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chenzhiwu — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:14:01 -0800

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What is a Calorie?

Monique Marie — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:32:51 -0800

What is a Calorie?

A calorie is a unit of energy. We tend to associate calories with food, but they apply to anything containing energy. For example, a gallon (about 4 liters) of gasoline contains about 31,000,000 calories.
Specifically, a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). One calorie is equal to 4.184 joules, a common unit of energy used in the physical sciences.
Most of us think of calories in relation to food, as in "This can of soda has 200 calories." It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not. A food calorie contains 4,184 joules. A can of soda containing 200 food calories contains 200,000 regular calories, or 200 kilocalories. A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 kilocalories.
The same applies to exercise -- when a fitness chart says you burn about 100 calories for every mile you jog, it means 100 kilocalories. For the duration of this article, when we say "calorie," we mean "kilocalorie."

What Calories Do

Human beings need energy to survive -- to breathe, move, pump blood -- and they acquire this energy from food.

Caloric Breakdown

1 g Carbohydrates: 4 calories

1 g Protein: 4 calories

1 g Fat: 9 calories

The number of calories in a food is a measure of how much potential energy that food possesses. A gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, a gram of protein has 4 calories, and a gram of fat has 9 calories. Foods are a compilation of these three building blocks. So if you know how many carbohydrates, fats and proteins are in any given food, you know how many calories, or how much energy, that food contains.

If we look at the nutritional label on the back of a packet of maple-and-brown-sugar oatmeal, we find that it has 160 calories. This means that if we were to pour this oatmeal into a dish, set the oatmeal on fire and get it to burn completely (which is actually pretty tricky), the reaction would produce 160 kilocalories (remember: food calories are kilocalories) -- enough energy to raise the temperature of 160 kilograms of water 1 degree Celsius. If we look closer at the nutritional label, we see that our oatmeal has 2 grams of fat, 4 grams of protein and 32 grams of carbohydrates, producing a total of 162 calories (apparently, food manufacturers like to round down). Of these 162 calories, 18 come from fat (9 cal x 2 g), 16 come from protein (4 cal x 4 g) and 128 come from carbohydrates (4 cal x 32 g).
Our bodies "burn" the calories in the oatmeal through metabolic processes, by which enzymes break the carbohydrates into glucose and other sugars, the fats into glycerol and fatty acids and the proteins into amino acids (see How Food Works for details). These molecules are then transported through the bloodstream to the cells, where they are either absorbed for immediate use or sent on to the final stage of metabolism in which they are reacted with oxygen to release their stored energy.

BMR

Just how many calories do our cells need to function well? The number is different for every person. You may notice on the nutritional labels of the foods you buy that the "percent daily values" are based on a 2,000 calorie diet -- 2,000 calories is a rough average of what a person needs to eat in a day, but your body might need more or less than 2,000 calories. Height, weight, gender, age and activity level all affect your caloric needs. There are three main factors involved in calculating how many calories your body needs per day:

Basal metabolic rate
Physical activity
Thermic effect of food

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy your body needs to function at rest. This accounts for about 60 to 70 percent of calories burned in a day and includes the energy required to keep the heart beating, the lungs breathing, the kidneys functioning and the body temperature stabilized. In general, men have a higher BMR than women. One of the most accurate methods of estimating your basal metabolic rate is the Harris-Benedict formula:

Adult male: 66 + (6.3 x body weight in lbs.) + (12.9 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)
Adult female: 655 + (4.3 x weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)

(Note: The first number in the equation for females is, in fact, 655. Strange but true.)

Your Caloric Needs

As you now know, there are three main factors involved in calculating how many calories your body needs per day: your BMR, physical activity and the thermic effect of food.
The second factor in the equation, physical activity, consumes the next highest number of calories. Physical activity includes everything from making your bed to jogging. Walking, lifting, bending, and just generally moving around burns calories, but the number of calories you burn in any given activity depends on your body weight. Click here for a great table listing the calories expended in various physical activities and for various weights.
The thermic effect of food is the final addition to the number of calories your body burns. This is the amount of energy your body uses to digest the food you eat -- it takes energy to break food down to its basic elements in order to be used by the body. To calculate the number of calories you expend in this process, multiply the total number of calories you eat in a day by 0.10, or 10 percent. If you need some help determining how many calories you eat in a day, check out these sites:

