Which is why Andrew J Sherman, in his self-improvement book Road Rules, suggests that we need to ‘Be the Truck. Not the Squirrel.’

Unlike squirrels, trucks are big, powerful, and have a plan, road map, and destination in mind. They, unlike the squirrel, don’t get squashed.

Yes, it sounds a bit extreme, even violent and aggressive. But once you get into the book, you’ll find that there is nothing at all aggressive about Andrew’s approach to life.

In fact, the book simply uses road signs and rules as the way to navigate the road of life.

Road Rules puts a new spin on many of the common road signs we see everyday in our travels

For example…

YIELD
We all need to yield to others more often – to other’s actions, to others thoughts and to other’s beliefs. Be open to their suggestions and alternative pathways.

LANE ENDS MERGE LEFT
Pay careful attention to changes in your roadway of life that are truly inevitable. You may be cruising along in your lane of choice, only to learn that you will be out of the runway sooner than you expected.

SLOW: Children At Play
Is an important message to slow down and watch out for young children, but it is also an important reminder to take your foot off the accelerator long enough to spend time with your children and your family

(from Road Rules, pages 89-94)

Anyone who likes to read self-improvement and motivational books will enjoy Road Rules.  It’s a easy, fun, and creative read with lots of little pointers and tips to get your life on track.

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But for millions of people around the world, there is no choice. The surgery treatment they need requires them to have a general anesthetic (GA). And anyone who has to have a GA really should get all the facts before that happens. Unfortunately, that’s not always something they get from their doctor or other health professions.

This book ‘Before the Scalpel’, however, spells everything out in a clear and concise manner. Easy to read and with plenty of visual aids, it covers pretty much everything you need to know, including questions to ask your doctor.

Written by Professor Panchati Dhar, MD, board certified in internal medicine and anesthesiology, Before the Scalpel covers almost every situation, from special needs of obese patients to specialized surgeries such as dentistry, cosmetic, and obstetrics. It also addresses issues such as the diabetic and surgery.

It even provides descriptions and explanations of the anesthesia’s tools – the equipment, drugs, and instruments used to administer anesthesia – and a comprehensive glossary.

Definitely worth a read if you or someone in your family is surgery bound.

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 Can you prevent it?

Can lost hair be restored?

These are just some of the questions answered by the user-friendly Hair Loss & Replacement for Dummies. Co-authored by well known hair restoration surgeons Robert M. Bernstein, M.D., F.A.A.D., and Dr. William Rassman, this book gives both men and women a clear understanding about hair loss, hair loss prevention, hair replacement, natural remedies, over the counter treatments, and medical and hair transplant options.

Featured chapters include …

• Getting To Know Your Hair ( What Causes Hair Loss; The Devastation Of Hair Loss In Women; Undergoing Hair Restoration Surgery)
• Anatomy and Physiology of Hair (How Hair Grows; Aging Hair; Hair & Ethnicity, Maintaining Self-Esteem in the Face of Hair Loss)
• Taking Better Care Of Your Hair  (Washing & Drying Your Hair Correctly; Avoiding Hair Damage; Caring For Childrens’ Hair)
• Understanding The How & Why Of Hair Loss  (Stress & Hair Loss; Environmental Issues; Male Pattern Thinning In Men and Women; Diseases & Disorders That Cause Hair Loss)
• Creative Techniques For Concealing Hair Loss (A Brief History of “Rugs”; Today’s Toupees)
• Taking Prescription Medications For Hair Loss (Being Aware of Side Effects)
• Supplementing Your Diet To Help Slow Hair Loss  (Pumping Up Proteins; Minding Your Mineral Intake)
• Hair Transplant Surgery (Do You Really Need A Hair Transplant; Psychological Considerations; Choosing A Doctor; Possible Complications; Heading Home With A New Head Of Hair!)

As with any book in the Dummies series, this book is full of facts and information you can use.

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But after reading Beth Greer’s book Super Natural Home, I have to say, I’m starting to wonder exactly how safe my house really is. According to Beth Greer, probably not all that safe, especially if you start taking into account all the dangerous chemicals that we invite in and have around our house at all times.

