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Feb 4

The making of chef Gabriel Rucker: talent, hard work and 'Ruck Luck'

On a cold, sunny Sunday in early January, Le Pigeon chef Gabriel Rucker lies next to 6-month-old son Gus on the living room floor of his compact home, a football game on the TV. In the kitchen, Rucker's wife, Hana Kaufman, spoons vegetarian chili from a pot. Hanging nearby is the gold medallion Rucker won at last year's James Beard Awards naming him the best young chef in the United States.

In many ways, the vegetarian chili says more about Rucker than the cooking award. The chef, who has liberally loaded twisted takes on classic French fare with rich goose liver, veal cheeks and beef tongue for the past half-decade at his Southeast Portland restaurant, is on a meat-free kick. "We both gained a lot of baby weight," his wife quips. Rucker has stuck to the diet, at least at home, to lose a few pounds and get healthy, hoping to be a better father to Gus.

From the moment he decided to pursue a career in food, few have doubted Rucker's talent or drive. But the climb has been steep. In the past 10 years, he has risen from a party-hard college dropout to Portland's most highly decorated young chef.

He's not resting on his laurels. Just over a year ago, with strong support from staff and friends, he opened a second restaurant, a downtown bistro called Little Bird. A cookbook is in the works. But Rucker is no empire builder. Right now, he's happiest cooking on the line at Le Pigeon and spending time with his family.

Earlier the same week, Le Pigeon is a haven from the cold rain beating down on East Burnside Street, all brick and copper and pilot flames burning on the range. Rucker, carrying a tray of avocados, walks up from the basement prep kitchen, where a handful of young, bearded cooks are helping get ready for the night's service.

The 30-year-old chef is tall, but no longer lanky. A caricaturist might zero in on his large nose and ears, but his most dynamic feature are his dark, slightly asymmetrical eyes, which alternately shine -- as when he juts his lower teeth in a mischievous grin -- then dart about guardedly, as if he's about to get jumped. Still, he's handsome, rakish even. Today, Rucker is wearing one of his signature trucker caps cocked at a 45-degree angle from his forehead.

As Rucker slices avocados, a man with a bluetooth device in his ear walks in and asks to see Le Pigeon's last two electric bills. The owners of Le Pigeon's three-story building are looking into putting solar panels on the roof, he says.

"Go downstairs and find Fairlie (McCollough, a manager)," Rucker says. "I don't touch the bills."

Freeing himself from restaurant management tasks -- like paying bills, or even knowing where to find them -- is a way for Rucker to concentrate on his strong suits, cooking and recipe creation.

James Beard voters, made up of "expert" panelists and former award winners (now including Rucker), are not required to explain their picks. But if there's been a theme to the positive critical reception to Rucker's cooking, it's been praise for his natural creativity.

Rucker started cooking relatively late in life and rarely consults cookbooks, preferring to build recipes in his head. His cooking is truly personal, with recipes riffing on everything from inside jokes and wordplay to something he ate the night before.

Like Wendy's, Le Pigeon's burger comes with a square patty. A peanut butter milk dessert was similarly inspired by the Dairy Queen near Rucker's house. An entree of pan-seared pigeon with angel hair pasta, pesto and parmesan, added to the menu last month, would have had walnuts, but Rucker, who prefers alliteration, chose pecans.

His recipes often sound bizarre: Barbecued eel toast, foie gras profiteroles. But the results display a surprising balance, marrying salt with acid, cooked food with raw.

Ask Rucker why he won the James Beard award, given to "a chef aged 30 or younger who displays an impressive talent and who is likely to make a significant impact on the industry in years to come," and he'll shrug.

"It's just a piece of metal hanging in my kitchen," Rucker says. "I don't think about it on a daily basis."

But for those who have known him the longest, watching Rucker on stage at last year's James Beard Awards in his black suit and purple Vans (he accidentally packed two left dress shoes) was a moment hardly imaginable a decade ago.

Rucker grew up on a quiet street in Napa, Calif., close geographically, but light-years culturally, from the limousine-chauffeured wine country tours and four-star restaurants of the greater Napa Valley. His father, Dave Rucker, was a civilian machinist at Travis Air Force Base. His mother, Laurie, was a teacher at a Napa elementary school.

He wasn't exactly a cooking prodigy. "People think that he must have been interested in cooking since he was knee high to a grasshopper," Laurie Rucker says. "I mean, he could make toast..."

In high school, Rucker was restless, seeking a new, more-anonymous circle of friends amid the music and drug culture of the Bay Area's booming rave scene. (He still plays techno music occasionally during prep shifts at Le Pigeon, but these days, he spends most nights at home.)

At his mother's insistence, Rucker finished high school, and, in 1999, enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College. Bored by a math class on his second day, he approached an adviser and, picking blindly from a list of vocational programs, landed in cooking school. "It sounded like good, blue-collar work," Rucker says.

The cooking classes, with their archaic lessons on the "five mother sauces," weren't exactly thrilling. But Rucker soaked up the lessons like a sponge. The once homework-hating student found himself picking up the cookbook of the French Laundry, noted chef Thomas Keller's Yountville, Calif. restaurant, and reading it, cover-to-cover, on his own time. Twice.

But the more advanced students in Rucker's class were those already working in restaurants. He left the program after one year and took a job at Napa's Silverado Resort & Spa. Eventually, he set off for Santa Cruz, walking up to a bistro's back door in his chef's whites to apply for a job.

"He was a recovering roller-blader with baggie jeans who listened to techno music and had no tattoos," says David Reamer, who cooked at the restaurant and remains a friend. "He was absolutely, 100 percent the opposite of what he is today."