Calories, Fat and Exercise

So what happens if you take in more or fewer calories than your body burns? You either gain or lose fat, respectively. An accumulation of 3,500 extra calories is stored by your body as 1 pound of fat -- fat is the body's way of saving energy for a rainy day. If, on the other hand, you burn 3,500 more calories than you eat, whether by exercising more or eating less, your body converts 1 pound of its stored fat into energy to make up for the deficit.
One thing about exercise is that it raises your metabolic rate not only while you're huffing and puffing on the treadmill. Your metabolism takes a while to return to its normal pace. It continues to function at a higher level; your body burns an increased number of calories for about two hours after you've stopped exercising.
Lots of people wonder if it matters where their calories come from. At its most basic, if we eat exactly the number of calories that we burn and if we're only talking about weight, the answer is no -- a calorie is a calorie. A protein calorie is no different from a fat calorie -- they are simply units of energy. As long as you burn what you eat, you will maintain your weight; and as long as you burn more than you eat, you'll lose weight.
But if we're talking nutrition, it definitely matters where those calories originate. Carbohydrates and proteins are healthier sources of calories than fats. Although our bodies do need a certain amount of fat to function properly -- an adequate supply of fat allows your body to absorb the vitamins you ingest -- an excess of fat can have serious health consequences. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that a maximum of 30 percent of our daily calories come from fat. So, if you eat 2,000 calories a day, that's a maximum of 600 calories from fat, or 67 grams of fat, per day. However, many doctors and nutritionists now set the maximum number of fat calories at 25 percent of our daily caloric intake. That's 56 grams of fat per day for a 2,000 calorie diet.

Taken from Health magazine

FoodServing SizeCaloriesFat Grams

Canola oil	1 cup	1,674	218
Peanut butter	1 cup	1,520	129
Cheddar cheese	1 cup	531	44
Granola	1 cup	270	8
Chocolate syrup	1 cup	837	3
Sugar	1 cup	774	0
Coca-Cola	1 can	140	0

FoodServing SizeCaloriesFat Grams

Canola oil	1 cup	1,674	218
Peanut butter	1 cup	1,520	129
Cheddar cheese	1 cup	531	44
Granola	1 cup	270	8
Chocolate syrup	1 cup	837	3
Sugar	1 cup	774	0
Coca-Cola	1 can	140	0

hangzhou body massage

fengwei21 — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:58:34 -0800

Christmas is fast approaching a time when, massage guangzhou clubs offer different kinds of massage services, massage promotions is endless unless you see, you are welcome to visit, massage technicians will provide you with a new look a more comprehensive massage services Fingrkht, we The service is absolutely the best!
The needs of male and female athletes are very different, and these differences are apparent in all phases of athletic medical care -- from diagnosis, to treatment, to massage or physical therapy efforts.
An ailment exclusive to female athletes is the female athlete triad, a triumvirate of disorders that have a domino effect on one's overall health. The three components of this affliction are disordered eating, amenorrhea (or loss of menstrual periods for three consecutive months), and osteoporosis (or a thinning of bone tissue and loss of bone density). Affected athletes are best helped when each component of the triad is addressed and treated separately - and massage and sports rehabilitation therapy are helpful treatment options for this condition.
Athletes of both genders must focus on developing many of the same attributes in their bodies: strength, balance, endurance, precision. However, women are more likely than men to participate in sports and athletic endeavors that focus on body weight, size, and appearance. Gymnastics, figure-skating, ballet, and cheer-leading/color guard are some examples of these image-focused sports. In ballet, for example, the pre-pubescent figure is regarded as ideal, and bodily markers of adult female estrogen levels, such as visible breasts and hips, are taboo at many dance schools.
Many adolescent girls and women become image-obsessed, focusing on cutting their caloric intakes as much as possible, while continuing to train at the same vigorous, competitive levels. Once a person begins a calorie-restricted diet, it can be difficult to stop - many dieters report starvation-induced euphoria and delight at their shrinking bodies. The starvation method of weight loss is detrimental to training athletes, who typically have lower-than-normal body fat levels to begin with. A girl or woman needs at least 18 percent body fat to menstruate, and once body fat drops below this level, menstruation can cease. In girls who have not yet begun their periods, the onset of menstrual bleeding (menarche) can be delayed for years.
The cessation of menstruation is problematic because it upsets the female body's natural estrogen levels. As estrogen levels drop, bone density loss and bone weakening can occur. Estrogen in women has a protective effect on the skeletal system, enabling bone development during adolescence, and halting bone loss throughout early- and mid-adulthood. Adolescent amenorrhea can prevent a female athlete from building peak bone mass; adult amenorrhea can speed up the process.
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Rob's " I'm a bore " interview

athena4rob — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:51:37 -0800

…Says the Sexiest Man Alive, Robert Pattinson, even as he discloses how he loves all the attention, and why he did a bare all in Twilight.
How did you prepare for your role? Getting in to character was the first thing I needed to do and for that Physical fitness was the priority and my only concern. I remember, before Twilight, I never worried much about exercising my abs out, but for being Edward, I did every freaking thing possible. Regularly for 2–3 months, I ran for two hours daily and had a three-hour long session of kickboxing followed by hitting the gym for some weight training and abdomen crunches. In addition, I was on a stringent diet regime too. I was just trying to lose every ounce of body fat, so when I took off my shirt, I would look like an alien.

