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Eat More Greens
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know this because our parents have been pushing this idea on us ever since we were old enough to hold a spoon. But now, rather than eating your broccoli in response to the all-purpose “Eat it ‘cause it’s good for you” exhortation, you have many more excellent—even exciting—reasons to eat more greens.
Blending your veggies is a good way to get them in. Try my “Green Smoothie” recipe. It’s packed with fresh veggies and spinach!
Importance of Community
Back in the 1950s—the “Happy Days” of American society—people didn’t talk about the value of community much. They didn’t need to, because they lived it. Most people lived in tight nuclear families, they knew their neighbors, they belonged to neighborhood churches, they participated in local Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, they were members of school clubs (yes, including glee club!) and local service organizations like the Rotary Club, and people chose a career and stuck with it, often staying at the same job for all their adult life. These were all communities within communities connected to other communities.
Fabulous community of friends
Eat More Fiber
Catch up on Catch up on Hello to Health Day 1 (Drink More Water), Hello to Health Day 2 (Don’t Drink Your Calories) and Hello to Health Day 3 (Walk More).
My Aunt Sharon tells the story of a college classmate in the 1970s who went on an All-Bran cereal diet and lost 50 pounds in a couple of months. No one had heard of losing weight by eating bran, so, of course, the joke around school was that the weight loss was only proof that he was full of (hmmm, how to say this politely?) manure to begin with!
Back then, the power of fiber (which bran is very high in) for anything beyond its ability to help folks “stay regular” was unknown to the general public. But today we know that fiber is not only good for intestinal health and weight loss, but it deserves our praise for its many nutritional and health-building benefits as well.
Walk More!
Catch up on Hello to Health Day 1 (drink more water) and Hello to Health Day 2 (don’t drink your calories).
Could any activity be more easy and natural than walking? We do it every day without even thinking about it. Even though it does take some serious thought and effort to turn walking into a real exercise (eh hem … jogging or gasp, running), it nevertheless remains one of the easiest and more flexible ways to “Say hello to health.”
Jamisen and I are ready to go on a stroller adventure together!
Don’t Drink Your Calories
Many of us have heard the expression that “all calories are not created equal,” and it pretty much makes sense when you’re comparing 300 calories of carrots to 300 calories of cake. But apparently, the weight-gaining effects of calories on the body differ depending on whether someone is drinking their calories or shoveling them in. Studies show that between solid foods and beverages, the consumption of liquids packs the greater girth-generating wallop. Who’d’a’thunk?
Somewhere along the line, the exhortations to drink plenty of water throughout the day (see Hello to Health blog # 1) got translated into drinking all sorts of beverages that, by both their nature and their ingredients, are wreaking havoc on people’s weight.
Happy Fall! I’m hitting the gym or in the case of last weekend, the water! That’s me and Jody Bergsma on paddleboards in Bellingham Bay. We paddled a very very long way and were so energized and inspired. I’m taking the necessary healthy steps to get my health back, post baby outside the gym too. If you missed that I had a baby back in April, check out the blog post here. And if you can’t get enough baby pictures, search the blog for “Jamisen” or follow BrambleBump on twitter. You’ll have more than a handful of blogs to read. Getting back on track (cute babies are so distracting), I’ll be posting healthy lifestyle tips (that I’m going to be doing myself) every Monday for the next eight weeks. With the kids back in school, now is a great time to focus on US! Join me by taking baby steps into a healthier lifestyle this Fall.
Drink Your Water
We feel kind of sorry for water. While everybody always fusses about what foods to eatand how much to consume, about the only thing folks hear about water is, “Be sure to drink at least 8 or 9 glasses a day.” That’s it. Poor ol’ water just isn’t getting the respect it deserves.
I have longed for a treadmill desk ever since Michael Hyatt tweeted a video about his. I don’t think I’ve eaten a piece of bread since 1979 in my constant search for caloric stasis yet it turns out, even working out daily and eating healthy isn’t enough to keep my metabolism on par with where it needs to be. The latest studies coming out show that your metabolism is damaged by sitting too much during the day and people who sit longer die earlier (eeek!). Though I am often up and down between my desk and the soap lab, when I’m in the office, it’s a sedentary existence. After seeing the metabolism study, I got serious about getting a treadmill desk.
