Healthy Eating is the Ultimate Discipline
By · CommentsEating serves so many purposes. Most people don’t restrict it to the main purpose.
The main purpose would be to get the fuel and recovery we need for burning muscle from strenuous exercise. When man was created, he had the need to survive like all animals by foraging and hunting. He needed lots of pure energy.
He got this energy by eating foods that were available in the ground and that ran around on four feet. Everything was clean and pure. Your body’s needs have not changed. We have only changed our activities.
We have also changed the reasons we eat. We no longer eat just to survive. We eat to handle our emotions. We eat food our body doesn’t recognize. We eat what is cheap and not just what is pure. Our body gets confused and our body gets sick and breaks down.
Few things are more difficult than eating what we need and what is good for us. The result of disciplined eating is more energy all day, better health, longer lives, better performance, more active brains, and happier dispositions.
The discipline of healthy eating can lead to better discipline in other phases of our lives.
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How to Bake the Cake of Happiness
By · CommentsFor some reason I seem to be stuck on the cake analogy lately, but I have found that happiness requires several ingredients.
You have to have some peace of mind or freedom from anxiety or you are not going to be happy. There are some important requirements and steps that can be taken. I cannot include your need for medication for anxiety but I will assume normal every day stresses of job, family, and future types of anxieties.
You need to have a plan and feel your house is in order. Your finances don’t have to perfect, but you need to be free of worry about impending doom. You have to live within your means. If you can cut back to the point you have savings every month, even if its a dollar, you are there.
Your relationships have to be in order. If you have unresolved issues with people close to you, this will prey on your mind. You have to be in good health. Chronic issues or concern about developing issues can wreak havoc on your nervous system.
If you are clear of health problems, start building better health in the future with healthy eating and exercise. The leanness you will gain, the pride you will feel, and the relaxation that will result from daily exercise will start to build exponential benefits.
Start expressing yourself. You are a wonder of nature. You have the same talents as given to famous people except they have practiced more than you. Start investing time into a passion that expresses who you are. As you build competence you will experience periods of “flow” which is engagement without concern for judgment. The brain produces dopamine as happiness in reward for your efforts.
Having your house in order and creating flow in your life daily produces a very delicious cake.
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Exercise Improves Productivity and Happiness
By · CommentsExercise is better than a magic pill. It can do things for your mind and body that no other consumable product or activity can equal. The body needs to burn muscle every day to get rid of inflammation and add restorative chemicals to the cells. The mind needs exercise to support the beta and alpha waves that run the left and right brain.
The oxygen renewing rush of heavy breathing energizes all our systems. When we have pumped fresh oxygen into a body that is fit, it creates a unmatched euphoria. Runners call it a high and become addicted to it. When I was running with a community track club, we would see injured runners jogging with casts on their feet.
I need to burn muscle every day now for the tranquility on which my mind seems to thrive. I need that peaceful exhaustion from surfing or running stairs that allows the mellowness to take over my brain. I like to work hard in the morning right up to that time I really need a break.
Exercise refreshes so much better than other habits we form to get relief. After exercise I am fully productive again. The rush of oxygen and draining of excess angst from stressing on creativity flush my system and restart my batteries.
I also have that feeling of accomplishment and elevated self esteem from knowing that I am building fitness, immunity, health, and longevity. I also look better from daily exercise. Nothing like stroking the ego a little. The best time to exercise is when you feel too tired to exercise. Give it a run and you will be happy you did.
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Real Fun Doesn’t Need Alcohol
By · CommentsWhen ever we think about blowing off some steam, alcohol seems to be part of the equation. One of the reasons we need to blow off steam is that we are not having fun during the week. We really can’t help it if we don’t like our job or if it is too stressful because we need the money.
Real fun comes from stretching your capabilities and reaching new plateaus in self expression or new frontiers in your passionate pursuits. There is risk expressing yourself. It takes as much courage as jumping out of an air plane. I know, I have done both. I used to think that if I conquered things that scared me I would eliminate fear.
