www.michelehallak.com

Calling all recruits for The PinUp Gals Project Flash Mob on 25th June in Trafalgar Square 1.22pm!

Our rehearsals for the Flash Mob are in the 3rd floor dance studio at the Wornington Centre. Please click below for the map.

The times are as follows:

Monday 20th June 6.30pm

Friday 24th June 3.30pm

http://www.kcc.ac.uk/contact/wornington.php

Please bring a white T-Shirt or if you want you can purchase an Exclusive PinUp Gals Project T-shirt (at the Flash Mob price of £8 usually £10) from us at the rehearsal if you email us before with your size and quantity ~ pinupgalsproject@gmail.com  All the money from the sale of T-Shirts goes straight back into the project. All the money from the projects calendar goes straight to Macmillan Cancer Support.

I salute you and look forward to seeing you all there,

Michele x

Join Us!! We Want you!!

**TRAFALGAR SQUARE ** SATURDAY 25TH JUNE ** 1PM

FLASH MOB DANCE STARTS 1.22PM SHARP

Please wear a white T-shirt & either army/pinup/combat/jeans/shorts

Come & dance, show support, be there!!

Do it for someone you Love, do it for Yourself, do it for LOVE

RSVP here now:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121342251284302

or

pinupgalsproject@gmail.com

Make a difference xx

Check out our Project Intro ~

Big things are happening ~ watch this space for more details coming soon…..

Mwah xx

My beauties!! Things are getting crazy, exciting over here at PinUp Gals Project headquarters, so since time is of the essence I have great pleasure in sharing with you a quick vlog recipe which is part of my secret to keeping my mouth healthy and my smile sparkly!

Remember, your mouth is the dirtiest part of your body!!! Keeping it clean and healthy not only helps prevent disease, but also keeps your smile bright and your mouth more kissable! 😉

So get your groove on with my quick, easy recipe

Love ya,

Mwah

x

Hey gorgeous people ~ I’ve been so busy with Secret Cinema (shh don’t tell anyone!), that I haven’t had much time to write. But I can’t stop thinking about you all, so I thought I’d make this quick vlog, just for you.

At The PinUp Gals Project our aim is to inspire and encourage health and beauty inside and out. With this in mind, this natural, cheap and simple to make body scrub will leave you feeling re-born with skin soft as a baby’s bum (as my nan says!).

So start preparing your body and soul for the upcoming summer rays (please God fingers crossed, don’t let this be an early summer, Amen) by pampering yourself with love.

Aurevoir for now

Michele ~ x

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• DIY Beauty (missalaneyus.wordpress.com)

Where have I been? Well let me tell ya ~ I dear people have been in Boot Camp ~ Tracy Anderson’s Boot Camp to be exact and boy did she boot my butt!

I dedicated the last 30 days to getting back some of my form, along with working on the project and the daily runnings of life and being mum to a three year old!

The great thing about Boot Camp, is that you can do it at home, so all you need is the will power and dedication to get through it and you’re sorted. Oh and the time to workout for an hour to hour and a half each day, shop for the diet and prepare the 3 meals per day. So yes, it is time consuming, BUT, is it worth it? Yes. Sorry ~ Hell YESSS!!

I lost 6 inches baby so as they say in the movies, ‘You do the math’, (whatever that actually means?). But yeah swear down and all that bizzle, 6 inches!! In weight this was around 7llbs. I started to get abs people!! Abs?! Me!! I have never had abs (?) even at my previous fittest and leanest, which was much leaner than now. Tracy Anderson, I hereby doth swear down to your method chick.

There were times (Tracy can tell you, she was there~) whereby I was so bushed, I would have to rest after putting my son to bed, before dragging my sagging ass up at 10 or 11pm to get up and get that work out in, but I always felt amazing afterwards and the results kept me going through the pain!

I still have a way to go before I’m where I want to be, but for those that are interested, I am now following up with her Post Pregnancy workout (specific for abdominals) and the cardio from her Boot Camp dvd, and am now on day 5 of the Alejandro Junger MD ‘Clean program’, in order to detox into spring and hopefully shed the last pounds!

Exciting News is that the brand new and exclusive T-Shirts featuring our very own PinUp Gals Logo have been printed and will be on sale very soon, so watch this space! All profits from shirt sales will go directly back into the project and towards the creation of our charity calendar on sale September 2012.

For your culinary pleasure here’s my vlog with a delicious, quick, raw breakfast treat:

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• Gwyneth Paltrow’s New Year’s Booty Workout (fitsugar.com)
• Gwyneth Paltrow: Thanks to Tracy Anderson, My ‘Sagging Ass’ Is in Shape (fitsugar.com)

I am currently squealing with excitement as the Project has been moving further forward at a Foxtrot pace!

