Continue reading »]]> Here are some useful exercises which promise to keep your body tonus. They can be blended with other cardio work outs or when using hcg ultra drops for losing weight.

Lie infront of a gym bench with a bar-bell on the floor in front of you. With your hands gripping at shoulder width and your knuckles facing away from you, lift the bar-bell up to the underside of the bench and then back down. Repeat ten times in three sets. “The temptation is to lift your chin and your chest off the bench. But keep the chin on the bench, don’t let your back curl and feel the exercise through the arms and lats,” says Grubor.

Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, holding a bar-bell with your arms straight down and palms facing out. Curl up from the elbows and bring the bar-bell almost up to your chin, making sure the elbows are tucked in and the arms, not the back, are doing the work. At the top of the range, stay contracted so the weight is held in the arms, and then lower. Three sets of ten. “Like the upright row, it helps to have bent knees and a bit of lean forward.”

Sitting sideways on a gym bench, take a dumb-bell in your right hand and, with your right elbow tucked inside your right thigh just above the knee, slowly raise the weight up and then down, feeling it in your bicep rather than back or shoulder. Maintain a good form rather than trying to lift too heavy a weight and aim for three sets of ten. “This isolates the bicep. You can use your spare hand on your thigh to help wedge the elbow.”

With your left knee and left hand on the gym bench and right foot toes on the floor, grip a dumb-bell in your right arm and pull a relatively light weight up to your body smoothly by closing the angle at your elbow. Keep the body still. Do ten times and repeat on your left-hand side to make a total of six sets of ten reps. ”

This helps your general muscular stability — for example, you’ll be using your stomach and your back, your lats and your arms. But don’t twist your torso.”

You can do this with either dumb-bells or a bar-bell, but form is better maintained with bar-bells. With a weight in either hand, arms straight down by your sides, standing up and maintaining full foot contact with the floor at all times, lift your shoulders up and back and then control them on the way down. Three sets of r o. “Use a relatively heavy weight for this one, having initially learnt the movement with a lighter weight.”

Stand with feet shoulder-width apart and hold a bar-bell with palms facing towards you, hands together. Keeping your lower back straight, pull the weight straight up to the chin. In the last few inches make sure your feet are flat on the ground. If the weight is too heavy, go lighter to keep the form good. Repeat ten times in three sets.

“This is an excellent workout for the front of your deltoids that also uses the biceps, forearms and traps. Make sure you keep your knees bent slightly and lean forward slightly so that you can feel just a bit of the weight in the lower back.”

The emphasis is on keeping the form good-back straight, elbows tucked in, the movements very controlled.You should feel it in the arms and chest, not the neck and back. “Do three sets of 20, resting for a minute between each set.”

The same form and body shape as for a regular press-up, but you have your hands together so that your forefingers and thumbs form a diamond shape under your chest. “You should feel this one towards the centre of your chest.”

Form the normal press-up position, push up hard and fast and, in mid-air, clap your palms together under your chest. “This is a good one for building explosive power. It sounds hard but it’s do-able.”

As an incline bench press, but with back vertical. “If you want to build mass, go for a higher weight with fewer reps ¬eight, then six, four and two. If you want speed and explosive power, use a lower weight but do four sets of ten, faster. If you want to combine the two, do one on Monday and the other on Wednesday, ensuring you give your body time to recover.”

BENCH PRESS-UPS This is the same as a normal wide-arm press-up, except you have your feet up on the gym bench instead. Form-wise, keep your arms in close to your body, so that your elbows are tight into your side. Do two sets of 20. “This one works both the pecs and the triceps.”

Adjust the gym bench at 45 degrees from the vertical. Take a wide grip on the weights bar and hold it at the top of your chest before pushing up and away with a steady movement. Do sets of ten reps, then eight, six and five. “Use a weight that’s tough but allows you to complete the set”

WIDE-ARM PRESS-UPS Shape as if for a normal press-up but move your hands a hand-span or so further away from your body than you would normally have them and then press-up as usual. Keep it nice and controlled throughout. “You’ll find that will burn, but it’ll work!”

PEC DEC WORKOUT Most gyms have one of these machines, which ensures form is taken care of for you. Simply keep the mantra “slow and controlled” in your mind and do four sets of ten. “Push yourself hard but ensure you can complete the set.”