I learned you can’t eliminate fear and if you hide, you just live a boring life. You can learn to manager fear. Big time surfers looking at 25 foot waves have lots of fear. They know that death could be the result of their fun. They have practiced competence and apply it to test their capabilities. That’s real fun.
Testing your limits creates adrenaline and the right amount of adrenaline leads to the production of dopamine. Dopamine is your brain neurotransmitter commonly associated with happiness. Now we’re talking. If we could have the right dose of daily adrenaline that produced copious amounts of dopamine, we wouldn’t need alcohol to have fun.
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I Hate Being Bored, and You?
By · CommentsI hear people say it a lot. What makes things or life boring? Not enough excitement. This is a very subjective word and is probably different for everyone. Excitement for me is challenge. If I don’t have challenge, but in the right degree, I am instantly bored.
Flow is the engagement in activities that are personally challenging but achievable. This causes the production of the brain chemical dopamine or happiness. So maybe I am a dopamine junkie. Being engaged in activities that are challenging, but where I can win make me happy. I like to write, surf, design websites, cook new things, read, and meet new people.
I have more mind time by eliminating distractions that require a lot of brain ram and can rob me of creativity. My prime time is involved in creativity because that’s what makes me happy. My down time is refreshing and creating the time for my nervous system/brain to rest. If I fill that time with TV, text messaging, social networking, I am using up my refresh time.
Exercise is one of the best refreshers. Then you need to eat healthy so the brain has maximum support and no drag. The digestive system has to work a minimum so it doesn’t take the oxygen and blood needed by the brain. Eating big meals, red meat, sugar, processed foods all create digestion and brain drain.
The final step is the need for courage. Nothing is more risky and scary than laying yourself on the line by expressing yourself. Would you get up in front of an audience and sing acapella? Not me in a million years. I even found it difficult to start writing using the “I”. But laying out who we are to the world without too much fear of judgment is the ultimate challenge.
Whether you are going to open a business, engage in athletics, dance, speak, cook in a restaurant, write poetry, or even consider parenthood, you are laying it out to be judged. This is exciting. If you are not expressing yourself in some way, your life is probably not very exciting and you are wondering why you are bored.
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Can Life Be Fun First, Life Second?
By · CommentsLet’s see if I can picture your day. You will start with your dash to work picking up some coffee and food on the run. Then you will check your emails. During the day you will watch your smart phone for text messages. The day will be stressful. At night you can’t wait for the first rest with a drink or some TV.
You have approximately 75,000 days on earth. Humans feel best when they are engaging in activities they enjoy that are challenging but manageable. This exercise creates dopamine, our happiness brain chemical. Would nature have created the most pleasurable sensations we can enjoy if she didn’t expect us to use them?
Contribution takes the activity engagement or “flow” to a higher level. The ancients said God can only give and man can only receive. We have learned to be pretty good at asking, “What’s in if for me?” But when man has received enough, he wants to give back. The ancients said this is our purpose. They had very few distractions in their lives and got much closer to understanding what life is all about.
We could emulate them as well. We have too many distractions. We don’t prioritize engaging in activities that really make us humm and using our talents to make others happier and more productive. Self expression is fun. Contributing is fun. They require getting out of our comfort levels, which is risky. Risk is an adrenaline rush we love and when it doesn’t kill us, makes life exciting.
The best way to introduce some new exciting activities would be to take out some existing activities. Free your mind of some of the things on which it always focuses. Spend some time out doors looking at a sunset and see if you can handle being with yourself for a half hour. If not, that is a little scary. It might be a clue as to the direction you can take to get out of your comfort zone and find yourself. You might find it very risky.
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Fitness is a Key to Staying Young
By · CommentsYou can feel old at any age. As soon as you bend over and it hurts or you try and carry something and its difficult or you have to run a short distance and it almost kills you, you say, “Man I’m Getting Old”.