The bistro gave him a job, the first of many in which Rucker enjoyed near-absolute creative freedom, with lightly supervised culinary experimentation and heavy on-duty drinking. But he was already accelerating past his peers.

"It was just obvious from day one that he was an unbelievably talented cook," Reamer says. "Even when he messed up it showed signs of greatness."

In 2003, Rucker and Reamer -- along with childhood friend Jacob Sims -- moved to Portland and landed in a low-rent Southeast Portland house. Rucker found a job at Paley's Place, where he picked up discipline and organization. But he was soon poached, along with fellow Paley's cook Jason Barwikowski, to help open North Portland's Gotham Building Tavern.

On a bright blue day in July 2004, Rucker's friends and Gotham coworkers drove to Washington's Washougal River for a day in the sun. Rucker and Barwikowski, by now close friends and friendly rivals, wandered off looking for big rock jumps. They found one, a 60-foot drop from the edge of a hiking trail.

Rucker leapt first, landing safely in the water. Barwikowski followed, but as he fell, onlookers gasped. He hadn't jumped far enough away from the cliff. On impact, Barwikowski glanced off a rock ledge, breaking his back in two places, shattering his tailbone, lacerating his liver and collapsing his lung.

Rucker, still in the water, pulled Barwikowski to shore and cradled him until an ambulance arrived.

"Gabe is a very calm, collected person, and very centered when he needs to be," says Barwikowski, who recovered after several months of physical therapy and is now executive chef at the newly opened Woodsman Tavern. "He was so kind and so gentle and helpful and solid. Afterward, he said it shook him up terribly. There was no doubt that he saved my life."

A few weeks later, Rucker got the first of many tattoos, a shark drawn by Barwikowski before the injury.

With Barwikowski in the hospital, Rucker began to take on more responsibility running the kitchen at Gotham.

"It was hard for him to be a sous chef," says former Gotham co-chef Tommy Habetz, himself a former sous to Mario Batali. "He's just naturally gifted and gutsy. I knew right away that he was on par with anyone I'd cooked with in New York."

Gotham, along with the larger Ripe restaurant group, collapsed on Rucker's 24th birthday. (There was a bright note to this period: It was the year Rucker met Kaufman, a Gotham server.)

Gabriel Rucker

Age: 30

Hometown: Napa, Calif.

Family: Wife, Hana Kaufman; son, Augustus Lightning Bolt

Restaurants: Le Pigeon, Little Bird

(A)typical dishes: Beef cheek bourguignon, square pattied-burger, foie gras profiteroles

Accolades for Rucker, Le Pigeon: The Oregonian Rising Star 2007, Food & Wine magazine Best New Chef 2007, The Oregonian Restaurant of the Year 2008, James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year 2011.

Significance of Beard Award: Five Portland chefs have won James Beard awards in the Northwest region, which stretches from Alaska to Wyoming. Rucker's rising star award, which came on his fourth nomination, pitted him against talented young chefs across the country. It was the clearest sign to date that Portland's dining scene has arrived on the national stage.

Less than a year later, in 2006, Rucker was offered his first head chef position. He would take over Colleen's Bistro, a small restaurant on East Burnside. In meetings about the new concept, named for the tattooed birds now flocking up his right arm, Rucker was told he had two months to make the struggling restaurant profitable.

Le Pigeon broke even two months later.

By 4:45 p.m. on a Friday in January, 10 people have already gathered outside Le Pigeon. The group includes a trio of young Portlanders in the wine business, a Nike consultant from New York who "always eats at Le Pigeon" and two young women visiting from the Ukraine.

The avocado Rucker sliced that afternoon has been turned into a terrine, a foundation for an architectural construction of crab leg, heart of palm, Meyer lemon sorbet and a Kryptonite-green compressed cucumber slice -- a masterwork of color and flavor. Rucker hands it across the counter to a customer.

Rucker is supremely confident on the line, trading jokes with cooks and describing dishes to diners. The kitchen is open and lively, and nearly every longtime staff member has a nickname -- "Bones," "Puma" "Mastodon." Rucker, sometimes called "Young Turk," prides himself on his restaurant's constancy. But like it or not, change has come to Le Pigeon. Five years ago, Rucker was the youngest chef in his own kitchen. Today he's the oldest.

When the restaurant opened in spring 2006, there were so few customers, Rucker cooked all the food himself. Owner Paul Brady placed 10 percent-off coupons in local phone books. Among Rucker's first customers were his parents.

"He had a menu posted on the glass window, and that wonderful logo, the pigeon made up of cooking implements, but nobody knew about it," Laurie Rucker says. "People would stop, look at the menu, occasionally someone would open the door."

Word soon got out, first for the brunch, then for Rucker himself, who charmed customers, remembering names and favorite dishes. The coupons disappeared, then the brunch, replaced by nightly crowds gathered under Burnside's covered walkway.

They came for the cooks in dirty T-shirts; the chipped plates and silverware bought from the Goodwill; the service with a slice of attitude; and most of all for Rucker, the chef who'd never (and still hasn't) been to France but was reinventing French food. It all added up to a kind of magic, with fellow Gotham-refugees Erik Van Kley and Su-Lien Pino helping make Rucker's recipes a reality.

Rucker was named one of Food & Wine magazines best new chefs in 2007. Later that year, Andy Fortgang, a high-impact manager who grew up in upscale New York restaurants, came on board. Service eventually met the high standards of the cooking. Le Pigeon was named The Oregonian's 2008 co-restaurant of the year.

"It was crazy at that time," Fortgang says. "A basic thing in restaurants is position numbers. Every seat in a restaurant has a number so you can give people what they ordered. When I got there, servers would walk up to a table and say, 'Who's got the chicken?'"

