Tag Archives: Health

Small Change, Big Result (Because Habits Cascade)

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?

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.

Improve Your Hand

This post isn’t about flirting with women.  Only read this if you want to be better with women though.

This post is a result of two things.  The first is a offhand statement I made in this post.  I said something along the lines of, “you’re not playing all your cards when you approach in a direct, sincere way, unless you have a weak hand.” Well, this got me to thinking, “how do you improve your hand?”

The second thing that motivated this post is that my parents came to visit last weekend. My parents don’t come up to San Francisco too often, and it is really nice when they do. We drank some wine, ate a huge, filling calzone at Uncle Vito’s, and had breakfast in Union Square.

One thing that my dad and I talked about is finances and wealth. I am learning how to make money, and I am learning about wealth. I am not wealthy now, but someday, I hope to be.  I am working on it.

This is the point of this article.  The easiest way to improve your hand with women is to get other parts of your life together.  Specifically, your health and your wealth.

I am a firm believer in the “health, wealth, and relationships” motto.  These three things are the most important aspects of a man’s quality of life.  By far.

When I don’t have one of these three things handled, I feel less confident.  My hand isn’t as strong.  I am gonna go out on a limb and say that this is universal. To feel confident as a man, we need to have these three things under control.

Now, what it means to have these three things under control is different to everybody.  Wealth to one person may mean having a yacht, two lamborghini’s and a house in the hills.  Wealth to someone else may mean a cozy apartment and a job they like that gives them enough extra spending cash.

What is important with all of these three things, it isn’t important to be the most successful person in this area.  I am not trying to tell you to be a Donald Trump triathlete that dates Carmen Elektra.  What is important is that you have the level of health, wealth, and relationships that you want.

…Or that you are working towards them.

This next part is the tricky thing. It is the cool thing. The thing that we are oh, so lucky about.

Your confidence will skyrocket if you just start making changes.  If you are trying to improve your health, starting to do something, like jogging, or eating healthier, will make you feel more confident.  It will make you feel more confident because you are doing something to get this handled. You don’t have to be able to run a half marathon, but starting the process of getting healthier will make you feel more confident about yourself, especially as you start to see results.

It’s the same thing with women.  If you go and talk to a woman today, even if it doesn’t go that well, you will feel more confident about this area of your life because you did something about it.  The same thing goes for wealth.

What I am really trying to say here is to pay attention to these other things in your life other than your relations with women.  Getting them handled will improve your overall confidence.  You don’t have to completely solve the problem, but just starting to take action will itself make you feel more successful and confident.

It is important that you actually do something about it though.  Reading an exercise book doesn’t cut it, but going for a quick jog does.  Reading Start Late, Finish Rich doesn’t do anything about it, but finding a way to save a dollar or two every day does.  Reading my blog doesn’t do anything about it, but talking to a woman today does.

Improve your hand.  Give yourself pocket aces.

Now I’m gonna go for a jog.