Self-improvement

Parenting, Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Procrastinate – who doesn’t do it? (Well, there are a few absolute “self-starters” out in the world and they’re annoying.) Almost all of us procrastinate in one way or another; some of us do it for nearly everything, some do it for a few things. The impetus of this blog post actually came from my procrastination to write one! (As well as the lack of ideas) And for those now-later signwho are parents, how many times do you ask your kid to pick up his shoes that cover the floor only for the disinterested child to grunt, “I’ll do it later.”

Any human at almost any age will procrastinate and it’s hard to break out of the mindset, especially when it’s ingrained (because who voluntarily jumps up to do weekly chores), but for those who have an extremely difficult time completing a task or a project, there are theories and ideas out there to help.

After a discussion between moms expressing their discontent about kids not doing homework, my friend sent out a video from her educational resources regarding procrastination (thank you, Julie P).

The gist of the video is that procrastinators are not lazy, instead they are avoiding a task because of the negative feelings that come up (I know, this could be debated, some certainly appear lazy). Here are some reasons why people procrastinate:

– They are disorganized and don’t schedule their tasks well (including their possessions), so it is hard to even think about getting started.study-overwhelm

– They are overwhelmed by the enormity of a task or project. They see the big picture as too intimidating. Instead of breaking it down into small parts to accomplish one by one, they give up before they begin. (I’ve certainly reached a halfway point in an organization project only to feel hopeless and surrounded by too much stuff.)

– They are perfectionistic. The fear of failure looms large and they would rather not complete the task because they might do it imperfectly or receive criticism. (Been there many times.)

– They are distracted. They find other things to do or are intentionally distracted by other tasks because they don’t like the one they have to complete (aka most kids regarding homework, chores, calling grandma, anything that keeps them from what they want to be doing).

So, what’s the magic solution? Inserting a few microchips into the person’s brain and controlling them remotely, of course! (That really was a joke.) But since that will probably be frowned upon, the next suggestion if you’re procrastinating is to take “One Small Action.”

To do this, first, stop calling yourself lazy or unproductive. Acknowledge whatever feelings you have (boredom, frustration, fear) and accept that they are there. Apparently, we tend to procrastinate on the same things over and over. Notice what comes up when you think about doing a task, even if it’s, “I don’t feel like it.” And then…

Take one small action, not matter what it is, to begin the task or project. People who completed one small action were 66% successful in completing a task, versus those who attempted to simply change their feelings about it (33% successful). The idea is that completing one little thing leads to action which begets more action.

Most have heard the suggestion that to motivate yourself into exercising, simply put on your workout clothes or sneakers. Or get out the yoga mat and put it on the floor. Once it’s there, you might as well go ahead and do it. For kids, it might be getting out the homework and laying it out on the table, opening the laptop, or bringing up the assignment. The idea is not to plan anything out, just do one small step involved in the task.

This tactic typically works for me. If I start something, even in a tiny way, it might take some time, but I will complete it (like this blog post!), but kids can be tough. Needing “breaks” and never getting back to the task is common in my house. My suggestion would be setting timers and having some kind of reward for the completion of said task (that works for my own lack of desire to begin again).

Here is the full video (short and to the point) if you want to see it for yourself: Procrastination Video

oscar-wilde-smallGood luck to all of us procrastinators out there.  As Oscar Wilde said, “I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.”

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Self-awareness, Self-improvement

“Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure,” that’s according to Tony Robbins (I went down an internet rabbit hole and ended up watching Tony Robbins videos). He gave examples of people who earn lots of money, achieve big goals, or overcome obstacles only to think, “now what?” Many of us have done the same. We were faced with a problem or a abundancechallenge, set the goal, succeeded, then felt a little empty after, or possibly disappointed,  because “now what?”

Here are five things that “Tony says” leads to a fulfilling life. They are tasks, some performed daily, that would ultimately begin a practice which would fulfill you on a regular basis. Here they are in no particular order:

1) Feed your mind (20 minutes/day). I assume this means reading, watching, or listening to something that involves new learning, instead of the regular habit of scrolling through social media or filtering through email. I have the intention to read on a daily basis; and that often doesn’t happen. Twenty minutes a day seems possible, even if it’s broken up into two ten-minute intervals. That can be done while eating lunch, waiting in line, or during an extended bathroom break!

