#but at the time there was tax on sodas and other sugary drinks (only in cook county though

[elastica1995]

the coca-cola vending machine outside of walmart my beloved

#i’ve probably written this on my blog somewhere else before but. #onetime i wanted a cherry coca cola so so bad and also was feeling incredibly depressed #i was 15 and i have next to no money because i was fifteen but a coke only costs like a buck or two #but at the time there was tax on sodas and other sugary drinks (only in cook county though? idr why) #so it would cost more than that and i didn’t have any money #my mom and i went to walgreens but w the tax i couldn’t just buy a bottle for myself #idk why my mom didn’t buy it but there was probably a reason (like ny dad hadn’t gotten paid yet and she needed to prioritize groceries) #so i was all ready to give up hope because i was depressed and 15 #but there are like 3 vending machines outside the walmart that hadn’t been adjusted to the tax yet #and it’s the sort where you can get a can for like 2 quarters or whatever #idk what was wrong w the machine though because it gave me 14 cherry cokes and spat my money out in the change tray #and idk i was still miserable and it was hot and i still didn’t have money and it was the middle of the night so i couldn’t have caffeine #but it was exciting i was so fun #my guardian angel is in love with me. i’ve said this before but it’s true

[reallygrossstuff]

DirkHalDave - Party Tricksters

Not a request today, but a commission! A friend wanted Dirk getting tag-teamed by some snack-happy tricksters, and I aim to deliver. Let me know what you think!

Knock-knock-knock.

Dirk gritted his teeth tighter, focusing with even more intent on the project in front of him. He was in a good groove, edging into hour five of his work session, so whoever wanted his company would just have to wait their turn. If they were someone he wanted to see anyway, they’d know to message him before coming anyway.

And yet.

Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock.

The gaps between knockings were growing shorter, the intensity of the impact growing. Even if Dirk could continue to ignore it, he ran the risk of his visitor knocking his door down if they continued. With a quiet groan, he forced his knees to unbend, rising to his feet and trudging to answer the insistent knocking – and arriving a moment before the lock snapped off its frame, causing the door to swing inward and narrowly miss his nose.

“I’ve got to say, literally knocking down my door is a new brand of bullshit, man.” Dirk groused, still blinking off alarm from the forced entry.

“Haha, sorry, man!” The voice was familiar in tone, and alien in every other way. Dirk took a shocked step back as Dave floated through the door, giddiness dripping off his every move almost as much as chocolate dripped off the dipped strawberries perched in his vibrant green hair. His short cape blew in its own wind as he fidgeted in mid-air, a dangerous grin plastered to his face. “You were just taking so long, we didn’t want to run out of time for the party!”

Dirk didn’t even have time to question ‘we’ before the answer became clear, and Hal of all people traipsed in through the still-open door. “You were taking a long time, Dirk. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were something less than sugar-tastically stoked for the celebration.”

Well, at least Hal being in on this explained why he hadn’t warned Dirk about his uninvited guests, even if the rock candy microchip on his head and the garishly trickster-coloured suspenders and tie he wore invited more questions than it answered.

“Alright, who the fuck thought unburying the hell-candy from wherever we shoved it after last time was a good idea?” When that only got a light giggle from Dave and an incrementally wider smile from Hal, he tacked on, “and how does it even work on you, I didn’t give you tastebuds! Or a goddamn stomach!”

“Aw, come on, it’s not a crime to want some fun!” Dave floated closer, seemingly allergic to touching the ground as he curved himself loosely around Dirk, getting a glob of chocolate on his shirt in the process.

“And you’d be surprised what, pardon the word, miracles a juju like that can weave. Who needs tastebuds when it’s so obvious it’ll taste scrumptious?” At least Hal had the wherewithal to close the door behind him. “Of course, then we realised it’d be downright mean to exclude you from the oodles of fun we wanted to have, so we came right over.”

“Yeah! So now it’s party time! You don’t mind hosting, right bro? It’ll be soooooo much fun!” Heart-shaped shades hovered an inch from Dirk’s own glasses, not quite tinted enough to hide the wide, almost manic red eyes behind them.

Dirk wanted to say no. He wanted more than anything to say no. “Sure,” his mouth said, knowing better than to refuse a trickster. “Just don’t make a mess of the place or anything.”

“Of course not.” Hal scoffed, as if his companion hadn’t just forced open Dirk’s door. “We’ll be superbly civil, I promise. Heck, you might not even notice we’re-.”

“Party!” Dave cheered, instantly flying further into the apartment. “Hal, c’mon and help me, you know there’s no party without food!”

“Right!” Hal’s train of thought was abandoned immediately at the suggestion, the android nearly giving Dirk whiplash as he flashed past to accompany Dave. Soon the two were enthusiastically emptying their sylladexes, dumping a hellish variety of party foods across Dirk’s kitchen counter, his workstation, his coffee table, and just across the floor once everything else was covered. There were bags of chips and party-sized soda bottles, alongside massive bowls full of chocolate-covered strawberries and rich, already-melting cakes. The overall impression was that someone had googled ‘party foods’ and just bought everything they saw on the list.

“This is the opposite of civil, assholes.” Dirk stepped forwards to gather some of the food into his own sylladex, even as his impromptu guests continued piling every surface high with more. “Two people don’t need this much food, this is fucking excessive.”

“Two people might not, but three should just about finish it all.” Hal’s grin slanted, somehow becoming more sinister without losing its bright glee. “Stop being such a party-pooper, Dirk, or Dave will have to show you how to enjoy something sweet for a change.”

“Ooh, I should do that anyway!” Finally Dave stopped pouring food out onto the floor, instead collecting an eclectic mix of it and approaching Dirk. Somehow, this didn’t feel like an improvement. “You’re always so sour, man, but I bet you’ll love this! Just give it a try!”

Dirk didn’t get a chance to voice his opinion on giving any of ‘it’ a try – as soon as Dave finished his sentence, he forced one of the crisp bags open with a loud bang and shoved a heaping handful between Dirk’s parted lips.

“There you go! We’ll start easy, I know you like chips and soda! And then once you’re not so grumpy, you can try all the tasty chocolate stuff too!”

Dirk’s responding “mmmph!” was all but drowned out by the crunching of chips within his mouth. He puffed his cheeks up, ready to spit the snacks out, but the moment his lips parted again Dave was there with one of the soda bottles, squeezing it with such force that Dirk had no choice but to swallow, or risk dying from suffocation on cheap party goods.

That set the pace for how Dave treated him. Dirk never opened his mouth without being silenced by more food, never gasped for breath without having to quickly brace for another splash of sugary drink. The taste was fine, good even, but each morsel just tasted of so much that it became almost tiring to endure. Not to mention that the giddy trickster seemed to have no sense for complementary flavours, alternating sweet and savoury, rich and plain, chewy and gooey with such reckless abandon that soon everything tasted like everything just from osmosis.

Thankfully for Dirk’s tired mind, Dave’s corralling seemed to be leading him towards the couch. Each forced mouthful gave him a little shove towards it, each invasion of his personal space made him flinch backwards, until his legs hit the food-covered furniture and he collapsed onto it with a muffled ‘oof’.

Had the feeding been any less taxing, Dirk would’ve had a lot of time to think on the deteriorating state of his clothing. His shirt was riding up something fierce, but even that didn’t save it from straining over the upper half of his stuffed gut. His jeans clung tight around his waist, filling Dirk’s ears with the sound of creaking stitches even after the button popped and the zipper was forced open. His shades were, first, covered in crumbs and smears from the messy feeding, and soon after knocked off entirely by an overly expressive gesture from Dave.

As things progressed, Dirk only became less able to react. Sugary sodas and chocolate bars might have been a distraction, but when Dave moved on to unbearably ripe chocolate-coated strawberries and rich, layered cakes thick and gooey enough to risk clogging his throat, his mind was fit to shut down entirely. There just wasn’t room for anything else beside the taste – even his vision was going funny, fogging and tinting as if he was still wearing his shades.

It should’ve been a relief when Dave relented, floating back to give Dirk both space and time to process the world once again, but the taste lingered in his mouth, in his mind, dulling his response to Dave’s announcement. “Okay, that’s a good start! Um… Oh. I didn’t go too far, did I?”

Dirk just groaned, still trying to clear his throat from the rushed meal. Before he could get himself together for a proper reply, Hal took charge. “I’d say you didn’t go far enough, bro. Sure, Dirk’s enjoying himself, but is he having the gummy-funniest time possible? I don’t think so.”

“Oh, no way! Look, he’s barely smiling!” Some part of Dirk piped up that he wasn’t smiling at all, for the record, but the sentiment never made it into the air. “Can he fit more fun, though? He looks kind of full…”

“Don’t worry.” Through his stupor, and the phantom lights in his eyes, Dirk managed to be intimidated by Hal’s smirk as he approached the couch. He raised one metal hand, and all it took was a puff of a sugar cloud to turn it into a wide, heavy-duty hose end, his stripwound arm turning transparent so Dirk could see something inside. Something neon green, speckled with glittery flecks, that dripped from the hose’s end even before Hal stuffed it in Dirk’s mouth.

“I’ll make room.”

The paste was thick, cold, and almost painfully sweet. The sort of artificial sweet that made Dirk think of his old snack stashes in his last apartment in unkind terms. It seemed to fill every gap and hollow in him, bloating his stomach almost as severely as it bloated the rest of him.

Cloth tore violently. Denim shredded. Even the couch groaned worryingly as Dirk expanded. Where before he’d simply looked overly stuffed, the more of the paste Hal forced down his throat, the more he looked like this sort of feeding was a regular occurrence. His face grew heavy, chins sagging until they touched his collarbones. Whatever fight was left in his arms was snuffed out as they grew too ponderous to leave his sides, which similarly swelled outwards with new love handles. The back of the couch bent slightly as his new ass-flab forced itself against it. All that preserved his modesty was the still-growing spectacle of his belly, forcing his chunky legs to spread and hanging trembling inches off of the trash-coated floor.

Whatever tank Hal was pumping from wasn’t endless, though, as much as it felt that way in the moment. Eventually, once he was thoroughly filling the couch and in no fit state to lift a finger, the hose left his mouth, turning back into a hand just so Hal could give his wobbling cheek a teasing pat.

“I’d say that makes for a mouth-whetting first course. What about you, Dave, any morsels of wisdom to add?”

“Nope! He looks like he’s having loads of fun! Now, for the second course, I was thinking-.”

-ify!

A blinding flash of multicoloured light filled the room. Dirk blinked as quickly as he could, failing to banish even half of the strange spots from his vision. His face and breasts obscured a large portion of his vision, and he was in no fit state to analyse the rest, but something definitely seemed… different…

“Ugh, my head… yo, Hal, the hell’s all this?”

“My initial assumption is some sort of intense party, though there’s no course of action that would explain my lack of memories. Or my sudden ability to have a migraine.”

Dirk’s stomach chose that moment to gurgle loudly, the tacky candy paste upsetting it to the point he had to let out a paper-shaking belch.

The silence that rang after his belch was deafening, leaving Dirk alone with his abused stomach, until, in two voices:

“Oh, shit.”

#homestuck #really gross stuff #dirk strider #dave strider #hal strider #fatstuck #stuffing

[caffeineivore]

The Taylor Swift Concert Hijinks

This is dedicated to the lovely @mygeekycorner and @minakosaino and follows the last thing I posted. M/K and a Taylor Swift Concert. Please don’t kill me, Swifties! Rated PG/PG13. Romance/humour.

The corporate office of Ainsley-Hart Holdings, LLC is not exactly her favourite hang-out spot, ever, but Romina Catherine Ainsley-Hart, “Mina” to everyone but her parents, still breezes in as though she has nowhere better to be at half-past four on a Thursday afternoon, carrying a cup-holder from Starbucks bearing no less than four drinks in one hand, a stylish oversized Gucci handbag in buttery red leather in the other. She plops the first one down at the desk of Janet, the formidable office receptionist, with a winning smile. “Grande soy flat white?” 

“Your father is off-site until five.” Wise to Mina’s wiles, Janet accepts the drink, but looks askance at the tray. “I was under the impression that you had a prior engagement-- drinks with some of your sorority sisters this evening? Shouldn’t you be uptown by now if you want to make it on time?”

“Well, Una has the flu, and Cassie bailed on me at the last minute because she has a hot date with Miguel Rivera-- you know, the buff Pro soccer player she hooked up with the last time she went to Cabo for vacation. He looked her up because he’s in town. So no drinks for me, no ma’am, so here I am! I’m just going to go on back, but I promise not to bother anyone or break anything!”

Janet humphs as though she doesn’t quite trust Mina’s word, and Mina pouts for a moment even as she sails off towards the elevator in the back. She’d jammed the copy machine one time, all of ten years ago, and the old battle axe still held a grudge! But no matter. She had more important fish to fry, so to speak. Her father’s office is empty, as per Janet’s report, but she sets down the espresso macchiato in the middle of the desk, with a post-it note scribbled “Mina was here!” with a smiley face tacked on as an afterthought. The four drinks now down to two remaining ones, she makes her way down the hall to the last door on the right. It’s open only a sliver, bearing a plain placard with the name “Kenneth Knightley, CFO” engraved on it. The quiet sounds of keyboard tapping alerted that her target is indeed inside, though from the looks of it, has his back turned to the door as he crunched numbers in a spreadsheet on the computer. Mina raps her knuckles on the door frame for a split second before she invites herself in. 

“Hey, Kenneth! I brought you coffee.” Kenneth, never Kenny or Ken, had been working for her father since her college days, though they rarely exchanged more than the usual pleasantries. Smart, driven, serious and good-looking in the unapproachable chiseled-jaw alpha-male way, Mina had always been quite certain that he had exactly zero use for the likes of her. That she knew bits and pieces about him that he’d never exactly told her himself-- his coffee order, for example (Grande Triple Americano, one non-dairy creamer, no sugar)-- was beside the point. But there was the not-small matter of the Taylor Swift concert tickets currently burning a hole in the bottom of her handbag, which had been discreetly dropped in there at some point after the gala masquerade. Exactly in the way that her infuriating older brother, Zander, had prophesied. And if he’d been right about that, then…

Kenneth’s shoulders snap straight, and he takes a moment to turn around, but by the time that he does, he’s schooled his face into polite neutrality. “Good afternoon, Mina.”

She’d insisted on their first meeting that she would not answer to ‘Miss Ainsley-Hart’ and only her mother called her ‘Romina’, and generally when she was not behaving herself. It had still taken him a good six months before he’d started calling her ‘Mina’, and she wasn’t above feeling a thrill of gratification whenever her name was spoken in those grave, collected tones. “You busy? I can just sit here and drink my own coffee until you finish. I got a caramel frappuccino with extra whipped cream and cinnamon dolce sprinkles on top. It is delicious.”

“I will take your word for it.” He saves whatever spreadsheet he’d been working on, then closes out of it, courteously. “What brings you here today?”

“Well, I thought I’d say hi, and you know Janet almost didn’t let me back here because I think she hates me, but you’re free tomorrow night, right? For the concert? Because you are so going with me since those are your tickets and I am so thankful that you thought to give them to me but it would be wrong if you didn’t come with, seeing as to how you paid for them. So I came to set up the plans so we can go there tomorrow and have a great time and I am so going to treat you to drinks beforehand so you can be good and tipsy before dealing with legions of screaming fans, which I’m sure is completely not your scene. So, yes. Do you want to meet at my place, or yours? Five o’clock?”

“I…” Kenneth blinks, apparently caught off-guard. “You don’t have any friends who you’d want to go with you to that concert?” He doesn’t try to deny the fact that he had, indeed, bought expensive-ass Taylor Swift tickets and dropped them into her purse. But then again, she’d never known for him to be less than scrupulously honest about anything.

“That’s not the point!” Mina has a tendency to talk with her hands, and this time she has the wherewithal to set her sugary coffee concoction on his desk first before launching into her schpiel. “You do not have to give me concert tickets just to be nice! And while it’s a sweet gesture on your part, I could at least also get to enjoy your company while at this concert, you know? I insist. You’re going or I will give these tickets away to someone else. And then I would be sad, because they’re TAYLOR SWIFT TICKETS. So, where do you want to meet? We’ll have an hour before the concert begins and we can get drinks before then. My treat, of course. You do drink in moderation on social occasions, right? Oh of course you do. Glenfiddich and soda, if I remember correctly. From the last company Christmas party.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him carefully pull a Kleenex out of the box on the desk and place it, coaster-style, underneath her frappuccino cup, and curses herself for not thinking of it, but soldiers on nonetheless. “So yes. I think we can meet at my place. It’s a bit closer. And there’s a great little bar called Dazzle right by the venue which certainly has your Glenfiddich as well as a nice wine selection, since I’m pretty sure Scotch would put me out on my ass, and you don’t need me embarrassing you on top of everything else. Please don’t stand me up? I know this is probably not your idea of a fun time, but…”

Perhaps the faintest note of uncertainty makes it into her voice, because Kenneth finally cracks the tiniest of smiles, and faint though it is, it transforms his whole face. “I wouldn’t do that.” 

