Tag: women

Countless exhibitions, a plethora of books, and many, many a Who What Wear article prove that the world has an infatuation with Princess Diana’s style. From the moment she stepped out into the royal spotlight right up to this very day, all of her looks have been put under the sartorial microscope, and we can’t find fault with any. In fact, looking back, it’s clear she was one of the most progressive dressers of her time.

While we’re obsessed with just about every aspect of her wardrobe. Be it off-duty or fabulously fancy, it’s Princess Diana’s party outfits that truly set our fashion pulses racing. And seeing as the ’80s influence on dressing this season is palpable, all of her ensembles still look the 2018 part. Which is why we decided to archive our favorite Princess Diana party outfits in one place to serve as inspiration.

This post originally appeared on Who What Wear UK. 

Never mind that totally sweet, race car-shaped bed you once coveted as a kid. Now it’s possible to own a truly insane line of Lamborghini-shaped desks and sofas courtesy of the inspired minds at Polish furnituremakers Design Epicentrum.

Taking inspiration from the nose of a Lamborghini Murcielago, the desks will be limited to an edition of 44 pieces only. 

The predominantly fiberglass design can be customized to individual specifics in terms of color (even down to the brake calipers) and some elements of the desk itself. 

There’s an additional plate of glass above the headlights for promotional purposes or even lighting options to make it pop even more.

Equally eye-catching are Design Epicentrum’s Lambo-inspired sofas. Featuring the same nose, these deceptively look almost like a regular couch, until you walk around it to see the hood and bumper integration. 

Like the desk, the sofa is highly customizable in terms of color and materials, especially for the upholstery and cushion elements.

The Lamborghini desk and sofa are both priced well into five figures, with the sticker starting at around $34,000 for each piece.  

Of course, it’s up to you whether you want to drop that kind of cash on a statement desk, bank it for your actual Lambo fund, or spend it on a BMW, Mercedes, Cadillac or Jeep from this best cars under $35,000 list. Your call. 

The final trailer for Aquaman is making waves among fans of DC Universe’s submarine superhero. 

Jason Momoa still looks perfectly cast in the title role, as does Amber Heard as the fiercely loyal Mera. But this last look shows us that Arthur Curry was once a timid young boy who had to be taught to swim with dolphins and catch deadly tridents wielded by Willem Dafoe’s Vulko before becoming an amphibious warrior. 

Here’s the official synopsis: 

From Warner Bros. Pictures and director James Wan comes an action-packed adventure that spans the vast, visually breathtaking underwater world of the seven seas, “Aquaman,” starring Jason Momoa in the title role.

The film reveals the origin story of half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur Curry and takes him on the journey of his lifetime—one that will not only force him to face who he really is, but to discover if he is worthy of who he was born to be…a king.

Aquaman also stars Patrick Wilson as Orm/Ocean Master, the present King of Atlantis; Dolph Lundgren as Nereus, King of the Atlantean tribe Xebel; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the vengeful Black Manta; and Oscar winner Nicole Kidman  as Curry’s mom, Atlanna. 

Dive into the action when Aquaman hits theaters on December 21. 

A while ago, we heard from a top cardiologist that the keto diet—a.k.a. high fat and little to no carbohydrates—is complete BS and that no one should do it, because it can lead to a 53 percent increase in mortality rates. Yikes.

Okay—so it can make you die faster, but does it actually work for losing weight and actually keeping it off? Because that’s all that matters, I guess.

Thanks to $12 million study conducted by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, we now know that keto and other low-carb diets really do help you lose weight and keep it off. Mainly because when it comes to shedding pounds, counting calories doesn’t matter too much. Rather, it’s nutrient quality that matters.

For the research, scientists studied 164 adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years old who all had a body mass index, or BMI, 25 or greater. In layman’s terms, they were all overweight.

Each participant was put on a weight loss program for 20 weeks, with one group on a low-carb diet consisting of 20 percent carbohydrates, another group on a moderate-carb diet of 40 percent carbohydrates, and the third group on a high-carb diet consisting of 60 percent carbohydrates. 

At the end of the study, participants who ate a low-carb and high-fat diet (similar to the keto diet) saw the most results, and had lower levels of insulin—which encourages fat loss—and burned over 200 extra calories per day.

Moreover, those on the moderate carb diet burned 100 extra calories each day, and those on a high carb diet didn’t burn any extra calories or fat and didn’t exactly see results. 

The researchers believe the reason for the lack of results with the high-carb diet is because carbohydrates increase insulin in the body, which inhibits fat loss.

Here’s how the insulin/carbohydrate connection works: Insulin is a fat-storing hormone, and high insulin levels lead to more stored fat and insulin resistance—that’s when cells require more and more insulin to function.