2)  Strengthen your body (20 minutes/day). This is another one that we have to set aside the time for and be intentional about, or else we’ll never do it consistently. I do a 25-minute cardio workout first thing in the morning (even when I really don’t want to), and the benefits are obvious. I feel accomplished, there is a nice endorphin rush, and I burned some calories. The incentive here is not just keeping weight off, though. Using your body and making it work not only makes you feel good; it also contributes to its longevity. I see countless older people who can’t do many of the basic things they used to because they simply don’t do them anymore. It’s worth it just to keep our bags of bones strong and moving!

3)  Find a mission bigger than yourself. This one can be tough. As a culture we’re not often taught to think bigger than ourselves. Instead it’s: work hard, earn as much as you can, and keep it for yourself. But that mindset usually leads to selfishness, jealousy, and a sense of lack (because you always need more). Many people focus on their families and raising their kids to be good humans (I try to anyway), but we can think even bigger. Are there any national or global problems that bother you? Are there any small ways you can help, even locally? How can you do something about it in a way that works for you?

4)  Have a role model. This one is also difficult, especially for adults, but it’s possible. I can’t think of any prominent role models I’ve had, but maybe there is something to it. We can aspire to be like someone we admire, or motivated by their life’s accomplishments, which creates a positive influence. That person doesn’t need to be someone you know, or would ever even meet, only a figure who demonstrates specific qualities or has achieved things that you would want too. It’s worth thinking about.

5)  Always know that there is someone worse off than you, and that person has overcome their hip-hop-1209499_640own obstacles. Sometimes thinking about other people and their bigger problems makes me feel petty and small about my own (i.e. my “first world” problems). But, good or bad, we all have issues; that is the nature of life. And maybe if we focus on the perspective that other people have faced problems, similar or even worse, and they got through them, we can too. It might just be the little lift we need to feel better or keep going.

So there you have it, five things to help us feel fulfilled.  I’m going to put them on a post-it note on my fridge, then try to do at least a few. I welcome you to try them too. Best of luck!

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Health & Diet, Self-improvement

Your first question after reading the title above might be, HOW? Who cares about all the details, the answer to HOW is the most pressing. So, short answer – eat within a designated set of hours, go to bed and wake up at decent times (without the assistance of a screen), and moderately exercise. There you go, it’s that easy! Or is it?

I recently finished the book The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda, PhD, a professor and researcher of biological studies. According to him and his many hours of research (along with others), he has studied the positive and negative effects that occur when we live within or outside of our circadian rhythms. He says all animals (humans included) have three: eating, sl3clockseeping, and activity. And living according to them is better for your health overall, including maintaining or losing weight, and getting beneficial sleep.

The first, eating, means you maintain all of your meals within a Time Restricted Eating (TRE) schedule. (Some may know this as intermittent fasting.) With TRE, the goal is to consume everything within 8-12 hours. That means from your first bite or sip in the morning to your last in the evening, except for water or herbal tea (others think black coffee and unsweetened creamer not exceeding fifty calories is acceptable in the morning before your first meal, but no nightcaps or that evening glass of wine, sorry).

Panda says the more you can restrict the time (to eight hours for example), the more weight you will lose. He has observed two people eating the same diet, one sticking to a TRE schedule and one not; the one with the schedule lost weight (even without a specific low calorie or low fat diet). This weight reduction happens over time, however, no ten-pound losses in a week, but as your body gets accustomed to this timeframe, you will start to shed pounds.

My husband started a new diet and exercise program, which involves eating specific types of food on different days (i.e. a low carb day, a macro day, etc), but a key part of the program is sticking to an eight-hour eating window. It has worked for him. He’s lost weight and inches, while gaining muscle (doing their targeted workouts). [Unfortunately, for someone like me who gets migraines from not eating for long periods of time, eight hours is unrealistic (I tried and got a migraine on two different occasions). I can do a 10-12 window fairly easily, however.]

Panda says that your stomach needs 12-13 hours of rest each night. During that fast, mostly while sleeping, your digestion slows and other important processes take place. Eating (or drinking anything but water) at night is especially bad for you because, as the author says, “the kitchen is closed,” and your gut is not prepared to start working again. As a result, that late night snack sits in your stomach until morning, often resulting in indigestion and acid reflux throughout the night.

