Jes Baker's TEDx Talk Tells You To Change Your World, Not Your Body

"We put our life on hold, we stunt it, because of our bodies."



That's the startling truth blogger and speaker Jes Baker shared in a May 2014 TEDx talk. Speaking on the topic of body love and self-acceptance, Baker reveals that most 10-year-olds are more afraid of getting fat than getting cancer or losing both of their parents. People put off things as small as buying new jeans and as important as asking for a raise until they've lost that weight, believing their bodies aren't good enough as is. Her conclusion? Something's gotta give.



"The creation of this presentation happened the moment I realized that loving your body could have international impact," Baker told The Huffington Post in an email. "I spend countless hours researching the larger issue of bodies, talking to medical professionals, and getting my statistics straight. And the beautiful thing that [comes] out of it [is] a clear understanding that body love [is] a global necessity."



Baker's reasoning? That body insecurity hinders personal and professional productivity -- and so the world is a better place without it. In her own words, "the way we view our bodies determines the way we participate in the world."



Baker began blogging as a way to share her personal journey of acceptance, with the hope of creating an inclusive body-love community.



"We are definitely in this together, no matter your size," Baker told HuffPost. "Every single one of us resides in a society that profits from telling us that we are not enough. It's powerful to know that you share in this; it makes it easier to refuse the status quo."



As for what you can do to start your self-love journey, watch the full video above to find out.



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13 Illinois Private Schools That Could Cost You an Arm and a Leg

In 2013, Illinois public schools spent an average of $11,842 per student in total expenses ($7,000 if measured strictly for classroom expenses), according to the Illinois State Board of Education's State Report Card. That cost is spread across the state and individual school districts through income taxes and, especially, property taxes.



But private school students (or more precisely in most cases, their parents) cover those costs themselves.



To help you get a sense of the cost of some of the private schools in the state, along with the differentials that exist between some private schools, we've got a list of the 13 most expensive Illinois private schools below. To keep continuity, we took the highest possible cost (which for some schools included boarding) for grades 9-12. All schools were found using Private School Review and the tuition rates were found on each school's respective website, which are linked with the school's name.



1. Lake Forest Academy - $51,400

Located in Lake Forest, Ill., Lake Forest Academy is a coeducational, independent boarding school.



2. Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart - $47,200

Also located in Lake Forest, Ill., Woodlands Academy is a Roman Catholic, all-girls high school.



3. Francis W. Parker High School - $31,830

Francis W. Parker High School is an independent, co-educational school located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, close to the Lincoln Park Zoo.



4. The Latin School of Chicago - $29,985

The Latin School of Chicago is a coeducational, independent school located in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago, just south of Lincoln Park.



5. University of Chicago Laboratory School - $29,424

The University of Chicago Laboratory School is a coeducational school affiliated with the University of Chicago and is located on the University of Chicago's campus.



6. The British School of Chicago - $28,250

The British School of Chicago is a coeducational, independent British international school located in the southwest part of the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago.



7. North Shore Country Day High School - $27,250

North Shore Country Day is a coeducational, independent school located in Winnetka, Ill.



8. Roycemore High School - $26,550

Roycemore High School is a coeducational, independent school located in Evanston, Ill.



9. Chicago Academy for the Arts - $24,720

The Chicago Academy for the Arts is located in the River West neighborhood of Chicago and is a coeducational, independent school devoted to the performing and visual arts.



10. Chicagoland Jewish High School - $22,900

Chicagoland Jewish High School is a coeducational, Jewish high school located in Deerfield, Ill.



11. Morgan Park Academy - $22,300

Located in the Morgan Park neighborhood on Chicago's south side, Morgan Park Academy is an independent, coeducational school.



12. Elgin Academy - $20,800

Elgin Academy is located in Elgin, Ill. and is a coeducational, independent school.



13. Beacon Academy - $19,900

Beacon Academy is located in Evanston, Ill. and is a coeducational, independent school that's teaching practices reflect Montessori principles.



Check out 12 more ultra-pricey private schools in Illinois at Reboot Illinois.



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WATCH: He's Related To Obama, Clinton And Einstein.. Here's How To Know If You Are Too

Could you be cousins with Barack Obama? What about Gwyneth Paltrow or Albert Einstein? It's entirely possible. Find out why we're all more connected than you might think.



We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.





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You'll Never Believe Why This Employee Is Suing Taco Bell

In a painfully ironic twist of fate for a faux-Mexican fast-food chain, a former Taco Bell manager is suing the company, saying she was canned for hiring Hispanics.



As Courthouse News first reported, Juanita O'Connell, who is Mexican-American, is suing Taco Bell for back pay and damages in federal court. In a complaint filed Wednesday, O'Connell claims that one of her superiors saw a Latino employee working at the Indianapolis restaurant she managed. The superior then allegedly said to O'Connell: "Didn't I tell you not to hire Hispanics?"