Well, maybe it was a good thing he didn’t smile often, because there was no point in being turned into a babbling incoherent mess just by the random side observation that his eyelashes were a few shades darker than his hair, curly and surprisingly long, and that his eyes softened from the colour of the sky before a thunderstorm to a pleasant cashmere-charcoal. Mina meets that faint smile with a blinding megawatt one of her own and picks up her half-melted frappuccino. “So, five o’clock it is. I’ll let you get back to work and see you tomorrow, then. I’m so excited!!”

**

True to his word, Kenneth does not stand her up, and the doorman of her building calls her at 4:59 on the dot to tell her that she has a visitor. Mina spritzes on perfume and gives her hair one final once-over in the mirror before opening the door for him, and really, it’s not fair. She knows, intellectually, that he’s tall and built in such a way that no stodgy numbers-crunching finance guy has any right to be, but it’s easy to forget when he’s usually hunched over a computer at the office. Here, standing in front of her in pressed gray slacks and a white button-down, he towers over her even in her sparkly Jimmy Choos. 

“Good evening, Mina. You look… nice.” If he’s a bit disconcerted by how glittery her dress is, he doesn’t say it. He does hold out her coat for her to slip into, and offer her his arm. It’s not a date, not exactly, but that doesn’t mean that Mina’s not about to make the most of it. She may or may not be vibrating with excitement, but keeps up a steady stream of conversation as they spend an hour at the bar over his Glenfiddich and her Riesling. Kenneth doesn’t talk too much about himself, seeming content to inquire, in his grave, polite way, what she’d been up to the last week. 

“Well, there was wrapping up the stuff with the fundraiser, of course. Una bought the Dior dress, and it looks beautiful on her, and Matthew is going to swallow his tongue when he sees her in it. And I saw Zander off to the airport. He was a bit distracted after the party, which bears further investigation, but he’s in Vancouver now, so it’s hard to get all up in his business while he’s so far away. I’ll still call him later, because at least it’s Canada and not like, Madagascar or something, right?” Zander had also been the one to clue her into Kenneth’s possible intentions, and that has her staring into the pale golden surface of her wine, uncomfortably aware that she’s blushing. “Anyway, there’s the tax forms for the fundraiser to get filed, but I’m pretty sure they just got slapped on your desk by my mom the morning after. In which case, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I sort of get paid to handle stuff like that.” 

“You’re paid to handle the real estate company’s finances, not this nonsense, and don’t try to pass it off as no big deal, because I did minor in econ at NYU, and non-profit is a whole new breed of pain in the ass to deal with from an accounting point of view. But thanks for handling it.” Mina plays with the slim stem of her wine glass, then glances up at him through her eyelashes. “The first time I met Dr. Miller, before the fundraiser, she cut the meeting short to Face-time her hospital in San Jose to talk to one of her patients. I sort of hung around. He’s a six-year-old boy who wants to be Captain America when he grows up, which… is a one in a hundred chance. She talked Avengers with him for ten minutes, and I’m pretty sure that’s not her type of movie. I almost cried.”

“She does important work, and so do you, for helping those like her get their funding.” 

Mina beams, and when the bartender moseys on over, cheerfully orders both of them a refill before asking for the check. “I’m so glad you think so. So many people think that only ditzy rich girls work on fundraisers, and don’t have any idea how hard it can be. Do people think that Dior exclusives commissioned for A-listers just fall out of the sky or something? Anyway, we have time for another drink before we should get going. Figure I should let you get as tipsy as possible before Tay-Tay. Which… what type of music do you like, anyway?”

She had never seen him at a loss before this very moment, but this is most certainly the most deer-in-headlights look which had possibly ever crossed Kenneth Knightley’s face in the history of ever. He takes a long swallow of the Scotch and soda that has just been set down in front of him, then clears his throat. “I’m not much of a music guy.”

“Oh, surely you listen to something? It’s okay if it’s embarrassing. Opera? Trance techno? Death metal? I won’t judge, even if nothing trumps Tay-Tay.”

“No, nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” Mina blinks, her wineglass halfway to her mouth as she stares at him with not a little confusion. “Surely you listen to something. In the shower, or on the subway. Everyone does. No one actually talks to people on the subway.”

“Umm. Usually NPR, though I follow a few podcasts as well.”

He looks so glum and embarrassed at this admission, as though not being a music guy would disappoint her on a personal level, and though her mind sort of boggles at the idea of anyone who would listen to NPR while showering, she grins at him over the surprise and gives his arm a quick squeeze, noting at random that the bicep underneath her fingertips is solid and firm as a softball. 

“Well, you’re in for a real treat, then. Tay-Tay is the GOAT. Just you wait and see.”

**

An hour and a half later finds Mina with a brand new sparkly white-and-gold Taylor Swift concert tee thrown over her equally sparkly dress, jamming and singing along with “I Knew You Were Trouble When You Walked In” next to a petite dark-haired girl with a nose-ring who, in typical concert fashion, was now her new best friend. Kenneth’s face looks much like that of someone in the waiting room of the dentist’s office right before a scheduled root canal. As there is a seven-foot-tall linebacker-sized man in a top hat and a legit Taylor Swift onesie dancing with at least equal enthusiasm to Mina and her new friend on his other side, she supposed that she couldn’t blame his discomfiture too much. 

The pop star goes on to something slower a few songs later-- All Too Well, a ballad about lost love, and the dark haired girl lets out a few hiccuping sobs at Mina’s side, so Mina wraps both arms around her and they hug it out for the duration of the song. Like magic, the melancholy mood vanishes when the next song comes on, and they’re belting along with “Shake It Off” and dancing around Kenneth in a way likely designed to give him whiplash. But for all this behaviour is undoubtedly outlandish and completely incomprehensible to him, Kenneth looks as though he could be persuaded to crack a smile if he’d only let himself relax a little more, so Mina redoubles her efforts, likely yelling out “Haters Gonna Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate” loud enough to annoy everyone around them. But it does bring a tiny smile to his mouth for a second, and she finds, to her surprise, that she’s okay with him finding amusement at her ridiculousness. That had never, ever happened before with another guy. 

“Are you having fun?!” She shouts at him over the applause and cheers as the song comes to a close. “Isn’t Taylor the best ever?!”

“It’s… catchy, I suppose. The music, that is.” It seems as though he had to think hard to find the correct word, but Mina forgives him even as she links her arm through his. 

“I’m glad you’re having fun, because we still have the backstage passes and we get to MEET HER IN PERSON! I am having the best time EVER!”

Much to his credit, Kenneth doesn’t say anything, though the sigh that he lets out says it all for him. 

**

They hit up a 24 hour diner after the concert, and this time, he insists on paying for her greasy hash browns and slightly burnt coffee, and though she knows quite well that he has likely been up for close to twenty-four hours at this point, he is a consummate gentleman and doesn’t mention that fact, and lets her excitedly run through a blow-by-blow of the concert that they’d just attended as he nurses his own coffee. 

“And she is so nice isn’t she? And so so pretty! I wish I was that tall. Legs for days. Then I wouldn’t have to jog to keep up with tall people, or they wouldn’t have to slow down their stride like you’ve been doing all night, don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Mina nibbles on a hash brown and gulps coffee adulterated with a good half-cup of sugar and cream. “Did you have some fun, though? At least a little? I hope I haven’t irritated you too much.”

“No, you didn’t irritate me, and you’re fine just as you are. You don’t need to be any taller.” It’s not exactly the most poetic or flowery of compliments, and yet Mina feels the stilted words warm her from within. Now, post-adrenaline-rush, a bit tired and content, somewhat cold from gallivanting about in a tiny dress all night and letting second-rate greasy food warm her back up, she absolutely can’t think of a better way to spend her Friday night. Undoubtedly, her usual crew is out at some place a great deal fancier, and having a blast, and yet… she takes a second hash brown and smiles up at Kenneth. 

“So, should I get you a Taylor Swift album for your next birthday? I love her new one, but the old ones are where it’s really at.” 

“You don’t have to get me anything for my birthday. But I should get you home, yeah? It’s getting late, and you’re probably cold. That coat’s still bound to be drafty with that dress, and you’ve been wearing it unbuttoned half the time.” Almost as though on impulse, he buttons it up all the way, then jerks his hands back like he hadn’t meant to take such a liberty. 

The traffic is reasonable by New York City standards when they share a cab to her place, and he walks her all the way to her door, gentleman-like. Mina turns to him with a smile, and-- is he leaning towards her just a little? 

He is, one hand held out towards her, and she launches herself at him, wrapping both arms around a broad back firm with muscle underneath his black pea-coat, but he freezes, stiff as a board, and belatedly she realizes that he probably meant to shake her hand rather than give her a hug, and she’s quite certain that the heat of her cheeks is warm enough to start a fire in the hallway. But there’s nothing to do but roll with it, and she stands on tiptoe, leaving a whisper of Tom Ford Lavish against his jaw as she air-kisses him. 

“Well, good night. And have a good weekend. I’ll see you around. Probably.” Uncomfortably aware that she’s babbling, like she has been all night long, really, she unlocks her door while managing to avoid his eyes, and all but jogs in, heels and all. She leans against the door after it’s locked back up behind her, and lets out a windy sigh as she pulls up Spotify on her phone. 

Lovelorn ballads by Taylor seemed to be in order, possibly played on repeat, the neighbours be damned.

**

Mina takes four days to talk herself into visiting the office again, and even then, makes a point to shuffle her own schedule for the day, getting up at an ungodly hour of the morning to sweet-talk a contact in Milan to donate couture evening-wear for a charity fashion show-- proceeds to benefit victims of domestic violence. That phone call, which was originally slotted in for early afternoon, freed up the rest of the morning to visit the salon after a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman-- it was never too late, after all, to get her parents the present for their upcoming anniversary, and she went with the traditional 35th anniversary gemstone of emerald for both-- finding matching platinum-and-emerald cufflinks for her dad and earrings for her mother. She has both presents wrapped and sent off to her place, and then leaves herself at the tender mercies of her stylist, Adrianna, whose surgeon-steady hands snip off the split ends of her golden hair and refreshes the layers without taking off so much as a centimeter more than necessary. In the very least, she knows, she will be facing Kenneth looking her absolute best. Not that he was the shallow type like that, but still.

“That’s a boy-related frown, and boy-related frowns cause wrinkles.” Adrianna’s voice floats, matter-of-fact, above her head. “I’m double-booked like a mother-trucker this whole week because of the ills of holiday over-indulgence which apparently I’m supposed to wave my magic wand and handle, and don’t have time to deal with wrinkles today, sweetie, so you’re either just going to have to jump him or get over him.”

“I don’t know if jumping him is in the cards, and there’s no getting over someone who never exactly-- well. It’s weird, is all.” Mina starts to pick at her nails, a bad habit from her middle school days, but a stern look reflected in the mirror stops the fidgety movement in its tracks. “Am I so obvious?”

“Sweetie, I’m pretty sure I’ve not seen a boy-related frown on your face since I did your updo and makeup for senior prom, and had to bite my tongue so I wouldn’t tell you that any boy who told people to call him ‘Ace’ with a straight-ass face is clearly on next-level rom-com antagonist levels of douchebag. But all I can do is make you look gorgeous, not that you’re not already, and wish you luck. Please tell me he at least has a normal name.”

“His name is Kenneth, and he has an MBA from Columbia, and he works for my dad, and he has absolutely no use for me whatsoever.”

“Oh, nonsense. If he found some use for you, he’d probably have lobbied for you to be on daddy dearest’s payroll, and then where would we be? Wearing some ugly blazer and god-awful follicle-destroying chignon. My suggestion is to get a stupidly large box of chocolates, of course. The damned things are already getting put up in stores in preparation for Valentine’s Day, of course. Either the boy is not interested, and then you can self-medicate with chocolate endorphins, or he is interested, and you can share the chocolates, in bed.”

The deliberately crass suggestion brings Mina out of her funk, as it is intended to do, and she laughs helplessly even as Adrianna finishes blowing out her hair, fussing with it until it gleams like sunlit silk. Mina thanks the stylist and leaves a generous tip, and then stops at a boutique bakery en route to the office. She does buy the stupidly large box of chocolates, but also a fancy box of assorted macarons in numerous pastel shades. 

**

This time, when she arrives at the desk of the formidable Janet, she doesn’t do much more than hold out the delicate cookies as a peace offering. “I’m just going to go on back.”

“Good for you. I’m too busy to chit-chat anyway. Take your cookies and be off. Close the door behind you when you have it out with him, will you?” Janet doesn’t even look up from the computer screen, the phone receiver cradled between her shoulder and jaw as she clacks away at the keyboard. Mina looks at the solidly-built brunette with a little bit of consternation, but Janet simply waves an irritable hand in dismissal. Put squarely in her place, she makes her silent way to the elevators, and makes a beeline towards Kenneth’s office. 

It’s almost deja vu when she gets there. Door slightly ajar. The man seated at his desk, typing away at some spreadsheet. She knocks, then lets herself in. “Hi.” To her annoyance, her voice seems to have gone all breathy and low.

Kenneth still takes his time to turn around, but this time, when he does, his expression is almost soft. As with the last time, he closes the Excel spreadsheet and gives her his full attention. “Mina. What brings you here today?”

“I… cookies? That is, do you want cookies? I thought I’d come and say hi. Hopefully you’re recovered from being surrounded by Swifties. Are you busy?” Belatedly, she remembers Janet’s injunction that she close the door, and gives it a hasty shove. The slam sounds overly loud in this quiet hallway, and she blushes. “I know my dad usually schedules his meetings in the mornings, so I figured this would be a better time.”

“Yeah, he’s off-site. A late business lunch with some guy from an architectural firm. And you didn’t need to come and make sure I’m all right. I… I had a good time that evening. Really.”

“I should’ve brought you something for lunch rather than cookies, probably, but they looked so good. Not practical, though.” She, too, wasn’t the practical type. Taylor Swift and sparkly dresses as opposed to NPR and spreadsheets. What was she doing, really? Without anyone here to stop her, she sets down both cookies and candy box on his desk and picks at her cuticles. “Anyway. Glad you didn’t hate it. I should probably go. I’m sorry if I bothered you.”

For such a big man, he moves with incredible speed as he stands up and comes around the desk, blocking her way to the door before she’d registered that he’d moved. “Mina. Are you all right? You seem out of sorts, and in the… six years, seven months, two days and… an hour and a half?... that I’ve known you, you’ve never been like this.”

She blinks up at him, then crosses her arms. “Six years, seven months, two days, and three hours and fifteen minutes. I know exactly when I met you.”

“No, your dad introduced you to me before taking you out for lunch that day at eleven o’clock. It’s twelve twenty-six right now.”

Mina, if she closes her eyes, can see that day as clear as if it were yesterday, down to the navy blue tie knotted just a little too tight on the man standing across from her. He’d filled out a bit since that internship when he’d started working at the firm, and his ties were both more expensive and more expertly tied nowadays, but… She raises her chin stubbornly. “Yeah, that’s when my dad introduced us. But I actually met you before that, when I was running to make the elevator and you held it open for me, remember? I said hi, you said hi back. I remember thinking, when my dad introduced us, oh, it was nice to have a name to go with the hot guy I’d run into on the elevator. But you sort of didn’t have any use for me, and you still don’t, not really, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other’s company, right? Maybe not at another Taylor Swift concert, if that’s truly not your thing, but I…”

“You remember that?” She’s not quite sure how he got so close, but he’s standing right in front of her now, and when she looks up, she’s eye-level to his chin. She tilts her head up, and the expression in his face is something she’s never seen before, and it gives her enough courage to finish.

“I remember a lot of things about you, Kenneth! You just don’t know, because you don’t pay much attention to me, which I guess we don’t have too much in common, not really, but just because we don’t talk that much doesn’t mean that I don’t know, just like you must have known how much I wanted to go to that concert, and being there with you was the best time I’ve had in forever, though you can’t tell Una that, because she’ll be sad and look like a kitten left out in the rain, and I was just trying to work up the nerve to see if you wanted to spend some more time together and…”

She’s cut off mid-sentence by a pair of strong arms, bare to the elbows with the sleeves rolled up, hauling her up just a little off her feet and pulling her close. She has one breathless moment to register that he smells really, really good before she’s being kissed, and there’s nothing placid about it at all as one hand fists in the glossy hair that Adrianna had just so painstakingly blown out and the other lands at the small of her back, hot and wide through the thin material of her dress. She can do nothing but clutch at his wide shoulders and hang on for dear life, but a moment later, she gives as good as she gets, lips parting under his and soothing the tiny nip that she inflicts on his lower lip with a flick of her tongue. A moan breaks the silence of the office, and she belatedly realizes that it escaped from her lips as his mouth shifts to the sensitive skin of her jaw, giving both of them the chance to catch their breaths. 

