Do you love holidays but hate the increase weight that follows? You are not alone.

    Holidays are happy days with pleasure and delicious foods. Many people, however, are worried about the weight that comes along with these delicious foods.

    With proper planning, though, it is possible to control your weight. The idea is to enjoy the holidays but not to eat too much. You don't have to turn away from the foods that you enjoy. The following suggestions may be of some help to you.

    Do not miss meals. Before you leave home for a feast(宴会),have a small, low-fat snack(小吃). This may help to keep you from getting too excited before delicious foods. Begin with clear soup and fruit or vegetables. A large glass of water before you eat may help you feel full. Use a small plate; a large plate will encourage you to have more than enough.

    Better not have high-fat foods. Dishes that look oily or creamy have much fat in them.

    Choose lean meat(瘦肉 ).Fill your plate with salad and green vegetables.

    If you have a sweet tooth, try mints (薄荷) and fruits. They don't have fat content as cream and chocolate. Don't let exercise take a break during the holidays. A 20-minute walk after a meal can help burn off excess(过多的) calories.

    Eight-year-old Owen Howkins suffers from growth delays(迟缓) and poor eyesight. This means that Owen needs a wheelchair to get around. Not surprisingly, he felt people were staring (盯着看) at him, and that made him very uncomfortable, so he became lonely and even stopped going outside of his house. That, however, was all before Haatchi came into his life!

    Haatchi had a very unlucky start to life too. Tied to a railway track when he was just five months old, the dog was hit by a train. The hit unjured his tail and a leg so badly that both had to be cut off. Taken to a rescue shelter(救助站), the dog would have probably been killed if his story posted on Facebook had not been seen by Owen's dad Will. He fell in love with Haatchi and decided to keep him, thinking that they were helping him. It turns out that it was Haatchi who helped them. By always staying at young Owen's side, he became the boy's best friend. Slowly Owen liked to go outside. Wherever he goes, the dog follows and protects him. Owen now proudly walks around the neighborhood, showing off his dog and telling anyone willing to listen, Haatchi's story.

    Haatch's positive influence on the young boy has not gone unnoticed. In October 2012, the International Fund of Animal Welfare presented him with a special award(奖). The amazing friendship between the two has also been shown in a touching short film called “A Boy and His Dog” by students from the filmmaking class at the University of Hertfordshire. It has won several awards and had almost 2 million views. British best-selling author Wendy Holden has also writtern about this touching friendship in a aheartwarming children's book, which was released on February 13th and had made Owen and Haatchi better known!

    Lisa Pina never thought she would need the fire safety training she received during her apprenticeship(学徒期)as a union painter and dry waller(筑墙工). On Friday morning, she was thanking God she had it.

    On Thursday night, while Pina was babysitting her granddaughter, nephew and two nieces in her sister's apartment, she smelled smoke and realized the apartment building was on fire. When her 4-year-old granddaughter Ilean Garcia began saying, “We're going to die, ”she knew she had to act.Pina,39, first sealed the door, and then told all four children to get on the floor. After calling 911, she told the children to start singing and promised them all treats as soon as they reached safety. “I said, ‘OK, we're going to lie down and we're all going to play a game,'” Pina said. “We all started singing our ABCs and 123s.I was just trying to make it fun.” Pina patiently waited, and a few minutes later, Riverside County sheriff's deputies (治安官的助手) arrived. Pina, Ilean,8yearold Gabriel Parga,5-year-old Aubreyana Parga and 4-year-old Meriyah Parga were all trapped on the second floor as flames filled the first story.  Pina did the only thing she could. She opened the window and dropped the children, one-by-one, into the arms of the sheriff's deputies about 15 to 20 feet below. “I just needed to keep the kids calm so they wouldn't be afraid，”Pina said.“I was deathly afraid inside，but I couldn't let them know that.”[Not long after dropping the children out of the window, firefighters arrived with a ladder and rescued her. Ten people were treated at the scene for suffering smoke, but nobody was seriously injured.

