Thursday, July 22, 2010

This is Why You are Fat

"Being fat isn't your fault; staying fat is." That's what Jackie Warner, America's favorite no-nonsense celebrity fitness trainer tells her own clients, and that's why no one delivers better results than Jackie does. Now for the first time, Jackie shares her revolutionary program, showing readers the best ways to drop pounds and inches fast, without grueling workouts or deprivation, and keep them off for good! Her two-tiered approach provides a complete nutritional makeover and a failure-proof condensed workout routine PLUS all the emotional support and encouragement you need to get to the finish line and beyond. With Jackie's core principles, you'll discover once and for all which behaviors are making you fat, and which can finally make you thin forever-and some may surprise you:

1. It’s not how long, it’s how strong. Incorporate 20 minutes of high intensity cardio each day. Walk fast on a treadmill for 2 minutes at a 15 incline then sprint for 2 minutes on flat ramp. Cool down for 1 minute and repeat this cycle 3 more times until you reach your 20 minute goal.

2. Women, make sure to include weight training at least 3-4 days a week. If you add 3-5 pounds of muscle to your body, you will burn 250-500 extra calories per day which equals 3-5 pounds of fat loss per week

3. Visualize the muscles you are working on–this is called the mind muscle connection and it will actually increase tone.

4. Your body hits a plateau with cardio and resistance training in one month so change your weight, reps and exercises accordingly

5. The fastest way to get the body you want is through my power circuit training. Combine 3 upper body exercises and 3 lower body exercises together to make one big set. Do not rest in between and alternate quickly from upper to lower for maximum fat burn.

6. The only muscle groups that really burn fat are the primary muscles like the chest, back, quads, glute and hamstrings. Focus hard on those!

7. You have to eat within an hour of working out to make sure you’re not eating into the muscle for energy. Make sure that you combine proteins and carbs like a blended protein shake with fruit and peanut butter or a piece of fruit with a low-fat string cheese.

8. Don’t just set a weight goal, set a physical goal too like running a 3k or training for a charity marathon. Human beings are competitive and you will spark that inner competition by trying to reach a difficult physical goal.

9. A little thing like changing your music playlist every week can go a long way. The more your mind is stimulated during your workouts, the better your results will be.

10. Instead of focusing on being fat, you’ve got to focus on being fit. If you think healthy, it eventually becomes reality to you. I always push my clients to focus on how strong they’re getting, how well they’re sleeping, and how happy they’re feeling by exercising.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

If You Have to Cry, Go Outside (Kelly Cutrone)

Ok, her photo is totally airbrushed, but we love Kelly Cutrone and we will equally love this book. Like, who wouldn't want to work for her? You know exactly where you stand with Kelly Cutron, and she makes no apologies for who she is or how she comes across. This book should be on the desks of any manager or executive who needs to grow a pair of b@lls and get sh*t done.

In this New York Times bestseller, Kelly Cutrone, the brash, brutally honest boss and mentor to Whitney and Lauren on the hit MTV series “The Hills” and “The City,” and star of Bravo's "Kell on Earth," combines personal and professional stories to share her secrets for success without selling out.

"Cutrone works in an industry that is superficial and fickle, but she’s the real deal. Her advice rings true no matter what field you’re in...."— The Associated Press

Book Description

Kelly Cutrone has long been mentoring women on how to make it in one of the most competitive industries in the world. She has kicked people out of fashion shows, forced some of reality television's shiny stars to fire their friends, and built her own company—one of the most powerful PR firms in the fashion business—from the ground up. Through it all, she has refused to be anything but herself.

Kelly writes in her trademark, no-bullshit style, combining personal and professional stories to share her secrets for success without selling out. Let's face it: this is a different world than the one in which our mothers grew up, and Kelly has created a real girl's guide to making it in today's world. Offering a wake-up call to women everywhere, she challenges us to stop the dogged pursuit of the “perfect life” and discover who we are and what we really want. Then she shows us how to go out there and get it. Much of our culture teaches us to muzzle our inner voice and follow the crowd; Kelly enables us to stop pretending and start truly living.

With chapters on how to find your tribe (those like-minded souls who make your heart sing), how sometimes a breakdown is really a breakthrough, and how there is no such thing as perfection, Kelly also shares practical advice, such as how to create a personal brand and how sometimes you have to fake it to make it.

Raw, hilarious, shocking, but always the honest truth, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside calls upon you to gather up your courage like an armful of clothes at a McQueen sample sale and follow your soul wherever it takes you. Whether you're just starting out in the world or looking to reinvent yourself, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside will be the spark you need to figure out what you have to say to the world—and how you're going to say it.

“Kelly’s book is full of anecdotes from her personal and professional life as well as motivational tips.”

Monday, July 12, 2010

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist is hired by Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of Vanger’s great-niece Harriet. Henrik suspects that someone in his family, the powerful Vanger clan, murdered Harriet over forty years ago...

Starting his investigation, Mikael realizes that Harriet’s disappearance is not a single event, but rather linked to series of gruesome murders in the past. He now crosses paths with Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker, an asocial punk and most importantly, a young woman driven by her vindictiveness.

