Eating Inedible

We are adults now, so we can eat balloons whenever we want.

Eating Helium Balloons. Photo from geekologie.com

I swallowed a coin. It is not accidental but I really put it into my mouth and sipped every irony taste of it. It is delicious; sometimes it could be a substitute to candies if you ran out of it.

The coin traveled down to my insides but got tucked within my esophagus, and that wasn’t a good feeling. I fought against my involuntary muscles to free it, but to no avail. Quickly, my brother handed me a banana, ate a slab of it but before taking it in, my brother slammed my back and I vomited it all, including the coin. Aaah, I’m amazed it worked!

My friend used to eat dog food, but he thought it was biscuits for humans. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t know the difference and it tastes alright. Another friend of mine loved herself so much, she couldn’t stop taking in what her body is supposedly shoving out. She bites her nails, early in morning, when conversing and while washing dishes. We all have our abnormalities.

One time, curiosity hit me and my friends. We were hanging out in a garden, two of us with Sprite and Pepsi cola in hand. This brilliant one blurted his idea of mixing two sodas with different plants around. And the rest of us are more brilliant in agreeing with it. We fetched one bowl and picked every representative flowers and leaves around the garden, ripped it to the smallest bits. We poured in the sodas and mixed it all, then you guess it! We took turns in drinking it, yum.

How about chewing straw, licking tissue paper, any other? Done that. What are the inedible things you’ve eaten/tasted in the past? Don’t you dare deny it,

More Moments for you:
Fast Food Industry Secrets
SillyWebsite Names.com
Changed College Education

Change Your Age?

With stem cell therapy, 30 years could look like 20.

51 years old Lorraine.

Meet Lorraine Giannotti. Listening to the way she talks, you would decide that she’s a sweet teenager girl – delicate like how a child would tell a story. Yeah, she sounds sweet, but she’s 51 on that photo. That shocked me as well!

She had a stemcell facelift, and she attribute that for clearing away the stresses that bagged her face. I guess we won’t see that face for long.

Stemcell has been clacking some news these previous years. The scientists will extract cells from an embryo, which is undifferentiated yet. Meaning, those cells can potentially turn into brain cells, organ linings, skin dermis or any other. In essence, if you inject stemcells to a blind person’s eyes, it may rebuild the dead cells needed for sight. It may also repair heart tendons, or improve immune system. It could be anything your body needed.

The promise is a heap of a deal, but these scientists will have to extract cells from an emerging life, thus killing a chance of living. Of course, Catholic Church will go nuts if they extract it from human life. I would go nuts too. To lessen the crime, they resort to animal embryo, mostly from sheep.

That’s the battle – kill one life to save another. This is also another validation that human beings are dominant among any other beings on earth, but does dominance grant us the power to exploit other life forms?

Now, stemcell slipped to cosmetics. If it is pasted or injected to your face, it’ll regenerate fresh and young skin cells, thus making you look younger. That’s another subject for debate. Should we just accept aging, or should we welcome the aid of breakthrough technologies?

Are we the same person afterwards?

Lorraine said that she doesn’t intend to change who she is but to enhance the person that she was. There’s no reformation of nose or thickening of lips, only the disruption of the natural turnover of life.

How long do you wish to stay and look young?

More Moments for you:
Deceitful Digital Enhancements
Life Facts: 1912 and 2012
Big Boys Cry

Source:
Stemcell Facelift Testimonial – Lorraine; YouTube

Fitness Industry Secrets

The fitness industry is more marketing and psychology than physical.

Fitness Membership. Photo from fitfreedom.wordpress.com

The fitness industry has a spur of growth these recent years, due to illnesses like diabetes and obesity. And of course, thanks to Hollywood we all want to be hot. And that’s the promise of the Fitness Industry, be it a club membership or DVD take-outs – you will be hot and sexy when you buy their products and services.

You decided to join a fitness club. On the façade you saw beachfront bodies, hot, sexy, and sizzling! Expectedly, models are the lean and muscular ones. It doesn’t mean that they got fit in that gym, but seeing them makes you believe. Admit it, most people are visual people. Seeing what you want to be is enough to persuade you.

You may or may not notice, but the trainers are marketing savvy. You signed the contract and gave them permission to bill your credit card. Often times, they still make you choose your personal trainer. And you’ll see, some are more expensive than the others. Paying them more doesn’t guarantee you better results. It’s still all you, you do the work for your own body, not the jam-packed trainers themselves.

The next step is to measure your current fitness or health status. How can you know if you are obese, overweight, fit, or underweight? They measure your BMI (body mass index). This scale, created by the US government is flawed! Its purely based on height and weight butwhat about fats proportion? What if you just have huge bone density that adds to your weight? And all other considerations are not accounted. According to this scale, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan are all overweight. However, it’s the most popular and easiest measure. But if your BMI surprised you, you may just have the body of Brad Pitt.

They offer the services of in-house nutritionist. They will give you a tease, and make the nutritionist assess your diet for the first time and recommend some changes. Diet and nutrition is common sense. Eat what the caveman eats, all natural and avoid processes and you’re good. Paying extra for nutritionists or books is expendable.

