New Year’s Resolution

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My goal is imperative and I’ll tell you why:

My father at the end of his life had stage 3 colon cancer that spread to his liver.

Though I don’t know that this type of cancer is can be inherited I’m not taking my chances..

It might not seem fair that hard work is required to succeed at a goal.

It takes mental work; physical work; emotional work; and spiritual work to get what you want in life.

My goal is to gain energy and achieve peak fitness.

The sub-goal is to have salads 3x per week for lunch.

To do this I will order food online and bring it to my job in the Rachel Ray insulated tote.

I’ve long advanced in this blog that eating healthful food can improve a person’s mood.

Two other goals I’ve achieved so far have contributed to having an elevated feeling.

They have been acted on using the Changeology book plan.

In the coming blog entry I’ll talk about Step Two: Prep

Sempre Avanti Questo Stagione

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Always – Forward This Season.

The holidays can be a time of enforced outward mirth when inside you’re just low or actually feeling depressed.

You might look back with regret on what you did or events that happened in your life  or goals you didn’t achieve.

You can be grieving that your loved ones are gone too.

I received a generic holiday e-mail greeting:

“A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to You and Yours.”

Yes: A published writer dashed that off and they couldn’t come up with a more distinctive message?

The truth is the holidays aren’t often bliss–these days can be a burden to get through.

Which is why if you have a New Year’s goal or resolution like I do, you need to execute a plan with a better chance of success.

When the holidays are over, you don’t want to experience another letdown like failing to make good on a resolution.

Only maybe it’s not you–maybe it’s your method that hasn’t worked.

This is why I’ve decided to record my own resolution in here to give readers hope.

I’m going to share the 5 Steps of the Changeology method with you.

In the coming blog entry I’ll detail my own New Year’s resolution.

Sempre Avanti,

Chris

 

 

Changeology: Step One: Psych

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On the upper right of this blog where there’s text I inserted a new quote. It’s well worth it to read and remember the quote.

Here it is in case you can’t see the quote right away on your cell phone screen:

“Proceed as if Success is Inevitable.” – Unknown

This week I’ve started Step One–Psych–in the Changeology book. There are five steps total: Psych. Prep. Perspire. Persist. Persevere.

Step One is where you get in the mental game to psych yourself up to achieve the goal you’re going to set for the 90-day time frame.

My goal is to eat more healthful food for lunch and to save money on buying lunches. So, I’m going to bring food from home instead of buying food outside.

To do this I ordered a purple Rachael Ray XL 10 Gallon Insulated Tote. It arrived at my door. Wow–the tote is huge. I’m going to use it anyway. It folds, so will be convenient to take back home folded up.

With the holidays here I’ve been exercising only once a week on Sundays. At the start of the New Year I intend to go back to the gym to lift weights 2x per week. Plus hop on the treadmill one day a week in the winter.

I’ll stick with this one goal of eating more healthful food and ordering food online to bring with me to my job.

First up is keeping a food diary which I’ve been doing for three days so far. I’ll keep the food diary for 7 days.

Next week I will start Step Two: Prep.

I’m so impressed with the Changeology book that I’m giving a copy out as a Christmas gift.

Using this 5-Step method I’ve been successful so far with 2 goals I wanted to achieve.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race. It’s a cliche because it’s true: Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

My hope is that by sharing my own goal-setting plan I can empower readers to reach for your dreams too.

Organic Food Benefits

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How to Be Well has opened my eyes to how it’s non-negotiable to eat mostly organic food.

Not only is eating meat not-so-great for our waistlines it’s obviously not good at all for the earth. CAFOs–that is slaughterhouses–wreck the environment.

I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade. Today I’m not keen to eat chicken and turkey either unless I buy or order the organic version.

According to Frank Lipman, MD the author of How to Be Well chicken is given a chemical bath.

Chemical bath? Those words alone alarm me.

I say: opt for buying and eating organic chicken and turkey. Just Say No to Beef of any kind.

In the coming blog entries I want to thrown down another Fitness Challenge. I’ll record my own progress to motivate readers to embark on your own goal-setting routine.

