Just a Little Better

It sounds so easy. “I’ll do just a little bit better.”  But, just a little better, in reality, can be a lot better. It can mean all the difference in getting enough sleep, eating more fruits and vegetables, consuming fewer calories, fewer sweets, fewer refined carbs, less alcohol. The list goes on.

For many of us, our daily decisions revolve around our work, our children and families, how we choose to and need to spend our time, what we are able to afford,  how we prepare our meals (or if we prepare our meals) . . . you get the idea. And, the idea is, that wherever we  are along the continuum, we can all do just a little better.

If you have two soft drinks a day, have just one (and then do better still). Do the same for your children. If you have dessert at every meal, try limiting it to once a week, or on special occasions. If you have sugar-laden breakfast cereals (because, after-all, that’s what your kids see on television), switch to a whole grain cereal topped with berries or a banana. If you don’t have time for 20 minutes of moderate physical activity every day, try for three times a week—maybe a family walk after dinner rather than half an hour of TV.

Even with time, financial and work constraints, we can all find ways to make even the smallest improvements in our lifestyle behavior choices. By adopting a just a little better attitude, you not only do better, you set a better example, and your children learn by that example.

 

Keep in mind too, that just a little better isn’t just anything—it might just be everything.

Digging in the Dirt

This morning's harvest

I love digging in the dirt. It’s about as down to earth as you can get. The fenced garden walls crawl with morning glories and other flowering vines, and they are beautiful in the early morning light.  The gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, leafy greens, cucumbers, eggplant, varieties of squash, okra, beans, potatoes, onions, peppers, herbs, carrots, radishes, beets, daikon and more, assure us we will eat well. It’s hard to feel the ever-present daily stresses when digging, tending and nurturing.

But, then there’s the work.  And, the work to maintain our garden paradise means aching shoulders and backs, a lot of mud, blisters, broken fingernails, and time. It’s a lot of work. But, then there’s the harvest (yea!). And, then there’s the more.

You can’t have a harvest without the digging, planting, watering, thinning, weeding, and ongoing care. It takes constant attention and tending. It becomes a part of your day. You can’t ignore the weeds, the bugs and grubs (yuck),  the watering demands, or the ongoing day-to-day attention required to produce a fruitful garden. It starts as a collection of tender shoots, demanding attention, and you can’t pay attention part time or only when it’s convenient. If you only tended your garden on Tuesday and Saturday, it would wilt in the hot sun. It wouldn’t thrive and it wouldn’t yield the benefits you were after. If you ignored the weeds, they would overtake your harvest, and at the same time consume and steal the nutrients from the soil. 

But . . . at the same time, you can’t overindulge your garden. You can’t over-feed, over-water, or over-plant. There’s a balance that must be maintained for your garden’s health and productivity, not just this year, but for the years to come. A garden is, in its own way, a kind of wealth—and health. It’s a living thing. And, with all we put into it, the payback comes in multiples.

So, digging in to wellness . . . Can you hope to achieve your wellness goals with only a few hours of attention each week? Most likely “not.”  You have to plan ahead and you have to do first things first. You dig, you plant, you nurture, and then you are able to reap the benefits of your effort.  Believe it, your wellness is also a kind of wealth. And, it demands your attention.

Do you have a plan to grow your wellness? Sure, it’s a stretch, but think of your body as your garden. You don’t want to underfeed it, and you shouldn’t overfeed it, and you can’t ignore it.  You already know that  too much takes its toll, as does too little. Only with too much, you are working in reverse to achieve your goals. Too much, just as too little, means your garden won’t thrive.

You need to be active. You need to be attentive. You need to be deliberate. You need to be moderate and you need to be mindful. Your body needs to be a part of the process. Your body needs fuel, the right amount in the right proportion supplied by you, just as your garden needs nutrients supplied through feeding – the right amount at the right time. 

Whether you have a garden or not, you are a gardener . . . 

 

Are you giving your body the nutrients it needs? Are you giving it too much food? Are you giving it the attention it needs? Are you on the right track for bountiful wellness?

The Information Diet

There’s a new book out, “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption.”  While it focuses on our information overload, I had to think, “WOW,” look at the parallels. The book talks about conscious consumption. Well . . .

If we stop to think about it, it becomes pretty obvious that healthy information consumption habits are about a lot more than just productivity and efficiency. It turns out even information consumption impacts our personal health, as well as the health of society. And, in the same way too much junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can actually lead to new forms of ignorance—call it cluelessness. 

The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. Hmmm . . . this sounds familiar. We can say the exact same thing about making healthy nutritional choices. After all, we know we are, at least in part, products of the food we eat. We are also products of the information we consume. This leads to the question of fault.

Is it the food’s fault that we eat too much? Is it the information’s fault that we have information overload? Maybe what we’re really suffering from is information malnutrition or information overconsumption. And,  it has all kinds of physiological and psychological effects on us. Hmmm . . . just like our nutritional choices. We may be eating too many empty calories, as well as too many empty mental calories. 

Here’s an interesting statistic. The average person spends more than 11 hours out of every 24 hours in a state of constant information consumption.  It seems that while we’ve grown obese on sugar, fat, sodas and junk food—at the same time we’ve become gluttons for tweets, texts, emails, instant messages, RSS feeds, downloads, YouTube videos, and FB status updates.

And it all comes back to the choices we make. It comes back to being mindful of those choices.

Guess what happens if we concentrate on cutting the low-quality information calories, as well as the low-quality nutritional calories?

Jumping the Chasm

It’s true. You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps. So, take a big breath, get a running start and go for it. But, if your big leap is the wrong thing, then what? Do you turn around mid-air? Make a different choice?  On the other hand, maybe you simply need to find a bridge. Maybe you want to just hedge your bets. Whether through one big leap or across a bridge, when find yourself on the other side of the chasm, what comes next?  Shift the conversation to wellness . . .

