Reasons to Stay Fit

Beyond the aesthetics

The Pyramid of Luxuries

The Bespoke - $4,000 Vacation + $1,000 VISA eGift Card

The Ultra High End - Kindle Paperwhite + 3-Month Subscription

The Superpremium - Captain Kangaroo

The Premium Core - Stanley Quencher H2.0

The Accessible Core - Reasons to Stay Fit

The Affordable Luxury - Pressured to Use Social Media?

The Everyday Luxury - Updated Ducky Tran Products

The Bespoke

The winner for January 2024 Bespoke Photo Contest is MURPHY from Dallas, Texas. This was her submission for “a picture in nature that amazes you”:

I was able to contact the member that referred her and surprised Murphy. She has won the $4,000 Vacation Voucher + $1,000 Gift Card. Congratulations Murphy!

Any member can win a vacation package like Murphy and Tam, our previous winners, just submit an entry for this February’s Bespoke Photo Contest!

Click on the banner to enter The Bespoke Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $4,000 Vacation Voucher + $1,000 in VISA eGift Cards [ARV $5,012]

• Odds: For every 660 Ducky Tran premium member by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) vacation bundle Prize

• Contest Period: January 31, 2024 at 10 AM CST to February 27, 2024 at 10 PM CST

See Issue 1 for more content about The Bespoke Prize.

The Ultra High End

Previous Contest Winner

The winner for Issue 11 is KIM from Grand Prairie, Texas! She has won the $100 Disney+ eGift Card. This is her submission for “your favorite cleaning tool”:

A tool should always make it easier for you in some way, so if you’re using this dishwasher as a drying rack, you may not see it as a tool but a piece of furniture. Unless it’s the only space that can hold all the dishes you’ve been saving up for the last week.

This Week’s Contest

Click on the banner to enter The Ultra High End Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: Kindle Paperwhite (16GB) + 3-Month Subscription [ARV $170]

• Odds: For every 120 Ducky Tran premium members by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) Kindle bundle

• Contest Period: February 7, 2024 at 10 AM CST to February 13, 2024 at 10 PM CST

This week I will be giving out a Kindle by Amazon. It comes in 3 different colors, a subscription for the Amazon library and no lockscreen ads.

I’m not an avid reader but I do love reading a physical book more than reading digitally. It’s just something about holding a physical book versus reading from a bright screen that feels better, and is usually better for your eyes.

However, books are not always the most convenient as my favorite books tend to be bulky and not easy to carry around. Luckily, this is the same conclusion many people have about books so now we have the Kindle Paperwhite.

The Kindle Paperwhite is a tablet that allows you to read as if you were reading from pages of a book while having the versatility of the 21st century technology. Slim, access to libraries of books, and great for your eyes, the Kindle is an amazing piece of technology disguised as a piece of matte paper.

The Superpremium

This week’s Superpremium topic is Captain Kangaroo in Okinawa, Japan.

Imagine this, you see an amazing restaurant ad on a billboard, you drive 25 minutes to order the new item featured on the advertisement, but then you are presented with what looks like the beat-up, miniature-version of the same item you just saw 25 minutes ago. I’m sure we have all experienced this before, especially through American fast-food chains.

Captain Kangaroo has the opposite problem. Captain Kangaroo is a restaurant on the island of Okinawa, Japan, where the menu pictures do not truly represent how massive these burgers are! You go to Captain Kangaroo, you sit down thinking about how much your friend raves about it, you order 2 burgers and fries because you’re American and that’s normal for you at McDonald’s.

Well, you’re wrong! As you are waiting for your food to come out, you start seeing enormous burgers being brought out to customers. Then you start planning how to take the food back or who you can share it with. Finally, the food arrives in front of you and your stomach cramps up from the fear of eating all that food!

Jokes aside, this restaurant was an amazing burger restaurant I got try out when I traveled to Japan. It wasn’t hidden but it was only known to people through word-of-mouth as it was in a part of the island that most Americans don’t venture to. The ambiance was open and inviting, the place was packed during lunch, and the staff, like at most Japanese establishments, were top-notch!

The burgers were not made like Western burgers, it must have had egg or a different technique of cooking because it had a smoked-meat look and taste to it. It was a juicy, fresh, and well-seasoned burger compared to Western-style burgers. The best thing was whatever you ordered on the menu; you would receive its doppelganger in the life-size version.

The Premium Core

This week’s Premium Core topic is the Stanley Quencher H2.0.

This week’s focus is physical wealth. One of the hardest things for me is fitness and hydration. I have a packed schedule weekly and fitting in time to work out is not easy. I must think of creative ways to fit in time to stay active and keeping myself hydrated, so here are some of my unique ways:

1. I have 4 little girls, so I play house, horsey or choo-choo train with them. It may not seem like much, but I am exhausted after being the train or the horse for 30 minutes.

2. In the morning, I fill up 2-3 water bottles and line it up right next to my laptop so it reminds me to drink while I’m working remotely.