The second circadian rhythm, that many of us know best, is sleeping. Besides the pain of jet lag or daylight savings, our bodies need a set number of scheduled hours of sleep each night (roughly 7-9) and it must be “quality sleep.” That means limited light exposure and few interruptions. Blue light from screens keeps our brains awake. They cause us to produce melanopsin instead of melatonin at night (the first is a light receptor in our eyes that wakes us up, the second is the hormone that induces sleep).

According to Panda, a full 7-8 hours of sleep a night is the time needed for the brain to do its work of storing memories and repairing itself. He recommends keeping devices out of the room, sticking to a schedule of similar bed/wake times, and wearing an eye mask if the sun wakes you up. Kids and teens especially need these important hours of sleep (and more for younger children) as their brains are rapidly developing.

Probably no need to go to this extreme!
Probably no need to go to this extreme!

The final part of the “code” is activity. Panda says that exercising before your first meal will burn body fat, not the meal you just ate. Doing so outside in the morning offers good sun exposure and wakes our brains up faster. As an added bonus, exercising will stave off hunger for a few hours, allowing you to fast a little longer. It also improves brain health (along with countless other benefits that I won’t list here).

So, to summarize Panda’s recommendations to “maintain a robust clock and maintain brain function,” as well as staying healthy, losing weight, and possibly sleeping better:

  • Get adequate sleep (according to a predictable schedule) with limited light exposure
  • Consume all meals within a time-restricted-eating schedule (TRE)
  • Exercise
  • Get exposure to daylight each day

I know that all four of those are often easier said than done, since our modern world complicates matters, but he says to start small and build from there. Good luck!

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Fear, Kids, Self-improvement, Technology

3D image of "Mindy"/TollFreeForwarding
3D image of “Mindy”/TollFreeForwarding

Check out “Mindy,” the grotesque human of the future! She appears to have a few issues, right? You might be wondering where she came from (and why I am sharing her picture). She is the 3D representation of a “future human,” which shows how using technology too much could form some rather unattractive abnormalities.

A company called  TollFreeForwarding collaborated with a 3D designer and researched the ways our bodies can change over time from overusing technology (mainly handheld devices). Mindy is supposed to be from the year 3000 (should we survive that long), but how many people do you know who are developing problems from too much tech right now?

Mindy first problems are her hunched back and “tech neck” from looking down at her device all of the time. The human skull typically weighs about twelve pounds, but once it’s at an angle (as it is when looking down at your phone), that weight can feel more like 30-45 pounds on your spine. Over time, your neck becomes strained and the shoulders hunch up.

Mindy also has a really attractive “text claw,” which comes from holding the phone in her hand while texting with her thumb. Keeping her arm at a 90-degree angle with device in hand strains the hand, wrist, and elbow causing “cubital tunnel syndrome” (inflammation of the ulnar nerve which passes through the elbow).

Researchers also think that her brain would be smaller and her skull would be thicker. The small brain comes from not having to think as much or struggle for survival as our ancestors did (brain size has reduced in the last 3,000 years). The thick skull is a result of her body protecting her from the radiation emitted by devices. People who started using such devices as adults have less exposure to radiation and fully formed skulls, but babies and children are at a higher risk and it is thought they might develop a thicker skull in a protective response. (I recently saw a women in a store with a baby no more than four months old with the phone propped up in the stroller.)

Lastly is Mindy’s horrific-looking third eyelid, which is thought to have developed in response to all of the blue light emitted from screens. Blue light causes the body and brain to be alert and think it’s daytime, which stops the production of melatonin and causes many problems with sleep (especially if you’re staring at your screen late at night or in the middle of

3D image of "Mindy"/TollFreeForwarding
3D image of “Mindy”/TollFreeForwarding

the night because you can’t sleep).

The article also pointed out another problem with Mindy that isn’t visible physically, which is her mental state. Tech usage with too much social media has shown to cause depression and anxiety. Staying inside and staring at devices instead of being outside in sunlight can contribute to more sleep problems and more mood issues.