Continue reading »]]> A veteran taster can tell the exact plantation a tea comes from, even the season it was plucked. If he likes a tea he says it is “attractive,” with a good “bloom” and “nose,” and has a “wiry” and “biscuity” character: that is, a well-made tea with a nice sheen, pleasant characteristics and good aroma. But a tea that is either “chesty,” “dull,” “flaky,” “baggy” or “hungry” is not worth buying.

Sam Twining, the firm’s export director, also took me to a tea auc­tion where 40 people were standing around in groups, speaking in discreet undertones. In the gentle­manly tea trade, business is con­ducted with only a few murmured words passing back and forth between purchaser and broker. In one day, as much as L2.5 million worth of tea may be sold.

And how do you make a good cup of tea? “The important thing is to make it the way you prefer it,” Twining said. Nevertheless, he passed on some general rules : keep your tea in a tightly closed con­tainer; always use fresh cold water, brought barely to a boil; and pre-warm your teapot, preferably one made of earthenware or china.

Steep the tea for three to seven minutes, depending on whether you are using a small- or large-leaf tea. If you use a strainer when pouring, a stainless-steel one is least likely to affect the tea’s taste. And there is apparently nothing wrong with put­ting milk into the cup first—in fact, it makes for a more evenly heated drink. Tea-bags? The tea tasters I talked to agreed unanimously that you can make a perfectly respectable cup of tea with a tea-bag, provided you buy good-quality ones.

Follow these simple rules, and—provided your tea is wiry and bis­cuity, with a good bloom—you will have a brew worthy of a Chinese mandarin. And you might become, like Samuel Johnson, “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker . . . who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight and with tea welcomes the morning.” Another good way to start your day is by getting msm powder and look healthy and younger.

Continue reading »]]> Tea got to the New World almost as early as to Europe. In the seven­teenth century, Dutch ladies of New Amsterdam served several types, with saffron or peach leaves for flavouring. In New England, where tea cost up to 30 a pound, Puritan housewives boiled the life out of it, drank it bitter, then thriftily ate the leaves with butter and salt. The leaves are as useful as the olive leaves. The olive leaf extract side effects are wide-ranging.

Tea would probably have become the American national drink if Brit­ain had not tried to tax it in 1773, inciting the outraged colonists to board three British East Indiamen in Boston harbour and toss over­board 342 chests of tea. In the years that followed the Boston Tea Party, tea all but disappeared from the American market.

Nevertheless, America made major contributions to its distribu­tion and consumption. One was the design of the clipper ship : Britain adapted it for the China trade, and soon flooded the market with reas­onably priced tea. Another was the tea-bag, inspiration of New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan. In 1904 Sullivan began sending out samples of his tea in little hand-sewn silk bags. Soon his customers were dropping his samples in boiling water and asking for more.

Top Brew. Americans consume some 200 million pounds of tea a year, about one pound per person. But this is still far less than the astonishing seven pounds per person in Britain. To keep the nation’s tea­pots filled, Britain takes in no less than 30 per cent of all tea exported by the producing countries, making her the world’s largest single importer.

Although there are less than half a dozen botanical varieties of tea plant in the world, it can be said that there are as many teas as there are plantations, seasons and soils, and various combinations of these. Tea is amazingly sensitive to its en­vironment—to soil, climate and odours. Thus the Chinese tea, Lap-sang Souchong, owes much of its smoky flavour to the soil of China’s Fukien Province, while the Indian Darjeelings get their fruity flavour from the soil and climatic conditions of the Himalayan foothills.

Teas from high altitudes are the most highly prized, since they grow more slowly and develop more dis­tinctive flavours. Apart from the Darjeelings, the best Indian teas are the Nilgiris from the mountains of the south-west and the strong, pungent Assams from the north­east, always best drunk with milk. Sri Lanka has its Dimbulas, Dikoyas, Uvas and top of the mountain Nuwara Eliyas.

The best Keemuns come from China, along with the tea used to make what several firms market as “Earl Grey.” Although tea firms are notoriously secretive about their blends, this one seems to contain, in addition to China tea, a bit of Darjeeling, to­gether with oil of bergamot, pressed from the skins of bergamot oranges.