Mina slides her fingers through the silky hair at the nape of his neck and leans her head against the crook of his shoulder, where it seems to fit perfectly. “Don’t you dare start to regret kissing me.” The words come out forcefully, but with a bit of a tremble nonetheless which she tries to hide by muffling it against his neck. He’d have lipstick on his collar, but it couldn’t be helped. 

A faint, slightly breathless chuckle escapes him, rumbling through his chest underneath her ear. “No. I regret not kissing you that night, though.” That statement is delivered in a shockingly frank, matter-of-fact way even as he tilts her face back up. Her fingers, of their own volition, link together at the back of his neck, and she’s sure that her smile is both goofy and excessive. It was quite likely that she would not be eating that box of chocolate in its entirety in boy-inflicted angst, after all. 

“Well, I can invite you to dinner tonight, and we can make up for lost time afterwards. Unless you’re busy. If you’re busy, we can resche--”

His mouth stamps over hers, cutting her off mid-sentence, but the kiss is sweet and gentle this time, and she’s sighing with the romance of it all by the time he pulls back. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Okay.”

The giddy thrill of it is not unlike something that would be touched upon in a Taylor Swift song, she decides, but she keeps that thought to herself for the moment. Maybe in another six years, seven months, two days and however many hours, she’d bring that up again. Surely by then, she could teach him to enjoy the finer things in life, such as jamming to pop music in the shower. 

#m/k #senshi/shitennou #sailor moon #fanfiction #fanfic #mygeekycorner #minakosaino

[arbitrarypoetry]

We’re All Adults Here

“…So then I said, ‘Oh, grow up, will you?’”

           Everyone laughed, and Adam did too, a second too late and maybe a touch too loud. He was standing just on the edge of the cluster of people in his living room, only half-able to hear the story the woman in the middle was telling. There was much more noise in the room than he was used to. On top of that, he was distracted. He kept glancing around his apartment, afraid he would find that he’d forgotten something that would give him away—but everything seemed to be in order.

           The coffee table, pushed to one side to make more room for the guests, was covered in tasteful magazines about things like wristwatches and boats, which he had quickly flipped through earlier that day to make sure they looked read. The walls held framed black-and-white photography and an ugly abstract painting that made him feel slightly queasy to look at, but that he thought seemed like what his mother might call a “conversation piece.” The floor was vacuumed. The shelves were neat. No sign of dirty laundry, stuffed animals, or comic books.

           You’re safe, he told himself. Nobody knows. They all think you’re just like them.

           Adam had spent days preparing for this party, weeks. He invited everyone from work, and, except for the crazy lady on the top floor, all the people who lived in his apartment building—the book they’d given him on successful adult life said that house parties were a great way to get to know people. He went out shopping for just the right kinds of snacks, struggling to steer the shopping cart around the aisles. He memorized small-talk conversation starters. He started to put up decorations, but then took them down, afraid that they would look childish.

           He was sure that he had done everything right. So why did he still feel so uncomfortable in his own home?

           Maybe part of it was the fact that Brian Craig was here, strutting around with his big, puffed-out chest and impressive sweep of hair. He worked in the cubicle across from Adam, and maybe Adam was just being paranoid, but he had the strangest feeling that Brian had it in for him. It was little things, like the way he would loudly ask Adam what he was doing Friday night, and then smirk knowingly at whatever Adam told him. He made fun of the posters Adam had tacked to his cubicle walls for decoration, causing Adam to eventually take them all down, and he had this way of calling Adam “buddy” that made him feel foolish and small.

           Adam could see Brian across the room, looking around the apartment, taking everything in, almost as if he was searching for something wrong. They made eye contact. Brian smirked and raised his plastic cup. Adam felt a sudden fear that Brian knew, that he could see right through him, that he was just waiting for a chance to expose everything—but no. That was impossible.

Trying to shake the thought out of his mind, Adam looked away and adjusted his choking tie, feeling a bit like a kid playing dress-up. A soda. That was what he needed. He turned to head to the kitchen, and promptly collided with a woman from the office, who spilled her own drink all over his shirt.

           “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry!” she said, covering her mouth, eyes wide. She wore a dark blue, knee-length dress, and her hair was pulled back. Adam recognized her as the girl at the front desk, who always gave him a shy smile and looked away again quickly when he came in for work.

           Adam had frozen, but now he made himself laugh. “It’s okay,” he said, pulling the wet shirt away from himself with two fingers. “This stuff happens.” Some of the red liquid dripped on the carpet.

           She bit her lip, squeezing the cup in her hands. “Do you need me to… I don’t know, pay for dry cleaning?”

           “Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. We’re all adults here.” He flashed her what he hoped was a carefree smile and turned away, praying that she wouldn’t hear the lie in his voice.

           Sure, the rest of them were all adults. But he wasn’t. Not really.

           Something had gone wrong.

 ***

           “You know what the procedure entails, correct?” The doctor set down his clipboard and looked at Adam over the rims of his wire-framed glasses.

           Adam shifted in his uncomfortable seat. He knew he had learned this in school, but he was too nervous to remember any of the details. “It has something to do with my brain, right?”

           The doctor sighed and turned in his swivel chair, pulling a colorful chart down against the wall. “You are eighteen years old today,” he said, pointing to a spot near the middle of the chart. “That means that, in the legal sense, you are now an adult, and are expected to become independent and begin contributing to society. However, your brain doesn’t naturally finish maturing until you are about twenty-five.” He pointed to the bottom of the diagram. Next to the number 25 was a pink cartoon brain with eyes, a big smile, and a tiny graduation cap.  “This would put you at a disadvantage in the real world—however, we can’t simply have you wait until you feel as if you’re ready, either. So what’s the solution?”

           This much Adam could remember. “The procedure,” he said, sitting up straighter.

           “That’s right.” The doctor let go of the chart, letting it roll itself back up. “Rather than waiting and wasting valuable time, we will speed up your natural brain processes, enhancing your problem solving abilities, social skills, and so on. The procedure will also help give you the knowledge and confidence needed to begin accomplishing your new responsibilities, such as living in a place of your own, working a full-time job, and, ideally, finding a partner in the next few years or so.”

           Adam wished he could have a drink of water. His mouth was so dry. “All right,” he said. “Is that all?”

           “There is one more thing.” The doctor took off his glasses. “I am required to warn you,” he said, “that due to the altering properties of the procedure, you will not come out the same. You may feel like an entirely different person in some respects. But you will be a more confident, intelligent, and better-equipped person than you are now. Do you understand?”

           Adam swallowed. “Yes.” Wiping his sweaty palms on his jeans, he wondered if the procedure would make him braver, too, less prone to worry. He hoped so. “So when do we start?”

 ***

             Adam excused himself to his room to change his shirt, closing the door against the chattering noise of the party. After putting on a clean, dry shirt, he groaned and flopped down on the bed. “Just a few more hours,” he said, pulling a battered-looking stuffed dog out from under his pillow. Rupert had been his favorite stuffed animal growing up, and Adam had smuggled him out of his parents’ house along with his collection of comic books at the bottom of a box of clothes. He was pretty sure that a true adult wasn’t supposed to have such things, but he just couldn’t stand to have them repurposed and given away with all his other childhood belongings.

           “After everyone leaves,” he continued, “we can watch TV and eat sugary cereal and not have to deal with a single other conversation about housing prices or taxes. All right?” Rupert simply sat there, ears drooping over his scratched and dimming eyes, but Adam smiled. “Awesome. I can always count on you.”

           Remembering suddenly that he had a house-full of adults just outside his door, Adam put Rupert back on the bed and straightened his tie to head out again. How embarrassing it would be if someone had heard him!

           No. Not just embarrassing—disastrous, he told himself as he entered back into the crowd, closing the door behind him. No one could know that the procedure hadn’t worked. That he was the only one.

           He still remembered the feeling when he woke up from the procedure and realized that nothing had changed. He was supposed to have transformed, become a better, smarter, braver version of himself, someone ready for the challenges of the real world—but he was still exactly the same. His first thought was to tell them that something had gone wrong, there had been some mistake, but they were already bringing him to his new assigned apartment, giving him information about the job he would start in the morning, everything moving so, so fast, and he just… He couldn’t find the words. He didn’t know what would have happened if he had. The procedure had worked on every other person in the country; why hadn’t it worked on him? What was wrong with him?

           No, he couldn’t let anyone know. He just had to fake it. He had to keep everyone convinced that he knew exactly what he was doing.

           Stepping out into the fray again, he navigated around people as they chatted and sipped drinks, engrossed in each other’s companies. He made eye contact across the room with the woman who’d spilled her drink on him and smiled at her. She gave him a small smile back and looked away, cheeks flushing.

           Ducking into the kitchen, he helped himself to some of the cheese platter he’d set out and did his best to join a conversation some others were having about a popular dark and gritty show that all the critics agreed was the best thing on television right then. He nodded along with the discussion, hoping they wouldn’t be able to tell that he’d only seen the first episode and then had trouble sleeping for a week. He preferred the violence of cartoons, where even if someone got a hole blown straight through them, they were up and running again in the very next shot.

           After a while, the discussion about one particularly odd-ball character in the show led the conversation to the crazy old lady who lived on their top floor. “I saw her going through the trash once,” said one young man with a daringly stripy tie. “Honestly, I’m not sure why they let her stay here.”

           “I wonder… She seems pretty old. Do you think she was around before the procedure? Maybe that would explain her behavior.”

           “Nah, they implemented that at least eighty years ago. She can’t be that old.”

           “Still, they didn’t start requiring it until…”

           Adam knew the woman they were talking about. She was the first person he met when he first moved in, actually. She’d greeted him with a cheerful wave as they passed on the stairs, calling “Hello there, sonny boy!”, much louder than Adam thought adults were usually advised to speak. She had been wearing an oversized coat and two brightly patterned, clashing mismatched socks. Adam, still occupied with his anxiety about the procedure, had only given her a weak smile back, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. She kept climbing down the stairs, whistling to herself in an off-key way.

           As Adam tried to adjust to his new life, figuring out how to balance grocery shopping and laundry and work, among other things, too scared to ask any of the others living in his apartment building for help, he found himself noticing her a lot. Through his front window, he could see her out in the park, where she spent much of her time.

Once, she had been walking along the path in a usual way, then abruptly flapped her arms and chased a flock of pigeons, sending them up in a frenzied, feathered cloud. He couldn’t hear from where he stood, attempting to run the vacuum cleaner, but he thought she was laughing.

Another time, when he was struggling with his taxes, he saw her stop and pick a bunch of flowering weeds that everyone else had simply passed by; later, when he went out to get the mail, he found them sitting on the front steps in an old jam jar full of water. They got dumped into the trash the next day.

Nothing she did seemed particularly adult; at least, not compared to the people Adam met at work or on the bus. But she seemed happy. She interested Adam, and in a way, he wondered if he might have found a kindred spirit—he longed to talk to her, to tell her about the procedure, ask her what she thought. Somehow he felt that she would know what to say. But once he learned the opinion that everyone else in the apartment building seemed to have of her—that she was a crazy old nuisance, no one wanted to spend time with her—he decided that in the interest of fitting in, he should probably avoid her. That was why, even though it made him feel a little guilty, he hadn’t invited her along with everyone else in the building to his house party.

To continue this goal of fitting in, and hoping to squash down the feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach, he joined the conversation. “Did you see the time she went outside during that huge thunderstorm?” he asked, trying to sound funny, clever. “Where it was all dumping down, but she just stood there looking up into it and catching raindrops on her tongue? She looked like a soaked cat.”

One man laughed, and the others all shook their heads, frowning in resigned disapproval. “So impractical.” “Probably got sick.” “Not an efficient use of time at all.”

“People like her are the reason they started making the procedure mandatory,” said the man with the striped tie. “If people refuse to grow up, where will society be?”

Adam was just in the middle of nodding and agreeing when somebody called his name. “Adam!” He turned, still smiling agreeably, and felt his expression freeze on his face. Brian Craig stood in the kitchen doorway, practically filling it with his broad shoulders. In his hands he held a stuffed dog. Rupert. Brian raised the toy, one eyebrow cocked. “What’s this?”

Adam’s skin went cold. Don’t panic. Don’t panic! “What?” Adam said, forcing a laugh. “Where did that come from?”

“I found it in your room,” Brian said. “I was looking for the bathroom. But when I opened the door, I found this on the bed.” He raised Rupert higher, holding him by one frayed ear.

A few guests in the kitchen tittered nervously. More started gathering to see what was going on. Adam saw the woman from the reception desk peering in, questioning. Adam felt his mind reeling for excuses. “Wow. I just… That isn’t mine, obviously.” He chuckled painfully. “I mean, only a baby would still sleep with a stuffed animal, right?”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” Brian said. His mouth was tilted in the beginnings of a smirk.

“But I’m no baby,” Adam forged on, inwardly cringing at how juvenile the words sounded coming from his mouth. “I mean, I got the procedure just like everyone. He—it must have gotten mixed in with my stuff somehow when they delivered it. Crazy.”

“It was sitting on your bed, buddy.” Brian raised an eyebrow. The smirk grew more prominent.

“Yeah, see, I had been sorting through some of my stuff—you know, before everyone got here—and when I found that I was like what? Who put this kid toy in with all my, uh, jazz albums? So I took it out and I was trying to figure out what to do with it and I thought maybe I would give it away to some kid. Because, you know. It’s a kid’s toy.”

Brian turned Rupert over in his hands. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “This thing is pretty beat up.” He held Rupert in the air so everyone could get a good look. “I mean, check it out. What kid would want a junky old toy like this?” He laughed. Some of the guests looked uncomfortable. Others started laughing too, and the noise began to build in the small, cramped kitchen.

Adam’s face was hot. He couldn’t let them know. He’d worked so hard. He had to fix this. “You know what?” he said, and he snatched Rupert from Brian’s hand, fingers sinking into the worn fur. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. The only place this thing belongs is at the dump.” And then, without taking his eyes off Brian’s face, he took Rupert and tossed him down the garbage chute.

 ***

 Brian tried to continue giving him a hard time after that, but no one else seemed all that interested anymore; it was like they all wanted to pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. In the end, Brian only clapped Adam on the shoulder, painfully hard, and said “Nice move, buddy,” before ambling off to chat with his work friends in a corner, loudly discussing the stock market and laughing uproariously at jokes Adam couldn’t begin to understand. The woman from the front desk wouldn’t meet Adam’s eyes.

The rest of the party soon went back to normal, people chatting in their own little groups, laughter breaking out now and then, cracker crumbs falling and getting ground into the rug. Adam knew he should feel relieved that the disaster had been averted, and he tried to go back to mingling, being a good host, but his heart wasn’t in it. All he could think of was Rupert, all alone, plummeting through the cold metal pipes. He would land in the big communal dumpster, get smushed in with all the used tissues, apple cores, everyone else’s junk. Like he was junk.

Adam’s mom had given him Rupert when Adam was only four years old. He had taken that dog with him everywhere; ate with him, climbed trees with him, slept with him. His fur, as matted and worn as it had gotten over the years, still smelled like home.

“…Would love to, but with this economy…”

“…So I told him, look, if I…”

“…A perfect game, they just had to…”

The conversations swirled around Adam. He smiled, laughed, tried to focus, but he couldn’t seem to absorb anything that was said. His stomach hurt. His mind kept replaying the moment when he threw Rupert, the easy toss of his hand, over and over.

Stop it, he told himself. It was just a stupid stuffed animal. An adult wouldn’t be upset. An adult wouldn’t care.

Grab, toss. Grab, toss. The sick, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach hardened.

But I do.

 ***

 Adam was knee-deep in the dumpster, digging through the trash, tie loose around his neck. If people didn’t guess on their own why he had excused himself, he was sure Brian would give them some ideas, but Adam didn’t care anymore. He had to get Rupert back. He tore through the garbage. He wasn’t an adult, he wasn’t, he couldn’t keep pretending, he…

A voice from behind him. “Are you looking for this?”

Adam turned. Standing there in the alleyway was the old woman from the top floor. In her outstretched hand she held Rupert.

“Yes,” Adam said, embarrassment at being seen mingling with relief. “Yes, I am.” He half climbed, half fell out of the dumpster, then stood, a little hesitantly, and waited for her to move to give the toy back. She didn’t.

“It looked well-loved,” she said, rubbing one gnarled thumb over the dog’s head. “I wondered why someone would throw it away.” She peered up at him with quick, bright eyes behind thick glasses. A yellow scarf was tied like a headband around her white poof of hair.

“It was an accident,” Adam said. “A mistake.”

She cocked her head. “So was it a mistake or an accident?”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Oh, I think they can be very different things.”

She sat down on a set of concrete steps to the left of the dumpster. The one good thing about this location was that it was away from the road, toward the back of the building, so no one could see them. A few straggly weeds grew from the cracks in the pavement. She gestured with the dog for Adam to sit down next to her. As he did, she asked “What’s its name?”

“Rupert.” The word came out before Adam could think about it.

“And what’s your name?”

“Adam.”

“Nice to meet you, Adam. I’m Daisy.” She shook his hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “There. Now that we’ve gotten to know each other, how about you tell me what’s going on.”

