Tomorrow is the deadline for my book, The Everything Flat Belly Cookbook. I'm thrilled with Adams Media for hiring me to write it but on occasion, my body has been very angry at them for giving me such a tight deadline. This uber short deadline has caused little Miss Fitzness Trainer to sit for 12 hours at a time with my head buried in my laptop quite often. My brain is thrilled, but my back has been bummed.

The only reason I've survived is because I'm already really good at taking care of my body. I've never had to sit down for such long periods of time as a requirement of my job, but when the side effects of doing so set in ... I knew how to respond.

I imagine a lot of you are stuck at a desk for hours on a daily basis. I feel for you. I also have some ideas to help you survive it without all of the stiff, achy and strained body parts.

I'm thinking back to the dinner I had last night. I'm visualizing it: Spinach lettuce, red grapes, shredded carrots, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, topped with salmon. No dressing. Just a bowl full of healthy stuff, all mixed together, simply scrumptious.

This visualization exercise is intended to cause me to eat fewer calories today. Not sure it's working. I think it's making me hungry instead.

According to the August issue of The Oprah Magazine, the findings of a study published in the journal Physiology & Behavior (2008) reveal that women who wrote a detailed description of their last meal (it happened to be lunch for this study) ate fewer cookies than those who didn't. OK, so maybe I should have written down my dinner items. No. I don't think that would have worked any better. Obviously, for some, journaling past meals does work. Might want to try it and see if it works for you.

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I'm a writer and yet I've never filled a journal. I've started many. But then I get distracted with other projects and life and writing for work ...

But one of my dearest friends has filled 37 journals in the past 10 years. Why? It's one of her main stress relievers. She swears by it. It's helped her recognize unhealthy patterns and make healthy changes. Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes excruciating.

It's the only place she can be honest. The only place she's free. It's a look in the proverbial mirror. And clarity looks back. "My journals save me," she says. "They're solace. A release."

Wow. Sounds good. Maybe I'll dust one off and fill the pages for once in my life.

Think about it: What did you learn in 2007? For many of us, we learned lessons about ourselves, our lives, our place in this world and so forth. But the world as a whole learned a thing or two as well. The BBC recently compiled this fascinating list of 100 things we didn't know last year.

In particular, there were several interesting things we learned on the health front, like:

• Adding milk to tea takes away any healthy benefit that the tea had.
  
• 99% of bacteria on dishcloths is destroyed by two minutes in the microwave.
  
• Two cups of spearmint tea a day will curb extra hair growth in women.
  
• The average duvet is home to 20,000 dust mites. Ick.
  
• Most crematoriums are having to renovate their facilities to accommodate increasingly obese corpses.
• Anthony and Cleopatra were not nearly as attractive as Hollywood would have us believe (Ok, not health-related but interesting!)

There's lots more (including the astounding fact that there is cell-phone reception on Mount Everest,) so check it out!

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Keeping a food journal is one of the simplest weight-lost tools out there. But it's not as simple as just writing down what you ate -- According to this article from Super Athlete Gabby Reece, you have to keep track of what time you ate, how much you ate and how you felt when you ate. And don't forget -- you need to keep track of your drinks too!

After time, you might start to recognize patterns in your eating. For instance, did you eat more at times when you were stressed about your job? Did you eat more when you had a drink before dinner? Once you've recognized these destructive habits, you can break them.

For more tips on keeping a food journal, click here.

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It seems like every few months some doom and gloom study is published decrying the state of decay being suffered by the brains of today's youth. I always thought such reports were a bit ridiculous, especially since I remember them coming out when I was a kid and I think I turned out reasonably intelligent. There are always kids who, for various reasons, excel and those who, for various reasons, lag behind.

However, when I read claims that the abundance of text messaging employed by Irish youth (and by extension kids all over who have cell phones) is destroying their ability to form complex thoughts and ideas, it made me wonder. The choppy sentences and shorted words (Hey QT, how R U 2day? Wanna meet L8R?) I've seen thrown all over Myspace and Facebook make me think that maybe there is some substance to this study.

Kids seem to be given cell phones at younger and younger ages. If texting has become the writing medium that they are most familiar with, perhaps it is possible that they won't learn to write or express complete and intelligent thoughts. What do you think? Is it all much ado about nothing or R we doomed 2 future leaders who can't put a proper sentence together cuz they spent their youth writing in txt-speak?

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