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TOP 5 TIPS FOR GREAT HAIR

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TOP 5 TIPS FOR GREAT HAIR
The latest advice on how to style and update your look

















When asked, Headgear Director Sean Cassar gave the following five tips for guys who want great hair:

1. Go for quality: Only use products that contain quality ingredients and superior styling formulas. Make sure your styling products are free from drying alcohols and Shampoos don’t contain Sodium Lauryl Sulphate, as this will help maintain strong, healthy and manageable hair.

2. Choose the right product for you: Everyone’s hair is different so go for products that suit your hair type and style. A strong hold and textured product like a clay will produce an extreme style, whilst a flexible Matte Shaper will create a more reserved, yet textured look.

3. Keep it trim: Styling products should be used to compliment a great hair style, not cover up a bad one. Visit your local barber or hairdresser regularly (say every 4 weeks) to ensure your look is consistently stylish and looking fresh

4. Keep your hair clean: Wash and condition 2-3 times a week so hair is kept healthy and manageable.

5. Be a little daring: Experiment with your style by using different products to achieve a more daring and expressive look. More expressive hair communicates confidence. Why not take things to the extreme with Headgear Memory Glue that will let you flick it, slick it or spike it, without turning greasy, flakey or dusty.


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10 TIPS FOR SMOOTH SKIN

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10 TIPS FOR SMOOTH SKIN
Ten DIY grooming tips to make your skin as flawless as your behaviour

FACE THE DAY
Each morning, apply an antioxidant-rich serum, followed by a moisturiser with SPF protection. This serves as armour for your face, fending off damage from the sun, free radicals and other nasty environmental pollutants. 
MH FIX: Botanics of Australia Repairing Antioxidant Serum; $27.95.


ROUGH IT
Use a gentle scrub twice a week to slough off dead skin cells and clear away oil, which can clog pores and lead to breakouts and blackheads. But don’t overdo it or you could strip the skin of natural oils, causing early wrinkles and triggering even oilier skin. 
MH FIX: Biotherm Homme Facial Exfoliator; $52.


BEAT “BACKNE”
Sweat and friction irritate hair follicles, creating back acne, says dermatologist Lance Brown. “Rough sponges and scrubs make the problem worse.” Use an antibacterial cleanser with benzoyl peroxide to kill the bacteria instead.
MH FIX: Clinique Acne Solutions Emergency Gel-Lotion; $13.50.


MEASURE YOUR MOISTURISER
“Judge a lotion by its viscosity,” says Brown. “Thicker is better.” Apply it when your face is still damp so the natural hydration is trapped. Only use a 20¢-sized amount, otherwise you’ll look shinier than a Ferrari salesroom. 
MH FIX: Nivea Revitalising Cream Q10; $13.47.


LOSE A LAYER (OR TWO)
“Peels are like exercise for your skin,” says Brown. He recommends four or five dermatologist-assisted strippings every year. A 2007 study published in the journal Dermatologic Surgery found chemical peels using alpha or beta hydroxy acid helped clear up acne in 94 per cent of patients after one month. 
MH FIX: for an at-home application, try MD Skincare Alpha Beta Daily Face Peel; $78.


KILL A COLD SORE
You can minimise the discomfort with treatments containing acyclovir, advises Kylie Hayden, owner of Sydney’s Face of Man salon (faceofman.com.au). To dull a flare-up fast, apply an ice cube to the area as soon as you feel it emerging. 
MH FIX: Zovirax Antiviral Cream; $16.95.


CLOSE SHAVE
Take a warm shower before shaving. Heat softens facial hair follicles and opens pores to prep the skin for shaving, says Hayden. Post shave, exfoliate using a facial cleanser that contains exfoliating particles and rinse with cold water to close the pores. 
MH FIX: Natio Purifying Face Scrub; $10.86

H2 WOO
“Drinking plenty of water is the single best thing you can do to keep looking young,” says grooming consultant Negin Niknejad. “It carries nutrition to the cells and washes toxins out of the body.”