Together they form an unlikely couple as they dive deeper into the violent past of the secretive Vanger family.

Must read the book before watching the movie. Your thoughts??

Friday, January 15, 2010

COMMITTED: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met.

Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous horrific divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which—after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing—gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is.

Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to "turn on all the lights" when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities. Gilbert's memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Best of the Best 2009

The 10 Best Books of 2009

By THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

After so many years, and so many lists, you might think the task of choosing the 10 Best Books would get easier. If only. The sublime story collections alone created agonies of indecision. So did the superb literary biographies we read — and deeply admired. But in the end the decisions had to be made.

Not that drawing up the list — or rather, whittling it down — was a wholly painful exercise. One of the pleasures it afforded was the chance to re-sample the sometimes surprising chemistry of reviewers and authors, particularly when it came to fiction. Jonathan Lethem, whose “Chronic City” made our list, reviewed Lorrie Moore’s novel “A Gate at the Stairs,” which made it too, while Curtis Sittenfeld, whose novel “Prep” was one of the 10 Best in 2005, reviewed Maile Meloy’s story collection “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It,” a winner this year. Any book review editor will attest that persuading fiction writers to assess other people’s fiction can be a struggle. These were heartening exceptions to the rule. May more novelists review for us in 2010!

This list will appear in print in the Dec. 13 Book Review. —The Editors

Buy these books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or local booksellers: Amazon Barnes and Noble Local Booksellers

Fiction

BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT

By Maile Meloy
Riverhead Books, $25.95.

In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them.

CHRONIC CITY

By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, $27.95.

Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS

By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.

Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.

HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel

By Jeannette Walls
Scribner, $26.

In her luminous memoir, “The Glass Castle,” Walls told of being raised by eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a novel based on family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith — mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The result reanimates a chapter of America’s frontier past.

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN

By Kate Walbert
Scribner, $24.

The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations and the impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert’s prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning.

Nonfiction

THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

By Richard Holmes
Pantheon Books, $40.

Holmes harnesses the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention in this superb intellectual history, which recreates a glorious period, some 200 years ago, when figures like William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Joseph Banks brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work,” and literary giants like Coleridge and Keats responded giddily to these breakthroughs, finding in them an empirical basis for their own faith in human betterment.

THE GOOD SOLDIERS

By David Finkel
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.

Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor at The Washington Post, gives full voice to his subjects, infantry soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan. (average age 19), posted in the lethal reaches of Baghdad at the height of the “surge.” Finkel’s own perspective emerges through spare descriptions — of a roadside bombing or the tortured memories of a single soldier — that capture the harrowing realities of war.

LIT: A Memoir

By Mary Karr
Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99.

This sequel to “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry” is also a master class on the art of the memoir. Mordantly funny, free of both self-pity and sentimentality, Karr describes her attempts to untether herself from her troubled family in rural Texas, her development as a poet and writer, and her struggles to navigate marriage and young motherhood even as she descends into alcoholism.

LORDS OF FINANCE: The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed
The Penguin Press, $32.95.

The parallels with our own moment are impossible to miss in Ahamed’s narrative about four members of “the most exclusive club in the world,” central bankers who dominated global finance in the post-World War I era. Ahamed, a longtime investment manager, evokes in glittering detail a volatile time of financial bubbles followed by busts, all of it guided by players wedded to economic orthodoxy.

RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer’s Life

By Carol Sklenicka
Scribner, $35.

Ten years in the making, this prodigiously researched and meticulous biography sympathetically and adroitly integrates its subject’s work with the turbulent life — marred by alcoholism, financial turmoil and family discord — that brought it into being. Sklenicka shrewdly deconstructs Carver’s fraught relationship with Gordon Lish, the editor who played an outsize role in the creation of Carver’s stories, the most influential of a generation.

: 10 Best Books of 2009

Sunday, August 9, 2009

The Witch of Portobello

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho is a great and mysterious read, with a bit of spiritual drama throughout.

The book begins with the death of the main character, Athena, and is written from the perspective of those who knew her – her adoptive mother, her ex-husband, a journalist , a priest, her landlord, a teacher, a historian and an actress. All the characters provide a different perspective of her, describing what they saw and experienced then adding their own impressions, interpreting her through their own beliefs and fears.

As the book begins, Athena is dead. How she ended up that way keeps the pages turning in the book. Athena grows into a woman in search of answers to many questions that arise within a person. She has a contented life but her mind is not at ease. So she sets out to find answers to the classical question of "Who am I?" through many experiences. In her quest, she opens her heart to intoxicating powers and becomes a controversial spiritual leader in London.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tweets

There are several Twitter books out there now, and if you are not already one of the millions of users joining Twitter to connect to friends, family, and interest groups, you soon will be.

Twitter is not only used to connect to friends, family, or to follow online threads and find out what’s happening around the globe.

This full color 288 page book tells readers how to set up a Twitter account, tweet from your cell phone, search for people and interest groups, and add Twitter to your blog. The book is an easy read and written in a user-friendly manner. It will be easy to try out the tips and tricks found in this book and you will soon see why Twitter is the hottest thing right now.

The downside? This book is written in more than 140 characters.