Beth used to be just like you and me, living what she considered a healthy but busy lifestyle. But when a medical crisis (a 5-centimeter tumour in her chest) caused her to re-evaluate her lifestyle, she discovered that maybe her lifestyle wasn’t as healthy as she thought. In fact, she discovered instead of being healthy, it was downright toxic.

So she spent six months cleaning up ‘her act’, eating an all-organic diet, discovered raw food, and cleared out all the everyday chemicals (cleaners  and personal products) from her house. Along the way, her health improved and within the year, the tumor and related pain and never damage seemed to disappear.

Since then, Beth has become an advocate of living a healthy, toxic free life, taking all the research and information she has accumulated while changing her own lifestyle and transforming it into the book Super Natural Home: Improve Your Health, Home, and Planet – One Room at a Time.

This book provides a practical guide to discovering potential toxic hot zones in your house and offers a straightforward soultion-based approaches to dealing with them. Broken into three main categories – what goes in you, what goes on you, and what surrounds you – the book can be used as a road map on how to become an environmental savvy consumer.

Of course, you might think, like I did, that your home isn’t toxic. In that case, I’d suggest heading over to Beth’s webstie SuperNaturalMom and sign up to take the Super Natural Home Quiz.

If you’re results are anything like mine, you might want to run out and get a copy of Super Natural Home. It will definitely help you figure out how to  make things less toxic in your life.

Image: SuperNaturalMom.com

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Which is probably why Christine Lakatos describes her book My Diva Diet as ‘A Woman’s Last Diet Book’. It’s a turn of phrase that’s guaranteed to attract those who are looking for an answer to all their dieting woes.

And it’s very likely it might just do just that. A 413 page workbook, resource, and motivational guide, My Diva Diet got my attention from the get go with it’s innovative characters. There’s Ms Diva who highlights all useful tips and her sidekick Paws, who summarizes the how-to information. Superheroes and Diet Villains also make an appearance to emphasize who the true diet allies and enemies are. If you‘re starting to think this is all sounding juvenile and too TV cartoon-ish, trust me it‘s not. There is so much information packed into this book, that it could easily become the only diet book I’ll ever need.

The basic premise of the book rests on what Christine Lakatos calls the ‘five factors affecting body fat and health’ – liquid consumption, quality and distribution of calories, quality and purity of calories, restrictive and unbalanced dieting, and exercise. Christine first explains in detail how each of these factors, individual and combined, can sabotage weight loss efforts. She then offers specific changes that can be made to help stop the sabotage.

But Christine doesn’t just focus on food and eating habits. It’s also about making positive lifestyle changes to ensure not short term success but lifelong success and improved health overall.

User-friendly and interactive, My Diva Diet offers quizzes, checklists, recipes, advice, and tips in a quirky way that will not only motivate but also entertain readers as they work on achieving their desired goals.

Image: www.mydivadiet.com

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Then head for the nearest lemon tree. That’s what Theresa Cheung, author of The Lemon Juice Diet, recommends. Having done detailed and extensive research, she believes that lemons and lemon juice is is all you need to kickstart a new healthier and slimmer you.

Lemons have natural detoxifying powers which stimulates the digestive system in a healthy and effective way.

And a healthy digestive system is very important if you have any hope at all of losing weight.

So I thought I’d jump on in and give it a go.

The first step turned out to be the hardest. Having always started my day with a cup of coffee, suddenly having to change to a glass of lemon juice diluted with warm water instead left a bitter taste in my mouth. But then, what’s a little bitterness if it’s going to aid in the battle with the bulge.