Adam thought of the crowd of adults in his apartment upstairs. “It’s a long story.”

She looked at him. Bright, piercing eyes. “Tell me.”

And then, it was like the dam that Adam had been building up for months finally broke. He told her everything—about the party, about Brian, about how homesick he got, about how badly he’d messed up his first load of laundry, everything right down to the procedure and how it hadn’t worked. It came pouring out; everything he’d been keeping to himself, trying to deal with it like an adult, trying to convince everyone that he was fine, he knew exactly what he was doing. It felt good to finally tell someone. He was so tired of pretending.

Daisy listened, un-interrupting, the whole way through. Only when Adam finally ran out of steam and slumped on the steps, feeling like he’d just run a marathon, did she speak. “So you say you don’t feel like an adult,” she said.

Adam shook his head. “Not even a little.”

“Well, what is an adult supposed to feel like, then?”

Adam hesitated. This felt like a trick question. “Well… They’re confident. And smart. They understand things way better than I can, and they always know what to do, and they don’t get all worried or scared. Like me.” Adam twisted his fingers together.

“And you figure this adult thing is how everyone else feels, right?”

“Well, yeah.” Adam drew his eyebrows together and glanced at her, tugging his tie further away from his neck. “Don’t they?”

Daisy stroked Rupert thoughtfully. “What would you say,” she said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather, “if I told you that the procedure doesn’t work on anyone?”

At first the words didn’t sink in. Adam stared at her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. The procedure doesn’t work. On anyone, not just you.” She gave him a wry, crooked smile. “How does it feel to know that you’re not special?”

Adam frowned, still not understanding. It was like the information couldn’t process. “But… That can’t be right. It does work! Everyone knows that. Everyone else…”

“And how do you know what’s going in everyone else’s heads?”

“Well, they… I just…” Adam found he couldn’t answer.

Daisy chuckled, the wrinkles around her eyes growing even more pronounced. “It’s always the same,” she said. “Everyone thinks that everyone else knows what they’re doing, so they lie to fit in. Everyone’s pretending, and they all think that they’re the only one who’s faking it. Part of growing up is learning that it’s not just you.” She gave him a small whack on the arm. “There. I just gave you a head start.” With a brief, warm smile, she slid Rupert into Adam’s lap and stood up, joints popping.

Adam’s head was spinning. “Wait,” he said. “So… If what you’re saying is true… Does anyone ever figure out what they’re doing? Did you?”

She laughed, leaning back to crack the bones in her spine. “Oh, no. I don’t think anyone does completely. But it does get easier.” She picked up a plastic bag that Adam hadn’t noticed earlier. It was full of glass bottles, clear, green, and blue. “Just keep doing what needs getting done, and do it your way. Don’t worry too much about anyone else. You’ll grow, in your own time. There’s no magic pill.” She chuckled again. “That’s what it was in my day. A pill.” She turned and began walking to the front of the building, the bottles in her bag softly clinking.

Adam’s head was full with these new ideas—he still wasn’t sure yet if he believed any of it—but he still found room to be curious. “What are the bottles for?” he called after her.

“I’m going to hang them from the ceiling,” she called back, not bothering to look back at him. “I like the way the light hits the glass.”

She disappeared around the corner of the building. Adam sat on the steps, holding Rupert, turning things over in his mind. She was probably crazy, he knew. There was no reason why he should trust anything she said.

But what if she was right? What if there wasn’t anything wrong with him?

What if he wasn’t supposed to be someone different?

Adam looked down at the worn, threadbare dog in his hands. “We should probably go back up,” he said, thinking of all the people crowded in his apartment, talking about politics and house remodeling and the state of the weather. “It would be the grown-up thing to do.”

But he didn’t. Not right away. He knew he would have to at some point—he would have to fix his tie, tuck Rupert away, and step back into the adult world. But for right then, he stayed where he was, listening to the hum of the cars passing by on the street, the twittering of the birds from the telephone wire, the sounds of a world that seemed just a little less frightening than before.

#growing up #adulting #adulthood #short story #we're all adults here #i wrote this when i was eighteen #my first semester of college #so i mean i was definitely thinking a lot about this stuff #i'm sorry it's so long but i'm hoping it will help someone else out there who's just as scared of growing up as i was

[beinglibertarian]

The Red Dirt Liberty Report: Seattle Giddy About New Soda Tax

Supporters of a new soda tax in Seattle are giddy with excitement that the tax has brought in more than $10 million in only six months. City officials are looking forward to the new tax receipts for a variety of uses. The tax’s intention was to discourage people from consuming sugared drinks, because of the presumed health-related issues associated with an increased consumption of sugar.

It is truly interesting that the response to an extra influx from a tax intended to curtail drinking sodas is met with enthusiasm. If people are enthused that the tax has produced large amounts of new revenues, does that mean that they’re happy people didn’t stop drinking sodas, but rather gave reason to people to be excited about new taxes? Does it mean that the new tax’s proposed purpose wasn’t to curtail sugary beverage consumption at all?

The way new public policy often gets support is by attaching it to something people are against. In this case, everyone knows that consuming less sugar is healthier. So, by attaching a new tax to something people agree with, they have managed to gained enough support for a new tax to pass at a time when simply increasing taxes would not have enjoyed such support. While I am sure many people who campaigned for the new tax were sincerely wanting to curtail peoples’ sugary drinking habits (as unethical an idea it may be to try and force people to do something against their own informed decisions), there were likely many more people campaigning for this that were just looking for new tax revenue streams.

Now, the city of Seattle will incorporate this new revenue into various projects and efforts to supposedly better the city, and I am certain there will be much debate about how to best spend this new windfall of tax revenue. The problem is that it now becomes a fixture of the city’s budget. The city now needs these funds to continue operations that have been planned with these new tax revenues.

While some may be attempting to dictate healthy lifestyles to others and are doing so under the guise of good intentions, the fact now remains that the city, if it wants its new budget to remain intact, is in the position of needing to encourage people to drink more sugary drinks rather than curtail their usage. Otherwise, the city will be forced to remove items from the budget, and no government entity likes to do that.

Then, there is the issue of damage to businesses that create and sell sugary beverages. Seattle has been hit with a large number of government backfires that have hurt its own economy. It’s invited, through policy, many employers to leave town. This is one more invitation for makers and sellers of these beverages to pack up and go somewhere else. It’s another reason businesses should conduct their business somewhere else, leaving fewer jobs and less tax dollars all the way around, as well as reduced overall economic activity.

All of this is nearly always the case with “sin” taxes and with taxes that are intended to encourage or discourage behaviors. When we attempt to control behavior through taxes, we incentivize government to do the opposite of what was intended. Congratulations giddy people of Seattle! You just told your government that you want them to encourage you to be less healthy. You also allowed them to create new taxes on you that will be difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of. Will people drink fewer sugary beverages because they know they cost more? Probably, but now your city will be in a constant state of going into the red as people consume less sugar, and then what new tax will be next? Which industries will you want to collapse and give unfair treatment toward?

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[gordonwilliamsweb]

Another Soda Tax Bill Dies. Another Win for Big Soda.

SACRAMENTO — A rogue industry. A gun to our head. Extortion.

This story also ran on San Francisco Chronicle. It can be republished for free.

That’s how infuriated lawmakers described soft drink companies — and what they pulled off in 2018 when they scored a legislative deal that bars California’s cities and counties from imposing taxes on sugary drinks.

Yet, despite its tarnished reputation, the deep-pocketed industry continues to exert its political influence in the nation’s most populous state, spending millions of dollars on politically connected lobbyists and doling out campaign contributions to nearly every state lawmaker.

The result? Bills long opposed by Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo and other beverage companies continue to flounder. Just two weeks ago, a measure that would have undone the 2018 deal that lawmakers so vehemently protested was shelved without a hearing.

“Big Soda is a very powerful lobby,” said Eric Batch, vice president of advocacy at the American Heart Association, which has petitioned lawmakers nationwide to crack down on sugar-laden drinks that health advocates say contribute to diabetes, obesity and other costly medical conditions.

“They’ve spent a lot of money in California to stop groups like ours from passing good policy,” Batch added. “And they’ve been doing it for a long time.”

In the past four years, soft drink companies spent about $5.9 million lobbying California lawmakers and giving to their campaigns or favorite charities. A California Healthline analysis of campaign finance records from Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2020, found that the American Beverage Association, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have given to nearly every state officeholder — from Gov. Gavin Newsom to roughly five-sixths of the 120-member legislature.

The American Beverage Association declined an interview request to discuss its political giving and this year’s bill that would have upended the soda tax moratorium it helped orchestrate. Coca-Cola and Pepsi did not return requests seeking comment.

In 2018, the industry spent $8.9 million to boost a statewide ballot measure sponsored by the California Business Roundtable that would have made it more difficult for cities and counties to levy taxes — not just taxes on sugary drinks — by requiring them to be approved by two-thirds of voters instead of a simple majority. Fearful that local governments could face a higher voting threshold for taxes and fees that would fund libraries, public safety and other services, lawmakers at the time said they had no choice but to negotiate with the industry.

In a deal that several lawmakers described as “extortion” and a “Sophie’s Choice,” the legislature agreed to pass a bill banning new local taxes on sugary drinks until Jan. 1, 2031, if the industry and other supporters dropped the ballot measure. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who had dined with industry executives several weeks before, signed the bill.

The California deal was a coup for Big Soda, which doesn’t appear to have paid a political price: Legislation that would have imposed a state tax on sugary drinks died a year later, as did a bill that would have required health warning labels on sugary drinks and another that would have banned sodas in grocery store checkout aisles.

This year’s bill, which would have reinstated cities and counties’ ability to put soda taxes before voters, is all but dead.

“They’re gaming the political system,” said Assembly member Adrin Nazarian (D-North Hollywood), the author of AB 1163. Nazarian said he hopes to revive the measure before April 30, the deadline for policy committees to hear legislation for the year.

“It’s one thing for us to make a bad policy decision once,” he said. “It’s another thing to give a signal to all the industries that will then utilize this loophole against us. How many more times are we going to be doing this?”

Public health advocates point to such taxes as a way to cut consumption of soda, sports drinks, fruit juices and other sweet beverages, citing studies that show the more they cost, the less people buy them. On average, a can of soda contains 10 teaspoons of sugar, nearly the entire recommended daily amount for someone who eats 2,000 calories a day. Some energy drinks contain twice that.

Four California cities — Albany, Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco — had soda taxes in place before the 2018 legislative deal that were allowed to remain. Boulder, Colorado; Philadelphia; Seattle; and the Navajo Nation also have soda taxes, with proposals under consideration in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

The revenue stream from the taxes could help fund financially strapped public health departments depleted by the covid pandemic, health advocates say.

For example, last year San Francisco directed $1.6 million of its soda tax revenue to local programs that feed residents affected by school closures and job losses. Seattle tapped its soda tax revenue to give grocery vouchers to its hardest-hit residents.

Nazarian said he expected his attempt to undo the soda tax moratorium to be an uphill battle, but he is frustrated the bill was denied even one hearing.

Nazarian, like lawmakers before him, is butting up against a strong anti-tax environment in U.S. politics, said Tatiana Andreyeva, director of economic initiatives at the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. So, while more than 40 countries have imposed national taxes on sugary drinks — including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Portugal and South Africa — national and state efforts have stalled here.

There’s also the political might of the soda industry.

“Look at how much money they spend fighting all these bills that have been proposed,” said Andreyeva, who has studied the soda industry since 2007. “We have seen dozens and dozens of bills at the state and local level. There’s always a lot of opposition by the industry. They are well-funded, they will organize and it’s very hard.”

In California, soft drink companies spent $4.4 million in the past four years lobbying lawmakers and state officials, treating them to dinners and sporting events. They hired veteran political firms staffed by former government employees who know how the Capitol works and often already have relationships with lawmakers and their aides.

For instance, until earlier this year the American Beverage Association had Fredericka McGee on its payroll as its top California lobbyist. She had worked for five Assembly speakers. Now, McGee is chief of staff to Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, a former state legislator who in 2018 was the chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee, which oversaw the deal banning new local soda taxes.

In addition to lobbying, the industry spent just over $1.5 million on contributions to lawmakers, including big checks written to charities on their behalf.

The largest contributions flowed to the lawmakers with the most influence.

Pepsi and Coca-Cola gave a total of $25,000 to charities in the name of Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, according to the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which tracks the donations, known as “behested payments.” That’s on top of the $35,900 Rendon collected in his campaign account from the industry over the past four years.

Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins cashed $26,000 in campaign checks from Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and accepted a $5,000 donation to one of her charities from Coke’s bottling plant in her San Diego district.

In an emailed statement, Rendon described the issue of sugary drinks as complex and said he co-authored legislation in 2015 that would have imposed a tax on distributors of sugary drinks. It died in committee.

“I want us to do something to reduce the consumption of sweetened beverages,” Rendon said. “These bills have been hard to pass, but I think it’s simplistic to pin it on contributions.”

Atkins did not comment on Big Soda’s political power but said in an emailed statement she would review Nazarian’s bill “on its merits” if it comes before the Senate.

Nazarian’s bill is on hold in the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee, led by Autumn Burke (D-Inglewood). A spokesperson for Burke did not return calls and emails requesting comment.

Burke also received money from soda companies, collecting about $22,000 from Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association from 2017 through 2020.

Public health groups aren’t willing to admit defeat and are mobilizing a grassroots effort to get a hearing for Nazarian’s bill. They say California must address the disproportionate health effects of sugary drinks on Black and Latino communities, which covid-19 only exacerbated.

“If the members of the legislature were looking at data and using data as the decision-making criteria for whether we should allow a ban on local taxes to be lifted, they would have to support that,” said Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, a program of the Public Health Institute. “But they are not looking at the data. Something else is influencing them.”

Elizabeth Lucas of KHN contributed to this report.

Methodology

How California Healthline compiled data about soda companies’ political spending

Among the ways soft drink companies exert influence on the political process are contributing money to campaigns; hiring lobbyists; plying elected officials with drinks, meals and event tickets; and making charitable contributions on the behalf of lawmakers.

Using the California secretary of state’s website, California Healthline downloaded campaign contributions made by the American Beverage Association PAC, Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo — the three largest contributors from Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2020.

To track lobbying, we created a spreadsheet of expenses reported on lobbying disclosure forms, also available on the secretary of state’s website, by the American Beverage Association, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. We found details about how much the industry paid lobbying firms and which lawmakers, or members of their staff, accepted gifts.

To find how much these entities gave in charitable contributions, California Healthline pulled data on “behested payments” from the California Fair Political Practices Commission website. These are payments special interests can make to a charity or organization on behalf of a lawmaker. Sometimes, a few of these payments also show up on lobbying forms. We compared the behested payments with the lobbying reports to ensure we did not double-count money.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

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[tornadorojo5]

What if Coke was the Only Thing to Drink, and Nothing More?

Ok, I know, everyone knows that great loads of sugar are bad for your health (especially if you are a woman), but the sad truth is that we all humans have a sweet tooth. Back in the XVIII century, the British started to refined very large quantities of sugar but back then, it was still considered a luxury item. They had a name for sugar, they called it the "White Gold", as it was so precious and expensive that only the very rich could afford to eat it. 

Nowadays, the sugar industry is huge (enormous, holy cow!! really big) and while our daily intake of this sweet delight should be only about 37.5 grams for men (that would be something between 8 to 9 teaspoons. This is a little more than 150 calories) and 25 grams for women (approximately 6 teaspoons, which is a little over 100 calories), it is thought that American sugar consumption was at its peak (1990), the average citizen was consuming 111 grams a day on daily basis. Things are getting better now since today we have a national average of 94 grams/person, which is mostly attributed to soft drinks. Now, let's talk about the one that by far is the most important soft drinks manufacturer in the world. Let me present you Coca-Cola.

History of Coca-Cola

The history of Coca-Cola starts in 1886 when an American pharmacist called Dr. John Stith Pemberton started messing around with carbonated water and syrup, and he was so pleased with the results that within a year, he was selling 9 servings a day, 5 cents each.

Today, around 1.7 billions of coke servings are sold every day, that is 42.8% of the U.S Carbonated drinks market. 

It's believed that half of the U.S.A population drinks at least half a glass of soda every day of their lives. So I think the question is Is it any good for them?.

First, let's take a look what is actually in Coke. Is there really a secret ingredient that nobody can fathom except its creators?. Well, the secret formula was actually created as a marketing stunt back in 1891, but until today, Coke says that only a few people on the inside know what that is.

Coke actually labels each ingredient as a merchandise, and they numbered from 1 to 9. One of them is of course sugar, or other sweeteners, caffeine, caramel coloring, and phosphoric acid. From here, the rest of the formula is a mystery, although there might be orange, lime, vanilla, cinnamon, and even nutmeg in the syrup. To add a little more mystery, one of the ingredients is called "7X". In a book on the subject, writer Mark Pendergast mentions that he has found the secret ingredients and they were a mix of oils containing extract of orange, Lemmon, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Coriander, Neroli and some alcohol. I'll leave you an Amazon link in case you want to check out this book.

