Category: Body & Mind

Vogue Wants Woman Who Look Real, not Girls

Vogue, a fashion magazine, has decided to only show women older than 16 and women who don’t appear to have an eating disorder. This may sound odd that they would have used young girls with eating disorders in the past, but at least they are paving the way forward for other fashion magazines to follow in respecting models.

In a six-point pact to appear in their respective June issues, the editors pledge to not to knowingly work with models under the age of 16 or with those “who appear to have an eating disorder”.

“We will work with models who, in our view, are healthy and help us to promote a healthy body image,” they said.

The editors will also instruct modelling agencies not to send them underage models, require casting directors to check models’ ID prior to photo shoots and encourage “healthy backstage working conditions”.

Fashion designers, meanwhile, will be encouraged – though not obliged – to “consider the consequences of unrealistically small sample (dress) sizes … which encourages the use of extremely thin models.”

Read more here.

A Better Approach Than Zero Tolerance in Schools

A school in Walla Walla was essentially a dumping ground for all the students deemed to have behavioural problems and their explosion rate was through the roof. This all changed when a principal ditched the atrocious zero tolerance policy that the school was using (many schools in North America punish and demean students this way).

The principal found that better communication between the school administration, teachers, and students was key to solving a lot of the issues that led students to be expelled. This new approach cut the expulsion rate by quite a bit and improved the overall learning being done inside the school.

2009-2010 (Before new approach)
* 798 suspensions (days students were out of school)
* 50 expulsions
* 600 written referrals

2010-2011 (After new approach)
* 135 suspensions (days students were out of school)
* 30 expulsions
* 320 written referrals

…These suspensions don’t work for schools. Get rid of the “bad” students, and the “good” students can learn, get high scores, live good lives. That’s the myth. The reality? It’s just the opposite. Says the NEPC report: “…research on the frequent use of school suspension has indicated that, after race and poverty are controlled for, higher rates of out-of-school suspension correlate with lower achievement scores.”

There are just two simple rules, says Turner.

Rule No. 1: Take nothing a raging kid says personally. Really. Act like a duck: let the words roll off your back like drops of water.

Rule No. 2: Don’t mirror the kid’s behavior. Take a deep breath. Wait for the storm to pass, and then ask something along the lines of: “Are you okay? Did something happen to you that’s bothering you? Do you want to talk about it?”

It’s not that a kid gets off the hook for bad behavior. “There have to be consequences,” explains Turner. Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.”

Read more here.

Get High from Running

You may hear from people who run that they feel great afterwards and get “addicted” to running, well it turns out our bodies may be born to run, which is why we get high from it.

As a doctor, Morganti knows what regular running does for her body. “Your heart gets stronger. It gets bigger. The amount of blood your heart can pump is more.” That’s called “stroke volume.” Oxygen metabolism gets more efficient, as well. “That means your blood vessels and muscles absorb more oxygen,” she says. “Running also builds new bone.”

But when I ask her about “runner’s high,” she lights up. “Oh, it’s really like an empowerment. And zen at the same time. You feel strong and light, and you feel relaxed.”

Read more at NPR.

Lose Weight the Geeky Way

Weight Hacker is a website and book that focus on losing weight in a very geeky way. The creator of weight hacking writes about geeky things all the time and he decided to take his appeal of geeky things to his diet.

Sometimes I tried dieting, but either it didn’t work or it didn’t work for long. I concluded that diets weren’t for me because 1) they usually aren’t sustainable for anyone in the long term and 2) they weren’t compatible with my geeky lifestyle.

So I created Weight Hacking, my own personal weight loss system that used my geeky nature to work for me, and one that I could incorporate into my daily life. I didn’t go on a diet, I permanently changed my diet. I didn’t “get exercise,” I re-arranged my life so that I was naturally more active. And it wasn’t particularly hard.

Read more.

MIT and Harvard to Launch Full Free Courses Online

This is a really cool way to bring post-secondary education to more people via the internet. Harvard and MIT are launching a new initiative built upon MIT’s expertise in online course delivery to launch a new project called edX that’ll give unbridled access to the knowledge in the two acclaimed institutions.

“Through this partnership we will not only make knowledge more available but we will learn more about learning,” Harvard President Drew Faust said this morning at a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access.”

Faust predicted the venture would “change our relationship to knowledge and to teaching for the benefit of our students and students and would-be students everywhere.”

Standing beside Faust, MIT President Susan Hockfield said: “You can choose to view this era as one of threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes. Online education is not an enemy of residential education but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally.”

Read more here.