AUbarnie News

Celebrities are one way or another obliged to look good as generally people expect them to be always stunning, nice-looking, pleasing and well dressed. They always try to evade aging in all possible means to keep a youthful and flawless image and presence. Though there are smart celebrities who know well how to use plastic surgery to their advantage creating a perfect complement of glamour and enhance physical features. The best illustration of this is Nicole Kidman plastic surgery.

She has truly perfected the craft of blending well plastic surgeries to boost her endow natural beauty, porcelain skin and physical attributes. At the age of forty, she looks ten years younger than her actual age. During the last film festival, she emerged so stunning that the journalists started to label her as a living doll. There are no traces of a forty year old – absence of wrinkles in her forehead, crow’s feet around her eyes, sagging skin and other signs of old age. It seems she has taken a bath in the fountain of youth that she simply surfaced with a youthful presence.

Of course, the genes play a vital factor to her looks. More so the diet, exercise regimen and lifestyle. However these factors can only serve at best to certain extent but not a total deviation of the process of aging. This is why celebrities seek for the aid of plastic surgery to try preserving their youthful look.

The most noted plastic surgery product of Nicole Kidman is her reshaped nose. It resulted to a defined shape as its tip is retracted and shorten with smaller nostrils. In addition to that, Nicole also embraces the Botox injection to keep her flawless skin. The fact that she has been shunning away from the sun as early as in her teenage years, it also contributed to the quality of her skin. The Botox approach has somehow an effective process as it indeed delays her aging and keeps youthful skin. It is very evident with a winkle free face.

However it was commented that her excessive use of the Botox substance has resulted to a sinister facial expression. This is one of the known side effects of constant injection of Botox. It leaves you a sharpen eyebrow arch referred as Botox brow that leaves her an angry facial expression. Her Botox treatment has been fired with comments as experts assume that she is taking the Botox injection only two to three weeks prior to any event she will be attending. Ideally, it is recommended to have a Botox treatment at least two to three months prior to wane the apparent effect of Botox.

Another noticeable feature of Nicole Kidman is the barely discernible sagging skin around her jaw line and neck. The tautness of neck and the surrounding area is believed to be the product of non-surgical facial procedures such as laser skin resurfacing, thermage and other methods.

Nicole Kidman underwent the process of breast augmentation also. The lean and towering plastic surgery doll used to be flat chested but in the past appearances in the media, she appears to be bustier.

As a physical fitness instructor, when I am meeting potential clients to assess their fitness objectives for the first time, a very common request would be “Can you help me develop a swimmer’s body?” The question seems like a no brainer, don’t you think so? The most logical and simplest answer would be to swim more often, isn’t it?

Really, do you think it just that simple? If that is the case, you will see many people with lean muscular bodies in your neighborhood swimming pools, right?. So why isn’t that the case?

Firstly, we need to know what do my clients mean by getting a swimmer’s body? Is it the body of your local lifeguard or of world class competitive swimmer’s physiques like those of, say, Ian Thorpe? I put my last dollar down that they meant the latter.

Most of you would have seen Ian Thorpe’s superb body shape in swimming competitions or commercials that he is endorsing. Do you really think world class competitive swimmers get their awesomely well toned muscular body by merely swimming? Of course not. The reason for them having such fabulous body shapes are that they include weight training into their exercise program. So their toned muscles are built mostly in the gym and not in the pool.

The perceived misconception about swimmers having well sculpted lean muscular body is that people only see them swim but did not see them working out in a gym.

Yes, swimming is a fantastic exercise and will get some people into shape, but not the body shape of world class competitive swimmers. Now, unknown to most people, although swimming is a fantastic exercise, trying to get a muscularly toned physique through swimming may get you into trouble because swimming only develop the muscles that are used to pull and not to push.

You can swim in any stroke and in any style, your swimming actions are all pulling actions. That means that swimming only develops your pull muscles. This can lead to muscle imbalances. An imbalance in a muscle group will cause the opposite muscle to work too hard, causing pain, loss of strength and endurance in that muscle group. Never thought of it that way, did you?

Now, since the opposing muscles (push muscles) are not being trained, the development of the pull muscles will also hit a plateau pretty quickly since your muscles like to grow and gain strength symmetrically. This is your body’s natural way to protect you from muscle imbalances and will put the swimmer’s improvements to a screeching halt. That is one of the reasons why competitive swimmers have to train with weights not only to strengthen their pull muscles but to develop the push muscles as well.