During the five or six annual har­vesting periods on the great Asian tea plantations, pluckers carefully nip of the two top leaves and a bud and toss them in the baskets on their backs. A good plucker gathers 65 to 70 pounds of green leaf each day. The leaves are then dehydrated,

processed and packed for market.

Most of the business in the in­ternational tea trade is done in London. At Twining’s, prob­ably the oldest (1706) English tea-blending house, I was taken into a scrupulously clean room where half a dozen men were tasting, evalua­ting and classifying teas. A taster tests up to 50o or 6cm samples a day, and sales worth hundreds of thou­sands of pounds may ride on his judgement. He begins by drawing tea—noisily—into his mouth with a spoon. He swirls the liquid round in his mouth and finally squirts it into a spittoon.

Continue reading »]]> IF you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you.” That was Glad-stone’s verdict. Indeed, wine may be the drink of conversation, whis­ky of conviviality, and coffee of the midnight scholar, but it is tea we turn to when we would be lucid, calm and at ease with ourselves.

Every day thousands of millions of cups of tea are consumed around the globe-230 million of them in Britain, where workers have been known to go on strike to safeguard their tea-breaks. Travellers on the Trans-Siberian Railway sip tea made with a samovar, while in Aus­tralia, Aboriginals drink it out of blackened billy cans. Kenyans greet a guest with “Karibu chai’ or “Welcome, let’s have some tea!”

Where do we get this boon, for which we all should be profoundly grateful? The tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is a cultivated descendant of the wild camellia. An evergreen, it grows as high as 30 feet when wild but is pruned to only three or four feet when cultivated. It thrives best on acid soils and well-drained hillsides, can grow on mountain slopes up to 7,000 feet, and must have at least 5o inches of rain a year. Tea plants have been known to live for more than too years.

Although tea can be grown on the northern shores of the Black Sea and right on the Equator, most of the world’s supply still comes from the regions that made the major types famous : India, China and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Africa, which now produces 12 per cent of the world crop, may be the tea exporter of the future.

Pick-Me-Up. Tea mainly consists of caffeine and tannins, which, when combined in well-brewed tea with theobromine and theophylline (two mild, non-addictive drugs), stimulate the heart and central ner­vous system and reduce stomach acidity. Tea also contains useful fluorides, volatile oils, B vitamins—and, with milk, only four calories per cup. Just like the Gnet supplement which will boost your immune system.

The ancient Chinese insisted that tea was good for anything from banishing halitosis to “making the bones feel lighter.” In seventeenth century London, Garraway’s Coffee House advertised tea as being good for “headaches, stone, dropsy, sleepiness, looseness or griping in the guts.”

Poet William Cowper spoke glowingly of “the cups that cheer but do not inebriate,” and even generals espoused tea-drinking: after Waterloo the Duke of Wel­lington was heard to say, “Tea cleared my head and left me with no misapprehensions.” Mod­ern believers agree that no other beverage has such power to calm as it stimulates, to give so much plea­sure while doing so little harm.

First Taste. It is thought that tea was first grown in China about 2,000 years ago, and reached Japan in the sixth century. It came to Europe in 1610, when traders of the Dutch East India Company re­turned from Java with chests of leaves. In the Netherlands it was at first sold in apothecary shops along­side exotic spices.

In Britain, where it began to in­vade the London coffee houses, it was outlandishly expensive (a pound of the cheapest tea cost about one-third of a skilled work­man’s weekly wage). As improved transport and cultivation brought down the price in the nineteenth century, it supplanted coffee as the national drink. In 1840 the Duchess of Bedford started serving tea with cakes at four o’clock, to assuage a “sinking feeling” she got at that hour. Thus tea became not only a beverage, but also a meal.

Continue reading »]]> For centuries, scientists refused to believe that ball lightning existed. They dismissed the persistent reports of these ‘balls of fire’ as mere superstition. Although, as RON HYAMS explains, ball lightning is now recognised by established science, its causes remain unexplained

FLYING TOWARDS Elko, Nevada, USA on a routine mission to refuel B47 bombers in flight on 16 June 1960, a USAF KC-97 tanker aircraft ran into a layer of cloud at 18,000 feet (5500 metres).