Are you enjoying all the attention that you are getting? Before Twilight people use to complain about a lot of things in me like my chest hair and I must say post Twilight it’s about me wearing same clothes. I got more compliments over complaints though, when I heard people say, ‘He wears same clothes, wow that’s so cool and real.’ Actually, I don’t mind wearing what I have worn before; after all they are all my clothes I am wearing. It has got nothing to do with keeping the paparazzi away. I do not desperately repeat the clothes. It is just by chance and sometimes in shortage of time, in fact a couple of times while promotion. I guess people like me as I am. And yeah, I am enjoying all the attention I am getting, ’coz it was my choice to be an actor first. So whatever the results, I have to accept.
How do titles like – sexiest man alive, make you feel? Who won’t like being called the sexiest person? Well, actually I don’t know whether I am sexy or not. How could I comment about myself? Ask others I guess. I am ok with such tags as far as there is no stereotyping. But yes, I would like to rename the title to The Sexiest Actor instead of just Man. After all I am an actor first.
Your favourite stars – male and female? Whose position do you envy? Who would you like to be? Jack Nicholson in male, I always wanted to be like him since my childhood. I used to try and be like him in whatever I did. I copied his accent, dressed like him. I do not envy him but yes he was my source of aspiration I must say. Among favourite actresses, actually there are many but yes, Kristen Stewart has impressed me and the whole world, with her acting skills at such an early age.
You have flaunted your bare body a lot in the Twilight… That was ’coz the character demanded it. In my opinion, it is the USP of Edward Cullen.
You have been linked up with a lot of women. Who’s your girlfriend? I do not have any girlfriend and neither do I want one, considering the environment I am in now. I am only reading books and watching films always. I am quite a bore kinda person you know. If I’d have a girlfriend, why would I shy away from the media glare and letting my fans know?
Have you watched any Bollywood movies? Do you know any people from Bollywood? No, I haven’t seen any Indian film yet. Though I have seen a couple of Hollywood films having an Indian touch and that’s where I see Indian actors and they are great-great performers. Names are hard to recall you know. Then this year’s Oscar showed us glimpses of Indian actors and India in Hollywood while Slumdog swept all the awards, so I guess it is needless saying how far the Indian cinema has come.
Have you been approached by any Bollywood movie makers for a film, except by Mira Nair for Vanity Fair? Not yet, but I won’t mind working abroad if it is a good project and has some potential for me to perform as an actor instead of adding just a name. There is no reason though for this choiceBut at this time, I am too busy with my current commitments. And once these projects are over, I must look for a short break for making some music may be.
Any plans of visiting India? What do you know about this country?Yes, I know in bits about India. Also the ongoing Indian and Hollywood associations have a lot to keep an eye on. Our actors are moving East and so is the Indian film industry moving here. Well it’s really good to have an exchange of cultures through the world’s strongest medium of communication, Films, which influences heterogeneous masses. Yes, I’d love to be there in near future, and why not? It is such a nice place. I went to Japan for promotion of our film, I wish I could have come to India too then. Apart from films, I know there is some real cool music in different genres and food that stirs the taste buds in India.

Get the Bod: Lady Gaga

FitSugar — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:30:05 -0800

If you can get past the wild outfits, ambitious hairstyles, and off-the-wall makeup, you'll find that Lady Gaga has a pretty rockin' bod. It's no surprise either - I mean, have you seen her live performances? The pop star sings her way through tightly choreographed dance sequences that require a tremendous amount of endurance, strength, and flexibility.

With a tour underway and being one of three female artists that lead the pack in Grammy nominations this year, Lady Gaga is on a high. And let's not forget that she's also looking pretty fabulous on the January cover of Elle. Not content to rest on her laurels, the star has taken celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak on tour with her as he reveals via Twitter: "About to "5-Factor-ize" the Lady GaGa tour...my luggage is packed with 5-factor snack bars, chips, and smoothies!"

To hear what kind of workout and diet Lady Gaga can expect from Pasternack, read more.

Besides Lady Gaga, Pasternack works closely with celebs like Alicia Keys, Jessica Simpson, and Vanessa Williams, and stressed the benefits of his 5-factor diet: three meals and two snacks daily that consist of lowfat protein, fiber, healthy carbs, and fats. There's also a sugar-free drink allowed with every meal. Pasternack's workout consists of a daily 25-minute session combining strength and cardio. Clients are allowed one diet "cheat day" a week and two days off from exercise.

On a recent episode of the Today Show, Pasternack revealed that the secret to Lady Gaga's killer abs were lots of crunches. He starts her on a basic crunch and modifies that into reverse crunches, ending with a double crunch - lifting both ends of your body toward your center at the same time. Pasternack says he and Gaga worked out together right before she hit the stage at the VMAs this year. The reason? It gives her an extra boost of confidence to perform well. I think many of us can attest to the high we feel after exercising, too!

Check in with Fit next week, where we'll be featuring Taylor Swift's and Beyonce's workout plans - Lady Gaga's biggest competition at this year's Grammy Awards.

Get the Bod: Lady Gaga

FitSugar — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:30:05 -0800

To hear what kind of workout and diet Lady Gaga can expect from Pasternack, read more.

Check in with Fit next week, where we'll be featuring Taylor Swift's and Beyonce's workout plans - Lady Gaga's biggest competition at this year's Grammy Awards.

