DP Health And Wellness: Is Only Yoga Enough To Loose Weight

A DelhiPlanet Health And Wellness Exclusive, In Association With Queen Yogini Kristin McGee

It is a common perception among people and especially the youth that yoga is a very slow form of exercise and not as intensive or satisfying as a gym workout. It is for this reason that not many young people take to it and even those who do treat it as something to help them do their workouts better or as an alternative to them. People who wish to loose weight feel that just doing yoga may not be enough and that results would be produced over a really long period of time. So what do the experts thin about this, in today’s article, Kristin writes about her thoughts on this.

It’s funny because people often ask me if all I do is yoga to stay in shape. A new private student today asked me that very question the other night and what else she could do along with her yoga to help her lose weight. Yoga is definitely a weight loss tool to some extent because it teaches us how to be mindful. As we become more aware of our bodies we can experience true hunger and feed ourselves when we’re hungry and learn to stop when we’re full. If we could all do this, we would naturally find our set point and be at a healthy weight.

But we eat for so many reasons outside of hunger. We eat to celebrate, we eat when we’re depressed, we eat because others are eating, etc. etc. So yes I do think yoga is a great way to lean out by tuning in to our body. Is it enough of a workout to blast calories and build strength? I think so, especially if you’re doing it correctly and really utilizing the breathing and working hard in the poses. But I also think it’s important to add some cardio. I do supplement my yoga with walking everywhere in Manhattan, playing tennis when I can and skiing every time I go home to Idaho. I also teach and do a lot of Pilates.

It’s important to do what you enjoy, and if I could do yoga all the time I would. I absolutely love it! The main thing is to continue to listen to your body and respond truthfully to its needs. Yoga more than any other activity will teach you this and that can be a huge benefit on many levels, including losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight.

Oh P.S., a great Web site for healthy recipes is www.hungry-girl.com.

Note: The above has been published by DelhiPlanet in association with and with explicit permission from Kristin Mcgee and originally published by Kristin on findyourdetour.com. Any reproduction without proper approval and acknowledgment is prohibited.

Cheap Beer In Times Of Recession

These are tough times in the world’s financial markets and just like the employees of Lehman, Merill Lynch and AIG have found out things can change drastically in a very short time. In such times it’s interesting to see the reaction and response of people all over the world especially those who work in unrelated industries.

The Fifty/50 Restaurant in Chicago for instance is hoping to give the employees of these companies a break. Apparently the bar is offering a half-off bar and restaurant tab for anyone who can prove they work or worked for AIG or Lehman Brothers. “Everybody is freaking out. We wanted to do something to make their day a little better,” said Scott Weiner, co-owner of The Fifty/50 restaurant. Lehman’s parent company filed for bankruptcy this week and AIG was bailed out by the U.S. government. In addition to job losses, the former’s stock traded for pennies while the latter was below $5 a share.

The offer is good Sunday through Thursday until October at the restaurant west of downtown Chicago. Weiner said 20 or 30 people, many of whom he had gotten to know while managing another restaurant frequented by employees of the financial companies, had already accepted the half-price discount (Source).

Well, it surely helps to unwind with a couple of beers while job hunting and such things can really help to overcome the depressed mood of an unstable economy.

Hear It, Record It and SHAZAM, You Got It

Imagine yourself in the following situations and just try to think what is common to all of them :

• On the way to or from work you hear an amazing track on the radio that you’ve heard many times before and you really liked. You would love to get hold of this track for your iPod but you just don’t know the name of track or the artist.
• You are at a club or at a bar having a good time with your friends and you hear a track that catches your fancy, it would be great if you could catch hold of that track to add it to your collection but again “How do you find out the track information ? “

The above are just a few scenarios where you just wished that there was a way you could find out the track information of the song you were hearing. Well, if you’re still wishing then it’s get ready to rejoice cause your prayers have just been answered. Shazam ID, Music ID or Track ID are the latest technologies that allow people to find out the track information of any song just by recording the first few seconds of that song. Pioneered and developed by Shazam Entertainment, a privately held company headquartered in London, this technology is designed for mobile handsets which have access to the internet.

