Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i Zoomer Magazine

DIETS. I’ve been on a few. My favourite was the Fast Metabolism Diet, which I ironically or perhaps just necessarily heard about at a caloric-dense six-course dinner, accompanying a whisky tasting. The organic “clean” eating aspect of it appealed (doesn’t it always, the morning after) as did the brisk scientific approach that the diet’s creator, nutritionist Haylie Pomroy, took with it. Using her background in animal husbandry, she breaks the diet down into three almost excruciatingly specific and work-intensive phases, strictly controlling what foods one could eat when, with the surprising encouragement to eat more to lose more. I dove into it with the religious zeal of a recent convert, and it worked spectacularly. Of course, it was difficult to maintain. But, on the other hand, I enjoyed the regimentation,…

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO during a United Nations conference in Johannesburg, I was interviewed by a Canadian reporter. I was asked, “What’s a woman from small-town Saskatchewan doing in South Africa – and why should we care?” I responded to the second part of the question with a wellworn answer about the nature of our interconnectedness in a fast-paced world and the fact that our common environment knew no borders. But it was the first part of the question that was unexpected and motivated me to think more deeply about the journey I was on. My story is an immigrant one so typical of many Canadians. My parents sought a more promising future. They believed firmly in the value of an education and exposed us to new surroundings and…

I ONCE ASKED prolific Can-American actor Colm Feore about the differences in sensibility between Canadian cinema and movies made south of the border and the 58-year-old replied right to the point: “We are slightly bent.” The Order of Canada recipient assured me that that’s not a bad thing, noting, “We just see the world in a slightly different way, and we see the conflicts in a slightly different way – perhaps more humanely and less black and white. It’s more nuanced.” And, let’s face it, the world could use a little more humanity and nuance. In that spirit, National Canadian Film Day 150 – billed as the largest one-day film festival in the world, celebrating both Canadian film and our sesquicentennial – couldn’t come too soon. On April 19, more…

i HAVE TO RENEW my passport for a trip at the top of my bucket list. I didn’t think twice about ticking the 10- year renewal option. Instead, I took time to think about whether I have enough time to mail in the application or whether I should spend the extra money to expedite the process. It was awhile before I even realized I had barely noticed something that would have set off an inner conversation about my mortality not so very long ago. Never mind the decade-long passport, I remember chiding myself for a twoyear renewal of my car’s registration. And getting a new credit card with a five-year expiry date used to set off waves of anxiety. Readers of this column know all about my experience with pancreatic…

eVERY YEAR, 25,000 Canadians are diagnosed with dementia. And if one of them is your family member, it can break your heart if they aren’t receiving the best possible care. That’s certainly how Janet Driscoll (her name has been changed for privacy) felt when her mom, who had Alzheimer’s and had moved into a Nova Scotia long-term care facility, went sharply downhill. Suddenly, she couldn’t hold a conversation or walk as easily. She started falling. “I asked a staff member what they thought about this,” says Driscoll. “I said, ‘She’s a very different person.’ They mentioned risperidone.” Risperidone is an antipsychotic medication, one of several that are prescribed to seniors with dementia to control behaviour, often without strong evidence to support this use. (A 2012 study in Quebec found that…

THE FIRST TIME you saw it happen, it happened to your grandparents. The second time, it was your parents. You thought, “Ha, not going to happen to me!” We aren’t talking about divorce or hairlines here but waistlines. The diabolical “middle-aged spread” that we grew up fearing and always assumed was the sort of thing that happened to other people – namely, those lazy types who didn’t exercise, ate fast food and drank too much. Then after 40, you felt it – a softening around the middle. Where did it come from? You weren’t eating more. You still exercised. Then at 45 and later at 50, that small amount of new fat had grown, and you saw your parents and grandparents less shapely bodies staring back at you in the…

MANY PEOPLE NOW OWN devices that monitor the number of steps they take each day. Some measure other things, such as calories burned, stairs climbed, heart rate and distance travelled. But do you really need to walk (or run) 10,000 steps a day to be healthy? The origin of the 10,000 steps a day recommendation was during the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, during which time pedometers became popular, and one company set the 10,000 steps-a-day goal. While there is no magic to the 10,000-step number, it is a challenging yet attainable goal for many people, and 10,000 is a round number that is easy to remember, so it caught on (like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert). A number of public health bodies have…

WOMEN WITHOUT BORDERS I enjoyed your first “My Canada” [“Frozen,” March] essay immensely, mostly because my life changed when at age 20 I, too, joined Canada World Youth, for an exchange to Sri Lanka. Little did I know that my love of travel, probably born as a child at my grandfather’s knee, when he told mesmerizing stories of life in Russia before the family’s escape, would teach me so much about myself, about where I come from (funny how much we learned about Canada and Canadians by going to the other side of the planet) and shape my future. Three-plus decades and 23 countries later, I am about to become the board chair of an international women’s travel friendship organization, Women Welcome Women World Wide (www.womenwelcomewomen.org). I wish my grandfather…

He’s second to none because he’s an excellent athlete – and there’s literally no one else alive able to compete against him Robert Marchand, a 105-yearold French cyclist, breaks his own world record for farthest distance travelled on a bike in an hour by someone 105 or older. At opening of new cardiac facility, 76-year-old New York man honours cardiologist who performed lifesaving surgery on him twice in two decades His kind words were sweet, but the monogramed defibrillator really proved a classy touch “Iknowyour other grandkids don’t ask you to clean their rooms and do their homework. I guess I just care more about your wellbeing” Study says grandparents who take care of their grandkids generally enjoy longer lifespans Some things are biggerandbraver in Texas 58-year-old mayor of conservative…

