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Friday, January 18, 2008

This year, a new you


7 diet changes to help you feel better (and healthier) in 2008

If you’re like most of us, you’ve been indulging in too many high-fat, high-calorie treats for the last few months and are suffering from a holiday diet hangover. But the New Year is the perfect time to put your less-than perfect eating habits behind you. Fortunately, eating well doesn’t have to equal denial and deprivation. Try these 7 strategies to help boost your nutrient intake, feel more energized and enjoy a healthier body weight in 2008 and beyond.

The world’s most romantic lagoon resorts



Heavenly vacations in the Maldives, Tahiti, Malaysia, Mexico and more

Looking to get away from the winter’s cold and live out your vacation fantasy on an island paradise, complete with lagoon-side accommodations?

Your fantasy can become reality at a wide range of posh resorts in the world’s top beach destinations, such as the Maldives, Seychelles, French Polynesia, Mexico’s Riviera Maya and even the Caribbean.

Run by luxury hotel operators like St. Regis, Rosewood, Aman Resorts and Six Senses, many of these resorts offer over-water luxury accommodations, like Soneva Gili’s 1,400-square-meter Private Reserve villa in the Maldives; this has two master suites, a private spa and speedboat with crew and personal butler service. Anantara Resort Maldives’ over-water suites float in the Indian Ocean; some even have their own private, infinity-edge plunge pools.

Although these hotels might be located in remote locations, that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice creature comforts or rough it. Villas and other guest rooms at these resorts are elegantly furnished; many use local wood and thatch in their décor. Butler service is frequently available too, not only at Soneva Gili, but also at the St. Regis Bora Bora and Six Senses Hideaway Nin Vanh Bay in Vietnam, among others.

Spa services can be found everywhere, including at Miri Miri Spa at the St. Regis Bora Bora; this 13,000-square-foot facility occupies its own private island and offers both Tahitian and Pacific Rim treatments.

Nor are dining options limited: Many resorts, like Soneva Gili, the Manihi Pearl Resort in French Polynesia and Pangkor Laut in Malaysia, will prepare private picnics or barbecues for you and your traveling companion on a deserted beach. Fittingly called Lagoon, the fine-dining restaurant at the St. Regis Bora Bora has a menu by the world-famous French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. And cuisine at North Island, a private island resort in the Seychelles, is based on a “no-menu” concept: After consulting with guests upon arrival, the chef prepares meals according to their preferences.

For vacationers who want to do more than just watch the fish swim by, the resorts offer numerous water and land activities. Many have snorkeling and PADI scuba-diving courses. The Anantara Resort Maldives has a surf school, while many resorts give guests the option of fishing (everything from deep-sea and hand-line fishing to bone-fishing). Some hotels—like Rosewood Mayakoba and Amanyara—even offer golf, the former on an 18-hole, Greg Norman course.

According to Albert Herrera, vice president of hotels and resorts for Virtuoso, a consortium of high-end travel agencies, the lagoon-hotel concept is really catching—and for good reason. These resorts, he says, are increasingly popular with honeymooners and couples who want “exclusivity, sun, beautiful beaches and water. They‘re for people who want privacy and love nature and the water.”

At these hotels, you feel like “You’re at the end of the world,” says Suzanne Hall, senior director of marketing and development for Ensemble Travel Group, another group of high-end travel agencies. “You don’t see people at the next bungalow, you view the aqua and sapphire water,” she says.

Lagoon resorts appeal especially to people in high-stress jobs, Hall says, because they “totally de-stress you, because they’re so removed from everything in the workplace. This is not true elsewhere. Maybe it has to do with being in an over-water environment where you can’t see your neighbors. There’s privacy, and respect for it. You won’t find anything like it on Hawaii.”

What's more, at many of these resorts, guests can jump directly from a private deck and into the water, whenever they feel like it, to swim or snorkel. “You don’t need a wet suit, and the fish are like flowers under the sea,” she says.

more about travel

The Moral and Aesthetic Importance of Travel
Traveling is very popular. Not everyone has the means to do so, but just about everyone would like to. Most probably regard travel as merely a form of relaxation, but it arguably has a moral dimension as well because it challenges us, tests us, and forces us to think about our lives in new categories.