So how does one use Music Id. Simple, the Music Id application resides on your phone which has access to the internet either via GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi. As soon as you hear a song that you like, you turn on the application and choose the option to find the music id of the song. As soon as you do this the application records the song for 5 seconds, sends the data to a database and within the next 5 seconds you have the information about the song that you were looking for. So basically in just 10 seconds one can find out all the information about a particular track. Shazam uses a patented fingerprinting technology that recognizes practically any audio that is within the recognition database very quickly and with a very small amount of audio even under heavy noise. Shazam’s internals are, no doubt, “commercially confidential“, however there is some information on possible algorithms available on the web.

The basic game is to compute a spectrogram at points of peak intensity in the music; the argument here is that a piece of music is, roughly speaking, characterized by how the loudest bits sound. At each peak in each piece of music, the spectrogram is divided into 180 buckets with frequencies between 200 and 2000Hz, and an entire piece of music is described by a sequence of such 180-value spectrograms, stored with their time position in the song. Matching is done by computing a similar sequence of spectrograms from the query (as recorded from your telephone or whatever) and searching for similar spectrograms in the database of known songs (sure, all this is not so easy to understand for the layman, but see here if you wish to know more technical details).

Shazam ID or Music ID is now available for a number of different phone models and was recently also introduced for the iPhone. It’s a really cool application and is great way to impress your friends or even win over people that you may like. The video below shows a practical use case of Music Id as well as a demonstration.

Looks great doesn’t it. So now the next time you need to find something about a track that you hear, just relax and Shazam it.

The Great American Recession - Good For Some, Bad For Others

The past week was perhaps the one of the worst weeks ever for financial markets all over the world as news about the bad financial condition of major firms like Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch and AIG crept in. As the week progressed it saw the demise of the 158 year old investment banking behemoth, Lehman Brothers which filed for the largest bankruptcy ever in U.S history on September 15^th. Pictures of employees leaving it’s Manhattan office represented a harsh reality of the current American Economy which goes for it’s Presidential Elections in just a few months. News of a Merill Lynch ( headquartered in NYC and it occupies all 34 stories of the in Manhattan) buyout by Bank Of America for USD $50 billion all stock deal was also confirmed ending the history of the 94 year old company as well. To add to the woes and distress of investors from all around the world the American International Group (AIG), one of the world’s biggest players in insurance and financial services, sought a $ 40 billion bridge loan from the US Federal Reserve as it faces a sharp downgrade from rating agencies. The Federal Reserve did come to the rescue of AIG late on 16th with a $ 85 Billion bailout.

The recession in the United States is proving to be far wider and deeper than was anticipated a year ago in August 2007 and while this is mostly bad news for a lot of people it also good news for others. The bankruptcy of Lehman has lead to layovers of it’s employees across the world and the acquisition of Merill Lynch by BOA is also likely going to result in a lot of pink slips. This in turn will have a deep impact on B-School graduates passing out in 2008 and 2009 as there would be a severe dearth of jobs in the investment banking and financial sectors for some time to come. As per IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn the global financial crisis is not over and more banks could close, possibly leading to the disappearance of independent investment houses. “The fact that a certain number of banks in the United States are restructuring shouldn’t lead to panic, But these events add to the uncertainty, and financial tensions cannot be excluded in the short term” he said in an interview in the wake of Monday’s collapse of major US investment bank Lehman Brothers (Source).

The Recession has also lead to the dollar becoming very weak. Comparing it to the rupee it currently trades around the Rs 46 mark which is at least Rs 3-4 more than what it was a couple of months back. This is probably good news for Indian Software companies and exporters as they would be earning more rupees for each dollar quite in contrast to the scenario about an year back when the rupee had become quite strong trading at around Rs 40 to the dollar.

