Monthly Archives: June 2015

Dieting Myths

This excellent article appeared today from  http://www.shebudgets.com/health/diet-fitness/10-weight-loss-tricks-that-are-complete-myths/55503?utm_source=facebookpage&utm_medium=luan&utm_term=shebudgets&utm_campaign=weightlossmyths&ts_pid=2

If losing weight was easy and simple and becoming thin and gorgeous was easy and simple, we’d all be thin and gorgeous. But it’s not always the case; if you want to lose 10 pounds, you have to lose 10 pounds. You can’t just sit down and hope some magic potion is going to give you a wish and then you’ll be thinner and more gorgeous than you were an hour ago. There is no magic potion or trick for weight loss. If you want to get healthy and fit and look great, you have to make some lifestyle changes. You have to stop eating like a pig, over-indulging, skipping the good stuff and hoping that the bad stuff is going to make you skinny. It’s not. You’re not going to get thin and stay thin eating nothing but milkshakes or drinking pepper water. You have to eat well, exercise and live a healthy lifestyle.
Sorry (not sorry) – this is not what you want to hear. You want to hear that you can take a pill and lose weight and all kinds of good things will happen to you without you actually having to work for those things. And it’s not going to happen. You have to work for what you want and get actual results. It’s called responsibility and dedication. Diet trends and myths don’t work because you have to keep them up forever and ever and it’s not healthy or possible to do so. We have, instead, decided that we’d tell you that all those things you’re hoping will make you look good in time for beach season will not work long term. Skip them; make lifestyle changes for the better. These diets are myths and they will not work.

Goodbye Gluten

If you have celiac disease and you have to eliminate gluten from your diet, do it. But it always makes me laugh to see people who go gluten-free as if they’re doing something good for themselves as a whole. A gluten-free diet is not a weight loss tool. It’s a way for people with a certain illness to eat food without getting sick. So if you’re using this as a way of dieting, you’re just wasting time and money buying things that aren’t doing it for you.

Juice Diets

Why would you drink just juice and hope that you could lose weight? Of course you are going to lose weight just drinking juice. You are eliminating actual food from your diet and you are not going to be able to keep that up forever. Can you go the rest of your life without actual food? No, you cannot, and that’s why these silly diets do not work.

Soup Diets

See above – you cannot live on soup for the rest of your life. Sure, it’s healthier than juice, but it’s not a way of life. You cannot just hope that you will lose weight because you are eating only soup and hoping that weight loss comes to you in many forms. You have to actually go about losing weight like a real person by eating healthy foods.

Skipping Breakfast

It’s never a good idea to skip breakfast. Of course you feel thin when you wake up; you haven’t eaten in 15 hours. So skipping breakfast is not going to make you thinner or healthier. It’s just going to make you hungrier and it’s going to make you feel bad because your metabolism is going to slow down and work on a pace that doesn’t burn any calories.

Negative Calorie Foods

Some people call this the grapefruit diet, and it consists of eating only things that have negative calories. These are foods that have fewer calories in them than it takes to consume them. While most of these foods are healthy, they cannot complete your diet. You still have to eat and use regular meals if you plan on getting healthy and losing weight for the long term.

No More Carbs

You can’t do it; because carbs are amazing. Sure, it might work for a few days and you’ll feel good and healthy, but when you eat them again you’re going to miss them. And you cannot stay away from carbs forever. Some of them are actually good for you and you need those to survive. So skip the fad and just limit your intake.

Eating Every Two Hours and Skipping Meals

Little meals are good throughout the day, but you cannot skip big meals at all in favor of snacking and grazing every two hours. A handful of nuts or yogurt every two hours does not make for a healthy day. You’re doing yourself a great disservice assuming you can eat like this in a way that’s healthy and beneficial.

Drinking your Calories

All right, so sometimes we all do this. We order a small salad with nothing on the side and then we order three glasses of wine. While it might make for a fun occasional night out, it’s not good for us on so many levels. You can’t skip food to drink – it’s going to kill you. It’s disgusting and unimpressive and not at all good for you.

Food Pairings

Did you know that some people say you should not eat certain foods together? For example, you should not eat carbs with protein because it will make you fat the way that they work together as they digest. Whatever; it’s not the truth. You can’t let people tell you that you can eat as much as you want if you just avoid eating certain things together. It’s not the way eating works.

Not Eating

Sure, not eating is going to make you lose weight. It’s also going to bloat you and make you feel awful. It’s not healthy, and it’s not good for anyone. You’re entire life will change if you stop eating. You’ll become sick, tired, anxious, stressed, grouchy, depressed and you still won’t feel as if you look good. Why? Because you won’t look good and you won’t feel good.

Some real home truths there.

Tim

Daily (Or When The Mood Takes Me) Gripe: Joe Hockey’s Baffled Aussies!

i was going to write on this myself, but it would appear someone else has written and excellent FB post on Treasurer Joe Hockey’s vaffling comments on how to get inti the Australian housing market last week. She saved me a lot of research. 

Good on you Mel Wilson. Straight for the jugular, and armed with the stats he should have had!

