Tag Archives: Change

More on this Lifestyle Nonsense

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I’m a little behind on posting, I got side tracked on other projects. I worked on a painting on Thursday night that I got thoroughly frustrated with after working on it for a few hours. I ended up scraping all the paint off of the canvas, and ended up not wanting to work on anything else.

Last night I stayed up way too late and drank way too much wine with a friend of mine. I invited her over for dinner to eat some of my healthy new groceries I said I was gonna get. Had a delightful time with her.

Now I am coming back to life, and back on track to revisit this lifestyle stuff I was talking about earlier this week. I started out the week talking about creating a healthy lifestyle for myself, and I have been doing just that.

I have been thinking about this in terms of lifestyle and habits. Lifestyle is the overall vision of how you and I want our life to be. The habits are the things we do that either makes that vision more of a reality, or less of a reality.

Some habits are good habits, and some habits are bad habits. In order to make any vision more of a reality, we have to both increase the good habits, and remove the bad habits. The reason why my vision is not reality, after all, is that I have plenty of bad habits that counteract all of my good habits.

Excising the bad habits is one of the most important, and most neglected, parts of changing any lifestyle. Bad habits can be invisible, and you and I may not even realize the effect that they have.

After thinking about this for a while, I realize another way of looking at this stuff is just strategy and tactics.

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics

Strategy is what you want to accomplish, and tactics are the specific actions necessary to accomplish that. Things that you want to do, or results that you want to get, are strategy. Specific things to do to accomplish that are tactics.

This healthy lifestyle that I am putting together can be thought of as a couple of strategies: I will eat healthy food and exercise. I will fill my kitchen with delicious, healthy foods. I will keep my kitchen clean and clutter free.

The tactics flow from this. I change in to my jogging gear every morning when I get out of bed. I go grocery shopping every Wednesday. I clean my dishes every evening after I eat dinner.

The tactics flow out of the overall strategies, and they create the results that the strategy seeks.

Not Such A Big Deal

When I started this week of thinking about lifestyle and habits, it seemed like a much bigger topic than I thought. Once I got started though, I found out that it really isn’t that big a deal. Once I got going with a few changes, it started the ball rolling and everything went from there.

A little bit of momentum led to more momentum, and made the next step to implement these lifestyle changes easier than the previous change.

My suggestion for lifestyle change is this:

Start with the first thing, and do it today. Don’t think too much, and don’t worry. Figure out what the first thing is and decide to do it.

What do I mean by this? Every change has a first step. Determine what that should be, and get to it! The best first steps are symbolic in nature. The first step should be something that is a big change from anything you did previously, something that makes you feel like “my life is different now”.

For me, cleaning my kitchen and filling it with healthy food was a good first step. With that one action, I changed my lifestyle from eating whatever food I happened to pick up, healthy or not, to a lifestyle of eating fresh, healthy foods all the time. I’m actually writing this while eating an oat bran muffin and a nectarine with my morning coffee. Tasty.

So what change do you want to make? Do you want to flirt with more women out at bars? Smile and say “hi” to every woman you see out at the bar from now on. Do you want to meet a woman while grocery shopping? When you see a pretty girl at the store, go tell her that you didn’t mean to hit on anyone today, but that she is really cute, and made you change your mind.

There all sorts of things you can do to signify to yourself that your life is different, find one simple thing, and do it today.

Small Change, Big Result (Because Habits Cascade)

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Still thinking about lifestyle change, and making an overall change in my life to having a healthy lifestyle, rather than just a few healthy habits. I will be lean, green, and mean.

It seems like a lot of habits cascade from other habits. One of my really bad habits is to pick up some food on the way home from work. I’ll stop at the taqueria and get a burrito, go to Uncle Vito’s for some heavy pasta, or get Thai takeout from King of Thai Noodle.

Not good for the health. It’s always too much food (that I eat all of anyway), and the way restaurants make their food so good is by extra helping of oil, cream, and cheese. Tasty, but not healthy.

It’s a bad habit, and is one I want to change.

Not so fast though, I realized that there are a lot of other habits I have to change to do this. Part of the reason I get take out a lot is that it is tasty, but another reason is that I don’t have much tasty food at home to make a good, healthy meal.

Another habit I need to change is to go to the grocery store often to get groceries. Makes a lot of sense. I also need to get to the farmers market on Saturday morning to get a nice bag of fruits and veggies for the week. Two new habits. Great!

