This is a site I just love. First of all, by going to the "home" site at The Animal Rescue Site, you can make a donation just by clicking (no money out of your pocket).  You can also choose to make a "one click" donation other causes such as:  hunger, saving the rainforest, literacy, child health, breast cancer, autism, and veterans.

There are some great gifts at this site for animal lovers. Each of the other sites has gift ideas as well. A donation to the cause is made for your purchase.

One thing I truly enjoy is the game page on the animal rescue site. If you like playing games online, why not spend a little of that game time here? The tab for the games is on the right hand site of the page, among the tabs. Choices of games include: bouncing balls, solitaire, gem swap and 24 others. You're sure to find one you'll enjoy. Just for playing, a donation of up to 10 cents per minute will be made.

I hope you will try the games and the shopping, plus make donations daily for the other causes. Donating just doesn't get easier and more pain-free than this!

An Easy Complete Health Regimen from Dr. Mercola

By Dr. Mercola

One of my mentors, Jack La Lanne, who died January 23, 2011 at the age of 96, once said, "Exercise is your king, and nutrition is your queen. Together they create your fitness kingdom."

I believe there is a lot of truth to that statement.

Exercise is the spark, and nutrition is fuel for your metabolism. You can exercise until you are blue in the face, but until you master what you eat, you will never reach your true fitness potential.

Eating Higher Quality Foods is Not Enough

On the surface it seems that not eating junk food and eating only healthy, living, unprocessed foods would do the trick. But in order to fuel your fat burning engine, you need to take it a step further. You need to eat smaller meals more frequently.

Eventually, you'll want to eat 5-6 small meals per day, with protein and carbs combined in each meal, and about 50 percent or more of your calories should come from healthy fats like avocados, coconut oil, butter, eggs and animal fat that is not heated at high temperatures and is organically- and humanely-raised. In order to get the most results from your fitness routine you must:

Learn about the timing of your meals in reference to your wake-up and bed time, and your workout time.

Learn about your macro-nutrient totals. That's just a fancy word for the optimal percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats in each of your meals.
Use good sources of acceptable proteins and carbohydrates.
Determine your nutritional type, which will indicate the ideal ratio of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that your body needs for optimal performance.

Beneficial sources of protein include:

Organic chicken (dark meat for protein types)
Fish (as long as it is free of heavy metals and other contaminants.)
Organic free-range eggs
Lean, grass-fed red meat
Whey protein
Nuts and seeds

Beneficial sources of carbohydrates (fibrous veggie type) include:

Any vegetable (the more colorful the better)
Dark green, leafy vegetables such as spinach
Apples
Grapefruit

Good sources of starchy carbohydrates are:

Brown or wild rice
Yams/ sweet potatoes
Bananas

A Typical Workout Plan

An effective, time efficient workout plan should include two cardio sessions per week, and two resistance (weight lifting) sessions per week.The cardio sessions are for fat burning. The resistance training sessions are for building muscle and sculpting your physique. It is important to combine a quality protein and a carb (fibrous veggie type) together in every meal, no matter whether it's a resistance training day, an interval cardio day, or a non-workout day.

In fact, there's a well kept nutritional secret in the competitive bodybuilding and fitness world. It is called carb cycling or zig-zag dieting. It works very well for building muscle and losing fat. It is a very simple concept. You simply add a small serving of starchy carbs to two or three meals throughout the day on resistance training days.

This helps your body and muscles to have more fuel on days that you are burning lots of energy with the resistance workouts.

For many, it's also comforting to know that you can eat some starchy carbs two or three days per week (on the days that you exercise intensely with weights). This can make it easier to avoid eating starchy carbs like breads and pastas at other times of the week when you are more susceptible to having them stored as fat due to low physical activity. This approach seems to help give most of our clients the mindset that they can stick to this nutritional approach as a long-term solution and a lifestyle.

How to Achieve Greater Health Benefits in Less Time

Incorporating high intensity interval training such as that advocated by fitness experts Phil Campbell or Dr. Doug McGuff can further improve your fitness regimen. These types of exercises dramatically cut down on your exercise time while producing greater benefits—simply because you're using your body as it was designed to be used. When doing high-intensity anaerobic exercises, you can literally be done in about 20 minutes, compared to spending an hour running on the treadmill. And according to Dr. McGuff, if you're doing Super Slow strength training, which is another form of high intensity type training, all you need is 12 minutes a week. Yes, you read that right: 12 minutes a week!

