Improve From Your Own Teachings

As I was doing my daily walk, I was struck big time by a profound thought! The thought has huge life enhancing potential for everyone on the planet. It has already been changing and helping my life because I have been using it for a long time only I have never really identified it enough to put into words until now.

I’m going to share this with you but, please, think deeply and intently about this and then put it into practice. See if it doesn’t profoundly enhance any part of your life that you choose to drastically improve. Whether you want to get in super great shape or become a much better parent or partner, or even make a few million dollars, you can do it if you follow these ideas.

Any goal, habit, human quality or desire that I start preaching, teaching or pontificating about automatically and almost without effort pushes me to do more of it myself. Those spoken and written pontifications are like a truth drug for my mind which pushes me to do what I have encouraged and taught others to do.  I am totally convinced it will and does work that way for everyone.

If you have been reading my past blogs you might remember me setting some pretty tough and overly ambitious work out, weight loss, and healthy eating goals for myself as I count down to my big 70th birthday.  As of the blog posting this week, I am only 4 days away from 70. As I look back on the last 86 days I’ve been doing this, I must say that not one day has passed without my mind fixating on those self-promises and the advice I gave to myself as well as to all my readers. I can now see that it’s been my inner brain keeping me on track rather silently and automatically.

I guess you could say that my brain pushed me to remain “true to myself” and to my readers.  You see, if you teach and preach to others what they could and should do for self-improvement, or just about any subject, your inner self gives you the message that you must live up to what you put out there.  We all know the saying “practice what you preach” and our inner most brain and soul does not want us to be a hypocrite, therefore our subconscious pushes us to be true to our words.  I am pretty darn convinced that is how we automatically become better at whatever subject, goal or life enhancing ideal we talk about and teach to others.

I challenge you to start teaching a preaching something that you want to improve in your life (be sure to write down you goals and objectives so you can stay on track) and then in a few months take a look back and see what it has done for you and how it has improved other people’s lives.

Next week I will give you a few great ideas to “jump start” your preaching and teaching plan.  Get ready to make things happen!

The Magic of Small Steps

Everything you do is comprised of many small steps, tasks and moments. As mentioned last week, if you can break down your goals into these very small steps and just aim to accomplish each small thing, one at a time, you are more likely to be successful and will avoid feeling overwhelmed. Let’s take a goal that is on a lot of people’s minds this time of year—not gaining weight through the holidays. Whether you want to avoid gaining those holiday pounds or want to actually lose weight, here’s the thing you should try because it really does work!

Let’s say you’ve decided to set a goal to get back to your high school weight and stay there the rest of your life (and I do believe it’s always a better to set a permanent goal rather than just saying you’re going to lose X number of pounds which can be perceived as temporary). Once you have your big weight loss goal set, push it out of your mind and begin working on what it will take just TODAY or just THIS HOUR or just THIS MINUTE to keep moving towards that goal. And when you have gotten through that day or hour or minute (not doubt successfully!) do the same for the next small increment you know you can meet.

Taking on only small goals is about setting small time frames as well as small, easy to accomplish tasks. For instance, one trick that studies suggest is very effective when it comes to setting super small, short goals while at the same time building self-discipline is to not completely deny yourself the thing you want but rather, delay it. Say you have decided that you are not going to snack between meals but now it’s an hour before dinner and you are craving a treat that’s calling your name and the craving is driving you nuts. What you do is say to yourself “Ok. I’m going to give in and allow myself to have that treat BUT I’m going to wait 15 more minutes.” If you are like most people who have tried this you’ll start watching the clock and counting down the minutes, but when the 15 minutes have passed you’ll no doubt feel quite good about yourself and your self-discipline. That in itself is a treat and a reward. You have proved to yourself that you can in fact postpone a little pleasure so why not try another 15 minute delay in gratification? And after that 15 minutes do another and another till it’s time to eat dinner and you may or may not even desire that treat after a good well balanced meal.

You can do this same delay technique when you want to take a break from your work out or stop working for the day or crave a cigarette. Just give yourself small time goals to get past and see yourself get through the trying time with relative ease.

Using super small goals and steps can and will work especially if you practice breaking your goals down to manageable small items or blocks of time and do this every day. Try this on multiple types of goals that you set for yourself and you’ll see just how much you can accomplish one small step at a time.