Once you master the early morning lemon juice, following the rest of the seven principles of The Lemon Juice Diet looks like a piece of cake (oops! take that back. NO cake)

• Drink lemon juice with warm water every morning – this helps jump-start your digestive system.
• Eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
• Keep your blood sugar levels balanced to avoid sugar cravings – that means eating little and often and using lemon in your cooking.
• Cut down on sugar-rich foods. The easiest way to do this is to swap refined foods like white bread, white rice and pasta for wholegrain alternatives.
• Avoid saturated fats and increase your consumption of good fats, like omega 3 and omega 6 which are found in nuts, seeds, oily fish and extra virgin olive oil.
• Eat more fresh whole foods, including beans, pulses and lentils. These contain plenty of fibre, which can help to stimulate your digestive system and slow down the conversion of carbs into glucose.
• Slow it down! It takes your brain 20 minutes to realise that you’re full. If you take your time eating you’re less likely to overeat and this in turn will help with your weight-loss mission.

The Lemon Juice Diet is a easy read with plenty of sound and sage advice (and recipes) for anyone looking to loss weight in a healthy and comfortable way. But even if you are not looking to lose weight, there is much in this book that you can use. There’s even a chapter on lemon cures for everything from acne to varicous veins.

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It’s pretty much a given that once in a relationship, many women will pick up their partner’s unhealthy eating habits, resulting in weight gain. It sure doesn’t seem fair, but it’s true. And the main reason behind this is simply that men eat different from women and often have little understanding on basic nutritional needs. They eat when they are hungry and as we women know, they are always hungry.

But, as Jenna writes in her book Your Big Fat Boyfriend, ‘love doesn’t have to mean love handles’. Learning this the hard way (ie not being able to fit into her ‘skinny jeans’), Jenna has taken this topic in hand and created a very readable and often hilarious book full of anedotes and tips on how to stop the boyfriend from sabotaging (which of course he is not doing deliberately) your healthy eating habits.

Geared towards young women in their late teens and early twenties, Your Big Fat Boyfriend is full of tips for eating, exercising and living with a guy who thinks French fries are vegetables, can’t say no to all you can eat buffets, and must always have ice cream in the freezer.

Along the way, you’ll learn…

• How to eat healthy when dining in not-so-healthy places (ie fast food restaurants)
• Creative ideas for active dates to keep you both on the move
• The differences between male and female metabolisms  – or why women can’t eat like men
• What to order when your guy insists on a trip through the drive-thru
• Healthy recipes that taste great and won’t leave your guy hungry

Definitely a book worth checking out, not just for it’s balanced diet advice, but also for the fitness and relationship tips as well.

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Thanks to everyone who entered, especially those who helped list all the singers who sung ‘Behind Closed Doors’. I had no idea that so many singers had recorded it. Here’s what you all came up with – Charlie Rich, Tom Jones, Dolly Parton, Percy Sledge, Bobby Goldsboro, Tommy Overstreet, Diana Ross, Steve Ivey, Don Estelle, Little Milton, Perry Como, Hank Thompson, Loretta Lynn, Ronnie Milsap.

Of course, now I can’t get the song out of my head.

But on to more important things.

The winner of Behind the Bedroom Door, thanks to the faithful random number selector, is…

Shannon Baas

Congratulations Shannon. I’ll be sending an email shortly with instructions on how to claim the book.

As for everyone else, don’t forget that there’s still another book giveaway – Take a ‘Road Trip to the Soul’: Book Review and Giveaway – up for grabs.

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- Behind Closed Doors, Charlie Rich, 1973

Okay, so it’s not something that we freely admit but let’s face it, we all have a little bit of curiosity as to what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. After all, we live in a world that seems to be obsessed with sex. But when it comes to talking about the intimate details of one’s sex life, it’s something that seldom happens, especially among women.

Writer and editor Paula Derrow thinks this is because of fear…

‘fear of being exposed as inadequate, or worse, of being boring. Living in an all-sex-all-the-time culture may be liberating in many ways, but it can also breed shame – shame for not keeping up, for not being invited to the party.’

So Paula set out to open up the door by getting a number of well known women writers ranging in their twenties to their seventies write about, well, their sexual experiences. The result – Behind the Bedroom Door - a collection of extremely frank, truly honest, and often hilarious essays that literally offer exposure to the other side of the bedroom door.