2011 has so far been a very inspiring year in terms of where we are headed and how beautifully things are coming together.

I have extreme pleasure, pride and satisfaction in announcing world-renowned photographer Mike Owen as our very own P.U.G Project calendar photographer!!! Eeek!! Double squeak!!

Within his (over 25 year) career Mike has worked with the creme brule of world celebrities from Pavarotti, Dame Shirley Bassey, and Joan Collins to modern-day icons such as David Beckham, The Spice Girls and Kylie Minogue. Not to mention his work in 1980’s with British pop-stars such as Duran Duran and Annie Lennox, the latter of which he also directed in her latest music video.

Over the years he has not only exhibited at none other than the National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers gallery, but his work has also extended into the high fashion world, shooting numerous commissions for magazines such as; Italian Vogue, cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazar, Esquire the list goes on with campaigns for the likes of Bailey’s, L’Oreal and Kangol to name a few! (Er yeah really that’s just a few!)

Most recently he has been the guest photographer on 4 series of “How to Look Good Naked” with Gok Wang, and notably his work has been compiled into a 2011 calendar currently being sold in Clinton’s to raise money for Breast cancer Awareness.

Check out Mike’s fabulous portfolio here : www.mikeowenphotography.com

Our PinUp Gals Project calendar will be available in shops from September 2012 the profits of which will be going to a cancer charity (yet to be announced, so watch this space!!)

T-Shirts are expected to go on sale next month ~ for realies this time peeps, so you too can get a piece of the action, and own your very own piece of glamorous apparel whilst supporting a good cause. All profits from T-Shirt sales will go directly into helping to fund the project, so watch out for them!!

The documentary shoot has already begun, tracking the progress of the project and my search for the final pinups.

We are looking for women of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicities to represent as broadly across the board as possible, so please step forward and contact us for an application form we would love to meet you.

And finally, media packs are available for interested media or sponsors, please e-mail us to receive one

Much love and health to you always,

I salute you!

Michele

x

Thank you to everyone who has uplifted and supported the Project by reading, subscribing, commenting, donating and taking part. It’s been an amazing year with so many things already achieved.

This New Year I have just one resolution.

To be honest, I was never one to conform, and the New Year has never been my only or main starting point.

I choose to look forward rather than back, I choose to be grateful for now and each day as it unfolds, rather than tally up the celebrations and disastors of time past.

I’m grateful that all that I faced this year has brought me to the space that I’m in now. I can slowly see the jigsaw of my life that was thrown in the air so long ago, finally settling piece by piece, and I can see parts of the new picture that it is starting to reveal.

This year I am grateful for so many things, one of them being, the giving up of lists!!

I gave up making lists, and instead began to concentrate on simplifying. It is still a work in process, but I learnt the more focused and simple I can make life, the clearer the path forward becomes.

Lists were my way of exerting unrealistic pressures and expectations onto myself. No thank you. I gave that up.

This year, I plan to continue building on the foundation that I started to lay this year.

Being kind to myself.

The kinder I am to myself, the more I can give. I’m invested in becoming the best version of myself, I figure this is the first step.

Try it. Be kind. To you.

Be grateful for the abundance that envelopes you.

But most of all,

Just be you.

Are you ready to be one? 1/1/11 ~ Happy New Year! 😀

I flicked through my posts lately and thought maybe I should write something about the darker feelings we have, or the shadow self.

This may sound suprising or even strange, but flicking through, I realised how happy and wonderful all the articles looked and I understand that although this can be uplifting it’s also a bit unrepresentative of real life 100% of the time. 

Let me elaborate. When I was sick I was spinning around faster than hamster in a hula-hoop trying to figure out what, why, how I had made myself sick and what I could do to reverse it. True to my beliefs, I felt the answer was saturating myself with positive thoughts, foods and treatments, as much as I possibly could. However, I also like to be very honest with myself and was and still am fully committed to exorcising the anger, frustration and pain I felt throughout my illness as well as before and after it.

My daily dose of positive blog subscriptions was part of my morning prescription for staying focused and uplifted. But some days the shadow just wouldn’t shake itself off my neck, instead it would coil up cosily in my lap and flutter it’s lashes. 

On those days I found it so impossible to take on board the positive, smiley, hopefullness brought to me by e-mail. ‘What did they know?’ ‘Yeah right unless you’re a 31 year old mother of an infant who also has cancer’. These thoughts and feelings of hopelessness and self pity, were some what justified and needed to come out in order to make room to put the good stuff in. At least that’s what I believe.

