Are You Ready For A Health and Wellness Transformation?
I don’t know about you, but I am excited about the start of the New Year because symbolically, it is a time to set new goals and make changes to better your life. Whether you desire to better your health, your spiritual life, your financial life—this is the time to say “This IS going to be my year for a great breakthrough in some aspect 
of my life”.
I am more convinced than ever that the first step toward living a healthier life starts from within—motivating yourself and making up your mind that you care enough about yourself to make some positive changes. Books, tapes, and people can help but YOU have to be ready, willing, and able to help yourself.
Perhaps you can take a few minutes out of your schedule to evaluate your physical, mental, and spiritual health as we start 2006. Are there opportunities for improvement? Are there areas of your health that you have been struggling with for years and have not been able to conquer? Well, if you utilize your faith and believe that this year IS going to be your year for meaningful improvement—I am convinced that great things will happen for you.
BlackWomensHealth.com will continue to be your partner as you journey through the process of living a healthier, happier, and more productive life in 2006. This site first emerged on the Internet in 1999 and we continue to appreciate and value the connections that we have made with people from throughout the world. Whether your are reading this in the United States, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, France, Saudi Arabia, other areas in Europe, and anywhere else in the world—we want you to remember that you area special and valuable person and you CAN accomplish your goals!
As we start the New Year, I urge each of you to start by taking a “Health Inventory” to determine exactly where you are at in terms of your health and wellness. Start with these 5 very basic questions:
(1) How is your blood pressure? If it is elevated, what are you doing to get it under control? High blood pressure (hypertension) can lead to heart attacks, stroke, kidney disease, and other ailments.
(2) How is your cholesterol? There are dietary and lifestyle modifications you can make to help lower your cholesterol. If these don’t work, there are very effective prescription medications you can take to help you lower your cholesterol.
(3) Are you at your goal weight? Overweight and obesity are epidemic in the United States and the problem is very significant for the African American community. Read the articles below for some helpful hints on weight loss.
(4) Do you have diabetes, and if so, is it under good control? Poorly controlled diabetes can have devastating health consequences and the African American community is at particular risk.
(5) Are you ready to make some sacrifices for improved health and wellness? It will take a little work to live healthier, but it is well worth it!
Courtesy of: www.blackWomensHealth.com
for more info click on the link
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Commentary: Here’s Hoping Black Men Recognize Their Sisters’ Divinity in the New Year
Date: Sunday, January 08, 2006 By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com
This is for the untold numbers of sistahs who are hoping that 2006 will be the year they find the love of their lives -- and for the brothas who need to recognize that the gold diggers, the skanks 
and the hoochies are sorely outnumbered by the millions who have only the best of intentions.
Most of us want romance and devotion. Some of us just would like the promise of it. The possibility of it. A bit of assurance that, one day soon or right now if we’d like, there will be another kind of dazzle in our nights other than fleece coverlets, warring lions and hyenas and a pint of fattening goodness from Baskin Robbins.
One of these days, there will be a man, whether at the door, in the parlor or a phone call away. A man who makes us laugh, who can handle the little girl, the vixen, the bitch on wheels, the sophisticate, the domestic goddess, the careerist -- all that we are. A man who is our friend, our defender, our confidante, our partner, our lover. A man who gets us and adores even what others might find odd. A man who shows up and calls and contributes and assists when he says he will. A man who is just for us and makes life at least a little bit sweeter when he’s there. That’s the dream that travels on our sighs.
Black women are, by tradition and redundant necessity, problem solvers. We are resilient, resourceful and determined. We are gifted with a strong survival instinct and have mastered certain coping skills that speak as much to our hopefulness as to our resolve. We are faithful to the idea of love, passion, security, sharing and joy.
But how do we fix this problem? Have we, at long last, come up against an unconquerable challenge? After all, we can’t go back in time and make more black men, keep them healthy and alive, get them educated and prepare them for this surplus of women who might have them for mates. We can’t raise our dead brothers from the grave, break our incarcerated brothers out of prison, cure all the ill and addicted, or clean out the heads of all those men messed up by racism and abuse and poor rearing, or get our aimless brothers up to speed in time to meet our needs.
There is plenty of advice out there on this subject, much of it for sale. Some of it appears as formulas or strategies for finding, winning and keeping Mr. Right, replete with guarantees, which should be enough of a red flag to stop even the most desperate zealot. In these times particularly, there is a temptation to resort to unconventional means. The proliferation of online dating services, the advent of speed dating and the ubiquity of singles bars and “meat markets” attest to the growing market of singles in-search-of.
One woman I know -- a beautiful, statuesque orthodontist -- pays $100 a month for membership in a certain matchmaking service. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the time to do it the old-fashioned way; it was just that she was having no luck “on the scene.” She has yet to find a match through the service, but she’s willing to give it six more months.
“After that, I guess I’ll just give up,” she says.