High-intensity exercises sequentially recruit all the different types of muscle fibers in your body, starting with the smaller motor units made up of slow-twitch fibers—which are primarily aerobic in metabolism, have a lot of endurance, and recover quickly—to the intermediate fibers; followed by the fast-twitch fibers. The key to activating your fast-twitch muscle fibers is speed. (I've explained how to properly perform high-intensity interval exercises in great detail, so for a refresher, please see this previous article.)

Your fast-twitch fibers are largely glycolytic and store a lot of glucose. When these muscles are recruited, it creates the stimulus needed to grow muscle. At the same time, it enlarges the glucose storage reservoir in the muscle, which in turn enhances your insulin sensitivity. I've often stated that normalizing your insulin is one of the primary health benefits of exercise, and this is particularly true in the case of high-intensity exercise. Conventional aerobics does not do this as efficiently.

How to Perform Super-Slow Weight Lifting

Essentially, by aggressively working your muscle to fatigue, you're stimulating the muscular adaptation that will improve the metabolic capability of the muscle and cause it to grow. McGuff recommends using four or five basic compound movements for your exercise set. These exercises can be done using either free weights or machines. The benefit of using a quality machine is that it will allow you to focus your mind on the effort, as opposed on the movement.

Dr. McGuff recommends the following five movements:

Pull-down (or alternatively chin-up)
Chest press
Compound row (A pulling motion in the horizontal plane)
Overhead press
Leg press

Here's a summary of how to perform each exercise:

Begin by lifting the weight as slowly and gradually as you can. The first
inch should take about two seconds. Since you’re depriving yourself of
all the momentum of snatching the weight upward, it will be very
difficult to complete the full movement in less than 7-10 seconds.
(When pushing, stop about 10 to 15 degrees before your limb is fully
straightened; smoothly reverse direction)
Slowly lower the weight back down
Repeat until exhaustion
Immediately switch to the next exercise for the next target muscle group,
and repeat the first three steps

When done in this fashion, your workout will take no more than 12 or 15 minutes. While this may sound ridiculously short, once you've tried it, you'll likely realize that it's really all you can muster. This super-slow movement allows your muscle, at the microscopic level, to access the maximum number of cross-bridges between the protein filaments that produce movement in the muscle. Once you reach exhaustion, don't try to heave or jerk the weight to get one last repetition in. Instead, just keep trying to produce the movement, even if it's not 'going' anywhere, for another five seconds or so. If you're using the appropriate amount of weight or resistance, you'll be able to perform four to eight repetitions.

Dietary Influence

If you're like most people—including many athletes—you're probably eating too many carbs. Your body's need for sugar is, biologically, very small. And when you consume more than you need, your body turns it into fat. As I've stated before, you do not get fat from eating fat—you get fat from eating too many carbs (sugar).

Dr. McGuff explains:

"Your skeletal muscle – if you're lucky – can hold maybe 250 grams of glucose, and your liver holds about 70. If you take 320 grams of glucose as what your storage capacity is, you can kill that with a single trip to Starbucks. Once you go beyond that, your body is going to find some sort of way to deal with those excess carbohydrates. If your glycogen storage is full, your body has nowhere else to put it. So instead of going all the way through this metabolic pathway, it… produces body fat. That's called the novel glycogenosis.

We are in the midst of a very bizarre, evil-scientist type experiment in the Western world, because we are dumping into our bodies an amount of carbohydrate and, in particular, refined sugars, that are way above the capacity of our metabolism to handle normally."

The result of our modern diet, which is loaded with grains and sugars (especially fructose), is a large percentage of obesity, and people that are overweight. This can be turned around, however, using a wise combination-approach of a high-fat, low-carb diet and high-intensity interval training.

"Through an amplification cascade, when you're doing a high-intensity exercise, you very aggressively empty sugar out of your muscle cells. By doing that and combining over the low-carbohydrate diet, you start to heal the metabolism," Dr. McGuff explains. "You're able to access your energy source finally. That's how you can turn things around.

... The standard American diet is highly inflammatory. It produces systemic inflammation of an order that is almost beyond belief. In that state, if you do exercise of any significant stress, you're just adding inflammation on top of the inflammation, and you're actually putting yourself at a bit of a risk. I advise people to get their diet straight and then exercise. Because I think a highly inflammatory diet, in combination with the acute systemic inflammation that occurs as a part of the exercise stimulus, can actually be a negative thing."

