Blog Posts by YouBeauty.com

Prepare your meals for the entire week—it's easier than you think.

Are you that person who frantically runs to the grocery store every afternoon because you have nothing for dinner? "Planning is the key to a balanced lifestyle, particularly when it comes to meals," explains Sharon Richter, registered dietician and FITiST expert based in New York City. "When you don't plan, you gravitate towards high fat, processed items," she says.

MORE: Cooking Gadgets That Make Your Life Easier

But if you commit to making your own food-and cook a lot at once-you'll know exactly what ingredients are in your dish, you'll save money and you won't find yourself hard-pressed for a meal at the last minute. Not sure where to start? All you need is a little how-to instruction on big batch cooking. And that's where we come in:

1. Choose One Day a Week To Work
Designate two or three hours on a weekend or a non-busy week day or night to grocery shop and cook your staples for the week's meals, suggests Devin Alexander, celebrity chef of NBC's "The Biggest

Seems like mushrooms truly are magical.

Mushrooms may not be a fruit or a vegetable, but science says they are a boon to your health. You may already have a hunch that they pack a pretty nutritious punch: "They're a good source of fiber, they also are low in calories, and they offer unsaturated fatty acids," says registered dietitian Heather Bauer, founder of the nutrition subscription service Bestowed. But recent studies have shown that mushrooms have even more benefits than we previously realized.

MORE: Why You Can't Stand Certain Foods

Not a fan of mushrooms? You may change your mind after we walk you through these fungi findings and the myriad of ways mushrooms boost your health:

Lose Weight
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University studied a group of adults who were trying to lose weight. Over the course of a year, half of these dieters substituted mushrooms for meat in their meals. The researchers found that these mushroom-eaters lost more weight than those on the meat diet, and they were able to keep

Getting in tune with your body is the best way to appreciate it.

Listen to your heart may sound like just another cliché catchphrase, but researchers have discovered that taking it literally may actually boost your self-image.

A 2013 study from the Department of Psychology at the University of London found that women who were closely in tune with the beating of their hearts had a healthier body image than women who weren't as accurate.

QUIZ: How Healthy Is Your Body Image?

Researchers had 50 volunteers try to listen to and count their heartbeats for a set period of time while a data unit recorded the actual number of beats. Then, the volunteers completed questionnaires designed to determine the extent to which they objectify themselves (that is, value their bodies based on attractiveness), a tendency that reflects poor self-image. The researchers found that women who rated highly for self-objectification were the ones who least accurately estimated their heartbeats.

While more research is needed to determine how much inner body

Now that chain restaurant menus list how many calories are in each dish, it's harder to justify eating certain foods anymore (we're talking to you ,460-calorie scone from Starbucks). But a study, presented by Texas Christian University researchers at the Experimental Biology meeting in April 2013, found that people make even healthier choices if, instead of seeing the calorie count, they're shown how much exercise it takes to burn off what they're considering eating.

Maybe one day, menus will list how many minutes you'll need to log on the rowing machine to erase that scone (48 minutes with vigorous effort, for the record). Until then, here's a quick guide for you (all calorie calculations are based on a 140-pound woman).

- by Melissa Walker

More From YouBeauty:

9 Nutritionist-Approved Snacks

Should You Get the Breast Cancer Gene Test?

The Health Benefits of Mushrooms

A preventative double mastectomy could be what keeps her healthy and cancer-free.

Angelina Jolie revealed today that she had a preventive double mastectomy after discovering she carried a "faulty" gene that made her highly susceptible to breast cancer. Now, she's encouraging other women to seek out information and consider testing for the same genes-namely, mutations on genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, which have been linked to the development of breast cancer. But how necessary-not to mention affordable-is this?

MORE: What's Your Risk of Cancer?

The 37-year-old Oscar-winning actress wrote an op-ed in today's New York Times announcing her decision to undergo a double mastectomy after losing her mom to ovarian cancer and finding out that Jolie herself had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer due to a mutation of the BRCA1 gene, which predisposes her to both diseases.

There's no denying that the numbers surrounding breast cancer are scary: More than 230,000 women are diagnosed in the U.S. alone each year and nearly

There's a reason that sometimes they can't help but stop and stare.

We Asked: Viren Swami, Ph.D., YouBeauty Attraction Expert and Reader in Psychology at the University of Westminster in London, England.

The Answer: They stare, they ogle, they pat and they pinch. But what is it that draws some men so intensely to the female behind? The long held theory that an hourglass figure, including a full lower body, is attractive because it suggests health and fertility has been largely discredited. It has yet to be replaced by a convincing alternative.

MORE: Best Sculpting Exercises for Your Butt Type

What we do know is that a booty is a uniquely female trait-and therefore uniquely feminine. After puberty, sex hormones begin to dictate the distribution of fat on the body. In men, fat accumulation is stimulated around the gut and inhibited in the seat. It's the opposite for women, who tend to carry fat in their gluteofemoral region, that is, the butt and thighs.

MORE: Butt Moments Through The Years

That doesn't mean that males everywhere are

Talking badly about your body is never a good look.

When was the last time you told your friends you thought your butt looked too big, or explained how much you wanted to lose just five pounds? How many times have you played verbal tennis, volleying back and forth about your body issues?

Ninety-three percent of women do it, no matter their weight. It's a bonding ritual-or at least that's how it seems, both to women everywhere and psychologists who study body satisfaction. But emerging research on fat talk-those disparaging comments about your own weight and body-suggests that, far from endearing you to other women, it could make them like you less.

QUIZ: Do You Fat Talk?

To test what women really think when others fat talk, Alexandra Corning, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab presented 139 college women with one of four types of photos. The photos were of either thin or overweight women, accompanied by a caption relating either a fat-talk statement or positive

Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan

Remember the first time you fell in love with someone who didn't want to be with you? The total high when he looked your way and the gut punch of his cold shoulder? The agony of unrequited love gets Baz Luhrmann's extravagant treatment in a new movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," coming to theaters May 10.

MORE: How to Be Lucky in Love

In the story, Gatsby and Daisy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, are teenage sweethearts separated by the war. Daisy has since married a rich, powerful man, Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby is doing everything he can to get her back. He becomes a self-made millionaire, buys a house across the water from hers and throws lavish parties hoping to see her at one of them. He finally does rekindle the fire, only to have his heart broken again when she won't leave her husband.

Gatsby is disturbingly obsessive, but his response to lost love is a heightened version of what we all go through. It's a natural, chemical