Tag: healthy living
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Why you should stop making New Years resolutions
When I was 19, my older brother bet me that I couldn’t go three months without consuming added sugar. My stubborn adolescent self began the challenge immediately. For the next three months, I watched wistfully as my family ate perfectly ordinary things like spaghetti and cheese toasties (added sugar in the spaghetti), my mum’s homemade…
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Growing older doesn’t mean growing old
My preschooler shuffled around on his seat until his face was almost pressed against the glass of the gondola. The whir of the cables serenaded us over rocks, grass and the odd sheep, until a small shudder rocked the gondola and we stopped. “Why have we stopped?” My son asked, clearly slightly worried that his…
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Laughter is no joke
It was weekly ritual. The giant bucket of popcorn was balanced precariously between the cinema seats. Even with my brother’s monster appetite there was no way we’d make more than a small dent in it, but that wasn’t the point. It was time to relax. Sweat beads slipped down the shiny glass beer bottles in…
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Supersized fruit and vege
My thumb flicked the phone screen to scroll the shopping list. Hmm. We already had almost all of the vegetables and fruit that we needed at home so the only produce item we needed today was some more fruit, to ensure we wouldn’t run out before our next shop. The corners of my mouth screwed…
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Lockdown getting you down? Get cooking!
I smoothed the homemade berry pie filling over the top of the New York cheesecake I had made. My chef’s knife slid carefully through the berries, dragging streaks of purple and read over the creamy lemony middle, and then crunched through the biscuit crust. I gently tugged the slice free from its cake prison, tipped…
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Fresh air
It rained this weekend. As all parents, school teachers and early childhood educators know, rain is not conducive to calm when there are children involved. Cooped up indoors and already fighting through the mind fog of another growth spurt, my own three-year-old burst into tears over things like “I wish I had green eyes like…
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Gym culture has changed for the better… and the worse
I started going to the gym in 2010 and, at the risk of sounding like an old lady, things were different back then. The gym I attended was split into two floors – weights room down the bottom, cardio equipment like treadmills and exercycles up the top. In practice that meant that guys went downstairs…
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Turn up the music, but choose your song carefully
I was driving on autopilot when it happened. Alone in the car, I was in a small queue leading up to a roundabout. My eyes had slid slightly out of focus staring at the brake lights of the four wheel drive in front of me, and the gentle tick-tick of the indicator was slightly out…
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Want to increase IQ and EQ? Read a novel
Recently I was told that I’ll never “develop as a person” if I continue to read novels instead of more serious non-fiction titles. It’s hard to explain my reaction when confronted with this view: a mix of exasperation, incredulity and facepalming. But sadly, this is a common misperception among self-help book devotees. I couldn’t bring…
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My covert mission to McDonalds
It was about six o’clock in the evening when I parked my heavily branded work car several streets away from my destination… Was this too close? I looked around suspiciously, second-guessed myself, and drove another block away. It was a hot evening in one of those summers that lingers well into fall, but I forced…