Are You Finally Interested in Losing Weight? The Resolution That Will Work!

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Lose It! The Personalize Weight Loss Revolution [Softcover]

by Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor

206 pages, $21.99

ISBN-13: 978-1605290942

Nonfiction

In the era of the smart phone, it seems that new applications are released nearly every day. Some applications, such as Rovio's wildly popular Angry Birds, promise to steal countless hours of your life with very little offered in return. Slinging birds via slingshot into the skeletons of buildings is alluring to many-but will not do anything for you health. In 2008, Charles Teague sought to change that.

He released an iPhone application which would help people manage their weight. Hugely successful, the LoseIt application has been downloaded by over 6,000,000 people. Today, the Lose It platform can be downloaded for use on the iPhone, iPad, Android, or used online. If you own one of these devices, or have access to the World Wide Web, you have the ability to lose weight and keep it off for good. The Lose It solution works because it is based upon a time-honored principle: you must burn more calories than you ingest to actually lose weight. You enter the weight you want to weigh and you are provided with a calorie maximum for each day (and are even told when you'll reach your goal based upon your plan for losing weight.)

In the book Lose It! The Personalized Weight Loss Revolution, Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor explain why the LoseIt application has been so successful. The LoseIt philosophy is based upon five pillars:
Embrace mindful empowermentTrack your caloriesTrack your habitsTrack your exercise as negative caloriesBenefit from peer support

The novelty of the program is the fourth pillar: Track your exercise as negative calories. When you use Lose It, you keep track of all calories ingested. The caveat is that any calories you burn while doing exercise are automatically deducted from your daily log as negative calories. It doesn't take the user long to figure out that losing calories from your log has a dual benefit: not only are you exercising-you're also able to ingest those negative calories and remain under your maximum for the day.

The Lose It! book helps dieters understand caloric intake and gives visual clues to help you understand how many calories you might be ingesting. For example, three ounces of cooked fish is about equal to the size of one's palm. Additionally, the book helps the novice by providing an exercise guide with plenty suggestions on how to burn more calories. Remember, calories burned can be eaten.

The most compelling chapter of the LoseIt book would have to be the one entitled, What's Your Type: Identify the habits that are holding you back. In this chapter, the authors illustrate why a one-size-fits-all diet will not work for everyone. In this chapter, this writer discovered he is the consummate weekender - logging calories fastidiously until the weekend, and then letting the logging go. LoseIt reminds you: a calorie is a calorie. Want to burn off a pound? Burn 3500 more calories than you've eaten and, yes, you will lose a pound.

Written in an easily read, narrative style, the Lose It! book is commended to anyone trying to lose weight. In the book, you will find the philosophy behind the LoseIt application; plenty of dietary information to help you; and a variety of personal testimonies of individuals who have lost over 100 pounds and have kept it off. If you like online forums, you will not be disappointed, either-there are numerous individuals who log on to LoseIt's virtual forums to discuss exercise strategy, swap recipes, and give each other motivation.

Slinging virtual birds into the meager structures to watch them cascade to the ground will not help you reach your fitness goals. LoseIt will: buy the book and download the program. After all what do you have to lose...

...except maybe the weight you've been wanting to lose all your life?

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood - Book Review

Award-winning author James Glieck, who wrote "Chaos" and "Genius," has the depressingly encouraging answer to this waterfall of information that overtakes us by the hours as gigaflops and teraflops literally pour fourth from the disk farms of the world and onto the Internet burying us ever more deeply in even more information - the Genie is out of the bottle and it won't go away.

Was it ever thus or did information just magically appear one day and need some sort of handling, rearranging, reinterpreting or reinventing? The answer is simple: information has been with us since the beginning, at first passed from shaman to son, who learned not only the "tribe's" story, but any new experiences that were picked up along the way that were bound to the story for the next generation. This went on for thousands of years and it was easy because things seldom strayed from the "truths" known. With the invention of illumination, the West was able to store its information as it was written - never changing as the keeper of information was happy with it remaining as it was. The invention of moveable type - actually a product of Chinese innovation 4,000 years ago - followed quickly surrounded us with more information and opinion. There was not more "keeper of the flame," as it were.

