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
I haven’t written much while we’ve been on our trip, although I hope you got the recipe in the previous post for the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, a true winner. At some point I’ll do a calculation of the sugar content of it and the buttercream, but that’s a subject for another day. In this post I want to give some random ideas on vacation eating, a topic I’ve discussed rather thoroughly before. But hey! There’s always room for more info about eating mindfully and well.
Since I’ve been writing so much about various fad diets that you should just blithely ignore (with more to come), I thought it might be a good idea to write something about how a person should eat, and how well my own diet stacks up.
So first, for breakfast, Jim and I typically alternate between an egg-and-meat meal and a grain-based meal. If we had an omelet with veggies, cheese and perhaps some meat one morning then I might make whole-grain muffins the next day. Or we might have bagels bought
It has occurred to me that I’ve evolved two simple principles that can then be applied to any aspect of life, in particular to eating. Here they are:
The laws of physics have not been repealed.
The secret is that there is no secret.
A short post today in which I publicize my other blogs and platforms and encourage you to subscribe. Here goes:
1. Are you subscribed to this blog? You may have stumbled upon it in a Google search. If so, and you’d like to get e-mailed updates, be sure to use the signup form on the sidebar. Whenever I post something new you’ll get a brief e-mail with a link to the actual post. This happens 3-4 times a week at most, and the posts themselves are fairly brief. I try to keep things no longer than about 1,000 words. You’ll get the title and the first line or so. If that doesn’t grab you, just delete that e-mail, and another one will show up in a few days that you may like better.
Yes, I know. We’re all so tired of being told to drink lots of water. And there’s plenty of evidence out there that the whole thing has been somewhat overblown. The original standard of eight glasses of water a day came from a paper written back in the 1940’s, and references to that study usually don’t include its caveat that much of the needed water comes from food. Also, other liquids besides water count. So if you drink orange juice (which you shouldn’t be doing, as it’s just sugar water, but never mind), or coffee, tea, or other beverages, all of those count as water. (Contrary to a very silly idea that circulated for awhile, coffee doesn’t cause you to excrete more water than was in the coffee to begin with.) The current state of medical advice is that your body will tell you if you need water, because guess what? You’ll feel thirsty.
I’ve been saying for some time now that one key to healthy eating patterns is the following:
Don’t eat in the evening.
Sounds pretty simple, but there are actually quite a few moving parts involved in this brief statement, most of them running counter to the way we eat in our modern American culture. Here’s the way it can go for a
Every once in a while I get an image of myself as I’d like to be: admirably self-controlled, unruffled, good-humored, respectful of others and therefore eliciting respect for herself, setting high standards for myself but being tolerant of others . . . the list goes on. It’s a picture of my so-called “best self.” That person doesn’t actually exist, unfortunately, but I find that picturing her is helpful. Last night, for example, we were at a restaurant celebrating a family birthday and I had ordered chili rellenos. Very, very good. But there were two of them, and I knew after finishing one that I didn’t need any more. I could save the rest for today. But that second one, with its crispy crust (always get the crispy rellenos! it’s a rule of life) was very tempting. I looked at it; it looked at me. And I thought, ‘My ideal self wouldn’t eat it. She’d stick to what she decided to do.’ So, while I did cut off one corner, the rest came home with me and is sitting in the fridge even now, waiting to be consumed for lunch.
I listen to a wide range of podcasts, some on politics, some about mysteries of the past, and some that I’ll call, for want of a better term, “lifestyle” podcasts, dealing with everything from home décor to finances to happiness. Last week I heard the same idea coming from two very different parts of this spectrum, that the way to get ahead in your career when you’re just starting out is to be willing to get things done, even if those things are tasks you might consider below you. The classic example is that of getting coffee for people.
A number of years ago I was acting as a group discussion leader in a Bible study group, and we were given a document titled “Are you a servant or a volunteer?” This happened near the end of the year when I was feeling a bit weary in well doing about being a leader. I loved my group and interacting with them, but I felt burdened and somewhat resentful about all of the time I had to spend in leadership meetings in order to spend 45 minutes or so guiding a discussion based on prepared questions that everyone was supposed to have answered in advance.So reading the article cemented my decision not to serve the next year. (I’m sure that was not the intention!) I had realized that my attitude fit the “volunteer” mold much more than the “servant” one.