In 2010, Rucker, Fortgang and Van Kley began brainstorming a second restaurant, partly as a way to give Van Kley his own kitchen. Little Bird, a handsome downtown bistro that shares an affinity for avian nomenclature with Le Pigeon, opened that December.

And a Le Pigeon cookbook is beginning to receive offers from publishing houses. The book will be written by Meredith Erickson, who co-wrote last year's impressive Joe Beef cookbook, with photos from Reamer, who has remade himself into a food photographer.

Right now, the mere idea of another big restaurant opening gives Rucker more headaches than excitement.

Kaufman, who works one night a week at Le Pigeon, agrees. "We talk about how fun it would be to live in New York, or live in Paris," she says. "But it's just fantasy stuff. It wouldn't be fun to have to live in those places and run restaurants. It's just so much work."

In many ways, Rucker has already exceeded any reasonable goal he could have set in his career. The Beard award, the first national cooking honor for a Northwest chef (five Portlanders have won regional Beard awards), was the icing on the cake. But he holds his Food & Wine best new chef honor -- a goal he set in his early 20s -- closer.

More important than the personal accolade, which Rucker attributes to the hard work of his staff and a healthy dose of happenstance (his family calls it "Ruck Luck), was the people the Beard award brought to his restaurants. After the ceremony, the 36-seat Le Pigeon served more than 100 diners a night, four nights in a row.

If anything, Rucker's roots in Portland are growing deeper. His parents recently bought a condo in Northeast Portland, stopping by Rucker's compact home two Sundays ago for a (yes, vegetarian) meal.

"I'm focusing on different goals outside my career right now," Rucker says. "Just being a restaurateur isn't the end all, be all. I'm lucky that I hit those goals, but now it's all about growing in a different facet of my life.

"Keeping the restaurants on par, being an excellent dad, an excellent husband. To come home, see my son smiling, and to know that my wife is happy. That's bigger than the James Beard Award that's sitting in my kitchen."

-- Michael Russell

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The making of chef Gabriel Rucker: talent, hard work and 'Ruck Luck'

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Feb 4

Leading Fitness Expert to Teach IYCA Resistance Band Instructor Course

The International Youth Conditioning Association has released a new Resistance Band Training Instructors Course

Elizabethtown, KY (PRWEB) February 03, 2012

Dave Schmitz, a leading resistance band training expert, has just released a new course designed to teach instructors how to properly teach resistance band workouts to kids. The new course, available through the IYCA, aims to increase the number of qualified resistance band trainers for young athletes.

Training with resistance bands is often considered a complement to strength training. In reality, it is one of the best alternative methods for training explosive strength.

Resistance band workouts make use of the forces of momentum, gravity, and ground resistance, which is not the case in standard weightlifting. As a result of the different movements available with bands, children can train motions they use in common sports situations, like throwing.

The number one goal of the IYCA is to promote athlete development (good place for link to my athlete development blog post). As such, they create products that improve the skill sets of those who train young athletes. Schmitz notes, “Resistance band trainers, like other strength trainers, need to be qualified for bands to work with kids.”

In this resistance band training instructor course, Dave Schmitz takes trainers from the basics of resistance bands through advanced workouts. It comes with 4 DVDs and a manual which includes beginner, intermediate, and advanced resistance band training programs.

“We are very happy to be working with Dave Schmitz,” said Pat Rigsby, co-founder of the IYCA. “He brings a level of expertise and commitment to training with resistance bands that is unmatched.”

Schmitz is a noted expert in the field of resistance band training. Since starting as a physical therapist, Schmitz has taken bands from an injury rehab tool to a means of boosting athletic performance. He was recently named one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Health & Fitness.

The Resistance Band Instructor Course is available now. Normally valued at $147, those who order by the end of February 3rd will receive a $50 discount (price: $97).

About Dave Schmitz: is the Co-Owner of Resistance Band Training Systems, LLC and the creator of http://www.ResistanceBandTraining.com, the only website exclusively devoted to training with large continuously looped resistance bands.

The IYCA is a member of the Fitness Consulting Group family of companies. It is the world’s leading authority in the fields of youth fitness, youth conditioning, and youth athletic development. To learn more about the IYCA, visit http://iyca.org/.

###

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/2/prweb9165163.htm

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Feb 4

Red Bull Launches a Fitness Mission With Fitocracy

Red Bull sponsors several extreme sports pros who produce videos with gnarly titles such as “Wakeboarding in the Swamps of Louisiana” and “Dust and Bones.” But through a partnership with online health startup Fitocracy, the company now wants to motivate average joes to submit decidedly non-extreme reports with names such as “20 crunches.”

Fitocracy is a one-year-old fitness tracking platform that incorporates gaming elements. Users earn points to “level up” and rank on a leaderboard by reporting any fitness activity.

[More from Mashable: Nike Unveils FuelBand for Tracking All Physical Activity]

They earn extra points for completing specific groups of fitness tasks or “quests.” The “Paperboy” quest, for instance, suggests this: “Take a ride around your neighborhood. If you hit a trashcan make sure you sprint away from that lady with the knife and rabid dog.” That’s 20 minutes of biking and 0.5 miles of sprinting, according to Fitocracy.

It’s pretty unique concept — but one that turns out to be in demand. About 230,000 people have signed up for the site and together have completed more than 100,000 quests.

[More from Mashable: 5 Fitness Brands Kicking Butt on Social Media]

Red Bull has sponsored both a surfing-themed quest (clap push ups, getups, woodchoppers, twist jumps) and a snowboarding-themed quest (split jump squats, lateral lunges, lateral hurdle jumps, jump roping), but its new challenge is more involved. The brand has created a challenge board within the site. Anyone can join, and 47,000 people have already done so. Whoever in the challenge earns the most Fitocracy points before Feb. 13 will win a trip to Santa Monica to train with Red Bull’s aforementioned team of professional extreme athletes.