O'Connell, 60, had worked at Taco Bell since 1987, eventually attaining the title of general manager at her restaurant, according to the complaint.



Taco Bell, which serves meals loosely inspired by Mexican cuisine, denied the allegations in a statement to The Huffington Post.



"While we haven't been served with the complaint, these are very serious allegations and if true, are not a reflection of our culture or standards," Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch told The Huffington Post in an email. "We've launched an investigation to get the facts."



"My client was working at one of the Taco Bell stores here in Indianapolis and her area coach basically came up to her and told her she needed to quit hiring Latinos," O'Connell's attorney Joel Paul told HuffPost. "And she continued to hire Latinos, because she thought that was discriminatory."



Paul said that two weeks after the initial incident, O'Connell's supervisors came to the store to punish her for an E-Verify violation that Paul said she may have incurred when hiring an undocumented worker. E-Verify is an online system maintained by the U.S. government for identifying undocumented immigrants who attempt to work illegally.



"They wrote her up, and two or three hours later that same day, they fired her," said Paul.



O'Connell's lawsuit is one of a number of eyebrow-raising complaints brought against Taco Bell in recent years. In 2011, an Alabama firm filed a class-action suit alleging that the beef in Taco Bell meals contained too much filler to be called "meat," according to NPR. The suit was dropped after Taco Bell changed its marketing practices.



Last year, Gary Cole, a prisoner serving a 25-year sentence in a Colorado facility, also sued the chain, saying he had invented the Doritos Locos taco, ABC News reports. The courts later dismissed the case, which Taco Bell said was meritless.



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Teacher Time

Every profession measures time differently. Doctors and lawyers measure time in hours or vague lumps. Teachers measure time in minutes, even seconds.



If a doctor (or his office) tell you that something is going to happen "at nine o'clock," that means sometime between 9:30 and noon. Lawyers, at least in my neck of the woods, can rarely be nailed down to an actual time. Anything that's not a scheduled appointment is "sometime this afternoon." Even a summons to jury duty will list a particular time which just represents the approximate time at which things will start to prepare to begin happening. Further up the Relaxed Time Scale, we find the delivery and installation guys for whom "Between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. Tuesday," means "Not at all on Tuesday."



Meanwhile, in teacher land, 9:00 means exactly 9:00. Other professionals may round off, saying 9:00 when they really mean 8:57 or 9:08, but we mean what we say. If a class starts at 9:00 and ends at 9:51, we are getting our 51 minutes of class.



This is one of those things that non-teachers don't entirely get. If you work in an office, time is pretty flexy. If a meeting can benefit by running an extra 10 or 15 minutes, you just do it. But in most schools, when the bell rings, you're done. There is no little extra bit of time you can just throw into the work.



Consequently, we tend to measure out our time in coffee spoons. One minute and forty-three seconds left in class? OK, I can totally get three more practice sentences about participial phrases in before I remind them of tomorrow's assignment. Which is better than realizing that you've got two minutes and twenty seconds left for a three-and-a-half minute piece of business.



Nobody in the business world feels any real difference between a 42-minute meeting and a 51-minute meeting, but most teachers feel a whole world of difference in that nine-minute gap. That's why the phrase "It'll just a take a couple of minutes," doesn't mean a thing to civilians, but makes a teacher's heart sink. I think it's also part of why civilians don't really understand what they're asking when they request or require that teachers add "just one more little" thing to the teaching day.



Other than the fact that it gives some teachers the uncanny ability to act as human egg timers, I'm not sure we benefit much from this heightened time awareness. Yes, teachers learn to be punctual, which is a virtue, I hear. But doctors and lawyers and other folks are fast and loose (well, loose) with time because for them, a task takes as long as it takes, whereas in teaching, a task takes as long as we get to do it.



It's a fantasy of mine to imagine a classroom in which I say, "OK, class. We're going to work with dependent clauses today, and we're going to keep at it till everyone gets it." I understand that problems that go with that (Mrs. Numberwhacker is up the hall wishing I would be done with clauses so she can get started with quadratic equations), but one of the screwy things about how we're set up in this country is that the most fundamental organizing principle is The Clock. Not the students, teachers, or lessons, but The Clock. I know it's hard to think of another way to manage several hundred humans working on a hundred tasks under one roof, but a guy can dream. And if your school figured out a way to be student- or task-centered, I'd be fascinated to hear about it.



Cross-posted from Curmudgucation.



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These Are All The States Where It's Legal To Breastfeed In Public

We often hear about, report on, and share stories about moms who are given a hard time for breastfeeding in public. In some cases, these women are asked to leave restaurants, stores, even churches because they’re nursing. In others, moms are told that they must “cover up.” The constant in all of these anecdotes is that employees and bystanders are unaware of one thing:



The law explicitly protects moms who breastfeed in public in almost all 50 states.



