Getting your SEX drive into gear

There’s not much David Garcia won’t do for sex with his wife, Ramona. He’ll talk dirty. He’ll flirt like he’s trying to pick her up. He’ll even agree to appear on YouTube sporting nothing more than a skinny black boy thong, a furry hunting hat and one hell of an embarrassed grin. One of three Canadian couples taking part in an online ‘intimacy’ experiment dreamt up by Johnson and Johnson brand KY, David, 33, and Ramona, 30, were chosen out of 150 couples from across the country who auditioned for the reality series, which tracks their sexual successes and failures on regular segments of the KY Intimacy Experiment. The thong? Part of the first episode that saw the Garcias skimpy shopping for each other. “Initially I said ‘no way, I’m not that type of animal’,” the Toronto small business owner says of the camera crew’s insistence he strut his stuff. “In the end, I didn’t do a full moon. But to be honest, the experience worked. We got out of our rut.” At sexual rut at 33? Join the crowd. Ever since humans first banged rocks together, the story’s been the same: No matter how committed and attracted you may be, things like kids, work, stress and responsibility literally seize the engine of your sex drive.

Posted in Health on 02/18/2010 - 0 Comments

Playing with the (adult) toy box

Shelley Taylor lifts a bean-shaped object off the shelf and holds it neatly in her palm. It’s shiny, black and has pretty floral decals across the top. Cute, I think. “This is one of our most popular items,” she says, handing over the smooth little ‘Nea’ in the back of Venus Envy, her adult toy store in downtown Ottawa. “It doesn’t even look like a sex toy.” She’s right. It really just looks like a shiny black bean—something Jack might have planted in the hopes of a beanstalk. On a shelf beside it, the ‘Mia’ vaguely resembles a slim case for reading glasses. “It’s rechargeable on the USB port for your computer,” points out Taylor. “Very popular with business women.” Turns out, sex toys are no longer the intimidating, rubbery and veiny things they used to be. In fact, some are so inoffensively and--it must be said--obscurely shaped that you really do have to read the instruction manual before using. Take the Laya Spot, for example. The description says ‘multi-speed clitoral stimulator’, but it looks like it would do a great job on my sore hip flexor and IT band. Same deal with the fashionable Gigi, a g-spot vibe that could double as a sort of battery-operated pestle. Then there’s Ottawa’s own award-winning couples toy, the We-Vibe and new We-Vibe II—complete with seven vibration settings, including the cha-cha—which was developed by Bruce and Melody Murison and will be featured at the Superbowl’s VIP gifting room on February 4 and 5. Superbowl? That’s not the only mainstream appearance the new generation of personal pleasure tools is making. A few shelves over at Venus Envy sits the glossy ‘Rabbit’—the clitoral and g-spot vibe made famous by a lonely and libidinous Charlotte York in Sex and the City.

Posted in Health on 02/18/2010 - 0 Comments

Canada's Trainer to the Stars

When Toronto's fitness and diet guru Harley Pasternak informed clients in 2004 he'd be out of town on business, he thought he'd back within five weeks.

Out of town? Try Hollywood. He was called there at the behest of actress Halle Berry, who had heard of the magic he'd done helping actors slim down for film roles, including Jim Caviezel (Passion of Chris) and Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil). Pasternak's job was to help Berry squeeze her frame into the skin tight Cat Woman suit. It was just going to take five weeks, he figured. Really.

Before long, however, word leaked out about the brainy-and-brawny Canadian trainer who rapidly transformed Berry into a superhero-worthy body by using short workouts that suited filming schedules and five meals a day that could be fixed quickly and were small enough to fit into a mini-bar fridge. The Hollywood machine kicked into gear. He appeared on Oprah. Orlando Bloom called. So did Jessica Simpson. Brendan Fraser wanted in, as did Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Robert Pattinson, Hilary Duff, and Miley Cyrus.

Six years later, Pasternak, 35, does get back to his house in Toronto, but only to visit friends and family.

"Next thing I knew, I had the largest celebrity client list in the history of the business. I mean, there's no agent with a roster of celebrity clients like I have," he says proudly.

