People are getting more aware of obesity, and a lot of people are starting their own way of healthy life style that would allow them to rationalize eating junk foods. Of course, there are plenty of people who are eating healthy and working out constantly to be healthy, but some people are exceptional. There is always that people in your life who is complaining about their weight gain, despite their “healthy ” life style.
It is indeed ironic to watch people who are complaining about their weight, when they are eating junk foods all the time after working out. Healthy diet is the way for you to be healthy. So eat your greens.
If you stay up late only once in a while, that is NOT ENOUGH and please change it as soon as possible! If you like to stay up late constantly, that is GREAT and please keep doing that as long as possible!
There are plenty of reasons to go to bed late, for most people it’s something really “important” and “urgent” they have to do. Either of these two reasons is definitely WORTH burning the midnight oil for.
This is a slippery slope, people who pull an all-nighter will get up late the next morning, then they can continue to go to bed late again.
Studies show, people who habitually stay up late gain weight really easily. In the late-night, your appetite will be better and the rate of metabolism will be affected as well. Then you can have more weight than others who eat the same amount of food and go to sleep regularly.
And you can also gain confidence through staying up the whole night. Your vision will become poorer and poorer, too poor to see your face with the poor skin condition in the mirror clearly. Of course, you will feel much better when you can’t see your pimples, dark circles, wrinkles, receding hairlines…
The most important thing is that both your focus and memory worsens, and productivity decreases. So you will forget unhappy things more easily, and you can enter the realm of true happiness.
So, for pursuing TURE happiness, please be a night owl and continue to stay up late.
“an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Horseman69 said to me today.
“ow about bananas?” I asked.
“too much work peeling them.” Lazy ass.
“but you also need to peel the apples.”
“no, you don’t.”
“fine.”
“and they get gross quickly, if you have left a banana in your bag, it will smell fantastic.”
“so does an apple.”
“no, apples rot slowly, they wouldn’t smell like someone has died in my bag after a day.”
“fine.”
photo credit: dmcdn.net
I like bananas as much as the Minions do. I always have a banana in my hand when I walk out from the cafeteria after breakfast.
Bananas can make people happy, at least they make me happier. In fact, they do possess tryptophan, and it will convert into serotonin, which is the happy-mood brain neurotransmitter.
Happiness is prominent to our health, so why not eat bananas? A banana a day can also keep the doctor away.
photo credit: media1.tenor.com
Btw, the Minions love apples as well, they call them “bapples.”
So maybe we shouldn’t be picky between apples and bananas… a bapple a day keeps the doctor away.
Everyone on my mom’s side suffers from depression. Some members on my dad’s side are alcoholics and suicidal.
Addiction is 50% genetic and 50% due to poor coping skills.
Depression is 40% genetic and 60% environmental.
Due to this, I am 90% screwed.
Mental health is something that has affected my life for years and will continue to.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and OCD.
By fourteen I was engulfed in an eating disorder that controlled and altered my life. My eating disorder was a blend of all evils, a coping skill for all my problems.
I hated my body, felt out of control in many aspects of my life, experienced great anxiety around food, and believed people would love me if I was skinny.
Starving myself fixed my problems, or at least I thought it did. I lost weight rapidly. I felt in control when I refused to eat. I got hooked in my ways.
But like for all things, the high only lasted so long… Even after losing sixty pounds, being underweight, and having every rib and bone in my spine visible, I still looked in the mirror and thought I was fat. My anxiety began to get worse, the panic attacks were hourly occurrences, and my heart began to fail due to the lack of calories and nutrients. I felt out of control once again, so I restricted even more.
It was a vicious cycle, and it continued… leaving me falling deeper into darkness, insanity, and sadness.
By the summer of that same school year, I was in the hospital. My struggles with mental health were close to taking my life.
Years have gone by now, and much has changed.
I no longer cope with anxiety and depression by restricting my food intake, I no longer weigh 80 pounds. I’m back in school, back in sports, and am much more emotionally stable.
But some things haven’t.
I still have anxiety attacks weekly, I still hate my body and worry about weight, and I am still extremely insecure and it affects how I act (making me seem full of myself when in reality I just need someone to reassure me that I’m not absolute shit). And lastly, I still feel out of control around food. I am unable to stop myself around certain types of food and it scares me. I feel like my previous ability to say no to food has disappeared, and it scares me. I feel like I have gone from starving my self to binging. It scares me a lot.
I need to find balance and balance is hard to find.
Due to statistics and my past, mental health is something I am going to have to deal with for the entirety of my life.
I don’t like this, but I can’t change this. So every day I strive to find healthy ways to cope with the way my brain thinks, the emotions I feel, and my general outlook on life because I believe, with effort and dedication, everyone has the opportunity to be happy, no matter how hard it may be.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
From the smell of fresh baked goods always circulating the house to the comfort of a warm bed, the idea of home sparks warmth and happiness, and I have been so lucky to consider my home in that way.
The white door that creeks and the roof that leaks is where I find home currently, but I have a vision of where I want to be or see myself once I have finished growing up.
Being a mix of all cultures, the Philippines in itself represents me. Living in a higaonon hut on one of the several islands, I would devour salty chicken adobo and lumpia.
Settling into my home, I would write in my journal about the culture that I experienced that day while looking out from my hut into the orange sunset reflecting off the ocean.
With beams of warm colors bouncing off the water, I would feel my late grandmother and her mother, wrapping their arms around me with their soft, delicate arms. Eventually, I will feel a sense of comfort and understanding of my surrounding culture.