In case that you wonder if the rumor that accuses Coca-Cola of containing coke?. Well, yeah, it used to contain Coke, but in those days the coca leaf was promoted as a health benefit. All we know is that by the year 1902, it contained 1/400 of a gram of cocaine per ounce of syrup, not enough to make you high but enough to get you a little hooked. Cocaine was finally removed from Coke back in 1929 (cocaine was made illegal in the USA in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act).

Prior to that, it was the drink's selling point, with its creator, a morphine addict himself, saying that Coke was "a most wonderful invigorating of sexual organs".

Much has changed, but Coke's marketing strategy is still often related to having a lust for life, youth, spirit, and sexiness. But, let's get to the point now, the sugar.

Sugar In Coca-Cola

There are 9 grams of sugar in every 100 grams of the drink, this means that in a 12 oz. can of coke (340.19 grams) there is 1.08 oz. of sugar (30.61 grams) or 2.16 tablespoons. But of course, we all know how people like to overdose on Coke, so in a 7-Eleven Big Gulp (30 oz. of Coke), there are 2.7 oz. of sugar (76.54 grams), more than 2 times the recommended daily sugar intake for men and more than 3 times the recommended daily dose for women, and a Super Gulp (44 oz. of Coke) contains 3.96 oz. of sugar (112.26 grams), and a Double Gulp (64 oz. Coke), 5.76 oz. of sugar (163.29 grams) or 11.52 tablespoons.

You can do the math by yourself, just multiply the serving size by 0.09 (or 9%) and you get the sugar ounces that you are eating, in tablespoons, you take this last result and multiply by 2.

Since drinks got so big, New York created the "Sugary Portion Cap Rule", but that had no effect on 7-Eleven monstrous portions since it only applies to restaurants, which were prohibited from serving sugary drinks bigger than 16 ounces (23% smaller than a large Mc Donald's soda). No surprise that the sugar drinks conglomerate opposed the bill, stating that the poor income families will lose out those great deals. You could splurge and purchase 3 separated drinks.

So, if you just drink Coke and nothing else, you will be putting yourself in a lot of danger, although it might be acceptable if you are in a Zombie-Apocalypse scenario, and you are locked up in a Coke warehouse, and there is nothing but stock. As you can imagine, your teeth will start to root, since the phosphoric acid on Coke gets in touch with your teeth, therefore destroying the enamel and the sugar will soon lead to cavities. The calories you consumed would be less than the recommended 2000, if you drink 14 cans of Coke at 140 calories per can, you will get near the daily recommended caloric intake, but still, the contents will hurt you.

Remember that all that high fructose corn syrup you are consuming would start to increase fat in your liver and will put you at risk of getting a cardiovascular disease. 

What is it like to Drink Coke Every day? Let's Ask John.

Meet John Prior, a super fit 50-year-old guy from L.A that actually drank nothing but Coke, every day, for a month, that is, 10 cans (1400 cal.) a day for 30 days. He ate other things too though. After his binge, the British press said that he put on 28 pounds (12.7 Kg). So in a month, from being slim, he developed "love handles", a "pot" belly, and man boobs. He also said that his blood pressure went u from 129/77 to 145/96, his conclusion was that "I think there are a lot of  people suffering health problems like diabetes and heart disease, who aren't aware they could help themselves by just stopping sugar." He also admitted that big corporations and their lobbying arm would be hard to stop.

According to some experts at Yale University, we'd start aging rapidly, as well as putting on pounds and losing teeth. The same study says that we'd feel very hungry all the time as sweet tastes increase appetite. We might even start gnawing at the crates in the warehouse and weight gain would be definite. Studies have shown that 1/5 of America's famous obesity epidemic is from people just drinking sugary products compulsively.

Another article about Natasha Harris, a woman who drank 18 pints of Coke every day (a little less than 8.5 liters) and no water for 16 years, died at the age of 30 from a cardiac arrest. At the time of her death, this woman, mother of 8 children had "hypocalemia, or the lack of potassium in the blood, did not have any teeth and one of her 8 children was born without enamel. 

Natasha Harris from New Zeland, downed nearly 9 liters of Coke every day otherwise she'd go crazy

Research has shown that only by reducing the amount of sugar in drinks could prevent over 1 million cases of obesity.

"We have solid evidence that keeping intake of free sugars to less than 10% of the total energy  intake reduces the risk of overweight, obesity and tooth decay"

WHO's Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, 2015

I know things could change, but sugar politics is a big deal and in the end, the bottom line is more important than your health, says most critics.

The sugar industry has spent over 54 million dollars lobbying in the last 8 years and well, in the UK, politicians knew this and tried to come up with a way to reduce obesity in the country by taxing sugar higher. This hasn't come in yet, but already drinks manufacturers have begun reducing the sugar in their drinks in the UK by almost 50% because of this. Coke was one of those companies, but the 30% sugar reduction will only happen in the UK, according to CNN. Let's check out what the Euro News are saying these days.

What Happens when you Drink Coke?

In a 1-hour period of time, after drinking a standard can of Coke, this is what happens.

Start Counting

The phosphoric acid that Coca-Cola contains gets in touch with the enamel on your teeth, provoking dental erosion. This type, unlike the localized erosion that gives you cavities in a certain tooth, affects all your teeth at the same time.

In 10 Minutes

A little more than 2 tablespoons of sugar strike your system (about 80% of the recommended daily intake of sugar). You won't be able to vomit due to the overwhelming sweetness because of the large quantity of phosphoric acid that cuts the flavor. Still, almost all the sugar that you were supposed to intake in a day, is punched at once in a short period of time (sounds pretty bad, huh?)

20 Minutes

You will experience a spike in your blood sugar, followed by an insulin burst. Now your liver gets to work (like when your boss makes you work until you break) turning all the sugar at its reach into fat. It accumulates very fast.

40 Minutes

Your pupils dilate due to all the caffeine absorbed, and as your blood pressure raises, your liver dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. At this point, the adenosine receptors in your brain are blocked preventing drowsiness.

45 Minutes

Your dopamine production increases, stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. In case you have not figured it out yet, this is just how heroin works.

60 Minutes

1) The phosphoric acid binds the calcium, zinc, and magnesium in your lower intestine, generating a further boost in your metabolism. The result is an increase in the urinary excretion of calcium, zinc, and magnesium. (Now you know why Coke is especially bad for women.)

2) Now we experience the caffeine diuretic properties in all its extension. At this point, you will pee all the calcium, magnesium, and zinc previously bonded, that were supposed to go to your bones (teeth included). Sodium, electrolyte and of course water get flushed at this point too.

3) As the rave party in your body dies down, you will start to have a sugar crash. It is possible that you get irritable and/or sluggish. Since you pissed away all the water of the Coke that you just had, not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used to build strong bones and teeth or hydrating your system, you will get thirsty again, only this time, you also get hungry, since you need to replace all the valuable minerals you have just pissed away.

So you take another Coke and there we go again.

There are several health issues involving Coke, and the one that I think is the true and silent-slow killer is the progressive damage to your kidneys. So eat well, drink more water, and try not to drink Coke...so you can "Enjoy".

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#What If-Nowadays Interesting Facts #https://whatifinteresting.blogspot.com/2018/04/what-if-coke-was-

[newstfionline]

How to fix the American diet, according to the man who coined the term ‘junk food’

By Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post, December 28, 2017

The nutrition crusader credited with popularizing the phrase “junk food” looks exactly as one would expect: bespectacled, vaguely professorial--and very, very thin.

Michael Jacobson, who retired in September as executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, hasn’t eaten a hot dog or drunk a soda since the 1970s. That was when, at the behest of consumer advocate and activist Ralph Nader, the recent MIT graduate began researching the food industry and publicizing his findings about the safety of food additives and the health costs of poor nutrition.

Since then, Jacobson has helped lead the fight to ban trans fats from the food supply, push the government to standardize nutrition labels, and expose the dangers of everything from movie-theater popcorn to sulfites and artificial colorings.

In the early ‘90s, the food industry dubbed him “the great ayatollah”--because of his zealous opposition to soda, Quarter Pounders and sugary cereals.

But the foods Jacobson included in his traveling “Junk Food Hall of Shame” in 1979--full-sugar Froot Loops and Coca-Cola, Pop Rocks, fried potato chips--are now banned from schools, discouraged by the government’s Dietary Guidelines, and increasingly shunned by an ever more health-conscious public.

Jacobson sat down with The Washington Post to talk diet, nutrition and what comes next for food policy in the United States. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Let’s start with something basic that a lot of people are worried about this time of year. I want to eat healthy, but there’s so much conflicting information out there. What do you think Americans should be eating?

It’s very simple. A good diet is rich in fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, seafood, low-fat proteins like chicken, and low-fat dairy products. And it’s low in added salt and sugar, which means eating more essentially unprocessed foods.

People get the vast majority of their sugar from soda, and some from things like pastries and ice cream. Most salt comes from processed foods--companies add it to everything. So if you cook at home, you can avoid those things.

But that’s it. It’s not complicated. And if you go back and look at the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans, that’s what the guidelines preached. There’s a little more emphasis on limiting fat intake, but aside from that, the message has been pretty consistent.

If the ideal diet is so clear and obvious to public health experts, why do Americans have such a wide variety of ideas of what “good nutrition” is?

There’s certainly confusion. When I open the newspaper and I see an article, “new study shows such and such,” you know I just think--”Oh God. What’s happening now?”

There’s just a lot of information out there, and a lot of it isn’t reliable. Some studies are commissioned by industry and are designed to come out with a contrarian finding. Other times journalists--some at The Washington Post--publicize advice that isn’t supported by the science. Journalists love “man bites dog” stories, and you know anything that is contrary to conventional wisdom gets a headline. So that adds endless confusion. Among experts, there’s no question that people should cut down on sodium, but you’ve seen articles saying maybe too little sodium is dangerous.

I think the average person has to rely on sources that aren’t grinding some industry ax. If we could only get people eating that basically healthy diet, that would be a major achievement.

Does the food industry have a role to play in promoting good nutrition? And have your views on that changed? There was a time when you were Public Enemy No. 1, as far as some food companies were concerned.

Yes, we’ve loosened up on that. You know, now I talk routinely with some of the big companies and trade associations, even if we disagree with them violently on certain things. I have had to kind of modulate what I say.

In the ‘70s, I remember, I’d meet somebody from industry and I would just as soon insult them as say hello. But I realized that some of the people there are good people trying to make improvements to their products. And even if they aren’t such great people, they probably know more than I do about what’s going on in industry and government. So we can work together on some issues.

For instance, we’ve been very laudatory about companies like Mars, Pepsi, Nestle and Panera, which have gotten rid of some of the bad stuff in their foods--lowering sodium and providing more healthful alternatives. Thirty years ago, that wouldn’t have happened, on either side. They would not have come out with the healthier products, and we probably wouldn’t have applauded them even if they did.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about government, which obviously also plays a major role in what and how people eat. What do you think the federal government still needs to do? What would be on your nutrition policy wish list, so to speak?

Getting sodium levels down, certainly. And limiting sugar and soda, maybe through a soda tax. Those two things would save thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of lives every year. They’re very important.

I know that a ban on junk-food advertising to kids is not going to happen soon, but that could also make a big difference. We really need to focus on kids. Adult obesity rates are not going down, in large part, because it’s extremely hard to lose weight. They aren’t going to come down until children have lower rates of obesity, and they gradually grow up and replace the adults who are obese.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just came out with new figures that show a shocking jump in obesity rates in kids ages 2 to 5 years old. So we still have a ways to go.

Would you say Americans’ eating habits are trending in the right direction?

Oh, absolutely. Just look at a grocery store. In the 1970s, few even had whole-grain bread or canned chickpeas or yogurt. Now you have to walk through a huge product section to get to that stuff, and there’s a large selection.

When I was a teenager, soda was something we normally consumed. Now so many teenagers and young adults you know look at it and think, “It’s crap, why do I want to drink this?”

And there are other things, too. Millions of people just automatically buy whole grains or low-fat dairy products. Meat consumption, specifically beef and pork consumption, has gradually declined over the last 40 years. These things are great for health, and they have nothing to do with government.

Overall, I think we’ve had a great impact. But there is still more to do, and I look forward to that.

#Michael Jacobson #Center for Science in the Public Interest #junk food #healthy eating

[letsansh123-blog]

# Ayurveda says –

Vyayama nityo jeernaashee yavagodhuma bhojanaha | Santarpana Krutaihi Doshaihi Sthoulyam muktwa vimuchyate ||

Daily regular exercise, eating only after the previous food has got completely digested, and regular intake of Barley and wheat in diet, are sure shot ways to curb obesity.

Ayurveda adopts a comprehensive approach to treat obesity. Ayurveda explains about a a combination of Panchakarma treatment, few simple Ayurvedic medicines, home remedies, and very easy to follow lifestyle adjustments to lose weight quickly.

# Cause for build up of fat in the body are – Avyayama (lack of exercise), Divasvapna (sleeping at day time), Shleshmala Ahara Sevana – intake of foods which increase Kapha Dosha

Due to above factors the annarasa (the end product of digestion) becomes sweet by not getting properly digested and there by results in accumulation of sneha (oiliness) and fat.

#So, Ayurveda explains the pathology of obesity as –

1. Increase of Agni – digestion strength, leading to increase of appetite and food intake. 2. Hampered conversion of Medo dhatu to Asthi dhatu, leading to increased production of Medo Dhatu. 3. Imbalance / VItiation of Vata Dosha – leading to increased digestion strength 4. Increase of Kapha Dosha, which is caused by excess sweets, fried food, excess rest etc.

A person who due to excessive accumulation of muscles and fat in the body presents with sagging butts, abdomen and breasts, the muscles and fat tissue are nourished and formed normally (they are abnormally deposited) and the energy levels also are not normal (below normal) is called ati sthula or obese.

#Clinical features of obesity:

Kshudra shwasa (gasping for air), Trusha – excessive thirst, Moha – delusion, inprecisive work, Svapna Krathana – snoring Saada – exhausion. Kshut – excess hunger, Sveda – excess perspiration, Durgandha – foul body odor, Alpa pran – short breaths Alpa maithuna- less sexual strength occur due to depletion of Shukra dhatu.

#Reason for fat deposition around abdomen area:

In human beings, fat gets accumulated in abdominal region. The root for medovaha srotas – fat channels are – Vrukka (kidney) and Vapvahana (greater omentum) as per the statement of Charaka

That probably is the cause for the pendulant abdomen in sthoulya people.

Ayurveda Tips To Lose Weight Fast :

#Hydrate with warm water: 75% of over weight persons are chronically dehydrated. According to Ayurveda, warm water is a natural detoxifier. Warm water mops up impurities as it travels through over-taxed digestive system,sweeping away molecules left behind from partially digested food that could be slowing down what nature intended to be an enviably swift metabolic rate. Replacing sugary beverages like soda and fruit juices with clear warm water automatically reduces number of calories per day.

Cold drinks cause the muscles and blood vessels in gastrointestinal tract to freeze and in turn vitiate digestive fire, which leads sluggish digestion. Warm water, on the other hand, relaxes the muscles and dilates the blood vessels. Dilation of blood vessels allows the assimilation and absorption of the contents of the meal to occur more efficiently. Sipping water during meal is ideal. It helps digestion, absorption and dhatu building. The rule of thumb is drink ¼ of capacity of the stomach while eating. Drinking water before meal will dilute agni, which will hinder digestion and lead to weakness. Drinking water right after meal will increase Kapha, causing weight gain. Ideal time to drink water is right after waking up in the morning and one hour before and one hour after each meal. The quantity of water consumption varies with body type; Vata needs more water than Kapha type. Drink a cup of hot water with a teaspoon honey and 10 drops of lime juice added whenever feel hungry will be a good substitute for eating and will help to melt the fat.

#Mindful eating: A study in the British Medical Journal has discovered that people who eat quickly are three times more likely to be overweight than those who take their time. While eating zoning out, watching TV, talking, driving, and multi-tasking undermine the digestive process and counteract the effort to lose weight. Mindful eating means it is about being conscious and present while eating. When food is eaten mindfully, the brain sees, tastes, smell and feels and sends signals to the stomach to release enzymes and juices to digest the food. According to Ayurveda, you are not what you eat but what you digest. The first stage of digestion starts in the mouth with Bodhaka Kapha. The moment that any kind of food or substance comes in contact with saliva (Bodhaka Kapha), the first experience is taste. Ayurveda says that taste has direct actions on doshas, so the moment you start eating food the process of digestion begins. The digestive process is governed by agni and certain subtypes of each three doshas. Usually six or more hours are required for the digestion of a meal.

