• It doesn’t have to take very long – just half an hour a day, in ten-minute bursts if necessary.
• It can be built into your day-to-day life - it doesn’t necessarily have to be found as additional time.

If you’re in employment

Despite advances in technology, many of us still spend more - rather than less - time at work. However, there are ways in which you can be more active:

• Go for a walk in your lunch break. Try to find at least three different walks and vary them throughout the week. It might even be possible to find an indoor walking route, incorporating stair climbing, for those inevitable bad weather days.
• Talk to your employers about promoting health at work. If they don’t already, ask if it’s possible to provide showers and cycle racks to encourage people to cycle to work. You might even be able to encourage them to provide subsidised membership at a local gym where you could go at lunchtime.
• Walk to and from work. If you live too far away, park further from the office or get off the bus or train one stop earlier – even a ten-minute walk will help as long as it is hard enough to get you slightly out of breath.

If you look after children

Having children can change everything about your lifestyle. Some parents find their activity levels drop and their weight increases as going to the gym or playing sport become more difficult. Here are some positive steps you can take:

• Exercise with your child. Take them to the local swimming pool or play in the garden or local park.
• Find out which local sports and leisure centres have crèche facilities, so you can exercise while your child is being looked after.
• Walk your child to school. Not only will this help you to be active, it will also help your child develop an early pattern of physical activity that might stay with them into adulthood.
• Find out if there are activities available at your child’s school for the local community. Many schools use their facilities for sports and exercise classes in the evenings and at weekends.

If you’re based at home

• Plan your week so you have to walk to the shops frequently. By going often you’ll only have to carry light bags of shopping back.
• Look at ways in which you can be more active in and around your home. Use the stairs to exercise, work in the garden or – if you have the space and can afford it - install some gym equipment, such as a mini trampoline or rowing machine, for example. Failing that, invest in a skipping rope.
• Look for community-based activity programmes in your local area. These don’t have to be fitness classes, just anything that gets you moving. Conservation groups can be a great way to get involved in improving your local environment and being active at the same time.

The early bird

If your normal day really doesn’t let you incorporate exercise, one option is to get up earlier. If you normally set the alarm clock for 7.30am, set it for 7am instead and use the extra half-hour to go for a brisk walk or even a swim if you have a pool nearby. We all experience exercise differently at different times of the day because of our individual biological cycle, and you might not be a ‘morning person’, but it’s worth a try as exercise first thing can really wake you up and leave you feeling invigorated for the day ahead.

Night owls

Alternatively, if you’re not an early bird, consider looking at how you could use any free time you have in the evening to increase your activity patterns. Most of us spend a lot of time sitting watching TV in the evenings, but you could buy some home exercise equipment and work out while you’re doing it.

Experiment to find a time for exercise that suits you best.

Maximise your exercise time

• Make an appointment to exercise - and write it in your diary. You could also record what you did in your workout, so you can keep track of your achievements.
• You can extend this idea by making a real appointment with a friend, colleague or relative to exercise together. If you’ve arranged to meet someone, you’re a lot less likely to skip it.
• Keep some exercise kit handy in the places you spend most of your time. This might mean leaving clothes at college, work, with friends or relatives, or in the boot of your car. By having the right clothes handy you can exercise whenever you get an unexpected free 15 minutes or a sudden burst of enthusiasm.
• Consider taking active holidays such as a cycle tour or walking holiday. You still need to get your exercise five days a week, but getting in shape for your holiday might be a good incentive, and if you enjoy it enough it might inspire you to keep it going when you get home.
• If you own a car, leave it at home as much as possible and walk or cycle to the shops for those small things such as milk or a newspaper.

Source: BBC lifestyle

Why growing up is in

At the premium horticultural event of the year, the Chelsea Flower Show, vertical planting will be presented in a number of show gardens. Inspired by plants in rainforest canopies or living on rocks around waterfalls the key features are green roofs and planted walls.

