Falling in love is the quickest way to lose weight, according to Italian diet experts. Love as the (diet) drug works because it sets off a reaction that lessens appetite and increases feelings of satiety. The benefits of that many-splendored thing are especially helpful to dieters fighting the over-40 bulge war.
Yet it’s official: getting married does make you put on weight, according to research also published recently in Italy. The survey showed that the majority of newlywed couples put on an average 10 kilos in their first year of marriage.
A publication quizzed 580 couples, aged between 28 and 40, who had just tied the knot for the survey. They discovered that nine out of ten couples had put on weight in the first year.
Lifestyle changes following marriage or moving in with your partner were the main cause of weight gain for 13 per cent of the women in the survey. More nights in, more food, more alcohol and not going to the gym are the chief causes, according to the couples surveyed.
Meanwhile, a German scientist may have the magic formula to help you and your partner stay in love.
According to Dr Hans-Werner Bierhoff’s happy relationship formula, criticism needs to be cancelled out by five compliments.
Professor Bierhoff and his colleague Elke Rohmann from Ruhr University Bochum’s social psychology department say that “people feel good in their relationship as goodwill increases your potential to be happy.”
The formula, which is based on tests of thousands of couples, has been used in a relationship advice book entitled What Makes Love Strong.
The book also addresses other relationship problems, such as the effects of unemployment, infidelity or “stressful experiences like diseases, depression or childbirth, which can lead to break-ups,” Bierhoff says.
“Time to kiss the Blarney Stone, rock on down with the Leprechauns and delve into something creamy.”
That’s how Ben & Jerry’s have introduced their brand new ice cream, Dublin Mudslide.
They claim that “Ben & Jerry’s had the luck of the Irish on their side when they concocted this yummy new ice cream.” Their latest flavour contains Irish cream liqueur ice cream, with chocolate chip cookies and a coffee fudge swirl.
Unlike many other famous Irish exports, this will not get you drunk, but if you overindulge you may experience similar sensations of nausea, disorientation and severe headache.
A new website, my-frustrations.com, allows angry consumers to air their views on substandard products. So now you can publicly blast that toaster that won’t toast. Dyson, the electrical firm and creator of the site, is offering everyone who “rages against the machine” a chance to win new, functioning Dyson products.
New figures from AC Neilson show that younger consumers are turning away from television in favour of DVDs and gaming. This turn is causing huge worry for advertisers and TV companies.
In 2004, viewers aged four and upward watched on average two hours and 54 minutes of television per day, but this was a drop from three hours in 2003 and 3 hours and six minutes in 2002.
Those aged between 15 and 24, an important target for advertisers, have dropped viewing hours to two.
New ways have been developed to advertise to this group while on the move. Advertisers in recent weeks have been offered the chance to take space on 15-inch screens placed inside the 24 Aircoach buses which operate in Ireland. The screens have been available since April and a monthly package will cost over €2,000.
Similar facial features initiate trust, but not sexual attraction, research has suggested.
During a study of 144 students, the majority picked individuals who most looked like them to be the most trustworthy. But in terms of sexual attraction, most choose those with differing facial characteristics, said psychologists at Aberdeen University in Scotland.
The results suggest that people steer clear of those who “look like family” to avoid inbreeding.
The students were shown a series of paired faces, unaware that before the experiment many of the photographs had been altered by psychologists to resemble the student before they looked at them. “This supports the idea that people — perhaps unwittingly — detect facial resemblance,” said researcher Dr Lisa DeBruine.
Dr DeBruine carried out the research at McMaster University in Canada and is now continuing her work within the schools of psychology at Aberdeen and St Andrews universities.
Pirates of the Caribbean stars Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom will really take to the seas when joining a round-the-world yacht race.
As part of the marketing for the film, Disney has entered a team in the gruelling round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race.
The vessel, named the ‘Black Pearl’ after the pirate ship in the film, will don a giant skull and crossbones on its sail.
Their seafaring efforts are to promote the summer release of the sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
Russian MPs want The Simpsons to be given a hardcore rating after a report blamed the series for introducing antagonism between children and parents.
Deputies from the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, have asked the Ministry of Culture and Communications to monitor the cartoons shown on Russian television closely.
After having watched The Simpsons, the experts found that the cartoons were crammed with violent and aggressive episodes.
London’s mayor Ken Livingstone has blasted the British media, blaming them for the death of Princess Diana and saying that some British reporters are the “scum of the earth”. That seems par for the course for a man who recently compared a newspaper reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. But what do others think of us journalists?:
“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.”
Oscar Wilde
“Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
Frank Zappa
“Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.”
Dave Barry
“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people — including me — would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
Hunter S Thompson
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
Thomas Jefferson
“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
AJ Liebling
“Journalism is the last refuge of the unemployable.”
Brian Donaghy