weight management
During your long journey to weight loss and ideal weight management, you will come across many different tools and methods for successfully losing weight and keeping it off. While some methods may be traditional, or completely natural, some are more procedural without compromising your well being.
While there are many ways to lose weight, one thing is certain, weight gain can be harmful to your health and even deadly. Individuals 20 pounds or more over their ideal weight at a risk of serious medical conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and sleep apnea.
The statistics of complications and medical conditions that can plague and over-weight individual are depressing. However there is hope in knowing that those who do lose even small amounts of weight and shed the pounds can improve their health and their overall lifestyle.
In your search for weight loss you are never alone, and there are many methods such as exercise, supplements, natural remedies and even procedures such as hypnosis that can help. Hypnosis is meant to assist you in effectively losing weight and it is a safer method than starvation or pills that can end up harming your body instead of helping you lose the unwanted weight.
There are many myths and misconceptions about hypnosis, even claims that hypnosis is just something used by street magicians and snake oil salesmen. When thinking of using hypnosis, do your part to research the benefits and risks of using this as your weight loss assistant.
As there are many claims about this method, here are some facts to consider:
1. Safety
Hypnosis is a serious method and should always be done by a trained expert. The trained professional should explain the concept and the factors behind hypnosis. Even though hypnosis is no a prescription pill or a surgery procedure, it is still a procedure that can be risky.
Hypnosis, while powerful, can also be risky if not performed properly.
2. Effectiveness
Hypnosis alone will not make you shed weight. It is meant to be a weight loss assistant to help you achieve your weight loss goal, and can easily become a part of your weight loss strategy such as dieting and exercise.
This method is meant to relax the mind, while still allowing you to be in control. It should be paired up with a weight loss program and it should never be used as a sole method of weight loss process.
3. Sessions
Hypnosis can be a gradual process of getting into the subliminal state of a person. A trained hypnotist is able to successfully get the body to respond to suggestibility because of its intense state of concentration during the “hypnotic stage”.
Hypnosis is not meant to reprogram a person and it should not be considered as paranormal or magical. This is a powerful treatment of a wide variety of conditions, and can even be used as a relaxation method.
In conclusion, hypnosis can be a very powerful friend to help you lose the weight and feel better overtime inside and out. It is not a magical transformation of one's person but a tool that can be utilized in the successful and effective process when trying to lose weight.
Hypnosis should never be used as a sole process of weight loss. It can however be successfully combined to help guide you to a better mind, body and overall a better you.
The top priority for the Milwaukee Brewers' front office this winter was to improve the worst pitching staff in the National League. By re-signing Trevor Hoffman and bringing in free agents Randy Wolf, Doug Davis, and LaTroy Hawkins, there is little doubt that the rotation and bullpen will not have similar results in 2010.
The moves have been received well by the fanbase. The Brewers have already sold 1 million tickets for the upcoming season, the second-fastest time in team history to get to that mark.
In the eyes of the fans, the most pressing need seems to be trying to lock up Prince Fielder to a long-term deal. While many feel it's a mortal lock that Fielder will bolt Milwaukee after the 2011 season, when taking a closer look, one can begin to see a way that the organization can keep the mammoth slugger for the next several years.
Fielder is entering the final year of a two-year, $18 million deal signed prior to last season. Should he put up numbers similar to the past couple of seasons, he'll be in line to make $15 million to $18 million for the 2011 season.
This won't be a problem for the Brewers to pay such a salary. The contracts of Jeff Suppan and Bill Hall come off the books after this year, giving the team more than $20 million in freed-up money.
If Fielder were the only big-name hitter in free agency that season, it would be almost impossible for the Brewers to re-sign him. The Brewers catch a break because he could enter free agency with fellow sluggers Albert Pujols, Ryan Howard, and Adrian Gonzalez.
The biggest advantage going for Fielder is his age. Pujols and Howard will be in their 30s, while Gonzalez will turn 30 in the 2012 season. Fielder won't turn 30 until May 9 in the 2014 season.
Most believe Pujols will remain in St. Louis, but nothing is set in stone until a contract is signed. It's hard to imagine his talent falling off so much in the next two years that he won't be the top prize for every team in baseball.
All would be a great fit for the middle of any lineup. Each will face different questions as teams will try to cut the best deal for themselves.
Fielder's weight will be an issue, but he has proven that he can maintain it during the last few seasons and not gain any significant amount. Regardless, he will likely always have questions about his long-term playing ability because of the size of his waist.