Carbs become glucose once they hit your digestive system. Eat a high carb diet and you’ll always have high levels of glucose in your blood. 

Insulin pushes that glucose into your cells as glycogen and then sugar levels drop. But since only a certain amount of glycogen can be stored in the body, the rest is stored as fat. 

Once the body is accustomed to high insulin levels, we become insulin resistant. Bodies require more of the hormone to function normally and that leads to extreme hunger, fatigue, diabetes, and a slew of other health concerns. 

TL;DR: Insulin resistance is very, very bad.

That said, study findings revealed that a low carb diet alone without exercise could lose you up to 22 pounds in three years. Furthermore, it could also help offset or at least delay hormonal changes that make you feel hungry, and could provide better blood sugar control for those with diabetes or pre-diabetes.

In the end, the keto diet definitely works for weight loss and health reasons. However, it has repercussions, because extreme diets are never healthy. You literally can’t keep up a keto diet for a long time because willpower has a limit. You’re going to cave and binge on bread and sweets sooner or later. 

So, instead of going full keto, it’s way healthier to simply limit your intake of carbs instead of completely cutting them out. This way, it’s easier on your body—and on your self-control.

Game of Thrones can’t stop branding booze. There’s already GoT wine, King of the North beer, and most recently, Johnnie Walker’s White Walker scotch. 

Scotch lovers already stoked about that zombie-inspired release will be happy to know the eight new single malt scotches previously slated for release this month are now available, in all their peaty glory. 

The scotch comes from some of Scotland’s greatest distilleries. For example: the House Targaryen crest is on the label for a bottle from the Cardhu Distillery, in business since 1824. 

House Lannister comes from Lagavulin, which regularly produces some of the most highly-rated scotch in the world, and Talisker produces House Greyjoy. The Night’s Watch gets its own special Oban Bay Reserve which comes in a sleek-looking black bottle. 

Here’s the full list:

• Game of Thrones House Tully – Singleton of Glendullan Select ($29.99)
• Game of Thrones House Stark – Dalwhinnie Winter’s Frost ($39.99)
• Game of Thrones House Targaryen – Cardhu Gold Reserve ($39.99)
• Game of Thrones House Lannister – Lagavulin 9 Year Old ($64.99)
• Game of Thrones The Night’s Watch – Oban Bay Reserve ($62.99)
• Game of Thrones House Greyjoy – Talisker Select Reserve ($44.99)
• Game of Thrones House Baratheon – Royal Lochnagar 12 Year Old ($64.99)
• Game of Thrones House Tyrell – Clynelish Reserve ($59.99)

Basically Thrones isn’t playing around with this sponsorship; this is the good stuff.

There’s a long winter between now and the April 2019 premiere of Season 8. Some may want to watch seasons 1 through 7 in anticipation, and there will be an entire home bar’s worth of Game of Thrones spirits to go with the binge.

Be careful to not binge on the booze, though—there’s one more season to go, and you want to remember it. 

View the 5 images of this gallery on the original article

The DeLorean may be the most iconic classic car with gullwing doors, but you can now own an extremely rare example of the vehicle that pioneered the eye-catching design: the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL. 

A 1955 model that’s been in a private collection for nearly 40 years is currently being auctioned off by Dorotheum. In its time, the SL was the fastest production vehicle in the world, which makes sense given that the 300 series was initially created to compete in Formula One. 

Mercedes-Benz adopted gullwing doors on the racing version of the 300 SL three years earlier to save weight and maximize the potential of its 170-horsepower engine. It went on to win titles at the Nurburgring, Carrera Panamericana and Le Mans throughout 1952. 

The racing prototypes gave birth to just 1,400 mass-produced SLs equipped with fuel-injection technology that bumped power up to 215 hp. Other slight changes were made to make it driver-friendly. 

Dorotheum has further details: 

The SL was given bumpers, and to save money, the light alloy was dispensed with apart from for the bonnet and doors. The gear-box was returned to the front of the car, by the engine. However, the engine was the same injection-based racing unit from the prototypes. It was rocket science when compared to everything else trundling down the roads. 

It was cloaked in this most traditional of colors, as were almost 40% of its fellow 300 SLs. Even the interior was standard, inasmuch as you can say that about a vehicle like this: L1, blue-checkered fabric and L, grey upholstery on the doors. Add-ons came in the form of instruments in English, sealed-beam headlights, bumper guards and an SWF windscreen washing system. 

This silver gray example, No. 200 of the 855 vehicles produced in 1955, has been updated with black leather seats. 

If you’re thinking about bidding, prepare to spend up at least $1.3 million. 

