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Simone Callahan’s sizzling body at 41!

Simone Callahan's sizzling body at 41!

She’s never looked better… and Simone tells Woman’s Day it’s all thanks to her new man Toby Roberts. She shows off her hot bikini body on a holiday in Bali.

With her skin glowing and blue eyes sparkling, Simone Callahan laughs when asked what sort of diet and exercise plan she relies on to look so good. “I’m not into diets,” the mum-of- three insists, instead attributing her renewed vitality to boyfriend of 12 months, Toby Roberts.

“Toby has always been big on eating well and that has probably rubbed off on me. “We both love the occasional chocolate, and I’ve always loved sweets, biscuits and lollies – probably too much!” How then does she keep in such great shape at 41? Friends would say it’s a “love diet”, with Simone the happiest she’s been in years since falling in love with model and business executive Toby, 37. “I don’t have much discipline when it comes to food,” she says.

“If I’m hungry, I like to eat, so I think a diet would kill me. “I’ve also been doing yoga on and off for eight years,” Simone explains. “And I know I shall be doing it the rest of my life. It’s almost addictive. “I started with iyengar yoga and changed to ashtanga 18 months ago. It’s a very disciplined yoga and I’ve been averaging about five sessions a week.” Simone credits yoga with helping her through the tough and turbulent times in the latter part of her 10-year marriage to Shane Warne, and the 18 months after they reunited.

“Yoga makes me feel very calm, centred and at peace with life,” she says happily. “It has been a great way of letting things go.” While Toby is dedicated to health and fitness, Simone has also been encouraging him to explore yoga. “Toby does cross training,” she explains. “He doesn’t like the gym environment. He prefers to be outside surfing, swimming, running and cycling as much as he can.”

Read more about Simone’s new body, see more pictures, plus see Liz Hurley’s bikini body in this week’s Woman’s Day on sale December 23, 2011.

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Woman’s Day winning bride: I wore Kate Middleton’s dress!

Woman's Day winning bride: I wore Kate Middleton's dress!

Kate’s beautiful gown, two stunning “Pippa” bridesmaids…Bec Wade-Ferrell’s wedding was a right royal affair, thanks to Woman’s Day.

The setting wasn’t exactly Westminster Abbey, and the groomsmen looked more like the Blues Brothers than dashing princes, but Bec Wade-Ferrell’s marriage to the love of her life, Dan Jackson, was a day no-one will ever forget. For a start, the couple were wed on Remembrance Day, with the magical date of 11/11/11.

“I was determined Dan would never forget our anniversary,” Bec told Woman’s Day on the morning of her very special day.And Bec and her attendants looked lovely in replicas of Kate and Pippa’s gorgeous gowns. Bec, 32, and Dan, 34, were the lucky winners of Woman’s Day’s Win Your Own Royal Wedding competition. Bec’s little boy, Henry, inspired her winning entry. When Woman’s Day asked, “How did you celebrate the royal wedding?” Bec replied: “With my son, four-year-old Henry. He said, ‘She’s beautiful, Mummy, but you will be more beautiful at your wedding and you have me to walk you.’”

The weepy judges were unanimous: Bec’s entry was the winner! And she would be a fairytale princess bride. Bec marvelled at her satin and French Chantilly lace wedding gown, a replica of Kate’s. Valued at $10,000, it took leading dressmaker Karen Willis Holmes and her team 130 hours to create. “It’s so heavy, it needs three coathangers,” Bec says. “It weighs more than 20 kilos. It’s a good thing I’m reasonably fit!”

Bec’s bridesmaids, Elissa Wright and Jenni Howells, wore exact replicas of Pippa Middleton’s much-talked-about maid of honour dress. Their rear views were pure Pippa! Melbourne’s Jason Grech designed the stunning gowns. “Sexy, elegant, hot,” is how Harry Georgiou, one half of the design team, summed up the head-turning outfits.

Read more about Bec’s beautiful wedding and see all the pictures in this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale December 23, 2011.

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Suri’s toy store melt down!

Suri's toy store melt down!

Tom and Katie’s precious little diva has the mother of all meltdowns.

She may have looked like an angelic fairy princess in a floaty mauve party dress and cute pink tiara, but Suri Cruise was transformed into a screaming banshee after not getting her way in an exclusive New York toy shop.