Here is her FB post.

Dear Mr Hockey, Victorian mother Mel Wilson has something she would like to say to you…
Earlier this week, Joe Hockey, North Sydney MP and Treasurer of Australia said, “The starting point for a first home buyer is to get a good job that pays good money.” He added, “If housing was unaffordable in Sydney, people wouldn’t be buying.”
Mel Wilson is a 28 year old single mother from Wodonga with two children (aged two and five) and two part-time jobs in human resources. In a Facebook post that has already been shared over 24,000 times, Mel has written an open letter to Mr Hockey, articulating the thoughts of seething Aussies everywhere.
The letter is too brilliant not to share, so here it is in full:
Dear Joe,
I just wanted to touch base with you regarding your comment that young people are able to enter the property market if they just “get a good job that pays good money.”
I just wanted to ask you how one might go about this?

Are you going to be reviewing all the current Awards that are in place to ensure that most jobs pay “good money”?
Are you going to be creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs that, under your Awards, pay over $100,000 per year?
Apologies if I have missed this fantastic news, but as someone working in 2 senior HR roles, I believe I would have known about this so that I could pass the message on to some very tired, over qualified employees who currently fall under various Federal and State awards and are being paid between $18 to $25 per hour.
Are you aware of what the average Australian wage is?
Are you aware of what the average Australian mortgage in Sydney is?
Are you aware of the first-home buyer process?

Just in case these facts and figures aren’t available to you, I thought you might be interested.
The average weekly wage according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 1st January 2015 was $1,128.70, or $58,692.40 before tax. This means a take home amount of about $904.00 per week.
The median house price in Sydney, according to the Domain Group Housing Price Report, as of March 2015, was $914,056.
Not sure if you know how first home buying works at the moment, but you normally need a deposit of about 20%. This is to pay for the Stamp Duty (which is a State Tax you must pay every time you buy a property), and also to assist in the approval process so that you don’t need to pay Lenders Mortgage Insurance.
So in this instance, the first home buyer would need about $182,811.00 saved to purchase a house that is the average price in Sydney.
So to go out and get one of these “good jobs that pay good money” I assume these young people you speak of would need to go to university first.
On average, it takes about 3 -4 years to get a degree, so if a young person goes to University straight out of school, they can expect to finish their course and be ready for the workforce at about 21, with a HECS-HELP debt of over $20,000. To make this a bit easier for you to understand, let’s say there is a young person named Joe Junior who has done just this.
If Joe Junior is extremely lucky, and is up there with the best of the graduates from that course and that year, he will get a job straight out of University paying usually under the average wage.
However, lets just be extremely generous here and say that Joe Junior got a job and was on the national weekly take home wage of $904 per week.
Joe Junior needs to only save every single dollar worked for about 4 years to save his $182,811 deposit for their first home.
Thank you, Mr Hockey, for throwing in that $7,000 first home owner grant too – that meant Joe Junior could get into his first home 8 weeks earlier!
Just a quick side note, this example does not take into consideration the rising house prices, or Joe Junior’s HECS-HELP debt that he obtained from getting his degree to get one of your so-called “good jobs”.
Joe Junior is now 25 (not so junior anymore), has been living at home with his parents this entire time and has not been able to spend a single dollar on any bills, board or holidays or public transportation. He also can’t afford a car or petrol for a car but then again “poor people don’t drive cars”. Oh wait, Joe Junior isn’t a poor person – he has a “good job that pays good money.”
Luckily Joe Junior’s parents have been happy to drive their little Joe Junior to and from work every day and provide free housing, clothing, medical expenses and also provide the food for his breakfast, lunch and dinner each day.
So finally Joe Junior has saved his $182,811 deposit (of which only about half will go towards his mortgage due to the stamp duty cost), and can now purchase his first home, with a mortgage of about $822,650.00.
According to the Commonwealth Bank’s online mortgage estimator, the repayments for a mortgage of this amount are $1,073.00 per week over 30 years.
So hopefully Joe Junior’s average weekly wage of $904.00 has gone up enough to cover the cost of the mortgage.
Joe Junior has been applying for these “good jobs hat pay good money” that you speak of (I assume by “good money” you mean more than the average wage as you have just seen it is not even enough to cover the cost of the average house prices’ mortgage in Sydney), but hasn’t had any luck as yet. He needed to stay in the same job post university to demonstrate to the bank job stability so that he could purchase his first home. So he only has a degree, and experience in the one job, one industry, and there are just not that many jobs out there paying “good money.”
Joe Junior now also can’t wash his clothes, eat food, or get to and from work as he no longer lives with his parents, so getting one of these “good jobs” is even more difficult.
So Joe Senior, are you really aware of all the facts and figures when you says things like buying your first home is “readily affordable” to young people?
Just slightly confused as to what you were thinking when you said these words at the media conference in Sydney.
Looking forward to another one of your politically correct, direct and well thought out responses.
Regards,
Another baffled Australian
http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/a-working-mum-delivers-a-glorious-smackdown-to-joe-hockey-on-house-prices/
Tim Alderman

Repost.