After much planning and budgeting, I started watching Craiglist for used gym-quality treadmills. In my research, I was told several times that for walking slowly for hours a day would be taxing on any motor (which made no sense to me but to be fair, my degree is in psychology and I’ve never been great with mechanics). Since I needed a big motor, it took a while to find a treadmill that had a huge motor without costing a huge bundle. I finally found a refurbished Precor Treadmill, just like the ones at my gym. It’s a huge monster of a beast. It took 4 guys and a forklift to unload it.
Here’s a blog poston how to build your own $39 desk to put on your treadmill. Or the fantastic cabinet maker that built mine said he is happy to share the plans for a nominal fee. Either way, if you work in an office and you’d like to burn calories while you work and yes, even live longer, start saving your pennies to save your life.
I love to work out. If you follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, you know that I generally squeeze in a workout daily. I lead an intentionally busy, very scheduled life and still take 60 to 90 minutes from my day, every day, to give myself a mental health break and keep my body and heart fit.
“You should never edit one dream. Never edit. Just go for it!”
Judi Sheppard Missett
Judi Sheppard Missett, the founder of Jazzercise, spoke to the Women Presidents’ Organization on its last day. In fact, she was the last speaker of the entire conference and she brought the event to a fitting, high-note, close. Wearing an adorable silver skirty leggings outfit thing (the photo doesn’t do it justice), she dominated the stage, at times leading us in group exercise to bring points to life.
Her premise is that life and success is analogous to music. First, there is the building block of the bass line. For Judi, this is passion. She exhorts that you must have a passion for what you’re doing. You should get up every morning with that kind of fluttery exciting feeling that happens when you’re anticipating something great. She says that’s this is what passion does for you – it gives you that opportunity to feel the butterflies of excitement every day. I was lucky enough to take a Jazzercise class from her at the conference and can attest first hand that she loves what she does.
During her talk, she went on to explain that when you are passionate about what you are doing, you can dream great big fabulous dreams – and orchestrate them because passion helps you to work really hard and helps you crank up the proverbial volume. When you need to be able to put in an extraordinary effort, if you’re passionate about what you do, it doesn’t seem like work. Passion helps you listen to your gut, your voice of truth. Just like the base beat keeps the music on target and tuned in, that’s what passion does for you. It helps to keep you excited, motivated and on target.
The next building block in music is its cadence and tempo. Cadence gives you cues, messages, signs and signals. You need to be aware of life’s cues and opportunities and be aware for changing messaging and signals. When you get results that don’t match what you were expecting, the clues (the cadence) help you to modify. You have to do things differently if you want different results. You have to want to change.
Finally, the melody helps to bring everything along in a smooth and predictable pattern. You get the melody in your life by maintaining your mind-body-spirit connection.
According to Judy, the keys to maintaining this melody in your life are: surround yourself with people that lift you up. Kick out the negative and don’t allow anyone to bring you down. Create a family culture in your work so that you enjoy and care for those that work with and around you. Improve your mind by challenging yourself. And of course, the rockin’ healthy, 60ish year old grandmother strongly advocated fitness as part of a healthy life. She said, “Strengthen the body – practice well being through exercise and nutrition. Get enough sleep. Eat things in their natural state. ”
Finally, to keep your melody going, make room in your life for spontaneity. Leave room in your life for serendipitous happenings. (Random aside: I totally took her advice yesterday and spur of the moment, went to go see the Mt. Vernon Tulip Fields by bike. Expect pictures later this week) Don’t become so rigid that you have no fun doing what you do. You won’t even be aware when things pass you buy if you are too rigid. In addition, practice gratitude. Every day Judi makes a gratitude list from A to Z. This outpouring of gratitude makes Judi want to share and give back. She strongly believes in the power of ‘giving back’ and suggests that you try to make a difference in someone’s life every single day. Proving that she walks the walk, she has raised $26million for charity (WOW!)
She closed with the exhortation: “Be brilliant and absolutely humble.”
Success is a combination of three things:
Idealism
Realism
Plain old hard work
Learn more about Jazzercise at their site here or read more about the background of Jazzercise and Judi’s rise in building a $93million/year business here.
Happiness, it seems, is a living thing. The particular way in which we think and act can determine a lot about how happy we are. What we focus on, in the past, present and future, makes a big difference to our happiness.
Happy people focus on the good things in their past rather than the bad things. They tend to be grateful and forgiving and they don’t believe that the past determines the future. In the present, happy people take pleasure in life, in their relationships, in their surroundings, in their day-to-day activities and in their work. Looking at the future, happy people are basically optimistic. If things don’t turn out, they readjust and keep going. They recover from bad things quickly and expect good things. They move forward.
