Progresso Souper You Review and Giveaway

This giveaway has closed.

At the start of every new year, most of the women I know and connect with regularly openly talk about how their New Year’s resolution is to lose weight and/or to eat healthier. These are some great resolutions, especially the eating healthy one because while losing weight is a perk for a great deal of women, I whole-heartedly believe that crash dieting and the diet industry as a whole is a multi-billion dollar business for a reason, so if you do truly want to lose weight, it should be for purely health reasons, which is why eating healthy and choosing foods that will nourish you instead of just fill you is really important.

Now that we are more than a month into the new year, (by the way, can you believe that? I know I can’t!) a lot of women have been reporting on their progress with their New Year’s resolutions and if they have been able to stick to what they had planned before January 1st. I have noticed that a lot of women are increasingly strong-willed this year in the commitments they have made to themselves, nearly everyone I’ve checked up on who I had read on their blogs had made a New Year’s resolution has been sticking to it pretty phenomenally. So, for those of you who made the resolution to eat healthier and who are still on the fast-track to healthy eating, I have something really great to share with you!

I am a big, big, big fan of soup. I have been not-so blessed in the teeth department, having been diagnosed with Periodontal Disease and rapid tooth decay a few years ago after my wisdom teeth had started to push their way in. Because I am a professional blogger and also a freelance writer and web designer and developer who works from home, I have a very modest monthly income. I can pretty much cover my expenses month-to-month and that’s about it. That, coupled with the fact that I also live with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and major depressive disorder, (which I have blogged about here before,) makes it impossible for me to hold a job outside of the home, it isn’t a possibility for me to go out and get a part time job to help pay dental bills. Needless to say, this causes me a great deal of excruciating physical pain where for days at a time, I am unable to open my mouth wide enough to get most foods in it. That is when soup saves my life and the sanity I would not have after getting insanely frustrated with how big bite-sized food is.

Progresso has always been a great source of delicious and nutritious soup and they have made it even healthier than before by offering an entire product line of light soups that are all 100 calories or less! It is officially super easy to get a great and satisfying meal in your belly and help manage your weight at the same time. To celebrate their line of light soups, Progresso has launched the Souper You Debut–a contest where you can enter for the chance to win a full makeover in New York City!

To enter the Progresso Souper You Debut contest, all you have to do is go to www.Progresso.com/SouperYou and submit an essay (200 characters or less) telling Progresso why you love Progresso Light or 100 calorie soups and why you would like a full makeover. You will also need to submit a photo of yourself that visually reinforces the theme of your essay. Three grand prize winners will be awarded a trip for two to New York City from May 21st-23rd and includes roundtrip airfare, a two-night stay in a NYC hotel, a full makeover, a $1000 wardrobe shopping spree and personal consultation at a New York department store. Pretty fabulous if you ask me!

Review & Giveaway

To get the good word out about new Progresso Light and 100 calorie soups, I had the opportunity to try them out for myself and thanks to Progresso and MyBlogSpark, received 15 cans of Progresso Light and 100 calorie soups in a variety of different flavors, along with a Progresso soup mug and a digital jump rope that keeps track of jumps and calories burned to help you start working out more, in addition to utilizing soup to help manage your weight.

The variety of soups I received is absolutely insane; I was completely blown away by the amount of different flavors offered and there is definitely something for everyone’s specific tastes. My partner, who usually despises soup and will not eat it regardless of what you bribe him with, loved the Italian-Style Meatball with Penne and I cannot get enough of the Chicken and Dumpling. I love, love, love the Progresso soup mug and now refuse to eat my soup out of anything else. It has a great little thumb indentation at the top of the handle to make carrying it from the kitchen to my computer desk very comfortable.

And we want to share the Progresso love!

Because Progresso is awesome like that and MyBlogSpark is always all about extending the opportunity to try awesome products to others, we have the opportunity to give one lucky Woman Tribune reader 2 cans of Progresso Light soup, a Progresso soup mug and a digital jump rope.

To win the Progresso Prize Pack, all you have to do is visit ProgressoSoup.com and tell us what flavor of Progresso Light soup you would love to try. [REQUIRED]

Additional Entries: [Leave a separate comment for each additional entry.]