 

Tips and Tricks For Staying Healthy During the Holidays

Last week I wrote a bit about the danger of “playing the victim”–you know the old “Poor, poor me,”  mantra. And now the day after Thanksgiving–the time of the year of family, food, fun as well as being thankful–I want to write about FOOD.  Yes, we all need it and yesterday most of us probably ate too much of it!  Yes, we can say “Hey, we were victims of the great aromas and flavors! How could we resist? Besides it’s the time of the year to celebrate!” but that isn’t going to help your health or waistline. Now I don’t want to take the pleasure and joy away from this wonderful time of the year, but maybe my few words in this post can help make this holiday season a bit healthier and give you a head start with your New Year’s resolutions.

There is a great little trick that can help you steer away from those delicious, tempting treats that pop up all over the place around the holidays as well as helping you avoid temptation all year long.  I learned about this little trick from David DiSalvo’s book What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should do the Opposite.

DiSalvo says in chapter 15 of his book, “If you imagine looking at a tempting treat, your desire for it will increase. But research indicates that if you imagine eating the same treat, your desire will lessen.  The reason is that to our brains, imagining an action and doing it are not too dissimilar.  We can trick ourselves into feeling like we’ve already enjoyed the treat, leaving our brain with less reason to target the genuine article.”  It’s a very simple little trick but it works. Try it. If you keep doing it over and over again, it’ll become a habit so you can easily avoid temptation during the holiday season and will continue doing so into 2014.

I would also like to refer you to page 78 and 79 in my book How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. These 2 pages have been highly instrumental and very motivating to me. They have helped keep me slim and trim and in great health which is especially important to me now as I am only 131 days from turning the BIG 70!  Page 78 lists 15 big benefits that you get from doing a periodic “fast”—even for just 24 hours and page 79 lists 14 benefits from following a calorie restricted diet.  Every time I review these lists it pumps me up and helps me stay on a path of good healthy eating habits.  I am very confident that reviewing these 2 lists can do the same for you. And this time of year, we can use all the help we can get!

If you don’t have my book How to Ignite Your Passion for Living or you do have it but you have a person or two on your gift list that you know will benefit from reading it, you can buy a copy on my website here. Now that’s some easy shopping!

The Self-Forgiveness Experiement

 

OK let’s explore the “What the Hell” effect I mentioned last week and the research that was done about self-forgiveness as it affects your future behavior and success or failure. The “What the Hell” effect was first coined by dieting researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman. Quoting from Kelly McGonigal’s book The Willpower Instinct, “These researchers noticed that many dieters would feel so bad about any lapse even if was just a piece of pizza or a bite of cake that they felt as if their whole diet was blown. Instead of minimizing the harm by not taking another bite, they would say, ‘What the hell, I already blew my diet. I might as well eat the whole thing.’”

Kelly goes on to recount the circumstances and outcome of an experiment on this behavior. “The two psychologists invited weight-watching women into the laboratory, then encouraged them to eat doughnuts and candy in the name of science. These researchers had an intriguing hypothesis about how to break the what-the-hell cycle. If guilt sabotages self-control, they thought, then maybe the opposite of guilt would support self-control. Their unlikely strategy: Make half these doughnut-eating dieters feel better about giving in.”

The women in the study were asked to finish off a doughnut then they had the women drink enough water to feel full. In the next step, the researchers divided the women into two groups giving the first group “a special message to relieve their guilt” while the second group were not told anything about going easy on themselves.

These same women were then served three large bowls of candy and asked to sample each candy and rate it. They could eat as much or as little as they liked. The idea was that if the women still felt guilty about eating the doughnut, they would likely say to themselves, ‘I already broke the diet, so what does it matter if I inhale these Skittles?’

After this taste test the candy bowls were all weighed to see what group ate the most. The results? “The women who received the special self-forgiving message ate only 28 grams of candy, compared with 70 grams by the women who were not encouraged to forgive themselves,” Kelly reports.

Wow, when you think about the overall implications of this experiment they are absolutely huge! Just forgiving yourself can be life changing. If you are paying attention and directing all or at least as most of that “self-talk” and “chatterbox” toward cutting yourself some slack, you would certainly be able to stay on track with your goals, even when you slip here and there. Just give yourself tons of forgiveness and watch your life get better and better by the day.

 

Not By Exercise Alone

By now I hope you have watched Dr. Robert Lustig’s video that I’ve talked about in my last 2 blogs. If you heed his advice it really is life enhancing. I have and it’s made such a huge difference. But now, as I promised last week, I want to talk about exercise and what it can and cannot do for you.