This picture has haunted me over the past few months so I thought that diving right in and writing about it would be better than thinking about it all of the time. The majority of us in the modern world use the same technology that would cause all of these problems, and none of us will be giving it up. You might be thinking, “but that’s SO far into the future, we’re fine.” I’d like to believe that too, but how many times do you see people bent over their phones while waiting in line, at the doctor’s office, or even in their cars. How many kids (and babies, eek) do you see completely sucked in at the store on devices while their parents push them around in carts?

I can’t help but wonder if this is what Steve Jobs would have wanted, a man who celebrated sleek design and simplicity. Would he befriend Mindy with her altered body, or would they just use avatars and communicate electronically so they never see what the other looks like?

I want to add that I am not much better than anyone else. I try to be cognizant of how I hold my device and give myself breaks, I try not to use my phone constantly, and I don’t use it when I go to bed (except for an alarm, which in itself is a little problematic).

This post isn’t meant to preach or tell everyone what to do with their devices, but what causes me pause is Mindy’s appearance and how we can see people already starting to have her problems (from tech neck to text claw to posture issues, and compare and despair on social media). Who wants that? None of us, I’m sure. So let this post give you pause to think about your tech usage or your kids’ because no one wants to look like Mindy, especially if we are all going to have her haircut in the future!

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Kids, Parenting, Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Recently, I listened to the audiobook, Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki. He is a proclaimed minimalist from Japan. Even though he is a single, childless, guy in his early-thirties, he found himself in the trap of having entirely too much stuff. The apartments and living spaces over there are often much smaller too, so he was overwhelmed by how many things he had and what to do about it. That is when he found the ways of minimalism. He realized that many of his possessions were either sentimental, things he planned to something with “eventually,” the latest-technology and electronics that didn’t properly fit in his tiny space, or collections of things he kept mainly to impress people (like books or art).

aaron stuff
This kid had too much stuff.

He purged, over time, the majority of his possessions so that now, according to him, he could pack up all of his things and move out of his apartment entirely in about thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! As someone who is currently experiencing an evacuation warning (due to the raging Mosquito Fire in N. Cal) and having to determine what I would take or leave if we get a mandatory evacuation order, I think about Sasaki’s simplicity of taking a mere half hour to pack up his things and go.

Obviously, he does not have children, animals, and an entire household to think about, but his advice and questions for choosing what to keep in your life and what to give away or toss are very helpful. I will be purging over the winter (I hope and plan to anyway).

Here are some of Sasaki’s tips and questions to help you too:

  • If you lost it (or in my case, if it burned up), would you buy it again?
  • Start with things that are clearly junk.
  • Minimize anything you have in multiples.
  • Get rid of it if you haven’t used it in a year. Let go of the idea of “some day.”
  • Don’t get creative when you’re trying to discard things (meaning turning that broken lamp into a vase).
  • Let go of the idea of getting “your money’s worth.”
  • Don’t get hung up on the price that you initially paid for something
  • Don’t buy it because it’s cheap, don’t take it because it’s free.
  • Discard it if you have it for the sake of appearance.
  • Take photos of the items that are tough to part with. It’s easier to revisit your memories once you go digital (i.e. your child’s artwork, trophies, medals, your own childhood things you don’t want to carry around anymore).
  • Leave your unused space empty.
  • If you are dealing with a deceased loved one’s things, try to imagine what the person who passed away would have wanted.
  • Discard anything that creates visual noise.
  • When deciding to keep something, if the answer is not a “hell yes!” then it’s a no.
  • Ask yourself why you can’t part with your things.
  • Remember, the things we really need will always find their way back to us.

Good luck, everyone. I don’t think I can pare down to moving in thirty minutes, but thirty hours would be a nice start!

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Gratitude, Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Here is a re-post from four years ago (with some tweaks and updates) that still applies today.

Much has been touted about the benefits of thinking with gratitude. If we can be truly grateful for what we have, we are supposed to feel happier, be less stressed, and experience life with more joy, overall. It’s true. If you stop and think about two things you are grateful for that happened at the end of the day, be it the guy who let you in on a crowded freeway or that you got your kids to school on-time with no complaint from anyone, a little gratitude can go a long way.