The pilot was concentrating on the instru­ment panel when he was surprised to see a yellow-white ball of light, 18 inches (45 centimetres) in diameter, emerge silently through the windshield. It passed at a fast running pace between his seat and the co­pilot’s, and travelled down the cabin passageway past the navigator and engineer.

The pilot had been struck by lightning twice on previous flights and knew that an explosion was imminent. His immediate reaction, as an experienced airman, was to concentrate on flying rather than to turn round and watch the ball drift to the back of the aircraft.

After a few seconds of shocked silence, the four men in the flight compartment heard over the intercom the excited voice of the boom operator, who was sitting in the rear of the aircraft. A ball of fire had come rolling through the cargo compartment, danced out over the right wing, and rolled off harmlessly into the night.

This remarkable report concerns ball lightning — one of the many natural pheno­mena for which science has no explanation. In fact, the properties of ball lightning are so hard to explain that for years scientists doubted its very existence. Their principle was that what can’t be explained can’t exist.

This attitude, unfortunately, is by no means rare among scientists. The fall of meteors to Earth was for many years con­sidered a superstition of ignorant peasants. Indeed, despite many well-documented ob­servations of these fiery bodies, sceptics were at one point so sure of their case that rare meteorite specimens were removed from museum collections and destroyed on the grounds that the stories of meteorites falling from the sky were mere superstition.

The ball lightning controversy has di­vided the scientific community since the early 19th century, when the first compre­hensive reports were prepared on the sub­ject. In 1890 a large number of luminous globes resembling ball lightning appeared in a tornado and were the subject of a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. The glowing spheres entered houses through the chimneys and bored circular holes in the windows as they departed.

A member of the Academy stood up at the end of the account and commented that the extraordinary properties supposedly attri­buted to ball lightning should be taken with a liberal pinch of salt, since the observers must have been suffering from optical illusions. In the heated discussion that followed it was agreed that the observations made by un­educated peasants were valueless. At this point the former Emperor of Brazil, a foreign member of the Academy, silenced the meet­ing by remarking that he himself had actually seen ball lightning!

Even today, many of the reports still have a certain medieval aura of witchcraft and magic about them, which scarcely serves to endear the subject to sceptics. Yet over the centuries literally hundreds of sightings have been made. The evidence for ball lightning now seems irrefutable.

An observation reported in great detail was made by a Russian chemist, M. T. Dmitriev, in 1967. He was camping on the banks of the River Onega in western Russia when there was an intense flash of lightning. A ball of fire appeared, hovering over the water. It was an oval mass of light with a yellow-white core surrounded by layers of dark violet and blue.

Apparently unaffected by the wind, it hovered across the water at a height of about

foot (3o centimetres). Dmitriev heard it crackling and hissing as it flew across his head and on to the river bank, where it hung motionless for about 3o seconds.

It left a trail of acrid, bluish smoke as it passed into a group of trees. It bounced like a billiard ball from tree to tree, emitting burst after burst of sparks. After a minute it disappeared from view.

From this and many similar reports it is possible to sketch out the properties ‘typical’ of ball lightning. It usually occurs at the same time as cloud-to-ground lightning. The balls are generally spherical or pear-shaped with somewhat fuzzy edges, and they range from half an inch to a yard (z to ioo centimetres) across. They shine as brightly as a domestic electric lamp; they vary in colour, but are often red, orange or yellow, and they last for anything from a second to over a minute.

The disappearance of a lightning ball may be either silent or accompanied by an explo­sion. Probably the best known report of a lightning ball causing material damage was reported in 1936 by a correspondent to the Daily Mail. He wrote that during a thunder­storm he saw a large ‘red hot’ ball, subse­quently described as the ‘size of an orange’, come down from the sky. It struck the house, cut the telephone wire, burnt the window frame and then buried itself in a tub of water underneath the window. The water boiled for some minutes — but when it was cool enough to search, nothing could be found.

How rare is the phenomenon? In a survey, 400o NASA employees were asked whether they had seen ball lightning. Their answers indicated that it might occur more common­ly than had been thought:

A comparison of the frequency of ob­servation of ordinary lightning impact points [with appearances of ball light­ning] reveals that ball lightning is not a particularly rare phenomenon. Con­trary to widely accepted ideas, the occurrence of ball lightning may be nearly as frequent as that of ordinary cloud-to-ground strokes.

