Question. Would you eat dog food?No?What if it was mixed in with your hamburger meat? Would you eat it then?What if I told you it wasn't your choice? What if it was already in the burgers you are eating?

I always thought that I was pretty old when I had sex for the first time (19), but Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that I was completely average. It turns out that 70% of unmarried teens in American have sex by the time they are 19. (OK, fine I was on the older end of the spectrum, but whatever.) I waited, despite intense pressure from a boyfriend in high school, because I wasn't ready and I knew it. It was a good decision for me. Other girls may be ready earlier, and those are their decisions, too.

A good friend is someone who will call you out on your stuff - kindly, lovingly and, most of all, honestly. A good friend did this for me the other day. She pointed out that I seem to be overthinking and that it was leading me to inertia. Inertia is a fancy word for being stuck.

February is National Heart Health Month...During this month we try to bring awareness to the symptoms and prevention of heart disease. Although many forms of heart disease are preventable, it continues to be the leading cause of death in women. According to the American Heart Association, each year nearly half a million women die of heart disease.

While we were on vacation, something crazy happened that led me to call my doctor once again for the Mystery Abdominal Thing. Long story short? We scheduled a CT scan!Lady at Scheduling: Your test will be on Thursday at 3:30, but we'll need you to be here at 2:30 for registration. AND, you'll need to stop eating and drinking at 11:30 so we can get an accurate result.Me: Okay and okay!

I've written at length about my experiences giving birth to my children. I've described - in what I'm sure is, to the average reader, excruciating detail - the challenges that I faced and the difficulties that I endured in giving birth, and I've been completely frank about the fact that I found the whole process terrifying. But I've also always been very clear that I still think that I was very fortunate in those experiences. I did, after all, survive them, as did my babies.

It has been a crazy year for Nadya Suleman and she has taken the rest of America on her wild ride after giving birth to octuplets.

I'm not a health expert, and I haven't performed any amazing fitness feats I can brag about. However, I have one proud accomplishment: I've pretty much manage to eat right and stay in shape... my whole life. And I'm almost fifty. That's a lot of cardio and vegetables and willpower, especially for a lazy slacker like me! I figure if I can do it, anyone can.

Teen pregnancy rates are up after a 10 year decline. What can we do about it? It seems obvious that abstinence-only programs aren't working to reduce teen pregnancy.  If you ask me, it's not the "abstinence" part that is the problem, it's the "only" part.  I'm not against teaching abstinence as part of a sex education program, but to only teach abstinence seem irresponsible.

Part two of a two-part post: Caitlin Boyle of OperationBeautiful.com and Gaby Montero of GivesMeHope.com both seem to say based on their experiences with being more positive and how people have responded to their motivational Web sites and blogs that we humans greatly underestimate thinking positively.

I believe that when we consistently stumble into the same messages, or the same thoughts flit across our mental screens repeatedly -- and those thoughts are reasonable, not crazy -- that the universe is speaking to us, and we should pay attention. So, when a BlogHer staff member suggested a contributing editor write about the blogs Operation Beautiful and Gives Me Hope and interview their founders, I raised my hand in cyberspace, "Oooh! Ooh-ooh-ooh! I'll do it!"

Blogs are our faces to the world--very public faces. Even the most personal of bloggers are mindful of this. Our BlogHer of the Week, Maggie of Okay. Fine. Dammit. was aware of the potential backlash that could ensue by coming clean to her readers about her alcoholism, but she made an even richer outcome possible with her confession.