ZAP A ZIT
“Use two clean tissues wrapped around your index fingers and apply pressure about four millimetres underneath the pimple, rolling it onto itself,” says Hayden. Squeeze until you just draw blood.

PUT THE SQUEEZE ON
For a quick facelift gently pinch your skin between thumb and forefinger and massage around the eyes and forehead. “This wakes up your skin and revitalises the tissue,” explains Niknejad.








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THE 10 BEST KNEE-FRIENDLY EXERCISES

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THE 10 BEST KNEE-FRIENDLY EXERCISES
Crush calories and build strength with these low-impact moves.



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LOSE 15 KILOS IN 3 MONTHS- EATING PLAN

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LOSE 15 KILOS IN 3 MONTHS- EATING PLAN
One MH staffer did just that - and took notes. You don't have to starve yourself to lose weight fast. Here's his eating plan

Here's a snapshot of what I consumed in a typical day. (Not shown: the total amount of water I drank.) Because each meal was packed with protein and fat, I never felt hungry, even though my overall kilojoule intake was far lower than before I started the plan.

7am: breakfast
3 scrambled eggs
Large bowl of rockmelon
230 millilitres green tea

Noon: lunch
Large salad of lettuce, cucumbers and green capsicum
170 grams tuna, mixed with mayonnaise
450ml water


3pm: snack
100g hamburger, no bun
55g mozzarella cheese
Diet soft drink

6.30pm: dinner
230g salmon fillet
2 servings steamed broccoli
Serving of cucumber
450ml water


Your Flex Plan: After six weeks, you can reintroduce a limited number of multi-grain foods into your diet.
The key is to monitor your weight to ensure that the grains don't slow fat loss. To start with, trade one serving of fruit for any of these items:

Two Ryvita
Multi-grain crispbreads
Packed with whole grains and fibre, these rye crispbreads have only 6.4g carbs each.

Two Arnott's
Vita-Weat 9 Grains
Better still, only 4.5g carbs per biscuit.

Two slices of Burgen soy-and-linseed bread
Each slice contains just 8.5g of carbohydrates, about 55 per cent of the amount in regular bread.




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IS YOUR FAMILY MAKING YOU FAT?

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IS YOUR FAMILY MAKING YOU FAT?
The hedonistic indulgence of the silly season is behind you. Are you still carrying those few extra "jolly" kilos?

























A few months after the annual Christmas food-and-drink binge, are you still carrying Santa's belly?

Relatives "can encourage overeating and even sabotage your diet", warns Cynthia Sass, co-author of Diet is Driving Me Crazy.


Here are her hints for avoiding family-induced flab

Mum
She expresses affection with food.
The fix: tell her ahead of time if you're limiting carbs or fat and she won't be insulted. Bring plastic containers to load up on leftovers. You'll be set for weeks.


In-laws
There are politico-familial reasons to "enjoy" what her mum serves.
The fix: pick one dish and praise it mightily. Go light on the rest.


Brother or dad
They expect you to down beer, chips and ribs like in the old days and take it personally if you don't.
The fix: bring light beer and healthy nuts. And revive the traditional touch-footy game.


Kids
They want to make a stop at McDonald's on the way to nanna's.
The fix: pack snacks so you won't be finishing off their fries. Rice crackers, pretzels and stick cheese are good choices.


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LOSE WEIGHT WHILE CHEATING

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LOSE WEIGHT WHILE CHEATING
A too-strict diet can undermine your weight-loss effort. To keep the pounds coming off, sometimes you need to break your own rules














Everyone knows how to lose weight. Eat less, move more.
What could be simpler? Except it’s not really that easy. For one thing, weight loss isn’t linear. The more you lose, the more your body fights back by slowing your metabolism and increasing your hunger.

That’s why so many diets that start as New Year’s resolutions collapse into gluttony before the end of summer.

Logically, there’s no reason why a diet should end with a single slip-up. What’s the worst that can happen? It sets you back a day or two. If your goal is permanent weight loss, what you do six days a week should matter more than what happens on the seventh.