Because it tests you at every turn, travel demands that you act deliberately, and offers in return the possibility of making everyday choices meaningful. On a recent trip to France I forgot to bring shampoo and resolved to buy a bottle of my cherished brand. But it was offensively expensive, so I scraped by with the hostel’s ‘ gel cheveux et corps,’ and when that ran out, I got by for a day or two. It was liberating to realize that shiny hair is inconsequential, and that in choosing not to buy shampoo I can resist the consumerist pseudo-values I detest. Do we really need shampoo, cosmetics, and i-pods in order to be fulfilled? In bringing everyday purchasing decisions to our attention, travel allows us to see that what we buy is not who we are.

Simply being aware of our choices can liberate us from many of them. When we realize that we are not what we buy, we also see that consuming at all is not intrinsic to identity. ... Who are we? This is the question travel poses, and gives us the chance to answer. On holiday, we throw off our roles as worker, mother, docile consumer. Of course, many of us cherish what we do and would never want to stop being doctors, teachers, writers and parents. But everyone needs space, even if only to better appreciate what they temporarily leave. When was the last time you were able to establish some “space” between what you do and the rest of your life? To what extent has what you do — your job, your daily commute, your weekly shopping — come to define who you are, thus constraining your identity to the few choices and actions which your daily schedule permits?

If it is true that some of your most fundamental moral obligations are to yourself — to how you live, to becoming the best person you can, and to making the most out of your life — then it’s arguable that you have an obligation to yourself to step outside your daily life, at least occasionally, and learn more about who you are. Or, at the very least, about who you can be when you are not caught up in the rigmarole of that daily life.

How to Get a Healthy, Full Night's Sleep and keep fresh your mind every morning



How to Get a Healthy, Full Night's Sleep
More than 50 million Americans occasionally take some sort of sleep medication in an attempt to achieve the 7 to 8 hours of sleep the body requires. In fact, According to the National Sleep Foundation, nearly 70 percent of women report sleep problems at least some nights, and 29 percent of woman report taking sleep aids at least a few times a week.

During sleep, specifically REM sleep, your body repairs itself from all the damage inflicted on your body during daily activities. In fact, your cells divide and multiply at a much faster rate during REM sleep than while awake.

According to Michael J. Sateia, MD, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Service at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H, "It's essential to life. If you disrupt the sleep cycle, you could face grave health repercussions throughout your body." In other words, start messing with the sleep cycle, and lots of things -- metabolism, hormone levels, and blood pressure -- go out of whack. Sleep loss has been associated with:

Heart Disease
Diabetes
Cancer
Obesity
Depression
Infection
Accidents


As seen on NBC News Channel 8, Metabolic Research (MTBR OTC.BB) has developed its unique and patented Fitness Formula, powered by Stemulite. Because sleep is a primary requirement to good fitness, the Fitness Formula is designed to directly support the part of your Endocrine system responsible for deep sleep.

Don't be confused, Stemulite is not a tranquilizer or relaxant. Stemulite is an all-natural nutraceutical that maximizes the effectiveness of your natural body functions.

Among other components, Stemulite contains Indium, a rare trace mineral that puts your HAP (Hypothalamus, Adrenal, and Pituitary) system in optimal functionality. This optimal gland and hormone performance will not only cause a deep and restful sleep, but increase metabolism to burn fat and decrease weight, and produce a sustained increased energy level for the next day.

menswear designers in Paris



Jean-Paul Gaultier looks to a more elegant era for inspiration for his fall/winter 2008/09 men’s ready-to-wear fashion collection at Paris Fashion Week

Paris menswear designers opt for caution
Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent play it safe with classic looks
With fears of a U.S. recession sending shivers through the retail sector, menswear designers in Paris are following the lead of investors and seeking refuge in safe-haven values.

