How to Deal With Stress in Los Angeles or Canada

I’m apartment hunting again. Casually.

Unofficially, I’ve been apartment hunting for several months, perusing craigslist at the end of the workday, looking for something special.

Then along came a sweet little deal in Malibu. $1095 for a single apartment just a walk away to the beach. I work in Malibu, why not live there? It’s what people dream of after all.

Then, ironically, the day I was to visit the apartment, my friends decided my apartment would be the perfect place for a barbecue. Everyone came over, drank, played Wii, and I cooked. It was a lovely day, and it reminded me that the place I’m living isn’t really that bad after all. I missed the appointment to see the Malibu place, but I didn’t feel forlorn about it in the least.

The barbecue day was fine, yet at the same time I realized, if I was almost willing to pay $1100 to live in Malibu, why wouldn’t I pay $1100 to live somewhere else in L.A.?

I began searching around with the new price bracket, and it turns out the options open up quite a bit for a few hundred dollars more per month (coincidentally, I got a $240 raise per month which also helps).

So, back to searching I go, this time I think I’ll look downtown. I always enjoyed living 20 stories up in college, maybe I can do it again. The only tricky thing is, the further in I move, the longer my daily commute. Bah, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Without further ado, here are four beautiful blogs worth gandering over:

Caveman Diet - It’s primal, it’s hot, it’s a summertime diet craze!
Vitamin information - pretty basic, but helpful
The vitamin shop - if you’re looking to buy, this is the place.
How to relieve stress - my suggestion is the beach, but maybe not right now considering how crowded it is.

I haven’t been talking about health too much lately, so I’ve decided to make this post the total health post.

L.A. is cluttered with new electronic billboards (as if there aren’t enough traffic hazzars already). And one unusual product being advertised with as much force as the new iPhone is pomegranate juice. Pom makes post-modern-shaped bottles of a variety of pomegranate juices. Pomegranate-blueberry, cranagranate, and pomegranate-agave, though I’m not sure what agave is. A 16 oz. bottle runs around $5. It’s the only juice being so heavily marketed, and the tent pole of the campaign is that pomegranate juice is the best antioxidant out there.

But, it’s not. It’s just the tastiest.

I have nothing against antioxidants. Excess oxidation in the body can lead to inflammation, which causes all sorts of bad health problems. But, there’s a serious difference between cleansing your body using antioxidants, and making yourself feel good by drinking something with a heart on the label.

Take bilberry extract. There is roughly 100 times the antioxidant power in one typical 20mg supplement of bilberry extract than is found in a serving of Pom juice. Bilberry extract is cheap, and it fits right into many multivitamins, but who cares about vitamin information these days?

Pom juice isn’t necessarily unhealthy, it’s just not what it claims to be. It’s like Vitamin Coke. Vitamin coke has 15% of your daily nyacin (B3) and that’s about it. Then again, Vitamin [diet] Coke might be healthier than Pom juice, because it isn’t carrying around an extra 300 calories of sugar the body has to process. And excess calories is one of the causes of excess oxidation in the body. So, in fact, there’s a very good possibility Pom juice is doing the opposite of what it claims.

Then again, it tastes good. And the bottle is so post modern.