Learning a language is a daunting task. Especially for most Americans who often aren’t offered a foreign language in the public school system until high school. By this age, the ability to learn a language has already started slipping away from us.

All over the world people are speaking English, and pretty well at that. In many parts of Europe and Asia it’s not uncommon for a student to start learning English, or another foreign language, in elementary school.

If you’re hungry, eat.

Starving yourself will not result in healthy long-term weight loss. Even on a short-term basis, it will mostly cause only a loss of water weight, not much actual fat.

If you eat 1500 calories or less for weeks on end and find that you’re not losing weight, it’s likely because your metabolism has adapted. Some people even try to eat only 1200 calories or so. This can cause a multitude of problems. Not only will your body go into starvation mode and metabolize fewer calories a day making significant permanent fat loss unlikely, but you can become seriously deficient in essential vitamins and minerals.

When cutting calories a lot of people turn to meal replacement bars or shakes. I’ve read recently in a health magazine that individuals trying to lose weight who replace one meal a day with a drink do tend to have more success at losing weight in general than people not using meal replacements.

On the other hand a nurse told me that some meal replacement shakes work a lot like some baby formulas. The mixture expands once it’s in your stomach to make you feel full temporarily. This can cause constipation in babies and is one of the many reasons to breast feed. Meal replacement drinks that expand in the stomach can also cause constipation for adults.

Ah, here I am… My first day of summer vacation, bright sun, blue sky, a warm gentle breeze. Wait, that’s some chick on a magazine cover. I’m the one standing in a line of 15+ people in a tiny dilapidated building with no air conditioning, which somehow serves as a post office for the city of Vincennes in France.

There are no computers, none of the self-service machines work, and there are only two unhappy employees glaring from beneath dripping brows. The room is so small that strangers occasionally brush their sweaty bodies against me. A tall African guy touches my derriere more than once. I doubt it’s a complete accident.

What to eat and what not to eat, that is the question…

First of all, not all healthy foods are optimal for losing weight, and even more importantly, many “diet

One of the benefits of living in France and being married to a French citizen is definitely the system of social medicine. I haven’t been insured for more than a few months at a time since being booted off my parents’ insurance in college. As a result, I learned to take care of myself as best as I could with over the counter drugs, herbs, and vitamins.

It’s not unheard of for an American having chest pains to say, “I’m sure it’ll pass,

People think it’s so glamorous to live in Paris, and they are usually a bit surprised to find out how much I dislike it, unless they’ve actually lived here.

I suppose if I was here on vacation seeing Notre Dame and the Eifel Tower for the first time that there would definitely be some charm. However, I’m not on vacation.

I’ve never been somewhere quite this filthy, and I’ve been to some dirty places.

One day I assigned my students to write about a significant event. The assignment was to retell the event and then explain how it affected them.

Most of the students wrote about the death of a grandparent or the birth of a sibling. Two students, however, wrote about an event that seemed extremely insignificant to me. Perhaps their lives were pleasant. Perhaps nothing traumatic or seemingly important had happened.

I suppose I was raised to believe in reincarnation. My mom claims to remember past lives, well, mostly past deaths, and she talked about it quite a lot while I was growing up.

If you would have asked me if I believed in reincarnation ten years ago I probably would have said yes. What I often used to think about back then was that there were some people that we were connected to beyond this life. Maybe my brother was my best friend, my best friend was my husband or wife, or my mother was my child.

I’ve written before about “growing up fat

Each season presents certain obstacles to weight loss, depending on where you live.

In general, most people don’t get outside for walks often in the winter or the rainy season. If you don’t make an effort to replace outdoor activities with indoor activities, like going to the gym, joining an indoor sport, or using exercise DVDs, it can be difficult to maintain a high level of physical activity.

Everyday at the same time I pass a man and his daughter walking on the street. The man is always walking at least 20 feet to half a block in front of his teenage daughter, who has Down’s syndrome.

The first time I saw them I didn’t think about it, because occasionally we get ahead of the person we’re with by some random act of shoe-tying or such. But after several weeks of passing these two, I suddenly realized today that the man NEVER walks with the girl.

At 12 years old I already weighed around 200 pounds. I was obese at such a young age that it’s difficult for me to look back and accurately evaluate my choices. I can reflect on my teenage years and analyze my behavior, but I was obese long before that. So how did it happen?

I don’t have any health problems that can lead to obesity. Doctors have been checking my thyroid regularly and everything always comes up normal. Inherent obesity doesn’t seem to run in my family. So, why?

Paris is burning, and no, I don’t mean cars getting torched in the Parisian suburbs.

My first time in Europe was about two years ago. I landed in the Copenhagen airport in Denmark, stepped off the plane, and got a nice big cancer-causing whiff of cigarette smoke.

The last few years living in Europe has consisted of an onslaught of second hand smoke attacks. You can’t walk down the street in Paris for more than a block without choking on someone’s cigarette smoke, unless it’s 7am on a Sunday.

Dance It Off, a cardio workout DVD from Prevention Fitness Systems, is made up of four different routines. Each of the routines incorporates a different style of dancing; hip-hop, latin, jazz, and ballet.

The first time you pop in this workout will be fun and a bit challenging. It’ll take several tries before you can really follow along with the dance routines.