In fact, some in the field suggest that a good diet plan should include wiggle room. In other words, you should plan to give yourself an occasional break – in the form of a cheat meal.

A popular example is Body for Life. Author Bill Phillips advised readers to follow his strict high-protein, low-fat plan six days a week and then use the seventh as a “free day” to eat whatever they wanted. Pizza, pancakes, “a Big Mac or two for lunch” – it was all on the table. Those free days, Phillips wrote, “may help convince your body that it is not starving”. But even more important is the psychology behind a break. “You don’t want to create standards you can’t meet,” he added.

The 12-week Body for Life program was put to the test in a Skidmore College study. Even with 12 days of anything-goes eating, people on the program reduced their daily kilojoules by 29 per cent and lost an average of five kilograms. But something interesting happened along the way: “Many of the participants grew out of the free-day eating plan early on,” says study author Dr Paul Arciero, a professor of health and exercise sciences at the college. After the first couple of weeks, they were happy with a single cheat meal or an occasional dessert rather than a full day without rules. Although it was impossible to say whether the call to cheat was crucial to the participants’ success, Arciero was intrigued; he decided to follow up with several longer-term studies. What he’s finding could lead to new and less militant weight-loss strategies. Answer these questions and outsmart the flab monster.


Do cheaters win by losing?
A Brown University study estimated that 80 per cent of overweight people who drop at least 10 per cent of their body weight regain some of it within a year. So it’s reasonable to ask if a diet that includes some kind of release valve – a way to fudge on the plan without giving up entirely –might work better than one that doesn’t.

Nutritionist Alan Aragon points out that a strict all-or-nothing approach to dieting has been linked to such problems as overeating, weight gain and anxiety. Conversely, people who take a more flexible approach – that is, those who slip up occasionally but then quickly jump back on track – may have more success.

The goal is what researchers call “flexible restraint”, or the ability to stick to the plan most of the time without forcing yourself to refuse cake on your own birthday. But that still doesn’t answer the question of whether a planned cheat meal works better than waiting for your urges or the environment to sneak up and blindside you with a plate of nachos.


Who needs to cheat?
“If your body fat is really high, then you don’t need a cheat meal,” says Shelby Starnes, a nutrition coach and bodybuilder who has spent the past seven years working with average blokes and elite lifters. “You can probably go weeks without one.” How high is “really” high? If you’re under 90kg and your waist is 36 inches or larger, then you’re probably at least 20 per cent fat, which suggests you’ve enjoyed quite a few cheat meals already.

The guy who most needs to cheat is the one who’s doing exhausting workouts while adhering to a strict diet. “It’s like a tank you’ve emptied,” says Starnes. “You use cheat meals when you’re depleted and your metabolism starts to drop a little bit.” A slowing metabolism is an obvious handicap to someone trying to lose weight. You have to do more to accomplish less. But that’s just one of the problems you encounter when your diet is working.

“When people diet, they overrestrict their carbohydrates, fat, or both,” says Aragon. Severe fat restriction, especially when it eliminates most saturated fat, may lower testosterone levels, Aragon says, while a low-carb diet could reduce levels of thyroid hormone. Lower T would make it harder to retain muscle while shedding fat. Less thyroid hormone may slow fat loss. Two other hormones could also be affected: leptin, a hormone related to satiety, declines when you restrict kilojoules, while ghrelin, a hunger-inducing hormone, rises.

Strategic cheating could reset all four hormones to optimal levels and temporarily boost your metabolism. But it’s important to note that no new research has examined the effect of cheat meals on any of these factors. Instead, we have to look at older studies of overfeeding and underfeeding to see what happened.

The answers aren’t always what we expect. For example, a 1986 study in the journal Metabolism found that lean people’s resting metabolic rates increased when they ate too much. But obese people’s rates did not rise, a result that supports Starnes’s point: cheat meals tend to work better for relatively lean guys who are trying to become even leaner.