Muscle Force Max - Weight Loss For Men

muscleforcemax1 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:52:06 -0800

Gaining muscle and losing body fat is a great way to gain the attention of females. There are tons of supplements on the market which are effective in ensuring great muscle gain and fat loss, giving you that lean look that women crave. Muscle Force Max can help you lose body fat at an accelerated rate and help you build muscle without much difficulty. If you are an overweight male and are concerned about your looks then Muscle Force Max is a great natural way to gain muscle and get that great lean look you desire.
There are quite a few natural ingredients in this supplement which make it different from most other weight loss products. Muscle Fforce Max is a great product which is designed specifically for men and composed to deliver the best possible results without spending hours in the gym.
It is enriched with Acai Berry extracts and a milk and soy proteins blend. Along with these great ingredients there are other components like L-Arginine proteins which can trigger faster metabolism rates and faster muscle growth.
Acai Berry is a great product which is considered to be the best anti oxidant in the world with a ORAC score of 330.The greater the ORAC score the better it is for the body as it can reduce the percentage of all free radicals in the body. Acai Berry has a higher Orac score than both Pomegrante and Blueberries, which up until now were considered the best natural anti-oxidants.
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Tamanna: Hot and Sexy Tamil Actress

jiapia121 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:47:49 -0800

The looks, the body, the style, you will find in her and she is Tamanna! She is a very famous and budding actress of South Indian film industry which is also known as Tollywood. She has done very successful movies in Tamil and Telugu. Few would know that her full name is Tamanna Bhatia and she is basically a Punjabi kudi. Like many actresses of Tollywood, she started her carrier with Hindi films. The name of her first Hindi film was “Chand Sa Roshan Chehra” and it did a decent business on box office. After having tasted success in her first film she looked towards Tollywood as her hunting ground, which is not an easy place. There is very stiff competition from the establish actresses and from other budding actresses as well. Despite this, she was determined to make a mark in Tollywood.
Tamanna started her carrier in Tollywood with a Tamil film called Kedi and she had Illena as co star in the film. Sri was her first movie in Telugu and she played the leading female role with Manoj Kumar as main actor. Happy Days was a movie that shot her to limelight, brought huge success at box office and proved that she had all what is required for a start actress.

As far as looks are concerned she is gorgeous as well as hot. Tamanna is having a very beautiful face and she is also having a perfect figure. Her figure may not a perfect zero size figure but she has got a physique that is required for any actress who wants to taste success in South Indian Cinema. Acceptance of her face is also portraying the change that is undergoing changes in the viewer’s choice. They no more want the actresses to be plump and fat but they want them to be reasonably slim, fit but petite. Kareena Kapoor type figure is still a big no no in Tolloywood and that is where she scores over her competitors. She has got a perfect blend of figure, beautiful face and colour that is the choice of modern day viewers of Tamil & Telugu cinema.
She has also shown her acting skills in both very subtle and very obvious way. In one way she is doing very demanding role portraying a character and at the same time she is also acting to make her films a commercial success. In today’s time, the actress has to balance her acting skills, dance skills and doing scenes which were considered to be of bold type till a decade ago. No film can succeed if it highly skewed towards any of these traits. This is because the films are being viewed by the entire family and Tamanna has been successfully delivered on this part. She has done a balancing act. Before starting her carrier in the film industry as an actress, she leant all kinds of dance starting form Indian classical dance to western dances. Her dancing skills are amazing and this is why her dance sequences are liked by all and the song of her recent films are topping the charts.

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New Rob Interview with UK's Sunday Times

athena4rob — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:17:58 -0800

On a balmy autumn day in Vancouver, a young man is longing for a walk outside in the sunshine, and deciding against it. Far easier for him to stay in his hotel room, cocooned in five-star luxury with a mobile phone that has run out of charge, safe at least from the girls chanting his name outside. Robert Pattinson, 23 and from Barnes in southwest London, ought still to be one of Hollywood’s beautiful dreamers, moving up the ranks of movie acting, enjoying his American adventure, his guitar, his good looks. Instead he lives in danger of being trampled in a stampede of teen love. He plays the vampire Edward Cullen in The Twilight Saga, the biggest books-to-screen phenomenon since Harry Potter - in which, by the way, Pattinson was Cedric Diggory, heroic golden boy and victim of Voldermort. Boy, his life has changed since Hogwarts.In Canada he is shooting Eclipse, the third of Stephenie Meyer’s quartet of novels. The second, New Moon, is released this month in a publicity extravaganza that will involve shutting down New York’s Times Square. The last time the actor was there, the square was also closed to traffic, for an event only marginally more fascinating to the world: the election victory of Barack Obama. We talk on the phone. Even now, a year after Twilight’s release, Pattinson sounds utterly stunned by the hysteria swirling around him.

The rest of the article, after the jump!