The weakening of the dollar is also great news for a lot of Europeans and the American tourism industry as people from Europe are flocking to US to take advantage of the strong euro and weak dollar scenario. With a weak dollar, foreign tourists are flocking to the United States — particularly New York City. Compared with last year, the number of international visitors increased by as much as 12 percent during the first four months of 2008. It’s hard to imagine a city like New York seeming cheap to anyone, but for many foreign travelers, that’s exactly what it is. With every one euro equal to $1.43 and every one British pound equal to $1.82, if there was ever a time for Europeans to travel in the U.S., it’s now. During the first four months of 2008, more than 15 million foreign travelers visited the United States and spent $11.6 billion in the month of April alone — a 21 percent increase from April 2007 — according to the U.S. Department of Commerce which tracks travel and tourism statistics. After Canada and Mexico, the largest group of foreign tourists is from Western Europe, and their visits through April of this year have increased by double-digit percentages, the agency reports (Source).

Experts suggest that the current recession will take a while to get over and things are expected to become much worse before they start getting better.

DP Health And Wellness - The Art Of Listening

A DelhiPlanet Health And Wellness Exclusive, In Association With Queen Yogini Kristin McGee

In daily life there are many occasions where people just don’t know what to do in spite of receiving clear instructions. This happens because many a times we aren’t just listening and are occupied with other thoughts or are doing something else. Just like writing and speaking, listening is also a very essential component of effective communication. People can avoid many problems and communicate very effectively if they just listen well. In today’s article Kristin will share her knowledge on how important it is to listen effectively and how yoga can help enhance that.

Sometime back when I was teaching my 12:30 yoga class at Clay and I gave the instruction “step your left foot forward and drop your right heel to the ground, lift up to warrior 1“, many students looked around for someone to make the first move so they could follow. Some of the students stepped their right foot forward instead and the rest of them were still in dog pose daydreaming! It made me realize just how much we’ve lost the art of listening.

We’ve become such a visual society and become lazy as far as how we learn. I remember taking a trapeze class down on the West Side Highway with my niece when she came to visit from Idaho. I learned very quickly that if you don’t listen and do exactly what they tell you to do when they tell you to do it, you’re screwed! My 12-year-old niece was a pro at it — she just listened and followed instructions. I wonder if we start to doubt ourselves as we age or if we get complacent and believe that hearing things is enough to get by instead of listening closely and absorbing things with our whole being. I think a lot of miscommunication in relationships could be solved if people truly listened to each other.

Yoga once again to the rescue. It is one of the few places where the teacher doesn’t do any demonstrating, but instead speaks the class through the poses and allows the students to experience the process. It is a wonderful way to redevelop all of our senses, especially our ears and truly listen. Once we give into listening we automatically are present and can no longer predict what will come next or get lost in what already happened. That is why music can make us feel so good — it puts us immediately in the moment and allows us to listen and experience things on a whole new level.

Note: The above has been published by DelhiPlanet in association with and with explicit permission from Kristin Mcgee and originally published by Kristin on findyourdetour.com. Any reproduction without proper approval and acknowledgment is prohibited.

DelhiPlanet Weekends - Everyone Is Born A Female

Have you ever wondered why men have nipples or why some men have more feminine characteristics than others ? As much as people may like to deny it, it is a fact that each one of us has certain male and female characteristics. So not all men are burly and masculine and not all women are slim and gorgeous, although it is the biological makeup of men which tends to give them certain female characteristics. As any high school science text book would tell you, every human being gets a unique set of 23 pairs of chromosomes at conception. These fall into two categories. One pair of chromosomes determines sex–the XX combination means you become female, the XY combination means you become male.

However what most textbooks won’t tell you is that every individual is born as a female and it’s not till after the 7^th week of conception that one starts to develop any male or female features. At that early stage of prenatal life, there is a fork in the road of development. If there are no hormonal changes in the prenatal environment, the embryo developes into a female. If, however, the embryo is destined to become a male, its Y-chromosomes trigger the production of testosterone (the male hormone), which masculinizes the brain and genitalia (internal as well as external) of the embryo. But it takes no female hormone to produce a female infant (Only at age ten or later does the female body begin to produce the hormones that transform the girl into a woman).