Your quality of life at any age is dependent on being able to do things you want to do. On a trip over seas after college a friend and I witnessed all these retirees as tourists. It seemed they could barely walk let alone put in the rigorous hours of touring they had probably dreamed about all their lives.
Even as your kids get older there are things you might want join in and participate with them. There is skiing, baseball games, jogs around the park, hikes, and bike rides. When your kids have kids you are going to need lots of energy to keep up with the really young ones.
Fitness slips away slowly and is tough to get back. You are less inclined to work yourself hard or go through the pain the further you let it go. Exercise, stretching, and aerobics hurt when you are not in shape. The least you could do is when you wake up, spend ten minutes before coffee stretching and doing a few push ups. If you are not stretched, you will pull muscles and get strains when you try something more vigorous.
Then you need an aerobic activity. Walking is good and least of the painful exercises. Try and throw in some runs, bike riding, or hiking after work or on the weekend. If you belong to a gym, don’t let your membership go to waste.
If you are in shape, you can take up new sports in your 50’s and 60’s. If you are not in shape, you can feel old in your 30’s.
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Happiness is a Collection of Habits
By · CommentsSetting your mindset to positive is what happiness is about. Do you see the glass as half full, are you optimistic about outcomes, do you feel gratitude every day?
If each circumstance you face is an opportunity instead of an insurmountable obstacle meant to ruin your life, you probably smile a lot, enjoy various activities during the day, love to eat healthy, exercise, treat others kindly, and feel you are contributing to the better of lives or the planet.
If you don’t have these feelings then maybe you should start including the above activities and behaviors in your life. The result of each one is usually more dopamine which is your brain’s happiness chemical. Flow is engaging in activities that are challenging but within your capabilities. Flow is a real dopamine producer.
Eating healthy and exercising support positive brain activity and support both alpha and beta waves. Beta waves at the healthy level give you the adrenaline you need to accomplish tasks but is short of the amount that throws you into anxiety or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Building health as a priority says you value your life and you want to live better and longer to make a better contribution. Placing tasks over health says you probably are anxious and not getting the most enjoyment out of your days on earth. Even if you are a self sacrificer, your well being is important for you to develop gratitude and a generous spirit that others will find infectious.
Living well is a contribution because it acts as an example that others can follow to make their lives better.
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The Life Affects of Having One or Two Passions
By · CommentsThere are not too many positive feelings better than passion. Even people who express anger or like being scared at the movies are getting high on the intense feelings that make you feel alive. We have a need to feel alive and if we don’t get it from positive engagement we often turn to negative behaviors.
Flow is the engagement in activities that we find challenging, but are within our capabilities. When engaged we bar distractions from our consciousness and get lost in the activity at hand. It is the supreme level of enjoyment. Our brain registers our contentment by producing dopamine, the happiness neurotransmitter.
Having a passion in which you can engage everyday starts setting up your emotional balance to a positive outlook. You look forward to it in advance and you revel in the feelings afterward. It creates a rest for your nervous system similar to sleep or a vacation. We need these breaks from the tension and stress of daily existence.
If you can string several passionate activities together in a day, your life starts looking more like flow and less like negativity. Passions that lead to flow require practiced activity, discipline, risk, and courage. To get better you have to leave your comfort zone. Risk is exciting, but this is controlled risk in many ways. The only real risk is whether your ego take set backs or failure to progress.
Better to adrenalize your system with risk of progress than negative behaviors that reinforce you are alive.
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Turning Negative Thoughts Around to Positive
By · CommentsWe all have those little moments when the negative thoughts try to take over our mind. They can come in the middle of a perfectly good day or often slip in during the night when we are sleeping and vulnerable.
The first trick is catching them and saying to yourself, these are negative thoughts. The second trick is having your little reservoir of positive thoughts that you can access at any time. You have to identify that you are having negative thoughts and move to your positive thoughts.