“It’s been a little frightening,” he laughs, a sort of embarrassed chuckle that punctuates his conversation, the sound of someone negotiating the best bit of luck they have ever had, not wanting to sound arrogantly blasé or overexcited. “In England no-one had heard of the series when I went for the audition, so it has been a total, utter surprise. The change to my everyday life is so extreme. Before this I was used to working 10 days a year. Originally, I did a three-picture deal, but I wasn’t even really thinking about that… I had no idea that I’d still be working on it now.”
Does the poor boy, who still calls London home, feel he has to hide? “I tend to stay in the hotel because it’s highly publicised where I’m staying all the time. There’s always a bunch of people outside. I can’t really be in LA now at all. It’s not that the fans are threatening, but the paparazzi follow me all night.” This hounding can evoke an absurd sympathy, considering the kid’s fortune and prospects. But then he brightens, telling me he was buying a guitar the other day and had to spell his name 12 times, and the guy still didn’t twig. “I loved that. It was my fault - I wasn’t speaking loud enough.”
When he read the first script, he had no idea how to play it. “I thought Bella, the heroine, would be a damsel in distress and I’d have to be the alpha-male hero type, so I thought I was never going to get it. But when they cast Kristen Stewart, she’s not really like that, so I realised there was a different way to play Edward, to show his vulnerability.” Could he get trapped, find it hard to move on to different sorts of roles?
“It worries me, because the whole Twilight thing keeps getting bigger and bigger, and now it’s so big that even my own ego can’t cope with it. A certain amount of success you can mentally deal with, but there’s a point where you think, ‘Jesus Christ, what is this? I’m not that great!’ I just wanted to make an American film, and I wanted it to be relatively good and to be good in it. I have never pushed to do anything… As soon as you start going to the gym every day and try to look like a movie star, you’re going down a worrisome track.” He laughs. “Being an English guy you get a lot more breaks. You’re allowed to look a little worse. It’s that thing about English teeth. Actually, Canadian teeth are pretty bad.”
To say New Moon is eagerly awaited is like saying the Pope could use a miracle: moreover, it promises to be twice as hormonally charged as Twilight, since it offers two poster boys for the price of one. Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob Black, Bella’s car-mad friend from the Native American reservation, moves centre stage as the leader of the giant werewolves, her defenders from the avenging vampires. More staggering than his lycanthropic powers, however, is the complete physical transformation of 17-year-old Lautner, who began his career in Disney’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. With his dodgy wig and gangly lope in the first picture, he was no competition for Pattinson, but in New Moon his hair is shorn, his six-pack ripples and his teeth light a path through the forest before him; his physique and prowess are redefining this chapter as more of an action movie than a spooky Romeo and Juliet.
Fearless and as often as possible shirtless, wolf-boy Jake is the third corner in a love triangle, as Bella is torn between blood-guzzler and beast. The martial-arts expert Lautner gained 30lb of solid muscle with gym work-outs. He’s graced the cover of Teen Vogue and had water artistically poured over him by its high-fashion Italian cousin, L’Uomo Vogue. Like Pattinson, he is a teenzine staple and heading for the giddy status of having prepubescent girls and their shameless mothers wanting to know if it’s a case of briefs or boxers.
Five thousand miles away from their ethereal and earthy pin-ups, the faithful are gathered at the Park Inn Hotel near the market square in Northampton. Welcome to Eternal Twilight 2, the unofficial fan convention staged by Massive Events, whose cheery operative Davey is dashing about with a mohican and a clipboard, keeping 800 young (but not that young) women happy. They don’t even complain about the absence of the godlike “Rob”, who at least until New Moon is out on November 20, is secure on his throne. Nobody here much mentions his brown-eyed “rival” Lautner, though the “Who’s hotter?” debate is already revving up, with “Camp Edward” and “Camp Jacob” sweatshirts.
While smitten with him, the Twi-hard posse are relieved Pattinson is not smouldering in their midst. “It’s such a concentration of fans,” says Rachel, 24, a bouncy Essex girl, “you might not be able to control the hysteria. It would spoil the atmosphere.” She thinks there might be tickets in tonight’s auction for the German premiere of New Moon, but is content to be brushing up against the “guests” here, actors who were “protected” from fans while making New Moon, travelling in cars with tinted windows, moving about the set beneath big umbrellas to foil the paps. Katie, 20, a vampire freak, tells me that she was “attacked by the books”, rather than the stars, and couldn’t put them down: she is clearly a lost cause. “They sparkle, they have no fangs, just really sharp teeth. They don’t sleep. It makes it more interesting.” Her friend, a bubbly American called Kendra who’s 35, says: “What I love is that Edward is the perfect man.”And Claire, at 38 a girlish Twilight senior, adds: “He’s an old-fashioned gentleman, chivalrous and protective. Edward has spoilt it for all the other guys. He’s set the bar too high.”
Around us drifts a sea of girls with straight black hair and lots of sequins; Pattinson’s face is tattooed on an upper arm; another fan has lovingly cross-stitched the wolf-pack emblem for Chaske Spencer, who plays one of the Quileute Native Americans in New Moon. Those who have purchased gold tickets (£195) enjoyed a cocktail party last night with the five (not very starring) actors attending the event; queues for autographs and photos snake around the hall. Tonight the auction will be staged: last year a girl blew £300 on a slow dance with the vampire patriarch Peter Facinelli, under a pagoda like the one Bella and Edward smooch beneath at the school prom. Even his empty can of Red Bull went for £20. “It was like, oh, let me catch flu off him, please!”
Last night’s party had a baseball theme, with candy floss and a bucking-bronco sheep from which one girl was toppled, ending up in casualty. But since the novels’ heroine, Bella, played by Kristen Stewart, is so accident-prone, this might have been a weird tribute to the elfin “K-Stew”, over whom fans swoon and coo almost as much as they do over Pattinson. They are also quite keen on the Canadian Rachelle Lefevre, who plays the vicious nomad vampire Victoria and is here as a (handsomely paid) guest, loving every moment. Her bodyguard is in attendance, and one of the organisers makes me promise not to interview the little-known Lefevre. In the real world, you would laugh: she should be so lucky.
But this isn’t reality; it is an arena of common purpose and warm acceptance, a million miles from the drudgery of homework and teenage acne, where boyfriends are never up to scratch and fashion rejects you if you’re over size 14. If the Twi-hards class all their actors as sparkling Hollywood A-listers, that’s all part of the make-believe at the friendliest party I’ve been to all year.
