My Online Journey

One of the reasons why marriages get into trouble is sex, or the lack of it. So when viagra came along ten years ago, a lot of men with erectile dysfunction thought they would all be able to save their marriages by being able to resume sex. Except, if you have a bad marriage, sex is not going to help. In fact, it may trigger an early departure. Now, let’s change the perspective. If a woman loses her sex drive, viagra is of no help to her. Ignore the myth on that score. Women who buy Viagra for recreational use get nothing in return.

There are a number of reasons why women find their libido reducing. Some drugs have that side effect so, changing the drugs or reducing the dosage can restore interest. But more usually, it follows surgery, say for a hysterectomy, or the natural menopause. Somewhat controversially, this loss of libido is called hypoactive sexual desire disorder. This labels a natural or surgically-induced decline in the levels of some hormones in a woman’s body as a medical problem to be “cured”. The theory is that a lack of testosterone and estrogen reduces the interest in sex. Thus, a topical cream or tablet can restore the hormone levels and improve desire. Unfortunately, there’s no real evidence to support the theory. Indeed, the FDA refused approval for a testosterone patch for women in 2004. The reason was a lack of evidence that this was a safe treatment.

The whole question is complicated because human relationships are complicated. Women may lose interest in having sex with a man for many different reasons. Although a reduction in some hormone levels may occur at the same time, this is no more significant than the fact that her hair may also be turning white as she grows older. More importantly, many women have excellent sex lives even with low levels of hormones. So the idea of developing a viagra for women is controversial. In the case of men, there was a more positive physical problem to treat. Obviously, completing the sexual act is difficult if the man fails to get or keep an erection. But, with women, it’s more complicated.

It’s always better to start off with the bad news first. Hopefully, by the time you reach the end, you will have forgotten this bit. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated there were about 400m obese adults around the world in 2005. It expects this number to almost double to 700m by 2015. Since most people don’t want to have the gastric bypass surgery which almost always produces significant weight loss, this leaves a massive market of people who want an easy way to lose weight. They all want a magic pill. One they can take in the morning and be slim by the afternoon. As if. . . Anyway, all the major pharmaceutical companies have been laboring away. They see a golden pot at the end of the rainbow where people who don’t want to eat a less unhealthy diet and refuse to exercise can still lose weight. For the last few years, everyone was sold on the idea that the cannabinoid receptor antagonists were the answer. Although they were not the “magic bullet” because people still had to diet and, hopefully, exercise, the first results from their clinical trials and the experience on the ground when first released into the market were largely encouraging. Except there was one little worry. Some people who took these drugs got depressed. Now this is one of these tricky situations. I can imagine (even though thin) that some people who are overweight do get depressed if the weight shows no sign of going away. But over time, the evidence of a genuine cause and effect has emerged so now further development on these drugs has stopped. So this has an interesting effect. Until the next wave of drugs comes along promising to be the magic bullet, everyone will have to make do and buy phentermine. This drug is quite remarkable. In most fields of research, there has been such rapid progress that if anyone suggested people should use a drug more than twenty years old, they would look shocked. Old technology = bad technology. But phentermine has been an approved drug since the late 1950s. It came on to the market as an appetite suppressant. More than fifty years later, it’s still a sold as a reliable drug for the suppression of appetite. If you’re finding it difficult to stay motivated in your diet, you buy phentermine and it keeps the hunger pangs at bay until your stomach gets used to having less food inside. Sometimes, old technology is tried and trusted until something better comes along. In the weight loss field, phentermine is still waiting for that replacement.

One of the more fascinating things you can think about when you’re bored is why the spam is so different depending on where you have accounts. Perhaps I’m just lucky, but I get very little spam through my ISP. Mostly, it’s just to persuade me to buy viagra and other more obviously fake ways of producing sexual enhancement. I suppose the way I trawl the web to find stories to write about here sells my name as someone desperate to find a way of overcoming sexual inadequacy. But, when it comes to Gmail, my inbox is more evenly divided between viagra and gambling sites. And then come the yahoo accounts (I have several for different purposes). Almost without exception, I am flooded by the Nigerian scam mail. It seems the spammers target different user groups depending on the mail servers they use. A research team based at the University of California has been digging into the problem - it’s completely fascinating to see how some research teams spend their time. Anyway, this team decided to try estimating how much money the spammers made out of persuading people to buy Viagra. Their guess? $3.5 million a year. How did they come up with this number? Well, like cunning hackers, they wormed their way into the Storm botnet. For the uninitiated among you, this is one of the control centers for all those hacked computers around the world. Storm lets you send out millions of e-mails. To monitor responses, they set up two websites of their own to promote. One offered to sell viagra. The other was designed to mimic infecting the users with trojans - the same little bits of code that allow spammers to hijack machines in the first place. Both were actually harmless but counted the traffic and downloaded benign bits of code. Now comes the exciting bit. They sent out almost 470 million e-mails. There were 350 million to promote the viagra site with 10,500 people responding and 28 people attempting to buy Viagra in quantities worth more than US$100. So the low conversion rate did not mean low profits. By scaling up this hit rate, the research team arrived at their annual estimate for gross revenue. But it’s actually quite expensive to send out all this spam so the only way the operation pays is if the spammers also run the sites they promote. The infection site was more efficient, converting an average of 6,000 PCs a day to clones. OK, so now you know who to blame for some of that spam you have been receiving, you can all get your own back by e-mailing the research team which is based at the campuses at Berkeley and San Diego.

Many people end up abandoning perfectly good fitness programs and weight-loss regimens before they even lace up their sneakers.

Why? Because in a world filled with fast food, instant messaging, and a five-second disease-tracking device, anything without a quick payoff goes against the grain of the typical American instant gratification ethic. While it would be nice to actually drop inches in just a few days like what most miracle ads proclaim, managing weight and losing weight through physical fitness is a slow and steady process that takes time and commitment.

Setting weight management goals for yourself can be a good motivator. Gradual weight loss, for those people who wish to shed off some extra pounds, is usually the safest.
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There are a hundred lots of home fitness equipment nowadays that are sold in the market. Do not make the mistake in buying something and then regretting why you bought it after a day or two. Home fitness equipments vary and you should always have one good reason to buy it. Don’t believe on everything commercials tell you about the equipment. Some equipment may seem easy to use on television but n fact will not really work for you. Try to ask yourself first of these questions before you grab your wallet and buy that equipment.

Do you need it? The equipment should suit your interests and needs. The activities that you will do with that equipment should be challenging and something to enjoy on. Buying equipment is never a guarantee that you will use it especially if it is something new that makes it harder to use. Make sure that you already know the equipment and that it is something that you already tried in a fitness club. Start from buying small equipments that are aligned to your interests.
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