So please remember: you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet, and the first step toward improving your diet is to cut out as much sugar/fructose and grain-carbs as possible. (For more of Dr. McGuff's dietary insights, please listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript.)

What to Eat After Your Workouts

After a cardiovascular workout (fat loss day), wait 30-45 minutes, and then consume a high quality source of protein (whole food) and vegetable-type carbohydrate. An example would be a spinach salad and some chicken. The reason why you'll want to wait a bit after the session to eat is to ride the fat burning wave of your cardio session. However, waiting more than an hour is typically too long, and can start to slow down your metabolism because your body goes into starvation mode. After a resistance workout (muscle building day) you need a different approach. The meal after a resistance workout is the only meal that you ever want to be absorbed rapidly.

Why?

Because typically, when a meal is absorbed fast because of high glycemic or simple carbs, there is a good chance your blood sugar will rise too fast, and the carbohydrates will be stored as body fat. But after a resistance workout, you've just primed the pump with an intense workout (with weights), and you have a one hour window of opportunity to shuttle in nutrients, amino acids, glycogen, and other anabolic nutrients to help repair your damaged muscles.

If you miss this one hour window after your intense workout, the chances that your muscles will be able to repair themselves, which makes them bigger and stronger, diminish significantly.

Keep in mind that after a workout, your stomach and digestive tract do not function as efficiently. The reason is because your digestive tract is incredibly vascular and uses significant amounts of blood to do its job. The problem arises because much of your blood is in the muscles that you just finished training. So an adequate amount of blood is not available to digest food eaten after a workout. For this reason, the best post workout meal on resistance training days is whey protein and a higher glycemic (fast released, starchy) carbohydrate. You can use a banana as your carb. The potassium in the banana seems to help with recovery. The whey protein is already pre-digested so it is absorbed rapidly.

You'll want to consume your fast released post workout meal 15-30 minutes after an intense weight training session.

Start to implement these rules of proper fitness nutrition, and you'll likely start to feel your clothes fit better within a couple of weeks. Everyone has the power to change. Many people get in the best shape of their life in their 40's and 50's. You can too! A healthy fitness lifestyle is the only true fountain of youth that exists. Train hard and expect success,

Comments on Book by George W. Bush - Decision Points

Decision Points by George W. Bush

My husband and I enjoyed reading this book very much. President Bush sets forth the major decisions made during his presidency and tells how the decisions were reached. He describes what information was available, how the reliability was checked, who made recommendations, and other points about his decisions. He is very candid about which decisions could have been better, given the information which came later. As in our own lives, hindsight is always 20/20. It is our feeling that George W. Bush was an excellent president. The decisions he made and actions undertaken will best be seen in 20 years, whether they were good or not. He attempted to get a Social Security reform law passed and an immigration law passed in the last two years of his second term but the Democratic congress did not pass or support these laws. In my opinion, those laws were past due then and to date, nothing has been done on either of these important issues.

This will be an excellent reference book in the coming years, providing much insight into the reasoning of this president. Thank you President Bush for your service to our country.


View all my reviews

Comments From A Legal Alien About Our American Future

Posted at:
http://governmentgonewild.org/thetragedy?utm_source=GGW&utm_campaign=66a9b26844-Tragedy1_9_2012&utm_medium=email

by Moneva
January 9, 2012 at 5:02 pm

I am a legal alien (no, not in NY, lol), but somewhere in the middle of the US of A. I pay my taxes, federal, state and local, and I cannot vote, of course, since I choose to remain on my green card status. However, even though I do, I care for this country, “the home of the free”, as it used to be called.

Sadly, for the past 20 years of my life here, I have seen the transformation happening, and it is scary indeed. My assessment is that there are deliberate plans to ruin this country, put into action by misguided souls who think a totalitarian system, controlled entirely by government, is the panacea of optimum civil existence. How often do I hear the “What is government going to do about this?” – very dangerous and misguided question!!! We Europeans have one advantage over you born citizens: we have practiced and/or observed socialism from very close up. We can see it, smell it, recognize it at its first whiff of appearance. Here, folks don’t know it when it already sits on its throne…

If America does not come back to its senses, and recover to a life of honest government practices, with the rule “spend no more than you have”, and “leave the local ruling to the local citizens”, and “encourage each citizen to take active part in the social fabric”, and “prepare your children for a career by giving them a great education, for free (yes, for free, we do it all the time in Europe, so why can’t we do it here!??!!)… if we do not encourage and foster small and medium entrepreneurship, and if we do not keep our local social fabric intact, this country is going down to hell in a hand basket, and it won’t take more than another two decades, before the process is accomplished.