• Tell us what steps you take to manage your weight.
• Subscribe to Woman Tribune
• Follow Woman Tribune on Twitter
• Become a fan of Woman Tribune on Facebook
• Subscribe to our videos on YouTube
• Tweet about this giveaway. Feel free to use the following tweet or write your own: [Can be done once per day.]
  

  Win 2 cans of Progresso Light soup, soup mug and digital jump rope from @WomanTribune: http://tinyurl.com/yf24hmk #giveaway

• Blog about this giveaway. [2 entries, so leave 2 comments.]

This giveaway ends Wednesday, February 10th at 11:59PM EST. This giveaway is open to all US residents over the age of 18. The winner will be contacted by email and has 48 hours to respond with their necessary information. If no action is taken, another winner will be picked.

Full Contest Disclaimer

Disclosure: I was given the opportunity to spread the word about Progresso’s Souper You Debut and new line of Light and 100 calorie soups from Progresso and MyBlogSpark. For this post, I received the factual information, 15 cans of Progresso Light and 100 calorie soup, a Progresso soup mug and digital jump rope from Progresso and MyBlogSpark. They have also provided me with the opportunity to give away two cans of Progresso soup, soup mug and digital jump rope to one lucky Woman Tribune reader. All opinions throughout this post are 100% mine.

The Post Where I Let My Mental Illness Hang Out

While doing some blog hopping yesterday, I came across a great post from 5 Minutes for Mom on the topic of depression, anxiety and living with mental illness. I was completely taken aback (in a good way) with the amount of uninhibited honesty in which Janice wrote about her own struggles and how she had always resisted writing about her depression and anxiety in fear of her readers judging her and thinking that she is weak and unable to do her job. What very few people who read this site know is that I am very familiar with this subject matter. Janice conquered her self-proclaimed “selfish fears” of being judged and ended on a very positive note–that people with mental illness are strong people who fight every single day and so I wanted to respond to her. I was going to respond in the plain old comment form us bloggers love so much but I thought that this subject matter should be talked about openly on all platforms because people who suffer from mental illness are widespread and people who suffer alone and in silence make up the bulk of that population. And so, I decided to blog here and hopefully she knows that she is definitely not alone and anyone who happens to find it can also take comfort in knowing that.

While most people who suffer from any form of depression, whether major depressive disorder (also referred to as clinical depression and unipolar disorder), manic depression, or it’s more severe twin bipolar disorder and so on, have a chemical imbalance that affects their brains and the way they function and respond to whatever elements are around them and it is said that those symptoms and later, those diagnoses have always been a part of them genetically. This is not the case with me; at least I don’t believe it is and after checking with the whole host of psychologists and psychiatrists I have been with over the years, neither do they. I am a special case, though sadly, not that special nor rare–I have been diagnosed as having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which has also led me to adopt major depressive disorder.

I was diagnosed with PTSD after everything in my life started feeling like it was just too much. I was overwhelmed, stressed over just about everything, my life seemed to cease resembling what it had always looked like to me. I was in high school and as if high school did not impose enough stress and anxiety on my life in itself, the never-ending questions being asked by myself and others were daunting. I was being expected to know exactly what I wanted to do after high school and not just what I wanted to do, but where I was going and what school would be taking me there. These sort of pressures are already overwhelming for average teenagers, start piling these questions onto a teenager who suddenly feels like they’re crawling out of their own skin and have no idea how something like that could sprout up out of nowhere and convince themselves that they must be crazy and well, you’ve got quite the situation on your hands. I ended up dropping out of high school as a senior and moving out of my father’s house and in with my best friend and her mother. It was not the best of decisions, but it did force me to get a grasp on what was going on with me. After getting a job, living with my friend and her mother for six months and then finally getting enough money together to move into my own apartment, I started going to therapy which luckily for me, was located right across the street from my apartment because those are the kind of perks you get when you move into the middle of a high-trafficked city.

