Blog Posts by Tips on Healthy Living

By Julie Underwood
You're Not Listening to My Words Blogger
As a kid, I lived for summer break. But as a parent, I dread it. I've found that establishing a summer routine makes the transition from school to summer break a little less chaotic. Children crave structure and when they don't have it, they can become a bit unglued. A summer morning schedule is a good place to start-otherwise before you know it, it's 10 AM and they are still in their jammys playing Nintendo DS (ahem).

So now that you have your mornings planned out, how about some fun, inexpensive ideas to make your time together more fulfilling? Here are a few creative things I have done with my kids over the summer that I thought I would share.

Open a "pop-up" restaurant in your home. Make it "one night only" and invite friends and family to come to your big opening. Plan and create a unique (but simple) menu. Shop together. Help your kids prepare the meal, take orders, and serve.

Have a movie

By Nell Stephenson
Author of Paleoista
There are so many diets out there, some based on science, others on religion or ethical beliefs, and more than I can count based on nothing other than anecdotal experiments or strange food combinations. But what's the best for physical endurance sports like marathon running and triathlon racing?

Having experimented with my own diet over the years, I feel well versed in providing an overview from a personal standpoint as an endurance athlete who's followed several different types of eating plans, all while training for and racing triathlon. Two in particular that stand out are a vegan diet and the Paleo Diet.

Keep in mind that this describes my own personal experience of how the two diets apply to my training and performance. It is not an attempt to stimulate argument or controversy over the animal rights issues that were the very reason I followed a vegan diet for two years, about a decade ago. When I followed a vegan diet, I

By Lindsay Harrison
Author of Missing
Two days before beginning graduate school, I moved from suburban Massachusetts to New York City, where I would be living in an unfamiliar neighborhood with roommates I'd found on Craigslist. I didn't know a single person in the city, and to say I felt like a fish out of water is an understatement.

Lucky for me, being in a small graduate program fostered fast friendships. My first two years in the city flew by in a whirlwind of classes, nights discussing books with my new writer friends, and then, all too soon, our graduation ceremony. The friends I had made moved to other cities and moved on with their lives. I stayed on in New York, moving to Brooklyn and selling my first book. My social life was suddenly nonexistent. Out of school for the first time in my life, I had to find new ways to make friends. Working from home as a freelance writer does not lend itself to making work buddies. When I heard about a co-ed social sports

By Dr. Mike Moreno
Author of The 17 Day Diet Cookbook
Going on vacation doesn't have to mean going off your diet. Sure vacations are the time you want to kick back, relax, and enjoy everything-but kicking back doesn't have to kick out eating right. Here are some practical suggestions to help you enjoy your vacation without undoing all the hard work you have put into losing weight.

Decide on what your diet plan is for the vacation. Do you want to maintain your current weight or continue to keep losing weight? For weight loss, you'll have to make sure you are sticking to your cycle; if you want to maintain your weight but haven't reached your ultimate weight, you can follow cycle 4 for vacation and then switch back to cycle 1 when you come home.

Don't take the "all you can eat buffet" and "unlimited food plans" literally. You can wind up eating a day's worth of calories in one meal if you do.

Stick to a regular schedule and make sure to eat meals and filling

By H. Ballentine Carter, M.D.
Author of The Whole Life Prostate Book
Taking the best care of a man's health begins with the basic understanding that the prostate is a little gland with the potential for big trouble. The prostate, not "prostrate" as so many men misname it, is the walnut-sized organ located at the base of the bladder that supplies some of the fluids in semen that supports the sperm. The size of a pea at birth, the prostate reaches its normal size by age 20. That's when problems can often begin.

For unknown reasons, the prostate is prone to the development of a disproportionate number of diseases that can affect a man's health-and greatly increase the possibility of erection problems. These include non-cancerous enlargement of the gland and a variety of bothersome urination symptoms that come from that; inflammation within the prostate and nearby pelvic floor muscles; infection; and prostate cancer, which typically scares-and harms-men the most. The good

Do you pick one religion when raising your kids in an interfaith marriage? Neither? Incorporate both into your family life? When author Elizabeth Weil met with Rabbi Larry Kushner to discuss her interfaith marriage, she got some unexpected advice that was not welcomed by her husband, Dan. From No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better.

I laid out our basics: Dan and I were raising our children as they were-part Jewish, part Christian. Given that neither of us was devout, we'd turned over the girls' religious training to our parents. Jewish holidays we celebrated with mine, Christmas and Easter with Dan's. My folks, predictably, took their job very seriously: children's services at their temple on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; a monthly subscription to the PJ Library book club, with kids' titles like Hanukkah at Valley Forge and You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! Up until the day I met Kushner, I felt solid and calm about our system. I helped

The best advice for watching your party budget is to start from scratch. The more you do yourself, the slower the costs add up-and the more fun you can have. Try these economic ideas from Tori Spelling's CelebraTORI: Unleashing Your Inner Party Planner to Entertain Friends and Family.

FOOD AND SHOPPING
The best way to save money on food is to make fewer dishes. Pull a number of recipes that interest you, then edit yourself. Be realistic. Think about how long the party will last and how much an average person eats. Sure, it's good to have an overabundance of food, but not a wasteful amount. And you certainly don't want to buy ingredients for a recipe that you end up having no time left to make. Go to the store with a set menu and a shopping list.

This may sound obvious, but before you go to the store, check to see which ingredients you already have at home. I must have six jars of cinnamon because I never remember to check before I'm at the store shopping for ingredients

What is the "secret sauce" that makes a happy marriage work? Many people resist it. The important thing to remember is that what couples need from each other evolves throughout life, says therapist and author Dr. Steven Craig in The 6 Husbands Every Wife Should Have: How Couples Who Change Together Stay Together.

When they marry, most people say things like, "I love you just the way you are; don't ever change!"-and they really mean it. The notion that their spouse might change is scary and nonsensical to most newlyweds. Furthermore, popular opinion supports this idea, dictating that marriages fail because people change. But of course people change! All healthy people grow and change as they mature. It's those who don't change who find themselves trapped in unhealthy marriages. The truth is, most marriages don't fail because people change, they fail because people don't change.

Couples need to change and grow in order to invigorate and rejuvenate their relationship. Despite