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Celebs in furry-looking fashion!

Liz has come under fire from animal rights activists after signing up to be the latest face of US fur company Blackglama. And it’s not the first time. At a party in 2001, an activist doused one of Liz’s white furs in red wine and called her a “murdering b—h!”

Liz Hurley is one in a long line of celebs who have come under fire for associations with fur. And she does seem to have quite the selection!

Fur has ‘casual’ in its repertoire — who knew?

In 2002, model Gisele Bundchen got more than free lingerie at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Activists protested on the runway against Gisele’s deal with Blackglama, dubbing her “fur scum”.

Lindsay is also a serial fur-wearer, pictured here looking fluffy on New Years Eve in 2004.

LiLo went feline for MTV’s TRL Award Show, held in New York City on February 21, 2005.

To fend off the cold of a New York winter, Lindsay wears a magestic-looking coat…

But when Lindsay arrived in London from Paris this month (Nov ’08), she was not wearing fur despite the wintery chill. Why? Because, just days before, she had a bundle of flour thrown at her by animal rights activists for her long line of furry fashion statements.

Desperate Housewives‘ Eva looked anything but desperate in her lavish coat.

This fuzzy number isn’t fur, but Gwyneth copped a serve from PETA after being photographed wearing a fox stole. She has since apologised via an American magazine:

“During one set-up, a stylist came up from behind and draped a stole around my shoulder.

“I didn’t pay much attention to it, and when I noticed it was fur, I assumed it was fake fur, but did not ask, so it’s my fault.”

Supermodel Kate Moss braved the cold, the rain and Pete Doherty in this plush number.

Did Mischa get into the genuine spirit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “WILD: Fashion Untamed” exhibit?

Real or fake? Let’s hope it’s the latter, because this one from The Body’s wardrobe looks a bit like an endangered species!

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Beat the wheeze with trees

Beat the wheeze with trees

Although pollen from trees may pose a problem for children with asthma, a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health claims trees actually reduce asthma rates.

Columbia University researchers found asthma incidence in children aged 4-5 years fell by nearly 30% for every extra 343 trees planted per square kilometre. There were also fewer hospitalisations for asthma attacks, even when risk factors like pollution and pets were taken into account.

Two reasons are suggested: one, trees clean the air and encourage outdoor play and two, exposing children to pollen could possibly help desensitise their immune systems to allergens.

Your say: Does anyone in your family suffer from asthma or allergies? Do you find that being outside improves their condition? Tell us below.

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Heather Locklear joins AA

Just days after being arrested for DUI, Heather Locklear has attended her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Los Angeles.

The Melrose Place star was arrested last Saturday after she stumbled through a supermarket, climbed behind the wheel of her BMW and began driving erratically through the carpark, causing a concerned witness to call 911.

Despite a police admission that Heather was under the influence of prescription drugs, not alcohol, she still showed up for the AA meeting, politely introducing herself to the star-struck recovering alcoholics at her local church hall.

Dressed in black and with her hair tied back, Heather was joined by her boyfriend Jack Wagner, who held her hand throughout the meeting and drove her home at the end of the night.

Heather will soon face charges in court over the DUI incident, and she’ll no doubt fare better in front of the judge now that she’s seeking help for her addiction.

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75 Years of The Australian Women’s Weekly gift book

A gift book to celebrate 75 Years of The Australian Women’s Weekly: Memories and great moments from Australia’s most loved magazine

This sumptuous gift book is filled with a lifetime of memories as seen through the pages of Australia’s most widely read magazine.

In October 2008, Australia celebrates the 75th birthday of a publishing icon. To mark this milestone, we have produced a beautiful gift book — 75 Years of The Australian Women’s Weekly. It contains stories from The Weekly’s first edition in 1933 through to today’s contemporary magazine that make you laugh, cry and proud to be an Australian. With familiar faces and familiar places there is something for everyone in this brilliant 300-page coffee table volume. This is a book you will treasure and return to time and time again.

Chapters include: The Weekly and Women, Home, Family, Food, Celebrities, The News, The Royals and War plus a special chapter on Behind the Scenes at The Weekly and much more.

“For more than seven decades, The Australian Women’s Weekly has resonated with generations of Australian women and men — there’s barely a family whose life hasn’t been touched by this extraordinary magazine at some stage. We hope you join us in celebrating this special occasion.” says Deborah Thomas, Editorial Director, The Australian Women’s Weekly.

Published by ACP Books on 1st October 2008, 75 Years of The Australian Women’s Weekly is available for $59.95 from all good book retailers and at www.acpbooks.com.au.

Your Say: What has The Australian Women’s Weekly meant to you? Send us your own special birthday wish below…

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You can be a ninja too!

By Glenda Kwek

You close your eyes and inhale deeply, with your back straight and legs folded. In the still room, the silence is punctuated by a low voice, encouraging you to clear your mind and concentrate on the present. As your chest rises and falls, you feel a growing calmness spreading through your body. A few minutes pass, and you open your eyes, ready.

This mediation exercise could have come from yoga or pilates. But it is from an Eastern art that popular culture has associated with pizza-eating turtles with a rat as their master!