Happy people are generally positive, cheerful, pleasant, optimistic, upbeat. They see possibilities. They neutralize or sidestep strong negative energy forces. They are healthier not only mentally but also physically. And, you can have this too! You need to be systematic about building your happiness framework by:
Day 1- Decide to be happy. Happiness is a choice.
Day 2- Foster close relationships.
Day 3- Focus on a larger purpose.
Day 4- Move purposefully towards your goals.
Day 5- Find quiet, targeted time to reflect. Make “slow” time.
Day 6- Challenge and excite your mind.
Day 7- Work out five days per week & eat a clean diet.
Day 8- Feel grateful & focus on the positive.
When we are happy, our happiness is contagious. Our families and friends and community benefit from our good spirits, our optimism, our humor, our laughter, our ability to look on the sunny side of life. Don’t you want this for yourself? Add any two of the ideas above to your routine for 30 days. In 30 days of mindful practice (for whatever your choices are), take an honest look and see where you are on your happiness scale. Did you move up? If you did, consider adding another framework and another happiness “best practice” until you work your way completely up the list. Won’t it feel good to look back at the end of 2009 and realize how many positive changes you made in your life?
Sarah Ban Breathnach: “Now be reassured. Optimism…can be learned. Start today with a little experiment. Smile at everyone you meet.”
Everyone has down times and our challenges to overcome. We all walk the path of life’s ups and downs and sometimes the up path can be steep.
This is where friends, family and community come in again. People with close friends, family and a strong community recover faster from down times, failures and sadness. Studies show that isolation exacerbates unhappiness whereas friends and family and community lift our spirits.
With friends we share our achievements, failures, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Good friends are there in good times and bad. We participate in each others’ lives. We share our feelings. We don’t go it alone.
When we’re going through our troubled time, we have our daily plan. We don’t have to think about all our decisions because we’ve done the roadmap – our goals and our vision for our life. So, it’s easier to eat well, exercise, spend time in nature, write in our gratitude journal, and spend time with positive friends. All these things nourish us and we recover faster.
Finally, there’s laughter. Laughter sends endorphins into the bloodstream and relieves pain, both physical and mental. Laughter has been described as “inner jogging”, “respiratory gymnastics”, “the stress fighter”, and “a tranquilizer with no side effects”. Well, it all sounds good! Hurray for those great giggles we’ve had at the craziest times and hurray for our friends who make us laugh!
Sure, we find ourselves in the doldrums sometimes, but we don’t have to dwell there.
We can just choose to shift gears. Helen Keller said, “When one door closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
Happiness tips for the doldrums:
PS – This overview post above is meant for those of us that have normal bouts of anxiety or sadness. If you are clinically depressed, these are good and helpful tips to consider in conjunction with vising your doctor for a more serious chat.
The longer I live the less confidence I have in drugs and the greater is my confidence in the regulation and administration of diet and regimen. ~John Redman Coxe, 1800
To keep our body happy and healthy and humming, we need to attend to three main things: sourcing and eating nutritious, high energy food; keeping our body moving: and spending time outdoors. We all know this. So, why aren’t we doing it? The slide show here shows the scary increase in obesity since 1985. Given that the government is considering a universal health care system, our obesity could get expensive for taxpayers everywhere. But, related to this foray into what you can do to increase your happiness, obesity and poor health cost you greatly from a happiness and productivity standpoint. This is all common-sense stuff that your parents taught you growing up but it bears repeating and reminding. Remember your goals for 2009? Many of you mentioned working out and getting healthy as a goal. If you’re not healthy on the inside, it’s difficult to feel content and yes, happy with your current place in life.
Eating – try to incorporate one or two suggestions for tangible benefits.
In minds crammed with thoughts, organs clogged with toxins, and bodies stiffened with neglect, there is just no space for anything else. ~Alison Rose Levy
Exercising – try to incorporate one or two for tangible benefits.
One critical aspect of happiness is taking good care of our minds and bodies. We can’t be truly happy if we’re not respecting and nurturing our essential selves.
We, among all the species on earth, have brilliant minds. How do we use them? What do we do with the overwhelming amount of information that we have? How do we use it well in our personal lives? How do we use it to teach and nurture our children? Are we using the media only for entertainment and not for information? There is so much entertainment! It’s important that we, and our children, don’t drown in it.
“Formal education will make you a living; self education will make you a fortune.”