The mini-fashionista daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes threw her biggest public tantrum ever, stomping her tiny gold designer heels and turning on the waterworks inside the Big Apple’s famed FAO Schwartz store. While embarrassed mum Katie tried to reason with her little girl as astonished fellow shoppers looked on, a red-faced Suri showed she wasn’t about to be placated in a hurry, clenching her teeth, fiercely clutching a soft toy and intimidating Katie as she screamed right into her face.

Perhaps feeling this was one meltdown that required calling in the big guns, Katie decided there was only one thing to be done – pacify her daughter with a lollipop and some toys. And, wouldn’t you know it, Suri’s tears soon dried up.

The lipstick-loving youngster, perhaps the most famous five-year-old on the planet, looked like the cat that got the cream as she left the toy store with a bag of treats. Friends of Tom and Katie have been known to refer to Suri as “the little dictator”, with one telling Woman’s Day, “Her tantrums have to be seen to be believed. She’ll be on the floor, kicking and screaming her head off, and Katie will just shrug.”

Read more and see the pictures of Suri’s meltdown in this week’s Woman’s Day on sale December 23, 2011.

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Miss country girl Australia 2011

After searching rural Australia for our next top models, Woman’s Day proudly presents the winners wearing summer’s hottest trends.

Meet winner Belinda Adams, 14 from Nannella (left), NSW, 2nd place winner Arielle Panta, 16 from Warrigal, NSW (middle) and 3rd winner place Ryle Waugh, 16 from Warwick, Qld (right).

See our shoot with the girls showing off all the latest trends followed by our video interview with them.

Trend: Shorts, they are a summer must-have!

Trend: Boho, Bohemian is all about busy prints and crochet accents.

Trend: Colour blocking, this works best with just two or three shades of colour.

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Cheating men spend more on their mistress than wife

Cheating men spend more on their mistress than their wife

Image: Getty, posed by models

It seems Christmas shopping for some men has become a little more expensive this year, with a new study finding that cheating men spend more money on their mistress than their wife.

The statistics taken from 2,000 men who use the Illicit Encounters website, an extra marital affairs dating service in the UK, found that cheating men spend an average of $192 on their mistress’ presents, while $170 is spent on their wives, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.

During the study 89 percent of men admitted to choosing something ‘ultimately decorative with that being it’s sole purpose’ for their mistress in comparison to 42 percent of the men surveyed choosing an item like this for their wife.

Half of men preferred to chose something ‘practical and useful for around the home’ for their wife.

Cheating expert and spokesperson for Illicit Encounters, Rosie Freeman-Jones says the way men buy gifts shows how they feel about their relationships.

“The difference in the sort of gifts men choose to buy for their mistress and wives mirror the different ways married men often view these two relationships,” she said.

“Men often see their mistresses as playing more “surface”, decorative roles in their lives, providing sex and affection without much emotional attachment.

“This explains why mistresses receive less practical and more “pretty” gifts.”

Rosie said that over time men start to see their wives as needing more practical things than pretty things.

“On the other side of the coin, a man’s relationship with his wife, after time, becomes less about being pretty and more about being practical – the bigger issues of mortgages and maintenance overtake the seemingly less important things like romance,” she said.

“The less a husband thinks of his wife as a sexual being, the more functional and “unsexy” his gifts will become.”

And according to the Illicit Encounters website, Christmas is their busiest time of year with a rise of 200-300% in activity and new members joining on the site.

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Bah humbug! Rich people really ARE less compassionate

Bah humbug! Rich people really ARE less compassionate

Penny-pinching millionaire Ebenezer Scrooge is famous for his mean, miserly behaviour — now new research has suggested that rich people really are less compassionate than their poorer counterparts.

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that poorer people were better at recognising signals of distress in others because they had been through hardship themselves.

People from more privileged backgrounds, on the other hand, found it much harder to notice when someone else were suffering because they hadn’t experienced adversity before.

“It’s not that the upper classes are cold-hearted,” study leader Jennifer Stellar said. “They may just not be as adept at recognising the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives.

“These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing.”

Stellar and her team studied more than 300 young adults from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

There volunteers were then divided into different classes — lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class or upper class — based on their parent’s income and education.