3. I only have my running shoes, which I only have a single pair, next to the door. So, when I leave the house, I always try to have running shoes on. It might not seem like much, but when I wear running shoes, I walk much faster than when I just wear my flip-flops.

4. Every meal time, I make sure to always fill-up 1-2 of my water bottles and put them right next to my plate so I don’t forget to finish them.

5. When I’m talking on the phone, I stand up and start pacing. It has always been a habit, but I realized sometimes I’m on the phone for hours a day, so now I get my steps in too!

My approach to fitness has always been take small steps and do things that work for you. For this week, I wanted to make it easy for you to stay hydrated and hopefully it will inspire you to do more for your personal health and fitness.

Stanley cups have been trending on the internet, so I’ve decided to make it more affordable for you to get your branded drinking mug. If drinking from a branded mug makes you want to drink more water, more power to the brand. Or you can use it for its intended purpose and put tea/coffee in it.

Here’s the deal this week:

Deal #1: I am offering a $45 Stanley Quencher H2.0 (40oz) for just $15 at shop.duckytran.com. There will only 10 available. Come get one for yourself or give it to someone as a gift! It will be available in every color that isn’t sold out on Stanley’s Amazon page. When selecting one, just look at the Amazon page to see the colors.

I know there are a few new members, so if you have trouble finding the password to the shop.duckytran.com, it is at the end of each newsletter and it changes weekly.

The Accessible Core

Reasons to Stay Fit

It is known that physical fitness is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. Regular exercise can help you lose weight, relieve stress, and help you live longer. All of them are important, but are those reasons enough to make you want to move?

There are many more reasons, let me list a few that may compel you to move:

1. Regular exercise can help you sleep better! By relieving mental stresses and exhausting your daily energy, a good workout during the day can help you catch better Z’s at night by removing the excess energy and stresses that make you toss and turn during the night.

2. Most know it can reduce stress, but how about improving your memory? Regular exercise helps remove cloudy mental blocks normally caused by stress. This helps your mental image become clearer, which in turn makes it more memorable. Also, exercise induces good blood flow that helps provide nutrients to your brain making it easier for your brain to do its job.

3. Physical activity has been linked to better attention span! Get your kids moving. I’m not sure if you have noticed, but the younger generation of indoor video-gamers and social media socialites tend to have a problem with attention retention. It seems counter-intuitive that you need to move to focus on things when they’re not moving, but the brain connections that are made by physical activity focuses your mind to become more resilient to focus on a specific event.

4. Did you know exercise can reduce your risk for certain cancers and serious outcomes from infectious diseases? Those that are active tend to bounce back from the flu and pneumonia more often. And most internal organ cancer risks are reduced with regular activity.

5. This last one tends to be overlooked. Regular exercise can improve bone and joint pains. Joint pain has become a normal complaint for many office workers and this is generally due to sedentary lifestyles. By getting some exercise during the week, you can improve the way your bone and joints feels.

Here are my tips so it may be easier for you to achieve the above reasons:

1. If you can’t fit in a full routine, just do 3 sets of 20 jumping jacks and 10 pushups a few hours before bed. The blood flow and activity are the important part. Adjust the number of repetitions to your strength level so you’re not sore tomorrow.

2. Power-walk your dog or (with) your husband for 30 minutes after dinner.

3. Play red-light green-light with the little ones; if they’re older, skip a set of chores, and in-place have a power-walk and discuss how if they walk and talk with you daily, they get to skip certain chores. It’s a win-win, they do the chore or they talk to you. (Sorry, I have a feeling most will just do the chores.)

4. Be intentional when moving, just push the grocery cart a bit faster, pace while on the phone, or take the stairs instead of the elevator to the 40th floor.

5. You don’t have to play full-contact football but sports tend to help the associated joints that you use most often. For example, if you have knee pain, light dribbling of a soccer ball each day can help. If you have wrist pain due to computer use, table tennis or playing catch can reduce it’s severity.

Even though physical fitness is beneficial for your physique, don’t forget there are many other things it is good for that you don’t even see.

The Affordable Luxury

Issue 11 Community Poll Results

This last week’s poll results:

1. Most members don’t feel any pressure to buy Valentine’s Day gifts for their significant other except for the 2 guys that “don’t have to buy anything” but will or they may end up on the couch for a week.

2. Most of you think a livable wage per person in the United States is between $3,000-$7,000, so I’ll put another poll to get a more precise answer.

3. For the upcoming videos I’ll be making, most of you are interested in food and travel content. I will be recreating the food and travel articles and visiting new places so I can get some videos put together. My goal is to turn the travels in the videos into future prizes for the members!

This Week’s Community Poll

The Everyday Luxury

(The referral program is only viewable on the email version of the newsletter.)

Since the Ducky Tran brand is new, I’ve been looking for better materials, vendors, and styles for all the Ducky Tran branded products. I have a few items that have been updated such as the hat and T-shirts.

I will be posting the updates here in a few weeks. I just wanted to let everyone that have received prizes through the referral program know that they will receive the updated items as well.

Visit shop.duckytran.com with the weekly password: kindle