IT WAS NOT A MELLOW start to my day. Moses had forwarded an email he’d received from a friend. The email described the brutal beating Jack Acker received at the hands of another resident at St. Joseph’s Villa, the Dundas, Ont., long-term care facility he called home. Hours later, we received a media request to speak to manslaughter charges laid by police against a resident of the Camilla Care Community seniors’ home in Mississauga, Ont. Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. Many people responded to our Facebook posts and radio show (“Fight Back with Libby Znaimer” on ZoomerRadio, a ZoomerMedia property) with woeful tales of their own. A study noted more than 20,000 reported incidents in Ontario care facilities in 2011, with a third (6,400) of them being resident- on-resident…

WHEN LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY wrote what she described to a friend as “a juvenilish story, ostensibly for girls,” she couldn’t have known that her Anne would become a Canadian icon, let alone one who is, with the possible exception of Céline Dion, the most enduring and recognizable cultural export we have. Yet hers is a cultural importance that we often take for granted. At the one extreme, there are the scholarly confabs that routinely gather (like around Anne’s recent 100th) to celebrate and analyze what often feels theoretical, at a remove. At the other, there’s the intended audience of children who continue to read the bestselling books. And in the middle, there is a juggernaut of licensing and the marketing of souvenir vials of raspberry cordial and White Way of…

TODAY’S younger generation is often house poor, with their income siphoned into a new home they’re nowhere close to owning. As we get older, though, we often become “house rich.” We’ve paid off a good portion of our mortgage, the house has rocketed up in value, and we’d have an impressive pot of money if we were to sell. Only problem is, we don’t want to sell. “Our home is very special, and that’s why we want to stay there,” says Bea, who, along with her husband, Ed, decided on a CHIP Reverse Mortgage. Even though their children are grown, the house is close to their hearts, and Bea and Ed wanted to keep it as long as possible. But they needed money to complete some necessary upgrades, including a…

QUESTION: IF YOU WANT to drop 10 pounds for good, which diet should you choose? Answer: one you can live with long term. I recently adopted a low-carb, lowsugar diet. I have minimal sweets, white flour and potatoes (and take a multivitamin in case I’m missing nutrients). I find it easy to put up with this way of eating, partly because I’ve lost 15 pounds in three months. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it works for me. The point is pick something you can live with. Here are five popular diets and what they’re all about. 1 Weight Watchers This started in the 1960s. In 1984, Lynn Redgrave became its first celeb spokesperson, a role more recently held by Jennifer Hudson, Jessica Simpson, Charles Barkley and Oprah Winfrey (who,…

RISING FROM VIMY RIDGE in northern France, its twin pylons silhouetted against the sky, the Vimy monument is Canada’s national memorial, commemorating all who took part in the First World War. Its placing marks the capture of the ridge by the Canadian Corps between April 9 and 12, 1917. It honours the memory of the 65,000 Canadians who lost their lives in that war. Carved across its great walls are the names of 11,285 Canadians who died in France and whose bodies were never found. Canada’s entry into the conflict followed automatically on Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914. At that time, Canada, a country of eight million people, had a standing army of 3,000 servicemen, supplemented by a part-time militia. By the end of the…

the public’s obsession with the British monarchy shows no sign of abating. What with Netflix’s prestige production, The Crown, picking up awards left and right, and the cheeky hit, The Royals, on E!. Add in the speculation about Prince Harry and American actress, Toronto-based Meghan Markle and the ongoing fascination with Prince William, Kate, Prince George and Princess Charlotte and we are a society that is royal mad. Tossing its tiara into the ring is Victoria, a lavish new series from the producers of Poldark, airing in April on VisionTV (owned by ZoomerMedia) and created and written by British novelist Daisy Goodwin. The pilot opens the morning that the diminutive royal (she was only 4 foot 11) wakes up to learn her uncle, King William IV, had passed away making…

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO legendary activist and artist Harry Belafonte released his album Midnight Special, a disc celebrated both for its own musical merits and for the recording debut of a young Bob Dylan on harmonica. The next year, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan lobbed anthems like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a- Gonna Fall” into the middle of the early 1960s protest culture. That same decade, both Belafonte and Dylan marched prominently in support of civil rights – the former alongside Martin Luther King Jr. himself – and became de facto voices for art-as-activism. Belafonte, who turns 90 on March 1, remains politically active, endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and serving as honorary co-chair of January’s Women’s March on Washington. The former…

INOUR “SWIPE RIGHT” clickbait culture, “first impressions are very important,” online and off, says sex and relationship guru Dr. Laura Berman. And since hair is often the first trait we notice, then stacking the odds in favour of more good hair days is a good strategy. Whether worn long or cropped short, it is thickness and health that make hair sexy at any age. Berman cites a study that shows more than one in four women have cancelled a date or social plans be cause of a bad hair day. Berman, New York-impeccable in vertiginous heels and a secondskin pencil skirt, is in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, speaking about the role of hair and dating to a gathering of international beauty press on behalf of Viviscal. She is a…