So you see, competitive swimmers get their muscularly toned body not by swimming training alone but through weight training as well. So if you are one of those who desire to get that fabulous swimmer’s body, then you must include weight training into your swimming program.

There’s something different, something special about Christmas in the country - a uniqueness which sets it apart from the same holiday in the city. Something more serene and seemingly more meaningful. A quieter, more reflective time. A time to actually contemplate what Christmas is really about.

Christmastime in the city is typified by hustle and bustle, tension and stress, and is certainly infinitely more expensive. Not so for a country Christmas.

In a rural area, Christmas is much more a time of fun and anticipation. A time for simple excitement, more meaningful giving, a truer grasp of the real spirit of the holiday.

Country folk do not get overly wrapped up in the commercial aspects of Christmas as is the case with most urban dwellers. They take more pleasure in simple gifts from the heart than store bought expressions of the holiday. Country folk tend to not place as much importance on the price of a gift as they do on the underlying meaning and thought put into it.

A batch of fresh baked cookies, homemade and delicious, packed into a nice Christmas tin, go a long way in satisfying the spirit of giving. Baking those favorite cookies takes much more thought and effort than purchasing a gift from some overcrowded store – much more.

Some country folk give the gift of doing a favor of love such as repairing an older person’s roof or doing odd jobs for another, especially an elder who may no longer be capable of doing such things themselves. They do so much more than their city cousins. Such expressions of thoughtfulness go a long way to assuage any guilt of not buying a present and, I suspect, are much more appreciated by the receiver.

In the country, one does not go to a tree lot to buy a dried out and sometimes scraggly, exorbitantly priced Christmas tree. Instead, in rural areas one packs their recently sharpened ax, heads to the nearest wooded area, scouts out the best pine tree there, and harvests it.

Tree cutting day is an exciting time for kids. I remember vividly my brothers and my adventures into the woods to find the perfect tree to take home. Most times we had scouted that tree for years prior to actually cutting it. We watched it grow year by year until it had reached just the right height for our living room. A few weeks before Christmas, and once we deemed it the best we could find, we cut it down, tied it to our Flexible Flyer sled, and slid it all the way home to the back porch. (There always seemed to be snow at that time of year.)

A tree freshly cut from the woods always seems to smell so much better, look more Christmassy, and provides infinitely more satisfaction than one bought at an urban tree lot. Always did for me anyway. I always felt sorry for city kids who never got to experience this pleasure.

Even a snow storm at Christmas is cause for celebration in the country whereas in the city it causes distress. City people may find themselves stranded in traffic or at airports. Tempers flare, rude behavior surfaces, and the Christmas spirit fades. Snow in the city at Christmas is not something to wonder at or enjoy for its serenity inducing effect.

In the countryside, as Robert Frost notes in his poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, a snowstorm at Christmas is an event to appreciate and marvel at. It somehow enhances the spirit of the holiday. Robert Frost points this out. Even though he had “miles to go before I sleep”, he reins in the little horse pulling his sleigh while passing down a wooded country road at night to “watch his (a landowner’s) woods fill up with snow”. He takes a moment to observe the snow and even listen to the distinct sounds of a snowy evening where he notes “The only other sound’s the sweep, Of easy wind and downy flake”.

Country folk eagerly anticipate snow at Christmas; in fact, they are truly “dreaming of a white Christmas”.

 Yes, Christmas in the country is manifested by the simple pleasures country folk get from simple things as opposed to a more consumer-minded, materialistically affected city dweller. One of my favorite gifts as a child was a pair of hand-knitted mittens I received each Christmas for many years from an elderly lady, a friend of the family, who must have spent countless hours of loving labor to make them special. They had my name knitted into them. I was the only kid in school who had mittens like that. I was as proud and appreciative of those warm hand coverings as I would have been had they been bought in the finest store on 5th Avenue in the busiest, most harried city at Christmas possibly in the world. Those mittens were something real and special – bright colored, expertly made, and toasty warm even on the coldest days. Those Christmas mittens were an expression of how much the lady loved me and I knew it even at a young age.

Does anyone knit mittens for Christmas anymore?