This is the first brand partnership for Fitocracy, and it could also be the first trickle of a new revenue stream for the site, which already takes in money from advertising and a premium version of its product.

“There’s a high volume of fitness forums online,” Fitocracy co-founder Richard Talens says. “But there are very few fitness communities that are powerful for brands.”

The startup has added about 200,000 users since June, and it’s done so while still in invite-only beta and without a mobile app. Fitocracy’s user base will likely continue to grow as it launches its iOS app sometime this month and opens membership to everybody. That should make it even more appealing for brands seeking new partnerships.

More About: fitness, fitocracy, red bull

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Feb 4

Janis Saffell – Kickbox for Weight Loss Program – Video

07-07-2011 15:27 Join Janis and her Kickboxing Team for a high energy kick butt workout! Put your gloves on and sweat those extra pounds off! Please consult your physician before beginning this or any other exercise program.

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Janis Saffell - Kickbox for Weight Loss Program - Video

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Feb 4

Students learn to 'read anywhere' – even on an exercise bike

By: TRAVIS FAIN | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: February 03, 2012 Updated: February 03, 2012 - 3:52 PM

In a trailer behind Ward Elementary School, students may be doing two of the best things they can for their future: reading and exercising.

Since 2009 the school has collected donated exercise bicycles for a program called "Read and Ride." Teachers bring in classes, usually 15 minutes at a time, to burn off energy and read donated magazines propped up on book holders attached to the bikes.

Some weeks no one comes in, said school counselor Scott Ertl, who came up with the idea and oversees the program. Other weeks - especially the rainy ones 20 classes use the bikes, he said.

"So many (students) associate reading with sitting at their desk," fourth-grade teacher Katie Garcia said recently, as her class pedaled away. "It kind of opens their eyes that they can pull out a book and read anywhere."

These blended exercise-learning programs appear to be rare in the United States, and Ward Elementary's program is the only one in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school district. One teacher at Kernersville Middle School sits students on exercise balls instead of chairs, but that's about it for in-class workouts, said Nancy Sutton, health and physical education specialist for the district.

But data – albeit limited data -- from similar programs suggest they can make a massive difference, not only with student health, but with education.

A Canadian teacher named Allison Cameron put exercise bikes and treadmills in her high school classroom in 2007. Three days a week Cameron split language arts classes into 20 minutes of exercise and 20 minutes of regular teaching.

Sometimes students would read as they exercised, but often they'd just chat or listen to music, she said.

The other two days of the week Cameron added pushups and situps to math classes, she said. All this exercise was in addition to regular physical education classes at the school, and the results "blew me out of the water," Cameron said.

Body mass indexes went down and test scores went up, particularly in writing, according to data posted on Cameron's website. An eighth-grade class keeping to Cameron's "Movement Matters" program improved its writing test scores 245 percent over a school year, she said.

Another eighth-grade class at the school, which didn't do the program, saw its writing test scores go down over the same period, she said.

"The only thing different in these groups of students' day was that language arts was replaced by Movement Matters (for) 20 minutes, three times a week," Cameron said in an email. "While the students of the participating group were exercising, the other group was spending the entire 40-minute Language Arts period on academics."

Cameron said participating students also behaved better and had fewer sick days. And as she exercised alongside them, Cameron said students "let their guards down, and this brand new relationship started to form."

Cameron said the program was so obviously successful that, at her principal's suggestion, she stopped keeping statistics and focused on expanding it. She has since established similar programs at hundreds of schools in Canada, she said.

In the United States, Ward Elementary's "Read and Ride" program seems to be one of the first of its kind. Ertl said he's looked online and talked the program up at national conferences without hearing of many similar ones.

He hasn't kept data on student test scores, and Ward's physical education teacher said she couldn't draw any conclusions about its effect on health.

But Ward's program is completely voluntary, and thus hard to quantify. Teachers have to take time away from regular lessons to let their students ride, and many have not embraced the concept, Ertl and Sutton said.

Many are concerned that the burst of energy children get when they start cycling will make them harder to control when it's time to return to class, but research shows the opposite, Sutton said. Other teachers may be worried about losing instruction time to exercise, Ertl said.

Russell Jones Elementary School in Rogers, Ark., has a more regimented program than Ward Elementary's, but school physical education teacher Lowell Ratzlaff said he believes the school got the idea for the program from Ertl.

Ratzlaff said he had two fourth-grade classes reading and cycling three days a week. Each of those classes averaged 113 to 118 points growth in state reading benchmarks, he said. Classes that didn't participate in the program averaged 71 to 79 points growth, he said.

"Anytime you do anything in a school like that, there are a lot of variables," Ratzlaff said. "But we didn't do anything different with them, other than the ride to read."

Naperville Central High School in Illinois found similar results, according to an ABC News report in April 2010. That school moved physical education to the start of the school day and put stationary bicycles in classrooms. Reading scores have nearly doubled, and math scores are up "by a factor of 20," ABC News reported.

Broader scientific research has drawn a direct line between exercise and brain function. Harvard Medical School professor John Ratey has written extensively on the subject, saying exercise makes the human brain "more ready to learn." Another study found that mice exercising on treadmills had increased blood flow to the part of their brains associated with the production of new brain cells.

Which means that it's entirely possible 10-year-old Wanya Martin, a fourth grader at Ward Elementary, was directionally correct when he offered this assessment of the school's Read and Ride program: "Helps with my brain muscle."

