2020 – Lanka Talents

These 9 tips from a nutritionist will help you eat healthy and clean in 2021

Lanka Talents Creation — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 07:56:40 +0000

Everyone loves food! That said, not everyone eats healthy or right. That’s why today I am sharing my top clean eating tips for anybody who wants to get healthy and eat better.

My definition of eating healthy and clean is simply this: eating real whole unprocessed foods as close to their natural state as possible most of the time.Your Daily Dose Of One of the most important ways of eating healthy is not to jump on the next diet you see; rather, making a long-term commitment to a lifestyle that facilitates it. Wondering how you can do that? Here are nine tips to help: So you need to eat foods like vegetables, fruits, healthy sources of carbohydrates like sweet potatoes and grains, and healthy fats like avocados, nuts, and seeds.

1. Allow yourself to be on the journey

When you are a beginner, adopting new lifestyle changes and habits you have to give yourself a little space.

2. Healthy eating is not the same for everyone

You can eat healthy and be a vegan, you can be a vegetarian, you can be a meat-eater, you can be a weight-lifter… you can be whatever you want to be and eat six times in a day. In any case, you will notice that your lifestyle will affect the type of healthy diet you are eating. There is no hard and fast rule, we just have to eat real whole foods, unprocessed food, and foods in their natural state.

3. Cook more than you don’t

Cooking your own food is the easiest way to eat better, because you are in charge of all your ingredients. So you know what you are eating and what’s going in it. Just make as much as you want but be attentive while using ingredients.

4. Focus on quality over calories

When you are focused on counting calories you tend to get caught up in feelings of restriction.

5. What grows together goes together

When you buy foods that all are of the same season, they taste good together because mother nature has a nutritious pack ready for you. We never notice it, but things like berries and squash, cranberries and basil that are grown together, taste amazing together.

6. Avoid highly processed foods

Foods that have been processed a lot are not truly fresh. So, when you decide to eat clean and healthy, you must also decide to stay from highly processed foods.

Also, read: Here’s your introduction to intuitive eating and how it can benefit you

7. Stock your pantry and freezer

Keeping some healthy staples in your pantry will be a huge help when time is not on your side. I love to have some healthy things in my pantry like stamens, soups, beans and olives. And in my freezer, you can also find frozen fruits and frozen vegetables.

8. Follow your stomach

So many people have the habit of eating according to the clock or according to diet plans. But that doesn’t mean you kill your hunger. If you feel you are hungry just give yourself a healthy treat.

9. Avoid artificial ingredients

These artificial ingredients are designed to bypass the logical part of your brain and trigger all pleasure points. As a result you want more and more. The result? A host of health problems and weight gain

The post These 9 tips from a nutritionist will help you eat healthy and clean in 2021 appeared first on Lanka Talents.

A Year Like No Other

Lanka Talents Creation — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:03:31 +0000

Certain years are so eventful they are regarded as pivotal in history, years when wars and slavery ended and deep generational fissures burst into the open — 1865, 1945 and 1968 among them. The year 2020 will certainly join this list. It will long be remembered and studied as a time when more than 1.5 million people globally died during a pandemic, racial unrest gripped the world, and democracy itself faced extraordinary tests.

The photographs in this collection capture those historic 12 months. Jeffrey Henson Scales, who edited The Year in Pictures with David Furst, said he had never felt such sweep and emotion from a single year’s images — from the “joy and optimism” of a New Year’s Eve kiss in Times Square, to angry crowds on the streets of Hong Kong and in American cities, to scenes of painful debates over race and policing, to the “seemingly countless graves and coffins across the globe.”

The impeachment of an American president culminated in early 2020. But two pictures taken in late January in Wuhan, China, are hints of a larger cataclysm to come. In one aerial shot, construction workers are building a giant hospital virtually overnight to handle hundreds of patients stricken with the coronavirus. The other looks like a still from a sci-fi film: A man dressed in black, wearing a white mask, lies dead on a city street; two emergency workers have stepped away from him and gaze at the viewer — all but their eyes hidden by face coverings and ghostly white protective suits.

Then the virus swept the world, recorded in indelible images. The scenes of people comforting beloved family members through glass and cellphones are heartbreaking. Some of the most haunting images are of emptiness. Still cities. Vacant streets of London and the Place de la Concorde. A desolate Munich subway station. Among the most disturbing is a photo of a refrigerated trailer set up as a makeshift morgue in Greenwich Village.

Punctuating these scenes are photographs of a tumultuous American election that even without the ravages of the virus would end up looming large in history books. As the year progresses, fueled by police shootings of young Black men, powerfully symbolic pictures of protests begin appearing. In May, a lone demonstrator carries an upside-down American flag past a burning liquor store in Minneapolis, in protest of the killing of George Floyd.

