not to touch your face a lot or rub your eyes - those fragile membranes are prime portals for those viruses to enter your body.

Honestly, I don’t espouse germ paranoia, but during the flu season, it only makes sense to use preventative techniques. The recent flu viruses are worse than usual, lasting several weeks, decimating employees in their workspaces. Lots of those who are sick are even still working, contaminating everything they touch, sneeze and cough on. Don’t catch it!