It’s ninjitsu — the secret art of the ninja. Ninjitsu is a Japanese martial art that’s believed to have evolved a millennium ago from farmers and peasants rebelling against the Samurai warrior class.

Unlike its Hollywood image of flying metal stars, wall-climbing and smoke bombs, the real art of ninjitsu is more subtle, with an emphasis on mental and spiritual enlightenment. Body mass and physical strength are not necessary attributes for students, making it more accessible to women than some other martial arts, practitioners say.

“The art of the ninja is being elusive, not being there,” says Anthony Bray-Heta, a ninjitsu teacher in Sydney’s North Shore. “It’s a simple art that builds confidence because you don’t need body strength to win.

“It’s about nerve endings, nerve strikes, and breaking balance by movement.”

Bray-Heta has been practising ninjitsu for 12 years, and has trained in Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia. He moved his school to Brookvale six months ago from Avalon in NSW’s Northern Beaches, and his Maai-Hyoshi dojos are attended by both men and women. He says while popular culture often portrays martial arts as having practitioners that are physically focused, the art of ninjitsu is easy to do and “good for those who don’t have the body mass”.

“As a teacher, I get the biggest students to come up against me. The grandmaster of ninjitsu is a very small man who’s 78 years old. It’s all about evasion and movement.”

Lara Ross is one of Bray-Heta students, and has been practising ninjitsu for four years. As a woman, she finds ninjitsu perfect as a self-defence skill for women.

“What I found with Ninjitsu was that it teaches you the principles. There’s no actual right way of doing things — the purpose is to survive,” she says.

“It’s yucky; it’s something that people don’t want to face. None of us want to wake up and think we might get attacked today. [But] it’s about being prepared for the unexpected, because you never know what will happen. At least you have some idea of what to do.

“For women, facing up against men, we have to be a lot smarter to get out of our situation. You want to look at the situation objectively. When you are been attacked, they (the attackers) are using your fear against you. When you are learning ninjitsu, it’s about being empowered and not letting them use your fear.”

Ninjitsu’s emphasis on survival techniques means it’s not practised as a sport, unlike some other martial arts like taekwondo or karate, where there are sparring competitions in controlled settings. There is also another difference — spiritual survival is given just as much attention as physical survival, from the day a new student steps into the class, Bray-Heta says.

“The whole thing about ninjitsu is harmonising your environment with the world,” he says. Participants learn physical moves, mental completeness and encouraged to grow spiritually through the use of sensory skills, Ki training, meditation and spiritual “pressure” training. Students are taught “mushin”, which means “no mind”, to learn how to still their thoughts.

Ross likens the practice to yoga, an ancient Indian art. Yoga’s popularity has grown among women over the past few years with its much-touted exercise benefits. But lesser known is its roots in serving as a path towards spiritual enlightenment.

“Ninjitsu is like doing yoga, because you are uniting your mind with your body,” she says. “You understand the full meaning of why you use a technique, and you can use the same principles in business, university, work or at home.”

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The feel-good meal plan

By Judy Davie

Some foods simply make us feel good, and I’m not talking about chocolate and your favourite gooey pudding!

Without getting too technical, the amino acid tryptophan found in certain foods is one of the 10 essential amino acids required by the body to produce necessary proteins for growth, development and tissue repair.

Tryptophan is also known for its important role in the nervous system. It is linked to chemical messengers involved in relaxation, restfulness, and sleep and can help us just stay calm.

When we eat certain foods our brain produces chemicals. One such chemical is seratonin. It’s the precursor to sleep, makes us feel relaxed and is known as the feel good brain chemical. Seratonin originates from tryptophan.

  • Turkey

  • Chicken

  • Beef

  • Lamb

  • Eggs

  • Salmon

  • Dairy

  • Tuna

  • Soybeans

  • Brown rice

  • Sesame seeds

  • Peanuts

  • Other nuts and seeds

  • Cottage cheese

  • Banana

  • Essential fats

However, it’s not as simple as eating these tryptophan-rich foods to feel good. Because other amino acids found in protein-rich foods compete for absorption, tryptophan often misses out.

To boost its absorption, we must accompany each meal with a quality carbohydrate food. The insulin produced after eating a carbohydrate rich food helps with the absorption of tryptophan and the production of serotonin. The net result is we feel good.

The skeptics among you may be interested in the findings of Harvard, Oxford and MIT Universities which found that women on high protein/low carbohydrate diets lower their serotonin levels, making them more prone to weight gain relapse, depression, excessive craving, bingeing, bulimia, and severe PMS. So, if that’s not enough to convince you that some carbohydrate is good, nothing is!

This month’s diet is designed to make you feel good and keep you calm. We combine tryptophan-rich protein with quality carbohydrate and, what’s more, the meal ideas are delicious!

Day one | Day two | Day three | Day four | Day five | Day six | Day seven

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Hairballs

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I gave gluten to my gluten intolerant flatmate

My flatmate bored us all to tears about being intolerant to gluten, so I set out to prove it wasn’t true.

