Weight Watchers Online: Pay $1 Joining Fee on the 3 Month Plan PLUS FREE GIFT

At Weight Watchers, we understand that life can be a series of fuzzy curve balls and delightful surprises. That’s why we’re Approved by Life™.

Weight Watchers is a customised weight-loss program that fits you perfectly. Whether you’re facing a day packed with meetings, birthday drinks, cooking for kids or a Sunday BBQ, we’ve got you covered. There’s no need to sit out family meals or trim your social life because Weight Watchers isn’t just a quick fix – it’s a way of life, where food can be your friend.

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* Save A$38.95 on Weight Watchers Online. Offer valid until 31st March, 2010.

Best and Worst Celebrity Couples of the Decade

The breakup of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon was a bitter ending to a decade fraught with numerous divorce and cheating scandals and sparse golden couples in Tinseltown.

Over the years, there have been celebrity couples whose commitment to each other have been nothing short of inspirational: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Linda and Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, and Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. There have also been celebrity couples that have completely disappointed: Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, Michael Jackson and Debbie Rowe, Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant, Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Gisele Bundchen.

With the new decade drawing near, online dating websites Date.com, Matchmaker.com, and Amor.com, polled thousands of single online daters and Twitter followers, asking who they thought represented the best and worst celebrity couples of the decade. Read more

Most Ridiculous Lawsuits of 2009

The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) has announced the top five Most Ridiculous Lawsuits of the Year for 2009. Nominees were drawn from the monthly Most Ridiculous Lawsuit poll winners chosen by visitors to FacesofLawsuitAbuse.org – a public awareness campaign website that aims to show how abusive lawsuits affect small businesses and average families in very real ways.

The top five Most Ridiculous Lawsuits of 2009 are:

1. Illegal immigrants sue rancher who stopped them on his property at gunpoint and turned them over to the Border Patrol
16 illegal immigrants accused Arizona rancher, Roger Barnett, of conspiring with authorities to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch on the US-Mexico border. According to The Washington Times, the Mexican nationals were seeking $32 million in damages from Barnett, his wife, his brother and a local sheriff.

2. Tourist sues hotel, claiming swimming pool got daughter pregnant
The Sun reported in July 2009 that a Polish woman was suing an Egyptian hotel claiming her daughter got pregnant from using the swimming pool. Magdalena Kwiatkowska alleged her 13 year old daughter conceived from stray sperm in the hotel’s  pool.

3. Holocaust denier sues Auschwitz survivor alleging memoir contains “fantastical tales”
Notorious Holocaust denier, Eric Hunt, is suing 80 year old Irene Weisberg Zisblatt who appeared in the 1998 Academy Award-winning documentary The Last Days, produced by Steven Spielberg. According to the Sun Sentinel, 25 year old Hunt has also named Spielberg, Zisblatt’s co-author and the publishers of the memoir, in his law suit. Read more

Book Review: No Impact Man – Saving the Planet One Family at a Time

When Colin Beavan woke on Day One of his family’s year-long attempt to have zero effect on the environment, he grabbed some paper towel and blew his dribbling schnoz on it.

Not the best start in a remarkable attempt to create no garbage, cause no carbon dioxide emissions, disseminate no toxins, purchase naught but locally produced product, buy nothing new and nothing in packaging, use no transport, no air conditioning, no plastic, watch no TV… for 365 days, with a baby girl, in the middle of New York City.

Tee hee ha ha tee hee ho! Read more

2010 NEW YEAR HOROSCOPE SPECIAL

2010 starts with a bang as the Lunar Eclipse stirs up emotions and trouble on New Year’s Eve. Expect a volatile year financially, when the world could rebound back into recession. Natural disasters are likely around April-May and July-August, as Saturn and Uranus oppose each other again as they did in February and September 2009, when there were bushfires and earthquakes/tsunamis

The good news? Jupiter and Uranus move into Aries which should herald an expansion in pioneering sustainable technologies in 2010-2011. Saturn in Libra promises more government focus on world peace, banks becoming more accountable, and the fashion trend will be towards more structured styles ie. the return of the corset and shoulder pad! On a personal level, getting the balance right between professional commitments and personal relationships is a major theme of the year. Read more

New Year’s Resolutions…you can do it!