Creating a healthy lifestyle through behavior change will for most of us require a combination of a flying leap over a chasm and then completing the journey by walking across bridges. Both serve a purpose. First you need to make the big decision to move forward. This might mean making a dramatic change, or several major changes at one time. But, once that big decision is made, you’ll find that most of the time, the way to create positive lifestyle behavior change is the more non-dramatic decision to start and keep walking across the bridge, one step at a time until you get to the other side. 

And, where behavior change and wellness are concerned, without the bridges, you’ll find it’s not a chasm you jump once to get to the other side—you have to make that jump again and again, over and over. Along the way, it’s easy to encounter wellness fatigue. Now, if you’re crossing the bridge, you will find it to be every bit as life-altering as jumping across the chasm (perhaps not as dramatic). You end up in the same place, and one step at a time is sustainable, allowing for some course correction along the way.

Believe it or not, the decision to leap the chasm is often the easier decision. You decide. You jump. The decision to walk across the bridge requires a number of steps. You may get distracted, find yourself off-course, or simply change your mind and turn around. But, you can always turn back around and keep going until you reach the other side. If you think about it, most decisions are bridge decisions. You get from here to there by taking steps, the basic process through which we achieve the goals we set. 

When changing lifestyle behaviors, there’s a goal, a start, and there’s a finish. Simply comparing the flying leap decision with the crossing the bridge decision is similar to wanting instant results, for a process that takes time. Each of us knows who we are better than anyone else. We know what we will do, and we also know what we won’t do. We probably also know whether we’re jumpers or steppers, or more likely, a little of each.  

It’s up to each of us to decide how to ultimately get “to the other side”—the question is, are you ready to start the journey?

In My Perfect World

In my perfect world, we would all be more compassionate. There would be no such thing as stress. We would have world peace. Politicians would play nicely and work together to do the right thing. We wouldn’t have to pay taxes, drivers in front of me would always signal, allergies would vanish, there would never be another paper jam, no more dust or sticker residue, and people would always return my phone calls. (I might do away with bagpipes and bush balls.) And, as I design my perfect world, I think I would like to see junk food become health food (healthy junk food, that is).

When creating a perfect world, it’s probably a good idea to define the word  perfect.  When I looked it up, I found out it’s derived from the Latin word perfectus meaning, “To finish, bring to completion.” The modern definition of the word is “entirely without any flaws, defects or shortcomings.” One of the slang definitions –Just what the doctor ordered—turns out to be the perfect segue to wellness.

None of us is without flaws, defects or shortcomings, so that in itself bursts the perfect world bubble. But, we can still work towards the "bringing to completion" and "finishing what we start" part. Where wellness is concerned, we can all agree that we want to be well, and while some of being well is out of our control, much of it is up to us.  Statistics say the foods we choose to eat on a daily basis contribute 80 percent to whether we will develop diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.  Approximately 40 percent of deaths in the U.S. are caused by behavior patterns that could be modified, and an estimated 87.5 percent of health care claims costs are due to an individual’s lifestyle.

   

So, in my perfect world, the choices we make when we don’t know what to do, would always turn out to be the right choice. And, where those lifestyle choices are concerned, they are choices in our control.

We know the world is not a perfect place, probably never has been and most likely never will be. But at least we can all contemplate, face and make those choices that will individually and collectively make it better. And surely, if we all strive to make our own worlds more perfect, we will find we have a better world overall as a result. 

So, where wellness-related lifestyle behavior choices are involved, what are you willing to do to bring your world a little closer to perfect?

Ordinary Choices

In the world of wellness there are always new, amazing (OK, maybe not amazing but at the least, surprising) findings, that really make one stop and ask . . . why? Why is it like this? Why do we do this? Why don’t we make better, or healthier choices?  These questions relate to the nutritional, or lack thereof, choices such a large percentage of our population continues to make—on a daily basis. Each of us makes an average of about 200 food and beverage choices a day. Well, according to the Chicago-based NPD Group, here’s what some of these choices come down to, choices about what we decide to eat—not what we say we eat (and that’s key). These are the choices that determine our actual culinary behavior.

For starters, there are some surprises here. On average, Americans frequent an upscale restaurant only about one out of every 100 visits. And, as for choice, we now have about 300 restaurant chains to choose from (with more than 2,000 locations). In fact, Applebee’s alone serves at least two million customers a day.

For the most part, our choices are sort of ordinary. Last year hamburgers topped the list of restaurant choices (we ate 13 billion of them—McDonald’s alone sells about 4.2 million each day in the U.S.). Next came french fries, pizza (about 23 pounds per person a year), Mexican food, and finally, chicken sandwiches. 

Convenience and cost have a lot to do with these choices—and this brings us to “takeout.” Takeout makes life a little easier. It lets you take food home to eat with your family, but you don’t have to prepare it. Yet, if you knew the average takeout meal averages close to 1,000 calories, not counting the excessive sodium, would you still eat it? Would you serve it to your family? How convenient are weight-related chronic illnesses? Where are the cost savings?

When we seriously look at serving size, portion size, calories, saturated and trans fats, sodium, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and other added ingredients, we have some serious choices to consider when making our daily nutritional selections.

So, with all these choices, where do we go from here? That’s the question. Do we make sound nutritional choices? Do we try to improve our dietary behavior? Do we really just eat for convenience or do we stop to ask, “Is this even good for me?” 

And, if we’re going to ask the question, maybe we ought to be brutally honest about the answer. Seems like a good place to start. Anyone agree?