The wealth of benefits from this planting style includes reducing pollution and rainwater run-off, insulating buildings and providing habitat for wildlife. Vertical gardening can offset the impact of paving over front gardens, increasing vegetation in otherwise concrete-filled spaces and reducing the risk of localised flooding.

Research by the Centre for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge has found that “a layer of vegetation can reduce heat loss from buildings, cutting the wind chill factor by 75% and heating demand by 25%.”

However, advantages go beyond the eco-friendly. Obviously there is the visual impact and pleasure of beautifying buildings but it can also provide screening, reduce noise and even have a positive impact on peoples’ health.

Origins and the future

The world’s largest green wall, known as the Bio-Lung, was unveiled at Expo 2005 in Japan. 150 metres long, 15 metres high and containing 200,000 plants of 200 different species, it was a representation of how plants can act as lungs for a city.

In the UK green roofs are gaining popularity and going mainstream according to Dave Austen of Greenfix Sky Gardens, UK green roof specialists. In some German cities green roofs are now a legal requirement for flat-roofed buildings with coverage rising by over 13 million square metres a year. Dave explains that UK planning regulations are now leaning in the same direction, with “new buildings required to have a proportion of green walls and roofs”.

Even nightclubs will soon be covered in foliage as club owner Billy Reilly opens a new roof terrace venue called Pacha on London’s Caledonian Road and is enlisting the help of famous French vertical gardener Patrick Blanc.

An inspirational project is being masterminded in the same area of London by the King’s Cross Community Projects, where an ugly wall on Wharfdale Road has been described by project co-ordinator Sophie Talbot as “the bane of our lives”. “Anything we can do to lessen the carbon dioxide and gunk thrown out by diesel engines is a good idea. We hope to create interest throughout the year with seasonal, successional planting, subtle lighting and ideally use indigenous plants”.

How does it work?

Plants need soil for support and to provide water and nutrients essential for growth. If you provide an alternative source of these many plants can actually grow without soil. This is known as hydroponics and the water and nutrients are supplied through irrigation systems.

The traditional method of growing vertically is to simply train a plant such as ivy or clematis up a wall. New ideas take this further; integrating plants into walls and roofs, and adding structures, containers and supports to buildings to be used for planting.

This new style of gardening changes the way we think about roof gardens too. Roof terraces are usually confined to containers and if you wanted to lay normal soil you needed a roof capable of supporting it. Now there are new lightweight growing media available, such as LECA (light expanded clay aggregate).

New approaches to green roofs mean areas are not always designed as gardens or roof terraces to use and enjoy and may be an area of grass or drought-tolerant planting, inaccessible and simply overlooked instead.

Wall technology

Stopping roots penetrating deep into walls is easier than you might think. The solution is to provide a water supply so the plants’ roots don’t need to keep growing in search of water. Designer Patrick Blanc conceived a way of supporting plants in a lightweight metal structure lined with PVC and rot-proof felt and added an automatic watering system complete with fertiliser.

Ready-planted wall panels are available in the UK and can simply be mounted and the irrigation plugged in. Green walls can even be installed indoors and fed from a reservoir which trickles water down the grid of plants.

Up on the roof

Flat roofs are the best for greening and a flat, asphalt-covered garage is ideal for a carpet of sedums. By adding a concrete support filled with growing media you could choose to grow a wildflower meadow.

Tiled or corrugated garage roofs are not suited to living roofs but will support moss and lichen which are useful wildlife habitat. You can develop a green roof on your shed but many need additional reinforcement first.

Follow our step-by-step guide to building a green roof here.

Keeping up tradition

If you want some of the benefits of vertical gardening with less construction work there are more traditional methods of smothering a wall in blooms. A simple wire framework or trellis can be used to train a climber against your house, garden wall or fence. For all year interest use an evergreen favourite such as ivy and intersperse with flowering climbers such as jasmine, honeysuckle or clematis. Alternatively create interest at eye level by mounting planters on your wall to fill with trailing flowers.