Meet me in the next blog entry as I start out with Step 1: Psych.

The Truth About GMOs

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Roundup–the Monsanto pesticide–was proven to cause cancer in a legal trial.

Farming communities have high rates of cancer. Pesticides cause all sorts of health issues.

Eating produce that’s locally grown is better if you’re able to do this.

The cost of shopping at a Greenmarket offsets the catastrophic cost of becoming ill from disease. You either pay more for healthful food or you pay more for medical costs.

After skimming pages in How to Be Well I’m committed to changing my behavior in terms of consuming food.

My goal is to persuade blog readers to buy mostly organic food.

As I see it, to eat healthfully 80 percent of the time is a great goal. I’ve talked about this 80 percent rule before in the blog.

Monsanto and the other biotech firms will stop at nothing to keep advertising GMO crops as safe and nutritious. Only GMO food isn’t better for you than organic food.

Luckily, I can buy organic food and shop at Greenmarkets where I live in New York City.

In the coming blog entry I’ll talk more about the benefits of eating mostly organic food.

How to Be Well

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how to be well

This book is the real deal just like How to Make Disease Disappear.

In the coming blog entries I’m going to write about health topics touched on in How to Be Well.

It was my goal to turn back to talking about fitness and nutrition.

With January 1st coming up soon a lot of us are going to want to achieve resolutions.

As always, there’s one goal-setting book I recommend. I seem to have altered the title before in the blogs. The actual title is Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions.

This method is effective no matter the kind of behavior you seek to change.

One goal I have–I really don’t like to use the word resolution–is to create a better weekly meal plan and fitness routine.

Step 1 of the Changeology method is Psych. In order to be effective in realizing your resolution you first have to get in the mental game to do this.

Joining a gym and firing away at exercise before you engage in the Psych Step you’re going to run out of steam two months later and quit.

I’m going to end here with the truth that I’ll continue to detail in the coming blog entry: M.D.s don’t eat junk according to Frank Lipman, M.D. the author of How to Be Well.

He devotes a section of the book to GMOs which should be required reading.

I’d like to start in the next two weeks to use this blog as a forum for New Year’s goal-setting.

My aim is to show how it’s possible to realize your resolutions.

 

Dark Horse

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In only five hours I read the book Dark Horse: Achieving Success through the Pursuit of Fulfillment. Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas have written the definitive guide to finding the career that is the right fit.

From the inside book flap:

“This mold-breaking approach doesn’t depend on your SAT scores, who you know, or how much money you have.

The secret is a mindset that can be expressed in plain English:

Harness your individuality in the pursuit of fulfillment to achieve excellence.”

The authors detail the achievements of a high-school dropout who created her own telescope observatory in her backyard. She found and named an asteroid and found a planet. This put her in the ranks of astronomers with PhDs.

This woman and the other people talked about in the book are dark horses because no one could see their success coming.

My memoir Left of the Dial is a full-length book recounting of my own dark horse life.

Those of us who are dark horses got here via a long and winding path.

Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas in their book rail against the “cookie-cutter mold for success that requires us to be the same as everyone else, only better.”

This “standard formula” is the root of inequality. People are competing to get better grades, get into elite colleges and universities, and get coveted jobs.

It really is a treadmill. One woman featured in Dark Horse willingly got on this competitive treadmill thinking this was what she was supposed to do.

She crashed, and had to rethink her whole life. Today she is successful as the operator of an underground supper club.

I say: stop living life on autopilot. Live an authentic life.

We don’t have to trample over each other in our lives like it’s a Black Friday sale every day. We don’t have storm through the doors reaching to achieve things at the expense of everyone else.

The book flap asks:

“As much as we might dislike the standard formula, it seems like there’s no other practical path to financial security and a fulfilling life.

But what if there is?””

I recommend readers of the blog buy Dark Horse.

I for one think the book is the most uplifting and inspiring literature I’ve ever read of any genre.

In the next blog entry I’ll talk about having a career linked to your individuality.

The Snob Diet

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Years ago I remember reading in a magazine–was it Glamour–about the Snob Diet.