As our thoughts turn towards New Year, we sometimes contemplate what we’d like to change about ourselves, and what we’d like to achieve in the year to come. When ‘resolutions’ are broken it’s usually because they haven’t been considered thoroughly, and then we feel disappointed in ourselves. 

How much better would it be to come up with one really important goal, to think it though properly and to set yourself up really well to achieve it?  Read more

Jolly Old St Nick – Who is he? Really?

As of this article, it’s only a short time until Santa sneaks into our homes, his sack stuffed with splendid treats for good little boys and girls. Lucky the Good Children List has now gone on the world wide web, otherwise how on earth could Santa possibly cover the mass of gaping stockings draped around houses, hungry for loot?

The traditional Santa Claus appears to many Western kids in a red, fur trimmed suit bursting at the seams, but this image is actually a relatively new incarnation.

Read more

The Corset Shapes More Than Our Waists

“Have you heard, corsets are coming back again?” a friend asked recently.

“Oh no,” I groaned, and thought back to my childhood and the sight of Grandma’s pink stays pinned up on the Hills Hoist. I recall staring at the cream laces and whalebone ribs and wondering how she did them up let alone why she wore them.

Little did I realise that for six centuries, fashion dictated bizarre waist narrowing for middle and upper class women in order to fit the idealized notion of the attractive female form. One French Queen in the 14th century declared a 14 inch waist for all her ladies in waiting! Even 2nd century poets idealised the small-waisted woman for her beauty and femininity.

Corsets cruelly controlled women’s physical and mental health, causing them to faint as they struggled to draw enough air into the top of their lungs. No wonder they had heaving breasts – they were trying to breathe! Women were considered delicate creatures with bird-like appetites, when in reality the tightness of their corsets shifted their organs and prevented eating more than a small serving. This was external gastric banding in the name of ‘beauty’, not for health.

In the 1800s, physicians objected to the associated health risks of trying to achieve ever smaller waists. Religious leaders thought the exaggerated female shape set the scene for depravity and feminists objected to the real and symbolic control of imprisoning women in corsets.

Googling ‘corsets’ recently, turned up 3.7 million sites of corset-related information. Madonna, Kylie and modern fashion designers have brought about a resurgence in the popularity of the corset, which is regarded as a unique form of sexual self-expression. It seems corsets have gone mainstream, also staying popular for bridal, evening wear and fetish lingerie or gothic costumes.

After Googling corsets, my thoughts turned back to Grandma, wearing those laced whale-bone corsets as she worked in the hot summers of Queensland, running the family hotel. As she lifted, cooked and carried, the intra abdominal pressure rises would have stretched her pelvic floor muscles down. The tight corset would have prevented her waist from expanding – her diaphragm would have been unable to move up and down, in turn limiting her pelvic floor capacity to lift and hold up against downward intra abdominal pressure. It’s no surprise she had surgery for a prolapse (hysterectomy) in her early 50s.

Pursuing a concept of beauty or femininity by restricting the waist and forcing pressure onto the pelvic floor exacts a cruel price. Let’s hope women don’t fall for this again.

The Self Imposed Muscular Corset

In the Bond girl photo, it’s obvious that Halle Berry on the left has coordinated abdominal muscles. Ursula Andress on the right has learned waist narrowing as a way to flatten her stomach. This ‘self imposed muscular corset’ is increased with anxiety, stress, chronic coughing with chest disease and some forms of exercise training.

Imagine you have a blown-up balloon in your hands. Push the top of it up under a ledge then squeeze in the ‘waist’ of the balloon. The under part of the balloon (your pelvic-floor equivalent) will bulge down. Now make the connection – pulling in the waist increases pressure inside the abdomen and stretches the pelvic floor downwards.