Aliens need to be given a deadline for legalizing themselves, criminal aliens need to be shipped back to where they came from, all others need to be accounted for on the basis of “One Rule for All”. Government must be handed back to the individual states, as it should be by constitution, taxes need to be paid to the state government FIRST, not to Washington, and then we can decide how much of that money we shall allot to Washington. This is the right way, and if we don’t do it, well, good night, America, you’ll be a 5th world in 20 years. (FYI, this is my new term for any civilized, industrialized and free world which managed to decline into oblivion, technically, intellectually, morally and any other way!) Read up on the history of Rome…. except you’ll have managed to get there much faster!

Keep this on your desk and read it every week until you get the message….

What she says makes sense to me!

Bothered With A Cold or Flu?

Bothered with cold or flu? Try this technique with hydrogen peroxide. I first learned of this technique from mercola.com, a terrific website done by Dr. Joseph Mercola. I thought it sounded so weird but when I got a cold, I tried it. Now, normally when I get a cold, it takes me at least two weeks to get over the worst of it and then it lingers for several more weeks. I have used this trick three times and each time, the cold was gone in days! One time, I had to re-use the trick about 3 times before the cold completely left. It's really so easy that I thought that was why it wouldn't work. I was mistaken; it certainly does work.

Briefly, using a eye-dropper, put two or three drops of peroxide in your left ear, while lying down. Let that stay in your ear for 3 to 5 minutes. Then, using a tissue, turn your head so the peroxide drains out. Then lie down again and repeat the process with your other ear. This process can be done up to 3 times per day but usually the problem clears up by using the process before going to bed and then the next morning.

Here's the article from Dr. Mercola's site:
Last November I initially posted this information, then pulled it after it was on the site for a few hours as I had reason to believe the source was flawed. I replaced the article with another related one.

However, a few people did retrieve the original article, which I have posted below my comment. I was quite surprised to receive an unsolicited email from someone who claimed it worked for her entire family. She also provides some positive experiences she has had with EFT*.

That is a strong endorsement for a totally non-toxic and incredibly inexpensive solution to a very common problem. Seems like it might be worth trying after considering the main contributing factors below.

So I have posted portions of the original document along with the email that prompted revisiting this topic.

By far it is most effective to be proactive and not get colds in the first place. It seems the major reasons why one gets them to begin with are:

Not following a proven healthy diet
Stress
Not enough sleep
Any combination of the above

So clearly the first approach is be careful and avoid food choices that will sabotage your health. If you are stressed please consider EFT, which is an amazingly effective tool to address the foundational and core reasons as to how the stress is impairing your immune system.

If, for whatever reason, you have come down with a cold my personal recommendation would be to use zinc lozenges. I have been using zinc in my practice for over 15 years, far before it was popular.

When using zinc lozenges it is important to recognize that they need to be sucked on, NOT swallowed, and smaller doses more frequently seem to work better. I usually advise patients to suck on a quarter lozenge every 30 minutes. If started early, this approach seems to work well for the clear majority of patients.

Two cautions should be heeded though; if the lozenges make one nauseous they should be stopped immediately as that is a sign of zinc toxicity. If you follow this guideline and listen to your body you will avoid the copper imbalance referenced in the study.

From what we have read, hydrogen peroxide works quite well and is supposed to be effective 80% of the time, especially if done when the symptoms first appear. While it seems contrary to what we have been taught about colds and flu we know quite a few people who have tried it with great success.

In 1928 Richard Simmons, M.D. hypothesized that colds and flu virus enter through the ear canal. His findings were dismissed by the medical community. According to Dr. Simmons, contrary to what you may think or have been taught about how you catch the flu or the cold there is only one way that you can catch the two, and that"s via the ear canal not through the eyes or nose or mouth as most have believed.

Keeping your fingers out of your ears will greatly reduce your chances of catching them, but then again these two are microscopic and can be air-born and may land on or even in your ear. Once they have entered the inner-ear (middle-ear) there they begin their breeding process, and from there they have access to every avenue throughout our body to travel to and to infect and make us sick.

In 1938 German researchers had great success using hydrogen peroxide in dealing with colds and the flu. Their data has been ignored for over 60 years.