Virginia Sole-Smith wrote the just-released book The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America and co-hosts the new podcast Comfort Food, about the joys and meltdowns of feeding a family. Trained as a magazine journalist, Virginia embedded with nutritionists, dietitians, critics, mothers, food obsessives and others to get at why our meals are so often served with a side order of guilt and self-loathing.

Her deep dive wasn’t inspired by idle curiosity. Virginia’s daughter Violet was born with a rare, dire congenital heart condition. She spent the first weeks of life spiraling into heart failure, too weak to nurse. Once the problem was discovered, Violet was subjected to countless emergency procedures, including open-heart surgery at five weeks old. Stemming from her trauma, Violet stopped eating and became dependent on a feeding tube. It took two years for her to learn to eat by mouth again.

Bare Necessities talked with Virginia about body image, hunger, the so-called “clean eating” trend, the specious connection between health, weight and nutrition, and modern diet culture. (Virginia is adamantly anti-diet.) Surprisingly, the takeaways couldn’t be more uplifting.

Q: Tell us about how you became a writer.
A: I never thought about being anything else. I was one of those kids who made picture books in elementary school, wrote plays and started a newspaper in high school, majored in English and got a magazine internship in college. My first job was at Seventeen, where I was somehow misguidedly put in charge of answering readers’ body and sex questions. I was 22, WTF did I know? The questions were heartbreaking but also smart, funny, angry…somewhere around there is where I became passionate about writing about how girls and women relate to our bodies and food.

Q: You’ve been a successful freelancer from early in your career. What’s it like to be your own boss? To have now done the thing—written a book—everyone says they want to do at some point?

A: I joke that I’ve been freelance so long that I’m basically feral—I’m an introvert and a bit of a control freak, and those were not ideal traits for office life.

But I also love organizational systems and projects, which makes me particularly well suited to being my own boss. There is a lot of strategizing, setting deadlines, even writing an annual business plan. People think writing is this peaceful existence with your laptop and a cozy mug of tea, but there’s a lot of business management, and book writing, especially non-fiction, involves a ton of planning. It’s also the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. I loved almost every part of the process. Okay, maybe not the 900th time I had to read the finished manuscript.

Q: In what ways did Violet’s experience change your life, your work, your relationship to food…?
A: I’ve always been fascinated by women, food and our bodies, but this was the first time I’d ever even thought about how babies eat. She’s my first child, so I had no prior knowledge of the more “typical” experience. It was devastating to lose out on nursing and bottle feeding because feeding is the most fundamental act of parenthood. I also became increasingly concerned about what feeding tube dependency and a fear of food would mean for Violet as she grew up; I’ve reported on eating disorders for years, so I know they’re about fear, trauma and power struggles. I was terrified we would fast-track there if we didn’t help her feel safe around food. But then, as I started to think about how to do that, I had to grapple with the fact that most of us, myself included, spend a ton of time not feeling safe around food.

Q: When the personal and professional converge in such a major way, how did you find the critical distance to tackle this subject?

A: To be honest, I’m not sure I had any distance in the beginning. This was a book I had to live before I could write. I threw myself into researching pediatric feeding disorders because asking questions is how I process the world, and I had to understand what was happening to my daughter and how to help her. It was only once we started to make progress with Violet’s feeding issues that I began to connect the dots between that experience and the larger dysfunction I see around food in our culture. It took three years to live through this and do all of the research; I wrote the manuscript in nine months. But I absolutely needed those three years to help me start to think more big-picture about the issues. Once I began to immerse myself in reporting the chapters that have nothing to do with Violet, I began to see things much more clearly.

Q: With a family, an irregular schedule, a daughter’s health concerns…how do you juggle so many priorities without letting any drop? How do you de-stress without reaching for a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies, as most of us probably would?
A: Neither of our careers would be possible without excellent childcare. Luckily, we also have jobs that give us a lot of control, so we match our work hours to our childcare; I work 9 to 4 most days, which is much earlier than my workday ended before kids, and I only have to commute from my office over the garage into our house. Late afternoon and evening are family time. That said, when I was writing the book, I added on what I call the “golden hour,” writing from 6 to 7 AM, before anyone was awake. Believe me, I hate setting the alarm that early, but I am so weirdly productive at that time. I had a daily goal of 1,000 words, and when I stuck with the golden hour, often I could get half of it written before the day even started.

I absolutely believe in the power of comfort food! Girl Scout cookies, brownies, ice cream, whatever brings you bliss. There’s a misconception that we should never eat emotionally, but eating is emotional. Full stop. The whole reason babies eat is because they find it comforting and pleasurable; somehow as we grow up, we stop giving ourselves that permission. I think it’s because we often tie the idea of eating emotionally to bingeing, but there’s an enormous difference between eating to give yourself pleasure and comfort and eating to numb your feelings or overeating in a self-destructive way. I eat chocolate every day. I also read a ton, go to bed really early to make the early mornings less painful, shop online, do yoga and make art with my kid.