Plants to try

Choosing the right plants needs thought as conditions for growth are not ideal; plants may need to withstand drought, extreme temperatures, high light intensities and strong wind. Look for plants adapted to cope with these harsh conditions.

The plants available to you depend on the depth of soil you create:

• 0–5 cm - Sedums, mosses and lichens.
• 5–10 cm - Short wildflower meadows, low-growing, drought-tolerant perennials, grasses, alpines and small bulbs.
• 10–20 cm - Mixtures of low or medium perennials, grasses, bulbs and annuals from dry habitats, wildflower meadows and hardy sub-shrubs.

With careful planning your green wall or roof will need minimal maintenance, just sporadic weeding to remove woody plants that have invaded. If you concentrate on developing a moss and lichen community remember to be patient, some lichens grow less than a millimetre a year. If you can’t wait, invest in pre-grown moss mats.

Five to try at 5-10cm soil depth

• Lotus corniculatus - Bird’s foot trefoil
• Primula veris - Cowslip
• Hieracium lanatum - Leafy hawkweed
• Anthyllis vulneraria - Kidney vetch
• Trifolium pratense - Clover

Five to try at 10-15cm soil depth

• Knautia arvensis - Field scabious
• Centaurea scabiosa - Greater knapweed
• Origanum vulgare - Wild marjoram
• Echium vulgare - Viper’s bugloss
• Linaria vulgaris - Toadflax

Seeding sedums

You can establish a sedum blanket from seed and obviously this is the cheapest option but will take time to establish. Cuttings are another option or for instant impact use a pre-sown sedum blanket which can have wildflowers added as an option.

Ideally include native sedums such as biting stonecrop, Sedum acre, which grows into a mat of twisting stems with tiny, green leaves.

Five sedums to try

• Sedum acre
• Sedum album
• Sedum hispanicum
• Sedum reflexum
• Sedum spurium ‘Dragons blood’

Solis is the Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0. Along with Geoff Livingston, Solis recently co-authored Now is Gone, a book that helps businesses learn how to leverage new and social media.

here

Read more on the forums: PR Secrets for Startups

Importance of eye-contact

Ok, so if eye contact is so important, what are some of the practical things you can do to enhance it and ensure that you are doing it correctly? Firstly, understand that a woman assesses you immediately. As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. It’s true, so it’s very important to carry yourself and present yourself optimally all the time, and your eye contact or lack thereof will tell her volumes about you. Like it or not, she will judge you on the way you walk and approach her, on the way you stand when you arrive and when you talk to her and, even more importantly, the way you look at her. She will immediately attempt to ascertain every facet of your personality from your appearance, your posture and the way you move. In fact, within 30 seconds a woman will pretty much feel that she has a handle on your past, present and future, all from her first impression. That’s how important it is. And a huge part of this first impression is the ease in which you, the seducer, look into her eyes.

A great example of eye-contact

For a great example of excellent eye contact, watch Mickey Roark in the movie “Nine and a Half Weeks”. When he first encounters Kim Bassinger, she’s shopping for scarves looking down at a table. He approaches from the side and he says something to her and when she looks up at him he looks DIRECTLY into her eyes. It’s great eye contact that he gives her. But further, (and this separates the great seducers from the average guy) when she’s looking at this guy thinking who is this guy, and she attempts to look back down the table, he follows her eyes. He stays locked on, and actually moves his head to keep giving her eye contact. It’s very seductive and very subtle. He wasn’t glaring at her but maintained a nice easy eye contact. It’s a great example, so rent the movie and see what I mean.

Three types of eye contact

So here’s a little bit about eye contact. Just so that you know.

With strangers (unknown males): When we are introduced to another person, like another guy for example, we tend to shift our eyes around without really giving good eye contact at all. In other words, we just casually greet person with a “Hi, how are you” or something and look around the room and then glance back at him and vaguely give him eye contact. That’s generally how you do an eye contact.

