For someone who played sports throughout the majority of her life, I admit I was never good at portion control or exercising for weight loss. My teammates were extremely lean while I looked — as my brother would say — chonky.
I didn’t have the best relationship with my body so I wanted to slim down and feel better about it, but I couldn’t find anything in the U.S that I felt like I could realistically accomplish. To be honest, the fitness culture in this country scares me. I knew I didn’t want to drink Kombucha every day or attend expensive SoulCycle classes for the rest of my life.
When I lived in Japan for a couple of years, I was shocked by the not-so-intense fitness culture. None of my peers went to the gym, drank protein smoothies, or ate granola bars for meals. Throughout my time learning about their culture, I realized that the health culture in Japan gravitates towards prevention rather than cure, which is different from the US philosophy. Rather than overworking the body to compensate for the overconsumption of high-calorie food, Japanese people eat balanced meals and walk miles for commute every day. Not many people go to the gym or buy expensive products to sustain their healthy lifestyle because their daily routine is already healthy.
There’s one question I hear as a personal finance writer more than any other. It’s not how to game the stock market, or become a billionaire—it’s simply how to make a budget work while still saving enough to retire comfortably.
And of course, it’s simple: Change your habits so you can put money aside for the things that matter to you. But that’s also really, really hard to do.
That’s because understanding personal finance is an uphill battle for many Americans. We’re not taught about the practicalities of money in school, because the truth is many industries profit from our ignorance. While wages have hardly budged in decades, shareholders and CEOs have never been richer. The cost of living in many major cities is prohibitive to just about anyone but the super privileged, or those willing to take on a lot of debt or make enormous sacrifices. While the stock market soars, just 52% of U.S. adults actually owned stock in 2016, according to Gallup, and the wealthiest 1% of households owned 38% of all stock shares in 2013. The government is actively working against consumers to make it easier for financial institutions to prey on its citizens, and a single medical bill can send a person into debt for the rest of their life.
Your shoulders are some of the most important muscles in your body. They’re involved in every upper body movement, whether you realize it or not. Every pushing and pulling movement you make with your arms uses your shoulder muscles one way or another. That’s why it’s so important to keep them healthy and strong, which you can do with these five shoulder exercises.
Best exercises to build bigger shoulders
The best way to build stronger and healthier shoulders is to incorporate a variety of exercises that target your shoulders from different angles and via different movement patterns. You’ll find that the best shoulder exercises mainly involve pushing in some variation of an up-and-down movement, but other great shoulder exercises involve pulling or rotational motions.
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Strong shoulders are healthy shoulders. Juanmonino/Getty Images
Some of music’s biggest names will descend on the Great Lawn at New York City’s iconic Central Park for the “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert” on Saturday to perform for a vaccinated crowd of 60,000.
The concert is meant to be “a celebration of New York City’s comeback” after a challenging 17 months marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and will “promote health, safety, and equity,” according to a press release for the show.
The event, which is being aired exclusively on CNN, is produced by legendary music executive Clive Davis in coordination with the city of New York and Live Nation. The coverage begins with a pre-show hosted by Anderson Cooper at 4 p.m. ET, with the concert kicking off at 5pm.
The performers
Andrea Bocelli, Kane Brown, LL Cool J, Earth, Wind & Fire, Jennifer Hudson, Paul Simon, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Rob Thomas, Carlos Santana, The Killers, Julia Michaels, and JP Saxe, Barry Manilow, Jon Batiste, Elvis Costello, Lucky Daye, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Cynthia Erivo, Wyclef Jean, Journey, Maluma, Polo G, and the New York Philharmonic. There will be some surprise performers taking the stage as well.
Xàbia is a coastal town in the comarca of Marina Alta, in the province of Alicante, Valencia, Spain, by the Mediterranean Sea. Situated on the side of the Montgó Massif, behind a wide bay and sheltered between two rocky headlands, the town has become a very popular small seaside resort and market town. Half of its resident population and over two-thirds of its annual visitors are foreigners.