Q: We’ve all got to eat. So why is food so fraught?
A: Food is fraught because we’re told every day that it needs to be fraught. That it’s unhealthy, toxic, too processed or farmed wrong. And that we don’t know how to eat right, so we need to find an external set of rules—diet plans, wellness gurus—to teach us. The research shows, fairly unequivocally, that none of these plans work. Dieting does not result in weight loss; it results in weight cycling and more dieting. And demonizing nutrients—first fat, then carbs, now sugar—hasn’t solved the so-called obesity epidemic. It’s time to stop buying into plans that make eating so complicated and start trusting ourselves. Because even if increased weight is responsible for a long list of health issues, and the research isn’t cut and dried on that either, losing weight just isn’t possible for most people. We need to try something else.

Q: Is the solution you propose—eat what we want, stop when we’re full and not when external cues guilt us into restriction, accept our weight ‘set point’ and a wider range of beauty standards—attainable?
A: I think it is. I saw what Violet overcame; I’ve seen what other kids with similar feeding struggles come back from. And watching those struggles has helped me reach a really different place with food than I was in five or six years ago. But it’s not an easy process, and it looks different for everyone. For me, a big part has been accepting that I’m not going to be as thin as I grew up expecting myself to be; that I am pretty much always now going to look like I’ve had two kids, because I’m lucky enough to have a body that could do that. People often push intuitive eating as a way to achieve thinness. For me, intuitive eating isn’t possible unless I think of it as a way to achieve freedom. What’s really hard about this is I would love to have a set of tips or rules that I could offer: Do XYZ and be at peace with food! But the whole point of my book is that we can’t find answers that way anymore.

Q: Unless I want to do the research myself, don’t I have to listen to experts? How does anyone learn to find the sweet spot they can reside in somewhere between all Nutella and all broccoli? 
A: It’s great to be informed about nutrition. It’s also important to know that most of those “experts” are struggling with their own food stories and nutrition research is an area of science riddled with biases and gray areas. Nobody knows any of this definitively. But you—and only you!—can know how hungry or full you are right now. You can pay attention to how your body feels when you eat certain foods and not leave the table until you’re satisfied. You don’t need a chart or a guru to figure that out.

Q: What’s the message you want to leave with readers of The Eating Instinct? What’s the best advice you could give women as each of us grapples in different ways with food?

A: Everyone’s story with food is unique, but the experience of struggling with food is somewhat universal. Your anxieties are the product of a culture that has set unrealistic standards for every part of a woman’s body. But it doesn’t matter whether you meet any of those standards. It doesn’t matter how much you exercised this morning or what you ate for breakfast. You have the right to be here. You have the right to eat. You have the right to take up as much space as you need in this world. And you don’t have to apologize for any of that.

Q: What does empowerment mean to you? How about wellness? Support?
Empowerment is knowing that you can be yourself without apology. Wellness should mean feeling strong and happy in your body. Unfortunately, right now, it usually means a diet.

When Violet was in the hospital, we experienced a tidal wave of support online and in person. It was old friends from high school who sent a breakfast care package to the hospital. It was a work friend who went out of her way to show up on my doorstep with pumped breastmilk to share. It was so many small and huge ways that people showed they cared about us. I still cry every time I think about it.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VIRGINIA
Favorite intimates: As someone who works from home, I’m feeling these PJ Harlow satin lounge pants. Also, I’m a DD-cup and believe over-the-head sports bras were invented by a man who had never actually seen boobs. I deeply appreciate that Bare Necessities carries sports bras that go on like regular bras and are really supportive, like this Elomi Energise High Impact Underwire, which I am legit putting in my shopping bag right now.
Comfort food: Marmite on hot buttered toast.
Favorite dish to cook: I make an amazing lamb and eggplant ragu over rigatoni.
Greatest extravagance: I know a lot of people dread travel with kids and it is a lot more packing, but we love going on adventures with our girls.
Personal hero: At the moment, it’s the painter Amy Sherald. She’s a tremendous artist who had a heart transplant at 39 and three years later, was chosen to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait. I know she didn’t ask to be a role model, but I’m so grateful to be able to share her story with my daughter.
Best TV show: Jane the Virgin.
Most influential book: Of all time? Emma by Jane Austen. And this year, it’s a tie between Dietland by Sarai Walker and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
If I weren’t a writer, I would be: an interior designer. I buy a lot of throw pillows.
Secret to living well: GOOD LORD I HAVE NO IDEA.

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