Gym Equipment Exercise. Photo from inletfitness.com

You got started. The leeway to steadfast weight trimming and strength building is the equipment and machinery. But you and your trainer will spend less time in it. Instead, your trainer will drive you to “stability balls, resistance tubing or bands, and balance tools”, more on exercises you can’t do alone. These trainers are told to veer away from constant use of equipment, because when the person learned how to use them (and it’s damn easy to learn), they won’t need trainers and will stop the service (DeFranco, 2012).

It’s a psychological game! They get you psyched up in the start, then when it’s been months and you do the same exercises over again, they intervene and re-psych you up to keep you paying the membership. It’s an industry, meaning a business. It doesn’t care if you get healthier or leaner. What it cares about your money.

Their programs may not work out for you, really. Our genetic makeup is part of the equation, but would they say it? No. They trick you to believe what the best looking body is, but each of us look at our best differently. And then they promise you that the best way to achieve it is through their gym.

If you noticed nothing’s changed, or at least on the timeline they promise you, it’s also planned out. They’ll say that despite the program, diets and supplements they served you, it all falls down to individual differences. It didn’t work out for you because it isn’t right for your body, and you keep on finding what works for you. Yeah, you’ve gotta pay them more.

Their gym is a breeding ground for germs, thanks to the sweaty bodies all around. From athlete’s foot to flu, they have it. And these clubs, not all of it, are not mandated by law to handle medical emergencies. Some trainers can’t even do CPR. Thing is, we are prone to injury when exercising, isn’t it? And heart attacks, due to improper exercise or overexercise, will need immediate help in matters of minutes.

Fitness industry doesn’t have a federal regulation to keep private data. Doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, all these professionals are ruled by law to preserve nondisclosure of any private information you shared with them. But the fitness industry doesn’t have that, and unfortunately you have to share your medical history to them at the beginning of your program. Be prudent as these people are free to gossip about you.

It’s hell hard to terminate a membership. Even if you communicate that you want to quit, chances are you signed a contract in day one and they’ll keep earning from you credit card even after you stopped. You better read before you sign, because if you sue them, they just present your signature and they win.

I’ve been a member of a nationwide fitness club. I know many success stories. Sure, there are people who got their magazine cover body, and fitness clubs helped them. But victim here, not all trainers are qualified to be one. Their management will employ many to meet the sky high demand, and see for themselves if they’re good with being a trainer. If not, oh well, drop him and get another.

Personal Trainer Encouragement. Photo from methodfitness.com

Even the professional and ethical can’t escape the demands of business, and what kept their growing bank account are some tricks here and deceit there to get you excited and believe all the miracles they claim.

I’m not implying that we quit our membership. Our body will always clamor exercise, and their services shot straight to that humane need. But you deserve to know all their secrets; and you can be fit at home, at work, at school, at Disneyland park, wherever.

How was your experience in fitness clubs?

More Moments for you:
Fast Food Industry Secrets
Weight-Loss And Science: What You Should Know That Helps
Boracay spelled Beach Activities

Sources:
Fitness Industry Secrets;   Fergus Niall Personal Training
Seeing Is Believing If You Want To Burn Fat – Or Is It?; FatBurning Furnace
10 Things Fitness Clubs Won’t Tell You; SmartMoney
5 Secrets the Fitness Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know; Ezine Articles
What the diet industry won’t tell you; Low-Carber

10 Things Your Personal Trainer Won’t Tell You; IDEA Health and Fitness Association

Bullying Helps

It’s all about preparations for advancing life.

Boy is Bullied. Photo from singlemindedwomen.com

It is not preferred for any child to be bullied at all. Yes, in a perfect world; but ours was imperfect. Regardless of one’s developmental stage, class or any demographics you can think of, bullies are sure visitors.

It’s true, a fact of unfair life. I’ve seen (and known) many adults who would break into a fistfight just because someone accidentally stepped on him, or would rant publicly in a waiter’s degraded face because of a trivial mistake of dropping an onion on her lap. These people don’t know how to handle unexpected and disadvantaged events, and it may perhaps because the likes of similar events are never experienced before.

A bullied child will learn how to fight later on. I’m promoting fighting; not to harass but to defend, not to be violent but to be vigilant, and not to be purely emotional but to be justly rational. It’s so easy to punch back or pull the hair of your bullies, but you’ve learned a valuable lesson when you restrained yourself and fought back with integrity.

Experiencing pain early in life only increases your threshold of it. Indefinitely, next time an oppressing force strained you, you knew you got over it, that it’s nothing beyond manageable. I see bullying as a practical teacher from life for the rest of life.

On finale note, there are two sides. It is better to be bullied, that to be the bully.

What’s your view in bullying? Has it changed you?

More Moments for you:
Offense Defense: Your Chosen Side?
Comment for Same-Sex Schools Study
Make A Girl Smile (Valentine’s Day)

Fast Food Industry Secrets

7 ingredients to make Chicken Nuggets, including Silicone – yeah, that one they use for breast implants.