Forty-six states, DC and the Virgin Islands have laws that specifically allow moms to breastfeed in any public or private location. Three of the remaining states -- Michigan, South Dakota and Virginia -- exempt breastfeeding moms from public indecency or nudity laws, and Idaho is the only state that has yet to pass any similar laws.



Currently, the only protection nursing moms have in Idaho is jury duty exemption. The Idaho Breastfeeding Law Coalition started a Moveon.org petition in effort to bring the state up to speed with the rest of the country, but despite its 1,400 signatures, there's no indication Idaho is close to passing legislation.



So, the next time you're in public and see someone sneering at a breastfeeding mom, show them this map:







This article is part of HuffPost Parents' World Breastfeeding Week series. For more from the series, click here.



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This Gene Could Tell You Who Is At Risk For Suicide

A new study could be the key to creating a blood test that can screen people for suicide risk. Such a test, experts say, could improve treatment in hospitals, clinics or even help military leaders assess which active-duty members and veterans are most at risk of suicide.



The military is battling a suicide problem; at least 22 veterans commit suicide every day, according to a 2014 study conducted by the Department of Veteran Affairs, while male vets under 30 are three times more likely to commit suicide than their age group in the general population.



"What we envision, potentially, is using this test in psychiatric emergency rooms. For example, it could dictate closeness of monitoring and treatment options, and drive potentially more fast acting treatment in someone who is really high risk," said lead author Zachary Kaminsky, Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins Medicine in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "In the military, if you were able to identify vulnerable individuals [with a blood test], you may, for example, ask them to turn in firearms when they come back from active duty, or limit access to lethal means."



The new research reveals a genetic mutation that may be able to predict suicide risk with a minimum of 80 percent accuracy. The study, published July 30 on the website of The American Journal of Psychiatry, found that alterations to the gene SKA2 -- which helps regulate the brain's response to stress hormones -- was more common in people who had committed suicide.



Currently suicidality can only be assessed clinically: People at risk of attempting suicide can exhibit warning signs like talking or writing about a desire to commit suicide or trying to access firearms or pills. Other risk factors for suicide include a previous suicide attempt, a family history of attempted or completed suicide and various mental disorders.



But often, medical professionals don't have access to that kind of information, which is why the need for a blood test is so urgent, said Dr. Alexander Niculescu, III, an associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the Indiana University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.



"People don't always tell others when they are suicidal, especially if they do not want to be hospitalized," said Niculescu.



In the first part of his study, Kaminsky examined the brain tissue of different groups of people who had died from suicide. He found that in some groups, lower levels of SKA2 were associated with people who had committed suicide. In others, a mutation that changed the way the SKA2 gene worked was also associated with people who had killed themselves.



Both findings are significant, because if the SKA2 gene isn't functioning properly, the body isn't able to suppress the release of cortisol, a stress hormone, throughout the brain.



Kaminsky then confirmed the results with blood samples from three different, ongoing studies. He designed a test to see if he could predict which of the participants had had either suicidal thoughts or attempts in the past. The test was able to predict participants' history of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts with at least 80 percent accuracy.



Among those with the most severe risk of suicide, Kaminsky was able to predict attempts or suicidal thoughts with 90 percent accuracy. Among the youngest participants, Kaminsky was able to predict past suicidal attempts with 96 percent accuracy.



"We have found a gene that we think could be really important for consistently identifying a range of behaviors from suicidal thoughts to attempts to completions," Kaminsky said in a press release. "We need to study this in a larger sample but we believe that we might be able to monitor the blood to identify those at risk of suicide."



The study discloses that Kaminsky, along with co-author Holly Wilcox, Ph.D. holds a patent to "evaluate risk of suicidal behavior" using the SKA2 gene. Another researcher on the study, Dr. Jennifer Payne, received legal consulting fees from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson and Johnson, as well as research support from Corcept Therapeutics.



Niculescu has also been on the hunt to find biomarkers linked with suicide risk, and he called Kaminsky's study a "great" corroboration of what Niculescu and other research groups have discovered in the field. Such corroboration across different research departments, said Niculescu, is key to eventually developing a blood test for suicide risk.



"I am glad to see that their top finding, SKA2, was shown in their study to interact with our top finding from last year, SAT1," wrote Niculescu in an email to HuffPost. "We have taken a look at SKA2 in our datasets, and see that indeed it is decreased in expression in the blood of suicide victims, consistent with what Dr. Kaminsky and colleagues are reporting."



"I think that in the future, like in other areas of medicine, a combination of clinical data and blood tests will ensure sensitivity and specificity in predicting who is at risk, and avoiding this preventable tragedy that is suicide," said Niculescu.



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