I can go to a day where I had three good events. I made a great break through in my surfing in the morning, I went with a friend to a fun restaurant we hadn’t tried, and then I sold a surf board in the evening. On another day I had a fun surf session in the morning and enjoyed a visit from a friend and went to a happy hour with two other friends.
It doesn’t matter that these events actually occurred on different days. I put them all together on the same day and can recall how I felt about each break through or social occasion. Each recall puts my mind into a happy place and forces the bad thought to the rear. I will stay with the happy thoughts until the bad ones are gone.
The final trick is catching the bad thoughts early and every time. As soon as doubt or anxiety or fear creeps in, I go to a positive, happy, or success story thought. Luckily, negative and happy thoughts can’t exist in the same space.
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Fun Breaks Make Life Fun
By · CommentsYou can take a break from routine and it doesn’t always have to be a vacation. Sometimes the spontaneous is the most fun. When you return to your routine, you feel invigorated. Sometimes dropping a routine is just as good. For instance, try not watching TV one night and see what happens.
A friend asked me if I wanted to visit a great little restaurant in downtown San Diego that he had not tried. It turned out to be a great spot with a view of the bay, windows open all around and a selection of draft ales. It was a great break. I had lunch with another friend yesterday and we enjoyed a roof top view of Oceanside while sitting in the sun and having good food.
Sometimes going for a run or taking time off to do something you would not normally do adds a little spontaneity and reminds you that there is life outside your life. I live at the beach and see it every day. I was surprised how invigorating a trip to Kauai was just because it was a total change of scenery and routine.
Your life can have more subtle but just as impacting changes by adding activities and taking away activities. Do something new you had been daring yourself to try. Try writing, painting, cooking, reading, hiking, biking, charity, or any number of things that could become passions. Take away distractions. Leave your phone at home for a few hours or a day. Don’t read the newspaper one day. Leave your emails or social networking alone for a day.
The ultimate change is to give yourself more time with yourself to see if any creative thoughts arise. Its hard to be happy if you can’t spend time with your own thoughts. Create a little time each day that you do something just for you. Then create more time where you pursue something just for you.Your life can get into flow where you combine work and passions.
When that time becomes a contribution to others, you are going to feel really inspired.
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Eating Just Half Has Surprise Results
By · CommentsWe are used to cleaning our plate. I always marveled how my daughter as an adolescent would push away her plate with food on it and say I am full. Not many adults can do that. I have learned to do it and there are a few nice surprises.
I cook most of my meals and it is easy to just take half of what I cook. If needed, I can always access the rest. But what I find is that after ten minutes, what I ate fills me fine. I can eat the rest later. I also feel better eating less. Eating less maintains more blood circulating in the body to bring blood and oxygen to the brain instead of to the digestive process.
Since I write a lot during the day, I want to feel mentally energized without having to resort to coffee. If you have mentally taxing work, stressful work, or even work involving exercise, less food makes you more productive. The key is to eat less but eat more often.
Many people will say that is not possible. There are all kinds of small snacks that can be appealing, satisfying, and energizing. Fruit, nuts and raisins, cheese, peanuts, and lots of water are good appeasers and energizers.
When hungry or tired reach for a few glasses of water first. Our early man body was used to getting water from food and thinks it still can. Therefore, hunger is often a false signal. Tiredness can often be abated by increasing our blood and oxygen supply, which water does immediately. It increases our blood volume.
Athletic coaches want athletes to hydrate before events to increase blood volume and oxygen.
Eating less than you want is great discipline. The most powerful asset you possess is controlling your mind. Living disciplined, focusing on tasks, pushing the envelope by taking risks, living in gratitude, being kind to others are all exercises in mind control.
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Fitness Follows Exercise and Healthy Eating
By · CommentsThe definition of fitness can vary depending on to whom it applies. A professional athlete has to be fit to a higher standard than the layman. The weekend warrior can be fit to a higher standard than a person who only walks for exercise. The walker is more fit than the person who gets very little exercise but eats healthy.
