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Ponani Sukumar , founder of Global Warming Foods, Ltd., a leading organic food distribution company, unveils a new look for the Global Warming Foods website. In addition to updating the look of the website, Ponani Sukumar  will now share articles and information on a daily basis.

“Natural food fans have consistently emailed us with questions or to seek advice,” reports Ponani Sukumar . “Creating a complete source for tips and resources on going green and eating organically will allow us to share our passion with visitors to our website.”

Recent articles posted by Ponani Sukumar  include:
1. The Health Benefits of 100% Organic Coffee.
2. Why Organic Green Tea is Better For You.
3. Good Nutrition Equals Healthy and Better Life.

“Ponani Sukumar  conducts extensive research and shares her findings with our readers in an engaging and easy to understand manner,” explains Dr. Michael Genstein, Board Member of Global Warming Foods. “Janet Schlarbaum is truly the authority in healthy, organic living.”

About Ponani Sukumar

Global Warming Foods, Ltd. is a privately held company founded in June 2000 by Ponani Sukumar , a nutritional expert for over 22 years.

Nail Biting Basics

By Christopher J. Henry

Articles selected by Pastor-Genève

Nail biting in all its various forms is problematic behavior beset by peculiarity and contradiction. Technically speaking, the correct word for nail biting is ONYCHOPHAGIA.

Nail biting typically begins between the ages of five and 10 and is common among children as well as adults. As many as one in three Americans bite their nails.

One of the more noteworthy and generally surprising things about nail biting is its high instance. It crosses every social and economic barrier. Prevalence figures for children are much higher than for adults.

Results of nail biting can result in short, ragged nails. It may also lead to damaged cuticles as well as bleeding around the edges of the nails. Infections can also develop if nails are not properly attended to.

Most relevant studies have found that nail biting tends to peak out around puberty.h

A study by Malon and Massmer studied the behavior in the Chicago school systems and reported that nail biting is prevalent in about 60 percent of children age eight to eleven.
Most people agree it is a learned habit, perhaps picked up by watching a parent or someone else biting their nails.

Nail biting is an extremely tough habit to break and treatment for it varies.
One possible solution is identifying the reason for nail biting. Avoidance or modification of these situations can be beneficial to the eventual elimination of the habit.

Improving self-esteem is also helpful when attempting to break the habit.
Products such as CONTROL-IT are available on the market and are designed to aid nail biters in breaking their habit. According to www.stopbitingnails.com, CONTROL-IT is a gentle and natural alternative to help prevent biting. A mild unpleasant taste helps to remind users to stop biting their nails.

A host of research efforts both in America and Europe sought to ascertain if in fact nail biting was linked to mental illness in one form or another. Most people would have anticipated they found a high prevalence of nail biting among the mentally disordered; however, they found that nail biting, in and of itself, is not systematic of any form of mental disorder or maladjustment.

Nail biting crosses all national borders, genders, and both social and economic lines and may also originate from a primal need for self-grooming. It affects both the nails and the cuticles; with greater potential harm caused via infection to the cuticle and nail biting tends to be a private affair, and is a relatively isolated form of self-indulgence.

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Top 10 Things You Should Do Before an Interview

By Tawana Wood

Article recommended by Mark Schlarbaum

1. Obtain the name, title, correct spelling and PRONUNCIATION for all interviewers. This information will come in handy when you mail or email your interview thank you letters.

2. Know the position for which you are interviewing and review relevant duties and responsibilities. Be sure to ask about short and long term goals for the position during your interview.

3. Note the location/address of the interview. Find out where to park; the best way to get to appointment by train, car or bus; where you should check-in when you arrive; and if any barriers exist.

4. Secure interview schedule and agenda in advance, if possible. Be sure to confirm the time, location, and contact person at least 24 hours in advance. To be safe, take down the name of the person you are going to interview with as well as their assistant or HR contact.

5. Research the organization and/or job. Check the company’s website for information or go to the library and research industry and corporate relevant publications, look in the newspaper, and/or ask friends/colleagues/family/professional networks. Also, by researching the company you will be able to ascertain the professional benefits, stability and growth potential of that company and what that means to you. Be prepared to answer the question “Why do you want to work here?

6. Prepare and practice for questions you may be asked. Have “prove it” answers ready. Practice linking soft skills (work traits) to some answers. Begin to recall major achievements. Memorize your resume. Interviewers will ask you questions based on information provided in your resume.

7. Compile questions you need to ask and write them in your note pad. You should always have three questions prepared. One of the questions should recap the key responsibilities of the position.

8. Collect and have handy information for completing an application, including full addresses and phone numbers of employers and schools.

9. Pack for the interview (briefcase or folder): extras résumés, reference list, pens, company card file, note pad, tissues, mints, application information, certificates of training and any items you were asked to bring. You should always have a minimum of two resumes on hand.

