SUPPLEMENTS NEWS:
Do any of you take calcium?  Be careful:
"Your doctor may have told you to take calcium supplements to protect your bones and reduce the risk of fractures. A new study in the British Medical Journal may turn that advice upside down.  Researchers pooled the results of 15 medical trials in which a total of about 12,000 people were given calcium-supplement pills. They found that the people taking the calcium had a 30 percent increase in the risk of heart attack compared to those who did not. There was also an insignificant increase in the risk of stroke and death."

Read the whole thing.  But as always, before making final decisions about things like this, it's always best to check with your doctor...

EXERCISE UPDATE:
Do you like to exercise?  Trust me--it's good for you, for your metabolism and for your muscle tone (it's really helped mine, despite my Moebius).  Well, if you like to work out, looks like you should use good up-tempo tunes to really get you going:
"For a study published last year, British researchers asked 12 healthy male college students to ride stationary bicycles while listening to music that, as the researchers primly wrote, “reflected current popular taste among the undergraduate population.” Each of the six songs chosen differed somewhat in tempo from the others. 
The volunteers were told to ride the bicycles at a pace that they comfortably could maintain for 30 minutes. Then each rode in three separate trials, wearing headphones tuned to their preferred volume. Each had his heart rate, power output, pedal cadence, enjoyment of the music and feelings of how hard the riding felt monitored throughout each session. During one of the rides, the six songs ran at their normal tempos. During the other rides, the tempo of the tracks was slowed by 10 percent or increased by 10 percent. The riders were not informed about the tempo manipulations.  But their riding changed significantly in response. When the tempo slowed, so did their pedaling and their entire affect. Their heart rates fell. Their mileage dropped. They reported that they didn’t like the music much. On the other hand, when the tempo of the songs was upped 10 percent, the men covered more miles in the same period of time, produced more power with each pedal stroke and increased their pedal cadences. Their heart rates rose. They reported enjoying the music — the same music — about 36 percent more than when it was slowed. But, paradoxically, they did not find the workout easier. Their sense of how hard they were working rose 2.4 percent. The up-tempo music didn’t mask the discomfort of the exercise. But it seemed to motivate them to push themselves. As the researchers wrote, when “the music was played faster, the participants chose to accept, and even prefer, a greater degree of effort.”

"My abiding faith in the possibility of self-transformation propelled me from one therapist to the next, ever on the lookout for something that seemed tormentingly out of reach, some scenario that would allow me to live more comfortably in my own skin.  For all my doubts about specific tenets and individual psychoanalysts, I believed in the surpassing value of insight and the curative potential of treatment--and that may have been the problem to begin with.  I failed to grasp that there was no magic to be had, that a therapist's insights weren't worth anything unless you made them your own and that nothing that had happened to me already could be undone, no matter how many times I went over it."--Daphne Merkin, "My Life in Therapy, NY Times 8/4/2010.

Merkin's piece was very interesting.  She backtracks a bit from the above quote later in her essay, but not completely.  It's important to be in touch with our feelings, to acknowledge our past and to deal with it rather than deny it; but we also have to move forward and not be paralyzed by it, either.  And I think that's a good message for persons with a facial difference or with Moebius Syndrome, and I bet you all know what I mean...