During interviews and presentations: Then there are situations in which we concentrate on maintaining eye contact. At a job interview, for instance, when we are trying really hard to maintain eye contact and we kind of shift our gaze from eye to eye, back and forth, and keep looking from one interviewer to the other. This is disinterested, polite eye contact. We are trying hard to maintain eye contact but we aren’t really feeling connected with that person in any way. So that’s another way we do an eye contact.

With friends and acquaintances: When we are having a heart to heart conversation with a friend, we tend to expand that eye to eye range to include the nose and the mouth, kind of like a triangle. So we look at both eyes then look at the nose and then the mouth. And this is the kind of eye contact we do when we are among friends and acquaintances.

How to use your eyes to seduce girls

Then, when we encounter a girl we like, and we are being a flirt, we do something different. We tend to expand our gaze to include more of the face and even parts of their body but we always return back to the eyes. And if we warm up to each other and feel that there is somewhat of a connection and a little bit of chemistry, you will notice and she too will notice that how the two of you start to gaze more intently into each other’s eyes.

Reading into eye contact

Another thing that we do when we start feeling attracted to somebody is that we tend to watch their lips a lot when they are talking, more than we would watch, let’s say, the lips of our boss. So we essentially take in a bit but we always go back to the eyes and watch the mouth. So here’s something you can do practically. If you notice she is watching you and looking at your mouth as you speak, that can be a very good sign. She might be wondering what it would be like to kiss you. So if you too consciously do the same, you will be able to draw out the girl, making her feeling attracted to you, in spite of herself.

The size of her pupils: If there is a one sign that’s impossible to fake, if you want to really find out if a particular girl is interested in you, is her pupil size. Invariably, the more she finds you attractive and the greater the degree of chemistry, the larger her pupils or yours will become. You just can’t fake it. So if you see her across the table, in a restaurant on a date and her pupil size is very large, you can be sure that she’s very interested in what you have to say and very attracted to you. Another thing is her blink rate. Her blink rate will tend to go up somewhat, so you could artificially increase your blink rate to make her more likely to reciprocate, to get that kind of attraction starting to roll.

The next time you are on a date, calibrate her level of attraction to you by where she’s is looking, how fast she’s blinking and the size of her pupils. So hopefully if you have given off the right eye contact signals, she will come across as love struck.

By: The Player, MensXpert.com

There are basically two ways through which a man can suffer from this problem. First one being very simple, the person is overweight. Secondly, he could be suffering from a medical problem called Gynecomastia. For the latter you will have to resort to a medical treatment but to deal with the first one, here are few exercises that you can try to win over your boob battle.

Interval Training

These types of exercises have been specifically designed to give your metabolism an excellent lift, and really start burning body fat fast. Interval training can be fairly intense, and this is an outstanding way for burning massive amounts of calories quickly. The best part here is that it also makes your body burn more calories even after your workout is finished, because the body is busy repairing and rebuilding your muscles.

Interval training workouts usually involve about 30 seconds to one minute of intense exercise, followed by two to three minutes of easy exercise. A very common and highly efficient way of burning fat and getting rid of the man boobs - is to sprint really fast for 30-60 seconds, then walking briskly for a another few minutes. Repeat this whole process for about 8-10 times minimum a day and for few weeks & you will surely find your metabolism increased. This procedure will cut down on your overall body fat and also assist in getting your chest back in shape!

Push Ups

Push ups tend to be excellent exercise for building your upper chest area. This won’t entirely get rid of your man boobs, but it will certainly make them less noticeable while you’re working on your other fat burning exercises.

Cardio Exercises

In order to get rid of your man boobs you will have to burn actual fat from your body. Since you can’t burn fat from just one area, you will need to choose exercises which burn fat generally, from your whole body. Cardio is an excellent fat burning activity.

Exercises like Running, Bike Riding, Rowing, and more are all excellent cardio workout examples that will assist you in burning the extra fat from your body and getting rid of your man boobs.

Elliptical Trainer machines

These machines have proven to be beneficial for various people. It is another excellent cardio exercise option, as these machines tend to workout both upper and lower body muscle groups at the same time.