More info

For more information: Ward Elementary School's Read and Ride program has a website at: http://www.kidsreadandride.com/. The Canadian high school programs described are discussed at http://www.4yourbenefitness.com/.

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Students learn to 'read anywhere' - even on an exercise bike

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Feb 4

15 Square Inches to Success

VOL. 127 | NO. 24 | Monday, February 06, 2012

Smart Stuff 4 Work

Chris Crouch

CHRIS CROUCH Updated 4:02PM

I decided to lose a few pounds in 2012. It’s not a New Year’s resolution and I’m not in a hurry. I’ve studied the psychology of weight loss enough to understand it’s not a good idea to lose too much weight quickly. Rapid weight loss is often interpreted by your nervous system as starvation. And your nervous system has a plethora of tricks up its sleeve to encourage you to not only eat but to binge eat to respond to such a situation.

Anyhow, in the process of setting up my plan to lose weight, I ran across an idea that will help you reverse any form of unwanted behavior – including behavior that might be limiting your business success.

I began my weight loss process by reading a book titled “The Beck Diet Solution” by Judith S. Beck, Ph.D. Dr. Beck is a cognitive behavior therapy specialist. Basically, cognitive behavior therapy helps you change things in your life by changing the way you think. Get your mind right and your body will follow.

One of the first things Beck suggests is carefully thinking through the specific benefits you hope to achieve and writing these benefits on a 3-by-5 index card. Then you develop your eating plan (you can use any plan you prefer). In addition to randomly reading the index card several times a day, you read it every time you have the urge to eat something that is not in agreement with your plan.

If you have read my column for a while, you might recall that last year I discussed something called If-Then strategies. Rather than declaring you are going to change behavior and hoping for the best, you identify a triggering event (the “If” part of the strategy) and predetermine a response to the triggering event (the “Then” part of the strategy).

Basically, using an index card I set up a very simple If-Then strategy to help me move toward a healthier lifestyle. In my case, if I want to eat something not in agreement with my plan (the triggering event), then I pull out the index card and read the benefits of losing weight (the predetermined response). So far, I find the think-about-food-but-read-the-index-card-instead strategy to be extremely effective.

For years, I have promoted the 3-by-5 index card as one of the most powerful productivity tools available. If you have read my productivity books or attended my classes, you know I rely heavily on this 15-square-inch tool.

Try using a strategy similar to my diet plan to alter one of your unproductive work habits this week. For example, record on an index card the benefits of staying totally focused on your No. 1 priority for a defined period of time every day. Then block out at least one hour a day for the next week to totally focus on your top priority. If – during the blocked out time you are tempted to answer the phone, check emails, check Facebook or do anything else, then – pick up the card and read it instead.

Chris Crouch is CEO of DME Training and Consulting and author of several books on improving productivity. Contact him through http://www.dmetraining.com.

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Feb 4

Swampscott rec panel wants farmers’ market

Home > News

 

Swampscott rec panel wants farmers’ market Originally Published on Thursday, February 02, 2012 By Cyrus Moulton / The Daily Item

SWAMPSCOTT ? The Recreation Commission is seeking volunteers to help establish a local farmers’ market that advocates say will improve residents’ diets and support local growers.

“I think it brings the community together and also think that buying local has a lot of benefits,” said Recreation Director Danielle Strauss. “It benefits people who live and work in our community and surrounding communities, and it benefits us from the health perspective because we’re buying local fruits and vegetables.”

Strauss acknowledged that many details of the market still need to be worked out. However, she said the commission has been discussing the idea at recent meetings and working with the Health Department and volunteers from the Marblehead Farmers’ Market to start a market in Swampscott.

The idea is to have a market on Sundays beginning in mid-June through October or mid-November, according to Strauss.

Volunteers will be needed to organize vendors and complete the necessary permitting with the Board of Health, according to a press release from the Recreation Department.

The department is seeking a volunteer manager ? estimated to work approximately 20 hours a week during the season ? to provide periodic updates on the market to the Recreation Commission, according to the release.

Strauss said the commission has not decided exactly where they will hold the market. But members of the commission have begun recruiting vendors ? they hope to attract farmers, bakers, musicians and crafters ? to see if they can add another event to their schedule.

“We hope it brings our community together too,” Strauss added. “It’s nice to have that community feel.”

If you are interested in volunteering, contact Strauss at 781-596-8854 or dstrauss@town.swampscott.ma.us.

Cyrus Moulton can be reached at cmoulton@itemlive.com.

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Feb 4

U.S. college ratings game set for shakeup

(Reuters) - An elite California college's admission this week that it tried to boost its reputation by inflating the test scores of incoming freshmen has stoked a heated debate over the outsized influence and controversial methodology of commercial "best college" lists.

But behind the furor over the fraud at Claremont McKenna College is a crescendo of calls from academics, politicians and parents for new rating systems that would measure what really matters: how effectively an institution educates.

Reformers argue that for too long, American institutions of higher learning have been measured primarily by their prestige. The rankings with the most cachet, compiled by U.S. News & World Report, rely heavily on a college's reputation in the academic world, how much it spends on faculty and the caliber of students it attracts.

The fraud disclosed this week by Claremont McKenna - ranked the ninth-best liberal arts college in America by U.S. News - involved an administrator who falsified years worth of incoming students' scores on the SAT, a key U.S. college admissions exam, to make the college appear more selective.

Other American top-college publications try to move beyond selectivity. The Princeton Review bases its ratings on student surveys that ask everything from "Are your instructors good teachers" to "How do you rate the food on campus?" And the Forbes list considers how much debt students incur to pay tuition and how favorably they rate their professors in online forums.