The area was first inhabited in prehistoric times, 30,000 years ago by cave dwellers on Montgó. Subsequent residents have included Stone and Bronze-age peoples, Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Visigoths, Germanic, Carthaginians, and Moors. Roman fishing boats used the port, and there is evidence that dates the Roman occupation of Xàbia to the 2nd century BC, it makes Xàbia the oldest known Roman site on the coast with a commercial port for fish and minerals.
In the 6th century AD, Christian Visigoth monks came to Xàbia and founded the monastery of Sant Martí, which likely gave its name to the cape in the area named Cap San Martí. Hermenegild, son of the Visigoth king Leovigild of Toledo, sought refuge in the Monastery after angering his father by marrying a Christian girl. When his father’s troops arrived to arrest him all but one monk fled to Portichol; Hermenegild and the old monk were killed. Several people with Visigoth names still live in the area. Wikipedia
The state Board of Education on Friday alerted Broward and Alachua school board members that funding equal to their salaries will be withheld.
Broward would potentially lose about $31,182 a month, which is equal to the monthly salaries of the eight School Board members who supported the mask mandate. The state will not withhold funding for the salary of Board member Lori Alhadeff, the only member who voted against the mandate. School Board members make $46,773 a year.
Alachua would lose $13,429 a month, which equals the salaries of four School Board members who supported the mandate, the order says. A fifth was board member was recently appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this week. School Board members here make $40,287.
COVID cases are so high in Orlando, Florida, that residents are being asked to cut back on water usage to save oxygen supplies for patients.
The city’s Utilities Commission asked residents Saturday to stop watering their lawns, citing a “shortage of liquid oxygen linked to the surge of COVID-19 inpatient treatments.” If residents didn’t do their part to reduce water consumption, the commission warned, “water quality may be impacted.
”Linda Ferrone, the commission’s chief customer, and marketing officer said the commission may be forced to issue a boil water notice if conditions do not improve.
“This is another impact of the virus continuing to surge in our community,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said in a Facebook post. “And it’s another result of what happens when residents do not get the vaccine and become critically ill, needing medical support and treatment.”
When the federal government enacted the CARES Act in March 2020, it boosted jobless aid and expanded the benefits to include people who weren’t typically covered, like gig workers. The legislation was designed to cushion workers against the massive blow of a partial economic shutdown during the pandemic.
But if you haven’t already buried your memories of last year, you probably remember how difficult it was to get those unemployment benefits.
Horror stories circulated about people waiting on hold for weeks, trying to get the money they needed to stay afloat. Maybe you remember spending long hours on the phone or the computer yourself. Delays in unemployment benefits heightened feelings of uncertainty that characterized much of 2020 and made the experience of losing your job even more frightening. But as Cezary Podkul reported for ProPublica this week, this expansion of benefits also attracted fraudsters from all over the world who sought to cash in on the CARES Act. In hindsight, the millions of phony unemployment insurance claims were a large part of what clogged states’ overtaxed computer systems, delaying payments to unemployed Americans filing legitimate claims.
We all know that lifting weights can build up our muscles. But by changing the inner workings of cells, weight training may also shrink fat, according to an enlightening new study of the molecular underpinnings of resistance exercise. The study, which involved mice and people, found that after weight training, muscles create and release little bubbles of genetic material that can flow to fat cells, jump-starting processes there related to fat burning.
The results add to mounting scientific evidence that resistance exercise has unique benefits for fat loss. They also underscore how extensive and interconnected the internal effects of exercise can be.
Many of us pigeonhole resistance training as muscle building, and with good reason. Lifting weights — or working against our body weight as we bob through push-ups, squats, or chair dips — will noticeably boost our muscles’ size and strength. But a growing number of studies suggest weight training also reshapes our metabolisms and waistlines. In recent experiments, weight workouts goosed energy expenditure and fat burning for at least 24 hours afterward in young women, overweight men, and athletes. Likewise, in a study I covered earlier this month, people who occasionally lifted weights were far less likely to become obese than those who never lifted.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Source: Diana Polekhina / Unsplash
James' World 2 