Play Sports

This is another outstanding form of both cardio and interval exercising. While playing sports, have you ever noticed the variation from being in a semi-resting state to a huge burst of immense action and vice versa at a moment? That’s the real meaning of interval training, and that’s the trick for charging your body’s metabolism and fat burning capabilities.

These were few straightforward and effective ways of transforming those man boobs in to chest. Don’t wait anymore, just go out there and try few or all of the above procedures, and you might be in for a surprise to find out how rapid it is to look like a man again!

FitnessXpert

Fix Your Diet

Now that you are not willing to workout at the gym, you definitely need to compromise on your eating habits. Instead of having the regular 2-3 large meals a day, try switching to 6 small meals. This new eating patterns will speed up your metabolism and consequently burn more fat which otherwise gets stored in your system.

Your first meal should be the heaviest of your six meals and then gradually cut down on the ratio. This pattern of eating will allow your body to use up more fuel, thus providing regular bursts of energy for exercise and other regular day to day life activities. Make sure of eating food that is low in fat and high in protein content, also.

Interval Training

Now that you have cut down on your food, the next step is interval training, which will further increase your metabolism rate and burn extra fat.

Start with running as hard and fast as you can for 30 seconds then take a brisk walk for the next 3 minutes to cool off. Do 5 repetitions of this exercise for 3 days a week

Play any outdoor sport that you like, be it football, tennis, basketball, or cricket. Just ensure that you’re playing with the main objective of burning as many calories as you can. Play this sport at least once a week and ensure that you are exhausted by the time the game ends.

Exercising

Given below is a list of different exercises for various muscle groups. These exercises are simple and do not require any loose weights or machines.

For your shoulders, Pectorals and Triceps: 3 sets of 20 to 30 Push Ups every alternative day.

For Back Muscles and Biceps: 3 sets of 20 to 30 Pull Ups or Chin Ups every alternative day.

For Abs: 3 sets of 20 to 30 Leg Lifts & 3 sets with 20-30 repetitions each of Crunches.

For Lower back, Hamstrings and carves: 3 sets of 20 to 30 Free Squats.

That’s all you need to loose extra fat and get those refined cuts. Moreover, all that is possible without touching dumbbells. Sounds good, isn’t it? Just follow the dietary plan, do these simple exercises, play some sport, and remain lean for the rest of your life!

MensXpert.com

Sure, a turkey burger sounds healthy. But is it, really? Not if you order the Bella from Ruby Tuesday, which packs a whopping 1,145 calories. (And yes, that’s before a side of fries.)

• 20. Worst Fast-Food Chicken Meal
• 19. Worst Drink
• 18. Worst Supermarket Meal
• 17. Worst “Healthy” Burger
• 16. Worst Mexican Entree
• 15. Worst Kids’ Meal
• 14. Worst Sandwich
• 13. Worst Salad
• 12. Worst Burger
• 11. Worst Steak
• 10. Worst Breakfast
• 9. Worst Dessert
• 8. Worst Chinese Entree
• 7. Worst Chicken Entree
• 6. Worst Fish Entree
• 5. Worst Pizza
• 4. Worst Pasta
• 3. Worst Nachos
• 2. Worst Starter
• 1. The Worst Food in America

Sure, a turkey burger sounds healthy. But is it, really? Not if you order the Bella from Ruby Tuesday, which packs a whopping 1,145 calories. (And yes, that’s before a side of fries.)

To further enlighten you on the prevalence of preposterous portions, we spent months analyzing menus, nutrition labels, and ingredient lists to identify the food industry’s worst offenders. Our primary criterion? Sheer caloric impact. After all, it’s the top cause of weight gain and the health problems that accompany it. (As you read, keep in mind that 2,500 calories a day is a reasonable intake for the average guy.) We also factored in other key nutritional data, such as excessive carbohydrates and fat, added sugars, trans fats, and sodium. The result is our first annual list of the worst foods in America.