International rankings, such as those produced by Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds, rely heavily on a university's reputation and influence, such as how often its research is cited in academic journals. QS also gives some weight to the views of global employers, who are asked which campuses produce the best graduates.

But by and large, the "best colleges" lists don't even attempt to measure what students get out of their years at college: Did they improve their critical thinking? Did they learn the subject matter? Can they land good jobs?

"Even the crudest measures of student outcomes, like job placement, are hard to find," said David Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, an advocacy group that is pushing for a new approach to ratings. "The way the system has developed, very few institutions have an incentive to ask, 'Are students learning?'"

Alternative rating systems are beginning to emerge, with the federal government, state legislatures and private groups all getting into the act.

President Barack Obama last week announced plans to assess the effectiveness of public and private colleges and direct federal aid to those that give students the most bang for the buck. The Department of Education is also developing a "college scorecard," akin to the fuel-economy stickers on new cars, that let parents and students compare competing institutions at a glance. The metrics to be used in the ratings, however, are still being developed.

CONCERN ABOUT PRESSURE TO 'DUMB DOWN'

Some states are further along. Minnesota has created an online "accountability dashboard" that uses colorful graphics to show how each college in the state system fares on measures such as the percentage of graduates who pass professional licensing exams, perceived academic rigor and even how many buildings on campus are crumbling.

Purdue University in Indiana publishes reports on alumni outcomes in such granular detail that prospective students can vividly picture their future. Those considering Purdue's landscape architecture program, for instance, might find it useful to know that one in four recent grads has been unable to find work - and that the average salary among those who are employed stands at $37,000.

Several states, meanwhile, have begun to rate colleges based on how many undergraduates are passing classes and moving steadily toward a degree. Campuses can often get bonus points for serving low-income students or awarding degrees in highly valued subjects such as math and science. Those that score well are rewarded with more funding. Those that do poorly lose out.

Indiana and Ohio have adopted this system. More than a dozen states plan to consider similar measures this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Skeptics fear that some of these new government-mandated ratings put too much emphasis on affordability and efficiency - in effect, rewarding colleges for pushing large numbers of students toward degrees cheaply and quickly. That, in turn, could prompt institutions to 'dumb down' the curriculum.

"If the goal is simply to reduce the cost of higher education and graduate more students, I can do that tomorrow at every institution in America," said Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University. The easy way to get there? "Require less," he said.

To counteract that temptation, there are also efforts to better measure - and report - how much students actually learn, as well as what they experience day-to-day on campus. More than 300 state colleges and universities, representing 60 percent of public four-year institutions in the United States, have pledged to post extensive data about their own performance on a website, CollegePortraits.org.

Prospective students who visit the site can find out that virtually every undergraduate class at the University of Colorado at Boulder has more than 50 students; that nearly 30 percent of freshmen at Northern Arizona University don't return for their sophomore year; and that given the chance to roll back the clock, just 72 percent of seniors at the University of Missouri at Kansas City would pick their school above other options.

MEASURING LEARNING

Within four years, the online profiles will also include information about how well students are developing high-level skills, as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test of critical thinking.

Several colleges have already begun posting results. Those include not just raw scores but also a measure of average cognitive growth from freshman to senior year - and how that stacks up against comparable campuses. The data indicate, for instance, that students at California State University at Long Beach improve their critical thinking skills far more than peers at similar colleges. Students at San Diego State do not.

Robert J. Morse, director of data research at U.S. News & World Report, said he would like to include such measures in his publication's rankings. "That's definitely something very important that's missing," he said. But few private colleges report such data.

Pressure on all colleges to step up disclosures are mounting in large part because of the soaring cost of college. Tuition, room and board at the most elite schools, such as Harvard and Yale, hover around $60,000 a year. The average private college approaches $40,000. And public schools are not always bargains: The average student attending his local state university faces a sticker price of $17,000, according to the College Board, a non-profit consortium of colleges.

Parents contemplating that kind of investment want to know what they're getting, said Tom Lindsay, director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that pushes for more transparency on college costs and outcomes. "There's a lot of skepticism" from parents and students, Lindsay said. "Universities are going to have to do a better job selling themselves."

But even when statistics about student outcomes are available, parents often don't know where to look. The College Portraits website got just half a million unique visitors last year, though millions of undergrads are studying at the public four-year colleges it rates. The non-profit groups that run the site do little marketing other than mailing posters to high-school guidance counselors nationwide.

"There isn't a shortage of data ... but I don't know that anyone has come up with a good way of harnessing it and making it easily digestible," said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Without a one-stop shop for clear, comprehensive information, some parents fall back on easy-to-grasp lists like the annual "best colleges" rankings, Hawkins said.

As for prospective students, many never think to look for statistical measures of a college's value.

"I don't think any of that really crossed my mind," said Jordan Seman, a high-school senior from Denver who has applied to nine colleges spread out across the country.

Jordan, who is 18, has visited a few of her top choices in person. Others she picked after taking virtual tours and scanning course offerings online. Jordan says she hopes to do more extensive research after she learns where she's been accepted. "Otherwise," she said, "I'll just go with my gut."

(Reporting By Stephanie Simon in Denver; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Eric Beech)

Go here to read the rest:
U.S. college ratings game set for shakeup

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Feb 4

‘The Coming Epidemic’

Posted: Wednesday, February 1, 2012 12:30 am | Updated: 4:07 pm, Wed Feb 1, 2012.

There’s an epidemic going on right now in children’s health, and you’ve no doubt heard the news reports — childhood obesity is at an all-time high.

Physicians and others have been sounding the alarm for several years now, yet the trend continues.

Dr. Burt Bromberg, a pediatric cardiologist with Mercy Children’s Hospital in Creve Coeur, has serious concerns, not just about what this means for children’s health presently, but in coming decades as they become adults.