But even that may be a stretch. “The rise in metabolism doesn’t last that long, and the increase in calories probably won’t be offset,” says exercise and nutrition scientist Dr Michael Ormsbee. Cheat meals may work best for weight loss only if the noncheating part of your diet cuts kilojoules enough to give you an overall deficit.


What are the best cheat foods?
You choices should depend on what your diet has depleted, says Aragon. If you’ve been curtailing your fat intake, you want a high-fat cheat – pizza, a big steak, cheesecake. If you’ve been going low-carb, then you want pasta, fries or another high-carb cheat.

But all that is irrelevant if you crave something specific. “The psychological impact of militantly depriving yourself of food you like can sabotage you,” says Aragon. “It gives all the power to the food and takes the power away from the dieter.” In other words, it’s best to just eat what you want and enjoy it.


When is the best time to cheat?
Although weekends may seem perfect for nutritional anarchy, they’re actually the most dangerous time. “You can spin out of control if your cheat meal stretches out to a full day or weekend,” warns Ormsbee. Dinner is the ideal cheat meal because it’s the easiest one to contain, says Starnes. But he cautions to eat for no longer than 45 minutes. He also recommends having your cheat meal the night before your toughest workout. The extra kilojoules, combined with your improved mood, can make that training session more productive.


How often should you cheat?
While Starnes recommends one cheat meal a week, Aragon’s approach is more nuanced. His goal for his clients is to have them eat right 90 per cent of the time, leaving 10 per cent of their kilojoules for cheating. He offers three options:


• One huge indulgence a week – “8500-12,500kJ of pure junky goodness.”
• Two 4200kJ-6300kJ meals a week.
• A small indulgence daily. “For most guys, this boils down to 850-1250kJ,” he says, adding that it’s the most popular option.

Arciero’s research points to the same conclusion. He gave participants 15 per cent “free” kilojoules. “The majority chose to spread out the 15 per cent over the week,” he says. “The cheat foods were embedded with healthy meals. It’s a very effective adherence strategy.”

It also suggests a new weight-loss paradigm, one in which it’s perfectly okay to have something fun every day if that’s your preference. After all, at that point you aren’t cheating on your diet as much as following it.


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WHY YOUR BEST IDEAS COME TO YOU IN THE SHOWER

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WHY YOUR BEST IDEAS COME TO YOU IN THE SHOWER
Plus, learn how to tap into your inner genius without getting wet.



Aaron Sorkin takes six showers a day to overcome writer’s block.

If his screenwriting Oscar isn’t enough proof that he’s onto something, a new study in the journal Thinking & Reasoning provides evidence that you’re a better idea generator when you stop trying so hard and just let your mind wander.

Researchers had people solve word puzzles, and then asked the subjects whether the answers came to them through a sudden flash of insight or an analytical approach.

When the answers came via an “Aha!” moment, they were more likely to be correct than the answers that came from a problem-solving approach.

Here’s why: When you use a methodical technique to solve a problem, the frontal lobe of your brain is highly activated, says researcher John Kounios, Ph.D., coauthor of The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain.


Your frontal lobe keeps you hyper focused—which is good if you need to power through a spreadsheet, but bad if you’re stuck on a problem.

When you’re stumped, you need a fresh perspective. But that hyper-focused state gives you tunnel vision. You’re more likely to stick to an established script, and less likely to come up with new ideas.

On the other hand, when you relax and let your wind wander, the activity in your frontal lobe decreases and the activity in a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate ramps up. The anterior cingulate monitors the brain for unconscious ideas that you otherwise wouldn’t notice.

“It literally expands your scope of thought,” Kounios says.

That’s why you can stare at your computer screen for 40 minutes trying to figure out an answer, and then the second you walk away—bam—the perfect solution hits you.

You don’t have to spend all day strolling around the office or taking showers to make those eureka moments come to you, though.

Try setting a limit for how long you stare at a screen before you force yourself to take a walk, Kounios says.

If you drive yourself to work, turn off the radio and see what pops into your head in the moments of rare silence. It just might be your next great idea.


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