At the auction the star lot is a baseball bat signed by Peter Facinelli, and this evening’s entertainment is a masquerade for which many have crafted ornate masks and splashed out on new dresses. The merchandise rooms are laden with mementos, from kitsch Bella and Edward dolls (£20) to handmade charm bracelets heavy with silver replicas of the book covers. The merchandise for the new film, New Moon, is arriving this afternoon. “Fifteen new lines,” enthuses a stallholder. There are Team Edward hoodies and caps, and Twilight plasters - “for a broken heart”. Sandira Reddy, a jewellery maker who has customised Converse baseball boots (£100), was inundated with orders (in the first book, Bella wears them with her ballgown at the prom). “Twilight has become a full-time job,” she says.
A girl called Ellie is crossdressed as Peter Facinelli’s character, Dr Carlisle Cullen, in a cropped blonde wig and a white lab coat that a friend has embroidered with his name. “I have a different outfit for tomorrow,” she says. “It’s a suit he wears when Bella hurts her arm in New Moon.” Her confidence that other fans will easily identify a man’s suit as being from a particular scene in a 500-page doorstopper says much about their shared application to the saga.
The Twilight phenomenon isn’t just about publishing (more than 70m of the four books sold) or a series of movies, or even merchandising opportunities; it’s about a lifestyle. If once teenage girls’ reading was a private affair, a way of disappearing without your annoying parents calling the police, it can now be performed and celebrated as an event. My own favourite young-teen reads, Jennie James: Top Model, followed by Jennie James: Fashion Designer and Jennie James: Air Hostess (have court shoes, will travel), enjoyed no crossover potential at all, no clubs or actors to follow, only the power that sometimes terrible literature wields over young lives aching for safe adventure and a more polished future.
Times have changed. For the sociable Twilight enthusiast there are tribute bands, parties where little girls paint vampire bites on their necks assisted by their doting mothers, countless websites, fan fiction, internet forums. It is about sharing, rather than shutting your bedroom door to drown out the sound of Crossroads and losing yourself, blissfully alone at last. Stephenie Meyer may be a clean-living Mormon housewife, but she knows how to feed this hype. She is said to track internet discussions of her books for feedback, “worried” about the writers of fan fiction who rework and extend her narratives, because they can never claim the story as their own. How many ideas she gleans in this mutually advantageous to-and-fro we will never know.
When the first Twilight movie opened in the US last year, it took $70m in its first weekend, the largest sum ever for a female director. (Though Catherine Hardwicke was replaced by Chris Weitz on the second film.) At Eternal Twilight 2, the bespectacled Native American actor Tyson Houseman, who looks more like a young Woody Allen than a member of the wolf pack, seems to have grasped the nature of the beast. “I am so delighted to have a part in this franchise,” he declares humbly.
The subject of all the books is eternal: sexual awakening, forbidden love, the odd demon for an added frisson. Seventeen-year-old Bella Swan moves from sunny Phoenix to live with her father in a rainy dullsville town in Washington state called Forks, where every day holds the promise of a wet weekend. On the first day at her new school, she notices a group of staggeringly attractive students, the pale and fabulous Cullen family. With their talcum-powder faces and coal-black brows, they look like refugees from some New Romantic dive in the 1980s, when many of the fans and actors weren’t even born. Insular and superior, the Cullens are - surprise! - vampires. No black capes or little horns, however, not even vaguely prominent canines, their dentistry being as immaculate as the fabulous cars they drive like lightning. They don’t sleep in wooden boxes; they don’t sleep at all. They stay wide awake in a shiny glass-walled house, which they quit in New Moon, leaving Forks bereft of its only interesting residents.
Pretty ordinary (and ordinarily pretty), Bella is in love with Edward - a 104-year-old vampire so stunning you wouldn’t care if he regularly snoozed in a coffin - and he with her. For all its supernatural posturing, it is really a story about the giddy fevers of first love. “It was ridiculous to think I could affect anyone that deeply,” gasps the ever-gasping Bella. Blood-guzzlers have their teeth marks all over popular culture right now, with Channel 4’s True Blood, and the fearless Buffy Summers and her novelisations, whom love-sick Bella resembles not a bit. (Or should that be bite?) In New Moon Edward leaves Bella - who naturally spends the whole book in mortal danger - for her own safety, casting her into a zombie-like depression. She is comforted by Jacob, to whom she is drawn, especially when he rips off his shirt to tend her bleeding face after a motorbike crash. (She has become an adrenaline junkie because Edward returns to her in a vision when she is in danger, leading to all manner of heart-stopping rescues.)
Meyer’s everyday heroine is not a slayer but a vampire groupie; actually, she doesn’t need to hang tough, because these suckers are the “vegetarian” variety, who control their lust for mortal blood, feeding only on animals, and even then only on the non-endangered species (they wouldn’t touch crate veal with a bargepole), which tells us that the author is not just aiming at a teenage audience but stalking it with a big fat net. More importantly, she is appealing not so much to her young readers’ universally presumed race for alcohol, sex, freedom, but the need for something far harder to rustle up: a return to a safer world in this throwback of a town. Bella’s crowd barely have a cell phone between them, nobody spends the evening fibbing about themselves on Facebook, and Bella’s clunky old computer has the status in her life of a rusty can-opener. As for drugs, there is only the high of attraction, the addiction to romance and, in New Moon, danger, which Stewart conveys a little too often with a doped, faraway look. “Am I your brand of heroin?” asks dreamy Bella, as if you selected the stuff from a supermarket shelf.
This absence of brain-sapping habits and gadgets leaves acres of time for dreaming and chatting about boys, trips to the beach, shopping for prom-frocks, homework and friendship, in a small, maybe claustrophobic, but entirely known and manageable environment. For all its scary moments and gory potential, Twilight is a refuge, like all fantasy fiction. No need to get stressed about sex, either. The flirtation in the books is chaste: the girls in Bella’s crowd don’t carry condoms, they are not jaded or exhausted before their time.