Faced with a phenomenon with such an unusual array of properties, scientists have had an unhappy time searching for a theory to fit the facts. Many scientists have de­veloped elaborate theories to explain away the whole business as an ‘hallucination’ or an `after-image’.

All in the imagination?

The Canadian scientist Edward Argyll claims that ball lightning is merely an optical illusion. He says that when lightning strikes the ground it creates such a bright flash that an observer will see a persistent after-image that can easily be mistaken for ball lightning.

By embracing this theory, Dr Argyll can finally make sense of the extraordinary pro­perties of ball lightning that are the despair of theoreticians who attempt to seek a plausible physical mechanism for it.

Passage through physical surfaces,such as metal screens, is possible for after-images and is reported for light­ning balls. After-images last for 2-10 seconds, and most lightning balls are reported to have a duration in the same range.

Unlike lightning balls, after-images generate no sound. But this is no problem for the sceptical scientist: ‘The typical observer finds it easy to imagine “suitable” accom­panying sounds.’ But what does Dr Argyll make of cases where the lightning ball leaves physical signs of its presence? He simply rejects the evidence that contradicts his theory: ‘If ball lightning is an optical illusion it would not be unreasonable to categorise these reports as unreliable.’

Yet there can be little doubt that, however imperfect the observations, and in spite of the outlandish behaviour of ball lightning, it does exist. No one will deny the existence of after-images, and most of us have experien­ced them. But how could they possibly explain fireballs that appear to more than one observer, on the same occasion, to have precisely the same form and to travel” the same path? And how could the after-image theory explain the fact that, although reports come from people who have not previously heard of the existence of ball lightning, all accounts display common features?

Continue reading »]]> When Nejma Khanum met the artist Peter Beard, she was half his age and the match was deemed so unsuitable by her parents that they sent her away. Still, not only did the couple marry and have a daughter, but Nejma also became his agent. This month, she is bringing his work to London

            On the edge of New York’s Central Park, there is an apartment so full of dizzying detail that it’s hard to know where to look first: at the enormous photographic and painted collage of dead elephants, one of the owners’ signature artworks; at the antique Egyptian tent hanging over the mezzanine’s balustrade; or at the multitude of embroidered and beaded artifacts — scattered tokens of a vigorously unpredictable life.

            In this glamorous reliquary live a dashing adventurer-artist-ecologist-rogue and his wife, agent and “troubleshooter”, a beautiful woman of serene intellect and humble exoticism. Nejma Beard (nee Khanum) was born in Kenya of Afghan parents. The youngest of seven children of a high court judge, Nejma was brought up under such strict protection that when she went to Sussex University her parents tried to send her with a nanny.

            It was, ironically, through a friend of theirs that she met the man she now refers to simply as ‘PB’. Peter Beard was, and is, an extraordinary conflagration of characters — as famed for his art as for his environmentalist activities and his playboy habits. He had photographed — and loved — some of the most beautiful women in the world, he had befriended Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon and he was an heir to Karen Blixen.

            His reputation didn’t intimidate Nejma whose aquiline looks and softly spoken manner are more beguiling than any cover girl’s. “I was crazy about PB,” she recalls. “You know, a person’s past is part of them — you have to embrace it, understand it and enjoy it. A lot of his old girlfriends and ex-wives are close friends of mine. I’m not a jealous person.”

            “The weirdest thing of all,” she adds, lighting a cigarette, “was that when I was a child I had seen in the back of Time or Newsweek the photo of Peter in the crocodile [a legendary shot of a gloriously tanned Beard casually writing in a http://www.gnet.org/raspberry-ketones-natural-powerful-fat-burner/ notebook, while everything below his waist is wrapped in the mouth of the beast] and I looked at it and thought, that’s the kind of man I want to marry. When I met Peter, it took me a couple of months to realised it was the same bloke.”

            She was 25, he was 50; when her parents found out they “stuck me on a Lufthansa plane with high security and sent me off to Heidelberg,” where her uncle was a professor. But Beard found her, they ran away and were married on the cliffs of Montauk, where, 15 years later, they still have a house on the very tip of the island. They now divide their time between Manhattan, Montauk and Hog Ranch in Kenya, where their daughter Zara grew up speaking two African languages.

