Lifestyle Choices

Every home should have some place where these beautiful bottles of wines are always handy in case of thirsty need. Your wine storage should be kept neat and orderly at all times. It need not carry a large stock wine supply. But several wine racks and simple wines are always helpful in the time of festivals.

Too many wine cabinets are filled with useless junk, such as boxes and bottles without labels, all of which should have been thrown away long ago. Some people are like squirrels, always hoarding everything. Then they are never able to find what they want! (more…)

Although money can’t buy it, anyone intelligent can learn to have good taste. You can spend like a drunken film star, but you risk an expensive clutter that hasn’t quite come off. If you pay someone else to design your home you risk something pretty expensive, lifeless and unlived in, or alternatively, an exuberantly camped-up setting with mouldings picked out in white and in which you feel uneasy.

So the first rule is Do it yourself. Because otherwise you’ll never learn.

Discovering your own good taste is an unpeeling process, eliminating the layers which other people have impressed upon you. One of the easiest ways to find out what you like is to get a pinboard and start sticking up anything which takes your fancy — a scrap of lace, photographs, postcards, a colour swatch, a cartoon. (more…)

Forget about counting kilojoules, but accept that they are not all equal. By now you know that unnecessary kilojoules gained from fat are the biggest contributors to your excess weight and detractors from your general well-being. You might as well also accept the fact that the enjoyment of fat-rich foods started off as a habit; one that perverted your taste buds to favour certain kinds of foods -the fatty kind, usually concocted into a fat feast with the addition of refined starch, sugar and/or salt. And I daresay, a habit that possibly grew into full-blown emotional dependence on the sensual comfort they provide - a dependence that hampers emotional growth in the long run and pushes you further into the vicious cycle of eating to feel better, only to wake up feeling worse.

But simply removing fat from the cooking process would mean removing a great deal of taste and juiciness as well. And you should also know that in the long run, bland and fat-free food could cause you to abandon your healthy eating plan. (more…)