By: Matt Goulding, Men’s Health

Polar stratospheric clouds are an alluring component of the high latitude sky. Reactions occurring on these cloud surfaces convert chlorine to a form highly reactive with ozone. Credit: Ross J. Salawitch

Polar stratospheric clouds are an alluring component of the high latitude sky. Reactions occurring on these cloud surfaces convert chlorine to a form highly reactive with ozone. Credit: Ross J. Salawitch

 

Earth’s ozone hole, shown here (in blue) in 2006, could be negatively affected by some efforts to mitigate climate change. Credit: NASA

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The evils of global warming and ozone depletion are competing problems, at least in Antarctica, the results of two new studies suggest.

Schemes to pump sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract global warming might help cool the Earth, but they could also cause problems at the poles, scientists warned today. Continuous injections could drastically deplete polar ozone, delaying the recovery of the current ozone hole over Antarctica by several decades.

And another study finds that if the southern ozone hole is patched, the heat would turn on in Antarctica.

Injecting sulfur into the atmosphere is one of the most talked about “geoengineering” schemes aimed at counteracting the warming caused by the carbon dioxide building up in Earth’s atmosphere, largely due to industry and vehicles emissions.

Sulfur particles, along with some other aerosols, can have a cooling effect on Earth’s surface because they scatter incoming sunlight back out to space. This effect can actually happen naturally when sulfur is spewed out in volcanic eruptions. After the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which injected millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures dropped by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius).

Not so simple

The artificial cooling idea proposed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, among others, is to regularly inject large amounts of sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays and cool the Earth.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, a new study suggests.

At very cold temperatures, sulfur particles provide a surface where chlorine gases in the atmosphere (from man-made chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and other pollutants) can react and form molecules that destroy ozone. These cold temperatures can arise during polar winters, when sulfur helps form polar stratospheric clouds.

Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and her team used computer models to examine the effect yearly sulfur injections would have on ozone levels at both of the planet’s poles.

The model showed that injecting sulfur in the amounts suggested by Crutzen and others would seriously impact Arctic and Antarctic ozone levels. Over the next few decades, these hypothetical injections would likely destroy between about one-fourth and three-fourths of the ozone layer above the Arctic. Because atmospheric circulation patterns over the Arctic tend to “wobble,” this Arctic ozone hole even could sweep over populated areas, Tilmes said.

Lower ozone levels allow the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays to pierce through the atmosphere, which can cause severe problems for life on Earth’s surface, from skin cancer in humans to DNA damage in many types of plants and animals.

Ozone wouldn’t suffer the same depletion over Antarctica, “because it’s already gone,” Tilmes told LiveScience. But the sulfates would delay the expected recovery of the ozone hole by about 30 to 70 years, the model found.

“Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects,” Tilmes said. “While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geoengineering solutions.”

The results of the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and European funding agencies, are detailed in the April 25 issue of the journal Science.

Another problem

On the other hand, a full recovery of the ozone layer could lead to intensified warming over Antarctica, according to another new study, detailed in the April 26 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Because ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation, it warms the surrounding air. More warming high in the atmosphere over the Antarctic could change atmospheric circulation patterns there that have so far kept the southern continent isolated from the warming patterns affecting the rest of the world.

“If the successful control of ozone-depleting substances allows for a full recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, we may finally see the interior of Antarctica begin to warm with the rest of the world,” said lead author of the study, Judith Perlwitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer

So how can we smell so much, with so few types of receptors?The answer is that cells mix and match. Each nerve cell in the nose can sense more than one odor, but picks up the smell to a different degree. An odor’s unique signature depends on which cells respond to it, and how intensely.

What happens when you inhale a rose is that a group of cells is stimulated, and that group sends a combination of signals to the olfactory bulb—the site at the very front of the brain where smell perception takes place. This unique combination of signals tells the brain the odor is the smell of a rose.