Beginning in 2012, only Wolf and Ryan Braun are under contract. Fielder will still be only 27 and likely ask for a seven- or eight-year deal. There's no doubt the Brewers would be taking a risk, but it's a risk they need to make.
The team offered CC Sabathia a five-year, $100 million contract after the 2008 season. No one in baseball thought he would sign it, but management was at least able to tell the fanbase it offered a player $20 million a season.
Sabathia ended up signing for just a bit more than $20 million a season, but the Yankees offered three extra years—something the Brewers weren't willing to do.
Milwaukee needs to step up and do more than offer a contract that can be spun by the front office as a positive public relations move. They have already signed one star, Braun, to a long-term deal, and they must do the same with Fielder to be taken seriously as a legitimate franchise.
Braun may be the face of the franchise from the front office's point of view, but Fielder is the reason fans come to the ballpark and watch games. Fielder is a clubhouse leader, while several media outlets have reported that Braun is more of a “me” type of guy.
The duo already makes up one of the top hitting combos in all of baseball. If the two were locked up for several more seasons, the Brewers would have a legitimate shot at the playoffs every year.
The Brewers could also sign Fielder long term, then trade Braun. He is under contract through 2015 with a limited no-trade clause the last few seasons.
It is reasonable to keep both players for a few extra seasons. Braun will only make $6 million in 2012, $8 million in 2013, and $10 million in 2014.
Having two players make up a third of the payroll is a dangerous idea, but the Brewers will likely have several young players under team control making very low salaries. Angel Salome, Jonathan Lucroy, Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, Carlos Gomez, and Lorenzo Cain are just a few of the position players likely to see prominent roles in the next few years.
Should Fielder decide to leave Milwaukee, it would be the biggest loss to the franchise since Paul Molitor left for Toronto after the 1992 season. Even with Braun, it would be hard for the team to compete and draw the type of crowds it has for the past few seasons.
Would an eight-year, $180 million contract be enough to keep Fielder in Milwaukee? Maybe, maybe not. That's a deal very similar to what Mark Teixeira signed last winter. It would also serve as the most lucrative deal in Brewers' history by more than $130 million.
Some say no player is worth that amount of money—especially one with concerns over his weight.
Fielder has proven to be an elite power hitter and has significantly improved his play in the field. Most importantly, he is the major reason why fans come to Miller Park in droves every summer, as well as spend their money on merchandise.
Losing Fielder won't kill the franchise, but it will set it back several years in trying to build a consistent winner. The Brewers can't afford to go back to the days of drawing less than 2 million at Miller Park.
No matter the cost, Mark Attanasio and Doug Melvin need to lock up Fielder for the majority of his career to remain a Brewer. He's a once-in-a-generation player, and no franchise—even small-market Milwaukee—can afford to let a player like that leave.
To read more by Jesse Motiff, click here.
Have questions about the Brewers? Email us at BrewersHQ@gmail.com
The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. A firm is nothing more than a collection of partnerships around certain funds that run for ten years or more. So if a partner gets fired? Well, he or she is still technically a partner in an earlier fund, so firms don’t really have to talk about it if it isn’t in their best interest.
And if a firm was one of many that couldn’t raise a new fund last year, who needs to know they were even trying? Unlike a startup, any firm that’s been around for a cycle or longer still has enough money under management from previous funds to keep the lights on. If they failed to raise a fund in 2009, they can always try again in 2010. It could take decades for even the worst firms to “go out of business.” Like generals, bad VCs don’t die, they just fade away.
It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and harder to hide. Aside from rumors, it’s hard to know exactly who couldn’t raise a new fund in 2009, but we know the numbers were down precipitously. And slow economic recovery aside, it’s not going to get easier in 2010.
Limited partners, the institutions that invest in venture funds, are finally accepting what almost every VC I know has been saying for a decade: There’s too much money in the industry and it’s killing the kind of early stage investing the asset class was founded on. And that’s killing returns.
But just as we’re finally starting to see limited partners make the hard decisions to throttle back investments in private equity, so too are some VCs grappling with their own hard decision: Stick with a broken asset class and try to fix it or just leave and start anew.
Vinod Khosla was one of the first to make that decision: Leaving Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at the peak of his and the firm’s power to get back to real, risk-taking early stage investing. Of course, his recent $1.1 billion fund flies in the face of the too-much-money argument, but it bears noting that Khosla invests in some capital intensive sectors like cleantech. Web 2.0 is a different matter. The capital needs are low, and, YouTube aside, the returns are low too.