A group of 148 participants were then quizzed on how frequently they felt positive emotions such as joy, contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement and awe.

When the answers were compared, compassion was the only emotion reported at significantly higher levels by people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

In the second experiment, a new group of 64 volunteers viewed two videos. One was a neutral training film, while the other was an emotional clip about the families of children who have cancer.

All respondents reported feeling ‘sad’ when watching the cancer video, but those from poorer backgrounds reported high levels of empathy and compassion distinctly separate to sorrow.

The remaining 106 participants were then divided into pairs and interviewed for a fictional job.

To make the situation more stressful, they were told the person who performed best would be given a cash prize.

Researchers found that people from poorer backgrounds were quicker to notice when their rival was becoming stressed and reacted with sympathy and compassion.

Richer respondents were less able to detect stress in their opponents, and therefore did not react accordingly.

Stellar said the results don’t mean rich people are uncaring, just that they struggle to detect when others are suffering so don’t realise there is a need for compassion or sympathy.

“Recognising suffering is the first step to responding compassionately,” she said. “The results suggest that it’s not that upper classes don’t care, it’s that they just aren’t as good at perceiving stress or anxiety.”

The study was published in December 12 in the online journal Emotion.

Your say: Do you think experiencing hardship in life makes you more compassionate to the suffering of others? Contact us at [email protected]

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Five nutrition myths busted

Busting five nutrition myths

One of the biggest dilemmas for dieters is sorting fact from fiction when it comes to nutrition claims. So, get ready to set five of those urban, nutrition myths straight.

  1. ‘Lite’ means a product is low in fat

Seeing the word “lite” on a product may automatically trigger a response to purchase that product. More often than not people are buying these products because they believe that “lite” products are low in fat. This word can be quite deceiving considering it can have other meanings. For example, ‘lite’ oil means light in colour and ‘lite’ dry biscuits can mean light in salt. The fat and kilojoule content of these products is usually the same as the regular product.

In pictures: How to lose kilos without noticing

  1. Olive oil is lower in fat than other oils

Olive oil contains the same amount of fat as other oils. The type of fat found in oils varies — olive oil contains predominantly monounsaturated fat. These healthy fats can help control cholesterol levels if they replace saturated fats in the diet. Olive oil also supplies beneficial anti-oxidants. But if you are watching your weight, the amount of all fat in your diet should be controlled, including the use of oils.

  1. Supplements can be taken instead of food

Replacing foods you do not like with pills is not the way to improve your health status. Fruits and vegetables have enormous health benefits because they contain vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and fibre. Their combined presence in food allows them to work synergistically. A tomato not only contains vitamin C but also phytochemicals and many other nutrients. When vitamin C is consumed as a supplement, you miss out on the benefit of the other nutrients present in the food. Supplements often contain greater amounts of nutrients than their food counterparts, however some may not be absorbed as well and many may be toxic in high concentrations. Most importantly food does taste a whole lot better than a handful of pills!

  1. By increasing my protein intake I will build huge muscles

Adequate protein is essential for muscle repair and maintenance. However, every gram of dietary protein is not converted to a gram of muscle. Consuming more protein than your body requires can result in the excess being stored as fat if your overall kilojoule intake exceeds energy expenditure. Without the appropriate strength training regime your body will not automatically convert the protein to muscle. So if you want to increase your muscle mass, combine a well-balanced diet with an appropriate strength training program.

In pictures: Gym habits that are holding you back

  1. Bananas are high in fat

Bananas are high in energy-giving carbohydrates and low in fat. They are a good source of fibre, potassium and vitamin C. Some people believe they are high in fat because of the creamy texture and sweet taste of the perfectly ripened banana. However, once you dip banana in batter, deep fry it and call it a banana fritter — well that’s a different story!

Video: Weird and wonderful diet myths

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Charlie Sheen’s family holiday

After a troublesome year, Charlie Sheen has escaped the hype of the festive season by heading on a holiday with ex-wife Denise Richards and their daughters.

Escaping to a luxury tropical location the pair, who have had a turbulent relationship since their divorce in 2006, have put it all behind them to enjoy a family holiday with their daughters Sam, seven, and Lola, six. Denise also took her six-month-old adopted daughter Eloise.

