Biologically, the body is an energy system. It takes in food, creates heat and energy and dumps the waste. Whatever increases or maintains that energy is good. To the contrary, whatever inhibits or obstructs that energy is bad. An abundance of energy is an abundance of health. Sickness and disease is an energy crisis, and the total absence of energy is death. Obesity and overweight are the result of an energy imbalance. Consuming too many calories without engaging in the physical activity to metabolize those calories causes this imbalance. Energy balance is like a scale. When the calories consumed are equal to the calories used there is no change in weight. If the calories consumed are less than the calories used weight loss occurs. And when the calories consumed are greater than the calories used weight gain is the result. When this occurs over a long period of time the body rebels against this imbalance by producing diseases that cause 300,000 premature deaths a year. When you continually ingest more calories than you expend you're creating a problem. I don't care if you call it a stroke, asthma, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer or any of a thousand other names that come to mind. Your problem remains the same. You're accumulating more calories than your body can handle. If you don't do something about it your body will. In fact, your body will give you more symptoms that can be labeled by some other names until it is called death. Unless you start turning things around your future is certain. So what do you do? Decide on a different future, start eliminating the waste!!

AFRICAN DANCE

  Annitra Ravenmoon & Tricia Alkmia Cochée 

There is an African proverb that says, "When you praise the Creator, you must move your feet". As African women who dance, we add, "you've got to move your hips too"!  From the fallopian tubes of the Nile River which begins in the heart of Africa in Uganda at the Mountain of the Moon, traveling down, north into ancient Egypt (also know as Kemet) civilization was borne. It's said that African people are a people of oral history, but the written word and sacred language began with Africans as well .

We told stories through our words but we also told them through movement and dance.  By the images on the ancient temples, dance was ritual, an expression of celebration and sorrow, dance was healing, dance was a part of everyday life and a way to pass on the culture.  Dance was used in the birthing temples of Queen Hatshepsut. So before there was a Christian or Islamic world, before the world was split into Occidental and Oriental, African women were expressing and healing their bodies through movement.  Our ancestral mothers carried their babies on one hip and walked with a sway while balancing a water jug on their heads. It was from this beginning that this dance, commonly known as belly dance, sometimes called Oriental dance, has evolved.
 
We have been taught to hide the beauty of our movement, and the natural sway of our luscious hips.  Our "Ancient Mothers" were revered for their beautiful luscious hips, full beautiful lips, and natural sensuality.  Our Mother Africa is so rich with different ethnic cultures and the way dance is celebrated. The words "Belly dance" was invented by the Europeans in, and around the 17-1800's when a man named Sol Bloom brought dancers of color to the United States. Some say they were from Tunisia, some say Algiers. He brought Middle Eastern belly-dancers to the Chicago World Fair in 1893.
 
Before that, NOBODY knows what the beautiful dance was called!