# In order to lose weight and reach optimal level of agni it is important to avoid the following: 1.Avoid overeating and/or eating heavy foods in large quantities 2. Avoid tamasic foods: Leftovers, processed, canned foods, fast food or food with additives and colorings 3. Avoid ice cold water and drinks and cold foods 4. Quit drinking alcohol and smoking 5. Avoid cruciferous vegetables, fried foods and heavy foods 6. Do not talk or laugh while eating. Do not eat on the run or while watching TV

# In order to be healthy and increase the digestive power (agni) while losing weight, the following steps should be followed: Eat according to your body constitution –

#Vata: Vata reducing herbs, diet and lifestyle, complex carbohydrates (whole grains and starchy vegetables), avoidance of refined sugar, fewer hot spices and more sweet digestives like cardamom, coriander, brahmi, jatamanshi, and ashwagandha calm the mind. Guggul helps cleanse and warm the body.

#Pitta: Pitta reducing foods, avoiding meat, fish oily, greasy, or fried foods, sugars, and desserts. Raw salads, green herbs, and chlorophyll, digestive bitters and bitter laxatives are the best foods to reduce weight and counter sugar addiction. Herbs include aloe vera gel, katuka, and turmeric.

#Kapha: Kapha reducing food, avoiding refined sugars, salt, dairy, sweet fruit, bread, pastry, meat, fish, fruit juices, cold liquids, and oils. Spice teas, vegetable juices, steamed vegetables, beans, and whole grains are good. Suggestion includes less sleep, no naps, and strong, aerobic exercise. Hot digestive herbs like black pepper, ginger, turmeric, and trikatu burn up the fat and raise the digestive fire. Bitter herbs, like katuka, triphala and guggul, reduce fat and dry water.

#Moreweightlosstips: ? Eat fresh and seasonal vegetables and fruit. ? Eat freshly cooked warm food. It will strengthens agni, digests food better, reduces excess Kapha and Vata ? Eat food, which has enough oil, and is moist enough (not fried). It tastes better, helps agni, builds dhatus, and increases strength. ? Do not eat food with wrong combination. E.g. Honey and ghee when combined in equal quantities is poisonous. Mixing sour fruits and milk curdles the milk. ? Eat only when you are hungry ? Eat three meals a day and avoid snacking ? Eat light meals for breakfast and dinner and heavy meal during lunch time, have early dinner between 6:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. ? Eat after previous food is digested ? Eat with proper frame of mind – create pleasant environment ? Eating sequence: First eat carbohydrates or sweet taste, next eat salty, sour, pungent and bitter foods. Finally eat astringent food.

#Breathing and Pranayama: Due to fast passed life style many of us do shallow breathing. Practicing diaphragmatic breathing is beneficial. By simply observing the breath, we can be aware of what is happening inside. The more we become aware of breath, the disturbance, the negativity of the mind disappears and it becomes pure and peaceful. Bhasrika is a very powerful Pranayama. It strengthens the heart and lungs, improves the digestion and calms the mind. Right Nostril breathing (surya bhedi) will also be helpful.

#Yoga: Certain gentle yoga asanas are helpful, including the Palm Tree pose, and the Triangle Pose.Also, while sitting on the floor, bend forward as far as you can, with the goal of eventually touching the head to the knees. The Fish, Camel, Cobra and Cow poses are simple, helpful postures. 10 minutes of Sun Salutations every morning is helpful. The “sun salute” is a complete Ayurvedic exercise, also known as Surya Namaskara. This series of postures simultaneously integrates the whole physiology including mind, body, and breath. It strengthens and stretches all the major muscle groups, lubricates the joints, conditions the spine, and massages the internal organs. Blood flow and circulation is increased throughout the body.

#Herbal Cure : The following herbal formula will help lose weight.

Arogyam Pure Herbs Weight Loss kit http://www.ayurvedahimachal.com/pure-herbal-products/index.php?route=product/product&path=33&product_id=55#sthash.Acr3sFc6.dpbs

?Obesity is a common problem in world. It is mainly due to improper lifestyle, wrong food choices and lack of exercise.Ayurvedic approach provides all the necessary tools to bring back health, harmony and peace in life. By adopting simple life style and healthy eating habits anyone can enjoy the life optimally without much stress or expenses. Possible diseases like diabetes, heart diseases,stroke, and cholesterol can be prevented.There will be happy and healthy people in a wealthy country!!

Regards

[paullassiterca]

What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Too Much Sugar?

Table of Contents

Why Is Excessive Sugar Bad for Your Health?

Effects of Consuming Too Much Sugar

Sugar Increases Your Risk of Disease

How to Manage or Limit Your Sugar Consumption

How to Shake Off Your Sugar Cravings

You add it to your morning cup of coffee or tea. You bake it into pastries, cakes and cookies. You even sprinkle it all over your breakfast cereal or your oatmeal for added flavor.

But that’s not all. It’s also hidden in some beloved “treats” that people consume on a daily basis, such as sodas, fruit juices, candies and ice cream. It also lurks in almost all processed foods, including breads, meats and even your favorite condiments like Worcestershire sauce and ketchup.

This additive is none other than sugar. Most people view sugary foods as tasty, satisfying and irresistible treats. But I believe there are three words that can more accurately describe sugar: toxic, addictive and deadly.

Sugar, in my opinion, is one of the most damaging substances that you can ingest — and what’s terrifying about it is that it’s very abundant in our everyday diet. This intense addiction to sugar is becoming rampant, not just among adults, but in children as well.

But how exactly does sugar work in your body, and what are the side effects of excess sugar on your health?

Why Is Excessive Sugar Bad for Your Health?

Today, an average American consumes about 17.4 teaspoons of sugar per day, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.1 While this is down by about a fourth since 1999, when Americans’ sugar consumption was at its peak,2 It is still significantly higher than the 12 teaspoons that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015-2020, has set.3

This is definitely alarming, considering the average Englishman in the 1700s consumed only 4 pounds of sugar per year4 — and that was mostly from healthful natural sources like fruits, quite unlike the processed foods you see in supermarket shelves today.

What’s even more disturbing is that people are consuming excessive sugar in the form of fructose or high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This highly processed form of sugar is cheaper to produce, yet 20 percent sweeter than regular table sugar, which is why many food and beverage manufacturers decided to use it in their products.

HFCS is found in almost all types of processed foods and drinks today. Just take a look at this infographic to see just how much fructose is hiding in some of the most common foods you eat.

>>>>> Click Here <<<<<

Embed this infographic on your website:

<img src=“https://media.mercola.com/assets/images/infographic/fructose-overload-infographic.jpg” alt=“fructose overload infographic” border=“0” style=“max-width:100%; min-width:300px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; display:block;” /><p style=“max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center;”>Discover the fructose content of common foods, beverages, sauces, and even sugar substitutes in our infographic “<a href="https://www.mercola.com/infographics/fructose-overload.htm”>Fructose Overload</a>.“ Use the embed code to share it on your website or visit our infographic page for the high-res version.</p><pre style="max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin: 20px auto 0 auto; padding:10px; border:solid 1px #999999; background: #ffffff; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap:break-word;”><code><img src=“https://media.mercola.com/assets/images/infographic/fructose-overload-infographic.jpg” alt=“fructose overload infographic” border=“0” style=“max-width:100%; min-width:300px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; display:block;”><p style=“max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center;”>Discover the fructose content of common foods, beverages, sauces, and even sugar substitutes in our infographic “<a href="https://www.mercola.com/infographics/fructose-overload.htm”>Fructose Overload</a>.“ Visit our infographic page for the high-res version.</p></code></pre>

Click on the code area and press CTRL + C (for Windows) / CMD + C (for Macintosh) to copy the code.

The bad news is that the human body is not made to consume excessive amounts of sugar, especially in the form of fructose. In fact, your body metabolizes fructose differently than sugar. As explained in the next section, it is actually a hepatotoxin and is metabolized directly into fat — factors that can cause a whole host of problems that can have far-reaching effects on your health.

Effects of Consuming Too Much Sugar

Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics in the division of endocrinology in the University of California and a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism, says that your body can safely metabolize at least 6 teaspoons of added sugar per day.

But since most Americans are consuming about three times that amount, a majority of the excess sugar becomes metabolized into body fat — leading to all the debilitating chronic metabolic diseases that many people are struggling with. Here are some of the effects that excessive sugar intake has on your health:

It overloads and damages your liver — The effects of too much sugar or fructose can be likened to the effects of alcohol.5 All the fructose you eat gets shuttled to the only organ that has the transporter for it: your liver. This severely taxes and overloads the organ, leading to potential liver damage.

It tricks your body into gaining weight and affects your insulin and leptin signaling — Fructose fools your metabolism by turning off your body’s appetite-control system. It fails to stimulate insulin, which in turn fails to suppress ghrelin, or "the hunger hormone,” which then fails to stimulate leptin or “the satiety hormone.”6 This causes you to eat more and develop insulin resistance.

It causes metabolic dysfunction — Eating too much sugar causes a barrage of symptoms known as classic metabolic syndrome.7 These include weight gain, abdominal obesity, decreased HDL and increased LDL cholesterol levels, elevated blood sugar, elevated triglycerides and high blood pressure.

It increases your uric acid levels — High uric acid levels8 are a risk factor for heart and kidney disease. In fact, the connection between fructose, metabolic syndrome and your uric acid is now so clear that your uric acid level can now be used as a marker for fructose toxicity.

Sugar Increases Your Risk of Disease

One of the most severe effects of eating too much sugar is its potential to damage your liver, leading to a condition known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).9

Yes, the same disease that you can get from excessive alcohol intake can also be caused by excessive sugar (fructose) intake. Lustig explains the three similarities between alcohol and fructose:10

Your liver metabolizes alcohol the same way as sugar — Both serve as substrates for converting dietary carbohydrate into fat. This promotes insulin resistance, fatty liver and dyslipidemia (abnormal fat levels in your blood).

Fructose undergoes the Maillard reaction with proteins — This causes superoxide free radicals to form, resulting in inflammation — a condition that can be also caused by acetaldehyde, a metabolite of ethanol.

Fructose can directly and indirectly stimulate the brain’s “hedonic pathway” — This creates habituation and dependence, the same way that ethanol does.

Additionally, research from some of America’s most respected institutions now confirms that sugar is a primary dietary factor that drives obesity and chronic disease development.

One study found that fructose is readily used by cancer cells to increase their proliferation by feeding on cancer cells, promoting cell division and speeding their growth, which allow the cancer to spread faster.11

Alzheimer’s disease is another deadly illness that can arise from too much sugar consumption. A growing body of research found a powerful connection between a high-fructose diet and your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, through the same pathway that causes Type 2 diabetes. According to some experts, Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders may be caused by the constant burning of glucose for fuel by your brain.12

Other diseases that are linked to metabolic syndrome and may potentially arise because of too much sugar consumption include:

Hypertension13

Lipid problems14

Heart disease

Polycystic ovarian syndrome15

How to Manage or Limit Your Sugar Consumption

Sugar, in its natural form, is not inherently bad, as long as it’s consumed in moderation. This means avoiding all sources of fructose, particularly processed foods and beverages like soda. According to SugarScience.org, 74 percent of processed foods contain added sugar stealthily hidden under more than 60 different names.16 Ideally, you should spend 90 percent of your food budget on whole foods, and only 10 percent or less on processed foods.

I also advise you to severely limit your consumption of refined carbohydrates (waffles, cereals, bagels and more) and grains, as they actually break down to sugar in your body, which increases your insulin levels and causes insulin resistance.

As a general recommendation, keep your total fructose consumption below 25 grams per day, including that from whole fruit. Keep in mind that although fruits are rich in nutrients and antioxidants, they also naturally contain fructose, and if consumed in high amounts may actually worsen your insulin sensitivity and raise your uric acid levels. Check out this article to see how much fructose is in the common fruits you eat.

It’s also wise to avoid artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, as they actually come with a set of health problems that are much worse than what sugar or corn syrup can bring. Here are some additional dietary tips to remember:

Increase your consumption of healthy fats, such as omega-3, saturated and monounsaturated fats — Your body needs health-promoting fats from animal and vegetable sources for optimal functioning. Some of the best sources include organic butter from raw milk, (unheated) virgin olive oil, coconut oil, raw nuts like pecans and macadamia, free-range eggs, avocado and wild Alaskan salmon.

Drink pure, clean water — Simply swapping out sweetened beverages like sodas and fruit juices for pure water can go a long way toward improving your health. The best way to gauge your water needs is to observe the color of your urine (it should be light pale yellow) and the frequency of your bathroom visits (ideally, this is around seven to eight times per day).

Add fermented foods to your meals — The beneficial bacteria in these healthful foods can support your digestion and provide detoxification support, which helps lessen the fructose burden on your liver. Some of the best choices include kimchi, natto, organic yogurt and kefir made from grass fed milk, and fermented vegetables.

How to Shake Off Your Sugar Cravings

The temptation to indulge in sugary foods will always be there, especially with the abundance of processed foods and fast foods that are available. However, most sugar cravings arise because of an emotional challenge. If this is what causes you to crave sugar, the best solution I could recommend is the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). This psychological acupuncture technique is a simple and effective strategy to help control your emotional food cravings.

The video below, which features EFT practitioner Julie Schiffman, demonstrates how to use EFT to fight food cravings.

If you feel that your emotions and/or your own self-image are pushing you to keep consuming sugar-loaded foods and other unhealthy treats, I recommend you try this useful technique. Prayer, meditation, exercise and yoga are also effective tools you can try to ward off your sugar cravings.

Health Questions Directory

from Articles http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/03/23/xdjm18-sugar-side-effects.aspx source https://niapurenaturecom.tumblr.com/post/183643810216

[frenchkisst]

Soft drink or ‘bottled poison’? Mexico finds a COVID-19 villain in big soda

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MEXICO CITY – While touring southern Chiapas state last month, Mexico’s coronavirus czar took aim at a vice he considers culpable for the country’s pandemic problems: rampant soda consumption.

Health Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell tried to connect soda consumption with COVID-19 deaths, blaming sugar for causing comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension – maladies common in Mexico, where almost three-quarters of the population is overweight, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

“Why do we need bottled poison in soft drinks?” López-Gatell asked. “Health in Mexico would be very different if we stopped being deceived by these lifestyles sold on television and heard on radio and which we see on adverts – as if this was happiness.”

As COVID-19 cases mount and the death toll soars – Mexico trails only Brazil and the USA in pandemic fatalities – López-Gatell and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have pinned Mexico’s pandemic problems on its poor nutrition habits – soda consumption chief among them.

Mexicans drink more soda per capita than any other country – about 163 liters per year. Bottlers such as Coca-Cola deliver products to the remote corners of the country – where potable water is scant and soda is often sold for less than water.

López-Gatell and López Obrador equivocate on the effectiveness of wearing face masks, but they’ve expressed fewer doubts on the negative impact of junk food and soda and its connection to COVID-19 fatalities. 

Coronavirus diet? Obesity, exercise affect severity of COVID-19

“The evidence is very clear, but there are many interests, which have led to information being covered up in other administrations,” said López-Gatell, who claimed sugary drink consumption claimed 40,000 deaths annually in Mexico. “With products that do damage, we have to discourage their consumption so that fewer people are unhealthy.”

Story continues

López-Gatell has been criticized for his handling of the pandemic. He has not tested widely for the coronavirus or conducted contact tracing as the death toll passed 60,000. 

Mexico City: Movie theaters reopen despite COVID-19

Al 21 de agosto de 2020 hay 549,734 casos confirmados y 82,953 sospechosos de #COVID19. Se han registrado 606,446 negativos, 59,610 defunciones confirmadas y 376,409 personas recuperadas. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/sBhsYCbt6x

— Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez (@HLGatell) August 22, 2020

López Obrador has peddled self-help lists as the pandemic worsens – with tips such as eating a “traditional diet” of corn, rice and beans, avoiding consumerism and finding spirituality. He’s spoken favorably of families acting as a social safety net rather than announcing robust economic relief packages.

“Dr. López-Gatell has decided to adopt a new strategy: find scapegoats,” said Malaquías López-Cervantes, public health professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It’s a pretext because the fact that sugary drinks contribute to gaining weight and obesity in Mexico is nothing new.” 

Mexico’s beverage industry shot back at López-Gatell, saying Mexicans consume less than 6% of their daily calories from sugary drinks. 

Public health proponents said the castigation of big soda is long overdue. And some states are starting to act. 

Southern Oaxaca state approved a ban this month on the sale of sodas and sugary snack foods to children. Tabasco state approved a similar measure this month, and federal lawmakers raised the possibility of a national ban on junk food sales to kids, citing COVID-19 complications.

Cans of Coca-Cola sit on an ice block to keep cool at a street vendor’s stand in Mexico City in 2014.

Oversized labels are set to appear on products containing high amounts of sugar, salt, calories or saturated fats, starting in October.

“There was already a pandemic, and we were calling attention to it and saying people are dying,” said Alejandro Calvillo, director of El Poder del Consumidor, a consumer organization and longtime critic of Mexico’s beverage industry.

The soda habit starts young in Mexico. A survey by El Poder del Consumidor from Guerrero state found 70% of children consumed soda for breakfast; another 70% of children reported drinking sodas at least three times the previous day.