Photo from photoXpress

Fast food is in every corner of every major city of the world. And how can they ever run out of business, people would prefer to watch streamed TV shows rather than cook. We don’t have all the musing time and we have priorities to focus on. It’s rather paradoxical that eating quality food, that which is the basic necessity for our survival, is the most neglected and crammed.

We trust other people to prepare foods for us; but there’s no way can we be assured of the utter cleanliness of the ingredients, the preparations, and the promises of the fast food chain. For all we know, we are eating one week old refrigerated veggies marketed as fresh salad.

Contaminants

Since at minimal amount it can’t affect your body, it is legal to contain traces of maggots, rat poop and the like in products of fast food. The Dateline crew, in their research,  found “rodents and insects (alive and dead), grime and debris in several chains”. (AskMen.com)

Documentary Food, Inc. showed that most cow meats are all mixed up in one grinding machine. If one cow is diseased, the rest is contaminated. Hamburgers and other meat are very susceptible to malicious bacteria, especially E. coli. How they clean it? They let it pass through ammonia gas. Ammonia is what you pee and what you clean your toilet with.

Certain fast foods admit that their products may contain additives that could irritate your allergies. They just won’t specify which products.

“The most common violations in fast-food chains? Employees not washing their hands (in some chains, there was no soap in the bathrooms), improper food holding temperatures, undercooked meat, and employees handling food with their bare hands.” (AskMen.com)

Expenses: Us and Them

Only 19% of cost you pay for your fast food product is accounted by food itself. The rest is just operations, packaging, marketing, and the aircon to keep your face fresh.

In 2009 alone, $4.2 Billion was spent on fast food advertising. Strategically, they targeted children more.

$1.6 Billion was the annual cost for online and TV advertisements for kids alone.

These fast food restaurants have high turnover, but they pay ridiculously low wages.

The food industry is serious about keeping silence from critics. If a party has a revealing study that could harm their industry, expect “heats” from multiple sources.

At Counters

Longer lines will make you buy more – due to exposure to temptation.

Fast foods have healthy options, hidden and more expensive; while value meals have blinded you to spend more since not all people like all to eat everything in the combo but coerced to by the offer.

Labels

Don’t trust their calorie count because it may be erroneous. An overstated net weight is more likely to be penalized by FDA than the understated, so they understate it more often.

“Low fat” label is just an illusion of a product being healthy. Check the calorie count because a  “low-fat” chicken quesadillas have 742 calories.

A “zero trans fat” label meant there’s a lot of saturated fat.

“Sugar free” contained high fructose corn syrup.

At least 50 different chemicals are found in the average strawberry milkshake of fast foods. And since FDA’s definition of natural ingredients is anything derived from a natural source, these fast-foods can call a strawberry milkshake ‘natural’ when in fact it was from an animal derivative.

Ingredients

Wendy’s Frosty took at least 14 ingredients to make, including the chemical used as electronic cigarette’s filter.

McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets contain at least 7 ingredients to make, including silicone – the same substance they put on breasts implants.

McDonald’s Salad contained a chemical that is not even approved for cat food because its safety isn’t warranted.

Cellulose, a derivative of wood, is mixed with most processed foods to give texture. Cellulose took the place of oils and flours just because it is inexpensive. In turn, we get zero nutrition. Our stomach can’t digest cellulose, so it’ll be released as is.

The berries that topped the muffins are fake. Starting 2010, fake berries are in production. Ingredients? Food colorings and a bunch of chemicals interplay to mimic the chewy berries that we love. It’s cheaper than that of nature, but with zero health benefits.

French fries, the one that’s always hanging with our combos, are meat flavored, not potato. There’s even a time when McDonald’s French fries contained more saturated fat than their burgers. Due to the controversy, they’ve modified it, yet an ingredient was from an animal still. And fries, when refrigerated, became colorless. Hence, a chemical intervention. They even fry it with hydrogenated oil too keep its crisp, but that special kind of oil is toxic to our body, linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Chicken products, like nuggets and sandwiches, contain beef as well to add taste.

The more lean you chose your beef to be, the higher sodium content it has. That is to make it juicy, because a lean cut took it off.

To keep it simple, there’s nothing simple in fast foods. All their products are bombarded with numerous chemicals and ingredients other than, say, chicken, beef, salad, potato and milk. Primarily, it is for prolonged preservation and unique flavor that would urge you to crave and come back. The real best trick is to eat raw food, it has the nutrition and it keeps you eating less.

If you have worked with fast food industry, or you have any additional dirty secret we opt to know, share it here.

More Moments for you:
Horsemeat Maltreat
World’s Best Excuses
Demise of Computer Mouse

Sources:
15 Shocking Food Industry Secrets; Yahoo! Health
Things Fast-Food Companies Won’t Say; Yahoo! Finance
Fast Food Industry Secrets; AskMen.com
The 6 Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry is Feeding You; Cracked.com
7 Dirty Secrets Fast Food Chains Don’t Want You to Know; OrganicAuthority.com
Top 3 Shocking Fast Food Industry Secrets; FilthyLucre.com
10 Secrets The Processed Food Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know; CoachdebFitness.com
3 Fast Food Ingredient Secrets: Industrial Chemicals, Synthetic Meat; NaturalSociety.com