I never found a blog or link that said anything like ‘hey I feel crap today, cancer is tough, life is tough, yes we are all going to die, but tomorrow is a better day’. Personally, some days I wanted and needed that more than forever rainbows and green juice recipes and skippy little poems about how the world is of course an onion and what is meant to be will be.

An Onion aka: Life

So, I just want to acknowledge that life is NOT always a bowl of cherries, although it can often be. And although I greatly believe and live by the power of manifestation, karma and the laws of quantum physics, some days truly are just, well, sh**. I am also a firm believer that repressed feelings are a major contributor to ill health especially cancer. So what to do?

Me & my Shadow

Here’s a few ideas;

• This too shall pass, remember nothing lasts forever, not even this moment ~ no one, not even yourself will feel as sorry for yourself soon as you do right now, so make the most of it!
• Take some time to be alone ~ re-connect with yourself & your feelings, however painful, allow the feelings to be ~ this can be the hardest/easiest thing ~ but it really works if you’re patient and brave ~ congratulate yourself for doing this too, as it’s a great achievement
• Give your feelings permission to exist ~ you have a right to feel this way ~ you really do

Permanent nature

• Re-connect with the world/universe ~ a walk in nature often does the trick or if that’s impossible, just spending time observing any form of life, a plant, an insect etc will give you a grounded feeling of security ~ a sense of being a part of the world
• Indulge yourself ~ pamper, physically hold yourself, cry, feed yourself beautiful food, read, walk, paint, bathe, anything that brings you comfort
  

  Oops!!

   

• Ground yourself ~ lie down on the floor, close your eyes, place your hand on your belly and inhale and exhale deeply into the space under your hand, feel your hand rise and fall, feel your body supported by the ground, the universe will support you, believe, just as the ground supports your weight
• Yogic philosophy states that all human emotional pain begins with the misguided feeling that we are alone, seperate. However, this is a false belief. We ARE a part of the universe, whatever your beliefs, we ARE a part of life and the world around us, remember that. YOU ARE IMPORTANT, especially to me 🙂 It’s true ~ I wrote this for you, you know?
• Journal, write and keep, or burn or destroy your deepest darkest thoughts, come on I dare you!
• If all else fails. Find a grassy, hill and roll down it like a pencil ~ you heard me! (be careful!)
  

  E.g of perfect pencil rolling hill

   

Lastly these are two of my most favourite mind games/tricks I like to play with my mind when it’s trying to play with me ~ remember you are NOT your mind, YOU control your mind, the mind does NOT control YOU, it is just an organ ~ o.k

• See the bigger picture ~ Imagine you’re standing infront of a beautiful, big tapestry. This is your life. You are relating to someone the stories of your life and what each little loop of thread represents, this is when I started school, emigrated, won a cheese eating contest, dumped the biggest loser in the world, realised life was an onion etc. Each thread/experience helps to make up the bigger picture, i.e the story of your life. Each thread is important, if threads are missing there will be holes in the picture. Now it gets cooler, look at the tapestry again. Where abouts are you right now? Choose a spot. In this spot it’s threads are a bit messy and muddled, maybe there’s one or two loops missed entirely. Now imagine as you relate your story, do you want to say, ‘This is my story where x, y and z happened and then I acheived a,b,c and then f happened and well…that’s it..I gave up, the end’ And there you are in this scenario standing with a half made thread bare tapestry, incomplete. OR do you wanna say, ‘This is my story x,y,z happened I acheieved a,b,c and then f, oh my this seems so long ago now, you can see how many stitches were missed, at the time I thought it was the end of me, but here you see I got right back in there and did g & h & s & p…’ as you proudly stand infront of your unique and beautiful complete tapestry with it’s complete picture.

• Give up. I mean it. Just give up, whatever that means to you. Go to bed, wallow, cry, sulk, become mute for a while. And then slowly realise, that you DO have a choice. Once you give in entirely to the minds tricks it can become a little bored. If you indulge yourself for a bit you may find yourself desperate to get into the scrum again, with renewed energy. This is because, we do have a choice. Sometimes life throws so much sh*zzola (yes it’s a word ~ what?!) at you, it’s easy to forget WE are choosing. Choosing to fight and overcome. We can give up too if we really want to, it does get boring quite quickly though. YOU are in control. And remember life is an onion at the end of a forever rainbow, with skipping unicorns (mostly!)

Melting yet still smiling!