I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Hooray for New Year! It’s dark and miserable outside, you are fat after Christmas munchies, everyone’s penniless and half of your friends refuse to go out because they are having a detox month. There’s only one thing that can save you from depression: the New Year’s resolutions.

I loooove New Year’s resolutions. Two years ago me and my friend Teemu travelled to Colombia for New Year (the best way to survive January is of course a two week holiday in Caribbean). When not lying on the beach drinking rum or "coco locos", we made resolutions for 2009. This is what was scribbled on my little red notebook.

Resolutions for 2009 (Lena)

Learn Spanish

Go to the gym A LOT

Lose 3 kilos

Drink less alcohol

Pay off my credit cards

Write a book

When going out, don’t always go to gay bars

Get a pay rise

Move house

Learn salsa (I was rather excited about salsa in Caribbean, now I have a triple CD with “300 best salsa songs” which I never ever listen)

Have more sex

Quit Smoking

Improve my Russian

Go to cinema every week

Teemu was perhaps a bit more realistic. His resolutions read:

Learn to whistle

Wear more boxers

Eat more healthy

Lose 3 kilos

Save money

Drink less beer

Get new friends and do interesting things with them

I found the notebook about year later and ticked off my achievements – 5 out of 14. Pretty good, I thought. How was I to predict the recession (no pay rise)? And going out in straight bars was a doomed idea from the start, because, you know, they are really really boring.  

We all know it’s not really about achieving everything on your list. It’s about looking into yourself, your life and finding out the little changes that would make you happier as a human being (like wearing more boxers - he did!). And just do your best.

If you need a little help with your resolutions this year, try hypnotherapy. It can help with quitting smoking, losing weight, social anxiety, phobias and bad habits such as nail biting. And to help you get started, Alphahypnotherapy is offering 30% off your treatment in January by quoting Blondie Ambitious. Cheers, for a better me! 

Life in Colombia was not that stressing until the New Year's resolutions kicked in.

Kissing My Vitamins Goodbye

I have recently made a fundamentally life changing decision to give up vitamin pills. I know it doesn’t sound quite as impressive as giving up drugs, alcohol or cigarettes, but believe you me, it is a big deal for me. I have been taking my daily multivitamins for as long as I can remember. I’m one of the “vitamin fanatics”, people taking supplements once a day or more (and I’m not alone, apparently 32% of us in the UK fall into this category).

My belief in omnipotence of vitamin supplements was passed down from my mother, who still keeps sending me little pill bottles for Christmas. On top of that I really liked believing in the magic pills that would make me forever young (vitamin E), happy (St John’s Wort), lose weight (Green Tea pills) and, of course, give me a super strong immune system (not rare for me to have four colds each winter).  

However after a lot of debate with my very smart and cute boyfriend and reading some research (and this great article from The Independent), I have come to a conclusion that I can, shock horror, actually get all the vitamins I need from my diet.

More and more studies are also showing that there’s no evidence of any benefit from multivitamin intake. And quite worryingly, overdosing on some vitamins can actually do you, especially your liver, more harm than good. God forbid, my liver does not need any excess strain on it.

So if you see me shaking in the corner, not to worry. It’s just new, less toxic me, getting over my vitamin withdrawals. 

Live Fast Die Young

I want my pop stars spectacular! I adore Courtney Love, Elton John, Lady Gaga, Britney and Boy George.  I loathe Leona Lewis and all the other boring X-Factor wannabes, including the judges. And I’m not alone. We are all fascinated when the pop stars go into meltdown. There’s a website where you can guess when Britney is going to die and no matter how much we burn the candle from both ends ourselves, there’s rarely any sympathy found for the “poor millionaire pop stars” and their addictions.

So it’s not really a surprise that a study done in Liverpool John Moores University shows that rock stars drop dead younger than the rest of us. But to find out that the life expectancy of an European pop star is only 35 years, sounds rather harsh. The yanks don’t do much better: a North American star can expect to die at 42 years of age.

The study looked at 1050 musicians, that had featured in the All Time Top 1000 albums list between 1956 and 1999, covering rock, pop, funk, R&B, electronica and new age genres. It found stars were more than twice as likely to die early and even more likely to die within five years of becoming famous. About 25 years after shooting to fame, European stars returned to the same levels of life expectancy as the general population while North American stars continued to experience higher death rates.

The main reason for the premature death of a pop star is obviously consumption of too much drugs and/or alcohol. I find the whole thing utterly depressive. Not that I really want to be a pop star but I know that if I was, I would definitely consume too much drugs and/or alcohol. But to die in your mid thirties? That’s so last season.

And I’m not the one to preach to the kids (or adults) what to do and think, but isn’t it just a tad questionable that the pop royalties are still being presented to us as role models? And don’t go saying they haven’t chosen that role. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be selling shampoo to us. 

Britney's back!

Elton John in his heyday, you got to love the look!