    When we think of leadership, we often think of power and strength. But leadership today is not about forcing others to do things. If this is even possible, it is short-term, and tends to backfire. If you order someone to do something against their will, they may do it because they feel it a must, but the anger they feel will do more harm to them in the long term. They will also experience fear.

    Fear causes the thinking brain to shut down, making the person unable to function at his or her best. If they connect you with this emotion of fear, they will become less productive around you, and you will have ended up in not only shooting yourself in the foot, but possibly making every good employee or partner unable to work effectively. Fear has no place in leadership.

    The way we influence people in a lasting way is by our own character, and our understanding and use of emotion. We can order someone to do something, which may be part of the workday; or we can employ him or her at the emotional level, so they put their heart fully into the projects and provide some of their own creation. Today's work place is all about relationships.

    People work harder in a positive environment where they're recognized and valued as a human being as well as a worker. Everyone produces just a bit more for someone they like. Leaders understand the way things work. They know the payment is not the only most inspiring factor in the work life of most people.

    The true strength of leadership is an inner strength that comes from the confidence of emotional intelligence – knowing your own emotions, and how to handle them, and those of others. Developing your emotional intelligence is the best thing you can do if you want to develop your relationships with people around you, which is the key to the leadership skills.

    We all need to eat. So, meals could be a chance to stop what we're doing and spend time with the people in our lives. A recent study from a team of South Korea suggests that eating together has many good effects on children and teenagers while frequently eating alone may lead to poor eating habits and poor food choices. People who eat alone more than twice a week have a greater risk of developing high blood pressure.

    There are benefits of family dinners on children and teenagers.

    In 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looked at data from nearly three-quarters of the world's countries. Among its findings is the fact that students who share a main meal with their families are less likely to hate school. Children who eat a main meal with their families are also less likely to take drugs (毒品).

    In the report, titled “The Importance of Family Dinners (VIII),'' researchers say that teens who have frequent family dinners are more likely to say their parents know a lot about what's going on in their lives.

    Another study from the University of Montreal finds that children who eat with their families experience long-term physical and mental health benefits. These children are physically in better shape and drink fewer sugary soft drinks. These children also seem to have better social skills and are less violent.

    One of the researchers, Pagani, involved in this study is a professor at the university. She says that mealtimes with parents possibly provide young children with firsthand social events, which helps them have better communication skills.

    I visited Elba last June, joining Mary and John on a bicycling vacation. They made the arrangements for the car, hotel and bicycles. I studied the history of the island, which of course particularly features Napoleon.

    Napoleon (now I know) picked Elba as a place for peace when he was forced to give up the throne (王权) as Emperor of France in 1814. Far from being a prison island, Elba is beautiful with towering mountains, thick forests and sweeping bays and beaches.

    It is also an island filled with treasure. Very early on this island, locals discovered rich deposits of iron. Soon outsiders, too, discovered the iron and 150 other valuable minerals on this little piece of land. Long before Etruscans and other Greeks set foot on it, Dorians had moved in by the tenth century B. C. and were mining the island. The Romans ruled next, obtaining the minerals and building grand houses overlooking the sea. From the twelfth century until the nineteenth, the island was traded back and forth and was passed to France in 1802. Then came Napoleon, the new ruler of Elba.

    I was eager to visit his house in Portoferraio. The Emperor lived with his court and his mother, but his wife, Marie Louise had ensconced herself in the splendid Viennese palace of her father, Emperor of Austria. She lived safely there and showed little interest in visiting her husband in his mini-kingdom. Apparently, Napoleon wasn't troubled much by this. He was too busy riding everywhere on horseback, building roads, modernizing agriculture and, above all, sharpening his tiny army and navy into readiness for his escape.

    In the formal gardens behind the house it seemed to me that I could imagine the exiled (流放的) conqueror's anxious thoughts. He might gaze over where I stood now, toward the lighthouse of the Stella fort, the sandy bay, and across it, the green mountains of the Tuscan coast. Napoleon spent only ten months here before making his victorious return to France and the throne.