So basically every person begins life with a proto-female brain. Testosterone masculinizes the brain (and genitals) of those embryos that are genetically marked to develop as males. Almost all male genitals are thoroughly masculinized. But, there is some direct evidence, and lots of indirect evidence, that there is a wide range of variation in the degree to which the male brain is masculinized. It is for this reason that there are many males with a lot of female tendencies all over the world, although the opposite is not that widespread (Source).

So the male nipple is basically the result of the first 7 weeks of life. Human nipples appear in the third or fourth week of development, well before the sex characteristics. As many as seven pairs of nipples are arranged along either side of a “milk line” a ridge of skin that runs from the upper chest to the navel. It is also true that both male and female babies are born with the main milk ducts intact–the gland that produces milk is there in the male, but it remains undeveloped unless stimulated by the female hormone, estrogen. Occasionally, a male baby is born with enough of his mother’s estrogen in his body to produce a bizarre phenomenon known as “witches‘ milk,” with the male glands, suitably stimulated, pumping away at the moment of birth.

Let Me Introduce You To My Children - Indiana And Dow Jones

Imagine yourself at your university’s 15^th year reunion party. You meet up with your old friends and catch up on all the time that has passed by and if you’re married with kids you would also introduce them to all your friends and their families. Imagine the reaction that you would get upon introducing your kids as Indiana Jones and Dow Jones. Well, your kids names will surely take your friends by suprise and would definitely make them stand out.

The past few years have seen an increase in the number of cases where parents have given odd, unique and at times even absurd names to their children so as to get media attention and experiment with their wild thoughts. So while Indiana and Dow are acceptable names (Indiana Elizabeth Jones and Dow Joseph Jones are the children of Port Deposit, Maryland resident Jennifer Jones) a name like ‘”Talula Does the Hula“, a 9 year old from New Zealand is just crazy. It’s a well known fact that a person’s name adds certain important characteristics to one’s nature and for people in film/media it plays a very important role in their careers (read here for more). Some names might not seem problematic until they’re actually used on a daily basis. Open Weaver Banks of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey feels that parents should think twice before giving their children an unusual name.

Open is an unusual name, but it’s not necessarily a name that one might expect to cause regular difficulties. Weaver Banks, however, says that she often has problems with it. “I have a hard time using my credit cards for personal items, because clerks will accuse me of using a business card. I cannot tell my name to someone without having to explain it. Some days, it is exhausting, and I can’t even disguise the annoyance in my voice“. Surprisingly it is the children of celebrities who have the weirdest names, for ex: Bluebell Madonna Halliwell is the daughter of Spice Girl Geri Halliwel, boxer George Foreman’s children, all named George and actor Jason Lee’s son is called Pilot Inspektor (Source).

Slate.com actually lists a series of cases where Judges in various states had to rule against requests from people to change their names to stuff like 1069, Misteri Nigger(with the second i silent) and Santa Claus. While it’s important to have a nice sounding and unique name, parents should be careful with what they name their kids as giving your kid a strange name can often have deep psychological effects.

Tags: hula, hawaii, santa, celebrities, names, banks, indiana, dow

Its Here And It Rokx - Google Chrome, The Real Web 2.0 Browser

They say that the key to selling a product effectively is to market it well and that Marketing is all about understanding the importance of the 4 P’s, price, product, placement and promotion. So while Apple has been really smart to have been able to sell millions of iPhones for more than a year now using a marketing strategy which highlighted all of the new features of the iPhone while hiding all it’s flaws(there are number e-mails doing the rounds highlighting the some of simple features that the iPhone lacks), google on the other hand has developed it’s brand by providing excellent quality products that no one can resist from using (although most of their products never make it past beta). Also unlike most other brands google hardly spends any money on marketing and announces it’s products only a day or two before it’s launch, thereby creating great curiosity on the day of the launch.

So a couple of weeks back there wasn’t much known about Google’s plans to release a browser, but the next few days are all going to be about Chrome, Google’s New Open Source web browser. Google took the unusual step of announcing its new browser via an online comic, the first page of which is shown below.