Don’t tell this woman that she needs to compromise or, to put it more gloomily, to “settle.” Turning her personal life over to a bank of strangers, no matter their expertise, is settling, she says. She doesn’t want to compromise her standards when it comes to the kind of man she is looking for. That, she says, would not be settling, but selling out. “I’d rather be alone,” she says.
On the other hand, as we have seen, there are women in such dire and pathetic need for a male companion that all they really require is an X-Y chromosomal structure. He doesn’t have to be much more than that. I don’t think that’s most of us; I hope it’s not many of us.
God bless the many women who are at peace with their matelessness. Or, if not at peace, then at least not hysterical. But -- and pardon my presumptuousness -- I doubt that I’d get in much trouble for declaring that, while it is entirely possible to live a happy and fulfilling life without a man, most single women would rather not.
Maybe this will be the year our brothers will look past the stereotype and see us for who we really are.
courtesy of www.blackamericaweb.com
Submitted by: Shelle'
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Snatching at King's Legacy
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News Column
The Hutchinson Report
January 9, 2005
Reprint Rights
The scramble to snatch and grab a piece of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has not diminished one bit in the twenty years since the first King national holiday was celebrated. Ironically, Ronald Reagan was the first to grab at it. Reagan fought tooth and nail against passage of the King holiday bill. After insinuating that King was a Communist, Reagan signed it only after Congress passed it overwhelmingly, and virtually insured that the bill was veto proof. But then Reagan reversed gears and apologized to a deeply hurt Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, and effusively praised King as a champion of freedom and democracy. Reagan said that King’s struggle for equality was his struggle too.
During the furious battles that raged over affirmative action in the 1990s, conservatives snatched a flowery line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and boasted that he would have opposed racial quotas, preferences, and by extension affirmative action if he had lived. It was a wild stretch. King almost certainly would have been a vigorous supporter of affirmative action if he had lived. But in his speeches and writings, he also stressed personal responsibility, self- help, strong families, and religious values as goals that blacks should strive to attain.
In the late 1960s when King denounced the Vietnam war, embraced militant union struggles, and barnstormed around the country blasting wealth and class privilege, the red-baiters and professional King haters branded him a Communist. The Lyndon Johnson White House turned hostile. Corporate and foundation supporters slowly turned off the money spigot. The NAACP, Urban League, black Democrats, and some in King’s own organization turned their backs on him. During his last days, King spent much of his time fund raising and defending his policies against the critics within and without his organization. The back biting, carping of and backpedaling from King not by his enemies, but by some of his one-time friends and supporters got worse when he railed against the penchant for lavish personal spending, luxury apartments and fancy homes by some of his group’s staffers.
In his last installment on King, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, Taylor Branch tells how King stormed out of a planning meeting on his Poor Peoples March in fury at the attacks at him by some of his top aides who wanted to scrap the March. The issue of uniting masses of poor people for economic uplift, smacked of class war, and was just too risky and dangerous. The fear was that it would hopelessly alienate their Democratic Party boosters. King was unfazed by their criticism and hurled another broadside at them for their personal egoism, selfishness, and opportunism. King’s civil rights friends weren’t the only ones that took shots at him. 
Many black ministers joined in the King bash. At the National Baptist Convention in 1961, then and now the largest black religious group in America, King and a band of dissidents challenged the Convention’s leaders to give more active support to the civil rights battles. They wanted none of that. They flung un-Christian like threats and insults at King and the civil rights advocate-ministers, engaged in fisticuffs with them, and slandered King as a “hoodlum and crook.”
When the dust settled, King was summarily booted out of the organization, and set up a rival ministers group. Even after King’s death, and he took his place among America’s heroes, many black ministers still remained stone silent on the assault on civil liberties protections, the gutting of job and social programs, and U.S. militarism. These were all issues that King relentlessly and loudly spoke out against when he was alive. In an even more insulting twist, many black ministers, and that included one of King’s daughters, shamelessly and unapologetically evoked King’s name to pound gay rights and same sex marriage. There’s not a shred of evidence that King would have been a gay rights opponent. Coretta even demanded that one group of ministers cease using his name to back an anti-gay referendum in Miami a few years ago. Yet they still snatch at his legacy and hail King as one of their own on the King holiday.
Then there’s the King holiday. Though many corporations and government agencies plaster full- page ads in black newspapers that extol King on his holiday, and tout how much he’s done for them, the King holiday is still rock bottom among the national holidays that business and government agencies observe. An annual survey by BNA Inc., a Washington based business news publisher, revealed that about one-quarter of businesses give their workers a day off with pay. That number pales even in comparison to the next least celebrated holiday, Presidents Day.
King is no different than other towering historical figures, especially those that had the bad fortune to fall to an assassin’s bullet. The hypocrisy, mythmaking, embellishments, and outright distortions, quickly kicks in about them. Everyone wants a piece of the fallen legend to puff up their importance and whatever social and political ax they seek to grind. Fortunately, King’s legacy is still big and wide enough to snatch chunks of.
courtesy of :The Hutchinson Report
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
phone:323-296-6331
Submitted by: Robyn from Calli
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