The “epidemic” of childhood obesity being seen now is foreshadowing a far greater crisis that will come in 20 to 30 years, he said, when these children are adults and are diagnosed with heart disease.

“As a pediatric cardiologist, I see mostly kids with structural heart defects or electrical disorders,” said Dr. Bromberg, “but the number of kids with these pales in comparison with the ones who are brewing heart disease.

“If you look at the people who develop heart disease as adults there are a number of risk factors: 1. weight or body mass index (BMI); 2. hypertension or high blood pressure; 3. cigarette smoking; and 4. adverse parameters in their lipid panel, or high LDL cholesterol and high triglycerides.

Dr. Bromberg will be the keynote speaker at Mercy Hospital Washington’s annual Heart to Heart Fair being held this Saturday, Feb. 4, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the hospital. Admission is free.

Dr. Bromberg will speak about “The Coming Epidemic of Heart Disease in Children — What You Can Do to Combat It.” His presentation will include a question and answer period.

The overall theme for the heart fair is “Heart Health for All Ages.” Heart health in children is a growing concern as more children are diagnosed with risk factors for heart disease.

See the sidebar story for complete details on the Heart to Heart Fair.

Heart Disease Is Progressive

Dr. Bromberg said the evidence that childhood obesity is laying tracks for adult heart disease is made clear in the results of the Bogalusa Heart Study, a longitudinal study that began tracking some 14,000 children living in a small community in Louisiana in the early 1970s.

The children were checked annually on various parameters, including blood pressure, diet, whether or not they smoked and how much physical activity they engaged in, said Dr. Bromberg. Along the way, some of the children died for various reasons, and the researchers conducted autopsies to inspect their aorta and coronary arteries, taking into consideration whether or not the patient had any of the risk factors for heart disease.

In the end, what they found surprised them, said Dr. Bromberg.

“They found the fatty streaks that are the beginning of heart disease in 2 percent of the patients who had died and had no risk factors for heart disease. And they found them in 12 percent of those who had three or four risk factors . . . that’s six times as high.”

The fact that the beginning stages of heart disease could be present in children so young was eye-opening, said Dr. Bromberg, but added to that was evidence that these fatty streaks got worse as the children aged.

Over half of the children had these fatty streaks by the time they were 21 and 70 percent had them by the time they were 26 to 39 years old.

The message parents and caregivers of young children should take from these results is that heart disease starts young and is progressive, said Dr. Bromberg. It builds over time.

“And the risk factors only increase the severity of it,” he said.

Genetics Argument Doesn’t Wash

While genetics may account for some of the cases of childhood obesity and the presence of fatty streaks, Dr. Bromberg said as a whole it doesn’t explain the marked increase in these conditions over the past 30 years.

“In the 1990s, 10 states reported a prevalence of obesity in 10 percent of adults,” he said.

“By 2000, there wasn’t one state that had an obesity incidence of less than 10 percent, and in 23 states it was 20-24 percent, but no state had (incidence) greater than 25 percent.

“In 2010, there was no state with obesity incidence less than 20 percent; 36 states had (incidence) greater than 25 percent, and of those 36, 12 states, including Missouri, had an incidence of greater than 30 percent.”

Similar increases are seen in the number of children who are obese, said Dr. Bromberg. He cited a survey from 1976-’80 that found the incidence of obesity in children ages 6 to 19 was 5 percent.

By 1988-’94, that number had increased to 12 percent; in 2000 it was up to 15 percent; and the most recent data, from 2007, puts the number of children who are obese at 19 percent.

Tracks Into Adulthood

One of the reasons the increasing number of children who are obese is so alarming and of such concern is that research shows obesity in childhood tracks into adulthood, said Dr. Bromberg.

“Eighty percent of kids who are obese will be obese as adults,” he said, noting there also is some evidence that once people become overweight their bodies experience metabolic changes that make it harder to lose the weight.

“Their body may not burn as many calories at rest as it did before and there may be hormonal changes . . . that make them feel hungry more often,” he said.

Plus any behavorial or emotional issues that led to the person overeating in the first place may still be present, so “it’s like the horse is out of the barn,” Dr. Bromberg remarked.

What this means is that the ramifications of childhood obesity are far-reaching and affect all of us.

“If you think our problem with heart disease now is a problem, imagine what it will be like in 20 or 30 years,” Dr. Bromberg said.

The good news, he stressed, is that there is a very clear solution.

Calories In, Calories Out

The secret to keeping weight in check is really no secret at all, said Dr. Bromberg. It’s basic math.

“It’s calories in and calories out.”

The more calories you take in, the more you have to burn off in physical activity, or else you gain weight, he explained.

Right now, too many people are eating unhealthy foods and then living a sedentary lifestyle — sitting around watching TV, working on a computer and playing digital games on their handheld devices that require little to no movement.

“It isn’t just that we don’t burn calories, it is that we eat while we watch (TV), usually chips or cookies or ice cream,” said Dr. Bromberg. “We see commercials for (food) and it makes us hungry.”

So the solution isn’t just a better diet, although that is key, he said. It’s also about having enough activities for young people, which Dr. Bromberg sees as a community responsibility.

“Kids need at least 60 minutes of activity every day, and many schools today only have gym class two days a week,” he commented.

“And as kids get older, the sports teams they played on aren’t available to them anymore because they don’t make the team. Why aren’t there recreational (sports) leagues for kids who may not be able to make the school team?” Dr. Bromberg asked.

“And what (foods) are kids being served in school? I don’t think it’s unreasonable not to have soft drinks and candy bars available to them . . . but part of the problem is there are too many people or companies that have a stake in continuing these problems.”