It seems that the young women of the “broken society” are identifying in droves with Meyer’s back-to-basics message. With Twilight, the first movie of the series, exit polls in the US showed that 75% of the audience were girls. On a nationwide “mall tour”, the cast was mobbed by 10,000 fans; an appearance in San Francisco became so huge it had to be closed down. In June, Pattinson, who is reported to have raised his fee to £6.8m for New Moon, was nearly run over escaping female fans in New York.
And what of the young man who can’t leave his hotel room? Robsessed, a documentary detailing his unimaginable rise, is released this month; speculation fizzes as to whether he and Kristen Stewart are a real-life couple. A less scary individual it is hard to imagine, though some fans have apparently been alarmed by his wispy chest hair. He mumbles a bit, not in a Brandoesque way, but because he is a nicely brought-up, self-deprecating, privately educated Englishman and somewhat embarrassed by the fuss. As well as loving it. The mumbling is also strategic: “It’s an attempt to cover myself up,” he admits.
When he tells you the hardest part of filming Twilight was having to look convincing in the scene where he threatens four grown men, you believe him. He is the ideal, unthreatening, sensitive object of a first crush, the noughties answer to David Cassidy in a satin shirt. Rather than sleekly groomed, however, he is adorably dishevelled, confiding to Jay Leno that he’s given up washing his hair, which he is contractually forbidden to cut. When a loved novel is adapted for stage or screen, the casting is delicate; one of 5,000 hopefuls who auditioned for Edward, Pattinson claims that fans were “100% negative” about his casting. “That’s just Rob being modest,” smiles Katie in Northampton, who loves him to bits.
Is he embarrassed to have millions of girls in love with him? “The only time it’s embarrassing is when you do a photoshoot and people try to force you to look clean-cut,” he says, “when they use pictures where you’re smiling sweetly and having your hair brushed, because that’s not what you want to be known for. “I don’t really know why the girls love the movie so much. The whole series has become a bit of a cult. People like being part of the club. They’re obsessed. The fan fiction is amazing: I’ve been sent whole novels featuring me as myself, in the Twilight world, with Edward in it as well.”
Anointed as “the new JK Rowling” by grateful British and American booksellers, 35-year-old Stephenie Meyer is ranked fifth on Forbes’s list of Hollywood’s Top-Earning Women and is the only author on the list. She tells interviewers the idea came to her in a dream, but she can barely have imagined how it would transform the life of a stay-at-home mother-of-three who had never really had a proper job, just a devotion to home and hearth and traditional views on monogamy. Meyer put a clause in the contract that the first film had to be PG-13 and has talked of giving airtime to the good kids, the ones who aren’t drinking and sexually active. “When I was in high school the people I related to were Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet, because I wasn’t having that experience.”
Indeed, the Twilight books are a moralist’s charter, an advertisement for abstinence under duress. Bella might be seized by an obsession with Edward’s “liquid topaz eyes” and an “overpowering craving to touch him”, but essentially this is a narrative about good kids not having sex. In Northampton, Sarah, a Twi-mum chaperoning her 12-year-old daughter, says: “It was her birthday, so I thought why not? There is not a lot of sex, none until the last book… and they do get married. When they go away on honeymoon it’s all very discreet.” Uber-fan Katie, by contrast, did not welcome the consummation after the most drawn-out of all literary foreplay. “I really hated it, actually,” she says. “I felt I knew the characters so well, I didn’t want to intrude on such a personal thing.”
Subjected by her creator to what Time magazine dubbed “the erotics of abstinence”, Bella is longing - frankly gagging - for intimacy with the immortal, but also for the protection and stability of a lasting relationship. “I’m the world’s most dangerous predator,” her glittering boyfriend announces, and as a teenage boy with sex on his mind, he is probably up there with the mountain lions and grizzly bears whose blood quenches his family’s curious thirst. Yet Bella is safe.
At first it seems that she has fallen not so much for the cool guy in class as the ice-cold one (literally); the one who, like those romantic blueprints Darcy, de Winter and Rochester, seems in the beginning to disdain her, but will turn out to be merely manly and masterful. Meyer likes to say that the books are about choices, good ones overcoming baser instincts. Edward is their moral centre, the prince of self-control whose magnificent restraint (“I can be patient - if I make a great effort”) saves them both. In the fourth and final book, Breaking Dawn, they marry, Bella becomes pregnant, refuses an abortion (though Edward fears the baby might be monstrous) and is rewarded for her steadfastness.
Bella Swan is a goody two-shoes, quite removed from the alienated products of divorce and dysfunction you might find in, say, Melvin Burgess’s Junk or even dear old Jacqueline Wilson’s books. It is not that she lacks valour: in New Moon she rescues Edward from committing suicide (by exposing himself to daylight) when he believes she is dead. But she is essentially homely, chugging milk and nibbling on granola bars; she is bookish and swotty, a little housewife, eternally marinating steaks, sorting laundry and preparing enchiladas for her father. Caitlin Flanagan, the postfeminist American author, hails Bella an “old-fashioned heroine”, praising Meyer for her canny grasp of what makes young adult readers tick: the fantasy of perfect love, the pain of failure, the thrill of being fought over by two amazing boys, the glorious prize. Meyer’s oeuvre is a literary companion for these days of retrenchment and fear, when girls aspire to be Wags or young mothers, sometimes making you wonder if 50 years of sexual politics ever happened.
Awash with bubbling hormones, self-doubt, sexual frustration and fear of friendlessness, the stories house all the teenage torments. When Bella first sits next to Edward in biology class, he recoils from her, “averting his face like he smelt something bad”. For the average adolescent girl, lack of personal fragrance is the worst crime: but her scent is what drives the muzzled-beast Edward crazy with desire. In return, her devotion renders her helpless, a long way from being an assertive role model, or even a sassy modern chick. Elizabeth Bennet could have taught her a thing or two about maintaining pride in the face of sneering male prejudice.
She may be a washout as a feminist, and a non-starter as an icon of girl-power like the seven-series super-slayer Buffy, but Meyer’s girl-next-door reigns over a magical realm that is a place of greater safety. It is a party you can attend without a boyfriend or designer bag, a badge of belonging that some fans of true romance and vampires might struggle to find in a hyper-sexual, cynical old world. “It’s not so much about meeting the actors,” one happy communicant tells me in Northampton, “as finding other people who don’t glaze over when you talk about what you love. It’s about friendship.”