On the other hand, some women with a strong abdominal bracing muscle action keep their pelvic floor muscles tightly drawn up for long periods without relaxing the muscles, causing the muscles to shorten and stiffen. Both the short, tight pelvic floor and the stretched down floor experience bladder and bowel problems along with sexual dysfunction.

Pelvic floor problems improve with learning to relax the waist and chest wall muscles, and by training the pelvic floor muscles to switch on, co-contracting with the inner cylinder of core muscles. When this action is coordinated with all the abdominal muscles, it flattens the abdomen.

So next time you’re passing a mirror or shop window, grow tall and draw up your pelvic floor (as you breathe out) instead of sucking in your waist. If your waist looks like Ursula’s when you draw up your pelvic floor muscles, this is a sign your floor, core and abdominal muscles are working in an uncoordinated pattern.

Maybe all those centuries of tightly laced waists to impossibly small dimensions have left us with a cultural imprinting of the ‘ideal’ feminine form, and the incorrect and damaging habit of sucking in and naturally ‘corseting’ their waists.

Contributed by Mary O’Dwyer, pelvic floor physiotherapist with over 30 years of clinical and teaching experience. Mary’s book Hold it Sister! is out now. See www.holditsister.com for more and sign up to receive Mary’s newsletter, packed full of healthful information for every woman. You can also access archived newsletters and take a free Bladder & Orgasm Risk Profile, assessing your personal pelvic floor risk factors.

Win The Map Reader starring Rebecca Gibney on DVD

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. With thanks to Arkles Entertainment we have 5 copies of The Map Reader on DVD to giveaway. In her first leading role in a feature film, Rebecca Gibney from Channel 7’s Packed to the Rafters, gives an outstanding performance in the movie, The Map Reader – a haunting coming of age film, written and directed by Harold Brodie.

Released to DVD in Australia by Arkles Entertainment on 25 November 2009, The Map Reader follows 16 year-old Michael, a lonely teen who leads a reclusive life with his mother Amelia , whose guilt about raising Michael alone threatens to drive him away. As Michael struggles to deal with his Mother’s alcoholism, he seeks solace in reading maps and forms unexpected friendships with his secretive classmate Alison, and a young blind woman named Mary.

After so many years in film and TV, it’s hard to believe it’s taken this long for Rebecca Gibney to be offered the lead role in a feature film. But Gibney has made the most of this opportunity, turning in a stellar performance for director Harold Brodie in The Map Reader. For her role as single mother Amelia, the New Zealand born actress has re-adopted her Kiwi accent and added colour to what would otherwise be a supporting role.

Whilst not particularly bright, Amelia is hard working and eager to please. She wants to reconnect with her son, but her years of alcoholism may have caused irreparable harm to the relationship. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment as a mother will be her willingness to let her son go. Gibney’s portrayal of Amelia elicits much empathy for the character and of course, the experienced actress steals just about every scene she’s in…[read more]

In 25 words or less tell us why you would like to win The Map Reader on DVD.

Simply write your answer to this question in the “comments” section below and you could be one of the 5 lucky winners!

Entry to this competition is free and is open to all Australian residents over the age of 18. Entries open at 12:01am (AEDT) on 22 December 2009 and close at 11:59pm (AEDT) on 17 January 2010.

Australian Women Online’s standard Terms & Conditions apply to this competition.

Top Tips for Baking with Kids

With another school year over, many parents are now looking for fun and affordable ways to entertain the kids during the school holidays. One option for entertaining the kids at home is to teach them the basics of cookery. From preparation to cleaning up and all the fun stuff in between, cooking with kids is not only a cost effective activity for children, it is also a great way for parents to teach their kids about responsibility and food safety in the kitchen.

Thanks to the popularity of TV shows like MasterChef Australia, kids of all ages are taking more of an interest in cooking and if you make it fun, they’ll never know they’re actually learning a valuable life skill. Children will enjoy measuring the ingredients, breaking the eggs, stirring the mixing bowl and rolling the biscuits. And of course, everybody will enjoy eating the finished product. Read more

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