To summarize what Dr.Lustig says on the subject of weight loss and exercise, exercise is not the key to weight loss, but it is one of two keys to great health. The first key is changing your diet by drastically reducing your intake of sugar in combination with a huge increase in your intake of fiber. Do that and your half way to excellent health.

The second key is, yes, exercise and by that he means consistent exercise. As Dr. Lustig points out, exercise will build muscle and in the very long run will help you lose a little of the weight because muscles burn calories faster than fat but this would only be a little additional weight loss. In other words, exercise should be part of a weight loss plan but is not the key to it. Without the change in diet, weight loss will be slow and the increase in overall health will be minimal.

Not a believer quite yet? Well, I’d recommend going out and getting Dr, Lustig’s book “Fat Chance” so you can read about all the factors that go into healthy weight loss and healthy eating. It’s not that exercise cannot have a tremendous impact on your health but exercise alone won’t do it. Next week I’ll tell you about another book and the story it includes of an amazing man, his commitment to better health and how you can follow in his footsteps. In the meantime, start evaluating your sugar intake. You may find it startling just how much you take in and, hopefully, it’ll stir you to do something about it.

Villainous Sugar

If you watch the link I posted last week of Dr. Lustig’s lecture you learned about the major damage sugar does to your body.  His words and proof of what he was saying certainly made a huge impression on me and has changed my eating habits significantly.  I’ve watched his video presentation twice and after that quickly got a copy of his book “Fat Chance” and devoured it. I’m so glad that I did.  Not only did I realize all the damage sugar was doing to my body but I began to see that what I believed to be true about how we process calories was, in fact, not true!

Most of us have been lead to believe that a calorie is a calorie regardless of the food we get it from.  So if we thin k that if we eat a 1,000 calories of food that is loaded with sugar versus a 1,000 calories of food that is relatively  sugar free the results to our bodies is exactly the same. But if you believe that (like I did) you’d be wrong.

The reason that one type of calorie can cause your body to gain weight and another one will not, is all in the way the body metabolizes the food.  So let’s say that in the next 6 months you ate 2000 sugar loaded calories a day. You might gain 5 lbs. But if you ate 2000 calories of non-sugar foods you might lose 5 pounds or stay the same weight.  But that’s just the beginning.

As Dr. Robert Lustig says in the beginning of his book, “Every good story needs a villain.  While I am loath to reveal it this early in the book, I won’t keep you in suspense.  It’s sugar…..a substance that now permeates nearly all food and drink worldwide.  It’s killing us … slowly, and I’ll prove it.  Every statement throughout this book is based on scientific study, historical fact, or recent statistics.”

Plain and simple, Lustig makes a totally convincing case that sugar is TOXIC.

If you read his book you will see all the ways sugar is doing damage to your body.  Lustig’s book certainly motivated me to cut out almost all the sugar and processed foods from my diet. By the way–did you know that there are dozens of different names that the food industry uses to hide sugar content, especially in processed foods? If you aren’t sure you can identify them, go to the USDA’s page here for a list.

And if you are thinking, like so many people, “I will just exercise more to counteract the sugar.” Sorry, that’s not going to work either.  Don’t get me wrong … exercise is not bad. In fact it’s very, very good for the body but that is not how you will counteract sugar or to lose weight. Why not, you ask? Well, I’ll talk about that next week. In the meantime, read your labels. See just how much sugar you are really taking in and try to cut it out of your diet. I bet you’ll be surprised just how many things you’ll have to eliminate but that just tells you how bad the situation is.

Changing for Better Health BEFORE the Alarms Go Off

Sometimes it takes huge bells on a gigantic clock to wake us up enough to change our thoughts and our habits. But, sadly, too many times when the alarm goes off we hit the snooze button or even sleep right through the loud ringing. I had the opportunity to see quite a few wake-up alarms going off at the hospital in Boston where my wife underwent a difficult surgery and I hope to permanently learn from them.

One such alarm was seeing and talking to a patient who had half her lungs taken out 5 weeks before but was back in the hospital with blood clots. Her husband took me aside and told me how sad it was. His wife smoked but never a lot. Still, she couldn’t seem to give it up. He was really hoping that this was a loud enough wake up bell that she wouldn’t hit the snooze button this time.

Another thing that really hit me was seeing so many obese people in the halls. This wake-up call was more one of empathy for them, knowing many were there for obese related problems. I realized that even though the alarm was going off for them, food addiction is even harder to give up than smoking! Unlike cigarettes, you can’t totally stop eating food, so in a way a person who overeats is constantly teasing and tempting himself or herself every time they eat.