In clothing terms, that means faultless tailoring and subtly opulent fabrics, as evidenced by the fall-winter collections presented on Thursday by leading labels including Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Vuitton had a novel solution for the cash-strapped consumer: rob a casino!

Its menswear designer Paul Elbers paid homage to heist movies with sharply tailored suits featuring secret pockets and reversible tricks. The outfits literally had the color of cash — muted tones of emerald, sapphire, brown and taupe inspired by old bank notes.

Though Vuitton has seen its share price tumble by more than 20 percent since late October, its chairman and CEO Yves Carcelle is gambling on its lineup of new products and high-impact advertising campaigns to keep the luxury behemoth on a roll.

“When you’re a luxury house, you don’t tailor your strategy based on the short-term economic outlook,” Carcelle told The Associated Press. “At this stage, we have absolutely not felt the recession, so why worry about something that hasn’t yet happened?”

Meanwhile, front-row guest Joshua Jackson said he was happy to find grown-up clothes after the recent fad of rock star skinny suits.

“I can actually put this on and not feel like I’m in shrink-wrap,” the actor said, pointing to his Vuitton jacket.

At Yves Saint Laurent, Italian designer Stefano Pilati also has been taking a stand for real men.

Though he reined in the ultra-large volumes of last season, there was an unfussy elegance to his 70s-flavored collection of crushed velvet jackets, wide cuffed pants and Indian silk scarves.

Pilati chose to forgo the catwalk in favor of a glossy video presentation coupled with a showroom presentation. This gave guests a close-up glimpse of innovative fabrics like the paper-thin leather of a biker-style zippered waistcoat.
Jean Paul Gaultier has challenged gender roles in the past by putting men in skirts and makeup. This season, however, even the most respectable British gentleman would feel comfortable in his collection of classic pinstriped suits and houndstooth jackets.

The French designer limited his trademark irreverence to styling touches like rounded bowler hats and heavy biker boots that conjured images of Alex de Large, the ultra-violent hero of Stanley Kubrick’s cult film “A Clockwork Orange.”

Didier Grumbach, head of the body governing French fashion, said he was hopeful that emerging markets would help high fashion weather any economic turmoil.

“Intuitively, I am tempted to say this is a favorable period,” he said. “There is a lot of potential in the opening of new markets — even if there is a crisis, you mustn’t forget that five years ago, Russia, India and China were not conceivable markets.”

Half of married Brits are unhappy



More than half of 2,000 people in a British survey admitted to staying in unhappy marriages to avoid money and emotional troubles.

The survey indicated 59 percent of wives would leave their husbands if financial stability was not a problem, while 51 percent of husbands said their marriages were loveless, The Daily Mail reported Thursday.

Seddons, a leading law firm in London, created the marriage survey after a flood of divorce requests came in early in January.

"Worryingly, some 60 percent of people in the survey were not aware of how mediation can be used to improve communication between the parties, minimize the impact of divorce and keep legal fees to a minimum," said Seddons Solicitors' Denorah Jeff.

Fifty percent of those surveyed said they would consider counseling in efforts to repair their relationships before getting a divorce.

Actresses challenged by real-life roles

It was hard having to make her talk about so much of it and watching her walk off to her tent, looking at her and realizing: This is a woman's memory of the worst time in her life," Jolie recalls. "Watching her and watching (her late husband Daniel's) - LOS ANGELES - In April 2005, Angelina Jolie was in Namibia, pregnant for the first time and awaiting the birth of her child.


It was a period of enormous emotional upheaval, not only because of the imminent baby, but also because Jolie had invited Mariane Pearl to stay with her. And now here she was, huddled with Pearl, director Michael Winterbottom and producer Brad Pitt, all developing a movie version of Pearl's memoir, "A Mighty Heart," about her husband's abduction and death at the hands of terrorists.

Looking back, Jolie remembers how difficult the experience was for Pearl.