But sometimes it’s just too hard to be grateful, or to truly feel it in difficult situations. If you’re behind on bills and have nearly run out of money, thinking about how grateful you are that you’re not starving to death in a third world country, or that you don’t have some terminal disease, doesn’t really help matters. Granted, you might feel truly grateful for those things (I know I do), but it does not change your attitude or situation for the most part.

A shift in perspective when gratitude isn’t working is to think in terms of abundance. This means seeing what you have instead of what you lack: abundance instead of scarcity. Many of us see our lives in terms of scarcity only – what we don’t have, what we want but can’t get, what we think we will never have. Advertisers bombard us  with the latest things that we just have to have, be it a gadget or a lifestyle, and show us how much better they are with those things. Social media can show us (often falsely) of the perfect life we think we “should” have. We can’t help but think we are lacking, and when we try to be grateful for what we do have, we still don’t feel truly glad.

Thinking with abundaabundancence in mind means looking at situation and seeing the possibilities in it instead of the lack. Back to the example of being behind on bills and money, we can see the piles of bills and the small stack of money with which to pay them, or we can see the possibilities we have in creating more wealth and paying those bills (which could be anything from a second job to a yard sale to selling unwanted collectibles on E-bay), and we can be grateful to have the opportunity to do those things. We can see how to make that money stack grow instead of continue to shrink. Will that solve all of your money problems? Not yet, but it is a start, a way towards seeing the world in terms of offering you opportunities instead of stripping you of everything and just being glad you don’t have to worry about eating cat food for dinner or contracting Ebola.

Steven Covey states it well, “The Abundance Mentality… flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.” This can be difficult to do when you had a bad day at work, you find dog crap  on your shoe (again!), or all of your dieting has equaled to weighing more instead of less, but instead of going to extremes and trying to be grateful for things that you can’t really connect with, try to stop and see the abundance in your life. That may mean just accepting that things aren’t perfect right now, but trusting that they will get better, reasoning that you usually have more good days than bad at work (the dog as well), and that you do actually feel better and your pants are looser even if the scale doesn’t say so.

thanksgiving-table-1888643_640One current example in my life is my choice to take a break from alcohol (more on that in a future post). As I have now noticed, alcohol is everywhere and people are drinking it everywhere too. Instead of seeing all of the beverages I cannot (choose not) to drink, I will focus on the abundance of non-alcoholic drinks that are available (even if it means providing my own). So, as the holiday comes and we sit at the table with our families and friends, try not to focus only on the one person who antagonizes you or triggers you. Instead, notice the many people you enjoy being with, the table covered in food, and the one day out of the year when we overeating is encouraged!  Abundance abounds (when we choose to see it).

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Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Have you ever heard of the RAS part of your brain? Me neither, not until recently anyway. It stands for the Reticulating Activating brainSystem and, put simply, it’s said to be the link and filter between your conscious and subconscious mind. It’s located in your brain stem and takes instructions from your conscious and passes them onto your subconscious.

The example often given is if you decide you want to buy a specific kind of car, you’re set on it, then that’s all you see when you go out into the world. Or if you’re thinking about getting pregnant, or trying to, you’ll see mothers-to-be everywhere. Your subconscious is now picking up on that specific thing and trying to find it.

Supposedly, using our RAS, we can guide ourselves towards accomplishing our goals more quickly by changing the way we word what we’re trying to accomplish. It lies with the word, “intend.” If we say we “intend” to do something, our subconscious brain will do its work to make that happen. One example I found is by comparing the use of the words: hope, want, and intend.

If you “hope” to buy a boat, you have some inclination and desire to get one someday. Maybe it will work out, maybe not. Hoping doesn’t guarantee anything.

If you “want” to buy a boat, you’ve made the desire a little stronger. This “want” could become a reality, or not depending on how things work out. As Mick tells us, “You can’t always get what you want…” boat

However, if you “intend” to buy a boat, you have a clear goal of purchasing one. You might start brainstorming ways of getting the money to buy one, look up different models and styles more readily, and drop it into conversations so that people know and might pass on any leads.

The intent to accomplish something becomes the goal and you subconsciously start doing more to achieve it. I’ve heard lots of talk over the years about “setting your intention” whenever you begin something. Set your intention for a good day, a better meeting, a successful outcome. You can then manifest it into happening. I can’t say that I completely believed that to be true, but I can see how the wording matters. I can hope all day for specific things, but that feels like whisps of smoke disappearing into the air. Intending seems different, more concrete and sure.