“What really strikes me is seeing people at 7 a.m. already poisoning themselves by drinking Coca-Cola,” said Pedro Arriaga, a Jesuit priest in rural Chiapas.

Beverage companies are among Mexico’s biggest advertisers and political lobbies. Calvillo and other proponents of a tax on sugary drinks were among the targets of an espionage campaign, in which sophisticated spyware was surreptitiously installed on their smartphones. (The government and beverage industry denied any involvement in the espionage.) 

Mexico introduced a tax on sugary drinks and high-calorie snacks in 2014 as part of a fiscal package. The 1-peso-per-liter tax (roughly 5 cents) diminished soda consumption by 6% in 2015 and 7.5% in 2016, according to Juan Rivera Dommarco, general director of Mexico’s National Public Health Institute.

The money raised by the tax hasn’t gone toward public health as promised or paid for installing fountains in dilapidated schoolhouses, which often lack running water, according to Calvillo. 

The impact of the soda tax is disputed by the owners of Mexico’s ubiquitous mom-and-pop retailers, who said people prioritize sugary drinks before other purchases.

“Soda-drinking habits correspond to poverty and the economic needs of the country,” said Cuauhtémoc Rivera, director of the National Alliance of Small Merchants, Anpec, which represents thousands of stores.

“There’s no money to consume (a healthy) diet or eat better,” he said, and small merchants depend on soda for 25% of sales.

In Mexico City’s southern Xochimilco borough, stricken with COVID-19 cases, locals purchasing sodas spoke of risks – and the difficulty of kicking the habit.

“It’s like an addiction. Even though we know it does damage, we keep on consuming it,” Víctor Martínez Alvarado, a government employee, said after buying a 3-liter bottle of sugar-free Coca-Cola. “They say sugar-free doesn’t do damage, but I think it’s the same. It does the same damage.”

“I’m aware as a consumer that this causes damage,” David González Flores, a construction worker, said between sips of Coca-Cola. “But it’s something that I like.” 

Covid-19 and the border: Restrictions extended until at least Sept. 21

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Soft drink or ‘bottled poison’? Mexico finds COVID-19 villain in soda

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[thisdaynews]

Big Soda’s big comeback

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/big-sodas-big-comeback/

Big Soda’s big comeback

When the mayor of Philadelphia unveiled his battle plan against sugary sodas, it looked like he was riding a national wave. The year was 2016, and one city after another was trying to fight obesity by nudging their citizens away from cheap, high-calorie drinks. In a speech to the City Council unveiling his firstbudget, Mayor Jim Kenney declared his plan to pay for a host of city initiatives with a new tax on every ounce of soda.

“This was a fight we thought was worth having,” said James Engler, Kenney’s chief of staff.

For a decade, concern had been rising in the public health world that soda’s superfluous calories were fueling an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and supporters in Philadelphia and elsewhere embraced local taxes as a win-win—a way to encourage healthier choices while also generating some new money to help communities with high obesity rates. In California, Berkeley had passed a soda tax in 2014. Oakland, Boulder and Chicago would soon take up their own laws.

In Philadelphia, the soda industry poured more than $9 million into fighting the new tax, to no avail. The City Council passed the law in June 2016,and Philadelphia began collecting 1½ cents for every ounce of soda sold—boosting the price of a 12-ounce drink by 18 cents, and far more on big convenience-store cups. Soda companies, represented by the American Beverage Association, appealed the law, and the case went all the way to Pennsylvania Supreme Court—where the city won.

That might have seemed like the end. But it was only the start of a whole new fight. Starting in 2017, the beverage industry changed tactics and opened a new front at the state capital in Harrisburg, spending considerably less money—less than $2 million—on an influence campaign to get the state’s business community to put pressure on their legislators. The goal was no longer just to quash Philadelphia’s tax: It was to pass a new state law that would prohibitanycity in Pennsylvania from passing a local soda tax.

And that fight is still very much alive. One version of the bill failed in 2017, and a similar measure is before legislators this year, with the lobbying effort led by a major grocery chain allied with beverage manufacturers who spearheaded the earlier version.

“They don’t want to just stop us from doing it now,” Engler said in an interview. “They want to make sure it wouldn’t happen anywhere else, either.”

Pennsylvania has found itself the latest battleground for a national strategy by soda producers aimed at stopping local taxes on their products—not by fighting the cities directly, but by pushing pliant state legislatures to ban any such tax increases statewide. Called “preemption” laws, they’re designed to limit cities from imposing taxes of their own. Legislatures in Arizona and Michigan have already passed state laws forbidding local soda taxes. In Washington state, the industry backed a voter initiative barring local soda taxes; it passed in 2018.

Perhaps the industry’s most remarkable success has been California, a progressive state in which multiple cities passed their own soda taxes in the wake of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation law and additional cities were ramping up campaigns. There, the industry used the statewide initiative system as leverage over lawmakers:It collected enough signatures to put a measure on the state ballot that would prevent any city or locality from imposinganytax on residents, no matter what the reason, unless approved directly by two-thirds of voters.The lobby then offered to withdraw the measure from the ballot if legislators simply passed a law stopping local governments from taxing soda. Faced with a potential new law that could have crippled budgets statewide, they complied. California’s preemption law went into effect in 2018—ensuring that, until 2030, the only cities in the state with extra beverage taxes are the handful, like Berkeley, that have already adopted them.

In its nationwide push against soda taxes, the beverage industry makes two main arguments: One, the health benefits of taxing soda are overstated; and two, the taxes put an unfair burden on small businesses and shoppers. “We are definitely solidly behind preemption efforts because this is a very damaging tax to consumers, working families and small businesses,” ABA spokesman William Dermody said in an interview.

Beyond that, however, its campaign trades on a basic insight about modern American politics: Although the liberal leadership of American cities might be a hard nut for a pro-business lobby to crack, state legislators are often far more friendly to business, and they often have the power to overrule city laws. And it’s often much cheaper to lobby in capitals like Harrisburg, Sacramento and Springfield than to wage a fight in expensive cities.

A study published earlier this year found that at least 12 states have enacted preemption laws aimed at squashing local anti-obesity measures including soda taxes; four states have specifically outlawed soda taxes and three other states have considered preemption laws in the past year.

“When you have a conservative state and a progressive city within that state, it becomes challenging,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Donna Bullock, a Democrat who supports Philadelphia’s tax, “because the conservative lawmakers use preemption to control progressive cities.”

THE SODA INDUSTRY’Spreemption strategy largely has gone unnoticed on the national level, in part because state legislatures tend to draw less attention than policy fights in Washington and in big cities, and in part because beverage companies often obscure the real focus of the laws by framing them as opposition to “grocery” taxes. They also enlist grocers associations, local farm bureaus and retailers as allies to make it appear that the opposition is local, even though the campaigns draw significant funding from the national association.

Public health groups, which are often local, find themselves outgunned against an organized national strategy, and tend not to have the resources to play defense in multiple state capitals at the same time.

There are a few exceptions,including the American Heart Association, which has been actively pushing for soda taxes nationwide.But even with a national network of lobbyists, it has been outspent and outmaneuvered in state after state. “[H]aving to defend against preemption has become part of our strategy,” the AHA’s Jill Birnbaum told POLITICO. She said this approach is playing out in virtually every state where her organization is pursuing soda taxes.

Another national player is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who became the face of anti-soda policy with a failed 2012 attempt to ban large sodas in New York. His organization now goes head-to-head with the beverage lobby in state and local campaigns, pouring more than $17 million into a trio of California ballot initiative campaigns,including the Oakland soda tax fight.He also put millions toward trying to defend a tax in Cook County, Illinois, that includes much of greater Chicago (unsuccessfully) and Philadelphia’s tax (successfully, so far). His money also helped beat back a preemption ballot initiative in Oregon. In Washington state, where the industry-backed preemption initiative prevailed, Bloomberg didn’t get involved.

Dermody, the spokesman for the American Beverage Association, said in an interview that the preemption push has gained urgency in the past few years. He pointed to an ultimately unsuccessful 2017 Santa Fe soda tax proposal that drew the support of the city’s political establishment as “one of those turning points” in the larger debate.

“I think a lot of folks in other cities and towns started to pay attention to it,” Dermody said, because the New Mexico effort underscored the idea that “my gosh, this could happen anywhere.”

In its push against soda tax, the beverage industry is acting in concert with business owners and in some cases labor groups, like truck drivers, that worry about the impact if taxes start to cut down on soda sales. “We back all of these measures, but they’re backed by many other folks in the states at the same time,” Dermody said.

In Harrisburg, the preemption push has been driven by both the ABA and the Wakefern Food Corporation, which operates grocery stores in Pennsylvania. Anthony Campisi, who has lobbied on the chain’s behalf, said there’s a natural alignment of interests between the beverage manufacturers and the stores that sell their products; carbonated beverages are an important source of revenue, particularly for convenience stores.

“What the beverage tax has done is essentially made it very hard for those stores, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods, to succeed,” Campisi said. “It really does it make it difficult to keep stores open in poor urban neighborhoods when there’s a massive tax on a core area of the business.”

While public health experts say the efficacy of soda taxes is well-established, the beverage industry points to contradictory evidence. Despite adopting a national soda tax in 2014, Mexico’s adult obesity rate rose from 2012 to 2016, Dermody noted, and research has shown that while consumption declines in areas with soda taxes, the reduction is at least partially offset by augmented sales in nearby jurisdictions. A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association said it is “still unclear if these taxes improve health outcomes,” given the multiple factors causing obesity.

“If you tax beverages at an extremely high rate, do sales go down? Yeah. We’ve seen that happen. Do they improve public health, and does overall consumption of sugar go down? No,” Dermody said.

Despite the murkiness, the industry is worried. Both Coke and Pepsi identified soda taxes as “risk factors” in recent reports to investors. Pepsi’s filing described a global phenomenon, encompassing not just Seattle but Saudi Arabia and France, in which soda taxes would reduce demand and amplify the public perception “that our products do not meet their health and wellness needs.”

THE LOBBY HASreason to be concerned: Whether because of taxes or health concerns, sugary beverage consumption has begun declining in the United States. The American Medical Association endorsed soda taxes in 2017. This spring, the American Academy of Pediatrics also threw its weight behind taxing soda to bolster public health.

Given the challenges of campaigning in liberal cities, it may have been inevitable the beverage industry switched to statehouses. It is certainly more economical.

Campaign finance numbers from California neatly illustrate the calculus. The American Beverage Association spent more than $30 million combined on failed attempts to beat back local soda taxes in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Albany, California. It cost a fraction of that to qualify the statewide initiative it used as leverage to push Sacramento into a deal that ended local soda taxes for more than a decade. The ABA channeled $8.9 million to the committee managing the initiative.

“What they did in California last year,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of Public Health Advocates, “was a sign to me that this is part of a much more intentional national strategy.”

The shift to state preemption has alarmed public health advocates and their political supporters, who had spent years mounting a city-by-city effort to build a track record—and momentum—for public health policies designed to slow the obesity rate.

“The mindset of prevention folks on sugary beverages was, ‘We’re not going to win at the state level until we win a constituency and get some momentum at the local level’,” said Victor Colman, director of the Childhood Obesity Prevention Coalition.

Industries hoping to avoid regulation often find it easier to fight a single battle in a state capital than a series of skirmishes in cities, said Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health professor at New York University who has researched preemption. Distance works to their advantage, she argued.

“Local legislators are pretty attuned to the needs of their community members, so the industry has a harder time,” Pomeranz said, “but once you’re at the state level, legislators are a little more disconnected.”

The Philadelphia experience figured into the calculus in Michigan, one of several states in which preemption efforts have themselves been preemptive strikes. Rather than wait for local soda tax proposals to bubble up, opponents moved to eliminate the option before anything could be proposed.

In 2017, before any jurisdiction had floated a soda tax in his state, Michigan state Sen. Peter MacGregor introduced a preemption bill, saying soda taxes were “creating controversy in other locations, Cook County (Chicago) and Philadelphia for example.”

Birnbaum of the American Heart Association also said there were exploratory soda taxefforts underway in Detroit when the Michigan Legislature passed its preemption bill andcrushed the possibility. Senators representing Detroit were among the few legislators who voted no.

In Arizona, state Rep. T.J. Shope introduced a preemption bill that was signed into law in 2018. As in Michigan, no city in Arizona had yet proposed a sugary beverage tax.But a November 2017 poll found broad public support for a statewide soda tax, and he suspected some Arizona cities were inclined to consider them.

A third-generation grocer, Shope said he was approached about sponsoring the preemption bill by soda industry representatives who were keeping an eye on the national landscape.

“I think they were probably looking for a state to take a stand,” he said.

IN 2018,California became the soda industry’s Rubicon. Because the state is both the nation’s largest economy and its biggest consumer market, economic and regulatory decisions there can have an outsize impact—particularly given California’s function as a liberal bellwether in which ambitious progressive policies are tested and then exported to other states.

Moreover, California offered the beverage industry some tools of direct democracy not available in other states, specifically the state’s ballot measure system. For a few million dollars, a sum that amounts to a rounding error for major corporations, interest groups can place a measure on the state ballot and then offer to pull it if Sacramento authorizes an alternative deal. As a result, it’s not uncommon in California for groups to launch a ballot measure that’s unpalatable to lawmakers or to an ideological rival, then forge a legislative deal that averts a costly campaign.

A committee launched by another business group but ultimately funded largely by soda giants got a measure on the ballot that would have set a two-thirds popular vote threshold for local governments to pass new taxes—a change that Democratic lawmakers and allies like organized labor warned would be ruinous for local finances. Though the group’s name didn’t exactly trumpet the soda industry’s involvement—“Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, a Coalition of California Businesses, Taxpayer Groups, Business Property Owners, and Beverage Companies”—the effort was universally understood as a beverage industry power play after the ABA kicked in nearly $9 million.

With a deadline to remove measures from the ballot closing in, organized labor and business groups struck a deal to remove the vote threshold measure from the ballot.The new language barring soda taxes was swiftly inserted into a budget bill, which lawmakers passed after railing against what they called industry extortion. Nascent soda tax campaigns in cities including Stockton and Santa Cruz evaporated.

Optimistic health advocates had hoped that California would become a cautionary tale of industry overreach, in part because lawmakers resented having their hands forced. Instead, it appears that the pendulum is still swinging in favor of the beverage industry. This year, every one of a batch of bills intended to combat obesity has collapsed, from taxing soda to slapping health warnings on cans to limiting portion sizes.

The medical groups backing the bills say they aren’t defeated yet: They plan to put a statewide soda tax measure on the 2020 state ballot, which could give them leverage to negotiate a deal with the soda industry.

But the legislative wreckage attests to the beverage industry’s favorable odds when it’s focused on statehouses. “You kind of feel like if it could happen in California,” Birnbaum said, “it could happen anywhere.”

Jeremy B. White covers California politics for POLITICO.

Read More

#comeback #Foreign #Politics

[fitnessexpert00-blog]

11 Fitness Tips & Tricks To Battle Wedding/Production Day Hangover

New Post has been published on https://fitnessqia.com/trending/11-fitness-tips-tricks-to-battle-wedding-production-day-hangover/

11 Fitness Tips & Tricks To Battle Wedding/Production Day Hangover

Health and wellness is a consideration every professional photographer should take into account to be the best possible versions of themselves. As photographers, we can find ourselves in odd positions or hiking miles for the perfect photos. Add in the additional weight of the photography gear we carry and the hours we carry it, and you have the perfect storm for soreness, fatigue, and what we in the wedding industry call a “Wedding Hangover.”

Learning how to combat the dreaded post-shoot fatigue is something every photographer can benefit from, regardless of niche. I’ve caught up with some of the best photographers in the industry and asked them how they battle this very real issue, so check out what they had to say on how they keep themselves in the best shape to create amazing photos. I hope their answers will inspire all of us to continue to work to be the best versions of ourselves for not only our clients and our livelihoods, but for ourselves as well!

Anna Nguyen Stratton – Website | Instagram

“Don’t ever forget that your mental health is just as important as your physical health. You should try to take care of both so that you are performing at your absolute best. It can take a huge toll creatively if your mind is feeling weighed down by the stress of running a business and emotionally being there for your clients. A few ideas that have worked well for me in the past are journaling, taking an electronics/social media break, seeing a therapist, and getting monthly massages (this is two-fold benefits!). There are lots of ways to take time for yourself, find the one that works best for you! I also find that clearing my system of sugary drinks or caffeine until the 11th hour (haha) on a wedding day (that little bit of soda for that extra push!) with drinking lots of water (at least half your body weight in oz) 2-3 days and on the day of the wedding not only keep me from becoming dehydrated, getting tired faster, but it also helps clear my mind so I can be creative. I pack with me a 30oz bottle with a straw built in that I drink from on the day of and I refill as necessary.”

