Tonight I went to a network marketing presentation of a product I've been using for over a year now.

I am going to share some secrets and findings.

First, a lot of people ask me what I use to look 25 at 45 (well, website photos, being low resolution, are very forgiving). I don't have the money or stomach for cosmetic surgery, so I am happy to share my not-so-secrets. At least while they're working, before I too look indistinguishable from a Chinese salty plum (that's pretty durn wrinkly if you've ever tried one).

What not to eat. I don't consume soda, anything deep fried, or anything that has partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in it - the latter is in most processed foods - take a look at the label. It's a killer. I also I avoid anything with refined sugar in it. Sugar has been shown to egg cancer cells along in a petrie dish. Eat sugar as part of the place it came from - an apple, a gloriously ripe fig, grapes, berries. Eat nuts (no more than 1/4 cup a day). EAT THINGS WHOLE. Brown rice and pasta not white, sprouted bread, beans and legumes. The moment you extract anything the body has to chemically deal with it and it's hard work.

What to drink. Next, get yourself a VitaMix blender. This is a very, very serious machine that will make anything chewable instantly drinkable. I haven't tried whizzing a three course steak dinner in it yet but I am sure it would produce a sustaining liquid lunch for the busy executive on the go. Of course you can use a good, regular blender but you'll have to whizz long and hard and the result won't be as smooth - and you'll wear out your poor blender. So, each morning I ingest the A.M.azing tonic Lance Armstrong's chiropractor and Olympian in his own right, Jeff Spencer, shared with me on the phone while upgrading his personal Bike Friday. This is my variant:

A.M.azing tonic:

2 scrubbed organic carrots
2 sticks organic celery
big hunk organic ginger, skinned (so much ginger I can't stand it - Jeff)
big organic apple

Chop small. Load into blender. Fill to within 1" of top with filtered water. Whizz the crap out of it. Taste varies with quality of raw ingredients.
If not sweet enough, add a tiny bit of liquid or powdered Stevia (a natural sweetener). A variation is to replace a carrot with a small beet, replace apple with pear. Fresh orange juice added is good too but not in blender - better in citrus press.

I have nothing to say this is the elixer of youth other than it just feels like it's doing you a hell of good.

My friend Tim bought a pressure cooker for $15 off Craigslist and pressure cooks everything from rice to soybeans. He makes the best soy milk by simply whizzing cooked beans with water in the Vitamix. Makes rich-tasting, killer berry smoothies. Get yourself a pressure cooker, cooks things fast and no flavor escapes.

Live authentically. Third, and following on from my previous post, I try to be whatever and whoever I am in the moment. This means not being phony or putting up with phony people. This is a challenge (hey, I wondered why no one's invited me out in the past 10 years) but you have to decide what kind of life you want to lead. I'd rather be alone than phony, which is why I tend to fly solo. The mental stress of being inauthentic ages you faster than the relentless marching calendar. Vipassana meditation is extremely worthwhile but that's the subject of a whole other blog entry - stay tuned.

Watch what you put on your skin. This is not just for women and metrosexuals. Putting stuff on your skin is like eating it. The fact that you can take medication, including birth control, through a patch on the skin means that when you go into the Body Shop and slather on the free testers, you're sticking a cocktail of chemicals directly in your bloodstream. Some common ingredients, like DMDM hydantoin, are formaldehyde-releasing. Not to mention preservatives. The more 'foody' and natural sounding the ingredients are, the more preservatives are needed. Otherwise it would rot like a banana in a glass jar. Or you'd have to keep it in the fridge. What's wrong with preservatives? Where some people are prone to asthma or migraine headaches, I tend to get skin rashes, triggered by stress and preservatives used in all cosmetics, shampoos, conditioners, moisturisers. For economy, companies use the mega-cheap parabens (look at the label). Go take a look on the labels of anything you stick on your skin. You'll see methyl paraben, propyl paraben, buytl paraben ...

USANA. So I searched for a preservative free moisturiser that would not need refrigeration and I found it: USANA's Sense, (with an arty stroke over the final 'e'). It felt different almost as soon as I started using it. My only criticism is the luxurious, heavy, frosty glass bottles they come in. Weighs a ton - not good for a travelin' gal!

How do you get hold of this stuff? It's sold by network marketing. I signed up as an associate, so you can get it from me, or become an associate yourself.