"It was hard having to make her talk about so much of it and watching her walk off to her tent, looking at her and realizing: This is a woman's memory of the worst time in her life," Jolie recalls. "Watching her and watching (her late husband Daniel's) boy run around -- it was very heavy, and we all grew up with it."

Growing up is an inevitable part of the acting process and comes with any true immersion into another person's life, whether fictional or not. But it happens to an even greater extent when the role is real.

This year, a number of actresses have taken on the challenge of playing real-life people -- from Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" to Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Emmanuelle Seigner in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," played a lesser-known character, but that did not diminished the challenge.

FEAR OF BETRAYAL
Speak to these actresses and the first thing they mention is the moral responsibility involved.

"Of course there's a great responsibility," Jolie says. "The heaviest pressure was really their son, knowing this little boy would one day see a representation of what his parents were like together."

"You feel like you don't want to betray anyone," affirms Seigner, who plays the common-law wife of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine whose story is told in "Diving Bell." Because of that, she says, "it is absolutely different" from playing a regular role.

Unlike Jolie, who spent considerable time with Pearl, Seigner chose not to meet her real-life counterpart, Celine Desmoulins, the jilted partner who stays at her ex's side as he lies in a hospital bed, paralyzed.

"I didn't want to meet the person I was playing, because I was afraid that I was going to imitate somebody," she explains. "I wanted to do it my own way, like if it happened to me."

At the same time, Seigner feared that if she got to know Desmoulins, she would skew her acting away from the real, whitewashing her character. "I didn't want her to be bitter, but I didn't want her to be saintly, either. I took the freedom of playing her like that because I thought it would be more interesting."

Seigner had the advantage of having known Bauby himself, thanks to the number of times he had put her on the cover of Elle. "I didn't know him well," she says, "but when (director Julian Schnabel) contacted me about doing the part, that made it very moving."

It was even more so when she did meet Desmoulins at Cannes.

"She is very different from me; she is dark and very skinny. It was very moving because she was crying, and the kids are now like adults." Desmoulins not only thanked her for the portrayal -- so did her mother, who wrote to Seigner to express how well she had captured the pain her daughter felt.

PIAF'S DARK SIDE

Cotillard, of course, was not able to meet Piaf, who died in 1963. When she signed on to writer-director Olivier Dahan's project, she had trouble accepting Piaf's flaws.

"There was something I was not very comfortable with, which was her very tyrannical side, and when I first read the script, it was hard sometimes," Cotillard notes. "It was an interesting part of the working process because I really had to understand her to accept that. I tried to avoid this: 'Oh no, she couldn't have been like that; it's so mean.' But by understanding her dark side, I understood a lot of things about her. And to finally have the feeling that you understand the character is really, really enjoyable."

In order to understand Piaf, Cotillard immersed herself in biographies, listened to Piaf singing and also listened to the music that Piaf herself liked -- notably Beethoven and singer Jacques Brel. Before that, "I never listened to Jacques Brel in my life," Cotillard laughs.

Better still, she found two people who had known Piaf well: Songwriter Georges Moustaki, who wrote "Milord," and Ginou Richer, who met Piaf when she herself was 16 years old and who remained Piaf's best friend until her death at age 47.

"She told me that was a very happy person," Cotillard recalls. "She was. She loved life, even if all those tragedies killed her. She loved to have fun, to laugh. She was not that dark. All this information and what I learned by watching and listening to her, by reading all those things about her life -- everything built the character inside me."

ELIZABETHAN ENIGMA

By contrast, nobody has seen Elizabeth I alive in 400 years, making it a challenge for Blanchett to open a window on the Virgin queen's soul.

"Elizabeth is endlessly fascinating, but nobody really knows anything about her," Blanchett reflects. "We know a lot about her ideas and very little about her heart."

There was documentation Blanchett could turn to, but in doing so she found that she only circled the queen, rather than finding her essence.

"Elizabethan history was written by her courtiers; you can look at that, and she also wrote some poetry. The cultural blossoming of England did arise from her patronage, and that reveals something about her," she says. "In the end, you go to your imagination."