That invention alone let the Genie out of the bottle, never to return, although the flood of information turned from a trickle into a torrent nearly overnight (in historical terms) as the printing press churned out information that was once restricted to an elite. Soon, as they saying goes, the "elite was us" as information became more and more a director of our lives.

Soon information for its own sake was the norm as the information of the ages was worked on by the new masters to define everything from apples falling on our head (magnetism) to the ending of the "flat earth" theory to the ending of the earth-centric view of things. While Glieck doesn't specifically mention studies the contributions of Galileo, Copernicus, Humanism and others, they are there tacitly in the background as we run into the age of the machine and the literal deluge of information that it brought.

Yet, while never mentioning the "scribes" or tinkerers of the information age, directly, he does mention the greats who were successful in beginning to organize some of this information such as Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first "computer," a large textile machine that changed manufacturing with punched brass cards that told the machine how to reconfigure itself.

There's the Lady Ada Byron, by some accounts the first computer programmer, for whom Ada is named and its spreads rapidly from there as our historical narrative turns to the thinkers of the Information Age, Turing, Hawking and others as the Information Age begins to cascade toward the first real computer ENIAC by RCA in 1948 (where coveys of white-smocked technicians raced up and down aisles that housed rack-after-rack of heat-sensitive triode tubes to replace tubes that constantly failed so that computations could continue - at the time, the world's estimate for computers was eight or 10 maximum).

Now, a new meaning could be ascribed the old saw: "Apres moi le deluge" as the floodgates of the information age open, constantly surrounding us with information and changing information and new additions to information to the Internet and Web and the world of "Social Computing" with its "Facebook," nameless "Tweeting," Instant Messaging, Texting and more and more.

At one time it literally took eons for information to change to now when eons worth of information changes in seconds, constantly surrounding us with a reality that has changed the way we think and act. We are as much prisoners of this onrush of information as its participants and creators. Glieck's seminal work points this out.

Roberto Sedycias works as an IT consultant for ecommUS-Books

Book Review: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

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AppId is over the quota

'Three Cups of Tea' is a remarkably interesting and unbelievably honest tale of Mortenson's mission to build schools for the children of the most remotest villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Honouring the memory of a deceased sister landed Mortenson at the foot of king K2 (the second highest mountain) in northern Pakistan where a failed attempt and an injury led him to a small village at the foot of the mountain. Inspired by the hospitality of the simple village people and their simple life, Mortenson promised to build a school for the children of the village. After a year spent in collecting donations and resources, Mortenson returned to Khorpe to fulfill his promise and ended up building not one but more than 55 schools in the cold northern terrain of Pakistan. Building schools for children who have never seen a school is like fulfilling a dream of generations of people dwelling at the highest valleys of the world.

Mortenson's simple and straightforward approach towards building Khorpe School instills a new vision and a new hope in readers. As much as Central Asian Institute (CAI's) work is impressive, Mortenson's attitude towards fulfilling his first promise with the Khorpe people and transforming this single promise in to life long CAI's goal is deeply inspiring.

It is admiring to get a different glimpse of Afghanistan and the Afghan people. It is surprising to read that a country worst affected in the aftermath of 9/11 and the rough Afghans who have become accustomed to guns and fighting after living through decades of warfare could welcome a person from their 'enemy country' and support him with their lives.

In spite of all the criticisms and allegations that surrounds the book and its author, this book is worth reading especially with reference to the culture of education especially girls education in Pakistan...it describes the importance and the logic behind promoting girls education where educated boys move to cities for good jobs and educated girls remain inside home to nurture and polish lives of future generations...it will inspire you to redefine your attitude towards impoverished people...it will inspire you to reach out and make a difference into their lives

I hope that we each do our part to leave them (children of Pakistan and Afghanistan) a legacy of peace instead of the perpetual cycle of violence, war, terrorism, racism, exploitation, and bigotry that we have yet to conquer".

The author works for the Aga Khan Foundation Pakistan in its aim to promote education especially girls education and Early Childhood Development for the ultra poors of the society.