Now I’m thinking about how these will fit in. One of the reasons I don’t go to the grocery store often is parking. It sucks in my neighborhood. If I move my truck, it can take a while to find a new parking spot. I never want to move my truck for just a few groceries.

Turns out that I head over to a friend’s house most Wednesday’s for our band practice. It is always more of a hang out and drink beer session than a serious band practice, but it is good fun, and it is a good time to spend time with one of my best friends. I can tack the grocery shopping on to that trip, when I’ll have to re-park my car anyway.

That was easy!

As for Saturday morning, it’s easy enough to head down to the Farmer’s Market, I just don’t think to do it. Just added a reminder in my phone for Saturday morning. That aughta do it.

Anyway, so I’m working backwards to figure out the habits that effect other habits, and addressing those. I may decide to make a habit of eating only healthy food, but if I don’t have the habit of going to buy healthy groceries often, then this isn’t really gonna stick.

The habits seem to cascade into the next, so I am working on addressing these high level habits. There are a few others that I know I can implement that will cascade down to the “end result” habits, bur I won’t bore you with the details.

This week’s posts are a week in progress, we’ll see where this takes me. Should be interesting.

Any high level habits that you can think to change?

Are You Happy With Your Lifestyle?

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I’ve been thinking a bit about lifestyle lately, how it effects behavior, and more importantly, how it effects efforts to change ourselves.

I’ve struggled throughout my life to maintain a healthy, athletic weight. I gain weight from the calories in the air, and it has been pretty tough for me to keep up an ongoing exercise plan.

I’ve done all the usual goal setting with rewards, plans, and so on, and I’ve even made this work for me. This stuff has gotten me in gear and gotten me results, but it hasn’t quite stuck though in a long term sense.

I had been trying to incorporate a bunch of habits into my life, but those habits haven’t seemed to create the overall change that I have been hoping for. I can get a new habit into my life, but I never removed the old habits that are counter productive.

The other day I was watching a video online, I can’t remember if it was Tony Robbins or Frank Kern (or if it was the video with both of them). Anyway, in this video, a visualization exercise was presented. The exercise was to imagine an average perfect day.

Kinda seems contradictory, to say average and perfect, I know. The idea is that if everything in my life were just right, the big three of health, wealth, and relationships were all squared away and how I wanted them, what would an average day in that life be like?

Anyway, like an idiot I closed my eyes and got to work figuring out what that life would be like. I’ll leave out the mansion in the hills and the Swedish bikini team from the vision, and just talk about the aspect of this vision that relates to health.

What I realized is that the the overall picture of this healthy life was very different from the way I live my life now. A lot of the components were the same, like jogging, triathlon training, healthy food and lots of fruits and veggies.

I noticed that this vision was as much defined by what I did do as much as by what I didn’t do. Certain bad habits of mine weren’t there. In this vision, I don’t get dinner from Uncle Vito’s Italian Food, don’t buy a fast, unhealthy lunch instead of bringing a good lunch with me to work, and don’t stay up so late that I don’t wake up and exercise.

In fact, I could describe my vision of a healthy life as much by what was included as with what wasn’t included. What I realized is that what I saw when I envisioned a healthy life was an overall healthy lifestyle.

The lifestyle I saw would naturally lead to a strong healthy body:

  • I wake up in the morning ready to exercise, and after a jog and workout I enjoy natural, wholesome fruits and foods that made me feel invigorated in a way that lasts throughout the day. I continue to eat good food throughout the day, and eat foods that are both good for me and delicious. I have alcohol in moderation, when I have any at all. I eat healthy foods because it makes me feel good, and get a restful night sleep anticipating waking up in the morning for a new, fresh day.

My approach to getting my health in gear has been to add habits into my current lifestyle, and I should have been focusing on changing my lifestyle. By changing my lifestyle, the results I want will fall in to place.

Lifestyle is the backdrop to our habits, the things we do every day. Overall lifestyle shapes and colors all of the habits that we do every day.

I am spending this week wrapping my head around changing one aspect of my lifestyle, that of exercise, health, diet, and well being. As I wrap my head around this, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on lifestyle change.

Why does this matter? Especially on a blog about dating women? Lifestyle, and changing it, applies as much to dating and being attractive as it does to health. The ideas that are gonna go into this discussion will carry over to a change in lifestyle that includes dating more, or being more flirtatious.

Lifestyle is lifestyle, and it effects everything we do. It may be one of the most important aspects that influences our habits and our ability to change those habits.

Anyhow, check back later in the week for more on this subject.