One result of fitness is health. The healthy person rarely gets sick because they have a healthy immune system. That is acquired by having an alkaline based blood supply. Alkaline based blood supply is created from eating food that grows out of the ground to a greater extent than sugars, flours, processed, and other dead foods.
The purpose of exercise to gain fitness is to burn muscle. When muscle is burned some cells die and are replaced by stronger cells. The person who starts doing ten push ups might soon be able to do 100. The body knows how to make itself stronger if it is properly exercised.
The level of fitness is fluid. You can keep getting more fit. The pace of fitness depends on how much muscle you are burning every day. If you exercise daily, you get fit faster. Week end warriors get fit over time. I experienced getting stronger surfing where everyone starts off in deficit. Paddling in the ocean requires muscles you really can’t train in advance.
The combination of healthy eating and your level of exercise will take you to an appropriate level of fitness that you can subjectively measure. Those who get carried away and want to test what the human body can endure get involved in competitions that include triathalons, marathons, ocean swims and so forth.
We might not yet have discovered the upper limit of fitness, but some people are always pushing it.
What’s your level?
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Doing the Right Things Everyday for Happiness
By · CommentsHappiness can be at the end of the curve, but health and fitness are just as important in building a foundation for a successful life. When I say successful, I am not talking about money and fame. I am talking about having gratitude and enjoying every day.
Good results do not happen in a month or even a few months although they can start to indicate progress. The best results start showing themselves after years of developing the right healthy eating, exercise, and spiritual daily routines. You chip at the stone with your hammer and chisel and pretty soon you have a beautiful statue.
Healthy eating begins with getting the right foods into your diet and eliminating the harmful sugars, fats, processed and restaurant foods. Exercise begins with even walking and should progress to stretching, building core, building upper body strength and adding aerobics.
Spiritual work develops from engaging in activities for which you have passion and developing your skills. If they are outdoors, you start increasing your connection to Nature and yourself. It also includes appreciating your self and your opportunity to make a difference while you are here. You don’t have to invent a vaccine, you can make those around you better enjoy their lives.
If you start developing a life that rewards you with pleasure, those around you will have more pleasure in your company and start to emulate some of your thinking and habits. The greater empathy and kindness you can show your circle of influence the more likely they are to pass it on.
Everyone can start building more happiness for themselves and those around them.
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Why Health and Fitness Can Lead to Happiness
By · CommentsHappiness often seems like the elusive dream. It is the goal of so many worthwhile pursuits. We have dreams as children of being successful and then being happy. What goes wrong so often in the process?
We confuse pursuit of worthwhile goals and achievement with behaviors that are the foundation of happiness. We are born happy and we can have happy anytime. We can have as much happiness as we can stand. Gay Hendricks in a great book called The Big Leap says our biggest obstacle is mostly that we don’t feel we deserve it.
Well that’s a slap in the face. Can you imagine that we are our own obstacle to what we want? Things happen to us when we are young that make us feel guilty about success, feeling better than others, feeling happy while others are suffering, being all that we can be and so on.
I found my path to happiness by building it anew from my own foundation. I had been pretty good in my life about achieving, making money, buying lots of toys, but happiness seemed to be hiding behind the next thrill. When I started eating healthy, I began a road of establishing a connection with myself and nature that delivered the goods.
Finding the beauty of health and fitness in our bodies that Nature, the Universe, or God gave us makes us appreciative that we weren’t just created to live a life of separation and toil. We are at one with all that is around us and we only need appreciate that after 3. 5 billion years of life, we have arrived. This is our day in the sun.
Be appreciative. Have gratitude that your mind, body, and spirit can achieve great self expression of what you believe, feel is important and/or want to contribute. The discipline, openness to risk, and courage I developed along the path gave rise to a life more in flow.
Flow is the engagement in activities that are your passions and yet are still challenging. In the process, you are lost in your own world without regard for time, judgment or reward. This produces dopamine which is the brain telling you in a natural process that you are on the right track.
Don’t buy more stuff. Get in touch with your own body and make it clean and exercised.
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