Google chrome is built on the WebKit engine which is used by Safari, Adobe AIR, iPhone, and Android. It has a brand new look and feel with the tabs occupying the top of the window, which gives you a really different browser experience. Some of the cool features of chrome are given below while you can check out the rest here.

• Whenever you create a new tab in chrome, instead of bringing up a blank page or home page, it creates a “new tab” page that shows links and images to the most visited pages, recently closed tabs and search engine boxes for favorite sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia and Amazon. In Google Chrome, there is also an “incognito window” feature - which is much like the private browsing feature found in IE8.
• Google Chrome promises to be more stable than IE(which is now the worst browser in the world) and Firefox 3 as each browser tab will run in its own process so a buggy web page won’t take down the entire browser. This also means that if you 6 tabs open in a single window you can see 6 processes running in your Operating system’s process manager and not just one.
• One can very easily move the tabs around and reorder them.Also each tab will have its own controls and its own URL bar, which Google’s developers are calling the ‘Omnibox‘.
• Google Chrome has a private browsing mode - if you create what it calls an “iincognito window” then pages won’t be saved in your history and when you close the window, any related cookies will be deleted.
• Google Chrome will feature a new JavaScript virtual machine. Google says this will be more efficient at running JavaScript-heavy apps such as Gmail, and allow smoother drag-and-drops.

There is wide speculation the chrome is a very serious threat to IE and would soon go on to rule the browser market, however it doesn’t seem that Google wants to compete with Microsoft in anyway because Google’s products are mostly open-source and are far superior than any of Microsoft’s products. By giving away the code, Google is practically begging other browser makers (including the top two–Microsoft and Mozilla) to take pieces from their browser and incorporate them into their own.

Well we had a great time writing this post in chrome and quite frankly it is a really good browser. It’ll take a while for it penetrate the browser market and it would be interesting to see if the big organizations across the world would think of migrating their business and enterprise applications to be compatible with Chrome. Now all we need is a brand new Operating System from Google that would be pre-loaded with all of google’s products and if it works anywhere as good as their search engine or their applications then people won’t even mind paying decent money for it. If you wish to know more about the thinking behind chrome, then checkout the comic here or watch the video below.

Now if you can’t wait to try the chrome, then download it here.

Tags: google, chrome, IE, firefox, mozilla, internet, browser, experience, web, rocks, marketing

DP Health And Wellness : The Power Of Meditation, Part 2

A DelhiPlanet Health And Wellness Exclusive, In Association With Queen Yogini

Following up on the first part of this series(read here) we are back with the last part, where Kristin will share a really simple and effective method on how to practice meditation, which is one of the best ways to achieve a balanced mind.

Here is a how-to guide to meditation that I read recently in Positive Thinking magazine (a little-known but great publication!). I like to breathe in and out through my nose only when I meditate but do what works best for you.

Meditation 101

1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Wear loose-fitting clothing and sit cross-legged on a chair or cushion, or on the floor. If you have time constraints, set an alarm to ring softly.
2. Keep your back, neck and head straight. Leave your eyes unfocused and half open (I like to close mine completely). Get comfortable and relaxed and minimize movement.
3. Breathe from your belly, not your chest. Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Try to become aware of your breathing, fixing your attention on the inhalation and exhalation, how the air feels entering and exiting your body.
4. The goal of meditation is to become fully aware of the present moment. As you breathe, watch your thoughts come and go. Don’t fixate on any idea, thought or memory. Simply take note of them and let them fade. If you get distracted, retrain your focus on your breathing.
5. Keep breathing and refocusing for as long as you need. Gradually open your eyes, look around you and slowly stand up — refreshed!

I’ve learned that I don’t have to get up at 5 a.m. to mediate; I can meditate any time, any place and it’s truly making a difference in my life. I hope you give it a try.

Note: The above has been published by DelhiPlanet in association with and with explicit permission from Kristin Mcgee and originally published by Kristin on findyourdetour.com. Any reproduction without proper approval and acknowledgment is prohibited.