My flatmate Megan decided, at the age of 27, that she was gluten intolerant. Just like that. She simply woke up one day and pronounced to the world that she couldn’t eat gluten. No doctors were involved in the process at all! Yet it was worse than that — she wanted everyone else in the world to know it too. It drove me insane!

I would have dinner parties, or friends around for coffee, and as soon as I brought out the bread or biscuits, Megan would start banging on about her “condition”. Not only did it bore the tears out of my visitors, but it quickly escalated to outright guilt trips, in which she would try to make my friends feel guilty about eating wheat products in front of her. Within a few months, it was nearly impossible to have friends over at my house — and Megan even started suggesting that she would begin throwing out any gluten products that I brought home.

Knowing that she was clearly imbalanced, I nevertheless felt pretty angry the day I came home to find she had done just that: all my breakfast cereals, bread and spaghetti, cast out to the garbage. As a student, that food was my staple. When I asked Megan to reimburse me, she curtly informed me that I’d had long enough to accept that it wasn’t fair to be eating gluten in front of her. Now, it seemed, she was giving me no choice. I decided to accept her new, enforced rules, on the surface at least. But I began scheming to teach her the biggest lesson of all time!

I began buying gluten free, which I hated, but secretly stockpiled gluten-containing products under my bed. Every time I cooked, I’d add real flour to the gluten free, throw in some real pasta with the rice stuff — basically, everything I cooked contained gluten. And everything I cooked, I shared with Megan, who happily ate my food, “knowing” that my cupboards were free from wheat products.

But this wasn’t even my real revenge. It was only the beginning.

Some weeks later, I organised a camping trip away with Megan and all my friends. I cooked and baked for several days in the lead up to the event, and bought loads of sausages — switching the labels while I was still in the supermarket, so that it looked like they were gluten free. They were not! My friends were all in on it and, after months of hearing about Megan’s supposed allergy over and over again, they were happy to go along with the trick.

We spent a lovely few days listening to Megan go on and on about her body’s supposed intolerance to gluten, as she wolfed down more than her share of cookies, cake, damper and sausages — all loaded with the forbidden substance. For a moment, I worried that she would indeed end up getting sick. But as the days wore on, she didn’t show one symptom. And she constantly reminded us what those symptoms were!

By the end of the trip, we were all so tired of hearing about them, that it became too much. My sister, Lucy, finally snapped.

“There’s gluten in everything!” she yelled. “You’ve been eating it for the last four days! You’re a liar!”

I felt no shame in the truth being revealed, but I also knew I still had to live with Megan. I couldn’t afford to pay the rent on my own! As Megan wallowed in embarrassment in the car, waiting for us to leave, I managed to convince some of the boys to take the blame for the sabotage; that they had swapped my careful, gluten-free cooking. Megan was furious, but at least she came home with me.

The other upside was that, instead of boring everyone with her intolerance stories when my friends came around, she made herself scarce instead. I was soon able to have dinner parties once again!

As for the cooking, well, it continued pretty much as before. Megan still clearly believed that she was gluten intolerant, and still liked to remind me of it fairly regularly. And every time she did, I simply smiled, and added a few cups of flour to the gluten-free cake I was baking!

Picture: Getty Images.

Your say: Have your say about this true confession below…

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Paralysed by my own dad

A terrible accident left Cindy immobilised, but her forgiveness has given her family hope.

Jerry Donald gently combs his beautiful daughter Cindy’s hair before he places her toothbrush in her hand so that she can try to brush her teeth.

Like any dad, Jerry loves his daughter desperately — and since Cindy was paralysed from the chest down in a freak accident, they’ve grown closer. Amazing, you might think, when you learn it was Jerry who ran over Cindy while she sunbathed at home.

‘It’s not his fault’

“I will never blame my dad for what happened,” says Cindy, 25. “I know he has to live with what he did for the rest of his life, and I hate that he has that burden on his shoulders.

“He’s still the wonderful father he was before this.”

It was a sunny day on March 25, 2005 when Cindy, a student, was sunbathing on a weekend at home from university. As she lay on the driveway in her bikini, she chatted with her friend Ashley.

Then Jerry, 55, pulled up after coming home from work for lunch.

“Suddenly, I felt the most excruciating pain in my neck and head,” Cindy says. “Dad hadn’t seen me…”

Read the full story in Woman’s Day (on-sale September 29, 2008)

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Kate Ritchie’s body secrets

She’s got one of the best bods in the business, so how does she do it?

Since leaving Summer Bay, Kate Ritchie has launched a successful radio career and found new love. But most stunning of all has been her dramatic physical evolution that’s seen her turn from frumpy to fabulous.

Gone is Sally Fletcher, the girl next door, and in her place is Kate, who at 30 has emerged as a sleek, sophisticated, stylish young woman with the kind of athletic shape that has seen her ascend to the top of the fashion stakes.

“Over the last year I’ve started to look different and I certainly feel different,” Kate said recently.

Now trainer Rebecca Roberts, who worked with Kate earlier this year, has revealed some of the secrets behind Kate’s amazing new look. She says diet is just one part of Kate’s stunning overhaul — with exercise and meditation helping her achieve her healthy new glow…

Read the full article in this week’s Woman’s Day (on-sale September 29, 2008)

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