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?

That Little, Bitty Thing

You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You can’t touch them or taste them. But you can count them and cut them. It’s not a riddle. We’re talking about calories, and we are obsessed with them.

We all know we need enough calories to support our basic needs, but not so many calories that we exceed those needs. And, yet  more than 64 percent of us exceed those needs on a regular basis, regular enough that it’s resulted in an obesity epidemic, with chronic illness and type 2 diabetes mushrooming out of control.  One-third of all children consume too many calories on a daily basis, and as a result are overweight or obese.  Those pesky excess calories are everywhere—convenience stores, gas stations, pharmacies, bookstores, electronics stores, garden centers, department stores. Grocery stores offer free food samples, and of course you can expect a lot of calories from the food court at most malls.

Not only is food everywhere, including places it doesn’t really need to be, but there’s so much of it. This is where portion size meets calorie intake. Meals are super-sized, sodas come in 64-oz “Big Gulp” sizes, and those personal pizzas can house a day’s calories. Restaurant portions generally provide enough food—and calories to constitute a meal for two—or more.

If you’re one of the 45 million Americans counting calories, you need to also consider where those calories come from, and what they do once they’re on their way down your throat. While it’s important to be mindful of the calories taken in, it’s also important to be mindful of how those calories are stored and burned. Those 100 calories from the fun-size candy bar aren’t going to provide the nutrition you’ll get from a handful of almonds or walnuts, or an apple or a banana with 100 calories—but they will be stored as fat.  (And, don’t you appreciate how using the word fun-size makes it seem more OK to eat than if it said junk-size?)

The majority of us underestimate how much we eat, and how many calories we consume. But, if we’re mindful, we might be in for a big surprise, one that might provide the motivation to think first about the nutritional choices we make, and how those choices will ultimately influence our overall health and general well-being.

And if you’re wondering what a calorie really is, it’s a measure of energy, just as a volt is a measure of electricity, a pound is a measure of weight and a mile is a measure of distance. Technically a calorie indicates how much energy it takes to change the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. (This would make more sense maybe if your body was made of ice, but, it’s not, and this is the definition.)

Now, are you ready to take on the “energy” of something you can’t even see, touch or taste? What do you have to lose?

Don't Fence Me In

When Robert Frost wrote “Mending Wall” and penned the phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors,” it’s a sure bet he wasn’t talking about food. He was talking about barriers.

Fences can be a good thing. They provide boundaries, or the perception of limits. They can promote a feeling of safety and security. They define our spaces. They keep things in and they keep other things out. They also create walls. And, sometimes those walls get in the way of choices we need to make.

We are creatures of habit. We do things the same way, day after day, and we become comfortable with our patterns and our walls. But sometimes the walls are unnecessary. They become barriers and that’s when the fences need to come down – and now we are talking about food, and food choices and lifestyle behaviors and habits. 

Work, family, time constraints, cost, and maybe just not knowing are all real barriers to creating healthier habits and healthier choices. Yet, when each of these fences holding us in is carefully scrutinized, those barriers fade away. Our existing patterns of comfort are habits which we can change to form new, healthier, sustainable replacements.

But just like a fence or a wall, you don’t just knock it down—you take it apart board by board or brick by brick. And, that’s the secret to creating your new barrier-free choices. Start small. Don’t do it all at once. Ask yourself  “why” you want to change. Define your motivational triggers. Be aware of situations and circumstances that set you up for failure (popcorn at the movies comes to mind). Have a new response ready. Get support from family and friends. Involve them in your choices to create healthier lifestyle behaviors. Congratulate yourself on each success. Stay with it. You didn’t build your old fence or form your old habits in one day, or week or month, and you won’t dismantle them that quickly either—but you will transform them over time.

When the fences come down, there’s a whole new field to explore, and an opportunity to expand into new territory. That would be the territory of healthy choices, healthy substitutions, and a new outlook on what might have been holding you back from making these choices in the first place.

So, here’s something to ask yourself . . . Are your personal fences holding you in or keeping you from discovering new territory? Are they creating boundaries it’s time to cross? Without that fence, are you ready to explore healthier lifestyle options?

Are You Playing, Practicing or Both?

I play the guitar. I also practice the guitar. There’s a difference. If you sound really good when you sit down to go through your material, then you’re not practicing, you’re playing. Practicing is working on new pieces that pose a challenge to you, and it’s very likely it won’t sound good at all—at first.

