Habits

My Post-Surgery Clean Slate

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Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay

It’s now been over a week since surgery. I went in yesterday morning for my first post-op visit, hoping that I’d be told to go back to regular shoes, but no such luck. Maybe next Wednesday. Things look okay, with the implants holding in place, although my not-so-stellar bones have allowed some slippage. My hope was that Dr. Blue would exclaim with joy over how wonderful everything looked, but instead it was more of an “okay.” Guess that’ll have to do. I’m not planning on doing any driving while wearing this very clumsy shoe, so I’m dependent on Jim and Gideon for going anywhere. No big deal! I’m not sure what I’d do if I were, say, a single person supporting myself as a waiter or a housecleaner, but since this was elective surgery I guess it just wouldn’t have happened.

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An Encouragement about Habits

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A goose doing his daily leg lifts. (I’m sure that’s what he’s doing!) Image by Alexandra ❤️A life without animals is not worth living❤️ from Pixabay

Not a food-related post today, but something I’ve found to be encouraging over the past couple of weeks as I’ve stuck to two habits:

  1. Doing my floor exercises, including the core ones, three times a week. As I write this on Wednesday morning I haven’t yet done the set for today, and I should probably start telling myself that I can’t have my coffee in the morning without doing the exercises first. Remember, the whole set takes only 10 minutes or so. Here’s that video I made about the abdominal ones–it’s a little on the amateurish side as far as production values go, but the exercises are genius. (I didn’t come up with

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Super-Simple Habits for the New Year

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Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Didja watch the video from yesterday? We worked pretty hard on it but hope to do better as time goes on. Just like the Zoom choral pieces I just about tore my hair out over for my choir’s online Christmas concert—I almost gave up on those but persevered. Now I’m looking forward to our spring concert and its new challenges. Same with videos for this site, which will include some v-e-r-y  s-i-m-p-l-e demos from the upcoming cookbook. So stick around!

Anyway, I emphasized in the video how important it is to form permanent, longstanding habits that have no finish line. Doing a short-term “challenge” is pretty useless. You go on some extreme, short-term diet and lose a lot of weight, but then you just go back to eating the way you did to cause the need for weight loss in the first place. So what was the point? You’re probably worse off than before, since you would have lost muscle mass but regained fat tissue.

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My First Exercise Video!

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Hi folks–While this isn’t a fitness blog, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to include some exercise ideas as we head into 2021. My own goals are to do my floor exercises three times a week, plus a walk at least four times a week. Nothing extreme or extravagant! But I explain my whole “forming habits with no finish line” philosophy in the video. So here it is:

Once Again, with Feeling: The Small Things You Do Every Day Matter More than the Big Things You Do Once In Awhile

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Image by Emilian Robert Vicol from Pixabay

The above is from Gretchen Rubin and tweaked by me. I’ve made this point many times, most recently in the area of healthy eating: What counts are the consistent, day-to-day choices that we make, not the big, dramatic flourishes that we perform periodically. Remember my theory of inverse drama:

There’s an inverse relationship between the drama of a process and the magnitude of its results. (from the post “Lessons from the Dentist’s Chair”)

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And My Word of the Year for 2020 Is . . . Respect.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Of course, I’m poaching unashamedly from Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft, as they discussed their words for the year on yesterday’s “Happier podcast. Gretchen’s word is “infrastructure;” Although it’s kind of a boring word in and of itself, perhaps, she’s using it in the sense of “support systems,” as she’s very bad at delegating and she needs to do less work that others can do. Liz’s is “lighter,” and she’s taking that word in both of its meanings: her weight and her attitude. Liz’s word leads Gretchen to quote once again G. K. Chesterton’s aphorism “It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light.” (One of my 2020 reading goals has to do with Chesterton; more on that in a later post.)

As I listened to the two sisters I realized that I had a word right there, ready for use, as I’ve been interested in the concept of respect for a long time. Indeed, the word shows up in the title of this blog, and when I give talks about the proper place of food in our lives I spend some time talking about what I mean by it in that context.

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Thoughts on Keeping Up With Exercise Routines and Other Good Habits

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I wrote last week about my accidental weight loss of 2-3 pounds and how I’m trying to hang onto it. So far, so good. Yesterday was 115.5. I have my A1C reading on Friday, so we’ll hope that’s okay, too. But, just to show that life is always throwing a curve ball, that very same Wednesday I started getting sick, which doesn’t happen too often. Once in a while, though, maybe every other year or so, my chronic allergies and my chronic sinus problems combine to give me an actual infection. Nothing serious, and I’m not going to share any gross details about nose blowing or anything, but I was laid low through Monday after caving in and going to a doctor last Friday. Once I started in on antibiotics there was a definite improvement, but the process took several days. No floor exercises or walks took place during that time, and then we started in with snow and cold as of Tuesday. I wasn’t going to get out on the trail with those conditions, so the dreaded treadmill was in the cards. I wimped out yesterday but finally got myself upstairs today, putting in 45 minutes at a fairly slow pace and also doing a full round of the floor thingies. (I should do a post sometime about what I do, but it would have to involve a video. Have to think about that one. Let me just say here that I’m a firm believer in doing something simple and short, qualities that make the routine much easier to stick with.) In theory I’m back in the saddle.

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Yet Another Fad Diet—This One with a Biblical Slant

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Image by engin akyurt from Pixabay

It’s been over a week since I’ve posted anything on this blog, but that lack of posting doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking and pondering about various food fads floating around in our modern society. As I said in my previous short post about the blood-type diet, I had thought that I’d pretty well covered at least the most egregious fads out there, but there’s always something more to be explored in this area.

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What’s the Difference between a Habit and a Streak–and Which One Is Better?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

We just got into the month of June, and I was thinking about ideas I could implement to get some results I’d like to see over the summer. Laura Vanderkam, one of only a couple of lifestyle bloggers I follow (the other one’s being Gretchen Rubin—of course) has been on a running streak for well over a year now (800+ days). She committed to running at least a mile every single day, and she has done so even if she’s been on a trip and had to run around the

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Is It Better to Know the Truth–About Diets or Anything Else?

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Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro, available in multiple formats.

This is a pretty interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. Dani Shapiro is an accomplished and best-selling author of several previous memoirs and novels. If you like real-life mysteries, especially ones that involve delving into the past, you’ll probably get seriously drawn into the story. I read it in big chunks over the course of a couple of days.

The plotline of the book centers around Shapiro’s discovery, by way of an impulsive DNA test, that the man she considered to be her father, whom she loved and revered, was not. She had been conceived with the help of a sperm donor. I won’t give away more of the story as I don’t think that’s fair, so you’ll have to read the book to find out if she finds her biological father and how she handles all the fallout. But here’s the central question for the purpose of my post today: Would she have been better off not to have known? Or, to put it the other way: Is it always better to know the truth?

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