Jared Gant – Website | Instagram

“A little over two years ago, I cut all refined sugar and nearly all sugar from my diet. This single adjustment has changed my health (and, without being overly dramatic, my life). My energy level, ability to focus, quality of sleep, among other things have all benefited. I don’t find wedding days to be physically difficult, but what I struggle with is a sore back from sitting at my desk for hours editing and completing other photography-related tasks. I have found that getting up at least once an hour and moving around, paired with 10-15 min of stretching daily, has drastically minimized that discomfort. This is something that anyone could do. Additionally, I enjoy lifting free weights. For less than $100, you can buy a simple set and work out where and when you want. They’re inexpensive, portable, and really you can keep a set in your office and knock out a few sets whenever you have time.”

Brian Mullins – Website | Instagram

“I’m in my 40’s and in my 14 years spent as a photographer, I’ve suffered 2 torn rotator cuff injuries (partial tears) from shooting too much. One of my tears came from working out TOO much and not giving myself enough rest. The other came from simply overshooting and overworking. Both injuries boiled down to one simple thing, not taking care of myself and listening to my body. I’ve found there is no magic bullet for staying in shape but one thing holds true, everything in moderation.

Let’s face it, wedding photography is a physically (and mentally) taxing career. If you don’t adequately prepare for its rigors and listen to what your body is telling you, it will make the choice for you and prevent you from working.

For me, a good diet including lots of veggies, good clean sources of protein, LOTS of water (half my body weight in oz daily) and watching the caffeine intake (which admittedly is a problem). There are some weekends where I will shoot 3-8 hour weddings back to back. It’s amazing how much better I feel on morning #2 and even morning #3 simply by changing my diet. I’m still absolutely wrecked at the end of those weekends but functional. Compared to before where I would literally need a day to recover.

Exercise is really different for each person. I’ve hit the weights, run 5k’s, kickboxing and even just tried being “active”. Every time I’ve been injured it’s from going too far into one thing. Balance really is key, especially as you get older. So now I run a couple of times a week, hit the weights a couple times a week and kickbox the others. If I’m feeling really run down or weak, I’ll still go but won’t push myself.”

Citlalli Rico – Website | Instagram

“I had to change my diet drastically 4 years ago and started working with my beloved nutritionist who gave me an awesome recipe for a “day after wedding” smoothie. It works like magic:

2 cups of spinach 1 or 2 bananas 1 teaspoon of peanut butter 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed 1 tablespoon of vegetarian protein powder

It helps your body and your brain after a long day of intense thinking and moving.”

Vanessa Joy – Website | Instagram

“I do yoga! Yoga specificities for Photographers actually. It targets exactly where my problem areas are and strengths and stretches them. There are tons you can do by my fav is the Post Wedding Hangover that you can find right here!”

Amii & Andy Kauth – Website | Instagram

“Besides chasing 5 children around every day? We have a well-equipped garage gym (used to do CrossFit back in the day), train jiu-jitsu, and eat clean (mostly). We’re also getting back into snowboarding this winter + surfing in 2019! We’re in our upper 30s (Amii)/low 40s (Andy), and we think we’re 20 … probably act like it too (more often than not). We attribute it all to regular exercise, eating well, and having positive attitudes.”

Megan Allen – Website | Instagram

Image by: Jason Vinson

“As a wedding photographer, I used to have the most brutal, hit-by-a-mack-truck wedding hangovers the day after a wedding. I was sore, emotionally tapped out, and it really took a full 24 hours for me to feel back to “normal” after a wedding day. Coming from being a collegiate athlete to having my butt kicked by a single day event was a wakeup call for me for my overall health, not just on the wedding days, but every day. I found myself getting winded on adventure shoots with my couples, and I realized, if I want them to climb a mountain with me, I have to be able to physically climb the mountain myself, and not be a health risk in the process! After a year of struggling, I really examined myself, my goals personally and for my business, and hired a personal trainer. He got me on the right track in both the gym and nutrition (spoiler alert: when you’re 30+, you can’t eat the cookie dough at midnight like you did when you were 20 and running 3+ miles a day for basketball), and I began to feel completely different, both on wedding days and every day. I now work out with weights 4-5x a week, focusing on a different area each day, as well as a few days of cardio, be it stairs, the treadmill, or a bike. Nutritionally, I watch my macro intake, choosing to go for a high protein diet that allows me to fuel my days in a solid manner, and not just go for that 5th cup of coffee to spur the next 3 hours. I’ve felt a huge shift in my ability to move and stay engaged on a wedding day, and I also don’t feel the wedding hangover blues nearly as much — it has to be one heck of a wedding for me to be sore the day after now!”

Shivani Reddy – Website | Instagram

“As photographers, we are on our feet anywhere from 10-20 hours. This has horrible consequences for several parts of our body and requires some TLC to alleviate the pain. After you’ve come back home and showered, (hopefully that is part of your post-shooting routine), lie in bed on your back and elevate your legs so the blood rushes down. Flex and point your toes to roll your feet in clockwise & counter-clockwise movements. Then, flex and grab the arch of your foot and pull it down towards your chest. I learned this trick from years as a dancer, being on my feet and placing immense pressure on them for hours on end. Stretching all over is always a good idea (yoga is golden for post-shooting days!), especially if you are carrying a lot of weight on your shoulders and back!”

Sean LeBlanc – Website | Instagram

“To stay fit throughout the year, I play ice hockey twice a week. I grew up playing hockey (almost made it to minor pro) and have a love for the game. Hockey provides a great cardio workout and really helps clear your mind while having a lot of fun with good friends and colleagues. My wife and I both run our businesses from home and have two young busy boys so we get up early to get our workouts and hockey games into our schedule. My wife will stay home with the boys while I head to the hockey rink for a 6:45AM game and vice versa (except my wife hits the gym). Then when I get home I feel energized and ready to tackle the day.”

Pye Jirsa – Website | Instagram

“Wedding and production days are one-part creative, and one-part construction worker. They are grueling days that would leave me with back injuries, shoulder pain, and aching knees. Interestingly, it all went away with strength training. In 2014 I decided to make a lifestyle change by eating clean and regularly doing HIIT. Within months, the back injuries vanished, I felt light on my feet, and I could lift significantly more weight without tiring. The day after, or even night after production, I could still go running for miles. Today, here’s what my regiment looks like:

1. Sunday Meal Prep (low-fat/low-carb) 2. Mon (Chest/Back), Tues (Legs), Wed (Shoulders/Arms), Thurs (Core) 3. Yoga 1-2x per week for flexibility/recovery”

Eric Talerico – Website | Instagram

Image by: Gennaro Ditto

“This year I will be 40 and I’ve never felt better in my life. Training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the past 7 years has taught me a lot about myself and my health. I know how far I can push my body before it breaks, literally, and how to prepare for extremely physical days that are required of a wedding photographer. Through much trial and error, I’ve learned that good health is a lifestyle, not a quick fix, and I feel best when adhering to a few basic principles. The first, and most important, is getting enough rest. I shoot for 8 hours every night, especially the days before weddings. I discovered that I am much more creative when well rested, which is important when you are a creative professional. Second is a healthy diet. Over the years I cut out processed foods, preservatives, vegetable oils, refined sugars and refined carbs from my diet. I also eat organic and natural if that option is available and only drink water and coffee. It’s not easy, and I’m not going lie, I have my cheat days, but following this routine on a consistent basis has worked wonders for my overall health. I also do intermittent fasting which helps with those long weddings days when you don’t have an opportunity to eat. The last is engaging in physical activity. It’s not so much the type of activity that is important but rather finding something that you are passionate about. If you are passionate about a physical activity the health benefits will be the easy part. I find that maintaining these 3 principles help keep me in tip-top shape, especially for those long wedding days.”

What are some of your favorite tips & tricks for battling post-shoot days? 

Source

11 Fitness Tips & Tricks To Battle Wedding/Production Day Hangover

[slrlounge1]

11 Fitness Tips & Tricks To Battle Wedding/Production Day Hangover

Health and wellness is a consideration every professional photographer should take into account to be the best possible versions of themselves. As photographers, we can find ourselves in odd positions or hiking miles for the perfect photos. Add in the additional weight of the photographic gear we carry and the hours we many times will be carrying it, and you have the perfect storm for soreness, fatigue, and what we in the wedding industry call a “Wedding Hangover.”

Learning how to combat the dreaded post-shoot fatigue is something every photographer can benefit from, regardless of niche. I’ve caught up with some of the best photographers in the industry and asked them how they battle this very real issue, so check out what these photographers had to say on how they keep themselves in the best shape to create the amazing photos you’ll find from them below. I hope their answers will inspire all of us to continue to work to be the best versions of ourselves for not only our clients and our livelihoods, but for ourselves as well!

Anna Nguyen Stratton – Website | Instagram

Don’t ever forget that your mental health is just as important as your physical health. You should try to take care of both so that you are performing at your absolute best. It can take a huge toll creatively if your mind is feeling weighed down by the stress of running a business and emotionally being there for your clients. A few ideas that have worked well for me in the past is journaling, taking an electronics/social media break, seeing a therapist, and getting monthly massages (this is two-fold benefits!). There are lots of ways to take time for yourself, find the one that works best for you! I also find that clearing my system of sugary drinks or caffeine until the 11th hour (haha) on a wedding day (that little bit of soda for that extra push!) with drinking lots of water (at least half your body weight in oz) 2-3 days and on the day of the wedding not only keep me from becoming dehydrated, getting tired faster, but it also helped clear my mind so I could be creative. I pack with me a 30oz bottle with a straw built in that I drink from on the day of and I refill as necessary.

Jared Gant – Website | Instagram

A little over two years ago, I cut all refined sugar and nearly all sugar from my diet. This single adjustment has changed my health (and, without being overly dramatic, my life). My energy level, ability to focus, quality of sleep, among other things have all benefited. I don’t find wedding days to be physically difficult, but what I struggle with is a sore back from sitting at my desk for hours editing and completing other photography-related tasks. I have found that getting up at least once an hour and moving around, paired with 10-15 min of stretching daily, has drastically minimized that discomfort. This is something that anyone could do. Additionally, I enjoy lifting free weights. For less than $100, you can buy a simple set and work out where and when you want. They’re inexpensive, portable, and really you can keep a set in your office and knock out a few sets whenever you have time.

Brian Mullins – Website | Instagram

I’m in my 40’s and in my 14 years spent as a photographer, I’ve suffered 2 torn rotator cuff injuries (partial tears) from shooting too much. One of my tears came from working out TOO much and not giving myself enough rest. The other came from simply overshooting and overworking. Both injuries boiled down to one simple thing, not taking care of myself and listening to my body. I’ve found there is no magic bullet for staying in shape but one thing holds true, everything in moderation.

Let’s face it, wedding photography is a physically (and mentally) taxing career. If you don’t adequately prepare for its rigors and listen to what your body is telling you, it will make the choice for you and prevent you from working.

For me, a good diet including lots of veggies, good clean sources of protein, LOTS of water (half my body weight in oz daily) and watching the caffeine intake (which admittedly is a problem). There are some weekends where I will shoot 3-8 hour weddings back to back. It’s amazing how much better I feel on morning #2 and even morning #3 simply by changing my diet. I’m still absolutely wrecked at the end of those weekends but functional. Compared to before where I would literally need a day to recover.

Exercise is really different for each person. I’ve hit the weights, run 5k’s, kickboxing and even just tried being “active”. Every time I’ve been injured it’s from going too far into one thing. Balance really is key, especially as you get older. So now I run a couple of times a week, hit the weights a couple times a week and kickbox the others. If I’m feeling really run down or weak, I’ll still go but won’t push myself.

Citlalli Rico – Website | Instagram

I had to change my diet drastically 4 years ago and started working with my beloved nutritionist who gave me an awesome recipe for a “day after wedding” smoothie. It works like magic:

2 cups of spinach 1 or 2 bananas 1 teaspoon of peanut butter 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed 1 tablespoon of vegetarian protein powder

It helps your body and your brain after a long day of intense thinking and moving.

Vanessa Joy – Website | Instagram

I do yoga! Yoga specificities for Photographers actually. It targets exactly where my problem areas are and strengths and stretches them. There are tons you can do by my fav is the Post Wedding Hangover that you can find right here!

  Amii & Andy Kauth – Website | Instagram

Besides chasing 5 children around every day? We have a well-equipped garage gym (used to do CrossFit back in the day), train jiu-jitsu, and eat clean (mostly). We’re also getting back into snowboarding this winter + surfing in 2019! We’re in our upper 30s (Amii)/low 40s (Andy), and we think we’re 20 … probably act like it too (more often than not). We attribute it all to: regular exercise, eating well, and having positive attitudes.

Megan Allen – Website | Instagram

As a wedding photographer, I used to have the most brutal, hit-by-a-mack-truck wedding hangovers the day after a wedding. I was sore, emotionally tapped out, and it really took a full 24 hours for me to feel back to “normal” after a wedding day. Coming from being a collegiate athlete to having my butt kicked by a single day event was a wakeup call for me for my overall health, not just on the wedding days, but every day. I found myself getting winded on adventure shoots with my couples, and I realized, if I want them to climb a mountain with me, I have to be able to physically climb the mountain myself, and not be a health risk in the process! After a year of struggling, I really examined myself, my goals personally and for my business, and hired a personal trainer. He got me on the right track in both the gym and nutrition (spoiler alert: when you’re 30+, you can’t eat the cookie dough at midnight like you did when you were 20 and running 3+ miles a day for basketball), and I began to feel completely different, both on wedding days and every day. I now work out with weights 4-5x a week, focusing on a different area each day, as well as a few days of cardio, be it stairs, the treadmill, or a bike. Nutritionally, I watch my macro intake, choosing to go for a high protein diet that allows me to fuel my days in a solid manner, and not just go for that 5th cup of coffee to spur the next 3 hours. I’ve felt a huge shift in my ability to move and stay engaged on a wedding day, and I also don’t feel the wedding hangover blues nearly as much — it has to be one heck of a wedding for me to be sore the day after now!

Shivani Reddy – Website | Instagram

As photographers, we are on our feet anywhere from 10-20 hours. This has horrible consequences for our several parts of our body and requires some TLC to alleviate the pain. After you’ve come back home and showered, (hopefully that is part of your post-shooting routine), lie in bed on your back and elevate your legs so the blood rushes down. Flex and point your toes to roll your feet in clockwise & counter-clockwise movements. Then, flex and grab the arch of your foot and pull it down towards your chest. I learned this trick from years as a dancer, being on my feet and placing immense pressure on them for hours on end. Stretching all over is always a good idea (yoga is golden for post-shooting days!), especially if you are carrying a lot of weight on your shoulders and back!

Sean LeBlanc – Website | Instagram

To stay fit throughout the year, I play ice hockey twice a week. I grew up playing hockey (almost made it to minor pro) and have a love for the game. Hockey provides a great cardio workout and really helps clear your mind while having a lot of fun with good friends and colleagues. My wife and I both run our businesses from home and have two young busy boys so we get up early to get our workouts and hockey games into our schedule. My wife will stay home with the boys while I head to the hockey rink for a 6:45AM game and vice versa (except my wife hits the gym). Then when I get home I feel energized and ready to tackle the day.

Pye Jirsa – Website | Instagram

Wedding and production days are one-part creative, and one-part construction worker. They are grueling days that would leave me with back injuries, shoulder pain, and aching knees. Interestingly, it all went away with strength training. In 2014 I decided to make a lifestyle change by eating clean and regularly doing HIIT. Within months, the back injuries vanished, I felt light on my feet, and I could lift significantly more weight without tiring. The day after, or even night after production, I could still go running for miles. Today, here’s what my regiment looks like:

1. Sunday Meal Prep (low-fat/low-carb) 2. Mon (Chest/Back), Tues (Legs), Wed (Shoulders/Arms), Thurs (Core) 3. Yoga 1-2x per week for flexibility/recovery

Eric Talerico – Website | Instagram

This year I will be 40 and I’ve never felt better in my life. Training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the past 7 years has taught me a lot about myself and my health. I know how far I can push my body before it breaks, literally, and how to prepare for extremely physical days that are required of a wedding photographer. Through much trial and error, I’ve learned that good health is a lifestyle, not a quick fix, and I feel best when adhering to a few basic principles. The first, and most important, is getting enough rest. I shoot for 8 hours every night, especially the days before weddings. I discovered that I am much more creative when well rested, which is important when you are a creative professional. Second is a healthy diet. Over the years I cut out processed foods, preservatives, vegetable oils, refined sugars and refined carbs from my diet. I also eat organic and natural if that option is available and only drink water and coffee. It’s not easy, and I’m not going lie, I have my cheat days, but following this routine on a consistent basis has worked wonders for my overall health. I also do intermittent fasting which helps with those long weddings days when you don’t have an opportunity to eat. The last is engaging in physical activity. It’s not so much the type of activity that is important but rather finding something that you are passionate about. If you are passionate about a physical activity the health benefits will be the easy part. I find that maintaining these 3 principles help keep me in tip-top shape, especially for those long wedding days.

What are some of your favorite tips & tricks for battling post-shoot days? 

from SLR Lounge http://bit.ly/2TSbR3B via IFTTT

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