Much of the research prior to that imaginative act had been done by Blanchett when she first played the role nine years ago in "Elizabeth." She says she watched that film once more before embarking on the role in "The Golden Age," but in no way sought to imitate what she had done before.

"She is entering a new phase in her physical life where she is having to leave her youth behind and yet needs it as part of her diplomatic arsenal," she says. "It's quite different."

All these were issues she wrestled with. And then, of course, there were those times when the screenplay veered in one direction and her own reading of Elizabeth in another. But rather than regard that as an obstacle, Blanchett saw it as an opportunity.

"The actor's job in this instance is to work out what is being omitted and try to bring it into the subtextual, subterranean life of the character," she says. "Often, when you play against the line, that's when it really works."

PEARL'S WISDOM

Unlike Blanchett, Jolie was able to soak herself in the real Mariane Pearl.

From the very beginning, she felt a strong connection with her, not least because Jolie herself had spent time in Pakistan, where Pearl lived with her husband until his death. Jolie was there, working with refugees in the weeks before September 11 -- and, indeed, received a warning from the State Department that she should leave because of threats Osama bin Laden was making.

When Daniel Pearl was abducted, it never occurred to Jolie that she would one day play his wife.

"I was watching anything happening in that region, as an American," she says, "and I was very affected by her when I saw her interviews and, like everybody, wondered if he'd make it home."

In those early days, "I couldn't understand how she had such grace under pressure. I couldn't understand how she was holding herself together. I hadn't yet had a child, so I didn't know the strength that can give you to carry on. But I found her fascinating; I saw her as so clear, and she had such a voice of tolerance in a time that was so dangerous, when there was so much hate. To have this woman, who had this horrible thing happen to her, speak about how there were also Pakistani people being killed and dying -- I was so happy she said that. And that was my introduction to her."

Sometime later, Jolie received a note from Pearl suggesting their children have a playdate. "I don't think she'd seen any of my films, but she had read an article about my work with refugees and thought maybe we should meet," Jolie says. "But we are both terrible at organizing things, so it took forever."

She was unaware that Pitt had bought Pearl's best-selling book; she would only find out when they worked together on 2005's "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."

"He had the book before I met him, and he and I had both become somewhat friends with her before he and I met," Jolie explains. "It was kind of odd; it actually drew us all together -- it was nice. But I had no intention ever of playing her on film. Then this idea of the film came up, and she talked to me about doing it. It didn't seem real; it was just an idea that was out there. And she had become my friend, so I found it that much more, not uncomfortable, just, I held her in such high regard that it was difficult to imagine taking it on. It became very personal."

Jolie's doubts that the movie would ever come together lifted when she and Pitt saw one of Winterbottom's films and felt he would be the right director.

"It seemed he would not make it precious, and he would make it honest and raw enough that it would feel like Pakistan -- and the situation wouldn't be that horrible the camera comes close and a tear drops," she says.

Soon, Winterbottom was on board, and the team was hard at work in Namibia, discussing the screenplay and the character and feverishly putting the project together. A few months later, Jolie was shooting in India (and later in Chicago after a widely publicized incident involving Jolie's bodyguards and the paparazzi forced the crew to relocate).

"The hardest thing was trying to detach myself and study her from a distance and analyze it without emotion," Jolie reflects. "I got all her tapes when she spoke, during the kidnapping and after his passing away, and tried to study her voice -- it's a further complicated accent because she is French and Cuban. I felt it is difficult to find a balance: She is such a strong woman, and sometimes, when she first did her interviews, there were people who had the opinion that she should have been more emotional. I came to understand that: If you begin to cry, you can't get up anymore. Part of me really wanted people to know her as she is, but I also had to be that other person who is very strong and focused."

Pearl never came to the set. But a few weeks after the movie was finished, Jolie heard she was ready to see it. A producer took the picture to her in Paris.

"I got an e-mail from her about a week later that was just the most kind, gracious ," Jolie recalls. "She was happy. Happy is a strange word, but it was what she had hoped it would be, and that is all we ever wanted. It was a great relief."