The editors claimed this diet works. I’m no fan of diets.

No–I didn’t ever go on a diet when I lost 20 pounds in my twenties.

Though I gained a little in the form of muscle I’ve dropped one pant and one skirt size by lifting weights for over 7 years. In fact I dropped one size only one year after starting to lift weights consistently at the gym.

On the days I’m unable to go to the gym I work out at home. See my blog entry Setting Up a Home Gym for details about the equipment I bought.

OK–so the Snob Diet involves eating quality food–regular food–and not eating junk that is totally crap.

In the Dr. Chatterjee book How to Make Disease Disappear his section on the Eat Pillar disproves the claims that experts and adherents make for diets such as low-carb or keto or paleo. This British MD details the truth about how to eat to fuel your body to function optimally.

I can vouch for being a snob in terms of what I eat: mostly healthful food and a once-a-week indulgence in a chocolate croissant or some other kind of delectable.

Dr. Chatterjee busts the longest-running myth in staying slim: that how you maintain your weight is as simple as calories burned versus calories consumed.

Forget going on kooky and restrictive diets. You could tone up lifting all those diet books on the shelves.

I wrote a number of blog entries about the tenets of How to Make Disease Disappear. Dr. Chatterjee’s approach to health is sane and simple. It’s not difficult to maintain the kind of eating plan he talks about.

In this blog about a year or so ago I wrote about my own sensible eating plan: having a consistent habit of eating 80 percent healthfully and 20 percent anything.

The name Snob Diet has a ring to it.

I don’t advise acting like a snob towards people in your everyday life.

Yet being snobbish in the kind of food you eat might have advantages.

Healthful Snacks

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pulse chick peas

This photo has been uploaded in a gigantic way. Apparently there’s a new way of saving photos that your iPhone has sent to your email as an attachment.

The chickpea and olive food products shown here do have salt. The Pulse version I prefer is the lemon-and-oregano chickpeas offering.

Either way these and the Gaea olive container are portable healthful snacks for on-the-go eating. I have on hand plastic-coated wire clips to use to close the Pulse container.

You can order these food items from FreshDirect online in New York City.

In the next blog entry I’ll talk about a so-called diet talked about if I remember in Glamour magazine years ago.

While I’m no fan of diets and I’m absolutely against the standard diets books poured out into the marketplace I want to talk about this “diet” because a couple of elements of it make sense to me.

After this I will return to talking about careers. This month–October–is National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

5-a-Day the Easy Way

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Dr. Chatterjee recommends having 5 servings of vegetables a day.

The MD includes avocados and olives in this “5-a-day” lineup.

You can print up copies of his Rainbow Chart and use them to check off the vegetables you’ve eaten each day.

In tandem with the “5-a-Day” eating plan Dr. Chatterjee recommends not eating food products that contain more than five ingredients.

The longer the ingredient list the more likely it’s processed food.

The government allows food  and drink companies to get away with not listing the actual names of chemicals contained in food and drink products.

Instead they’re listed as “natural flavor.” Food  or drink that companies claim is organic or otherwise good for you often has natural flavors in the ingredient list.

It’s perfectly legal to load up food and drink products with chemicals without having to list the chemicals on the ingredients list.

Any kind of protein bar is most likely high in sugar and has natural flavors.

Kind bar now lists on the package: Made with Real Food. Only when you read the ingredients list it also contains chemicals in the form of natural flavor.

I urge you to read the ingredient lists of food and drink products:

Anything that makes an emotional claim as being good for you most likely has chemicals added to whatever “good” part of the food they’re championing.

In the next blog entry here I’ll talk about some great snacks you can buy that are truly healthful.

You can do away with products that have natural flavors.

With 100 percent confidence I can tell you: stay away from any food or drink that didn’t come out of God’s green earth.

You’ll be healthier and feel better eating real food that isn’t doused in chemicals.

It’s fine every-so-often to have pastry or a cookie or doughnut. That should be an occasional treat. I stand by indulging once-a-week.

In a coming blog entry I’ll talk about a particular diet that was championed in Glamour magazine years ago.