In 2020, a year when all aspects of life seemed transformed, so was the process of making these photographs. Journalists are observers, not participants, but the most striking sense to emerge from interviews with the photographers who took these pictures — described by Mr. Henson Scales as the most diverse group in his more than a decade curating this annual compilation — was how much they too lived what they witnessed. No one could escape the virus and vitalness of 2020. It gave photographers fresh perspective. And they gave us unforgettable images from a historic year in our lives.

“Everyone was so hopeful and excited making proclamations that 2020 was going to be their year. It just seems like a horrible joke now. It seemed like we were ringing in a very special year, and we were, but wow.”

— Calla Kessler

Hong Kong, Jan. 1

After weeks of relative calm, pro-democracy protesters took to the streets, resuming mass demonstrations that had begun the previous June.

Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Des Moines, Jan. 5

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prayed at the Corinthian Baptist Church during his presidential campaign, in which he promised to restore the “soul of America.”

Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

This trip to Iowa was Brittainy Newman’s first time on the campaign trail, and this image came from one of her last opportunities to photograph anyone in such close quarters this year.

“They were praying for him on his journey, on this trail he’s going on, and for him to become president and wishing the world would get someone new,” she said. “Everyone was trying desperately to believe. Even Biden’s face — he’s staring right at Clara Jones. He was just staring at her, and her hands — they never let go. They just kept saying ‘Amen, amen.’ You could feel it. It was like a crescendo building up. Everyone at the end had goosebumps.”

Saudi Arabia, Jan. 6

The Dakar Rally, an annual off-road endurance event that has been held in dozens of countries, was hosted in 2020 by the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula.

Bernat Armangue/Associated Press

Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 7

Supporters of Nicolás Maduro tried blocking the re-election of Juan Guaidó as leader of the National Assembly. Since 2019, both men have claimed to be Venezuela’s rightful president.

Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

New York, Jan. 8

Fidaa Zaidan performing in “Grey Rock,” a play about a Palestinian man who decides to build a rocket to the moon.

Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times

Bago State Forest, Australia, Jan. 10

A dehydrated and underfed wild horse was on the verge of collapse as Australia battled one of the worst wildfire seasons in its history.

Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

“Once a fire goes through, things are just so quiet. You don’t realize all the bugs, all the birds, all the little beings make these noises. It’s just so disconcerting to be walking through this destroyed forest and have complete silence.”

— Matthew Abbott

Milwaukee, Jan. 14

President Trump at a “Keep America Great” rally, two days before the official start of his impeachment trial for charges of obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Kansas City, Mo., Jan. 19

Eric Fisher of the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs’ 35-24 victory over the Tennessee Titans in the A.F.C. championship game sent the Chiefs to Super Bowl LIV, which they went on to win.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Benghazi, Libya, Jan. 23

After years of conflict, Libyan factions edged briefly toward a cease-fire, but this street in Benghazi best told the story of life in the exhausted country.

Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Ivor Prickett traveled to Benghazi in Libya, from where he had reported years earlier, after being granted the rare permission to photograph the eastern part of the country.

“It was basically unrecognizable,” Mr. Prickett said after his chance to get a look at a part of the nation that had been largely cut off to foreigners for years. “I couldn’t really figure out what was where. It did come back to me, but it was one of the most heavily destroyed scenes I’ve seen in years, and that’s saying a lot because I’ve been in Mosul and Raqqa.”

Officials in Benghazi kept steering Mr. Prickett away from the old, colonial part of the city. He found a way to sneak in with the help of friends, and eventually persuaded officials to let him work there.

“At night it was particularly poignant, because there was no electricity and would just be lit by lights of cars,” he said. “There were people living amongst the ruins. It was really evocative and spooky. And I was walking around and saw one of the most heavily destroyed streets and saw this one light probably as far as the eye could see across three or four blocks on the second or third floor of an apartment block. It looked so out of place in this completely gutted building.

“I was waiting for a car to come down the street to light the buildings with a slow exposure, then just by chance this cat walked across in front of the car, and that was the picture. I had the car and the cat, and I knew I had the picture and just packed up and went home.”

St. Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 15

During President Vladimir V. Putin’s state of the nation speech, displayed on a facade, he called for constitutional changes that would allow him to hold power past 2024.

Anton Vaganov/Reuters

Los Angeles, Jan. 22

New citizens were sworn in at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 30

Milagros Vásquez, seated, was turned away by five hospitals as she went into labor. Venezuela’s public health system has been shattered by a broken economy, with maternity wards the most damaged.

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Meridith Kohut wanted to show how the economic collapse in Venezuela was devastating the country’s health care system by illustrating the plight of pregnant women.