How the olfactory bulb interprets this signal as the smell of a rose is not well understood, but scientists do have some insights into the process. For example, many researchers have used brain scans to see what areas of the brain become active after people are exposed to different smells. It is unclear, however, whether that activation corresponds to recognizing a given smell. And other factors—for example our past experiences with certain smells, and whether we liked them or were turned off—also play a role in how we perceive them.

In other words, a rose is a rose is a rose, as Gertrude Stein wrote, but not always to our nose.

Photo: © ISTOCKPHOTO/DMITRIY SHIRONOSOV

SciAm

Not all shoppers are the same. Some women love to trawl the high street on the off chance that something might catch their eye. Others approach shopping with the strategic skill of a three-star general: the internet is her weapon and she has her personal shopper on speed dial. She’s a shopzilla, and she’s already bought most of her autumn/winter wardrobe.

Shopzillas shouldn’t be confused with spendaholics. A shopzilla would never buy for the sake of it. She plans ahead, does her research and makes informed decisions. For Fiona White, who runs her own events company and is the executive producer of Glasgow’s famous T in the Park event, adopting these tactics is the only way to fit getting dressed into her hectic lifestyle. “My office isn’t near the boutiques and I often don’t have time to shop,” she says. She has developed a close relationship with the buyers at Cruise, Glasgow’s chic label boutique, and plans all her purchases with them. “I’m not slavishly into fashion, but I know what I like and what suits me. I don’t make the mistakes I used to,” she says. “I look online at style.com, then speak to the girls at Cruise. Next season, I’ve got a fantastic Burberry Prorsum double-breasted coat on order. It’s coming in August and Glasgow is cold, so I can wear it in September.”

White is just one of a growing number of fashion-savvy women passive into something completely proactive. “Customers are wise to websites such as vogue.co.uk and style.com, and in the desire to be seen in something first, they don’t think twice about calling up to put their name down for forthcoming collections,” says Averyl Oates at Harvey Nichols. “We have already had a number of inquiries about Moncler Gamme Rouge, designed by Giambattista Valli, from people who haven’t even seen the collection yet.” So keen are its customers to shop the catwalk, it has had a waiting lists since March for Valli’s plunge-fronted party frock and Christopher Kane’s 1920s-style party dress.

The story is the same at Browns and Matches, where customers are obsessing over next season’s moulded black cocktail dresses and costume jewellery from Balenciaga. At Harrods, shopzillas are racking up orders for Balmain gowns and Fendi bags studded with precious stones, and the store expects to sell out of Chanel by August.

Net-a-porter.com is at the forefront of the I-want-it-now culture. It offered customers the opportunity not just to pre-order from the autumn/winter Halston collection, but actually buy pieces straight from the catwalk. This prompted an online stampede, with more than 300,000 people viewing the collection, and the two items available for delivery (a belted Grecian dress and a sleek shirt dress) sold out within hours. “Our aim is to provide immediacy and access. It’s a very 21st-century approach,” says Holli Rogers, head of retail.

The shopzilla’s natural territory is the designer boutique, however, where customer service is at a premium, but there are Shopzillas on the high street too. After Banana Republic put its spring/summer fashion show online, the store saw a jump in customers preordering the one-shouldered pink silk dress and the giraffe-print patio dress. At Marks & Spencer, a pre-order service is available online for certain items; there is currently a growing waiting list for the chic cream tailored leather dress.

As more and more of us rely on the immediacy of the internet for fashion information and to shop, so the phenomenon of the super-savvy, super-demanding customer will grow. In a few years’ time, we’ll all be a nation of shopzillas. Are you ready for that?

HOT ON THE HIGH STREET

New Look: a fab festival dress, £35, hits the stores on May 20

Urban Outfitters: Alexa Chung is on the waiting list for their lilac dress, £175

M&S: a leather dress, £149, is available instore tomorrow

Celia Birtwell for Topshop: playsuit, £100, is from the new range and goes instore on July 30

Banana Republic: after customers saw a preview of their purple asymmetric dress, £95, on Banana Republic’s website, the waiting list began to grow

Claudia Croft, TimesOnline.co.uk