Living the simple life and knowing my roots, I would sense closure and be able to flee to my new home in San Fransisco, California.
Even though I was not born there, my roots are in California and more specifically, San Francisco. Like my little Filipino grandmother, I would come from the Philippines and go to the Golden City.
My fate would bring me to the perfect two bedrooms and bathroom apartment on the seventh floor having an auburn red door. Decorated with poems written by my father, my apartment would have the smell of essential oils embedded into the walls, specifically lavender representing my mother’s spirituality.
This would be my sanctuary where tears would be shed, laughs would explode, and love would be felt.
The Mission district, where my brother was born, would give light to the art forward theme that I created in all the rooms but made sure that every area had its own distinctive flair.
Wanting to explore more about my culture and ancestors, I would travel to the plains of Africa. Settling down in Nairobi, Kenya, where the lifestyle is filled with the history of the Bantu people and the Swahili language, my home would be in a Kikuyu house with no rooms.
Compared to my other homes, I would be connected with the earth where elephants and antelopes have carried their children on their migratory voyage.
This home would give me insight to my African heritage before Europeans came into their territory, before slavery, and before segregation. Instead of learning about the hardships of my culture, I will learn about the rich tradition that the country brings.
I have always been a homebody. I find extreme comfort with the idea of my home and enjoy its atmosphere. I am excited to see where my future home may be.
Worried about the potential health damages cigarettes might do to him, my father quit smoking a couple years ago. Before his abstinence, he had been smoking for over a decade. Cigarettes were a major category of his life for all those years, but he still abandoned it steadfastly. Why? Because smoking kills.
Many are unaware of the damages that come with smoking, whereas the others are unable to stop smoking. As a hobby, people don’t see the harm; as an addiction, people find it hard to abstain from. How is cigarette-smoking such a bad thing? To begin with, smoking jeopardizes your health, the health of the people around you, and the health of the planet.
If you were a smoker, smoking cigarettes can induce lung diseases by damaging the airways and the alveoli located in your lungs. The regeneration in your lungs is slow and according to the studies of stem cells in the past few years, there is little to no effective way to regenerate lost bronchioles or alveoli in humans. Smoking damages your lungs while you have little chance to regrow.
Nicotine is a major part in the making of cigarettes. The nicotine-intake from cigarettes decreases the amount of oxygen your heart gets and elevates your heart rate. More stress is put on your heart because of smoking. That’s how smoking induces heart diseases. However, that’s not all cigarettes bring you, they also bring death.
The statistics speak volume. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), more than 1 in 10 deaths worldwide from Cardiovascular Diseases in 2000 were attributed to smoking. “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,” the CDC stated.
Photo credit: wikipedia.org
In total, diseases that can be caused by cigarette-smoking are: lung cancer, heart diseases, strokes, aortic aneurysm, oropharyngeal cancer, esophageal cancer, diabetes… There are many other symptoms triggered by smoking. However, it’s not just the smoker that’s affected by smoking, secondhand smoke kills as well.
According to the CDC, More than 41,000 people die in a year because of secondhand smoke exposure. All these people are going to be gone because there is a smoker in the office, in the hallway, or in the family. You are slowly killing your family if you smoke next to them!
Cigarette smoking also leads to environmental pollution as it releases pollutants into the atmosphere. The cigarette butts are littered everywhere—you would often see them on the ground. The leftover chemicals in cigarettes would also seep into the ground or waterways, inducing further pollutions. By the way, cigarettes can also be an environmental hazard as smokers often fail to put out cigarette thoroughly. When they dump the still lit cigarette butts on the ground, it’s a dangerous fire hazard. In a report from the Los Angles Times, on Nov. 8, 2018, a wild fire in California killed 85 people when it ripped the Butte County apart.
Photo credit: laist.com
In my eyes, smokers are reapers. They come not with a sickle, but with the smoke that chokes, with a fire that burns. If you are one of them, listen to me: the one that’s eventually get reaped is yourself.
The United States has a complex and deep rooted relationship with the rest of the world. We stood beside Europe on the march to victory in the first two world wars. But then the 60s and 70s yielded economic and political corruption centered in Latin America, casting us in a malicious light. Then the 1980s saw the fall of the Berlin wall/ Soviet Union, which the US had a large part in. We were the heroes – until the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, when we invaded places where there was no need to invade, while withdrawing from regions at crucial, inopportune points. Now, in October of 2019, we burned a bridge that had been forged with blood and brotherhood, united under a common desire for justice and peace. For decades, the Kurdish people, an ethnic group living between Syria and Turkey, helped the United States with intelligence, manpower, and resources. In turn, we drove radical insurgents from the surrounding area. But as of this week, the Kurds no longer see us as the ally we have always been. Despite strong warnings from various agencies and the pentagon, President Donald Trump ordered American troops out of a buffer zone between Turkey and Syria, which had for years stopped the Kurds from fighting with the Turks over land. By essentially opening the gate for the Turkish Army, the United States turned its back on the Kurdish people, which has resulted in a plethora of problems. Two issues that stand out greater than the rest are the fact that we betrayed a long standing and loyal ally, and that because of Turkey/Syria’s concentration on the impending conflict, large amounts of prisoners that belong to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have escaped from prisons that as of recent lack security. Many fear that an old and strong bridge has been destroyed, and that the future of the western Middle East may be drastically changed for the worst. The events that are to unfold are likely to be harrowing and unpredictable, so please read from reputable sources if you wish to learn more.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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