Anxiety (and depression for that matter), are major mood and disposition issues here in the US and abroad. There are tons of pharmaceutical medications conceived of every year that are supposed to be the next best thing when it comes to treating and/or at least alleviating anxiety and stress as well as depressive disorders, and not one of them comes without a long list of potential side effects and warnings.

There are some advocates of an approach to working out and exercising that say it’s the quality that mostly counts when you go to the gym or wherever else it is you go to do your routines, and not the quantity, or the length of time that you spend on those exercises. Then there are those that say not to focus so much on the quality, but more so on quantity, saying that you can’t even begin to burn calories, no matter how intense the workout is, until you reach that magical 25 minute mark.

We’ve been hearing about this modern marvel as a possibility for quite a long time now. It’s the idea that people could gleen the same benefits from a pill that their body could from actually getting off their duffs and exercising. In other words, a pill that could cardiovascularly condition you just like exercise, and elevate your metabolism, as well as all those other wonderful “side effects” you get from exercising on a regular basis.

The ongoing debate and crisis that we have with childhood obesity rages on, and there’s yet another piece to add to this discouraging story of how our youth is being plagued by inactivity in a day and age of parents sitting their kids in front of the tv for hours instead of having them go outside and play, and kids getting glued to the television playing games for hours on end instead of the “good old days” when kids used to have no other viable entertainment options than going outside and blowing off steam (and hence burning calories) for hours and hours, until dusk many times as when I was a kid.

After doing yoga for a few sessions, way back when I first started to experiment with yoga practices to see if I like them or if they made me feel any better or helped to change up my hum-drum workout routine, I started to wonder what the word, or term “namaste” meant, at the end of many yoga sessions, when the instructor bows their head and has their hands in prayer position in front of their chest.

Yoga has been a savior for me during times of high stress. I’m not saying that it’s totally superior to actually just getting a good, sweaty workout in, but I am saying that I think yoga provides benefits that just plain old elliptical or treadmill type exercise can’t really touch, and that is the realm of stress management and breath regulation, both of which are critical to us living stress free, happy and fulfilled lives.

My boyfriend was just telling me about a very interesting theory he heard on a satellite radio show, the Ron and Fez show, who has on a guy who is postively fascinating to listen to and seems to know a little about everything under the sun, a guy they call Mike the Teacher. I’ve listened to the guy before, and he knows about pretty much everything, especially the fascinating details about why he thinks drummers live longer than ordinary people.

Apparently text messaging is causing more than a new language emerging in the teen and tween set and beyond, like LOL and LMAO, and so on and so forth. Text messaging is apparently also the cause of a lot of physical mishaps because when people are texting, they aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing. Surprise, right? That’s exactly why I always tell my friends who have jumped on the texting crazed bandwagon that I don’t like doing it.

Experts have actually kind of backpedaled recently on whether exercising regularly is absolutely essential to short term weight loss goals, saying that the initial weight loss isn’t really accelerated by a normal workout routine (unless you are doing some insane calorie burning during those workouts), and that the biggest thing when you are initially trying to get rid of the pounds is to cut calories, since calories butting is what takes weight off the body, period.