            “Don’t give away any secrets, Nej!” Peter calls out, “like how horrible it is to live with me!” His wife smiles. “Guilty conscience?” she asks. He leans over to grab one of her cigarettes — “I save her life by five minutes a day by doing this,” he tells me — and leaves in high spirits. In an inversion of their biological ages, Nejma considers herself to be her husband’s guardian, an arrangement the Beards have recently extended to his work. Now Nejma organises Peter’s shows, photo shoots, travel, books, and she films him while he works. She has amassed five years of footage, some of which will accompany his forthcoming exhibition.

            But far from giving herself over to his art, Nejma remains, as she says, “very much my own person.” It has always been imperative to her that Zara was “brought up in a very stable way,” and in a life of continuous motion, Nejma has been the constant. She remembers an occasion when the headmistress of Zara’s New York school thought Zara had been lying. She had written a little book about her life in Africa. “She said that she’d played with the warthogs, and she’d fed the giraffe and that she sat by the fire and ate raw meat with the Masai — which was completely true.” Now Zara wants to be an artist, and “knows she’s different,” Nejma tells me, adding: “I think it’s a great thing to be — an outsider, looking in.” Peter’s latest book is to be called Zara’s Tales, and is a collection of stories she was told in Africa.

            Nejma still devotes herself to rather cerebral forms of travel (she recently took her cue from Herodotus and went to the oasis where Alexander the Great had met the oracle). “The world has become too small,” she says, “and every bit of it you should find sacred.” And on that note, I must leave her, because some Bushmen are coming to tea.

Continue reading »]]> Almost everyone surely wants to know the secrets of those individuals, who possess a “perfect” body, or more importantly, those persons who were previously fat and now enjoying a slim and sexy body. Don’t be too jealous, in fact, you can actually do the same. All you need to have is discipline and proper knowledge on how to effectively lose weight. Have you heard about raspberry ketones? Or green coffee weight loss? How about what exercises burns the most fat? These are some of the things you might don’t know that exists but these are some the key ingredients in losing some unwanted fats residing in your belly, thigh, arms, chest for men, and butt. If you want to discover more about these secrets in weight loss, it is highly advisable to keep reading.

Exercises That Burns the Most Fat

It is a common misconception that once you do any exercises, you will lose weight. Actually, part of that statement is right and the other half is quite misleading. In reality, there are certain exercises that are built to burn fat more effectively than others. These exercises will concentrate in reducing your actual fat mass while improving your core strength. As a result, you will have a leaner and stronger body. Both fitness trainers and dieticians agree that all exercises that are proven to burn fats are under single category- aerobic exercises. These exercises, if done correctly and daily, will improve your endurance as well as to eliminate fats in certain areas.

Green Coffee Weight Loss

This is one of the secrets that are known to limited individuals only, so consider yourself lucky. Green coffee is the best alternative for your usual black coffee. Not only that it contains lesser caffeine which is good to your heart, but it can also lower blood pressure while boosting metabolism. As a result, it will induce an effective fat burning in the liver. In addition, green beans coffee has a natural active compound known as Chlorogenic Acid which is a key ingredient in the inhibition of glucose production in the body. This compound also inhibits the fat and sugar absorption of your fat-storage cells resulting to weight gain elimination.

The only sad news about it is that you can’t drink it as coffee if you want to maximize its weight loss component. Roasting the green coffee will surely lessen Chlorogenic Acid content thus leading to lesser weight loss outcome. That’s why green beans coffee supplements are now available in the market. Just make sure to purchase the pure one with no fillers and taste enhancers so you can fully enjoy its weight loss benefits.

Raspberry Ketones
Raspberry ketones are another good supplement for weight loss. It greatly helps in liberating the unused and stored fats from the fat-storage cells. This means that your body will have an access to convert these fats into energy. In this way, you don’t have to eat more proteins just to sustain your energy. Raspberry ketones also inhibit future fats and sugar to be stored again, so your body can convert them immediately.

The aforementioned secrets for weight loss can be of immense help in achieving your weight loss goals quicker and safer.