Being in a hospital environment, there are many instances where you are exposed to the problems people have with taking care of themselves. The big take away, at least for me, is knowing that we all need to be much more observant, to see our own selves clearly and see what we need to be doing to stay healthy. We need to figure out better paths to go down before we get the big wake up calls. Additionally, I would say–don’t hit the snooze button! Go out and make the necessary changes—now!

**If you like what you’ve read in this blog please send it on to people you know and love, to people who you think this message and information may be very helpful. There is nothing in the world that brings greater satisfaction than helping other people. Don’t you agree?

Commit Yourself–to a Grand Health Goal

So, are you ready to put together your Grand Health Goal? Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to get yourself into the best possible health and do it for the rest of your life?

We should back up here a bit because, of course, that Grand goal is way too general by itself. You absolutely need to break it down into specific small goals and steps in order to be able to monitor and measure your progress along the way. I talk about what I call “Bite Sized Miracles” in Chapter 6 of my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”. It’s one of the most essential elements to guarantee you are successful in this very important goal.

What small bite-sized miracles can you aim for that will make your Grand Health Goal a reality? That’s not something I can tell you. You need to decide what you want and then figure out the steps to get there. Just don’t let the idea of a Grand goal make it feel impossible. You can just add a short exercise routine this week and then a new sport next week to get yourself back into shape. Try cutting out soda followed by eliminating all the empty calories of white bread and white rice soon thereafter to keep your weight down. With these small, managable steps and changes in your life, you will soon find you are healthier and feel better and that high energy feeling alone will motivate you to do even more. Then you just keep it up and there you are, living your Grand goal!

But back up one more step. Are you ready to do this? Is it important enough to you? (And if you say, no, you really have to ask yourself what is more important than the very aspect of your life that allows you to do all the things you want to do and enjoy it because you feel good?) Because the first and most important step is for you to realize just how enormously important your health is and commit yourself to preserving and improving it.

So, are you ready to live a healthy and full life for the rest of your life?

The Right Goal–For Life

Last week I talked about how important it is to keep yourself in shape–not just for now but for LIFE! In the next few blogs I am going to cover what it takes to stick with a program that will get you in the best possible health for the rest of your life.

The very first step is—and if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve heard this before– you just absolutely need to set the right goal. For example, the wrong goal would be to say I am going to lose 20 pounds. Why is that wrong? Because that’s too short term. I mean, think about it—you set the goal and when you reach it, you celebrate a bit but a few weeks or months later it’s so easy to slowly slide back to your pre-diet eating and exercise habits until, once again, those 20 pounds are back.

This will happen because your goal didn’t address that you wanted this to be for the rest of your life. If however, you set the right goal—like setting the goal of hitting your ideal weight and make keeping that ideal weight for life a critical part of that goal, then that is the right goal.

And yet, there may be an even better goal than this. Although having that correct health goal for life is huge, why not take it a step further and go for a Grand health goal? It’ll take a number of small steps including this first health goal for life. So get to work on setting the right goal for yourself and then next week, we’ll talk about bigger and grander goals for your health that will allow you to get the most out of every day.

A Picture of Greatest Health

Back in 1998 I saw a picture of a man that really shocked me. It was the picture of an African American man posing in a swim suit as he flexed his rather well defined muscles. The headline below it read “can you guess this guy’s age?” i took up the challenge. I saw that he was in great shape and his skin looked pretty wrinkle free so i guessed 45 or 50 years old at most. I wasn’t even close.

Harry Scott was actually 65 years old which, of course, made me ask if just anyone, myself in particular, could look that good at age 65! I tore that page out of the magazine (sorry about that my good doctor’s office!) And have carried that now very tattered page with me ever since. It was and is such a great inspiration to me to not just look good and be in good shape but more importantly, to strive to be in the greatest health that is possible at every age!!

I am 67 now and near my high school. The things I’ve done to keep in shape are likely stuff you already know but let me give you some critical keys to put what you know into practice but may not do consistently. Remember that old great saying “To know and not to do, is not yet to know.”

So I would suggest you start thinking about what you’d like to improve in your health, fitness routine, and energy level. Over the next few weeks, I will cover what it takes to stick with a program that will get you in shape and keep you in the best health possible.

If you want to see this great picture of Harry Scott, it’s in the picture center of my re-written book “The Next Step To Waking Up The Financial Genius Inside You”

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