10. Dress conservatively and practice good grooming. Avoid heavy
make-up and scents. Remember to clean nails, shine your shoes and clean your eyeglass lenses.

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How to Give a Great Interview

By Kelly Margaret Wallace

Chances are if you are getting bored during your interviews, so is the audience and the interviewer.

One of the most common and dreaded (I might add) attachments I am prone to receive as an interviewer, are Questions that either my guest or publicist has diligently typed up thinking that they are being prudent as well as thoughtful of me, the host.

Now don’t get me wrong. I appreciate anything that makes my job easier, a good bio goes a long way, but when it comes to questions, well, I want to ask questions I want to ask!!!. Ones I don’t even KNOW I am going to ask.

You see, I think it’s my job as an interviewer and radio host, to get curious about my guest. I take great pride in reading the books I am sent by authors, and I love to explore the depth of their work, the author behind the book as well as said book might change/help the reader.

I want to ask the question I think my audience wants to know the answers too. I figure that if I am curious and conversational, then my listeners are being entertained as well as educated.

Now Listen UP. There is a big difference between being well prepared for an interview, knowing your material inside out, and just reading answers off a sheet of paper.

The more interviews you do this way, the more you will begin to resent them.

I am often told that my guests had the best time, it was the BEST interview they’ve had so far. What a wonderful host I am, etc.

I believe they feel this way because there is energy in the room. It isn’t the same old same old routine.

Like I said earlier, I have a conversational style that lends itself to opinions, differing points of view, while at the same time, making sure that my guest is the important person in the room and that they are well taken care of. It’s my job to make them look good.

I prefer to engage my guest in a transformational conversation, one that is interesting to all of us, guest, listener and host.

The way I see it, if I am supposed to ask a series of questions that are put in front of me, then I don’t need to listen to the answers. I am just waiting to ask the next question.

I think it’s better for all of us if I Listen to what my guest has to say, and then proceed with curiosity and sincerity to find out more about them.

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Power Job Hunting - 5 Ways to Improve Your Chances

By David James Brewster

Job hunting is a lot like fishing. You might get lucky and land the big one on your first attempt. On the other hand, you could invest a lot of time and effort casting out numerous applications and end up having nothing to show for it. No one can guarantee either will happen, but there are ways to improve your chances.

When I was a kid I did a lot of fishing in my summer holidays. For years it was all about luck. Find some water, bait a hook, cast the line … and hope. When an uncle of mine started joining us on our holidays, he taught me how to be a bit smarter about my fishing. Later, as a recruitment consultant, I realised that much of what my uncle had shared with me is relevant to the typical job search.

Be clear about the job you want

Effective fishing means using the right bait with the right equipment - especially the right-sized hook - for the type of fish you are trying to catch. The same applies to job search.

The tone of your application letters, the detail and emphasis in your resume, the way you dress for, and answer questions in, the interview. All of these will be different, dependent on whether you are going for a CEO role or a junior administrative role, or something in between.

Target specific industries and companies

My uncle taught me the importance of finding good spots to fish: rock-pools, deep water channels, sheltered areas, and so on. Job hunting is the same: the more targeted you can be, the more chance you give yourself of landing the ideal role.

Find out which organisations are most active in your desired industry and approach them. Read trade magazines to become familiar with what is going on and who’s who. Apply directly to your ‘dream’ employers: whether they are actively advertising or not.

Ask around

Perhaps the most important thing I learnt from my uncle was the importance of local knowledge. We were always asking the locals where we should fish. Sure, they may have sent us to the second-best place and kept the best to themselves, but we were still better off than all those ‘random’ fishers.

The lesson: don’t be afraid to ask. Ask former colleagues, customers and others in your industry what they know. Ask people who report the news in your industry. Ask friends and neighbours.

Advertise yourself

Fishing was a topic of camping conversation whether we were actually fishing or not. My uncle would always be chatting to people and he would always, in these chats, turn the conversation to fishing. Nearly every time, he was able to glean additional local information as a result.

You can use a similar strategy when searching for a new job, particularly if you’ve been made redundant. The important thing is not to keep your situation to yourself. Let people know, when the chance arises, what your situation is. Your local community, former bosses, pretty much anyone. When you do this, you effectively gain an army of job search assistants and increase your chances of finding out about the plum job that hasn’t even been advertised.

Use technology to help

Walk into a modern fishing supplies shop and you’ll realise that the pastime has moved well past the era of a hook hanging from a stick. While it’s easy to go overboard, the fishing experience can be made much more pleasant through use of some quite inexpensive, readily available tools.