The result – a real page turner of a book that will hold your attention in it’s truly illuminating and deeply honest discussion about sex that’s seldom found. You’ll nod, laugh, despair, and empathize as you read essay topics range from illicit affairs, one night stands, sex toys, and sex addiction to dealing with sex in pregnancy, monogamy, lesbian affairs, and living in a sexless marriage. Nothing is left unsaid in this book that shatters many of the deeply entrenched myths about women’s intimate lives. Covering a wealth and variety of female sexual experience,  Behind the Bedroom Door will leave you questioning conventional notions about women, sex, and sentiment. 

Having read the book, I got to say I was really curious as to how Paula managed to put this book together. So I asked her.

Healthbolt: How did you choose these particular writers and was it easy to persuade them to write about their experiences? 

Paula: I turned to the best writers I know, both from working at Self over the years, and from all the reading I do. Some writers led me to other writers. I also called some favorite writers cold (or their agents), and tried to pique their interest with this juicy topic.

Healthbolt: How in the world did you manage to get these writers to lay open such personal aspects of their lives for public display?

Paula: As an editor at Self and a teacher focusing on personal essay writing, I’m used to pushing writers to go deeper, to search themselves for the real meaning of what they are trying to say.

Healthbolt: Any problems along the way?

Paula: Of course. Given the personal nature of this topic, there were some challenges: Some writers dropped out; Some husbands objected and persuaded their spouses to drop out.

Healthbolt: I guess that’s understandable. After all the writers are not using aliases and are really exposing themselves and often their spouses or partners in these essays. And yet, they were willing to be extremely frank and honest in their essays.

Paula: Mostly because I tried to emphasize that these stories weren’t about betraying a partner or airing dirty laundry or simply about voyeurism – each one is about the women herself – what she feels, experiences, desires and worries about in bed. Making sure that we were keeping the focus on that helped make it easier for each writer to feel comfortable and deliver.

Healthbolt: Well, you certainly succeeded. Anyone reading Behind the Bedroom Door will get a much better understanding on the variety and extreme differences that each of us experience behind the bedroom door. It’s definitely got Healthbolt’s seal of approval.

….

Healthbolt’s got one copy of Behind the Bedroom Door to give away. All you need to do is leave a comment here by 31st January to be in to win.  And when you leave the comment, if you know, tell us who else sung the Charlie Rich song ‘Behind Close Doors’.

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- three times more likely than men to suffer from some types of back pain
- more susceptible to a whiplash injury
- prone to low back pain

And that bra straps, high heels, and hormonal swings add to the chances of women suffering from an aching back.

Christine Lasich MD knows all this and more. Having suffered from chronic low back pain herself and acutely aware of the lack of gender-specific information on preventing and dealing with back pain, Christine has written the highly informative and entertaining High Heels to Hormones: A Woman’s Guide to Spinal Care.

Featuring short easy to read chapters illustrated with pencil stick cartoons, High Heels to Hormones is an effective self help guide for woman. The contents include information on how everything from bras, hormones, and high heeled shoes to convenience foods, smoking, exercise, high-achieving, and multitasking lifestyles will affect your back.

And while it is all evidence based information, there is a distinct lack of med-speak in this book. Instead, the tone is fun and light. For example, here’s Christine’s take on the importance of good posture: “Did I threaten your sense of decency by telling you to stick your chest out with the shoulders back? Don’t be shy, because shyness creates an unhealthy, slouched posture.”

Women of all shapes, sizes, and ages will benefit from the advice that Dr Lasich dispenses. It could easily be the best resource yet to help women say goodbye to sore necks and aching backs and instead be able to enjoy strong, healthy spines.

High Heels to Hormones has the Healthbolt Seal of Approval and therefore, we are happy to be able to offer a copy to one lucky reader.

Simply leave a comment by end of day Friday 25th July and we will do pick a winner using the trusty random number selector.

By the way, you can increase your chances of winning by heading over to Alzheimer’s Notes where another High Heels to Hormones Giveaway is being run.

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