What Parents Can Do

There are a number of ways parents can take charge of this situation, said Dr. Bromberg, beginning when children are very young — even newborn, by watching their own attitude about food and eating.

“Breast fed babies are less prone to be overweight,” he said, explaining there is no concern over how many ounces a baby drank because it can’t be measured.

Yet babies who are fed formula in a bottle where it can be measured may be encouraged to “finish the bottle,” even when they aren’t hungry for more.

When children move to the table for their meals, Dr. Bromberg stressed the importance of introducing a variety of healthy foods at an early age.

“Everyone should now be aware of the importance of a balanced diet – four to five fruits and vegetable servings a day, whole wheat bread and grains, 1 percent milk.

“The problem I frequently encounter is the parent who says, ‘He just won’t eat vegetables; he only likes chocolate milk; he will only drink sodas.’ These are learned patterns of behavior,” said Dr. Bromberg. “The reason Indians eat a largely vegetarian diet, that Chinese eat rice dishes with vegetables and spices, is that these are the foods with which they grew up.

“Parents need to be firm with their children from the time they begin baby food onward, continuously exposing and re-exposing them to healthy foods.

“The average exposures a baby needs to begin to accept a new taste is five to six times. Once they acquire a taste for fruits, vegetables, whole grain cereals, etc., you don’t have to battle them when they are 10 or 15 years old to change their eating patterns.”

Next, parents need to be cautious about placing their young children in front of the TV and, for older children, allowing them unlimited “screen time,” which includes TV, computers and any digital device.

“For children under 2 years old, there is no reason to have them in front of a TV. There is no educational benefit,” said Dr. Bromberg. “And beyond 2 years, the recommendation is two hours or less a day.”

Knowing much of the screen time children experience is a result of parents working or trying to keep a child occupied while they complete a few household chores, Dr. Bromberg suggests they look outside the home for solutions.

“So this is a situation where a community can look around and say, ‘We need a place where kids can do recreational things safely’ . . . so they’re not just walled off playing video games or holed up in the basement.”

Dr. Bromberg also puts pediatricians on the hook too.

“They need to be tracking a child’s weight from age 2 on,” he remarked.

Parents, teachers and community leaders who are looking for ways they can turn the tide on childhood obesity can find solutions online too. There’s more help out there than people may realize.

Dr. Bromberg suggested these websites:

http://www.letsmove.gov, a portal to First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to address childhood obesity.

http://www.choosemyplate.gov, where topics include sample meal plans, dietary guidelines and eating on a budget.

Posted in Feature stories on Wednesday, February 1, 2012 12:30 am. Updated: 4:07 pm.

Read more:
‘The Coming Epidemic’

Read More..

Feb 4

'We are going to have to send you to the zoo' says doctor to obese patients too large to fit in scanners

Standard sized CT scanners too small for obese
CT scanners customised for horses could accommodate growing problem Dr Dharamshi, said he was told to refer patients to zoo

By Jenny Hope

Last updated at 3:47 PM on 15th January 2012

NHS hospitals have resorted to asking zoos and vets to scan patients who are too obese to fit into hospital scanners.

The bizarre requests to use CT scanners, normally intended for four-legged animals, at the UK’s leading veterinary college in north London were revealed as hospitals face pressure to adapt beds and wards for an increasingly obese population.

The Royal Veterinary College (RVC)yesterday said its CT scanners, customised for horses, could be used to accommodate patients weighing 30 stone or more but they would need to get a special licence to scan humans.

CT scanners usually used by zoos and vet for horses could help scan obese human patients

Riaz Dharamshi, a geriatric registrar at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, West London, said he was told to refer obese patients to London Zoo when he was training.

 

The practice of referring patients to zoos is commonplace in America where obesity has reached epidemic levels.

Writing on his blog, he said ‘Imagine the humiliation for the patient. ‘I’m sorry sir but you are too fat to have a CT scan, so we are going to have to send you to the zoo where they are used to dealing with larger specimens.’'

However a spokesperson from the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which oversees St Mary's Hospital, said: 'We have never referred or been asked to refer a patient to London Zoo or the Royal Veterinary College for scanning.'

London Zoo also denied taking obese patients but a spokeswoman for the Royal Veterinary College confirmed they have been approached.

She said ‘We have been approached on several occasions but have always said we are only licensed to perform scans on animals.’
It is not known whether any veterinary colleges are seeking licenses to perform the procedure.

Hospitals face pressure to adapt equipment for Britain's obese population

Dr Dharamshi added ‘Some bright spark decided it would be a good idea to up the loading capacity of the tables we use in the CT scanners, so the problem of having patients too big to scan is not one we face all that often.

‘Wheelchairs are wider, theatre operating tables are stronger and we have access to reinforced hospital beds when we need them. Being overweight has become the norm.’

The CT scanner at the RVC is housed in the equine hospital and is used with a specially built table to support anaesthetised horses.

CT scans are used by doctors to assess body fat as well as for more general health checks to see if anything is wrong.

Briatin’s fire crews have spent millions on callouts by the NHS in recent years shifting obese patients who have got stuck in the bath or their bedrooms, or who cannot be safely lifted by ambulance staff.

A report last year warned the NHS is ‘poorly prepared’ to deal with obese patients, lacking staff and equipment to care for them safely.

Bigger trolley, beds and wheelchairs are needed – with more than half of women and almost two thirds of  men likely to be obese by 2050, according to official estimates.

The report found incidents involved equipment not being able to take the weight of obese patients, with specially adapted equipment either not being available or normal equipment not working properly when used with obese patients.

 

See the article here:
'We are going to have to send you to the zoo' says doctor to obese patients too large to fit in scanners

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