It is important to begin treatment as soon as symptoms appear. If treatment is started promptly effectiveness seems to be in the 80% range.

We have found remarkable results in curing the flu & cold within 12 to 14 hours when administering a few drops of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) into each infected ear, (sometimes only one ear is infected) The H2O2 starts working within 2 to 3 minutes in killing the flu or cold; there will be some bubbling and in some cases mild stinging occurs.

Wait until the bubbling & stinging subside (usually 5 to 10 min) then drain onto tissue and repeat other ear. A bottle of Hydrogen Peroxide in 3% solution is available at any drug store for a couple of dollars.

Although this method is perfectly safe for infant/children to use, the loud bubbling and stinging frightens them, they"ll need someone they trust to put the hp in their ears. (don"t get h2o2 in the eyes- if you do, flush with water)

E-Mail From Subscriber to Dr. Mercola's site:

Thanks to one of your articles in your newsletter about using peroxide in the
ears for flu or colds, my family and I have had a relatively flu/cold free
winter! We have been exposed to a serious flu in our area, but have managed to
dodge it. Here are some specifics:

My 6 year old son had kept me up during one night with coughing and sneezing.
By noon the next day he had a fever. I then remembered recently reading in
your newsletter about using three drops of peroxide in each ear for 10
minutes. You should have seen his face when I told him I was going to put
peroxide in his ears! He was nervous, but soon settled down. It bubbled a lot
in both ears. I did only one treatment in each ear, and from then on, his
fever went away and his symptoms were reduced to the sniffles. That night he
slept well, as did mom. The cold did not return!

Next came myself. About a week later I felt like my head was in a "fog", a
familiar fog that is a sure sign I am going to get sick with a bad cold or
flu. I used the peroxide treatment in each ear and went to bed about an hour
early. The next morning I felt fantastic! Not a trace of illness.

Again about a week after I had felt something coming on, my husband started
feeling "ugh". I told him about the peroxide and he looked at me skeptically.
But he tried it. And it worked! He works for the school district in the bus
shop and is around the drivers (who are around all those kids passing germs
about) frequently.

At the same time my 10 year old son who is rarely sick said he didn"t feel
well. I wasn"t sure if he was saying that because he felt left out (the
peroxide treatment aroused his interest), or if he really was coming down with
something. So, I gave him a treatment, not seeing that any harm would come of
it. He had strong bubbling on one side. He soon felt better and did not become
ill.

The peroxide has been used a few other times on all of us with almost amazing
results. There was a different result in one case, which had to do with
myself. It had been a couple of weeks from my first use of the peroxide on
myself.

I came home from our local library book sale which was held in the basement. I
quickly became ill, as if allergic to something in the basement, of which this
was my first time down there. By the next morning I had a full fledged cold
and felt awful. I tried the peroxide.

Although I had to repeat the peroxide treatment about every 4 hours, the
peroxide alone relieved my symptoms! I was a bit tired, but other than that,
no sneezing, coughing, fever, etc. After about 4 hours I would feel pressure
building in my head (especially the ears) and I would begin to get quite
cranky. Then I would use the peroxide again and be much better.

The peroxide allowed me to maintain my schedule of homeschooling the boys and
doing my chores. It worked better than anything I have tried over the years
and had no side affects!

A few notes: the peroxide feels like ice when it is dropped into the ear! It
usually did not sting. The hardest thing for me to get used to was the
tickling of the bubbles!

Thank you again for the information on peroxide for flus and colds. This wife
and mom has had many peaceful nights thanks to you! Thank you also for ALL the
fantastic information that you pass along in your newsletter. If it weren"t
for you, how would we know of these things?!?

Last fall I started using EFT and am very pleased with the results and that I
have such a useful tool for others and myself. I learned of it through you.
You have made a difference in many lives.

*EFT is Emotional Freedom Technique, information found at http://eft.mercola.com/

State Policy Fellowships (Texas) Job Opportunity

I just learned about a job opportunity for recent graduates who live in Texas. I received this in an email from my state representative, Rafael Anchia.

To be eligible for the program, candidates must 1) have a graduate degree in public policy, public affairs, economics, social work, public health, law, or a related field by August 2012; 2) have a strong academic record; and 3) be eligible to work in the United States for the two-year duration of the program.

Visit www.cbpp.org/fellowship to learn more about the program, current fellows, or to apply. If you have any questions or concerns, please follow-up with Tianca Crocker at fellowship@cbpp.org or (202) 4081-1080.