Sheen, 46, tweeted: “What’s better than a modern family vacation!?! love spending winter break w/ @denise_richards & my kids.”

“All in the family a Christmas…. to remember..! xo c”

See the pictures of their holiday tweeted by Charlie Sheen here.

Charlie Sheen has tweeted a series of photos from the family holiday.

“All in the family a Christmas…. to remember..! xo c” Sheen tweeted.

Charlie take in a spot of fishing.

“hello fish!! hmmm… Small but feisty!!!” Sheen tweeted.

“…an awesome crab cake fest.” Sheen tweeted.

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Gerard Butler hospitalised after on-set surfing accident

Gerard Butler hospitalised after on-set surfing accident

Gerard Butler has had a lucky escape after almost drowning while filming his latest movie in California.

The 42-year-old had to be rushed to hospital after being hit by a succession of waves during a surfing stunt while filming his new movie Of Men and Mavericks.

While filming, he became caught in the 12-foot swell and was hit by a large wave, becoming trapped underwater by a succession of following waves.

Butler, who plays the role of champion surfer Rick “Frosty” Henson in the true life flick based on surfer Jay Moriarty, was pulled from the water onto a jet ski.

He was then brought to shore, helped from the water and taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, but escaped serious injury.

Eye witness, surfer Fran Quirarte, saw the events unfold during the filming at the northern California surfbreak.

“Butler was held down for a solid two waves and took four or five more waves on the head,” Quirarte said.

“He was then washed through the rocks on the inside before he was finally able to be plucked out.

“Even on small days the inside at Maverick’s can push 10-foot plus and really tear you up. When they brought Butler in he had that 100-yard stare that surfers get after a two-wave hold [down] or near-death experience.”

Quirate claimed Butler and the film crew were becoming impatient after waiting several days to get in the water.

“With Maverick’s and the entire Northern Hemisphere big-wave season off to a slow start surfers and the film crew were chomping at the bit to get a few days of surfing and filming in,” Quirate said.

“Waves were running at 12ft, but some large ones had got through.”

Butler was held in hospital overnight for observation.

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What to eat to avoid cancer

What to eat to avoid cancer

Citrus fruit may have a protective role in certain types of cancer

Everyone knows healthy eating is important for overall wellbeing, but did you know some foods can reduce your risk of cancer?

Here are some foods thought to protect the body from cancer and other serious diseases.

Soy foods contain natural plant substances called phytoestrogens, which are thought to have anti-cancer effects. Population groups, such as Asian men and women, who eat traditional foods rich in phytoestrogens, have a much lower risk of developing prostate and breast cancer.

In pictures: Ten ways to look younger instantly

Tip: Sauté an onion with some garlic and grated fresh ginger. Add two tablespoons of mild curry paste and a packet of diced, firm tofu. Cook for five to eight minutes or until golden. Add a handful of pumpkin-seed kernels, two diced fresh tomatoes and five cups of baby spinach leaves. Serve with brown rice.

Citrus fruit may have a protective role in certain types of cancer, particularly of the mouth, stomach and larynx. It’s thought that vitamin C, folate, carotenoids, fibre and other phytochemcials work together to provide this protective effect.

Tip: Boost your citrus intake with a refreshing citrus salad. Combine segmented oranges, pink grapefruit and lime. Add sliced strawberries and fresh mint leaves. Enjoy chilled.

Wholegrain breads and cereals are packed with dietary fibre, folate, antioxidants and lignans. These nutrients are thought to be responsible for a protective effect against stomach and other digestive-tract cancers.

Tip: Start your day with wholegrains. Try a natural muesli based on rolled oats with added fruit, nuts and seeds; a couple of slices of grain bread with peanut butter; or another wholegrain cereal with fresh fruit and low-fat soy milk.

In pictures: Mood foods

Cruciferous vegetables have a number of complex-sounding compounds like glucosinolates that have been linked to lowering cancer risk. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, cabbage and bok choy fall into the cruciferous vegetable group. These vegies could protect against lung, stomach, prostate and bladder cancers.

Tip: Cut a bunch of baby bok choy in half lengthways. Lightly steam and serve as a side dish with a dash of soy sauce.

Your say: What are your favourite healthy recipes?

Video: Cancer-fighting vegetables

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