I would like to become a great guitar player, but that requires serious dedication, and with an already busy life, there just isn’t enough time. For me, balancing work, family, social and home responsibilities (many are self-imposed demands, but time demands all the same) —and now music, means I don’t have a lot of extra time. 

It’s not easy to become great. But, I’ve discovered that I can be “OK.”  I’ve discovered that even a little practice results in steady progress. Small steps, small efforts, and a modest time commitment have resulted in OK, and it hasn’t taken that long. I can see, and hear steady (even if slower than I wish) progress.

So why are we talking about playing—and practicing the guitar? Because it’s like wellness, and weight loss, and developing healthier lifestyle choices. We start out with modest, yet meaningful choices, which with a little practice, result in sustainable healthy habits.

We know habits can be made—and broken.  We all get used to doing something a certain way, and before we realize it, that’s the way we do it without even thinking about the “doing” of it.  If we begin to make a few modest changes, those comfortable, automatic patterns (habits) begin to change as well. When we become mindful of the choices we make, the changes follow. We learn new notes, new chords, new progressions.

We all have goals. We set goals to regulate our spending, our weight, our eating, our alcohol and cigarette use, our physical activity levels. And most of us, as soon as we set a goal, start readjusting that goal.

Big goals, and big problems are usually not solved with big solutions, but with a series of small solutions and small steps. Long-term wellness goals too, will be achieved through short-term decisions and actions. 

The guitar is not an easy instrument to learn to play, but it doesn’t have to be hard either. This is where, as a metaphor, it comes back to wellness and wellness goals. You can’t anticipate every step, but you can take the first step. That’s the beginning. You know where you want to go. That’s the ending. It’s the middle that takes the most practice.

So, how’s your performance going?

Drinking From a Firehose?

Are you glued to your smartphone? Do you feel as if you're slugging your way through a data fog? Do you feel you have way too much information—so much so that it makes it hard if not impossible to weed out what you need, what is true, or even what is right for you? You're not alone—not by a long shot. Most of us are suffering from what back in 1970 in his book Future Shock,  Alvin Toffler termed “information overload.” And, that was 42 years ago.

Today the amount of data being stored doubles every 18 months (The Economist). We have emails to answer, social networking to manage, texts and tweets requiring our immediate response, and YouTube videos to pass on to our virtual friends. Then we have the office, where we attend meetings, make decisions, work too hard for too little. We make time for home, our families and a literal deluge of needs to be met. If you’ve heard the phrases, data smog, cognitive overload, information fatigue syndrome, and time famine, you are familiar with information overload. You can probably also relate to the fact that the term “wired” is now defined as both “connected to the internet,” and “frantic, high, and unable to concentrate.”

And, now, let's add wellness and well-being to the mix. Information overload can result in feelings of anxiousness. Research shows that multitasking actually makes us less productive (except in the production of stress hormones, which goes up). Other symptoms include increased cardiovascular stress, impaired judgment, weakened vision and increased blood pressure.

How much information do we need to be satisfied, yet not left feeling stuffed—sort of like the portions we often find on our plates. We know we don’t have to eat it all. What if we think of the overwhelming amount of information in terms of useful portions, using reasonable discretion in terms of how much we digest and how often, rather than choking on too much?

And, like with our nutritional choices and decisions, all the information we’re faced with isn’t necessarily true. Are potatoes really evil? Is milk good or bad for you? How much sodium really is too much? Sorting out the conflicting reports is a form of information overload all by itself.

Consider what might happen if we start to ration our information intake. What happens if we “unwire” ourselves from time to time? In our Team Esteem Challenges we talk about making “modest but meaningful changes,” in reference to lifestyle behaviors and choices. Using the food analogy, in the same way we require food, yes, we need information. But, just as with food, we need to remind ourselves that we have control over the information we let into our lives. 

Now,  just as with our nutritional choices, where information is concerned, all information and all calories are not created equal. But, if we put a little less on our plates, we still benefit from a balanced meal—without the extra calories. Social psychologists point out that an individual’s consciousness is formed over time by the information and stimuli experienced. Do you really want to think of your consciousness as the result of data glut?  

As an alternative, by being mindful of our information overload, what do you think might happen by deciding to "decrease quantity, and increase quality?" It’s an interesting question, and one we can each answer for ourselves. We’d like to hear some of your solutions.