Ms. Kohut and Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, followed one woman in labor who was turned away from several hospitals before planting herself in front of one and refusing to leave.

“She had been in labor for 40 hours,” Ms. Kohut said. “She just said, ‘I’m not going to go try anywhere else.’ She eventually fainted and a bunch of other pregnant women who had just started labor were there and they and their families all started banging on the door.

“We were afraid she was going to die. I took a photo of her when she fainted, and her mom was screaming and pleading for help. Then everyone in the Times team dropped our cameras and everything and we all started banging on the door, too, and then they finally let her inside. And unfortunately, her baby died the next morning.

“The crisis is so bad that to do a funeral is like the equivalent of a year’s worth of minimum-wage salary. So she couldn’t afford to bury the baby and had to leave the body in the morgue. It was absolutely heartbreaking.”

Wuhan, China, Jan. 24

Construction teams worked around the clock on a field hospital that was mostly built in 10 days to help cope with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Getty Images

Wuhan, China, Jan. 30

A month into the coronavirus outbreak, workers in hazmat suits attended to an elderly man who collapsed near a hospital.

Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Hector Retamal remembers taking the train from Shanghai to Wuhan, China, in January, as the city was locking down.

A woman approached him and asked where he was going.“‘It’s no good. It’s dangerous. Don’t go to Wuhan,’” he recalled her saying. “People were really afraid of the virus.”

Mr. Retamal arrived to find a deserted train station and a ghost town of a city of some 11 million people.

He and a videographer spent about 10 days there. The two men often had to walk, lugging their gear across the sprawling city and trying to keep a low profile from the police, who would shoo them back to their hotels.

Coming across a man’s body on the ground not far from one hospital was startling, Mr. Retamal said. The scene unfolded in utter chaos and confusion.

“My question was what was he doing there,” Mr. Retamal said. “He didn’t move and, wow, is he dead? I was starting to take photos because it was strange and at that exact moment a woman started to scream, saying ‘No, no, no,’ and she asked us to leave the place, and she was angry.”

More people arrived, surrounding Mr. Retamal and telling him not to take photos.

Everyone kept their distance from the man until people in white protective suits and masks arrived and placed him in a yellow body bag. They sprayed disinfectant around the area where he had lain.

The police began to arrive, and Mr. Retamal hurried away. He and his colleagues never officially confirmed that the man had died of Covid-19; nobody would answer their questions.

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Is 2020 really the worst year ever?

Lanka Talents Creation — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 05:55:04 +0000

Despite most people describing 2020 as the worst year par excellence, it is very positive to say that it is the year that we have increased our appreciation for science, family and other beautiful things in our life.
Perhaps from here on some things became more important and some less important after this year… Can I really declare 2020 not the worst year?
While we are close to the end of the year by a few days, I follow the feelings of people who assert that 2020 has been their worst year. It is true, you have suffered from sadness and fatigue and perhaps we all share that list of reasons for declaring that 2020 was not a good year but rather a tiring year.
Interestingly and here let me remind you that it was not like the year 1918 for instance, when the epidemic claimed millions of lives, or as it was in the 1940s, when lives were lost as a result of the Second World War.
Despite all the surrounding conditions with closing Schools, business decline, restrictions imposed on many activities and people’s tendency to believe that their lives have reached a stagnation in 2020, it is nice to search for positivity in our life, so that life continues and looks forward to the hope of restoring it as it might have been before.
If we look at 2020 in terms of the development of science and technology, we will see that it is a positive year, creating scientifically continuous societies working together to accelerate safe and fully tested COVID-19 vaccines. Hence, it is difficult to classify 2020 as the worst year when we were only one year ago, we did not know anything about the coronavirus and now we are close or even started getting the vaccine to end this pandemic.
On the one hand, this year may also have been the worst for some, but in one way or another it has affected us all and therefore without a doubt our loss, grief and anger will be collective. And I might go right here and say when we say (worst) what we really mean is weird!
In fact, this is a very strange year as it is frightening not to know it. However, most of us can look around on most days and find fun and beauty differently from the word (worse) like sunrise and sunset, for example. Without a doubt, we have learned what is important and we have played different games with our children and we have already spoken and listened to them.
All these things are good things, but do we capture that delicate texture of what our lives have been like this year in our villages and cities? When we are told that we shouldn’t go out at all except for occasional exercise, walking in the sunshine becomes the thing we cling to. How lucky we were to be able to do that that at least! In the lanes or suburbs of town, our restrictive measures opened up new avenues for creativity: we might turn out of our way to witness spectacular sunsets or finally hit the hiking trail differently as we set out to explore it.
After all, I think here — if you agree with me — that if we feel that any year is the worst, it is mostly because our minds tend to judge the present more harshly. Where unrestrained media consumption of news distorts our perception and it becomes easy to slide into unhealthy patterns of thinking.
If I were thinking, for instance, about how much I wanted to go to football matches, I wouldn’t remember the times my team lost, so we judge the past by its greatest successes, but we judge the present based on all we have.
What I want to point out is how do we change the mentality (the worst year ever)? How do we water something that will grow well? Every morning you wake up with the sunrise, is it not a great gift from God! … Some yawn or get upset on their way to life and do not even realise what is the chance of being here?
At the end, I think that 2020 was the year of change in everything and it was not the worst years. Most probably we learned a lot from this year and during the coronavirus pandemic and at the very least, there is an ongoing increase in awareness of health and interest in healthy habits.

