American Marketing Scam #1 – If you LOOK sexy, you must BE qualified, good enough, smart enough, honest enough, or whatever enough… – deserving of whatever it is you want.

In the USA obesity – body mass index above 30 – is pandemic. My sense is that the “problem” has become societal as well as personal. Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” illustrated one important fact – fast food can make you fast fat. Our wealthy society has created a situation where most Americans under-exercise and overeat. Further, our lifestyles of cubicles and computers and fast food mean many Americans don’t see the kitchen for weeks on end.

On the psychological side, there is the ever-present push here for you to eat more. Every other TV commercial is about FOOD – the others are about CARS – and ALL use thin, sexy models to sell their wares. Ack!

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Dark chocolate – my miracle drug of choice.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a compound in dark chocolate may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage. They found that mice given the compound suffered significantly less brain damage after induced stroke – even when given to them hours afterward.

OMG! Is there nothing dark chocolate can’t do?!

It seems the more research is done on the miracle drug, dark chocolate, the more amazing things they find it will do for you.

I’d write more about it now, but I gotta get down to the See’s Candy Store. I gotta replace my emergency supplies. You never know when I might have a stroke and need it! And, of course, it’s only reasonable that I test for quality before I have to use it for real – don’t want the EMTs stuffing BAD chocolate down my throat at the moment I need the good stuff!

Be right back…

And what was that about my weight-loss regime? Hey! You know what they say? A pound of prevention……..

A scotoma is a mental situation in which one locks on to one idea and excludes all others – known as the “lock on lock out” principle. We all do it – it’s our human way of avoiding overwhelm when faced with too many choices. However, a scotoma can get you into trouble as we shall explore here.

In a Spongebob Squarepants cartoon, Spongebob gets up one morning and thinks he’ll create a fantastic dessert for himself. Unfortunately, his choice of ingredients cause him to have horrific halitosis (bad breath). Spongebob proceeds to go outside, where he meets several people, all of whom scream and run away from him as soon as he opens his mouth and says, “Hello.”

His conclusion – “I must be terribly ugly!”
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Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults.

Eight-year-olds respond better to positive feedback (‘Well done!’) than negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’) whereas twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

Developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered this difference using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and barely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their strategic “control centers” in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

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Stop reading this article, get a piece of paper and a pen, and do this exercise RIGHT NOW!

You’ve probably heard and seen them all – sure-fire ways to manifest what you want. Here’s a rather simple method that takes your ideas out of your head and gives them a head-start (so to speak) by manifesting your goals in writing first. This starting point seems to set them up for manifestation and is a lot of fun to boot.

Some years ago, Ranae Johnson, the originator of Rapid Eye Technology, kept a shoe box in which we placed such papers – like a wish list. I don’t know what happened to the box. I do know what happened to my life – it took off in the directions I wrote about – BIG TIME.

Write out what you want on a piece of paper:

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