Will it work? I can’t say, but I can definitely hope so, or oops, intend it to. I’m going it give it a try.

Let me know if it works for you.

 

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Health & Diet, Self-awareness, Self-improvement

I like to believe, or maybe want to believe, that once I “have it all together,” then my life will flow so easily and effortlessly. Like once I can check all the boxes of: exercise daily, write daily, eat well, meal plan for the week, drink less alcohol, drink more water, meditate, stretch or do yoga every day, keep up on this dang blog, save more, budget better, journal, monitor my plankids’ screen time, monitor my own screen time, date night once a week…the list goes on and on. Somewhere in my head I think, yes, that’s it, once I consistently do all those things, my life will be easy and good, even perfect.

But will it? True, many of those things will help, but I always fail to see the reality tucked in between those healthy tasks. Like, injuring myself so I can’t exercise, hearing that my mom is continuing to decline so I skip the meal planning, just plain being lazy so I don’t stretch or journal, that list goes on too. Where is the middle ground? And when will I accept that life isn’t so black-and-white? Doing all those things will benefit me, but they won’t solve anything. Maybe that’s what I’m looking for, the solution to stress, sadness, a stiff and aging body and brain, overwhelm, grief – and wouldn’t I be richer than Jeff Bezos if I could bottle and sell that magic potion? (Ah, to dream)

In the end, I suppose the real solution is to accept that life isn’t meant to flow easily and effortlessly all of the time. Even Jeff Bezos has bad days; and who knows, maybe he is so discontented with his billionaire’s life that he has to leave Earth on his rocket ship to get some perspective.

Where does that leave us though? The “regular people” who don’t have his money (or want it), and also realize that dollars wouldn’t solve our problems either (at least not all of them). For me, it’s probably picking a few of those things listed above and trying to do them on a daily basis. Doing all of them would be nice, but let’s be realistic, it’s not going to happen. If I start with one, like keeping up on this dang blog, I’ve already accomplished something. Yay for me!

And, of course, the funny and ironic part is that many of those healthy things would help anyway (exercise for stress, meditate for overwhelm, etc). It’s just that doing them requires effort and discipline. And that’s where I start all over again – if I only made more of an effort and had better discipline, my life would be…

 

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Health & Diet, Self-improvement

A new year brings people thinking about eating healthy again, since they completely stopped doing it during the holidays. I’m one of those people too. For the past three years some friends and I have done a cleanse at the start of January, which means cutting out dinnereverything you ever loved about eating. It can be torturous and grueling at times, but it does the job. It clears out the junk I’ve been consuming and the habits that started forming as I reached for another dessert, another glass of wine, another handful of chips… Once the cleanse is over, I am mostly in the groove of eating well again.

That was last Sunday and so far, I’m still doing pretty well. I haven’t gone back to my favorites for fear of starting some avalanche of eating those banned foods I had cut out for the last three weeks. But an article I recently read got me thinking. It was entitled “How I Ditched Dieting for Good,” and it was about the fairly new idea of eating intuitively. What does that mean? I wondered the same. Essentially, it’s means eating what your body wants, when it wants it. So, stopping all that “can’t have that, mustn’t have those,” thinking and just eat what you want. What?! This sounds too good to be true, right?

According to this article, and some blog posts, the idea is to trust yourself and your body about what you want to eat, and basically, eat it! Here are some guiding principles:

-Forget diets and diet culture, for many they are a short-term solution to a problem. You can do them and lose weight, but then soon go back to gaining it again.

-Use a Hunger-Fullness scale to judge when you are truly hungry. That means asking yourself if you are really hungry in that moment (or maybe you just need water), as well, as stopping when are comfortably full. Not sort of full and you’ll be hungry twenty minutes from now, or overly full so you’re lying on the couch moaning, actually nicely full.

-Eat what you really want. Ask yourself what you want to eat, and throw away the ideas of “this food is bad and that one is absolutely terrible for me” (which is hard since we’ve been so programmed over the years). Supposedly, if we just let ourselves have what we are craving, we will have a little of it, be satisfied then naturally choose something healthier (true? who knows).