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Here’s The Most Shared News Post On Facebook In 2020 (It’s Not What You Think)

Lanka Talents Creation — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 04:41:09 +0000

KEY FACTS

Posted by Chicago television station Fox 32 in mid-January, the article covered a missing child alert for Brylee and Braylen Pate, 7-year-old sisters who live on the Florida Panhandle, and exhorted readers to “circulate their photos on Facebook.”

Fox 32’s post has earned about 3.48 million shares on Facebook according to data from CrowdTangle, making it the site’s top-performing link post, a category that includes most news articles but excludes photos, videos and other posts without links.

The post reached such a wide audience partly because users continued to circulate the article in public Facebook groups weeks after the incident, even though police found the two sisters safe just hours after the article was published.

TANGENT

Local police issued an alert for Brylee and Braylen Pate two days after they were reported missing, spurring Fox 32 and other outlets to run articles. Police asked residents to watch out for a car owned by a woman allegedly connected to their disappearance, and within hours, a Florida driver spotted the car with the two sisters inside, local news outlets reported. The sisters were safe, and the driver was arrested for interfering with child custody.

SURPRISING FACT

The 3.48 million figure only includes users who clicked “share” on Fox 32’s Facebook page, so the story likely earned even more shares from other pages that posted links to the same article. For that reason, other news articles on Facebook may have reached a larger total audience than Fox 32’s story if their links were widely posted on individual pages.

KEY BACKGROUND

Several other stories about missing children have gone viral on Facebook this year, drawing millions of shares from concerned users. Out of the 10 most shared U.S. link posts of the year, two are articles about missing children and seven are prayers or Bible verses. But on a typical day, the social network is flooded with politically focused posts and articles from national outlets. So far this month, Facebook’s five most widely shared link posts are a story about the death of actor Tommy Lister by TMZ, two prayer-of-the-day posts, an article about the Covid-19 relief package by conservative pundit Dan Bongino, and a link to White House advisor Peter Navarro’s debunked voter fraud report posted by President Donald Trump.

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‘World’s ugliest Orchid’ among new species named in 2020

Lanka Talents Creation — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 08:50:59 +0000

London: Orchids are not often called ugly, but that is how the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, described a new species of the normally vibrant and delicate flower discovered in the forests of Madagascar.

Gastrodia agnicellus, one of 156 plants and fungal species named by Kew scientists and their partners around the world in 2020, has been crowned “the ugliest Orchid in the world”.

“The 11 mm flowers of this Orchid are small, brown and rather ugly,” Kew said in its list of the top 10 discoveries of the year. The Orchid depends on fungi for nutrition and has no leaves or any other photosynthetic tissue.

Although assessed as a threatened species, the plants have some protection because they are located in a national park.

Among the other discoveries officially named this year were six new species of webcap toadstool mushrooms in the United Kingdom and a strange shrub encountered in southern Namibia in 2010.

Botanist Wessel Swanepoel could not place the shrub in any known genus and neither could anyone else, and so Swanepoel called Kew’s molecular expert Felix Forest and his team for analysis.

The result was that it was not just a new species, but a new genus and a new family, called Tiganophyton karasense.

While around 2,000 plants are named new to science annually, new families are only published around once a year.

The shrub has bizarre scaly leaves and grows in extremely hot natural salt pans, hence its name Tiganophyton, derived from the Greek ‘Tigani’, or ‘frying pan’, and ‘Phyton’, or ‘plant’.

Martin Cheek, senior research leader at Kew, welcomed the latest natural discoveries.

“Some could provide vital income to communities while others may have the potential to be developed into a future food or medicine,” he said.

But he warned: “The bleak reality facing us cannot be underplayed. With two in five plants threatened with extinction, it is a race against time to find, identify, name, and conserve plants before they disappear.”

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‘World’s ugliest Orchid’ among new species named in 2020

Lanka Talents Creation — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 03:11:58 +0000