Network Marketing or: Lose friends who never really were friends in the first place. I personally have never had a problem with this kind off selling model, although many people do. Why? Because we hate to think our friends are benefitting from us even in a small way. And if they get rich, that's even worse. 'Every time my friend succeeds I die a little' (Gore Vidal). We'd much rather buy from a faceless exploitative conglomerate like Safeway. We'll go and mow a friend's lawn or help them move but they made a dollar out of this great product I bought? No way! As I said, I am not that kind of fair weather friend. If you got something I could be interested in I'll look. As a very good friend said, 'the definition of friendship is to use each other in the nicest most mutually beneficial way.'

I use to be a dealer for a couple of directly marketed products. Not Amway, the companies I worked for were not nearly as big or successful.

The first was a brilliant hydroponic indoor plant system called Luwasa, which has not gone to seed, I am pleased to pun. One look at the simple beauty and logic of this low maintenance, low cost system, and I was hooked. I had a whole dirtless nursery of foliage on my desk at work and people would stroll by, admiring, asking to buy. So I became a distributer, largely because I got 30% off, you'd be mad not to. I gave presentations, which gave me valuable experience at the 'show and tell' - something that Aussies don't grow up with. Not to mention garnering a useful thick skin against people who would rather go down to Wal*Mart and give their money to them in exchange for a small potted ficus benjamina.

The cheery bubble hovering over my desk burst when a couple of particularly joyless colleagues reported my selling the odd 5" fern to a client while waiting for my COBOL program to compile. I was called into the oval room and told I was not getting a raise that year, due to 'unprofessional' behavior at a client site - despite the clients proudly displaying their burgeoning Luwasa plants at every opportunity and extending my contract over and over. Ach, the penalty for spreading a little joy in the office. These days I'd get a raise, as my joyfully despicable behavior would fall squarely under the relationship marketing umbrella, otherwise known as Customer Evangelism.

My next foray in the direct marketing world was selling sniff-alike perfume, along with just about everyone else at the time. I didn't actually wear the stuff myself, I just liked sniffing it, so that was short lived. But what made those knock-off perfumes so popular? Perhaps it was, a friend told me, like nail salons - it's a little bit of luxury for under $20 that the common man can afford, in lieu of a holiday in the Bahamas or a Prada handbag.

In this decade, people seem more and more concerned with health and wellness, as things get crazier, more expensive, stressier.
Maybe that's why we're selling more and more Bike Fridays.

Supplements in trial: I'll be a guinea pig. So I'm now signed up as a USANA associate, and my next step is going to require some effort: road testing their lauded nutritional supplements. That's because I'm not a big pill-taker. They get stuck in my neck. (I've since learned the technique is to drop your chin to your chest and swallow).

The reasoning behind taking supplements, according to supporters, is the degree of oxidative degeneration that occurs in the human body due to our nutritionally depleted foods, as well as, stress, pollution and so on. The result is cancer, diabetes - all of the common killers. Of course being 'young' I haven't much paid attention to this until now...

Apparently, off-the-shelf supplements need only meet the FDA's food grade requirements, which is a lower, say, meat-packing facility standard. Analysis done on several commercial vitamin pills revealed that many contain far lower amounts of vitamin or mineral than that stated on the bottle, and some don't even dissolve - you could still read the label after it had gone through you. It is very cheap to produce vitamins at this level. I've been reading that USANA is ranked #1 for their pharmaceutical-grade supplements, which is a much higher, more costly standard, and would make them very expensive if sold in retail outlets. It has numerous athletes on its books is the official supplier to the US Women's Tennis team.

Now I am NOT a pill-taker, but whenever I get stressed or can't maintain a good diet on the road, I admit I take a stress pill - that is, multi-B plus mega C which seems to keep me rolling. I've decided that if I am going to ingest anything, it might as well be the best. And if it's good enough for the American/Canadian Women's Tennis team, it's gotta be good enough for me. (Just like I say that if Bike Friday is good enough for all these famous and serious cyclists, it's probably good enough for you).

Understanding that I am leery of sticking bad or downright unnecessary things in my body, my fellow USANA associates are offering me a sponsored trial, that is, a daily dose of USANA Essentials - a multivitamin and chelated mineral supplement - for three months.

I'll be reporting here on my progress. I very much appreciate their offer, as I don't have cash to burn on something that doesn't serve me.

I also will be testing it from the point of view of the ordinary person. Time and time again, big companies see value in only supporting 'top athletes', as if the supreme physical state of a luge champion translates in any way to the average Joe and Josephine with dullard day job in a carpeted cubicle struggling to support three kids and an overfed dog.

As I told Forbes.com's James Clash (Take a look, I'm 5th in line), I champion not so much the XP (Extreme Pursuitist), but the UP (Untrivial Pursuitist). And especially all SAMs (Single Adventurous Misfits) - welcome to my world.