Great Sex? Smoke a Joint, used as an aphrodisiac for thousands of years

PinkNC — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:40:14 -0800

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Marijuana has been used as an aphrodisiac for thousands of years. So what exactly is it about weed that turns people on?

The ancient Indian Ayurvedic medicine systems used cannabis to increase libido, produce long-lasting erections, delay ejaculation, facilitate lubrication and loosen inhibitions.

Some Tantric sex practitioners drink a substance called bhang, a sort of spiced marijuana milkshake to enhance the sexual experience. According to one source, Indian prostitutes eat bhang sherbet to help them feel sexually aroused.

In 19th century Serbia, female virgins were given mixtures of lamb's fat and cannabis on their wedding night to make sex less painful. Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern and Northern African cultures used cannabis for sexual purposes in a potent form known at kif as recently as the early 20th century.

So what exactly is it about weed that turns people on?

Besides the obvious: it heightens your senses, relaxes you and makes you feel hyper connected, there are also physiological effects.

Along with an increased heart rate, changes in blood flow and respiration, according to William Novak, author of the 1980 tome, High Culture: Marijuana in the Lives of Americans, "Neurochemistry, hormonal systems and brain regions such as the temporal lobe are affected by both marijuana and sexual arousal."

That's because THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the active ingredient in pot, not only releases dopamine in the brain -- causing the "high" -- it actually replicates the effects of a sexy little naturally occurring neurochemical called anandamide.

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