The modern job hunt is no different. There are job search websites, networking tools like LinkedIn and Twitter, and all sorts of resume-building and personality-testing widgets out there to try. You may not use them all, but do spend some time getting to know what’s there so you can make a considered decision about where to invest your time.

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Is Real Estate a Career For Me?

By Timothy Andersen

It is very common to hear success stories about people in various fields of real estate and mortgage refinance, and all the money they made last year. Naturally, you think to yourself that you could do that too, be your own boss, set your own hours, and make a pile of money, all the while not having to race with the other rats. If that sounds attractive to you, read on!

First of all, the term “real estate” is really large and encompasses numerous industries and specializations. You have residential real estate (and its sub-categories), commercial real estate (and its sub-categories), investment, residential or commercial appraisal, mortgage lending and banking, construction, management, auctions, leasing, and so forth. So the first choice you must make is which of these fields will be your specialty?

For simplicity’s sake, let’s suppose you choose residential brokerage, the most popular of these specialties. That means you want to sell real estate, since that is what brokerage is all about. Here is the secret: to be good at sales you must possess two personality traits. The first is empathy and the second is ego-drive. Without these two traits you cannot succeed (in the long run) in sales. Empathy is the ability to feel with someone. When a prospective purchaser says, “I just can’t afford that house”, your empathy says, “You know, I understand where you’re coming from ’cause I’ve been there.” Now your ego-drive must kick in. Ego-drive is defined as the need to persuade. So your ego-drive kicks in and you say, “I know you think you can’t afford this house, but let me show you how you really can.” In other words, you can’t let the prospect fail to buy something because then you feel unfulfilled.

Empathy and ego-drive are learned traits, but they are a part of your personality which is pretty much formed by the time you are five or six years old. If you don’t have these traits by that age, the shrinks tell us that your chances of “learning” them are very low. And if you don’t have these, you need to go into another facet of real estate.

But assuming you have them, you must first get a real estate license. This requires a long class (the length of the class varies by state) and a difficult exam (with extensive - though not really hard - math). Assuming you pass the class and the state exam, now you must find a licensed broker to sponsor you. If you have a lot of sales experience (in any field), this will likely be simple. If not, it will be more challenging.

Now you must get listings, the lifeblood of the successful real estate sales person. The competition is cutthroat since there are always more agents vying for the listings than there are listings. You say, “that’s OK, I’ll be a buyer’s broker”. Remember, even the National Association of Realtors (c) says its most successful associates, as a trend, concentrate on listings far more than sales.

Another choice is the time you are willing to invest in learning your trade. Real estate is not “part-time”. Would you want the health of your children in the hands of a part-time doctor? Would you want your defense against a charge of white-collar crime in the hands of a part-time lawyer? Do you want somebody who teaches dance classes three days a week repairing the brakes on your car? If you will sit down with the really successful real estate sales people, you’ll find that they work at it 50 to 60 hours per week, and that’s not always between 9AM to 5PM, either.

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Four Facts About Recycling Plastic

By Chris Norriss

Fact One: In the United States alone, we use over two and a half million plastic bottles every hour. These are not just water bottles, but cleansers, health products and other liquids containers from motor oil and lubricant to milk and juice bottles. Most of these bottles unfortunately end up in the dump.

Fact Two: Plastic garbage bags and those little plastic rings that hold soda cans together can kill an estimated one million sea dwellers every year because so much of our trash is dumped into the ocean. Plastic is light weight so it swims with them and they get caught or suffocate in it. That’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Number three: We in the United States all by ourselves toss away over twenty-five billion Styrofoam products every year. This stuff isn’t biodegradable, folks.

Last fact: To end on a positive note, recycling our plastics can uses half as much energy than it takes to burn it. It also reduces the amount of toxic chemicals in the air from incinerating. Due to public awareness, in just nine years between 1990 and 1999, the number of plastic recycling companies grew by 80%. And they are new ones around the world being built every year.

Since the mid-twentieth century, plastic has reigned as the preferred material to use. It is cheap to produce, does not corrode, can be molded into all sorts of shapes and is relatively unbreakable. Today we would find it hard to live without plastic. I dare you to take just five minutes and write down all of the plastic in the room where you are. It can by an eye-opener.

So, yes, recycling plastic is of the utmost importance.

More good news is that it is easier than ever to recycle plastics. Most major metropolitan areas have plastic recycle capabilities. But you must remember to look for the recycle code in the triangle on your plastics and verify what numbers your community recycles. Not all plastics are recyclable. If it does not have a number in a triangle embossed on the bottom, it is not. Many microwavable plastics are not recyclable. You just need to train yourself to look for the “emboss” before you toss. (And of course, rinse them out before you put them in the bin). These numbers are identification codes that lets the recycler know what type of chemicals are in the plastic, how pliable it is, etc. The most common plastics are the termed the PET (such as clear looking soda bottles) and the less see-through MDEP bottles (such as milk and laundry detergent bottles).