"It's the strangest thing, because it wasn't contrived," he marvels, then paraphrases his favourite passage from

Posted in Health on 02/01/2010 - 0 Comments

Do you need your A, B, Cs? The Great Vitamin Debate

Joe Schwarcz is known for his blunt, take-no-prisoners style when he gets fired up, and today is no different. For the past 25 minutes, the erudite director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society and outspoken star of the Dr. Joe Show on Toronto's CFRB radio has been on a roll, taking shots at pseudo-science, the gullible public, "vitamin advertisers who shove things down our throat" and the biggest kahuna of them all, the $23.7-billion dietary supplements industry. So it's just a matter of time before he mentions Nick Nolte. "Look at him!" Schwarcz directs, and sure enough, an image of the aging actor's ravaged face comes to mind. These days, Nolte eschews hard living for a thousands-of-dollars-a-week vitamin habit in an effort to turn back the clock. "See how sick he looks?" Schwarcz says, his voice rising in exasperation. "He takes 60 supplements a day!" It's an extreme example -- few of us live Nolte's life, much less endure his medical bills -- but it does beg the question: If 60 pills a day doesn't make a visible difference to someone's visage, what chance does a single multivitamin have?

Posted in Health on 03/31/2009 - 0 Comments

Keeping them young at heart

For her 20th birthday last year, Larissa Taylor knew exactly what she wanted. You could say she had her heart set on it.

After four months of lying in a hospital bed at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute after a virus caused congestive heart failure, the Ottawa woman had convinced herself that by her next birthday, she would have a new heart.

Sometimes dreams do come true. On the eve of her birthday - ``just after the Simpsons started on TV,'' she recalls - doctors announced they'd found a donor. Just after midnight, she was rolled into surgery.

``I kept insisting that I would get a heart before I was 20. It depressed me to know that this was my new reality - that I couldn't go to school, go to parties and spend time with my family. When the surgeon said he had a heart for me, I looked at everyone who'd doubted me and thought, 'Told you so!' ''

Posted in Health on 02/17/2009 - 0 Comments

No Doctor In The House

In the end, it was neither Government programs, an online search nor dumb luck that landed Carisa Morison one of the hottest commodities in Ottawa: a family doctor. Rather, having exhausted those options, the 29-year-old did it old school and networked with a half a dozen friends. Eventually, one of them called in a favour with a GP friend, who agreed to take on the pregnant Morison and her young family as patients. “I felt like I’d won the lottery,” says Morison, who recently moved to Barrhaven from Hamilton. “Unfortunately, she’s 25 minutes away and that’s not convenient, especially at rush hour. But I don’t mind, because I have a doctor I really like. I just don’t understand why I had to work so hard to find one.” She’s not alone. According to the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), one in five Ontarians—including those with chronic and acute conditions--are without a family physician. In the meantime, doctors face a crunch themselves.

Posted in Health on 02/10/2009 - 0 Comments

When life gives you lemons....Michelle Schoffro Cook profile

Michelle Schoffro Cook doesn’t look like a woman who has danced with death. Where, one wonders, is the consumptive, Camille-like pallor, the dark circles? Even a whiff of quietly heroic martyrdom would do. If such a struggle exists, the Ottawa-based author and doctor of natural medicine has cleverly disguised it under a cheerful mop of ringlets, twinkling eyes and one of those complicated, layered outfits that requires the wearer to adopt...

Posted in Alternative on 01/06/2009 - 0 Comments

Treating SAD...naturally

It creeps up on you like salt stains on your pant legs -- short winter days coupled with depression.

Affecting two-thirds of Canadians, and three to four times more women than men, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is triggered by short daylight hours and a lack of sun exposure and can leave sufferers in a serious slump.

But according to Jonathan Prousky, associate professor of clinical nutrition at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine and author of Naturopathic Nutrition (CCNM Press, 2006), SAD doesn't have to...

Posted in Alternative on 12/16/2008 - 0 Comments

The Last 15

Every diet has them--those last few kilos that, no matter what, just won’t budge. It may be called a diet plateau, but it may as well be Mount Everest. Yet it doesn’t have to be, says best-selling Canadian diet guru, Dr Joey Shulman. “Those stubborn few kilos are what I call the tipping point. For 98 per cent of dieters, the kilos they lost will return within five years. One reason is metabolism, which slows by five percent every decade,” she says in her latest book, The Last 15: A Weight Loss Breakthrough. (Wiley, $48, Hardback). “You can’t do anything about your basal metabolic rate, which accounts for 65 per cent. But you can do plenty about the other 35 per cent.” Where do you start?

Posted in Diets on 12/04/2008 - 0 Comments

Snuffing out winter sniffles

Sniff. Sniff. Cough. Splutter. Sneeze. Got a cold? For years, common wisdom was to take a pill. But scan pharmacy shelves these days—not to mention bookstores—and the message is changing. While over the counter cold and flu medications have lost favour in light of studies that show the only worthwhile ingredient is the painkiller, natural remedies are gaining ground.

Posted in Health on 12/04/2008 - 0 Comments