I got a hold on my PTSD. I learned to understand it and the triggers that sent me into episodes of mentally and sometimes even physically re-living abusive and traumatic events from my childhood, which is to blame for my mental illness. My mother was (and maybe still is, I don’t know, I haven’t seen her or heard from her very much at all in upwards of ten years) a drug addict and an alcoholic who kept many, many boyfriends, as well as her dealers and sometimes they were one in the same, around constantly and were the abusers who left me as another statistic of childhood sexual assault.

Janice was completely spot-on when she said that people who live with mental illness fight every day and every day, it is a struggle, but with the right knowledge (remember, in whatever situation you are in, knowledge is power), coping mechanisms and of course, support from people you trust and who do not pass judgement or look at you as being less than anything, it is something that we conquer; and then we get up in the morning the next day and do it again. However, Janis did touch upon why she had never written about this particular struggle of hers and that is because of fear of being judged, which is completely understandable and the reason why I had never brought it to light on Woman Tribune; but also of people thinking that she could not do her job well.

I have been a blogger for many years now. I started blogging on Teen Open Diary and LiveJournal when I was 13 and had just gotten a computer in our house, and I began dabbling in web design and development at 14. I have literally grown up online, which is why I can say with absolute certainty that my mental illness has little impact on my ability to blog and to effectively market and promote my blog. Sure, there are days when I absolutely, positively cannot get out of bed in the morning, which makes me pretty lucky to have a laptop that I keep set up right next to my bed for days like that. And sure, there are times when I absolutely, positively cannot blog because the words just will not come out of me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t send out a short and sweet Tweet, which does help keep your repour up with your dedicated and passionate readers who follow you on Twitter. (Shameless plug: You can follow Woman Tribune on Twitter right here.) I think the internet gives people who live with mental illness even more opportunities to excel. We don’t have to leave the house, which is why you’ll probably be hard pressed to ever see me attend a blogger’s conference, given the fact that having PTSD does make me a bit of a hermit, and we can truly “write out” our struggles, triumphs, tribulations and victories and that is the biggest coping mechanism there is.

Edited to add: I forgot a little “update” on my situation, I suppose. I’m currently 23 years old, I did end up getting my GED less than a year after dropping out of high school and as far as where I’m going and how I’m getting there, I still don’t have that figured all out. However, I can say that for the most part, while I do struggle with my PTSD and depression and while some days I do feel like a walking zombie, for the most part, I am happy. I have a loving partner, an adorable cat, two amazing stepdaughters who show me that I can have a maternal instinct of sorts, regardless of my personal vendettas and while I can’t say that I have a thriving career or a big, fancy house, I do have an apartment in a great area and as far as my “career,” well, you’re looking at it.

- – - – -

I want to thank Janice of 5 Minutes for Mom for opening up the discussion on mental illness and the fears many of us who are also living with it have about “coming out.” Thank you for the inspiration to let it all hang out.

Alexa Ray Joel Starts the New Year by Raising Awareness

Alexa Ray Joel had made many headlines in the past few months after an overdose on sleep medication after, she says, experiencing real depression after a breakup with her boyfriend.

While many of us have had very hard breakups in our lives, some people do experience such heart-wrenching depression that cannot be cured with wallowing either with our best girlfriends, a sad movie, a large pizza with everything on it and copious amounts of ice cream. Because of her own experience, Alexa Ray Joel took to her Facebook page to spread the word about her “current passion”:

I have many exciting new developments for the New Year, and I hope all of you can be a part of it!! This includes new creative projects, and even more volunteer work in hopes to give back to the community and, most importantly, to help young girls with something I feel I know a GREAT deal about: Heartbreak-Related Depression. Although it does not get much attention in our society, it is a very serious and painful condition that often gets “swept under the carpet”. I hope to bring this topic more to light… I’m even going back to school for Psychology in hopes to learn more about this and many other afflictions that many of us have had to face… after all, there’s nothing more fascinating than the human mind and it’s respective conditions…

I think that it’s pretty awesome that she isn’t merely using her celebrity status and her name to blindly “educate” people who may need real help and is going back to school for psychology so she can initiate some real change for those who need it most.

[Image via INF Daily]