【推荐1】Being healthy is important. Often, we’re crazy about articles in health magazines talking about the latest popular diets, or advertisements that offer cures (疗法) for fatness that are often too good to be true. One of the latest crazy phenomena (现象) is intermittent fasting (间歇性禁食).     1    

There are different ways of intermittent fasting.     2     Another common way is choosing a diet that sees people only eating during a limited part of the day, for example, over eight hours.

    3     A study suggests intermittent fasting may help control blood sugar and reduce the possibility of suffering related disease. Other studies have shown intermittent fasting may help slow the ageing process, support brain function, lose weight, etc.

Some people try intermittent fasting for weight management, and others use the method to deal with some conditions such as high cholesterol or arthritis.     4     Fasting might not suit those who are underweight or with a long-term medical condition. Fasting may cause some people to experience symptoms (症状) such as headaches or make them easily suffer from overeating after a reduced calorie intake (热量摄入) day.

As with many diets, it’s always wise to speak to your doctor or weight-loss professional before changing your eating habits. And, at the end of the day, it could just come down to what lifestyle choice suits you.     5     If not, your health may suffer.

【推荐2】If you wish to lose weight, there are so many fitness programs and weight loss diets to choose from. Here are some plans that might help you achieve this.

The Diet Solution Program is based on a scientific approach. The weight loss diet is not a quick fat loss method, which stresses that losing weight is never a quick process. This makes the program one of the safest dieting plans that you can turn to today.

Fat Burning Furnace brings a new approach to the weight loss problem. The program comes with a large and detailed set of workout exercises that are specifically designed to in-crease and improve your metabolic rate (代谢速率). Fat Burning Furnace uses workouts that are about 20-30 minutes. They train the whole body and don’t require special equipment, which is good because you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on running machines or other fit-ness machines.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots is a diet-based weight loss program. The guide is dead against weight loss drugs. Moreover, because it’s a diet-based program that aims to help you lose weight, you won’t need to spend any money on gym equipment.

Xtreme Fat Loss Diet is designed around a special dieting and exercising routine that is made up of several special fitness and diet programs. This dieting and exercising routine is repeated 5 times, each needing 5 days. These days make up a unique combination of a special workout technique and eating plan that will help you improve your leptin (消瘦素). Leptin controls the rate and degree of hunger that the body experiences, and helps to reduce the physical desire for food.

【推荐3】A recently published paper finds that following a Mediterranean diet for three weeks can help reduce depression and anxiety among young adults.

In the study, participants in the test group were instructed to eat about six more servings of fruits and vegetables per week, compared with the control group. In addition, they were told to get per week three servings of fish besides three recommended servings per day of whole grains. As for milk, the recommendation was three servings per week, unsweetened. Participants were also asked to consume three tablespoons of nuts and seeds per week, as well as two tablespoons of olive oil per day.

“One of the shortcomings of nutrition science is that it often relies on asking people to recall what they ate and how they felt in the past. Given our failing memories, these data can be unreliable,” says Heather Francis, one of the researchers. “But our study included a device, called spectrophotometer, which can detect the degree of yellowness in the skin, which can precisely monitor the intake of carotenoids (类胡萝卜素), which the participants get from their food.”

“We have highly consistent and extensive evidence from around the globe linking Mediterranean diets to reduced depression risk,” says Felice Jacka, a professor at Deakin University in Australia who was not involved in the study. “I think the next step is to show how diets can reduce depression.”

However, it’s almost impossible to unravel how diet changes may help improve mental health according to the strict standard in medical research, where participants do not know that they are part of the group assigned to take the medicine or the placebo (安慰剂).

“In a diet study, there’s no way to ‘blind’ the participants so that they don’t know if they’re getting the ‘medicine’ or ‘placebo’,” says Heather Francis. “And research has shown that if people are told that they’re doing something that may make them less depressed, they will indeed report less depression. That’s known as the placebo effect.”

【推荐3】“In English, my speech is very polite, with a relaxed tone, always saying ‘please’ and ‘excuse me.’ When I speak Greek, I start talking more rapidly, with a tone of anxiety and in a kind of rude way…”

“If the words resonate (共鸣)with you, you’ve probably already experienced the surprising, odd phenomenon of feeling like having different personalities when speaking different languages. How is that possible? Could it be that bilinguals (双语者)change their personality when they change language? After all, the Czech proverb does say, “Learn a new language and get a new soul. ”

In my book on bilingualism, Life with Two Languages, I noted first of all that monocultural (单文化的)bilinguals who make up the majority of bilinguals in the world are not really affected by this phenomenon. Although bi-or multilingual, they are in fact members of just one culture. But what about bicultural bilinguals? I proposed that what is seen as a change in personality is most probably simply a shift in attitudes and behaviors that correspond to a shift in situation or context, independent of language. Basically, the bicultural bilinguals in academic studies were behaving bicultural, that is, adapting to the context they were in. Different contexts and domains trigger different impressions, attitudes and behaviors.

Imagine the way we speak to a best friend and the behavior that we adopt. Then, think of how all this changes when we are speaking the same language to a superior (e. g. a school head, religious authority or employer). We behave differently and sometimes change attitudes and feelings even though the language is the same. The same is true for bilinguals except that here the language may be different. It is the environment, the culture, and the people one talks to that cause bicultural bilinguals to change attitudes, feelings and behaviors (along with language)-and not their language as such. In essence, there does not seem to be a direct causal relationship between language and personality.