In the last few weeks, another investor who I respect has made a similar move. Simon Levene of Accel’s UK offices has resigned the firm, despite an impressive track record that includes investments in MyHeritage, Seeking Alpha and Etsy. I spoke with Levene this week about the decision and unfortunately for me, it’s not a particularly juicy story. This wasn’t an intercontinental Accel battle royale. This wasn’t an issue where he wanted to invest in sectors the firm deemed dead. Nor was it a case where Levene wasn’t pulling his weight. And, of course, with investments in as varied and successful companies as BBN Technologies, Marvel and Facebook, Accel itself isn’t in any trouble.
It simply boiled down to the fact that, like many of the world’s best Web investors, Levene doesn’t see the best deals out there needing many millions of dollars. And structurally, a small partnership investing a $525 million fund with $1.5 billion actively under management can’t do a large number of tiny deals and still give each investment the attention it needs. As he puts it: “You see something that needs half a million or a million and you think, ‘That’s a good investment,’ but there are only so many you can do given the structure of these larger funds.”
In London, Accel takes a classic VC approach of putting at least $15 million in each company. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kinds of micro-deals that Levene saw netting better returns and frankly, the ones in which he had more fun investing. “I enjoy the bigger deals too, but they are fewer and far between, and they tend to be very competitive, so you have to pay up for them,” Levene says. “When it comes to early stage I’m just seeing a bigger market opportunity in Europe and Israel.”
That VC angst—while similar to what you hear about in the Valley—has a different twist in markets like Europe and Israel. In the Valley, it’s largely a reaction to more nimble angels and seed funds beating traditional VCs in the market. Funds have been forced to adapt or lose.
Witness Greylock’s hiring of uber-angel investor Reid Hoffman. Indeed, even before Hoffman’s arrival, forward-thinking partners like David Sze had been doing less-traditional deals. In 2006 Sze did two deals that didn’t seem to fit with the venture model and had peers scoffing that he’d never make money off either. One was Digg, where he could only invest $2 million, a fraction of the normal-sized series A deals at the time. The other was Facebook, where he invested at a whopping $500 million pre-money valuation. At the time, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know how I’ll make money, I just believe in the teams and believe it’ll work out.” In hindsight, he looks like a genius on both.
Sze’s approach —not just downscaling to do seed-deals, but investing without spreadsheet-induced restrictions at all — is similar to that of newer firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which does tiny deals as well as mammoth deals like the recent investment in Skype. Andreessen has said he wants a piece of the best tech companies in the world—no matter when they’re started, what stage he can get in and what price is necessary to make it happen. (After all, it was pure, math-based investing that helped wreck the public markets.)
But in Europe and Israel, there’s not that same level of experimentation on the part of venture funds, nor are there many investors like Andreessen or Hoffman who have the clout, confidence and star power to say they’re just going to invest in what they want and trust it’ll work out.
The closest is Saul Klein’s firm Index Ventures, which has had plenty of traditional venture hits with Skype, MySQL and Last.FM, but has been open to plenty of experimentation too—much of it lead by Klein himself, a long-time angel investor and entrepreneur. Index has not only supported Klein in continuing to do investments from his seed fund, The Accelerator Group, it’s encouraged him on a project called Seed Camp, that scours Europe and Israel for good companies and makes Y Combinator-style investments in them.
So far Seed Camp has invested in 21 companies and mentored nearly 300. Klein brought a crop of them over to Silicon Valley this week to meet with investors, get grilled by the press, and get mentored by success stories like Google. “Given that the raw natural material for venture capitalists is entrepreneurs, I find it strange that the venture community does nothing to help develop those raw materials,” Klein says. (There’s much more on his blog about this topic here.)
For Levine’s part, he sees the venture industry in Europe and Israel as “still a work in progress.” He continues, “There’s more of an opportunity to pioneer and strike new ground. That’s part of what was exciting to me when I moved back here seven years ago.” Not surprisingly, Levene spent a lot of time talking with both Hoffman and Klein as he was mulling the ballsy decision to leave one of the top firms in the venture universe.
What’s he going to do now that he’s unemployed? He’s not saying yet. (My guess is he’s not saying because raising a seed fund takes some time, but that’s only a guess.) But the more investors who follow their heart in this uncertain time for the asset class, the better for startups here and in Europe and Israel. After all, that’s what top investors would advise entrepreneurs to do during a downturn.