– Jim Rohn
We need to stay informed. We are among the most blessed people on earth to live in a democracy where we are not governed by ruthless dictators, where our lives and the lives of our children are not in constant danger. Do we contribute to our democracy? Are we civic citizens? Do we help to keep our schools, our communities, our government, our leaders, accountable? Do we pay attention to the issues of the day? Do we pay attention to our environment and the small, besieged planet we live on?
As humans, we “love, learn and leave a legacy”. What is your legacy? Are you focusing beyond yourself? Helping others or working for a cause is one of the actions that contributes to a satisfying life. Volunteering and giving back to the community are a huge way to make sure that you are thinking outside just your life and issues. Bramble Berry donates a portion of our profits and I donate my time serving on various non-profit boards to give back and also recognize that there is a greater purpose and calling in life than just my small world sphere.
Another action is the time-honored ritual of “gratitude”. Gratitude represents an attitude toward life in general. Over many centuries, gratitude has been recognized as a way to elevate the human spirit. Keep a Gratitude Journal and every day write down the things you are grateful for. Or before you go to sleep at night, think of the things you are grateful for.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, founder of the non-profit agency http://www.gratefulness.org/, says “Gratefulness is the key to a happy life… because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy – because we will always want to have something else or something more.”
Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of the wonderful book, Simple Abundance, tells us: “Your life will not blossom and flourish without gratitude. With gratitude, we discover we are much richer than we think…. You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life.”
Things you can do to increase your contentment and happiness quotient:
Keep a gratitude journal
Volunteer
Turn off the TV
Read a non-fiction book
Take a class
Learn another language
Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!
Busy-ness seems to be a plague of our current society. Despite modern conveniences and technology, once thought to be the key to a more leisurely lifestyle, time seems to be in shorter and shorter supply and we think we have to keep moving faster (I know I certainly do!). People (myself included) seem to boast about being busy, as if having 112 e-mails to answer, or only getting six hours of sleep, was a sign of success.
If Barack Obama can try to focus on one simple thing at a time, so can we. Time is a precious resource and we need to reflect on how we use it. Do we manage our time wisely? There are many time management models, but over the years, I’ve always loved Stephen Covey’s model of time management, described in his books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First.
He talks about the difference between “urgent” and “important”. We respond to urgent matters all day long and keep up an urgent time schedule, and are driven by urgency, but we don’t do the things that are important – that are, in fact, vital to our happiness.
According to Covey, the important things that we typically don’t allow ourselves time to do include: improving our communication with the people in our lives, taking better care of ourselves, personal development and personal empowerment, seizing new opportunities, and better planning and organizing.
For example, when we don’t focus on our communication – with spouse, children, family, friends, fellow workers, etc. – there’s a string of negative consequences – and there’s a BIG, if sometimes not immediately obvious, effect on happiness.
Like chemical abuse, says Covey, urgency is an addiction. It’s like taking a painkiller and then using it in excess. Then what happens is that we don’t make choices and decisions; urgency makes those choices and decisions for us.
Which means we need to get off the urgency treadmill. We need to think carefully about what is truly important that we’re not doing and who is truly important that we’re not spending time with. Shandel Slaten from True Life Coaching has a great call-in class (Life 101) that can help you identify what your values are and what is truly important to you. We have to say “no” to urgency and “yes” to the vital, meaningful, life-giving things that make us truly happy.
And there may be other things we may need to say “no” to besides urgency. Our time is a precious and limited resource. “No” is an important part of our vocabulary, and essential for self-care. Jack Canfield in The Success Principles recomends a “Just Say No” list. I have one of those lists and while it doesn’t make everything all perfect and easy for me to whittle down my to-do list, it certainly helps.
We have the slow food movement; now we need the slow time movement. What slows time for you? Some people meditate or join meditation groups to slow themselves down and cultivate awareness. Some people do yoga. Some people walk in the forest or by the ocean to get back in touch with the rhythm of the universe.
Trying to add “slow time” to my life, I’ve started yoga and meditation time in my morning routine for the past six months. I get up 15 minutes earlier and do a quick set of 5 “Sun Salutations” (don’t know what a sun salutation is? Click here for a quick YouTube video explanation) and then focus on my goals for the year ending with an easy daily meditation reading. This morning time seems to help me focus on my day and reviewing why I do what I do before the day really starts. It is a great motivator and reminder (“Oh yeah, I practice Chinese daily because eventually, I want Bramble Berry to do something over there.”)
Whatever you do to add more quality time in your day, feel good knowing that quality time pursuing activities that mirror your life values increases the level of happiness you feel on a daily basis.
Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!