-Eat mindfully. That means paying attention to what you are eating, slowing down, and really enjoying it. That also includes eating what your body craves, not what your emotions do. Scarfing down a carton of ice cream after a bad day is not the idea.

-Be nice to your body, regardless of its size. Part of what keeps us in the cycle of dieting and eating only certain foods is to change our bodies. Eating intuitively means accepting our bodies, regardless of what they look like.

The author of the article initially had a really difficult time throwing away the ideas of dieting or eating only “healthy foods,” but as time cakewent on and she recognized the pre-programmed messages in her head, she let herself just eat what she wanted. She says that when she wanted peanut M&M’s she would have a few, not the whole bag, and be satisfied. She not only lost weight during this year-long experiment, but said the most significant change is that she doesn’t waste “mental energy agonizing over food or body size anymore.” She says she still stresses over potato chips sometimes, but she doesn’t guilt herself or “promise to make up for it.”

Too good to be true? I suppose it depends on your relationship with food. If you know you eat when you are stressed, depressed, angry, etc, then this probably isn’t the best for you because you can justify eating anything (unless you pay close attention and stop yourself, which is possible). I don’t think I’m ready to jump on this bandwagon yet, but it is definitely food for thought, especially on this snack-laden Super Bowl Sunday.

 

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Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Last month, I convinced my husband to go to a couple’s workshop with me. “Couple’s workshop?” you may be thinking, “Why would you ever want to go to one of the those? We don’t need that kind of help.” Well, we’ve been married for fourteen years, and together for nineteen. We are used to each other and our own, personal, quirks. We also still like each other, thankfully, but after kids come, so does the lack of time spent together. When you have babies, forget about it, then, even as they get older, the carefree days of taking off to do something fun, just the two of you, ends. And distance and disconnection can grow instead, things we have both felt.

This idea all began because I heard a podcast with an interview of a psychologist named John Gottman. He and his research partner had been studying couples and divorce for years. They could observe a couple for an hour and predict with over 90% accuracy if that couple would get a divorce in the coming years. I thought that was incredible, and although I didn’t want to sign up and be observed, I looked more into Gottman and his methods. Turns out he has numerous books on the subject, co-authored with his wife, Julie Gottman, and they also have formed seminars and workshops about marriage. Again, I was interested in what they teach and what they have learned over the years by observing and researching couples. After digging around I discovered that there was a couple’s workshop, entitled, “The Art and Science of Love,” created by the Gottmans and it would be in the Bay Area, somewhat near us and fairly soon.

I approached my husband with the idea who looked at me with skepticism. “A couple’s workshop?” He wasn’t too excited about it, and thought that he and our relationship would be under a microscope. I honestly wasn’t too sure about what would happen, but I thought it couldn’t hurt, maybe we would feel better about ourselves as a couple, and if anything, I would have a topic for my monthly blog! I didn’t think our marriage was in any danger to begin with, but we also were pretty stuck in our ways of seeing each other briefly between work, kids’ practices, performances, sports, etc. We both felt a little disconnected. He agreed (because he’s a nice guy and a good husband) and we both waited, with some anxiety, for the weekend workshop.

We walked in on an early Saturday morning of an overcast day to a room full of many different couples: old, young, various ethnicities and backgrounds, a same-sex couple, but everyone had the same sense of interest and apprehension of what was to come. The room was set up with rows of chairs and a projector. It was more of a classroom setting than a group therapy session. I think we were both relieved! Over the next two days we were taught by two marriage/family therapists many things about what the Gottmans have learned over the years. What helps couples stay together (being good friends, and doing small things for each other often were some examples), what predicts divorce (more negative interactions than positive, feeling alone, unable to resolve conflict), and how to resolve those conflicts when they arise (or what to do when you can’t).

Overall, it was an interesting lesson in what makes marriages work, according to their research, and what causes them to slowly disintegrate, then ultimately end in divorce. If we all started out learning these things, the rate of divorce would surely be less! (If anything, because a person might decide not to marry a potential spouse in the first place.) I’ll be posting more of what I learned because I think it can be helpful in any close relationship. As for my husband and me, we still like each other, even after sixteen hours of examining our marriage!

So long ago!
Near the beginning, so long ago.
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