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Five Things to Know About Recycling Waste

By Chris Norriss

Article placed by Carlos Lama

I am sure as a child you heard your mother or grandmother say “Waste not want not.” In this day of environmental concerns and the desire to save energy and money, the saying rings truer than ever.

But first, what is waste recycling? Most commonly used it can stand for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and encompasses all of our trash and garbage that is picked up by the trash disposal crews and dumped in land fills or on barges to be sent out to sea. Therefore, everything is waste and a vast majority of it can be recycled if it is set aside and separated.

The second thing to know is that there are methods for utilizing compacted waste as building materials, insulation and packing cushioning. It may sound bizarre, but your banana peel from breakfast just may end up down the road as part of the insulation in someone’s house someday soon.

Thirdly, a form of waste recycling is called source reduction. It is taking the scraps and/or used products and using them again thus reducing the need to produce more new materials. This not only saves a company money and time, it also emits less toxicity into the environment and uses up a lot less energy.

The fourth thing is that not all of our trash ends up in the landfills or on a barge floating out to sea (which always reminded me of sweeping dirt under the rugs- it doesn’t eliminate the problem, just hides it a while and makes it someone else’s job to clean up). There is a relatively new method in the history of recycling called combusting. This does involve the incineration of garbage instead of recycling it, but the energy derived from the combustion process can be harnessed to provide electricity for factories Recently developed emission control methods to keep the toxins from escaping into the air during the combustion process have made this option more and more attractive.

The fifth and final thing is more and more technologies are being discovered to make almost every waste transformed into reusable materials. The technology is resulting in increasingly more non-toxic and environmentally safer methods to handle our MSW. As the world either runs low on natural resources or realizes it is just not economically feasible to use new resources every time the manufacturing of a product is demanded, recycling our everyday waste will become more and more commonplace, create jobs and help preserve our nature for future generations. RecycleAbility will continue to support these efforts. We hope you will as well.

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When Grief Goes Wrong

By Ken Warren and suggested by RJ & Makay

My dear mum, Ethel, did not manage well at all after my dad, Bob, died when my brother and I were aged 8 and 5. Although we were all absolutely grief-stricken, mum’s grief was especially intense, prolonged and tragic. In the immediate days following, mum was incapable of caring for us and allowed neighbours to do so. Perhaps this is understandable - she may have thought it best to protect us from her grief.

In the weeks following, she suffered facial palsy, where one side of her face became paralysed. In the following years, she suffered a type of emotional palsy where she found it hard to express any affection to her sons. Perhaps if she had allowed herself to feel even positive emotions the pain would have been unbearable.

You can put your tissues away now. Things did eventually improve, but it took some years. But this story prompts the question, ‘How do you know when grief is going wrong?’ There are a number of ways you can do so.

The first is to notice that someone is not moving through their grief. Here I want to clarify that there are some losses you simply never ‘get over’. But there is often a sense by people with problematic grief, that they are ’stuck’.

Professor James Worden suggests that there are four stages people need to go through in coming to terms with their grief. The first is to accept the reality of their loss. Secondly, people have to find a way of expressing their pain that is appropriate for them. Some do so by crying and talking with their support people. Others express their pain through rituals such as visiting the cemetery or talking to their loved one who had died. Some do so through physical activity - perhaps working harder or through exercise.

The third stage according to Worden is to overcome the barriers to moving forward with their life. In the case of loss associated with injury, it could be managing their pain or changing what they do for a living. Fourthly, people need to find an emotional place for the loss that allows them to continue to live their life well. They still feel sadness at different times, but they are still able to live, love and laugh.

Although people grieve in different ways, often at a different pace, and to different intensities, if people become stuck at one of the early stages, this is a sign that the grief may well have become complicated.

Another sign of problematic grief is a delayed grief reaction. Perhaps people were not able to grieve properly at the time of their loss, due to having to hold it together for the sake of others or the extent of their losses not being fully appreciated until later. However, a more recent event triggers a strong grief response from the earlier loss. In my counselling practice, I often saw people coming to terms with losses associated with their childhood abuse when they have young children themselves.

People can also have exaggerated grief reactions, where the pain of their loss is expressed through depression, anxiety or problematic alcohol or drug use. When such conditions are present after someone has suffered a major loss, chances are the real problem is the grief, not so much how it is coming out. But if a clinical condition, such as depression is present, this needs to be addressed as well.

Some people even have what is called masked grief reactions, where they experience similar symptoms to a person who has died or imitate the deceased in other ways. One widow I know of developed similar heart problems to her husband who had died even though there was no diagnosable condition.

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